400 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



tigation. Then we saw how they tried to switch it to an economic in- 

 vestigation to be made by the Department of Agriculture. But the com- 

 mission was given powers which the department lacks. It was enabled 

 even to open secret safes and examine every paper bearing on the inner 

 system of control. When they failed to block the commission at the start, 

 they intimated that the commission wouldn't have as long a life as 

 Methusaleh. 



"Well, it doesn't need it. If a body does one good job, it should be 

 content to die. None of us had to do it for a living. 



"We reported the facts as we found them, without the slightest 

 malice and without any preconceived notion as to what they would prove 

 to be. They can have paid advertisements from California to Maine, but 

 they can not get behind the facts. 



"The packers were not the only ones investigated. It was a general 

 inquiry into food distribution methods. The other industries have not 

 kicked. They haven't said we weren't fair. It all depends on what you 

 say about a man whether he kicks. No one does so if you give him a 

 clean bill of health." 



Here is another quotation: 



"They criticize the language in which the report was written, but I 

 failed to see what difference that makes so long as the facts are in the 

 report, and the packers do not say the facts are not there. They can 

 not deny the facts, because they were obtained from their own files. 



"The packers tell you that it is Bolshevism to license packing houses, 

 commission men and stock yards. But the packers have been licensing 

 the commission men, so if it is Bolshevism, it must be all right for them. 

 They have been licensing the commission men through clauses in their 

 leases which permit them to oust a commission man from the stock yards 

 which they control, if he does not follow their regulations." 



I wish you could have heard Mr. Colver talk to the cattlemen out 

 there. The Federal Trade Commission are not people that are going to 

 back up. They know their rights, and no United States Chamber of 

 Commerce, and no group of packers, are going to be able to back the 

 Federal Trade Commission off the map. They have got the President 

 behind them, and I believe they have the united support of the stockmen 

 of this country who have taken the trouble to investigate the situation 

 and really know what the facts are. 



Of course, it has been very difficult to do that. The unprecedented 

 campaign of publicity which the packers have been engaged in during 

 the past year is something almost beyond belief. Their side of the 

 question has been presented from a perfectly partisan standpoint, while 

 the side of the producers and consumers has not yet had a hearing. It 

 is most unfortunate. Just to give you a conception of what this campaign 

 of publicity has been like, you probably noticed in the testimony of Louis 

 P. Swift, yesterday before the senate committee on agriculture, in which 

 he admits that his firm alone spent last year for advertising $1,700,000, 

 and he further admitted or stated that in matters of that kind the packers 

 are in a pool, each contributing to the pool on the same basis in which 

 the meat pool was handled in 1902. That was a pool they were operating 



