Cotton Storm

Last week Secretary of Agriculture William M. Jardine felt like a person who, upon making some sound in the presence of a high-strung friend, is suddenly turned upon and bitterly accused of willful noisiness.

In Secretary Jardine's case, the offending sound was a routine bi- monthly report prepared by some of his economic experts on the world's cotton markets. The last sentence in the report said: "As was indicated in last month's report, should the present estimate of production be realized and past relationship between supply and price prevail, it is likely that prices will decline in the next few months."

The eager eyes of men who operate financial news tickers singled out these words, lifted, them from their context and flashed them all over the country to men who speculate in cotton. At once a blizzard of cotton-selling began. In one day's trading, cotton prices dropped off $5.50 to $6 per bale. With 20 million bales the prospective total of their current crop, U. S. cotton growers found themselves some $90,000,000 poorer overnight. Speculators on the "long" side of a previously rising market found themselves sore stranded.

Flooded with irate telegrams, flayed in the press, vituperated on plantations and exchanges, called to conference by the President, Sec- retary Jardine promised an investigation of his Bureau of Agricul- tural Economics whence the report had issued. Later, upon leaving a meeting of the Cabinet, he announced that the Government would not again forecast the price of cotton.

Secretary Jardine protested, however, that similar statements on the price situations of major farm commodities have been prepared monthly for two years by his Department to help farmers anticipate the future. Secretary Jardine thought that the cotton speculators had been "unduly disturbed," and wondered why they had not become excited last month when the cotton forecast of Aug. 15 explicitly predicted cheap cotton "in the immediate future."

The speculators' answer was that, good economist though Secretary Jardine may be, he has no idea how sensitive the cotton market can be.

The cotton episode was accompanied by, or perhaps it caused a rumor that Secretary Jardine would soon resign to accept a high-salaried position as "tsar" of the orange-lemon-grapefruit industry in Flori- da.

The rumorists even went so far as to represent President Coolidge as being silently indignant at his chief agronomist for not telling about this plan. But Secretary Jardine denied that Florida fruit-men had made him an offer.