Prolonged Debate

All last week the Senate tore its hair, rent the air with cries and filled the Congressional Record with words for the sake of the nation's farmers.

The most important thing about the farm relief proposals was nevertheless the parliamentary situation. The House had refused to pass the Haugen farm relief bill (TIME, May 31, THE CONGRESS) by vote of 212 to 167. It had previously passed a bill supported by the Administration creating a division of co-operative marketing in the Department of Agriculture, a bill designed to aid farmers in forming and operating co-operative enterprises. In the Senate with an election coming on, and with the dissatisfaction registered by the farmers two weeks ago by the nomination of onetime Senator Brookhart and the defeat of Senator Cummins, there were many Senators who felt impelled to take up the Haugen bill to satisfy the farmers.

So Senator McNary of the Committee on Agriculture reported the one agricultural bill which the Senate had received from the House--reported with an .amendment. The amendment was the addition to it of the entire Haugen bill (defeated by the House) with very little change. If the Senate were to pass the bill as Mr. McNary wished, the House might consent to a joint conference to arrange the differences or it might, as seemed probable, reject the Haugen bill just as it was rejected before. If by any chance the House should accept the Haugen bill, it was reasonably certain that the President would veto it. The most the proponents of the bill could really hope for was a greatly modified compromise--a sort of patchwork bill as a sop for the farmers.

Senator Moses took an informal poll, which indicated that there would be 52 votes against the Haugen bill in the Senate, enough to defeat it. But that did not still the disturbance. The Senators from the northeastern states were against it, and Senator Carter Glass of Virginia brought most of the southern Democrats into line against it. The advocates of the bill were led by Senator McNary of Oregon and Senator Gooding of Idaho. They included one Southerner, Senator Simmons of North Carolina, and such others as Steck of Iowa, McMaster of South Dakota, Watson of Indiana and, strangely enough, the Vice President.

Mr. Dawes sometime ago put the question of the advisability of the Haugen bill to an English economist, Sir Josiah Stamp. Sir Josiah approved it, and lately Mr. Dawes has been sitting in at the conferences of the supporters of the Haugen bill. In fact the bill, originally called the Haugen bill from the chairman of the House Committee of Agriculture, and then the McNary-Haugen bill, adding the name of the sponsor of the bill in the Senate, was last week dubbed by its opponents the Dawes-McNary-Haugen bill.

Since cloture in the Senate is nearly dead as an issue, it is as a farm leader that Mr. Dawes is most likely to be a candidate* in 1928. This has made the Vice President some curious friends. One of them is Mr. Brookhart, who was defeated in 1924 because he denounced Mr. Dawes as part of the Republican ticket. Now Mr. Brookhart is quoting Dawes on farm relief in Iowa. Another is Senator Watson of Indiana. Senator Fess of Ohio, hoary onetime college president, launched a bitter attack on "this Dawes-McNary-Haugen plan":

"In the past few Congresses 22 measures have been enacted looking toward farm relief. But this Dawes-McNary-Haugen plan will bring ruin instead. The theory is that the farmer shall pay an assessment which shall be devoted to bidding up domestic prices of corn, hogs, wheat, cattle and cotton to some fixed level above world prices and dumping the 'surplus' abroad at a loss. All these commodities have a surplus over the domestic demand, the average annual exports amounting to about $1,500,000,000. The idea is that the farmer will gain because the major part of his product is sold at home and a minor part abroad. Regardless of the pleasant sounding theory it is disastrously unworkable."

He argued that it would "sovietize" agriculture; that it would set up a great bureaucracy in the government; that it was price-fixing; that the farmer and consumer would pay and the packers and millers would profit; that the trouble with agriculture is overproduction which this plan would further stimulate; that the consumer is the ultimate power in politics and, if a political board controlled agricultural prices, the consumers would soon seize control to the farmers' detriment; that it was a proposal to sell cheaply to foreigners and expensively to Americans--in short that it was "a lift-yourself-by-your-bootstraps theory of economics."

Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, after several times intimating studious opposition to all bills such as the Haugen, finally came out as the Administration's heavyweight against radical agarian economics. He stated that the Haugen bill would increase the cost of living, while at the same time it would create a still greater surplus of farm products by artificially stimulating production. Furthermore, the "equalization fee" is of doubtful constitutionality, and as to its administration, "the intricacies of the income tax and prohibition enforcement appear simple by comparison."

*The Vice President looked askance on this attitude of press and Senate; told Correspondent Frederic William Wile flatly: "I am not a candidate for any office, nor will I be a candidate for any office at the expiration of my present term as Vice President."