ADLAI ON THE FARM

The 1956 Democratic farm program as outlined by Candidate Adlai Stevenson in speeches at Newton, Iowa and Oklahoma City:

I want to talk to you about the people who run their own farms, keep store, work for themselves. These people are an issue in this campaign . . . They are in danger of being swallowed up by big corporations in alliance with big government in a world which has become dangerously indifferent to the fate of the little man. This threat of bigness shows itself in many forms. It shows itself in the struggle of the farmer to survive--in the fact that the family farmer in many parts of our country has his back to the wall . . .

Men whose life has been lived in a vast corporation do not see a disaster like the drought as a human problem. They see farms and livestock only as statistics. As a result, relief is grudging and reluctant, too much red tape, too little real help--and always too late . . . Many of you here [at Oklahoma City] today are farmers. You have had particular reason to feel the neglect and the indifference of a big-business administration. For three years the Republican leaders watched farm prices fall with philosophical calm. This is the nice, polite way of saying they did nothing--until election year came around . . .

More Than Stopgap. This year we have the best farm plank in our Democratic platform that any party ever had . . . We propose to support basic commodities at 90% of parity. We propose to extend protection to perishables through a combination of direct production payments, marketing agreements and production adjustments. In this connection I would like to try production payments to encourage earlier marketing of hogs in the years when the runs are heavy. This may be a good way to help end the anxiety and the anguish of violent price movement.

We will administer vigorously the soil bank, a good Democratic idea.

And I would urge consideration of what could be called a "legume bank" to change the emphasis from reducing cash crop production to increasing acreage of soil-building crops . . .

We must go on to assure ample credit at fair rates to the farmer who has to borrow money. We must protect REA co-ops by safeguarding and using the preference clause and by assuring them adequate funds for transmission, generation and distribution. We must conserve the greatest asset we have inherited--the soil . We must strengthen the agricultural conservation program and the Soil Conservation Service, restore the role of leadership to the conservation districts, restore the administration of agricultural programs to farmers, and take emergency measures when needed to prevent another dust bowl.

World Food Bank. We must go to the root of the causes of farm distress today--the inability of people both at home and in foreign lands to buy the food that they need and that you can raise . . . Abundance is not a blight but a blessing. At home, we can vastly expand our school-lunch program. Did you know that less than one-third of all school-age children participate in this program? And we can launch a new food-stamp program that will put food into the mouths of the many who need it. Abroad, there is much we can do with food and fiber to the advantage of mankind and the U.S.A. We can encourage voluntary relief agencies to distribute surplus foods, and we can create a world food bank and materials reserve to help the people of other nations.

Today we are confronted not with a breakdown of our agriculture but with a breakdown of imagination and leadership. What we need today is the concern and determination that wrought the agricultural revolution of the 1930s. So much for our program.

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