Bedlam

Everywhere Americans saw the specters of food shortages, in meat, in milk, in other foods. The food front was in real danger.

For a well-fed nation just beginning to pull in its belt after 19 months of war, there was still food aplenty. But it was at the wrong places, it was going to waste, it was being badly mismanaged.

Last week:

> Incoming cattle at Chicago's Union Stockyards (world's largest) one day dropped to a dribble of 600.

>Four more Cincinnati slaughterhouses closed (in all, eight had closed in two weeks).

> Cattlemen, ready to sell their cattle at the East St. Louis stockyards for lack of feed, turned out the cattle to graze on the lush green grass which had come up in the wake of spring floods.

> Food prices were up 17% over May 1942, up 46% over January 1941.

Nearly 130,000,000 pigs grunted on the country's farmlands, yet every city and every hamlet had already had days of little or no meat. Corn bulged high in the nation's cribs and elevators, yet some corn refineries had already curtailed operation for lack of grain.

Scandal. For this inexcusable condition, the nation's farmers, cattlemen, canners and many a public official had but one point of blame: a fantastically mixed-up Government food policy, pulled and hauled among nine agencies.

For these reasons last week the country heard high, hot talk about food.

> Before the Dairymen's League Cooperative Association. Inc., in Manhattan, uprose greying Fred H. Sexauer, longtime president of the league (which represents 29,000 New York dairymen). Said he: "Some day city people will learn that as far as milk is concerned, the OPA has been their No. 1 enemy. . . . The present system of price fixing on food products has all the elements of a national scandal and the making of a ghastly tragedy. . . . Subsidies are the tangled net in which a free people become so enmeshed that they become helpless pawns of a dominating centralized Government." Administration talk of inflation seemed to Mr. Sexauer just a "bogeyman to induce a nation to accept social reform, regimentation, limitation of opportunity and incentive."

> Day before, shock-haired Novelist Louis Bromneld, owner of a 1,100-acre Ohio farm, had become so incensed before the dairymen that he tore up his prepared speech, roared: "Since preparing that speech, I have read a vast amount of nonsense about the food crisis. I am tearing mad. . . . They haven't any real farm policy down there in Washington. One word can describe the one big mess they've made: 'Bedlam!":

> To Vermont's Republican Senator George D. Aiken the subsidy plan was "an alien plan ... a hoax inflicted on the American people."

>Ohio's Senator Robert A. Taft warned: "You are not going to have any meat for civilians next month."

> New York City's peppery little Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia warned his 7,500,000 constituents to go "very easy" on meat: "The supply of beef is about as low as it has ever been in the entire country." He predicted a meat "famine."

Kill the Pigs. The talk ran cross-country; at the Governors' Conference in Columbus, up rose New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey to warn his Midwestern colleagues that unless more grain flowed from the Midwest to the East, milk rationing would be a fact by October.

Asked Indiana's Governor Henry F. Schricker: "Would the New York Governor advise us to kill our pigs?"

Snapped Tom Dewey: "I would advocate the immediate execution of your pigs, which are competing with my cows for corn." He added, with a smile: "But I would advocate eating them, not plowing them under."

Pigs v. Corn. Governors Dewey and Schricker were not exchanging mere pleasantries. As every farmer knew, the pig-corn crisis was typical of the entire U.S. food mess.

There might not be a meat shortage, if a substantial number of the nation's nearly 130,000,000 pigs were sent to market. And there would not be a corn shortage, if corn were shipped to refineries instead of being hoarded to feed to the pigs.

Root of the corn-pig crisis is the price ceiling on corn ($1 a bushel) and the price floor on hogs ($13.75 a 100 lb.). By feeding the corn to the hogs, farmers figure they can get the equivalent of $1.35 a bushel for their corn. Last week corn bootleggers roamed the Midwest, buying up corn at above-ceiling prices to sell to hog raisers.

The Administration, with its fixed price ceilings and floors, had got itself into a jam. One proposal: requisitioning the corn now in elevators, at ceiling prices, and throwing it into the market. On this, Food Czar Chester Davis, conferring daily with corn growers, feeders and processors, was mum.

But on the general food situation, Chester Davis spoke out. Said he: "Less has been done in this country [on management of civilian food] than on any other important factor in the war picture. . . . No matter how much food our farmers produce, no matter how good the weather, or how much labor and machinery are available, or how high our mountains of reserves, or how soon the war is over, this is one fundamental truth: We won't have enough food to satisfy all the claimants for all kinds of food they want."

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