Misery Question

Two months ago Secretary of Agriculture Hyde raised the warning cry of "Dole!" against the Senate's Drought Relief plan and thereby started the Arkansas food war in Congress. Last week the same Secretary pronounced the same relief plan "no Dole!" and thereby brought to a peaceful conclusion the bitterest issue of the session. Nevertheless the Senate had won less than the White House Administration had surrendered.

When Arthur Mastick Hyde ran a thriving Buick agency in Trenton. Mo. before the War, his interest in farms and farmers had been nominal. Pitched into the Governor's chair at Jefferson City by the Republican sweep of 1920 he made Missouri's farmers roar with rage, earned the epithet of "tax-eater" by his expensive road building program. President Hoover picked him for the Cabinet chiefly because he had once been a "Lowden man" but had got a divorce from the equalization fee. Mockingly Secretary Hyde's archfoe, onetime Democratic Senator James Reed, used to greet him: "Howdy, Arty. As one dirt farmer to another, how's crops?" The same spiteful Reed on the stump referred to him as "a steam whistle on a fertilizer factory." Two years in the Cabinet, Secretary Hyde helped to pick the Federal Farm Board to rid Florida of the Mediterranean fruit fly, to make himself silly with charges that Soviet Russia, by short sales in Chicago, was deliberately trying to depress U. S. wheat prices. Washington life has not diminished his liking for pie, buttermilk, cigars, chess, fishing in the Ozarks.

What gave Secretary Hyde his chance to settle the Drought fight he had started was last fortnight's compromise on $20,000,000 for "agricultural rehabilitation" (TIME, Feb. 16). Did or did not those weasel words mean that money could be spent for food for hungry farmers? Nobody in Congress knew for sure. After much interpretative haggling, the Senate last week put the question squarely up to Secretary Hyde in a resolution that asked "whether the amendment relating to Drought Relief includes in its terms food, clothing and medicines."

Secretary Hyde was speechmaking in Louisville, Ky. when the Senate's query reached him. Long distance telephone wires to the White House hummed busily as the wishes of President Hoover were ascertained. With the President's sanction Secretary Hyde telegraphed the Senate a long, rambling message about Red Cross aid and rural credits in which was buried away this all-important sentence: "It is my understanding . . . that there could be no prohibition against the proceeds of such loans being used for food or other supplies if they were necessary."

Admission by the Administration that Drought-area farmers could borrow from this $20,000,000 fund to feed their hungry families was all Congress needed to clinch the compromise. The Senate adopted it (67-to-15) as did the House. The President's signature followed immediately. Drought relief could no longer provoke an extra session.

The Arkansas Compromise, however, did not get by the Senate without hard oratorical pounding. Nebraska's Norris offered some beatitudes of his own making:

Blessed are they who starve while the asses and the mules are fed, for they shall be buried at public expense.

Blessed are they who hunger in the land of Drought, for they shall be told that a great Government feeds the starving in foreign lands.

Blessed are the little children who shiver from the cold, for their suffering shall receive "sympathetic consideration."

Virginia's Glass flayed Democratic Leader Robinson of Arkansas, who accepted the Compromise, for his "abject surrender" on the principle of free Federal aid. Idaho's Borah in one last dramatic revolt against the Compromise, exclaimed:

"A few kernels of corn for the hungry child, the drippings from the mouth of the merciful mule! . . . These people are going to suffer beyond the power of human language to portray. . . . When did these picayunish objections to feeding the hungry first appear? They appeared when the income tax payers became afraid of an increase in taxes."

Perfectly plain to all was the Democratic backdown on food relief. Senator Robinson had first proposed an outright Federal gift of $25,000,000 to feed the hungry who had no other means of sustenance. By the Compromise he had accepted a proposition whereby $20,000,000 was to be loaned for food only to those who could put up collateral. Piercingly to the point critics showed how the family, without food, without grocery-store credit, without security for a Federal loan, would get none of the $20,000,000, would be as dependent as ever upon the Red Cross.*

President Hoover had also changed his position since December, agreed to far more Drought relief than he had originally intended. Last week, through Secretary Hyde, he surrendered to the Senate's primary plan of 'Federal loans to feed the hungry, a proposition he once flayed as ''playing politics with human misery."

Meanwhile the Red Cross was caring for 255,735 families--about a million mouths. Its $10,000,000 relief drive climbed slowly past the $8,000,000 mark. Rations were being distributed on the basis of 42-c- per person per week. Still unreported last week was any authenticated case of death of starvation in the Drought area.

*The difficulty of negotiating secured Federal loans in the Drought area was demonstrated in Lee County, Ark. where only 22 farmers out of 5,500 had been able to put up collateral to get seed and fertilizer advances from the Government.

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