162 Singing Valleys 



But one million farmers signed the contracts which the 

 A.A.A. offered them. They would have signed anything that 

 offered even hope of relief. The contracts covered seven basic 

 commodities: wheat, tobacco, cotton, milk and milk products, 

 cattle and poultry, corn, hogs. The contracts covering the last 

 two of these called for a reduction of 20 percent in the acre- 

 age of corn grown, and 325 percent reduction of hogs. 



It was estimated that the 45,000,000 hogs the average num- 

 ber slaughtered annually under Federal inspection during the 

 previous ten-year period would be reduced to 38,000,000 in 

 1937. Actually, the farmers bettered their contracts by one 

 million hogs. 



These were the eight million pigs which squealed in the 

 Senate and the Supreme Court. Eight million pigs which did 

 not exist. Meanwhile, pork prices were the highest they had 

 been in years. Bacon and ham went off the nation's breakfast 

 tables. Lard substitutes made of vegetable oils were bought 

 in place of high-priced lard. Pork, which had always been the 

 working man's food, was beyond his wages or relief check. 



One interesting consequence of the pork shortage, accord- 

 ing to William Whitfield Woods, President of the Institute 

 of American Meat Packers, was that Americans began to eat 

 fish. Chain stores installed fish and vegetable counters. In one 

 district where no fish had ever been sold before, a chain of 

 stores advertised skinned whiting at ten cents the pound, and 

 sold one hundred thousand pounds in a week. 



It was the meat packers who brought to court the case 

 against the A.A.A. They were being squeezed between the 

 upper and the nether millstones. They could not get the pork 

 and lard to fill their orders from abroad, and their business 

 was severely menaced by the importation into this country of 

 foreign hog products to meet the sudden shortage here. To 

 show how these importations followed the A.A.A/s restriction 

 of American corn- and hog-raising, one has only to examine the 

 figures for 1933 and 1935. 



