Roosevelt was more concerned about the plight of the farmers than that of any other group because he believed that the nation was becoming overcommitted to industry. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of May 1933 combined compulsory restrictions on production with government payments to growers of wheat, cotton, tobacco, pork, and a few other staple crops. The money for these payments was raised by levying processing taxes on middlemen such as flour millers. The object was to lift agricultural prices to “parity” with industrial prices, the ratio in most cases being based on the levels of 1909-1914, when farmers had been reasonably prosperous. In return for withdrawing part of their land from cultivation, farmers received “rental” payments from the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA).
Since the 1933 crops were growing when the law was passed, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, son of Harding’s secretary of agriculture and himself an experienced farmer and plant geneticist, decided to pay farmers to destroy the crops in the field. Cotton planters plowed up 10 million acres, receiving $100 million in return. Six million baby pigs and 200,000 pregnant sows were slaughtered. Such ruthlessness appalled observers, particularly when they thought of the millions of hungry Americans who could have eaten all that pork. Thereafter, limitation of acreage proved sufficient to raise some agricultural prices. Tobacco growers benefited, and so did those who raised corn and hogs. The price of wheat also rose, though more because of bad harvests than because of the AAA program. But dairy farmers and cattlemen were hurt by the law, as were the railroads (which had less freight to haul) and, of course, consumers. Many farmers insisted that the NRA was raising the cost of manufactured goods more than the AAA was raising the prices they received for their crops. “While the farmer is losing his pants to his creditors,” one Iowan complained, “NRA is rolling up his shirt. [Soon] we’ll have a nudist colony.”
A far more serious weakness of the program was its effect on tenant farmers and sharecroppers, many of whom lost their livelihoods when owners took land out of production to obtain AAA payments. In addition many landowners substituted machinery for labor. In the Cotton Belt farmers purchased more than 100,000 tractors during the 1930s. Each could do the work of several tenant or sharecropping families. Yet acreage restrictions and mortgage relief helped thousands of others. The law was a remarkable attempt to bring order to the chaotic agricultural economy. One New Deal official called it “the greatest single experiment in economic planning under capitalist conditions ever attempted by a democracy in times of peace.” This was an overstatement. The AAA was a drastic change of American policy, but foreign producers of coffee, sugar, tea, rubber, and other staples had adopted the same techniques of restricting output and subsidizing growers well before the United States did.
•••-[Read the Document An Attack on New Deal Farm Policies at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
