Washington v. Iowa

Guardsmen's guns kept the peace at strife-torn Le Mars, Iowa, last week while a military court worked up evidence for the civil prosecution of those rural mobsters who, week before, had abducted and outraged Judge Charles Clark Bradley (TIME, May 8). Nearly 100 earth-stained farmers were held prisoner in a military stockade outside town. Governor Herring had just promised to lift martial law in Plymouth County when at Des Moines, 160 mi. away, fresh farm trouble sprouted to plague the good name of Iowa. Meeting in the cattle pavilion of the State Fair Grounds, the Farmers' Holiday Association, under rough-spoken Milo Reno, raucously voted another farm strike May 13. That it. like last year's, would end in violence and failure was the foregone conclusion of all but the most disgruntled Iowa farmers. The conservative American Farm Bureau Federation surveyed rural sentiment in eleven States, reported that only a tiny fraction of farmers support the strike idea.

Meanwhile in Washington the bulky farm relief bill, designed to take the steam out of such farm uprisings as Iowa has been experiencing, lumbered on toward final passage and the White House. If its

$2,000,000,000 farm mortgage provisions had been in effect a month ago, Judge Bradley might never have been set upon by rural thugs who tried in vain to make him foreswear signing foreclosure orders. If its price-upping machinery had been started a fortnight ago, a farm strike might not have been agitated at Des Moines. The House and Senate conferees last week ironed out 83 Senate amendments tagged to the House bill and then stuck on an 84th--a proposal for the Government, by straight price-fixing, to guarantee farmers' cost of production. Elimination of this feature was foreshadowed by Secretary of Agriculture Wallace's warning that its presence in the law would "muss things up." Secretary Wallace was ready to start the relief program the moment the ink was dry on President Roosevelt's signature. But even that would be too late to catch 1933 crops, most of which were already planted and growing. Thus it was probable that Secretary Wallace would be unable to use his favorite device for reducing production--government leasing of farm land. Unofficially picked last week as chief administrator of the bill was George Nelson Peek. 59, of Moline, 111. Mr. Peek, long a professional Farmer's Friend, used to manufacture plowrs. harrows, seeders, is now interested in making useful things out of cornstalks and husks. Farmer's Friend Peek served on the War Industries Board where he caught the eye and favor of Bernard Mannes Baruch. its chairman. He is still rated a Baruch protege. One of the earliest and loudest advocates of the Equalization Fee. he helped lobby through the Senate the first version of the McNary-Haugen bill from a desk in Vice President Dawes' anteroom. His brother Burton was a director of the Dawes bank (Central Republic Trust Co.) in Chicago before Mr. Dawes formed City National Bank & Trust Co. As a regular Republican George Peek worked for Frank Lowden's Presidential nomination. When Mr. Lowden walked out of the Kansas City convention and left the field to Herbert Hoover. Republican Peek became Democrat Peek whooping it up for the Brown Derby. In 1932 Mr. Peek was early in line for Roosevelt, telling him all the farmers' woes, all his own remedies for them. Mr. Peek's stubborn opinions about farm relief last week produced a clash in the Department of Agriculture where he already has an office, required the conciliatory intervention of President Roosevelt. Still loyal to the Equalization Fee idea, the new administrator objects to arbitrary limits on farm production, favors letting the farmer grow all he can, dumping the surplus abroad. Secretary Wallace takes a contrary view. If Mr. Peek has his way he will pay liberal bounties (raised by the processing tax on the consumer) to farmers of the domestic share of their 1933 crops and try to force the surplus out of the country for whatever it will bring.

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