| Show za 0 national topics interpreted by william bruckart national press building Wast hington D C washington it has been several months month since the administration farm relief program the memory agricultural adjust lingers on ment act was declared dead but like the words of the song the memory lingers on and it Is quite apparent that mistakes as well as memories of the AAA will continue through the heat beat of the coming presidential campaign and probably considerably longer for it Is only necessary to recall that the stepbrother of the AAA the federal farm board of the hoover administration still Is the butt of much criticism and many pointed paragraphs one of the main reasons why the memories linger on where those memories involve AAA Is republican pub rican senator arthur 11 senator never did get enthusiastic about the merits of AAA as they were expounded by secretary wallace administrator chester davis and other new deal spokesmen and when the supreme court t of the united states threw out the processing taxes upon which the law was wag predicated senator was to in a delightful spot from a poU polk standpoint lie he has not found it necessary to say 1 I told you so and has had I 1 imagine a great deal of personal fun in simply hinting to or reminding others of his previous stand but it was not until the michigan senator began pulling figures out of Ms his senatorial hat showing how benefit payments from the AAA had bad gone to great and wealthy corporations in sums sum s as high as a million dollars or more that he held a key to the new deal skeleton closet they know now however exactly what he be meant when he be announced in the senate several weeks ago that no such plan as the AAA could be administered without vast sums being distributed in what he termed unwarranted payments unwarranted from the standpoint of help tor for the smaller farmers secretary wallace stalled olt off senator Vanden bergs demand in the senate for a complete list of beneficiaries es who received checks from AAA in excess of one thousand tho osand dollars for quite a while but there were too many se senators who believed as senator did that the truth ought to be known of course as the procedure dur usually goes in washington many filings are done without actual force being used it was thus in the case of the AAA payments democratic senators who foresaw their inability to prevent a senate vote demanding a list of AAA payments persuaded mr air wallace to make public the list voluntarily and it was done just in advance of senate action so we now have tor for the first time at least an in indication di of tile the grotesque results of the agricultural adjustment ad administration mins program that was wag balled bailer from the atlantic to the pacific as an ideal idea plan 0 0 a the dynamite in the situation lies in the fact that there were dozens even hundreds of dynamite corporations w which h I 1 c h in it received AAA checks among the big bounties paid to induce curtailment of basic foreign crops this would not be so bad except for the fact that the brilliant biant planners of the AAA continuously stressed its value to the small debt ridden farmers throughout the time the law was under consideration and through the two years of its operation never did air clr wallace or mr davis fall to point out in their numerous speeches how great sums of money collected in processing taxes were being distributed to thousands of farmers and that these payments were in time going to put agriculture on its collective feet now however the truth of their statements hns has been proved but when the whole truth had bad been exposed on the floor of the senate it was found to go far beyond the small debt ridden farmers the whole truth disclosed in fact that several million dollars had bad been paid even to corporations chartered by the british government and with home offices in england wall street that home of entrenched greed received its share and its share was substantial on top of all of this there lately has come a disclosure that a great wheat farmer in montana received something like for agreeing I 1 ng not to plant wheat on land which he had rented from the indians through the federal department of the interior for the specific purpose of raising wheat the list of huge benefit payments Is much too large to include in this letter but the fact remains that it showed how even the best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray even when those men are brilliant brain tr usters who themselves claim to know all there la 19 available for human understanding beyond that the disclosures have set in motion discussion that will come pretty close to continuing into every farmhouse in the land unless I 1 miss my guess and I 1 am no doctor tugwell thousands thousand S of farmers are going to bitterly resent the fact act that their payments pay menta were small whereas gigantic corporations received sums bums ranging from ten to a thousand times as large 0 0 0 in behalf of 0 the AAA officials it must be said that there will be as indeed there has been unfair already considerable criticism unfair criticism the criticism to which I 1 I 1 refer Is of this type that they should have discovered in advance of the payments that funds were going boid to these corporations assuming that they could have discovered that fact in ID advance there was no alternative for them except to pay the chocks checks authorized by law congress made the law or rather congress passed it under tinder the lash of the administration but it was on the statute bonks and administrative officials are not supposed to disregard such provisions if there is to be criticism it should be directed at the initial framing of the statute that brought about tile the condition the results that have attracted so much attention since senator van exposure constitute one of the curious coincidences and queer quirks of planned economy and a further word about the criticism A grent great many people are likely to forget that while their check was in three figures and some corporation received one in six fl figures ures the condition results wholly fram from the tact fact that one owned more land annd than the other you may properly say this should have been foreseen and I 1 believe you will be making a correct statement but surely this Is a fact the AAA officials cannot be blamed for sending out the checks when the law said they should do it regardless of the name or nature of the beneficiary the fault lies solely and completely with those who from their professional desks conceived the whole scheme and gained president Roosevel ts approval tor for it 0 development of the vulnerable spots in the AAA crop curtailment program probably will prove vulnerable beneficial t to 0 t the b is spots country as a whole eventually for one thing these disclosures have forever choked off proposals of that kind they may result as well in strengthening edid the new proposition for crop con trop through the medium of soil conservation in other words since the bulk bulk of the congress thinks through legislation only in ID the terms of aamir arguments they will likely be less prone t to enact legislation without knowing what results will be obtained it seems to me that the new farm ald aid plan likely will be stronger and probably more workable and certainly less extravagant than was the AAA because the AAA weaknesses have been ex es posed these exposures ought to have an effect also among thinking farmers who hereafter are unlikely to accept dogmatic statements and rainbow pictures painted for them by political demagogues and professional farm leaders without examining the practicability tic of the scheme personally I 1 am convinced that a great many farmers were led to believe that AAA was their only salvation and they gained this conviction solely because the other side never was told to them while we are talking about mistakes and about the results obtained by brilliant theorists I 1 hear bear Flet fletcher chers s more and more als brain trust cession of the latest move by chairman henry P fletcher and his republican national committee sir fletcher has hired ten university professors to head up what he calls the committees research staff and in announcing their ampol appointment intent he stressed a declaration that the division Is not a brain trust but brain trust it Is going to be e called notwithstanding mr fletchers fletcherr Flet chers assertion that they were practical men and women of experience they are going to be a brain trust in exactly I 1 the be same sense that mr air Roosevel ts brain trust has been denominated and how else could it be there actually seems to be little choice between the type of men mr air fletcher has chosen and the Tug wells HoP kInses and other doctors and professors who have constantly had the ear of the president these men will have mr fletchers fletcherr Flet chers ear and undoubtedly will pour into it their own theories of government and their own ideas of approach to the problem that confronts the republican national committee namely the defeat of sir mr roosevelt I 1 have observed political battles to for a good many years and I 1 have observed the management of governmental responsibilities through a parallel period the conclusion Is inescapable as far as I 1 am concerned that practical men always have done a better job always have been better administrators and better planners than the men and women who have spent their lives lecturing from a university classroom ros trum I 1 once criticized professor tugwell by saying that his qualification for the post of undersecretary under secretary of agrical ture consisted of tending flowers in a window box and I 1 am wondering now whether mr fletchers fletcherr Flet chers new brain trust Is any better equipped for its job however we must not forget the country now has one brain trust trying to find out what la Is wrong with another brain trust 0 newspaper union |
