American Politics; 12; Less Corn and More Hell

This is National Educational Television. Washington University and KETC, Channel 9, the St. Louis Educational Television Station presents American Politics, of course, for television, with Professor Thomas H. Elliott, Chairman of the Department of Political Science of Washington University. Our subject today is the Politics of Agriculture. John Kenneth Galbrafe has reminded us that price guarantees for farmers are just about as old as this country.

In 1631, the colonial authorities of Virginia, in response to the petitions of at least some of the tobacco growers of that colony, decreed that it would be illegal to barter, to swap any pound of Virginia tobacco for less than six pence worth of English goods. Now, after 1631, for about 240 years, American pioneers, frontiersmen, gradually moved inland from the Atlantic coast, settling and cultivating more and more land. And yet, in all that time, nearly two centuries and a half, less land in the United States was settled and put to productive use than in the 20-year period that followed it. That's the period from 1870 to 1890. Perhaps our consideration of farm politics today can appropriately begin with that period of such astonishing expansion, a time incidentally which is only too well known to the TV children of today.

Of course, by 1870, the party politics of many farmers and farming areas were pretty well fixed. The southern cotton farmers, at least the white cotton farmers, had most of them always been Democrats. Now, in 1870, reacting against the alleged excesses of post-civil war reconstruction, they were more than ever anti-republic. In contrast, the farming areas of the Middle West, the so-called, especially the older Middle West, the so-called North Central or East Central States, such as Ohio and Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, had been settled largely by people from the Northeast. By large majority in the Civil War, they were pro-Union, and after the Civil War almost automatically, as we have seen, they were Republican.

The Great Expansion, after 1870, this extraordinary period of 20 years, brought more union veterans, and hence presumptively at least Republicans, into political dominance in the new states west of the Mississippi River. However, the 1870s also marked the beginning of a 20-year decline in the real income of the average farmer. Over production, all this expansion, lowered the prices he could charge simultaneously the growth of industrial monopoly, increased the costs he had to pay. So great did the agricultural distress become, so frequently did it descend even into despair, that eventually a new party, the People's Party, commonly called the populists, came into some prominence, and wielded considerable influence in a few states, most of them, west of the Great River. Among the better-known orators of this group, was a fiery lady named Mary Ellen Lease, otherwise known as the Kansas Cassandra.

There's a picture of her, I don't think she looks as fiery as the story books and the history books make her out to be, but apparently she did have considerable effect, as a populist art. Her slogan, as a matter of fact, is one that is dimly reflected even today among the farming groups, for what she stressed was the existence of an agricultural surplus, and the need of the farmer politically to help himself. That slogan has given us the title, of course, for the present lecture. The farmers, Mary Ellen Lease, said, should raise less corn and more hell. But the Republican tradition, despite all this, the Republican tradition in the rural counties of the northern and northwestern states, was still too strong. Despite widespread discontent and distress, the populists couldn't really crack it.

Even when the unhappy farmers gained a stronger voice with the nomination of William Jennings Bryan by the Democrats in 1896, even when the Democrats, to a very considerable degree, took over the populist program. The Republican tradition was hardly shaken. Bryan and Abraskin carried his home state, a few other states of the West. But the older farming areas, upstate New York, outstate Ohio, downstate Illinois, remained true to the GOP. The farm depression ended shortly after Bryan's defeat in 1896, not to return with any severity for more than 20 years. So let's skip to the 1920s. From standpoint of party politics, the significant thing about the government's agricultural policies, from the 20s until the late 1940s, I think, is that basically they cannot fairly be described as party policies. Instead, the various farm programs adopted and not adopted, successful and unsuccessful, were formulated chiefly by representatives of the farmers themselves.

The 20s, I guess technically I should say 1919, but effectively the 20s, saw the founding of a new farm organization, the American Farm Bureau Federation, which grew rapidly and soon gained, among all the groups, the preponderant influence. Farm relief bills for 20 years, were largely hammered out and actually in part written in the conferences of the leaders of this group and other organizations, state and local, representing various agricultural interests. Economic interest, economic interest, not political party interest, was dominant. The vote in Congress in 1927, for instance, on the McNairy-Hogan bill, the first of the really big farm relief bills to make any headway, although it didn't finally succeed, illustrates this point that I have just made. And it sets a pattern, a 20-year pattern, too.

On that bill, which was passed by the House, the Republicans voted for it for Farm relief bill 101-68, and the Democrats 100-253, a very similar split, you see, in both of the major parties in the House of Representatives. At the same time, in those same years, the so-called Farm Block of the Senate illustrated a bipartisan ship, which obviously was pointed toward the economic interest, farmers or the local political interest of the senators, rather than any widespread national party policy, 28 Republicans and 27 Democrats, where the self-style and generally recognized members of the Farm Block in the Senate in the 1920s. Incidentally, President Coolidge vetoed a Republican vetoed the McNairy-Hogan bill. And yet, one year later, the Republicans, their president having vetoed the McNairy-Hogan bill, carried every single one of the northern farming states.

Everyone went Republican. This is just a reminder of the tremendous deep-seated strength of the historic Republican tradition in the rural areas of the North and Central West. The Farm programs of the 1930s were largely bipartisan, too. As a matter of fact, I can say without sounding partisan, I hope, that in the early 1930s, when these programs first got underway, there were actually so few Republicans in Congress that I don't think putting figures on the board about the votes on those bills would serve us any particularly useful purpose. But let's remember that these bills, too, the agricultural adjustment acts and their counterparts, were chiefly, again, the product of conferences between and among farm leaders rather than party politicians. So, matter of fact, the chief political figure in pushing that program, that original program, which is basic to what we know today, was himself a highly successful farmer and farm editor by the name of Henry Agar Wallace, that picture of him incidentally, must be in one of his later political incarnations.

It does not look like the man I remember as Secretary of Agriculture. Mr. Wallace had grown up as an Iowa Republican. Not being much of a respecter of party loyalty, as we well know, he had found it easy to leave the Republicans after Mr. Coolidge had vetoed the McNairy-Hogan bill. In a way, he does symbolize the bipartisan approach of the bipartisan nature of the fall farm program. Now, before we take up the recent change, the new comparatively new appearance of party conflict on agricultural issues, let's briefly examine the farm program, which began in the 30s, as I have said, and which basically continues today. Present day political battle, you know, concerned chiefly the details of that program and not its real essentials.

At the risk, and please recognize that I am running a risk here and make due allowance for it, at the risk of drastically oversimplifying, let's now try to take a look at those essentials. The basic idea, the basic idea is to guarantee to the farmer a decent standard of living. Agriculture is by far the most competitive part of our national economy. The prices rise and fall, depending upon the amount of supply and the extent of demand. Surpluses, the production of more foods than people want to buy or can buy, send farm prices down, down, down. Now, that wouldn't be so bad for the farmer, yet at the same time, the prices of the things that he has to buy, tractors, harvesters, trucks, paint, barbed wire, rugs, I guess, don't know, anything else. If they dropped too, the difficulty, however, is that those goods, most of them, are not sold on a purely competitive market.

The price of those things do not respond quickly to changes in the relationship of supply to demand. Look for a moment at what happened between 1929 and 1933. Depression had hit and hit hard. Millions were unemployed, savings had been wiped out. For everything, demand diminished. People just couldn't buy much of anything as much of anything as they had been buying. And therefore, farm prices dropped, as that lower, rather straight line indicates. But the prices which the farmers had to pay went down only by brief, shorter steps as the upper line shows. And so at the bottom of the depression, at the right end of that chart, the farmers not only had much less cash income than before, but their standards of living had gone down catastrophically, represented in the chart by the difference between the two lines on the right side. Now we come to the government's remedy or attempted remedy for this condition. The heart of that remedy, the heart of that remedy is the concept of parity.

I think we can grasp the general idea of parity, most easily, if for a moment we get rid of the thought of buying and selling, and think instead in terms like the old Virginia colonists of swapping or buttering. Buttering or swapping a farmer's crops or the things that he has to have like a harvester or a truck. Suppose an average sweet farmer, at some time in the past, was making a good living. He wasn't exactly rich, but he wasn't poor either. Suppose at that time in the past, he raised 1,000 bushels of wheat and was able to swap those 1,000 bushels for one new Ford truck. The idea of parity is, in effect, that he should be able today to swap 1,000 bushels of wheat for one new Ford truck. Now in the old days, let's assume, a Ford new Ford truck costs 1,000 dollars.

Therefore, the farmer in swapping his 1,000 bushels of wheat was swapping 1,000 dollars worth of wheat. In other words, he was getting a price for his wheat of 1 dollar a bushels. Today, let's assume, the price on the market of a new Ford truck has risen to 2,000 dollars. If the farmer still only gets a dollar for his wheat for a bushels, he can only buy half a truck as the picture shows. If he's going to be able to swap his 1,000 bushels still for a new Ford truck, he's going to have to receive obviously 2,000 dollars for his wheat or 2 dollars a bushels. And so today, 2 dollars a bushels, in our example, would be parity or the parity price for a wheat. In the case of numerous crops, the government guarantees to the forest. In fact, a price a little less than parity. The political battles now are not over whether there should be this government guarantee or price support, but what it should be. They are all for such questions as how much less than parity should the government guarantee be?

What costs should be included in deciding what is a reasonably good standard of living, just trucks and tractors and paint and borrowed wire or what about televisions and other of the present day alleged necessities of life? What specific period in the past should be the basic period for computing the whole parity formula? What crops should receive these government price supports or guarantees? What conditions, if any, should the government insist upon before granting these price supports? Should farmers, expecting to receive this help, be required to conserve the soil, for instance? Or should they be required to reduce the agricultural surplus by taking some of their acres out of production? Farm income recently has been going down again while farm costs again remain high. Does this mean that the guarantee itself should be a fixed high percentage of parity, or would such a guarantee merely stimulate more production, more overproduction, greater surpluses, and thus load upon the taxpayers in general, a really crushing burden of having to buy at high prices a vast amount of unused and unwanted farm commodities? I was cautioning you again that we are necessarily oversimplifying the complications of agricultural policies are endless.

Nevertheless, perhaps we have considered enough of the broad outlines to return now to party politics on the farm front. The record in Congress shows that party lines had little difference, not only in the 20s and 30s, but even in the first eight years or so of the 1940s. Biggest and hottest farm fight probably in the 40s came in 1942. President Roosevelt was then seeking not to put floors under farm prices, but during the shortage of the war farm prices were going up, and the whole price control program of wartime was jeopardized. He was trying to put ceilings on farm prices in 1942, and he lost on the big votes on that program. He lost again to a farm vote, not a Democratic vote or a Republican vote, but a farm vote in the Congress, both parties dividing about the same against his price control proposal. Finally came the year that marked, I think, probably we can say, that it marked the great change.

In 1948, a very unexpected event occurred, the re-election of Harry S. Truman as President of the United States. Mr. Truman, as you will recall, in his whistle stop campaign, had made a very wealthy and direct appeal to the economic self-interest of the farmers, claiming that the Republican Congress had in some fashion been undermined the whole price support program. Mr. Truman, quite surprisingly, captured a number of these northern agricultural states. Now, actually, there is a good deal of evidence that in 1948, the Democrats made only very small and indecisive gains in the rural areas. A study, for instance, in Iowa, which Truman unexpectedly carried, shows that his greatest gains were in the city of Des Moines, and not, as had been commonly supposed, in the corn counties. Nevertheless, as Professor Charles Hardin has pointed out, whatever the actual statistics were, the general idea among the people was that the farm vote in these northern, middle-western states had actually swung the election.

Accordingly, Democratic leaders apparently decided that a direct partisan appeal, like Truman's, might well swing future elections too. All of a sudden, votes on farm bills in the Congress began to reveal real differences in the party lineup. I say votes in Congress. Of course, in campaigns, in actual campaigns, campaigning being what it is, the Republicans often tried to match or even outdo the Democrats in their promises and their appeal to the self-interest of those engaged in agriculture. In 1952, the Democratic candidate came out squarely for a fixed high percentage, 90% of parity, as the level of government-price supports. Immediately, the Republican candidate came out in favor of 100% of parity, which he explained a little later, as meaning 100% of parity in the market place.

A phrase which I confess baffles me, and I fail to continue to baffle me as long as I live. The meaning is, say, the least obscure. Nevertheless, in Washington, regardless of these campaigns, in Washington, when the chips were down and when the decisions had to be made, the end of the 1940s and the 1950s saw calm questions becoming for the first time real partisan issues. Especially this seems to be true, not exclusively by any means, but especially this seems to be true, of the question that I just mentioned, of whether the government guarantee should be fixed at 90% of parity, or whether it should be flexible. Flexible, in a sense of being able to drop much lower than 90%, if heavy surfaces of a particular product are piling up. On this issue, a partisan division became apparent dimly, as early as 1949, year after Truman had been reelected.

On a Senate vote, a motion was made for flexible supports. The supports had been made firm and high at 90% during the war. Now came a Republican motion, as it were. I don't know what it was. I guess it was Democratic motion, actually. But it was a motion to adopt the flexible price system for the possibility of guaranteeing considerably less than 90% of parity to the farmers. On this motion, the Democrats divided 15 for the flexible, but 24 for the 90% fixed parity. The Republicans, 41 for flexible, and 29 for high fixed parity. This was during a period, what was right after the election, 1949. The next vote wasn't on the parity question, but it was related to it. It was a question of extending and liberalizing the price supports for three crops in 1950.

Cotton, peanuts, and potatoes. Here you have something of a party split. Here you get an even bigger one. On this in the Senate, the Democrats divided four, the liberalizing of the supports, 34 for five, and the Republicans were against it three to 28. I don't think we should put too much stock probably in those figures, because cotton is involved there. The Republicans are very sparse in the Senate who come from cotton states, whereas the Democratic strength is very considerably centered there, that may be why there's such a very sharp party difference in that vote. Now we come to 1952, and back to the real question of whether to have flexible supports or 90% fixed parity. On this, the parity, the fixed parity, the 90% parity side one in the House. I give you the figures. The Democrats dividing 133 to 35 for flexible supports, and the Republicans, 74 to 85. Now that figure isn't too different from some of the other ones that I've just been giving you. In one sense, all of these more recent figures indicate a higher degree of party unanimity, still by no means unanimous, but a higher degree of party unanimity on these issues, among the Democrats, then among the Republicans.

This isn't uniformly solved, but it's delicately solved. I don't think the reason is very hard to locate. I think basically the reason is that quite a number of Republican congressmen and senators, true to tradition and history, still come from the northern farming states. They are torn between the economic interest and perhaps their own beliefs and interests of their constituents for the highest prices possible and delight, and often between the quite different policies espoused by the leaders of the Republican party. I think that's basically why you have a much closer split among the Republicans than you do among the Democrats. The dilemma of this Midwestern Republican farm group became very apparent in the year 1956. That year, the Eisenhower, or Benson, or Republican farm program, was aimed primarily at reducing surpluses, was focused on that goal. Among other things, as I hope in the hope of reducing surpluses, it urged flexible parity prices instead of 90% fixed parity prices, hoping that lower prices might cause less planting and thus reduce the surplus.

On this bill in the House, a fixed parity bill was brought in and representative Martin, the minority leader, moved that it be recommitted and that flexible supports be substituted for it. On that bill, the Democrats voted against flexible supports, in other words, for the fixed parity price. 14 to 201 in the House, whereas the Republicans voted the other way, 167 to 27. Not so very much of a split, still the Republicans splitting a little bit more than the Democrats. The split was much more clear in the Senate. In the Senate, the vote was on the bill for fixed parity, 90% parity. On this, the Democrats were almost solid, 35 to 4, and the Republicans backing Eisenhower, nevertheless had a one-third of their group against Mr. Eisenhower's program, 15 to 31, 31 back Mr. Eisenhower in flexible supports, 15 went the other way.

As you know, Mr. Eisenhower vetoed that bill and those majorities were nowhere near two-thirds, so there was no serious attempt made to override the veto. Then both parties seemed to be getting together on a bipartisan program aimed at reducing surpluses, aimed at incidentally reducing surpluses by paying benefits to farmers for not producing animals or goods. This is the throwback all the way back to 1933, when people said Mr. Wallace was killing millions of little pigs. It's now called a soil bank and seems to be respectable, both parties are quarreling about how the payments should be made, but not about the principle. The only thing we can say is that this party division has become apparent on these other issues, and that neither the parties, nor the farmers, nor the presidents, nor the secretaries of agriculture have yet solved, nor seemed likely in the near future,

and solved all of the nation's problems with respect to agriculture. This is National Educational Television. Thank you.