Agricultural Adjustment Administration

The United States Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) (P.L. 73-10 of May 12, 1933) restricted production during the New Deal by paying farmers to reduce crop area. It established acreage and production controls, paying farmers not to grow or raise wheat, corn, cotton, hogs, etc., and to plow under crops and destroy livestock. The aim was explicitly to raise the prices of all farm commodities by inducing shortages. The economic “theory” behind this was that if prices and wages were jacked up, that would increase “purchasing power.” The farmers were paid subsidies by the federal government for leaving some of their land idle. The Act created a new agency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, to oversee the distribution of the subsidies.

The AAA produced all sorts of dislocations in the economic system. Oats were being burned while the U.S. was importing oats from abroad on a huge scale, killing pigs while increasing imports of lard, cutting corn production while importing 30 million bushels of corn from abroad.

100 Days

In President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Inaugural Address, Roosevelt spoke of redressing “the overbalance of population in our industrial centers” by an of unspecified “redistribution” of the population to the countryside. This would somehow make farmers out of the unemployed. At the same time, though, there would be efforts “to raise the values of agricultural products.” Roosevelt referred to the need for “national planning”.

In May when the AAA began its operations, the agricultural season was already under way. In effect, the agency oversaw a large-scale destruction of existing crops and livestock in an attempt to reduce surpluses. For example, 6,200,000 pigs and 220,000 mother sows were slaughtered in the AAA's effort to raise prices at a cost of over $30,000,000. The total live weight of the pigs and sows slaughtered was 443,69.7,348 pounds. Of this only 97,064,159 pounds of food products were obtained-the rest was converted into inedible grease or fertilizer. Even some cotton farmers plowed under a quarter of their crop in accordance with the AAA's plans Due to the nature of the Great Depression, many United States citizens saw the AAA as cruel: while they were often hungering, the federal government was destroying crops and livestock. Adlai Stevenson and Telford Taylor worked in the AAA.

While the AAA was paying out hundreds of millions to kill millions of hogs, burn oats, plow under cotton, the Department of Agriculture issued a bulletin falsely telling the nation that the great problem of the times was a failure to produce enough food to provide the people with a mere subsistence diet. The Department made up four sample diets. There was a liberal diet, a moderate diet, a minimum diet and finally an emergency diet ­below the minimum. The problems in agriculture were from over-production which resulted in low prices. The figures falsely claimed that the United States did not produce enough food for the population to meet the minimum diet.

The American Liberty League which included such prominent Democrats as Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, John Davis, the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee, and Dean Acheson, the future Secretary of State under Harry Truman, referred to the economic planning of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration as "a trend toward Fascist control of agriculture."

Unconstitutional

The AAA was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in the case United States v. Butler et al. (297 U.S. 1, January 6, 1936) because it taxed one group to pay another. Congress then achieved part of the original Act's goals with the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936 until the enactment of a second AAA (P.L. 75-430) on February 16, 1938. This second AAA was funded from general taxation, and therefore acceptable to the Supreme Court. In the two years of the AAA’s existence it distributed some $700 million to farmers to restrict production and destroy their crops, in an attempt to make food (and textiles) dearer for consumers.

Sharecroppers

The AAA policies of the federal government intensified the already deepening misery of the southern sharecroppers. Under the set-up devised by Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, the farm owner profited-at the expense of the sharecropper who was being dispossessed throughout the South and the West.

Communist influence

The Soviet espionage ring commonly referred to as the Ware group originated among government employees in the AAA. Alger Hiss began his government career with the AAA. Charles Kramer worked the AAA consumer council. Leonora Fuller, an associate of Hiss from 1933 to 1935 stated that Hiss, Lee Pressman, Gardner Jackson, Frank Shea and others interpreted the Agricultural Adjustment Act not in the spirit of the law but in manner which would suit their own beliefs and private purposes. Hiss and the others brought into the government employees of their choosing who they intended to fall in line with their social and economic agenda. Fuller stated it was the definite purpose of this group to change the form of government of the United States, regardless of its democratic and constitutional underpinnings, and to use the instrumentality of the offices of the Department of Agriculture to further their purpose. Instead of administering the law as it was intended, they deliberately used the government's time and money for unionization efforts.

In 1933, Brain truster Felix Frankfurter sent Alger Hiss a telegram urging him to join President's Roosevelt's administration as assistant general counsel to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). At the peak of Stalin's Terror Famine (during which the Soviets killed some 14 million people through collectivization of agriculture), the AAA curtailed U.S. farm production in order to drive up food prices in the depths of the Great Depression.

The agency was the brainchild of FDR's Secretary of Agriculture (and future Vice President), so-called "farm dictator" Henry Wallace, who was reportedly "most impressed" with Soviet collective farming. Wallace would run for President in 1948 on the Communist-inspired Progressive Party ticket, finally recanting his support for the Soviet Union in 1952.

In response to a query about candidates for employment at AAA, Lee Pressman, a Soviet operative already serving as Wallace's assistant general counsel at the agency, wrote, "I have talked to Alger Hiss and Nat Witt who are considering" taking posts at AAA (Hiss would later deny under oath that he had discussed the position with Pressman).

At AAA, Hiss reunited with Henry Collins, a Soviet operative, as well as International Juridical Association (IJA) collegue Pressman, and Witt (who would be identified as a fellow Communist by Pressman), and became acquainted with secret Communist John Abt and the Communist Harold Ware—recently returned from several years in the Soviet Union, where he had been instrumental in the organization of collective farms.

Even before the Federal Bureau of Investigation would learn of Whittaker Chambers' charges, one of Hiss' colleagues at the AAA would tip off FBI investigators that Hiss and his circle were fellow travelers, if not Communists. In February 1935, the "radicals" were "purged" from AAA. According to New Dealer Gardner Jackson:

“

Late in the day of our dismissal Wallace sent word that he would see two of the people on the dismissal list. Jerome Frank and a member of his legal staff, Alger Hiss, were delegated for the interview. Wallace haltingly greeted them (and, through them, others on the list) as "the best fighters in a good cause" he had ever worked with. But he said that he had to fire them.

”

As it turned out, Jackson, Frank and Pressman were indeed fired—but Hiss was not. "Alger must have known at least a week before the purge that it was coming," said Jackson. "He undoubtedly told Pressman, and Lee told him what to do in order to remain in the Department as his pipeline."

Frank, believing Hiss to be closely linked to a coterie of Communist lawyers at the agency, would later refuse to appear as a character witness for him. According to reporters Ralph de Toledano (who covered the Hiss trials for Newsweek) and Victor Lasky (who covered the trials for the New York World-Telegram): "When Hiss' lawyers approached a well-known jurist to ask him if he would appear as a character witness [for Hiss]...he said tartly: 'I have no way of knowing whether or not Mr. Hiss was ever a Communist. But as to his character—Mr. Hiss has no character.'"

Collins would refuse to testify on grounds of potential self-incrimination, but another AAA official, Nathaniel Weyl, would later testify that he attended Communist cell meetings with Hiss and saw him pay his party dues, testimony he would reaffirm in his 2004 autobiography. Ex-Communists Ralph de Sola and George Hewitt would both also testify to having seen Hiss at Communist Party meetings. Communist lawyer John Abt would later admit having been a member of the Ware group, as would Communist writer Hope Hale Davis, who would write that its meetings involved discussions of how to "achieve promotion—a primary goal," or whether to "try to influence policy," as well as "secret directives—for purloining official documents," etc.; a former GRU station chief in London and New York reported that during the early and middle 1930s Hiss was a source of agent information for a Soviet spy ring in Washington, the Silvermaster group, according to Pavel Sudoplatov, former deputy director of Foreign Intelligence for the USSR.

See also

• Ware group

External link

• Roosevelt and Tugwell in the New Deal