AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



came out second best in his contest with Clyde Reed, his Republican 

 rival. 59 



There was nothing in the tone of the Republican campaigners that in- 

 dicated that there would be an end to farm relief when the new Congress 

 took its place. The vote in 1938 was more against the low prices than it 

 was against the federal farm program. The major crops around which 

 the whole A.A.A. program was built were selling below the average prices 

 of the five years preceding the New Deal. A New Yorf( Times corre- 

 spondent predicted that the farmers, "instead of demanding an end to 

 a national agricultural program, probably will insist that [their] leaders 

 move on to bigger and better experiments." 60 If anyone did seek the out- 

 right repeal of the A.A.A., it was the Corn Belt Liberty League, which 

 took the congressional defeats in the corn belt as a personal triumph. 61 



Besides sagging prices and a falling of industrial employment, the year 

 1938 saw the emergence of a growing tension between farmers and labor, 

 perhaps far less in fact than the newspapers made many believe. Of the 

 states in the western Middle West, perhaps in no other did these relations 

 reach the stage that they did in Wisconsin. Here labor legislation had 

 reached greater dimensions than it had in most other states, if not any 

 other state, in the union. 



The outbreak of labor troubles in two isolated farm areas of the state 

 furnished the signal for a head-on assault against its labor laws and also 

 the beginning of a big press campaign. First a strike broke out early in 

 May at the Frank Pure Food Company, a canning concern near Racine, 

 Wisconsin, and then there came another at the Richland Center Coopera- 

 tive Creamery. Both became the focal point for an attack by the Wisconsin 

 Council of Agriculture. 62 



What particularly hurt labor was the fact that both these strikes took 

 place in a year of sagging farm incomes and at a time when the drift was 



59. Capital Times (Madison, Wis.), November 9, 1938; "Farmers in the Elec- 

 tion," editorial, Christian Science Monitor, November 12, 1938. 



60. New YorJ^ Times, November 13, 1938. 



61. Wisconsin State Journal, November 22, 1938. 



62. Milwaukee Journal, May 24, June 6, 1938; Milwaukee Sentinel, June i, n, 

 1938; Kenosha Labor, June 17, 1938; Milwaukee Journal, June 26, 30, 1938; Capital 

 Times, June 28, 1938; Labor Policy Adopted by the Wisconsin Council of Agricul- 

 ture, August 6, 1938 [mimeographed]. 



