IX 



Hogs and Hominy 



Q. What makes more noise than a pig under a fence? 

 A. Two pigs. 



Q. What makes more noise than forty-five million pigs going 

 to market? 

 A. Thirty-seven million pigs. 



OF COURSE it doesn't make sense. But then that was the 

 charge the packers and a large proportion of the break- 

 fast-bacon-eating public brought against the Agricultural Ad- 

 justment Act that it didn't make sense when it put this 

 riddle to the nation. 



In 1937, the squeals of eight million pigs which did not go 

 to market were heard from the Red River of the North to 

 the Pecos. Newspaper headlines screamed, the packers repre- 

 senting America's three-billion-dollar meat industry went to 

 law, and hundreds of housewives in Los Angeles, Detroit, 

 Chicago, Cleveland and New York stormed the butchers' shops 

 and demanded cheaper pork and more of it. 



Hogs and hominy are now a chapter in American history. 

 Those eight million pigs wriggled under the fence and into the 

 United States Senate and the Supreme Court. They broke the 

 A.A.A. They made it plain to the whole world that we had a 

 hog situation. 



The hog situation and the farm situation are inseparable in 

 a country where more than 60 percent of the farmers raise corn 

 and hogs. More than 40 percent of this country's corn crop 

 goes into pork and lard. Hogs and hominy work together like 

 the blades of a pair of scissors. There have been periods when 

 they cut coupons for the farmer. Recently they have cut 

 him in two. 



