THE LA FOLLETTE FORMULA FOR PUBLIC WORKS
The La Follette Formula For Public Works SEN. LA FOLLETTE'Srecent fight in the Senate to secure a $75,000,000 appropriation for state, county, and municipal planning of postwar public works...
...The weakest point about FSA is that it is still an emergency agency, acting with very limited funds when a situation becomes critical...
...Yet, America is allowing that indispensable core of its democratic way of life to erode and disappear, just as surely as the soil in which it sinks its roots is washing down to sea...
...Therefore, I hope we will not repeat that mistake in contemplation of whatever may develop from an economic standpoint in the postwar period...
...These chats are very interesting...
...La Follette recalled that the Senate thought he was dealing with fantastic sums prior to and during the last major depression when he fought for an adequate public works program...
...Add to this picture the tremendous growth of industrialized farming in the past decade and you can see pretty clearly how rapidly the vision of Jefferson is fading from the American scene...
...Up to the time of the war, one third of all tenant farmers were a migratory horde, moving from one farm to the other...
...That is entirely proper...
...Then the American people could listen and make up their minds for themselves...
...Today 42 per cent of our farm operators are tenants, with no real stake in the soil they work...
...Once a week top-notch officials of the department gather around the "mike" and read the script prepared by Archibald MacLeish, now an Assistant Secretary of State, and once head of the Congressional Library...
...Legislation has been introduced into this session of Congress to make the FSA a permanent Government agency...
...But there are outstanding men in public and private life who feel the Administration's policy has serious defects...
...Rural rehabilitation loans made since the start of the program in 1935 have been paid back 87 cents on every dollar...
...From Labor, organ of the Railroad Brotherhoods) THE State Department has launched an elaborate campaign to familiarize the American people with the Administration's foreign policies, and more particularly with the proposal to set up a new League of Nations...
...Its adoption would be a basic step in the direction of preserving farming as a way of life in America...
...The La Follette amendment, which proposed to increase the projected appropriation for postwar planning from $35,000,000 to $75,000,000—or less than the cost of a single battleship—was rejected by a vote of 42 to 31...
...4-»->Why Not Both Sides...
...La Follette said, must be to provide a bulwark against large-scale unemployment, "not by wasting money on made work," but rather by "spending it upon constructive projects which, when completed, would add to the total wealth of the community concerned...
...The first bill I introduced then called for an expenditure of $5,000,000,000, and I was looked upon, I think, by some of my colleagues, and I know by rtumy of my fellow citizens, as being in the wild-eyed category...
...A Basic Need rT",HQMAS JEFFERSON, one of the first great •*- Americans to catch the true vision of American democracy, looked upon the small, family-sized farm as an indispensable factor in a democratic society...
...I was one of the early advocates of what at that time seemed to be a large public works program...
...FSA has filled a specific need in our agricultural economy and for an agency dealing with some of the neediest elements in our society, it has made an extraordinary financial record...
...Tenant farms are increasing by 40,000 every year...
...IN his losing fight for the appropriation, Sen...
...However, I still believe that had that program bsen initiated at the time when it was proposed, it was of sufficient magnitude that it might have prevented the depression from reaching such depths, and might have prevented it from producing such a cataclysmic crisis...
...It is the one Federal farm agency designed to assist and promote the small, family-sized farm...
...But wouldn't it be a good thing to give them a chance to present their views...
...My interest in this matter," he said, "stems from the experience gained prior to and during the depression...
...LA FOLLETTE'Srecent fight in the Senate to secure a $75,000,000 appropriation for state, county, and municipal planning of postwar public works emphasized anew how unwilling Congress is to face up to its responsibilities in building a first line of defense against the threat of peacetime economic dislocation...
...The goal of a genuinely useful public works program, Sen...
...MacLeish and his colleagues champion the doctrines favored by President Roosevelt...
...The Federal Government has taken only one real step to arrest this trend—the establishment of the Farm Security Administration...
...The program of the FSA should be the barest minimum of the Government's participation in stabilizing the family-type farm...
...However, why shouldn't the American people get all sides otthe story...
...If something like this is not done, the people are likely to feel that Assistant Secretary MacLeish has started another propaganda bureau and they may tune out when the State Department's program is announced...
...I had something to do with the early consideration by the Senate of the question of Federal assistance for the relief of persons who were t Ik own out of work...
...La Follette reminded his colleagues that "during the depression one of the reasons some of the expenditures then made were of a wasteful character was that there had not been sufficient advance planning of a constructive type of wealth-producing projects...
...An examination of the official roll call shows that Senators like Austin, Ball, Byrd, Green, Saltonstall, and White, who are bursting with postwar plans for the rest of the world, refused to support an appropriation which would enable the states, counties, a ad local communities of America to get ready for the day when the wartime boom, with exorbitant profits, cost-plus contracts, and fantastic spending, comes to an end...
...It is not the complete answer to the serious ills that afflict our agricultural economy, but it has made a magnificent record in the stop-gap area to which it is confined...
...MacLeish knows how to make the English language attractive...
...Since his day countless thousands of Americans have struggled to maintain that ideal, for American history has demonstrated irrefutably that it is the "indigenous radicalism," as Life Magazine called it, of these agrarian groups that has been a constant challenge to the growth of plutocracy in this country...
...Perhaps they are wrong...
Vol. 9 • March 1945 • No. 13
