AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



by government auditors who sought to find out what the average cost 

 of doing business was. A comparison of the figures of the private com- 

 panies and the cooperatives placed the farmers' agencies in a very favor- 

 able light. Obviously, the cooperatives had injected much vigor into the 

 enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act. 22 



Equally important to the farm bloc was the passing of legislation to 

 regulate the grain exchanges of the country. Movements of this type had 

 been on foot since the days of the Grangers. For the most part they suc- 

 ceeded in forcing the grain exchanges to clean house on their own, as the 

 Packers' Consent Decree was intended to do, thus checking the passage 

 of regulatory legislation. 23 But this time there was no escape; the Futures 

 Trading Act was passed. This put a prohibitive tax of twenty cents a 

 bushel on speculative transactions such as "puts and calls," "bids," "offers," 

 "indemnities," and "ups and downs" and on grain sold for future delivery 

 except when the transactions were made by owners of the grain through 

 certain authorized contract markets. These authorized contract markets 

 were placed under the supervision of the Secretary of Agriculture, who, 

 along with the Secretary of Commerce and the Attorney General, had 

 the power to punish violators by revoking their privileges. 24 In 1922 this 

 act was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court. 25 



Tariff protection was another aim, but it was not brought to the fore 

 by the farm bloc. Although this movement gained greater momentum 

 later, some of the farm-bloc spokesmen, in cooperation with a western 

 tariff bloc, kept protectionist sentiment alive by insisting that the same 

 policy that had been used to build up industry had to be applied to agri- 

 culture. Also, they remonstrated that foreign products had to be kept out 

 if the American farmers were to survive. 26 



It was logic such as this, before the farm bloc took form, that was behind 

 the emergency tariff bill that was introduced in Congress during the 

 closing days of the Wilson administration. The bill met a hostile reception. 



22. Ibid., pp. 189, 241, 244. 



23. Herman Steen, Cooperative Marketing (New York, 1923), p. 211. 



24. The New International Year Boo\, 1921, p. 23. 



25. U. S. Dept. Agri., Yearboo^, 1922, pp. 48-49; G. O. Virtue, "Legislation for 

 the Farmers: Packers and Grain Exchanges," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 

 XXXVII (August, 1923), pp. 693-704. 



26. Capper, The Agricultural Bloc, pp. 105-7, *$ 



