NEW DEAL: LATER STAGES 537 



administration circles. A lengthy conference of "an interdepartmental 

 committee of top-fiscal officials" was called by direction of Roosevelt, 

 Wallace, and his aides to get agreement on the plan. The Treasury De- 

 partment looked askance upon the certificate plan and opposed it on the 

 grounds that it was a tax. The opposition of Henry Morgenthau seemed 

 to be causing the President to go along with that department instead of 

 with Wallace. As was to be expected, additional opposition, and very 

 weighty too, came from the processors concerned. The flour millers had 

 been particularly opposed to it. 



Support for the proposal came from Wallace, Senator Wheeler, and 

 the Farmers' Union, especially in the spring wheat states. Wheeler not 

 only supported it in public speeches, but also introduced a bill embody- 

 ing the plan. 92 



Regardless of what grievances the farmers had had, and despite all 

 efforts made by the administration to shape a long-range program, the 

 outbreak of the European war in the late summer of 1939 had important 

 effects on prices. Within a matter of a few days after the outbreak of 

 hostilities, grain prices on the Chicago market soared as high as govern- 

 ment and exchange rules would permit them to go. 93 "Trading came to 

 a standstill. Rules which have been put into effect the past six years to 

 curb runaway speculative markets met their first real test. Because they 

 prohibited prices from going any higher than the daily limits amounting 

 to 5 cents in wheat and rye, 4 cents in corn and 3 cents in oats, they 

 throttled trade." Buyers with orders to buy millions of bushels were 

 unable to fill them because there were few sellers who wanted to dispose 

 of their holdings at the maximum prices. Only a few sales took place, the 

 first time in exchange history that anything like this had happened. 94 

 Late in 1939 the Chicago market was described as "a seething caldron" 

 that "bubbled over with the greatest flood of orders it has had to digest 

 in months as prices skyrocketed in the wheat, rye and soy bean pits." At 

 the same time grain prices on the Minneapolis market had closed sharply 

 with wheat leading the way. 95 



92. Ibid., December 10, 14, 20, 1939. 



93. St. Paul Dispatch, September 5, 1939. 



94. Pioneer Press, September 6, 1939. 



95. Ibid., December 19, 1939. 



