182 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 



are elsewhere. Haven't you men in this room heard men talk two years 

 ago that you would never see low prices of grain and live stock In Iowa 

 again, that we were on a permanent war level of prices and you would 

 never see cheap food again? You heard men talk also, not only farmers 

 but bankers and business men, that Iowa land would never stop until it 

 went to a thousand dollars an acre. I heard that. I talked in twenty 

 different counties in Iowa in the spring and early summer of 1920. I tried 

 to talk and say what all scholars and economists said, prices were on a 

 war level and we would go through the same period we had gone through 

 after every war, and they used to say to me: "Wallace, you are all right, 

 but you have got this thing sized up entirely wrong. This land won't go 

 back again, it is never going to stop until it gets to a thousand dollars 

 an acre." I think all of you have heard the same kind of talk. I see 

 no use in bemoaning a fact, but I say we ought to have seen something 

 of this severe period of restoration which has come upon us, we are in part 

 to blame just as everybody else is; not any more to blame than other 

 people for not anticipating some of it. 



Now I want to tell you what the Department of Agriculture tried to do. 

 The Department of Agriculture for forty years has been seeking increased 

 production. We have searched the world for new plants and animals. We 

 have studied in every field of scientific research for ways of cheapening 

 production, increasing production, to produce better. The Department 

 had not given the same attention to what I call the business side of farm- 

 ing; had not studied the economic side, and it seemed to me that side 

 of the department work needed strengthening. Very shortly after I went 

 there I began to strengthen that by combining various economic units in 

 the department, getting them together where they knew one another's 

 work, one man knew what the other man was working on, was given in- 

 spiration working together. I sent men over the seas to look into the for- 

 eign market. Our trouble we all said came from two causes: first, we had 

 stimulated production as a result of war demand in the hope and in the 

 expectation no matter if peace did come there was the starving world over- 

 seas to take all we produced at a good price, and then we felt when peace 

 did come and these people did undertake to come back to normal times, they 

 did like every sensible man did in his own business, they found they were 

 about broke and they said "we won't buy anything that we don't have to 

 buy, we will wear our old clothes. We will not eat more than we need 

 and we will go to work and pay off these debts." So our foreign demand 

 decreased while our production had increased and our costs of produc- 

 tion were the highest ever known. 



Then the trouble came to this country and our industries began to 

 slow down, men were thrown out of work, our consumption at home de- 

 creased, so you had a situation where forty per cent of our people depend- 

 ing on agriculture were selling their products at far less than cost of pro- 

 duction and are still going down to pre-war prices, while things they had 

 to have maintained a war level. I sent men overseas to seek cotton exports, 

 meat exports, grain exports and other products to see where we could sell 

 our stuff. People had been saying all we needed to do was to give these 

 people credit and they would buy our stuff. We. found that Avas not true. 



