How High?

Into Atlantic City, NJ.'s Convention Hall last week trooped 5,000 ruddy, weatherbeaten farmers. As delegates to the annual convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation, they had come to listen, vote, sing such old favorites as A Bicycle Built for Two, and take in the sights. Many of them also had a shock. At home they had never seen such prices as they paid for meals in Atlantic City's restaurants.

But the high food prices were not likely to decline so long as the high support prices for farm products were continued. In its nearly 30-year history, the federation, strongest U.S. farm lobby, has always gone down the line for price supports and for guaranteed markets. Congress had seldom failed to heed its cry. This year it was the Southern cotton and tobacco growers who came out strongest for keeping farm support prices as high as possible and for extending them to commodities that are not being supported under the present law (e.g., fruits and vegetables).

Their main target was the Hope-Aiken Act (TIME, June 28), under which the Government is free to lower price supports from 90% to 60% of parity after 1950. Led by Georgia's white-haired H. L. Wingate, the Southerners fought a three-day battle behind closed committee doors for a resolution urging Congress to repeal the Hope-Aiken Act, keep price supports at 90% of parity.

But the Southerners got some powerful opposition. It came from shaggy-browed Allan B. Kline, who succeeded the South's Edward A. O'Neal when he retired as president last year (TIME, Dec. 29). Farmer Kline last year raised $40,000 worth of hogs and hybrid corn on his Vinton (Iowa) farm; he also found time to sit on the board of Chicago's Federal Reserve Bank. He believes that if farmers are to stay free enterprisers, they should not rely too heavily on Government support.

Kline thought the Hope-Aiken Act and its sliding scale of price props were just right. The Middle Western farmers thought so too, helped Kline defeat the Southern proposal and got the federation to go on record in favor of the Hope-Aiken Act. But it also urged Congress to enact a permanent law making any agricultural commodity eligible for price support. No one suggested that the farmers prove they were the free enterprisers they fancied themselves by eventually doing away with all price supports, any more than other businessmen would do away with tariffs.

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