454 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



Agricultural Reform in the United States. Subsequently, this transferable- 

 rights plan was acknowledged as having been originated by Beard sley 

 Ruml, who was at the time the director of the Laura Spelman Rockefel- 

 ler Memorial Foundation. According to Joseph S. Davis of the Food 

 Research Institute of Stanford University, this resembled "an earlier plan 

 presented unofficially by W. J. Spillman." 

 The transferable-rights plan, at least as applied to wheat, proposed 



to give to every grower a certificate expressed in bushels representing his pro-rata 

 share, on the basis of his average production in some recent period of years, in 

 approximately the amount of wheat domestically consumed for food. These cer- 

 tificates were to be salable to millers, who were expected to buy them at approxi- 

 mately the tariff rate per bushel; and they were to be required to surrender to 

 federal officials, on the first sale of flour for domestic use, such certificates in 

 amounts corresponding to the amount of wheat ground into this flour. Thus 

 it was hoped that with no complex machinery, no disturbance of wheat produc- 

 tion or marketing, no export dumping, no burden on the federal treasury, and 

 little or no stimulus to production, the sale of their "transferable rights" in the 

 "domestic allotment" would bring wheat growers a supplementary income suf- 

 ficient to satisfy their ideas of "fair return." 4 



One of the most energetic converts to the domestic allotment plan was 

 M. L. Wilson of the Montana State College faculty, who headed a group 

 that came forward with a radically different version of the Ruml-Black 

 transferable-rights plan. This Wilson version came to be known as the 

 "voluntary domestic allotment plan." 5 



In 1933 Wilson said that his proposal took the international situation 

 into account and had four basic points attached to it. (i) There was the tax 

 to be collected at the processing point, be it the flour mill, packing house, 

 or textile mill. One plan was that the tax collected was to equal the amount 

 of the tariff, but another asked that the tax be sufficient to give the par- 

 ticular commodity its prewar purchasing power. (2) The government 

 then would give the cooperating farmer a pro rata share of the funds col- 

 lected, provided that he signed a contract not to increase his crop the 



4. Joseph S. Davis, Wheat and the AAA (Washington, 1935), pp. 30-31. 



5. "Bounty," Fortune, VII (February, 1933), pp. 117-19; Davis, Wheat and the 

 AAA, p. 31; "The Voluntary Domestic Allotment Plan for Wheat," Food Research 

 Institute, Stanford University, Wheat Studies, IX (November, 1932), pp. 23-62. 



