EPILOGUE 555 



suit was a widening of the breach between them and the administration. 

 Meanwhile, Republican aid to the cooperatives continued. The Capper- 

 Volstead Act of 1922, the Intermediate Credits Act of 1923, the Purnell 

 Act in 1925, another measure creating the Division of Cooperative Mar- 

 keting in 1926, another passed in 1927 to prevent discrimination by boards 

 of trade, and finally the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 which created 

 the Federal Farm Board were among the important measures having 

 deep roots in the western Middle West. 



For the Republicans, the often-referred-to handmaidens of the indus- 

 trial and financial interests, to sponsor cooperatives and to pour out federal 

 funds for the purpose may appear strange and inconsistent. In fact, there 

 is good reason to have expected the opposite. But for the Republicans to 

 ignore the farmers, whose votes they had counted upon so regularly in 

 the past, would have been a mad piece of political strategy. If anything, 

 the cooperative movement appeared less offensive than did that of the 

 equalization fee. The Republicans also must have realized that coopera- 

 tives should be a part of any long-range policy for agriculture, though 

 they were hardly adequate to bring instant relief, and they must have 

 seen that building the efficient marketing bodies for which the coopera- 

 tives' most enthusiastic supporters had hoped would be a long-drawn-out 

 process rather than an overnight affair. The Republican stand was that if 

 the farmers were not as well off as they should be, their position at least 

 had improved, and it was but a matter of time before the farm depression 

 would lift completely. But in 1929 when the general economic situation 

 took a turn for the worse, the Republicans, already committed to coopera- 

 tives, could do nothing more than offer the farmers larger and larger 

 doses of them and throw stabilization operations in for good measure. 

 Even though this was not what the organized farmers wanted, it also 

 was far more than some of the ardent supporters of the Republican party 

 had bargained for. 



In 1928 organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, the 

 Farmers' Union, and an undesignated number of commodity associations 

 were on record as being opposed to all forms of farm relief short of the 

 equalization fee. But by 1930 sharp differences were in evidence: the rival 

 farm groups had aligned themselves into Farm Board and anti-Farm 

 Board factions. Hence, elements that were hostile to Republican farm 



