NEW DEAL: LATER STAGES 5*9 



tain levels; the law also authorized a crop-insurance plan, with some 

 $20,000,000 set aside for wheat. The Secretary of Agriculture was the one 

 to determine what the domestic and foreign needs would be and to set 

 the acreages accordingly. If production exceeded certain bounds, market- 

 ing quotas would be invoked, provided they were approved by a two- 

 thirds referendum. The administration of the act was to be handled by 

 the thousands of local committees that were to be set up. 3T 



The passage of the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act marked the 

 third stage in the adjustment program. Administration spokesmen re- 

 ferred to it as occupying a sort of middle course between the A.A.A. of 

 1933 and the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936. The 

 1938 measure embodied the idea of "surplus control, that is, control of 

 marketing in interstate commerce," in place of "the production-control 

 approach of the original adjustment act." It was likewise believed that 

 setting up the marketing and storage provisions for control of surpluses 

 strengthened the conservation program that had been built up under the 

 act of 1936. The new features of the 1938 act were the ever normal gran- 

 ary plan and the crop-insurance program for wheat. 38 



The year 1938 was a hard one for the New Deal. In the spring of that 

 year, in the face of dropping prices, vigorous opposition, led by an ag- 

 gressive minority of "old dealers" and supported by newspapers like the 

 Chicago Tribune, began to mount against the acreage allotments of the 

 1938 act. This drive was spearheaded by small but very vocal and highly 

 publicized bodies like the Farmers' Independent Council and the Corn 

 Belt Liberty League, which demanded a free rein in agriculture and 

 death for the farm law. 39 At a meeting held in Macomb, Illinois, plans 

 were made to form county organizations and to call a meeting to assemble 

 late in April with representatives present from seventeen western Illinois 

 counties. Hope was expressed that the movement would spread into the 

 entire Middle West. "The farmer doesn't want politicians telling him 

 how to run his farm. He has been misrepresented and misquoted. Now 

 he's going to have a chance to state his case." 40 Later, Governor Nelson 

 G. Kraschel of Iowa, in a telegram to Wallace, urged the elimination of 



37. Congressional Digest, XVII (April, 1938), pp. 97-98. 



38. U. S. Dept. Agri., A.A.A., Agricultural Adjustment, 1937-1938, pp. 17-18. 



39. Chicago Tribune, April 19, 1938. 



40. Ibid., April 20, 1938. 



