Both Ends v. the Middle

Of all the refugees from the collapse of world trade, ex-King Cotton has had the hardest time making his own living. Last week the New York Cotton Exchange figured that by this season's end (July), the world surplus would be nearly 25,000,000 bales--4,316,000 bales more than last year's surplus and a new all-time record. As usual, the lion's share of the surplus belonged to the U. S., No. 1 would-be exporter. In U. S. warehouses now are nearly 11,000,000 bales without a market. Awash with surpluses, the U. S. price of March cotton sank 60-c- (to $51.80 a bale) last week.

Yet U. S. mills bought cotton as never before. In December they consumed 775,472 bales, more than in any previous month except March 1937, which had more working days. If prosperity in the U. S. textile business could set King Cotton on his feet, he should be there already. Unfortunately, he was regally habituated to a cosmopolitan orbit. Producing around 12,000,000 bales a year, U. S. cotton growers never sold more than 8,000,000 (1940, a record) in the U. S. As long as the export market remains closed, the U. S. must either grow less cotton, or consume more.

Henry Wallace, reluctant to adjust his policies to a changing world, spent the better part of eight years as Secretary of Agriculture, keeping the death of U. S. cotton export markets a political secret. Only after he became Term III's Vice-Presidential candidate did he publicly confront the dilemma. That was in a book: his campaign tract The American Choice--(Reynal & Hitchcock; $1), which told the U. S. that it would either have to subsidize more domestic consumption of cotton, or move several million surplus cotton farmers off their land.

At Indiana's Purdue University last week, Henry Wallace's successor, Indianan Claude Raymond Wickard, served notice on the cotton industry that as far as the Department of Agriculture is concerned, America's choice has now been made. He reminded his audience that the decline of the U. S. farmers' export market long antedates Hitler: it began when the rest of the world began to grow corn, wheat & cotton of its own. Said the new Secretary: "There are two bales of cotton in the world today for every bale that will probably be used in the current marketing year. . . . That is one reason why I say we need agricultural adjustment and not just [crop] reduction."

Both Agriculture and the Cotton Textile Institute have long sought new uses for cotton. To their promotional efforts (rather than to defense, which accounted directly for only 300,000 bales) were due last year's record 8,000,000-bale domestic market. But Secretary Wickard looked beyond the laboratory for his "agricultural adjustment." It involved the New Deal's No. 1 pre-defense friend: the ill-clad, ill-housed "third of a nation."

Agriculture, the one U. S. industry which the defense boom has passed by, is also the one U. S. department in which New Dealers can still think in nonwar terms. There dwells Surplus Marketing Administrator Milo Perkins, the ex-Texas businessman who invented the popular Stamp Plan for distributing surpluses to reliefers without bypassing the grocer. Agriculture last week announced another Perkins scheme: the application of his Stamp Plan to cotton growers, many of whom have not been able to buy enough mattresses, clothes and other cotton products for their own use.

The new Perkins scheme: farmers who wish to plant less than their 1941 AAA acreage allotments will receive a bonus of stamps, good for cotton products at any retail store. The bonus: $25 in stamps for each acre voluntarily put out of production. Estimated cost of the scheme: $50,000,000. By cutting production and upping consumption in one stroke, the plan would attack King Cotton's trouble from both ends, put the two more nearly into balance.

Last week Agriculture's farm servicing organization (streamlined by Henry Wallace) swung into action, sought cotton-belt backing for the Perkins plan. It also sought to get farmers to put their freed acreage into the production of food and feed crops, badly needed in the South. In that way the Perkins plan became more than mere peacetime New Dealism, took on a defense coloration. For defense is multiplying the South's army of industrial workers, and industrial workers must eat well to work well. If the South, traditionally an importer of food from other sections of the country, can feed its new industrial workers on land now given to surplus cotton, and limit its cotton production to larger farms, it will gain a more efficient distribution of man power all the way round.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.