FARM BOARD TO FARM STRIKE 47 



for the debenture proposal, while the House and the administration were 

 against it. After continued debate the Agricultural Marketing Act was 

 finally passed, without the debenture clause, and was signed by the Presi- 

 dent on June i5. 6 



This act called for the creation of a Federal Farm Board with eight 

 members, to be appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate, 

 but including the Secretary of Agriculture as an ex-officio member. The 

 Board was authorized to extend loans to cooperatives and to conduct 

 stabilization operations from a revolving fund of $500,000,000. Stabiliza- 

 tion operations were to be conducted by corporations created for this very 

 purpose; and in addition, the corporations were to serve as marketing 

 agencies for the cooperatives affiliated with the Board. 7 



It was apparent that the Hoover program had much in common with 

 farm programs functioning elsewhere in the world, but for the most part 

 it was indifferent to the world situation aside from the possible markets 

 that might be found for hard-pressed American farmers. 



Granted that the 1920'$ were afflicted with world-wide epidemics to 

 regulate production, prices, and surpluses, and also granted that our farm 

 experts and advisers were fully aware of these developments abroad, there 

 still were ample precedents in the United States for all phases of the 

 Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, including the Federal Farm Board, 

 the subsidy, the stabilization features, and the proposed national market- 

 ing machinery. For instance, the farm board proposal was hardly a novel 

 one. The Dickinson, the Capper-Haugen, the McNary-Haugen, and the 

 Curtis-Crisp bills called for the creation of a farm board of one type or 

 another before the Agricultural Marketing Act was placed on the statute 

 books. 8 As for subsidies, the extension of them by the federal and state 

 governments to railroads, canals and turnpikes, education, manufactur- 

 ing, and agriculture are too well known to merit further comment. 9 Nor 



6. United States Daily News, May i, 2, 9, 10, 15, 17, 18, 27, June 7, n, 12, 15, 16, 

 1929. 



7. For a full text of the act, see First Annual Report of the Federal Farm Board 

 (Washington, 1930), pp. 64-70. 



8. John D. Black, "The Progress of Farm Relief," American Economic Review, 

 XVIII (June, 1928), pp. 263-65. 



9. For a convenient summary of this point, see Merle Fainsod and Lincoln Gordon, 

 Government and the American Economy (New York, 1941), pp. 81-112. 



