Ir 4 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



What he had in mind was essentially a gigantic holding movement. Why 

 shouldn't the farmers set prices themselves instead of allowing "the 

 captains of industry, the promoter, the underwriter, the labor leader, and 

 the grain gambler" to dictate to them ? By devising some simple machinery 

 for setting prices, and by keeping farm produce off the market unless and 

 until these prices could be obtained, Everitt was certain that the farmers 

 could not only secure relief from the ill effects of monopoly; they could 

 themselves, in fact, become the greatest of all monopolists. 5 



Everitt was much concerned with the necessity of holding down the 

 "visible supply" of any given commodity, for it was this "visible supply" 

 which in relation to the demand tended at any given time to fix the price. 

 He believed that wherever possible the farmers should provide storage 

 facilities for their own crops on their own farms. If forced to it, however, 

 they could "put up granaries, elevators or warehouses to hold their prod- 

 ucts, or build cooperative cold storage plants to hold their fruit, etc." But 

 he was chary of the business complications that resulted from joint-stock 

 companies, or even cooperatives after the Granger pattern. The farmers 

 should keep out of all business except the farming business as completely 

 as possible. All they need try to do was to put farming itself "on a safe 

 profitable basis," with benefits for the farmer "equaling those realized in 

 other business undertakings." 6 



The violent fluctuations in prices from which the farmers continually 

 lost while the speculators gained, Everitt believed to be entirely unneces- 

 sary. The farmers could change all this if only they would stop dumping 

 the bulk of any particular commodity on the market at harvest time. 

 What they needed was some method of feeding the market with a twelve- 

 month supply on a twelve-month basis. Everitt was sure that this could be 

 done if only a fraction of the producers the more intelligent ones would 

 join forces. He had no notion that all the nation's wheat growers, for 

 example, could be persuaded to hold their wheat off the market. But if 

 the organized farmers could control no more than half the total amount 

 of wheat normally exported, he insisted, they would be in a position to set 



5. Everitt, The Third Power, third edition (1905), p. 35; fourth edition (1907), 

 p. vii. 



6. Plan of the American Society of Equity, pp. 2-3; Bahmer, in Agricultural His- 

 tory, XIV (lanuary, 1940), p. 37. 



