A Pest-Ridden Harvest

The day before the conference committee's monstrous farm bill came to a final vote in the House last week, the chamber was sealed off for a closed caucus of Republican members. "We simply cannot send this bill to the President," Massachusetts' gnarled Joe Martin told the waverers among his colleagues. "It's a bad bill, and I'm sure he won't accept it." On the other side, Texas' egg-bald Sam Rayburn and other Democratic leaders were telling the doubtful among the Democrats that the bill might provide the only way to get a Democrat elected President in November. A key proposition in the Democratic reasoning: if Congress should pass the bill and the President should veto it (as many Democrats expected and hoped he would). Democrats could say that the Democratic Congress handed the farmers $2 billion and the Republican President took it away.

Next day the galleries were jammed as the House began the debate. Within minutes the floor was in an uproar as most of the members began talking or clamoring for recognition at the same time. At one point Missouri Republican Dewey Short leaped to his feet and shouted that the disorder was ''absolutely disgraceful. I demand quiet!" Few heard his cry. and fewer heeded it. It was soon obvious that election-year pressures were more powerful than sound legislative judgment.

Many Splendored. Amid the confusion Joe Martin got the floor long enough for one last warning: "The bill as it stands is a many splendored thing, and like the current movie of the same name, is intended as a big box-office attraction . . . We would be unworthy of our own responsibilities if we pass a bill which we know is bad, and which should not--yes, cannot--be signed."

The first vote, against a Republican leadership motion to send the bill back to conference for revision, was 238 (211 Democrats, 27 Republicans) to 181 (167 Republicans, 14 Democrats). At midpoint in the roll call the outcome was clear; Louisiana Democrat Allen Ellender. chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, strode onto the floor to thump the back of his House opposite number, North Carolina's Harold Cooley. Actual passage of the bill, 237-181, was anticlimactic. Within six hours the Senate rolled it through. 50 (35 Democrats. 15 Republicans) to 35 (31 Republicans, four Democrats), and sent it to the White Houre.

Passage of the contradiction-cluttered measure (TIME, April 16) was a bitter defeat for the Eisenhower Administration, which utterly lost control of farm-state Republicans. It was likewise a pest-ridden harvest for U.S. farmers. The bill would establish the Administration's soil bank (much too late in this farming year), but also would restore high, rigid price supports to work at cross purposes with the new program. Said Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson: "The bill would seek to cure the farm problem with the very measures which built up the surpluses, which lost farmers their market, and which reduced their income."

There were immediate and powerful pressures on President Eisenhower to sign the bill. Four Republican governors from the farm belt (Iowa's Leo A. Hoegh, Kansas' Fred Hall, Nebraska's Victor E. Anderson and South Dakota's Joe Foss) got an appointment for this week at the White House to urge a signature. The 15 Republican Senators who voted for the bill, led by Kansas' Andrew Schoeppel, also wanted to present their case directly to the President. For the most part, the argument of these Republicans was that, politically and economically, a bad bill was better than none at all.

"Utterly Bad." Two national farm organizations, the Grange and the left-of-center Farmers Union, urged the President, to sign. Farmers Union President James Patton shot off a sardonic telegram to the President's vacation headquarters at Augusta, Ga.: WHILE YOU ARE GOLFING IN AUGUSTA, AFTER THE NINTH HOLE OF YOUR GAME, WE HOPE THAT YOU WILL PAUSE TO GIVE SOME CONSIDERATION TO THE AMERICAN FAMILY FARMER. WE FARMERS MUST HAVE MORE MONEY IN OUR POCKETS . . . WE WANT YOU TO SIGN IT, AND THEN PICK UP THAT LITTLE WHITE TELEPHONE ON YOUR DESK AND CALL EZRA BENSON AND TELL HIM: "EZRA, YOU'RE THROUGH." But the head of the nation's biggest (1,623,000 families) farm organization, President Charles B. Shuman of the American Farm Bureau Federation, held firm against the bill. Illinois Corn-Cattle Fanner Shuman called it "utterly bad legislation--representing a strictly political approach to a very serious-economic problem."*

*A recommendation for a "soft veto," i.e., accompanied by reassurances to farmers, came from Franklin Roosevelt's longtime (1933-40) Secretary of Agriculture, onetime (1941-45) Vice President Henry Agard Wallace. Farmer Wallace added that he will vote for Eisenhower in November, "not on the farm issue but on the peace issue."

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