AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



Events soon demonstrated that neither bill was going to emerge from the 

 committee rooms. Later Wilson said that all the farm-relief measures to 

 come before Congress during the spring and early summer of 1932 were 

 incomplete. 10 



Since 1932 was a presidential election year, it was only natural for the 

 major political parties to make some kind of a stand on the principles 

 behind the domestic allotment plan. Some of the Republican party chief- 

 tains apparently were favorably impressed with it, because one of the 

 planks in the platform read : "We will support any plan which will help 

 to balance production against demand, and thereby raise agricultural 

 prices, provided it is economically sound and administratively workable 

 without burdensome bureaucracy." But Hoover in his speech of acceptance 

 on August n, 1932, indicated his opposition when he said: "There is no 

 relief to the farmer by extending government bureaucracy to control his 

 production and thus curtail his liberties, nor by subsidies that bring only 

 more bureaucracy and ultimate collapse. I shall oppose it." n 



Franklin Delano Roosevelt was fully aware of the disaffections of the 

 farmers when he decided to open his campaign in the western Middle 

 West. On September 14, in Topeka, Kansas, in the first of his projected 

 twenty-one campaign speeches, he accused the Republicans of failing to 

 understand the farm problem and came forward with a six-point recovery 

 program. He asked that the producers of staples, in which there were sur- 

 pluses, be given tariff benefits equivalent to those enjoyed by industry, 

 but in a fashion that was different from anything that had been proposed 

 previously. Such a program had to be self-supporting and of a nature 

 that would not compel European nations to retaliate against the United 

 States on charges of dumping. What machinery was erected to put this 

 program in operation had to be as decentralized as possible, with authority 

 resting chiefly with the locality rather than with a bureaucratic Washing- 

 ton machine, and be built as well as possible on the existing agencies. 

 Roosevelt expressed approval of the idea that the program be put into 



10. Congressional Record, 72 Congress, i session, Vol. LXXV, Part 14 (1932), 

 pp. 15395, 15398, 15641. See pages 15641-43 of the Record for a statement by Wilson 

 on the domestic allotment plan. Nourse, Davis, and Black, Three Years of the 

 A.A.A., p. 13; Wilson, Farm Relief and Domestic Allotment, p. 36. 



11. Davis, Wheat and the AAA, pp. 32-33. 



