NEW DEAL: FIRST PHASES 



a chance to borrow at more than the market price on corn and still retain 

 their corn to sell at a higher price in the event that the acreage-reduction 

 program succeeded. 29 



More difficulties were in store for the administration when late in 1933 

 a smoldering revolt that had been going on within the A.A.A. broke 

 into the wide-open. It involved Administrator George N. Peek and his 

 brain-trust wing headed by Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rexford G. 

 Tugwell and Jerome Frank, an urban liberal and counsel for the A.A.A. 

 Peek, whose protests found wide support among the conservative oppo- 

 nents of the New Deal, was a man who had no use for abstractions, no 

 stomach for theories. He wanted facts. Some believed that because he 

 was "a connoisseur of facts," he furnished a valuable balance to Wallace, 

 "the professors and the economists." Peek also had been an implement 

 manufacturer and this no doubt had much to do with his seeing the 

 problems of the farmers as being largely those of finding a market. While 

 Wallace surrounded himself with "the professors and the economists," 

 Peek surrounded himself with farm lobbyists from the Middle West. 

 Much of the lack of sympathy between the two men stemmed from this 

 fact. The chief complaint by Peek was that the liberal wing was delaying 

 the approval of all marketing codes and was insisting on making it "field 

 day" for socialism and social planning. The breach between Peek and the 

 Tugwell-Frank group had been mounting ever since June, 1933, when 

 Wallace sided with Chester Davis and M. L. Wilson in favor of con- 

 trolling production. 30 



Wallace, himself, was skeptical over arbitrary code and marketing 

 agreements. 



Codes are all right for industry, business and wages. The NRA codes will 

 work, but in meeting problems of the farmer and the consumer of foodstuffs, 

 we are faced with the fundamental law of supply and demand. By imposing 

 these agreements on the production of foodstuffs which force prices out of 

 line with supply and demand, we are exerting the same kind of pressure that 

 the prohibition law did and we are creating the same bootlegging condition. 31 



29. Ibid. (December 23, 1933), p. 3. 



30. Edwin G. Nourse, Joseph S. Davis, and John D. Black, Three Years of the 

 Agricultural Adjustment Administration (Washington, 1937), pp. 81-82; Minne- 

 apolis Journal, December 6, 1933; Fortune, IX (January, 1934), p. 61. 



31. Minneapolis Journal, December 7, 1933. 



