554 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



Potentially, industrialists and consumers were against the equalization 

 fee. Those industrialists who were eager to recapture as much of the 

 foreign market as they possibly could were opposed to any program that 

 threatened to raise the price of food for labor and that of raw materials 

 for industry. It is obvious that the lower the production costs of industry 

 were, the better the chances for American manufacturers to tap the foreign 

 market. Theoretically, millions of consumers also were opposed to any 

 program that threatened to raise their cost of living, but curiously enough 

 their case was presented not by an organized group of their own rep- 

 resentatives but by spokesmen of industry and commerce who were 

 hypocritically posing as defenders of the consumers' interests. 



By the spring of 1926 the export debenture plan, another farm-relief 

 proposal, entered the arena of farm politics. It was proposed by economist 

 Charles L. Stewart of the University of Illinois, while its most ardent 

 convert was the national Grange. Supporters of the plan called it a simpler 

 one to operate than the McNary-Haugen proposal. It did not provide for 

 the purchasing and storing of surpluses, but it did provide for a bounty 

 on agricultural products. It was an arrangement which promised to make 

 it possible for exporters of those agricultural products of which we pro- 

 duced a surplus to receive a certificate from the Treasury Department. 

 This certificate represented the difference in production costs here and 

 abroad and was to be used "in the payment of import tariffs on any 

 articles later imported." Representatives in Congress drafted bills embody- 

 ing the chief features of the export debenture plan and introduced them 

 in their respective houses. Hearings were conducted, but the bills never 

 emerged from the committee rooms. 



At the same time that the campaign for "tariff equality" reached its 

 peak, the cooperative movement, under Republican encouragement, also 

 was making tremendous strides. In fact, this is one major constructive 

 contribution made during a decade that usually is decried as one of cor- 

 ruption and reaction. 



Meanwhile, Calvin Coolidge was telling the farmers that agriculture 

 was about to "resume normalcy" and that what was most needed was co- 

 operative associations for the farmer and higher tariffs for industry. If 

 these Coolidgean exhortations were reassuring to the industrialists, they 

 certainly were nothing of the sort to the organized agrarians. The net re- 



