Play to the Farm Vote

"Unacceptable hodgepodge," snapped Agriculture Secretary Benson a month ago when the Senate passed a farm bill freighted with amendments designed to curry election-year favor with virtually every special interest in U.S. agriculture. Last week, in more diplomatic vein, President Eisenhower made a public appeal to the House-Senate Conference Committee that was ironing out differences between the Senate bill and an almost equally objectionable farm bill passed by the House a year ago. Said the President in his press conference: "I have never been one to say . . . that you must hold up good things in order to attain perfection . . . I am looking for a good bill for farmers and one that makes sense ... I just am not demanding my own ideas . . ."

In effect, Ike seemed to be proclaiming his willingness to compromise, but asking for a bill that he could sign in good conscience. But some of the ten members of the conference committee read Ike's statement as a hint that he would accept complete emasculation of the Administration's flexible price support program rather than veto a farm bill this year. Accordingly, at week's end, the committee came forth (by an 8-to-2 vote, Vermont's Republican George Aiken and Florida's Democratic Spessard Holland dissenting) with a bill that Democratic Senator Allen Ellender, the committee's chairman, jauntily declared "gave the President everything he asked for, and added some ideas of our own." What Louisiana's Ellender apparently meant was that the bill gave the President the soil bank program (backed by an authorization of $1.2 billion) that he had asked for as a cure for surpluses. But the conference committee had coupled with it an utterly contradictory, surplus-producing, one-year restoration of mandatory supports for five basic commodities (cotton, wheat, corn, rice and peanuts) at 90% of parity.

Other bad news in the bill:

P: Mandatory 85% of parity supports for feed grains--an increase of 15% over present pegged prices.

P: Minimum 80% of parity for dairy products--an increase of 5% over present supports. (Said Benson: "This would return us to the dark days of 1953 and 1954")

P: Dual parity, an arrangement that would set up two methods of calculating parity prices on wheat, corn, cotton, rice and peanuts and give farmers the higher of the two. (Said Benson: "This would make a joke of parity. Parity . . . would become a statistical stairway to the promised land.")

Hailing this catchall as a bill "that will give immediate relief to farmers," Ellender and Democrat Harold Cooley, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, announced that they "fully expected" it would pass both House and Senate, perhaps within the week. At week's end President Eisenhower called Ezra Benson in for a discussion of the bill. Emerging, Benson strongly implied a veto unless Congress changed the measure considerably. Then Ike set up a farm bill conference with congressional leaders. The White House hope, a dim one: House and Senate may still make some sense out of what the conference committee has brought forth.

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