Parting

John Nance Garner looked down from his rostrum, his keen eyes seeing everything taking place on the Senate floor. Deliberately blind to half-a-dozen Senators on their feet clamoring to be heard, he put an end to four weeks of haggling, took a final roll call on the Pope-McGill Farm Bill. It was passed 59-to-29. His act was a defiance of the sacred tradition of free speech in the Senate, and an eminently sensible thing to do because 1) the bill was going to be passed anyhow, 2) its form was immaterial--it and the far different House bill will be combined and rewritten in conference--and 3) the important theatre of action in farm legislation was last week far from the Senate chamber.

The scene had shifted from Washington to Chicago's bustling Hotel Sherman, to the 19th convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation. There two men who have written most of the farm legislation of the New Deal finally saw the parting of their ways at hand.

In New Deal Washington few partnerships have been so enduring as that between Henry Agard Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, and Edward Asbury O'Neal III, president of the Farm Bureau Federation. Homespun Henry Wallace and the tall, grey, calloused Alabama cotton grower were bound together not only by common interest, but power. As head of a farm organization whose 408,000 members in 40 States are a more united force than the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, 62-year-old Ed O'Neal has been since 1931 the most influential farm leader in the land. When Henry Wallace projected AAA which required a nation-wide executive setup to estimate crop acreages, the Farm Bureau's 1,800 functioning county organizations stepped into the breach and Ed O'Neal stepped into the Administration. Although the New Deal's lavish benefit payments helped all farm organizations, they helped big Farm Bureau Federation most. When the Supreme Court intervened to break up AAA, Ed O'Neal stayed on to help Henry Wallace salvage what he could with the Soil Conservation Act. So this year when Franklin Roosevelt, in the face of mounting agricultural production, asked Congress to amplify the slender powers the Government possessed to control it, Henry Wallace and Ed O'Neal seemed destined to work on another farm bill together.

Two chief types of legislation were possible: "voluntary" crop control--giving benefit payments to cooperate in crop reduction programs and giving loans on amounts withheld from the market: and compulsory control--levying penalties on excess production. Secretary Wallace observed in his annual report last month that although voluntary methods were preferable, compulsory methods should be invoked when crop reserves on hand grew too large. So Ed O'Neal and his Federation helped draft the Pope-McGill Bill accepting the compulsory principle wholeheartedly, setting permissible crop reserves at the low levels they considered necessary to maintain prices.

While Ed O'Neal thereupon set himself the unwelcome task of selling his members compulsory control, Chairman Marvin Jones of the House Agriculture Committee introduced his own bill, which set the reserves so high that compulsory control would seldom operate. Superficially the House bill appealed more to farmers because it would allow them to receive benefit payments on larger crops--but actually, according to Ed O'Neal, money for the payments could not be authorized in the present budget situation and the whole control structure might collapse. At this juncture Henry Wallace, whom Ed O'Neal considered at least the uncle of the Senate bill, wrote to Senators Pope and McGill warning against the dangers of too much compulsory control, advocating larger reserves. When this was interpreted as a Wallace endorsement of the House bill apparently leaving the Farm Bureau stranded with the Pope-McGill Bill, Ed O'Neal began to wonder. When the House passed its bill last fortnight without Henry Wallace taking any steps to disown it, Ed O'Neal got sore.

Last week, as President O'Neal rose to his six feet to address 3,000 members of the Federation at their convention, he well knew that one of his audience was Henry Wallace. Scuttling his prepared speech, Ed O'Neal boomed: "The farmers are meeting opposition . . . even from our fighting Secretary of Agriculture. Secretary Wallace favors big granary supplies, and we just can't go along with him on that idea. ... If adequate money were available for big parity payments, then we would not object. . . . We want a measure with definite control written into the law. We hate to disagree with our good friend, the Secretary, but we cannot and will not compromise on this fundamental issue."

If Ed O'Neal expected to lure Henry Wallace into a debate, he was disappointed. Admitting to interviewers only that he found something to recommend in both House and Senate bills, the Secretary gave the convention's afternoon session an innocuous speech on general farming policies and the "sacredness of the soil," a speech which he asked them to repeat in their own neighborhoods. Many an observer wondered whether Secretary Wallace's split with the Farm Bureau Federation might be due to the caution of an available Presidential candidate, but one fact was unmistakable. When Henry Wallace and Ed O'Neal went back to Washington to help in the difficult job of hammering two farm bills into one. for the first time in four years they would not be working side by side.

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