Forgotten Vegetable

Scalloped Potatoes, Potatoes Julienne, Potatoes an Gratin, Lorette Potato, Potato Pancakes, Potatoes Allumettes, Potato Souffle--all these are delicacies when delivered from the hands of an expert chef. But there was no chef artist enough to make any of these as savory as the Potato Intrigue served last week in Washington.

The basic ingredients in the Intrigue were simple: 36,000,000 Ib. of potatoes in storage, worth a mere 35-c- a bu. compared to their $1.37 ancestors of 1930; 3,000,000 potato farmers, bitter when they think what AAA has done for cotton, for tobacco, even for such a "basic commodity" as peanuts; two railroads eager for potato traffic; a Secretary of State devoted to foreign trade; three great potato regions --Idaho, Maine and the South Atlantic Seaboard--and three great potato statesmen.

Year ago Huey Long proposed that rhubarb and spinach be declared basic commodities, but it remained for Representative Lindsay Carter Warren to propose a "Potato Tax Act of 1935." It remained for pious Representative Ralph Owen Brewster (former Governor) of Maine to enounce that "Potatoes are the Forgotten Crop." It remained for William Edgar Borah, most famed member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to take himself to AAA's hearings on potato restriction and portentously declare "Idaho raises a very fine potato. I am not quite familiar with the plan Mr. Warren has offered, but I can say frankly that ... the people of my State want to cooperate and I feel in that mood myself."

This represented a profound change in mood on Mr. Borah's part. Last year the great individualist opposed the cotton and tobacco control bills. But last year he made a mistake by being asleep at the political switch when AAA put a "compensatory" tax on jute sacking in which Idaho farmers bag their potatoes. This year he wishes to avoid mistakes, for next year he faces an election. Next year Mr. Brewster also faces an election and his constituency includes Aroostook County where, because of potato prices, the current relief bill is $100,000 a month and going up.

The Warren proposal is modeled on the cotton and tobacco restriction acts: a quota for every state and every grower, a penalty tax of 1/2-c- to 3/4-c- per Ib. But the circumstances attending potato control are not simple. Potatoes do not have to go to a gin like cotton, nor are they bought by a few big buyers like tobacco. So collection of the tax and enforcement of quotas will be difficult. It will be more difficult because there are an estimated 3,000,000 potato growers who raise an average of less than an acre of potatoes each. Enforcement is to be simplified by exempting, from quota, producers of less than 300 Ib. of potatoes. But who is to know if a grower sells an extra ten pounds to a housewife on the edge of town?

But this was only half the Intrigue. Already Secretary Hull has reduced the tariff on winter potatoes from Cuba. It would be parlous of Mr. Hull should he extend a similar favor to Canada--with whom a treaty is being negotiated. One person interested is Frank C. Wright, vice president of the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad Co. which has a monopoly on one of the U. S.'s best potato hauls and whose dividends show it. He is a good friend of Mr. Hull and recently tried to get closer to him by renting the apartment under the Secretary's at the Carlton Hotel. He was disappointed, however. Representative Brewster already had that apartment.

Mr. Wright was naturally not much in favor of restricting a crop from which his railroad draws fat revenues but when the Farm Credit Administration announced that it would as lief let Aroostook County's potato farmers go out of business as extend help unless the railroads reduced their rates, Mr. Wright, like Mr. Borah, suffered a change of mood.

About one matter his mood did not change, however: Vice President Wright remained wholly opposed to the efforts of former Republican Floor Leader John Quillin Tilson who wants to get a $3,000,000 loan to bring a track from the Quebec Extension Railroad into Aroostook County to share the potato haul. Last week it looked as if Mr. Wright had outlobbied Mr. Tilson so far as the loan was concerned. But in the current state of Potato Intrigue it was highly uncertain whether anybody would outlobby the Potato Tax Act of 1935.

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