Hogs and Hominy 161 



sequent dust storms, following springs in which the snows in 

 the north melted too suddenly for the rivers to carry them off. 

 Corn withered in the dry summers, and stock, without pasture 

 or water, died. Millions of dollars' worth of topsoil was washed 

 down the Mississippi as once the produce raised on that soil 

 had been floated. In Oklahoma, starving sharecroppers looked 

 at the stunted cotton and blasted corn and knew they were 

 licked. Farmers in the northern midwest besieged the banks 

 for loans and were turned down. Cornlands weren't worth 

 lending money on. 



There were men, like Farmer Summy, who came through 

 those years. They came through chiefly because they had kept 

 their heads in the years of rapid farm expansion. They had 

 steadfastly refused to farm against the future. But most of 

 them grew gray holding their own and seeing their neighbors 

 go to the wall. 



The Secretary of Agriculture had figured largely in the fram- 

 ing of the McNary-Haugen Bill which was planned to allow 

 the Government to set prices for farm produce and to control 

 production. When, during the first Roosevelt administration, 

 Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, this con- 

 ferred on the Secretary of Agriculture extraordinary power to 

 bring about farm relief. The lines taken by Secretary Wallace 

 were those suggested in the bill which Coolidge had defeated. 



The relief measures briefly, paying farmers not to plant a 

 certain acreage of certain crops, or to raise more than a certain 

 number of cattle, hogs and poultry startled the country. 



The idea of cutting down the nation's food supply at a 

 time when the bread-lines in every city were lengthening filled 

 people with horror. Where was the economy in that? What 

 had happened to the machinery of production that it could 

 not move the surplus from the farms to the hungry towns? 

 And what became of the consumer's dollar that so little of it 

 reached the men who raised the commodities for which the 

 dollar was paid? 



