AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



the law. Any landlord found resorting to such practices would have his 

 benefit payments withheld. He had no advance information that some 

 of the landowners had done that, but he made it clear that "under the 

 act payments are made both to landlords and to sharecroppers, but it is 

 provided that landlords cannot get during the year the payment normally 

 going to the tenant if they evict him or change his status to hired man. 

 The landlord further undertakes not to reduce the number of share- 

 croppers during the year for which he gets an AAA payment." 29 



Provoked landowners, in turn, demanded an inquiry, preferably by 

 the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to determine what had brought this 

 demonstration on. They insisted that it had been encouraged by "certain 

 agitators who are telling the people that government will give them forty 

 acres of ground, tools and teams," and that the demonstrators for the most 

 part were neither sharecroppers nor residents of Missouri. Some Negroes 

 were reported waiting for "Uncle Sam to give them a white house with 

 a porch, a barn, well and a span of mules." 80 At the same time the land- 

 owners asked for an investigation of the supervisor of the Farm Security 

 Administration resettlement project at La Forge, Missouri. This La Forge 

 project, a 6,7oo-acre affair with one hundred families on it, was dedicated 

 late in 1938 as a laboratory attempt to solve the problems of the share- 

 croppers. This project had appealed to many of the demonstrators, who 

 reportedly demanded, "We want another La Forge." 3 



Another part of the program had to do with holding up prices by 

 storing away during seasons of plenty surpluses that could be used in 

 periods of lean crops. This was the main idea behind the ever normal 

 granary plan, variations of which had been employed periodically during 

 the early stages of the New Deal and even before. It attracted the attention 

 of the administration from the start. In the fall of 1933 loans of forty-five 

 cents per bushel of corn were advanced; this was one of the very first 

 manifestations of the ever normal granary idea under New Deal auspices. 

 By late 1934 some $120,000,000 had been lent on corn that was put under 



29. Ibid., January 12, 27, 1939. The latter issue gives an account of the effects of 

 mechanization on the plight of the cotton producer. For a brief account of conditions 

 there, see U. S. Dept. Agri., Farm Security Administration, Southeast Missouri: A 

 Laboratory for the Cotton South (Washington, 1940) [mimeographed]. 



30. New Yorf( Times, January 17, 1939. 



31. Ibid., January i, 13, 17, 1939. 



