Milk Without Honey

Last week New York City's milkshed, largest in the world, was at war--the bitterest, toughest Blitzkrieg it has ever known. Battleground was New York's upstate dairy country, source of 2,640,000 of the milkshed's 4,000,000 daily quarts of milk (74% of which is sold in bottles, 26% as cream, butter, cheese, etc.).

This week, as swart Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia sat down in conference with strikers, besieged dealers and handlers, New York City's milk supply was halved. Home and hospital deliveries continued, but bakeries and restaurants received only a trickle.

On New York highways tight-lipped pickets of the new Dairy Farmers' Union halted market-bound trucks, spilled thousands of gallons on the roadsides. Strikers in automobiles threw bottles of kerosene on trucks that did not stop. Pickets fought State troopers, deputies and non-strikers. One man, slow getting out of the way of a charging milk tanker, was killed. A New York Central train with a load of milk was stalled on greased rails.

This war of violence was the culmination of half a century of economic struggle. Since the "milk war" of 1883 there has been little peace in the milkshed. When farmers got high prices for their milk, dealers were squeezed between production prices and the unwillingness of the public to pay more than 13-14-c- a quart. When production prices were down (due either to competition between the States or general overproduction) dealers and handlers were in clover while farmers pastured in barren fields.

Pasturage for everybody began to look lusher a year ago. State laws had failed to bring order into the shed, but interstate control by the U.S. Department of Agriculture had ended price-cutting competition from the six outlying States. So last year New York State's dairy farmers held a referendum, voted to subject themselves to the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937.

But they soon found Federal control was complex and hard to understand. It also brought into the milkshed a formularized way of figuring milk prices: the "blended price." Milk was classified by the use to which it was put--from $2.25 per cwt. for Class I (bottled milk) down to 94-c- for Class IV-B (American Cheddar cheese), average estimated at $1.65 per cwt. To farmers who knew one gallon of milk cost about as much as another, who distrusted the reports of milk utilization turned in by dealers (although checked by the Department of Agriculture), this seemed an injustice. Many a farmer began to suspect he was being gypped.

Three years ago a new character appeared in the milkshed. Thin-faced, spectacled Archie Wright, onetime representative of the hard-boiled National Maritime Union of the C. I. O., bought a dairy farm near Ogdensburg, N. Y. Between seeing that his cows were milked, he set out to help form the Dairy Farmers' Union. Last year he became its president.

Fortnight ago, while the more conservative Metropolitan Milk Producers Bargaining Agency (45,000 members) was asking the Federal-State administrator to up the price of Class I milk from $2.25 to $2.82, Archie Wright took a bolder step. He announced D. F. U. was going to strike, not only against present prices, but against the whole "blended price" system. His demand: that farmers be paid $2.35 per cwt. no matter what use was made of milk. So war was declared.

Quick to see a chance of getting a new ready-made union (and at the same time getting a foothold on eastern farms), C. I. O. announced its support of Archie Wright's strike. Meanwhile milk dealers declared that the demands of D. F. U. would send bottled milk prices (now 13-c- a qt.) above 1929's record level (16-c-). In the past a one-cent increase in the price of milk has not appeared to have more than a small, temporary effect on the amount of milk consumed. But what a three-cent rise would do to milk sales, New York City's dealers hated to contemplate.

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