Show Forgotten Man Likes Raising Family's Food When the administration set aside to lo experiment on subsistence subsistence subsistence tence farms it started something the finish of which is a matter for the seventh son of a seventh son None of the new deals deal's experiments Is more interesting than this one few lew of them have more completely unpredictable unpredictable di table consequences The fact that the experiment is beginning to prove enormously popular indicates that we wc may bump into those consequences a aLot alot lot sooner than we expect The idea is to set up colonies of small homes each surrounded by a garden sufficient to provide its iu owner with most of ot his foodstuffs Occupants Occupants Occupants pants of such homes would hold jobs in m industry some would work in coa coal coalmines coalmines mines some In factories and so on The jobs would give them their Income and the gardens would give them their food rood if an industrial slump lp cut their jobs out from under them they at least could keep on eating regularly until things picked up again That's the program Now it devel develops ops that the government is being overwhelmed with a regular flood of demands for tor subsistence farms The director of the project already has received received re re- re applications which if granted would run the cost of the experiment up to Letters are are coming com corn ing Irig in n at the rate of 1000 a day Here is pathetically eloquent testimony testimony mony to the forgotten mans man's fear of insecurity and also to his dislike of ordinary urban life Furthermore it is a pretty fair indication that there will be plenty of sentiment in congress In favor of extending the scope of the whole project These applicants are voters you youcan youcan can depend on it that their congressmen congress congress- m men n arc are arc he hearing ri g from them We are arc likely then to hear more rather th than n less of the subsistence farm idea in the future And it U is lis high time for us to figure out just where such program would lead us i if it were expanded greatly Would it it as as some critics say say say- establish an American peasantry Would it depress industrial wages and cut agricultures agriculture's markets Would it solidify the population in iii such way as to diminish the fluidity of labor to a disastrous extent It might do all those things it might do none of at them It is up to tous tous tous us to lo find out The best way to find out is to try It and see and that seems to be just what we are going to do on do-on on a larger scale than any of us had expected |