Dropping the Dole

The nation's two million cotton growers were shocked. To a House subcommittee for postwar agriculture. Claude E. Wickard, the mild Secretary of Agriculture, recommended that the Government with draw its cash support of cotton prices. In place of this political handout, Secretary Wickard proposed a nonpolitical plan to end the lopsided one-crop economy of the South. His proposal: let the Government pay growers a direct subsidy in stead of the present indirect subsidy of the parity system (TIME, Oct. 9), which gives growers "loans" of 20-c- a lb., at the present parity price.

The subsidy would be based on the extent to which cotton growers 1) replaced cotton with other crops; 2) mechanized farms to cut costs. Thus, Southern farmers would have a cash incentive to cut down cotton acreage, produce cotton cheaply enough to stand on its own competitive feet. As a clincher, Wickard would end the subsidy in five or ten years, cut cotton growers completely from the public purse.

The merit of the Wickard plan was that it would, end the Alice-in-Wonderland economics of cotton (TIME, Nov. 20), yet give the South ample time to put its economy in order. The plan's weakness was that, once subsidy payments are started, they will be hard if not politically impossible to stop.

Cotton traders wanted proof that the plan would work, but like Dr. Claudius T. Murchison, head of the Cotton Textile Institute, and almost everyone else who had soberly pondered cotton's bleak future, they were prompt to endorse it in principle. At 22-c- a lb. the-U.S. cotton growers have priced themselves out of the world market, have come recklessly close to pricing themselves out of the domestic market. Government warehouses bulge with 6,500,000 bales of surplus cotton. And the price of rayon is now so close to that of cotton that many of the larger textile mills expect to convert their production to rayon fabrics after the war.

Said Wickard: "I think cotton farmers should recognize the inevitable."

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