A Responsible Lobby

The farm policies of the New Deal were, as much as any man's, the handiwork of an affable Alabama cotton farmer named Ed O'Neal. As president of the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation, O'Neal's influence was instrumental in pushing ever higher support prices and ever stricter production controls through Congress. The natural history of lobbies indicated that the Farm Bureau would feed on success, ask for more and more and more.

After World War II, however, the Farm Bureau began to have second thoughts. In 1947, when aging Ed O'Neal retired, the strongest farm lobby in the U.S. replaced O'Neal with Allan Blair Kline, a prosperous Iowa hog farmer (who had managed well enough during the Depression to build a swimming pool on his farm). Kline damned controls, helped kill the Brannan Farm Plan and then helped Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson push a flexible price-support law through Congress this year. Last week at the Farm Bureau's annual convention at New York, President Kline announced he was resigning because of ill health. In this change of leadership, however, there would be no change of policy.

To replace Kline as president, the convention unanimously elected Charles Baker Shuman, head of the Illinois Agricultural Association. Shuman, 47, is a teetotaling Sunday School teacher who owns a corn, cattle and soybean farm near Sullivan, Ill. Almost painfully serious, he lacks Kline's charm and self-assurance, but in farm policy, the two men are carbon copies. Both oppose rigid supports and Government controls.

At last week's convention the bureau showed how deeply it feels its responsibility for a sane farm policy. Although it is solidly behind Benson, it scolded him in a resolution for removing "cross-compliance" regulations, which prohibit farmers who accept high support prices and quotas on one money crop from diverting acres made idle by their quotas to other surplus crops. The provision has been unpopular with some farmers and Farm Bloc Congressmen, but the Farm Bureau feared its loss would swell surpluses. The convention also resolved to oppose any attempt to revive high, rigid supports. As Benson himself put it in his convention speech: "Maximum progress can come only if agriculture is free . . . with a very minimum of Government control."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.