Last Chips

To the Federal Farm Board last week was passed its final stack of chips to play the wheat and cotton markets. Congress voted it $100,000,000--last of its original $500,000,000 allowance--with the implication that it must make good on its stabilization program or quit.

In passing the Farm Board's ultimate appropriation Senators openly deplored its open market policy as a "sheer gamble with public funds." An effort to end its wheat and cotton speculation was beaten (55-to-26) only because Senators did not want to shoulder the responsibility of "hamstringing" its operations at a time when failure by its own action was widely anticipated. Applause rose from the galleries when small, precise Senator George of Georgia declaimed: "Four years more of Herbert Hoover and we'll be fortunate if we don't have to turn the Treasury into a community chest. ... If the Government wants to gamble, it should hire professionals, not amateurs."

The Farm Board is now carrying approximately 130,000,000 bu. of wheat, 2,000,000 bales of cotton, all bought high above the current market in an attempt to sustain domestic prices. These operations have put the Board $100,000,000 into the red.

That Alexander Legge, the Board's $12,000 per-year chairman and chief sponsor of its market program, would resign shortly after March 4 to return to his $100,000 per-year post as head of International Harvester Co. last week became an accepted fact. In his place was foreseen James Clifton Stone, vice chairman and tobacco's representative, who was expected to sheer the Board away from its present market program. Though Chairman Legge would not give a yes-or-no answer, he did say: "If a street car were to run over me tonight, the Board would go on exactly as it has been and no one would know the difference." Demanding a 20% wheat acreage reduction Chairman Legge declared realistically that otherwise "this stabilization effort will have to be abandoned, the loss written off and the adjustment left to the old-time principle of the survival of the fittest."

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