Monday, Feb. 06, 1933

Remedies for Revolution

Near Bowling Green, Ohio, 800 ugly-tempered farmers last week assembled at Wallace Kramp's place to watch a finance company foreclose its $800 mortgage. Bidding began at 15-c- for a spring harrow. When the company's representative raised it to $1.35, somebody shouted: "That's the guy what holds the mortgage." Promptly the bidder was marched well out of bidding range where he was rescued by a sheriff. Wallace Kramp's neighbors bought in all his things for $14, handed them back to him.

P: At Nampa, Idaho, where a United Farmers' League was in process of organization, one William Ai Frost jumped up and shouted: "Just give me a six-shooter and four red-blooded men who will have the nerve to follow me and we'll make the Legislature put through any law we want."

P:At Overton, Neb. any outsider who dared to bid at the foreclosure sale on Mike Thinnes' farm was threatened with a ducking in the horse trough at the hands of 200 farmer friends. Mrs. Thinnes bought in cows for 10-c- horses for 2-c-, tractors for 50-c---at total cost of $15.

P: At Perry, Iowa, approximately the same prices prevailed at the foreclosure on George Rosander's place when 1,500 of his friends collected to restrict the bidding. The holder of a $2,500 mortgage collected precisely $45.05.

P: At Le Mars, Iowa, 25 farmers gathered to block foreclosure of a mortgage on the home of Dentist George Washington Cunningham. They explained that they all owed Dr. Cunningham for professional services. Events such as the above were what John Andrew Simpson, president of the National Farmers' Union, had in mind last week when he told the Senate Committee on Agriculture: "The biggest and finest crop of revolutions you ever saw is sprouting all over this country right now."

Edward Asbury O'Neal III, president of American Farm Bureau Federation, sounded the same warning to the same committee: "Unless something is done for the American farmer we'll have revolution in the countryside in less than twelve months."

An agrarian revolt is the last thing President-elect Roosevelt wants on his hands during his first year in the White House. He and his Democratic associates have been cudgeling their brains to devise ways & means of heading off such an uprising before it reaches the blood-&-bullets stage. As one remedy for revolution Arkansas' Joseph Taylor Robinson, leather-lunged Democratic Senate leader, last week produced a 25-page bill to relieve mortgage-ridden farmers. If the revolutionaries could be bought off with cash, the conservative lawyer from Little Rock was ready to invest $1,500,000,000 for civil peace.

Heart of the Robinson measure was a billion-dollar Emergency Agricultural Refinance Corp. This agency would lend individual farm owners up to $10,000 each at 3% interest on a second mortgage. With the money the borrowers would buy off other creditors, pay delinquent taxes, meet back interest on first mortgages and otherwise get squared away financially for a long pull.

Also, the Robinson bill would pour another half-billion dollars into the Federal Land Banks, to enable them to take over and extend first mortgages about to be foreclosed. Joint stock land banks would be liquidated. Farm interest rates would be cut to 5%.

Cried Senator Robinson: "This legislative program is designed to stop the wave of farm foreclosures and to provide a simple means for the voluntary composition or extension of debts of good farmers. . . . It will also strengthen the Federal Land Banks so they can refinance all sound first mortgages offered by any individual creditor. It will establish a temporary credit agency to refinance frozen loans to permit good farmers gradually to work out of their financial difficulties. . . . While the program is necessary to prevent complete demoralization of agriculture, it is not and cannot be a complete solution of the farm credit problem."

Behind the Robinson bill, on which the Banking & Currency Committee promised speedy hearings, stood the united lobby force of organized agriculture. Also behind it was the shadowy outline of the next President's approval. The measure probably would not pass this session but it was a clear indication of what was coming in the next.

P: Another remedy for revolution, the Domestic Allotment bill to up certain commodity prices, was last week undergoing Senate committee hearings. Loud was the squabbling over which commodities should receive a Federal bounty for reduced production.

P: Passed and sent to the White House was a third remedy for revolution in the form of a bill to lend farmers $90,000,000 to produce 1933 crops. Critics complained that this measure would stimulate production, pile up more surpluses, depress prices even more. Still outstanding are some $25,000,000 crop production loans which 667 agents of the Department of Agriculture are motoring about the country, at a cost of $7,000 per day, trying to collect.

P: "Pursuant to the request contained in the proclamation of the Governor of Iowa," announced President Thomas A. Buckner of New York Life Insurance Co., "instructions have been issued by the company suspending foreclosure of mortgages on Iowa farms, pending further consideration of the farmers' difficulties by the Legislature."

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