EPILOGUE 557 



holiday movement directed a bitter campaign against the New Deal and 

 the "college professors." This group also seems to have had a degree of 

 influence on some of the midwest governors, who during the late summer 

 and early fall of 1933 urged the administration to adopt more effective 

 measures to raise prices. Reno wanted the principles of N.R.A. extended 

 to agriculture. 



The over-all objective of New Deal relief was to preserve individual 

 farm ownership wherever possible and to provide help for those who had 

 lost their farms or had never owned one. Administration strategists were 

 of the belief that these objectives would be achieved, at least in part, if the 

 farmers got a "parity price." This was a price that would give the pro- 

 ducers of a particular commodity a purchasing power equal to that which 

 they enjoyed during some base period in the past, generally from 1909 

 to 1914. Parity was expected to bring about that better balance between 

 agriculture, industry, and labor to which its supporters gave so much 

 lip service. 



Production controls, buttressed by processing taxes, were but one way 

 by which it was promised that the farmers would receive parity; they were 

 the chief means to this end from 1933 to 1936. Other methods included the 

 payment of commodity loans, soil-conservation payments, trade pacts, 

 marketing agreements, export subsidies, rural rehabilitation and electrifica- 

 tion programs, inflationary practices, debt adjustment, mortgage relief, 

 and more liberal credit facilities. When the first A.A.A. was declared un- 

 constitutional, the emphasis shifted from production control to soil- 

 conservation practices, and except for the processing tax, most of the 

 other means, with variations, were retained and even added to. For in- 

 stance, there were more aid for farm tenants insufficient though it might 

 have been the ever normal granary plan, and the "all-risk" crop-insur- 

 ance idea. 



Dissatisfaction with the A.A.A., low prices, a drop in city employment, 

 and a large wheat output brought serious New Deal casualties in the 

 congressional elections of 1938, the heaviest losses being registered in the 

 corn-hog and wheat states. In 1939 a new farm-mortgage emergency arose 

 in the dairy, wheat, and beef-cattle states from Minnesota and Iowa west- 

 ward. The administration sought to handle this crisis by making the Farm 

 Credit Administration a division of the Department of Agriculture rather 



