Burgoo & Boom

Breezy as any college football crowd were the 10,000 tobacco farmers who poured into Carrollton, Ky. one day last week to help celebrate Carrollton's first annual tobacco festival. They guffawed when a big black hearse lumbered into position at the head of a half-mile parade. Emblazoned on its side was the legend: OLD TOBACCO PRICES--SIX FEET UNDER THE SOD. To the blare of a 40-piece band they marched through the business streets of Carrollton to the Henry County Tobacco Warehouse. When somebody yelled "C'mon folks, the burgoo's ready!" they broke ranks, stampeded for the warehouse platform.

To insure the success of their first show, Carrollton businessmen had gone over to Lexington to fetch grey-thatched, handsome old James T. Looney, best brewer of burgoo stew in northern Kentucky. Over his open air vats, "Burgoomaster" Looney, proud of his 500-gal. iron kettle that was used in the Civil War to make gunpowder, had spent a day and a night brewing 1,500 gallons of burgoo.* Every last dipperful was exhausted before the crowd settled down to a program of speechmaking. On the platform, along with many another bigwig, were Carrollton's Ralph Malcolm Barker, president of Barker Tobacco (independent), and President Wood Fitch Axton of Louisville's famed Axton-Fisher Tobacco Co. Inc. (Spuds, Twenty Grand, Old Loyalty, White Mule).

Juicy as the burgoo were the business prospects of each & every tobacco farmer at Carrollton and of thousands of their colleagues throughout the burley belt. When the burley market opens next month they will get an average of 18-c- to 20-c- a lb., highest burley price in five years. Reason: a one-third crop reduction under the AAA program. "Crop reduction has transformed a buyers' market into a sellers' market!" cried Secretary Ben Kilgore of the Kentucky Farm Bureau.

As president of the sixth largest tobacco company in the U. S., Wood F. Axton is pre-eminently a buyer of raw tobacco, not a seller. As such, he might be expected to favor low leaf prices. But this far-seeing Kentuckian, who once was a grocery salesman, seized the opportunity to publicize his interest in a square deal for Kentucky tobacco farmers regardless of the consequences to him or his company. From behind a rough-hewn speaker's table in the warehouse he declared: "The leaders of the AAA are honest, earnest men and not politicians....I would urge your continued co-operation with these men...." Espousing New Deal economics, the man who threw a scare into big tobaccomen two years ago with the 10-c- package,* continued: "The farming classes have been let down by too much profit-taking by industrialists. It is no wonder that the game has been broken up. There has been too much takeout. The country cannot have prosperity unless the producing class gets enough to buy back the products of its labor."

Meanwhile the tobacco boom was making itself evident in other sections. In a survey of 39 tobacco markets in North Carolina, the United Press reported that more than 200,000,000 lb. had been sold in that State up to Oct. 1 at an average price of $27.02 per cwt. Tobacco income was up 35% over last year, was five times greater than in 1931 when the average price was $8.86 per cwt. Tobacco farmers were pouring into North Carolina towns to spend their money on automobiles, zipper jackets, silk dresses. At a Winston-Salem warehouse, where the average price has been well over $30 per cwt., Farmer R.C. Johnson, patting his wallet, explained: "We paid our debts to those folks who carried us so long. We mended the fences, painted the barn, chinked up the cracks in the roof....Then we got around to the house and painted that." Another farmer walked into a bookshop with a wad of bills, demanded five copies of Herbert Hoover's The Challenge to Liberty.

* "Burgoomaster" Looney's recipe for 1,000 pal. of burgoo: 800 lb. lean beef with no bones; 200 lb. fat hens; 900 lb. canned tomatoes; 240 lb. canned carrots; 180 lb. canned corn; 200 lb. cabbage; 60 lb. salt; 4 lb. pepper; "my own seasoning." Cook 18 to 20 hr. in iron kettle out of doors over a wood fire. "It is thicker than soup and has a flavor from the open air you can't describe."

* Intent only on supplying existing demand, makers of 10-c- cigarets have lately been allowing their product to drift. Reasons: 1) rising tobacco prices have necessarily eliminated advertising and sales promotion: 2) most manufacturers did not have sufficient capital to accumulate large supplies of cheap raw tobacco when the price was low.

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