PROCEEDINGS IOWA FAIR MANAGERS ASSN. 181 



to do to help this whole agricuUural situation. I think there is no well 

 considered measure that seemed to be practical which has been proposed 

 there which has not met favorable support and which will not become law. 



There are two matters pending which I assume will be acted upon 

 favorably. One of them is to clear away the obstructions to the formation 

 of farmers' co-operative marketing organizations. As you know, now and 

 then in this state and the other state the officers of such organizations have 

 been arrested by over-zealous local attorneys on the ground they were' a 

 combination in restraint of trade, and this law is designed to take away 

 any excuse for that sort of thing. It has passed the House and is on the 

 Senate calendar and I assume will be acted on at an early date. The other 

 bill is a proposal to put agricultural representation on the Federal Reserve 

 Board, and that grows out of the feeling on the part of a large number of 

 people that the policy of deflation which was inaugurated by the Board a 

 little more than a year ago has had a disastrous effect upon agriculture 

 and has been in considerable part responsible for the severe drop in agri- 

 cultural prices without corresponding drop in other prices. What will 

 happen as to that law I do not know. Naturally the bankers feel that the 

 Federal Reserve Board should be composed of bankers, it is to administer 

 the credit machinery of the country and only men of wide banking experi- 

 ence should be on it. On the other side of the question they point to the 

 fact on the Bank of England Board there is not a banker, it is composed 

 of representatives of the various businesses and industries, and that the 

 administration of the credit machinery in that country is with due regard 

 to all industries and businesses. Clearly if the federal reserve board is to 

 be a board simply to administer credit, without undertaking to administer 

 that credit in a way to influence business, then it is a bankers business. 

 If on the other hand it is to be the sort of an institution which undertakes 

 to encourage or depress business according to its judgment, then I think 

 the argument is good that representatives not only of agriculture but 

 manufacturing and labor and other business interests should have a seat 

 on the Board. That matter is going to come up for discussion this winter 

 and it will be a very interesting discussion. 



So much for what Congress has done. And I want to say again that if 

 Congress has not done more it is not for lack of desire to do more to 

 solve this whole situation. The difficulty has been to determine what is the 

 practical thing to do, wiiat will work, what will do more good than harm. 

 That is the difficulty of the whole affair. It is not an easy matter to bring 

 about all at once a condition of prosperity following such a period as 

 we have been through. Here we had thirty million men in the field with 

 guns in their hands set to work to kill one another; taken from the walks 

 of business. We had practically all the civil population of the world 

 working and planning for that war w^ork and to support these men in the 

 field; a complete disorganization of all our ways of doing things up to 

 that time, and you cannot expect in going through a period such as this 

 that there is not going to be some disturbance in getting these men back 

 and started again in the walks of business. 



We must take to ourselves a good deal of the blame for not anticipating 

 such a thing as has come upon us; and we are to blame here in Iowa as we 



