On Rhubarb and Revolt

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Adlai Stevenson the Governor used to like to lean on fences, survey the prairie horizon and insist that in small places things are revealed to the humble that are obscure to the great and powerful.

The yard of my family's home in Greenfield, Iowa, this summer is an extraordinary clarifier. Down the line of porches the past echoes. There is a rhubarb patch--survivor of a century of drought, blizzard and small boys--that still yields its tender shoots for pies, a singular delicacy, which, when done right, is a dish to tempt a Paul Bocuse. A hand pump still stands proudly on a cistern. The rope hammock strung between the phi oak and the sugar maple is ragged but enduring, curving invitingly in the dusk. Hollyhocks fringe the small barn with the hayloft and the split door. The barn had been built for a new horse and buggy when Henry Ford was still considered a crank.

But there is a freshness too. The blooms of roses, petunias and daisies show through the twilight. Fireflies and children burst from leafy caverns. A look into the barn shows that it stables a red Chevrolet Monte Carlo. Far off, thunderheads pile up over the Missouri River, and then ringers of coolness touch the broad leaves of the linden tree overhead.

Voices and egos are reduced in such a setting. Thoughts are proffered with some reluctance. Yet the talk in this small place shows that the tax revolt is firmly rooted. Here is a clear vestige of the California-contrived Laffer Curve (the correlation between rising taxes and falling incentive). The ideas of Harvard's Samuel Beer are on many people's minds--not under Beer's label but as an outcropping of a deep vein of common sense. Beer believes that the Government is now so big and so oriented toward self-preservation that it is the Government itself, not citizen need or demand, that stimulates and promotes most of the big new programs.

The remarkable thing in Greenfield, Iowa, on this Fourth of July is that so many of the residents have their personal stories to support their concerns. Four policemen in town do the job that two used to do. Neither the population nor the incidence of crime has increased more than a fraction. A nearby hamlet was adequately supplied with two special education teachers, but there were funds left over so they hired a third teacher to sop up the surplus. A member of a state review board attended a meeting where he and the others were warned that their appropriation was not all spent, and if they did not use the funds, they would be cut back next year. A small shop received through the mail a 326-page compendium of OSHA regulations--the advance warning of federal scrutiny. No member of the ten man staff had time to read it. When the OSHA inspector arrived, he disallowed a grace period and fined the owner $60 for not having a guard on a compressor belt used once a year. The area's education agency, created to replace the school superintendents of eight counties, has ballooned into an aggressive bureaucracy of far more people than all the old county offices put together. The agency has hired a flack, is promoting itself with the legislature, and has even created its own printing department, which robs the local printers of work they used to do.

It is little wonder that George Gallup and Louis Harris get conflicting signals when they ask questions in the far corners of the land. Many of these people now see government as an adversary; yet they rush into its embrace to claim their share of money that they feel they paid. There are no villains in this landscape.

The choices are between good and better, between much and more. The momentum comes from highly educated and skillful bureaucrats who know how to maneuver in their worlds but have a full perception only of their own interests and do not sense the full burden the people must now sustain.

''How does Joe Califano spend $182 billion?" asked a pharmacist. "The answer is that he can't. He wastes a lot of it." In the 25-year history of HEW there has never been a clearer explanation of the problem, given with such an economy of language.

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