Billion-Dollar Squeeze

The public was only given to understand that somehow the regular Department of Agriculture appropriation had got hung up in Congress, but something far bigger than that was going on. At stake was the success of the nation's entire wartime food program, not to mention the possibility of entirely unnecessary and artificial inflation of food prices. At stake for a relatively few top-drawer U.S. farmers were several hundred million dollars of velvet.

Four men had accomplished a gigantic legislative squeeze. Lobbyists Earl Smith of Illinois and Ed O'Neal of Alabama and Congressmen Clarence Cannon of Missouri and Everett Dirksen of Illinois now had the Administration, the Congress and some five million farm operators in a tight vise.

In a decade of lobbying and fighting for power, the two Farm Bureau chiefs and the two Congressmen had never been sitting quite so pretty as they were last week. By preventing the passage of the farm bill, they had tied up the Administration's basic wartime food plan.

The plan is simple and logical: to turn what the nation does not want into something that it needs. With 260 million surplus bushels of wheat already in the Government's hands (and many million more unwanted bushels soon to be harvested), the Government planned to sell a fraction (125 million bushels) of its hoard for use as fodder, at 83-c- a bushel. As fodder, the unneeded grain would be converted into much-needed meat and eggs. More than that, by releasing some of the stored wheat, grain prices would be kept from rising to artificial heights.

Prodded by Franklin Roosevelt, the Senate approved the request for authority to sell the surplus wheat. Not so the House, mindful of elections and the Corn Belt vote.

Goaded by Illinois' Dirksen and Missouri's Cannon, the House flatly refused to let any of the Government wheat be sold for less than an arbitrary sliding-scale price that would work out at about $1.34. So that Franklin Roosevelt could not veto this provision, the farm bloc tied it to the Agriculture Department's appropriation bill.

In tying up the bill the Farm bloc also served another of its interests. Part of that $680-million bill is a request for $222.8 million for Farm Security Administration, the farsighted, big-hearted New Deal agency that keeps small farmers and marginal farmers on their feet--the farmers who by comparison get the skim milk after the top-drawer farmers have taken the cream. FSA can help 500,000-odd small-time farmers produce much-needed foodstuffs. But the Farm Bureau and their Congressmen hate FSA with a real and poisonous hatred; FSA helps impoverished Negroes and whites to own their own 40 acres and a mule, to gain independence, to pay their poll taxes, to assert their rights as individuals.

Who are the Big Farm Four? His friends call tall, wealthy, gimlet-eyed Earl Clemons Smith, 56, the most powerful farm lobbyist in the U.S., say that he wants to be Secretary of Agriculture. They boast that he can outwit any La Salle Street broker. The 75,000 members of his Illinois Agricultural Association pay $5 annual dues each, make the biggest single farm group in the U.S. He is vice president of the American Farm Bureau Federation (450,000 families), a title which does not measure the amount of control that he exerts. He heads three money-making I.A.A. offshoot insurance companies. Once a year, Smith wines & dines the Illinois Congressional delegation, gives them pointed advice. In downstate Illinois especially--Dirksen's section--Earl Smith's support means election. The 400 acres his college-president father staked him to in rich Pike County, Ill., Smith has enlarged to 1,000 acres.

Now 66, nearly six feet tall, bulgy from lack of exercise, Edward Asbury O'Neal III, nominal Alabama cotton planter and Farm Bureau president, stays in Washington on the other end of the telephone line from Earl Smith in Chicago. Since 1931 he has lobbied mightily for higher farm prices, come hell or high water. Inconsistently sometimes, he backed a surplus-control plan, supported the Agricultural Adjustment Administration as a cafeteria where "all you have to do is to help yourself" to its benefits, many another promise of better incomes. Said he in 1936: "If we, the farmer majority, vote for the good of agriculture, the minority, damn 'em, have got to get into line."

Forceful, loud Representative Clarence Cannon, stubborn as one of the mules on his 800-acre Missouri farm, and wild-haired, sharp-nosed Everett Dirksen speak for the farm bloc in the House. Franklin Roosevelt, naming no names but obviously pointing at them, called them selfish, power-hungry.

They make plausible arguments: farmers have higher living costs; the cost of things the farmer buys rise faster than the price of things he sells. They assert flatly, as if their statements were not open to debate, that farmers are making a relatively greater contribution to the war effort than other economic groups; the Administration is doing nothing to control wages, costs of manufacture, distribution.

Continuing Deadlock. Along those lines, the farm bloc has long stood its ground, holding locked up in Senate-House conference committee the entire appropriation bill. A stopgap compromise last week gave the Agriculture Department enough money to get through July, but only prolonged the stalemate.

The man who could speak out most tellingly, most indignantly was mild, dry, shy Henry Wallace, who had helped U.S. farmers and the Farm Bureau in the dark depression days. But Henry Wallace was feverishly busy on his own hook, trying to write a bill that would save the farm program he had built, a bill that would get through Congress. Even he had little hope of satisfying Messrs. Smith, O'Neal, Cannon and Dirksen.

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