Curiosity on Checks

Though he is making no overt campaign for the Presidency, Senator Arthur Vandenberg in recent weeks has managed to keep himself in the Congressional spotlight with his subtle attacks on the New Deal. Fortnight ago this Michigan Republican finally succeeded in beating efforts to appropriate money for the Florida ship canal (TIME, March 30). Last week he popped up with a modest resolution asking AAA to report the names of all farmers who received more than $10,000 a year in benefit payments.

Senator Vandenberg got the attention of the entire Senate when he quietly declared : "It seems to me this information is highly pertinent. . . . Let me make it wholly plain that I am not questioning the integrity of the disbursements. I am asking only for information bearing upon the public policy involved.

"Let me illustrate. I understand the average corn-hog benefit payment in Iowa is under $400. But I know, for example, about one corn-hog contract in another State where the beneficiary was paid $219,825 in two years for not raising 14,587 hogs on 445 acres.

"Again, I understand the average cotton contract throughout the South is under $1,500. But I know, for example, about one cotton contract which paid $168,000 for not planting 7,000 acres.

"Again, I understand the average wheat contract in Kansas runs in the neighborhood of $800. But I know, for example, of one such contract . . . which produced 65 checks for a total of $78,638 in two years."

So interested were Senators that Secretary of Agriculture Wallace hastened to tell the Press that he would be glad to supply a list of $10,000 AAA payments if Congress asked for it, but that he would hate to divert AAA's clerks from preparing checks to distribute $296,000,000 in benefit payments on 1935 crop contracts to compiling the list called for in the Vandenberg resolution.

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