AGRICULTURE Buttering the Bread Tax

From his solemn mien and the badge pinned defiantly on his lapel, anyone who spotted Orville Freeman on the street in recent weeks might have concluded that he was rehearsing for a cigarette commercial. And in fact, though his badge, I WILL NOT BOW DOWN TO THE BREAD TRUST, was hardly aimed at the consumer, the Secretary of Agriculture proved as unswitchable as they come.

As Freeman explained it, he was merely defending the Great Society against "aggressive, go-for-broke special interests." Specifically, he was battling for a new, cash-enriched farm bill whose most controversial provision was a 50-c--per-bushel increase (to $1.25) in the special subsidy paid to farmers for high-grade domestically consumed wheat. The only snag was Freeman's notion that wheat processors should subsidize the increased subsidy by paying the entire 500 increase themselves.*

Household Word. Far from bowing down to Orville, the milling and baking industries banded together with unions in an outfit called the Wheat Users Committee. Led by Maurice Rosenblatt, an astute professional lobbyist with a green thumb for controversy, the committee printed 5,000,000 pamphlets attacking the proposed "bread tax," a phrase that became a household word overnight. The pamphlets, distributed free at supermarkets around the U.S., explained that if the wheat plan were passed, housewives would soon be paying more for bread as well as for flour, crackers, cookies and cereal. Before long, outraged mail against the wheat plan started deluging Capitol Hill.

Freeman fought back tooth and nail, wrote to every member of Congress, and denounced "the most bitter, most irresponsible, and most heavily financed attack ever aimed at farm and food legislation." Many Congressmen, while naturally leary of supporting anything that smacked of a bread tax, were al most as perturbed by Orville's increasingly vindictive attitude toward the baking industry. "We should bear in mind," cautioned Illinois' Republican Representative Paul Fintlley, "that Secretary Freeman's office often becomes a propaganda mill and his statements are not always reliable."

Expendable Item. Administration officials also became fearful that the wheat issue might jeopardize the entire farm bill. Freeman took a count of the House, claimed that 210 members-only eight short of an absolute majority -would vote for the bill as it stood. In more objective surveys, House Majority Leader Carl Albert and White House Legislative Aide Larry O'Brien both realized that the bread-tax issue would cause major defections; they figured 170 votes for the bill at most. As Massachusetts Democrat Thomas O'Neill said: "I do not intend to reduce the excise taxes on diamonds, to reduce the excise taxes on automobiles, to reduce the excise taxes on jewelry, and then to put a 2-c-, tax on bread so that every housewife in America will be irked at each member of Congress."

"To lose a farm bill over this one item would be stupid," reasoned a top House Democratic leader, and the party's high command agreed. So on the eve of the farm-bill debate, Freeman got the news. Instead of saddling millers and bakers -and housewives -with the subsidy, the Government would foot the bill. The cost: between $150 million and $250 million a year. The House then passed the bill, 221 to 172, and sent it to the Senate.

* They already have to absorb the current 75-c- subsidy. The increase, added to the basic support price of $1.25, would guarantee farmers a $2.50-per-bushel price for wheat they grow under federal acreage allotments.

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