MCNARY-HAUGEN MOVEMENT 385 



farm products; production to meet domestic needs "with only such foreign 

 markets as shall be profitable"; and the extension of more aid to state 

 experiment stations. On February 2 still another report recommended 

 closer coordination between federal departments to prevent friction and 

 duplication, and advised that the problems of agriculture were "com- 

 plex, widespread and highly technical" and did not "lend themselves to 

 any one remedy for any specific piece of legislation through which there 

 may be found complete cure for many ills." 33 No bill before Congress 

 was held to be adequate to solve the problem. 34 



During the course of the hearings the Capper-Haugen bill was intro- 

 duced, embodying the recommendations of the conference; this called 

 for the creation of a federal marketing board outside the Department of 

 Agriculture, with the Secretaries of Agriculture and Commerce as two 

 of the five members. This proposed board was to be empowered to register 

 all sound cooperatives. In February the Purnell Act, which previously 

 had been defeated, was passed authorizing an annual grant of $20,000 to 

 each state agricultural experiment station conducting research in rural 

 social and economic problems, with graduated sums to be added each 

 succeeding year up to 1930. This, incidentally, was the only tangible 

 result of Coolidge's agricultural conference, for the Capper-Haugen bill 

 was defeated by the substitution of the Dickinson bill, which had been 

 drafted by cooperative groups opposed to the conference proposal. The 

 Dickinson bill also proposed to set up a marketing board in the United 

 States Department of Agriculture, but omitted the provision for register- 

 ing cooperatives proved to be sound. 35 



In March, 1925, a revised McNary-Haugen bill, dropping the cumber- 

 some price-ratio feature, was favorably reported on by the House Com- 

 mittee, but it failed to come up for a vote in the Sixty-eighth Congress. 36 

 It was caught in the legislative jam of the closing days of the second 

 session. 



If the administration believed that added doses of cooperative market- 

 ing were going to soothe the disgruntled farmers, they soon learned other- 



33. Ibid. (October, 1925), pp. 267-68; Black, in American Economic Review, 

 XVIII (September, 1928), pp. 263-64. 



34. Congressional Digest, IV (October, 1925), p. 267. 



35. Black, in American Economic Review, XVIII (September, 1928), pp. 263-64. 



36. Ibid., p. 407. 



