Waiting for the Whistle

"We talk and talk about what to do but always come out in a circle," said Iowa Farmer John Hilbert to Pollster Samuel Lubell. Farmer Hilbert's gloomy, no-way-out tone was typical of what seasoned Listener Lubell found on a seven-week trip through farm country in Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, North Dakota and Wisconsin. Lubell's basic finding: the Midwest's farmers, who once had firm opinions about federal price-support programs, are now as baffled by the massive, $7 billion-a-year farm-glut scandal as the experts, the Eisenhower Administration and Congress (TIME, March 2). "Not a single farmer," Lubell reported last week for United Feature Syndicate, "could offer even a crackpot solution to the surplus problem." And a "sizable majority of farmers confessed they thought there might be no solution at all."

The farmers are uneasy about the surplus mess, but they are so wary of drastic measures to cope with it that most farmers "prefer to drift along with things as they are," bad as they are. "I don't like farming for the Government," admitted a troubled Minnesota wheat farmer. "I know it's wrong. But it's not for me to figure out what should be done. I have four children to take care of. As long as the Government pays for it, I'll raise as much wheat as I can." The farmers, concluded Lubell, are "waiting for someone other than themselves to blow the whistle and say the party is over."

Probing into farmers' political opinions, Lubell found a Democratic trend still running in the Midwest, but scant enthusiasm for Democratic presidential hopefuls. Adlai Stevenson's defeats in '52 and '56 count against him, Lubell found. "A blank stare was often the reaction I got to the names of [Minnesota's] Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, [Missouri's] Stuart Symington and [Texas'] Lyndon B. Johnson." Of all the Democratic hopefuls, Massachusetts' "John F. Kennedy emerges as almost the only one who stirs any real public interest." Among Republican voters, "Vice President Richard M. Nixon shows up as a 7-to-4 favorite over Governor Nelson Rockefeller." But Nixon "emerges as an extremely partisan figure who does not appeal to wavering Democrats."

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