Difference between revisions of "Agricultural Adjustment Administration"

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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 <ref>''A People's History of the United States'', Howard Zinn, Harper & Row, 1980. ISBN 0-06-014803-9.  </ref> while increasing imports of lard, cutting corn production while importing 30 million bushels of corn from abroad.  
 
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 <ref>''A People's History of the United States'', Howard Zinn, Harper & Row, 1980. ISBN 0-06-014803-9.  </ref> while increasing imports of lard, cutting corn production while importing 30 million bushels of corn from abroad.  
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==Goals==
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The idea of raising farm prices by cutting production was developed in the 1920s by Profesor M. L. Wilson of Montana State University. The idea was a) it would raise city prices a little and farm income a lot; and 2) it was assumed that farmers (not cityfolk) are the best citizens and they deserve special protection and support.
  
  
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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 “[[Economic planning|national planning]]”.  <ref>[http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1468 ''FDR: The Man, the Leader, the Legacy''], Ralph Raico, Future of Freedom Foundation, April 1, 2001. Retrieved from The Independent Institute.org 06/17/07.</ref>
 
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 “[[Economic planning|national planning]]”.  <ref>[http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1468 ''FDR: The Man, the Leader, the Legacy''], Ralph Raico, Future of Freedom Foundation, April 1, 2001. Retrieved from The Independent Institute.org 06/17/07.</ref>
  
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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
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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.  
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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  <ref>''American History: A Survey'', Alan Brinkley, Tenth Edition, McGraw-Hill College, 1999, p. 879.  ISBN 0-07-303390-1.</ref> 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.
 
  
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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. <ref>[http://www.rooseveltmyth.com/book/hbzfrm.htm ''The Roosevelt Myth''], John T. Flynn, Fox and Wilkes, 1948, Book 1, Ch. 5.</ref>
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The conservative [[American Liberty League]] referred to the economic planning of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration as "a trend toward fascist control of agriculture."
  
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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."
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The production cutbacks worked; farm prices shot up (and city food prices rose a little), restoring prosperity to the farm sector well before the problems of the cities were solved.
  
 
==Unconstitutional==
 
==Unconstitutional==
 
 
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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.
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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 gave the Executive branch powers that belonged to Congress. Congress then reqrote the law, creating a '''second AAA''' that 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.
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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.
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In the two years of the AAA’s existence it distributed some $700 million to farmers to restrict production and keep farm prices high.
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==Sharecroppers==
 
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The AAA policies of the federal government intensified the already deepening misery of the southern sharecroppers.<ref>''Revolt Among the Sharecroppers.'' Howard Kester. Originally published 1936. New introduction by Alexander Lichtenstein. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-87049-975-3. </ref>  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.
 
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==Communist influence==
 
==Communist influence==
  

Revision as of 22:14, August 30, 2009

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 [1] while increasing imports of lard, cutting corn production while importing 30 million bushels of corn from abroad.

Goals

The idea of raising farm prices by cutting production was developed in the 1920s by Profesor M. L. Wilson of Montana State University. The idea was a) it would raise city prices a little and farm income a lot; and 2) it was assumed that farmers (not cityfolk) are the best citizens and they deserve special protection and support.


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”. [2]

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 conservative American Liberty League referred to the economic planning of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration as "a trend toward fascist control of agriculture."

The production cutbacks worked; farm prices shot up (and city food prices rose a little), restoring prosperity to the farm sector well before the problems of the cities were solved.

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 gave the Executive branch powers that belonged to Congress. Congress then reqrote the law, creating a second AAA that 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 keep farm prices high.

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 [3] 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[4] 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.[5]

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[6] Progressive Party ticket, finally recanting his support for the Soviet Union[7] in 1952.[8]

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).[9]

At AAA, Hiss reunited with Henry Collins, a Soviet operative, as well as International Juridical Association (IJA)[10] collegue Pressman,[11] and Witt (who would be identified as a fellow Communist by Pressman),[12] and became acquainted with secret Communist John Abt and the Communist[13] Harold Ware—recently returned from several years in the Soviet Union, where he had been instrumental in the organization of collective farms.[14]

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.[15] 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[16] 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."[17]

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.[18] 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.'"[19]

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[20] and saw him pay his party dues,[21] testimony he would reaffirm in his 2004 autobiography.[22] Ex-Communists Ralph de Sola and George Hewitt would both also testify to having seen Hiss at Communist Party meetings.[23] Communist lawyer John Abt would later admit having been a member of the Ware group,[24] 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.;[25] 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.[26]

See also

References

  1. ↑ A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn, Harper & Row, 1980. ISBN 0-06-014803-9.
  2. ↑ FDR: The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Ralph Raico, Future of Freedom Foundation, April 1, 2001. Retrieved from The Independent Institute.org 06/17/07.
  3. ↑ Roosevelt and his supporters saw the New Deal in revolutionary and dictatorial terms: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt “lamented that the nation lacked a benevolent dictator to force through reforms." Soviet intelligence source Walter Lippmann told Roosevelt, "The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers"; in his influential column, Lippmann added that the use of "'dictatorial powers,' if that is the name for it—is essential.'" The New York Herald Tribune approved the Inauguration with the headline "FOR DICTATORSHIP IF NECESSARY." In response to a hit Hollywood movie featuring as hero a President who “dissolves Congress, creates an army of the unemployed, and lines up his enemies before a firing squad,” FDR wrote that he thought the film “would help the country.”
  4. ↑ Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) ISBN 0195051807) p. 306
  5. ↑ “During the Great Depression of the 1930s, agricultural price support programs led to vast amounts of food being deliberately destroyed at a time when malnutrition was a serious problem in the United States.... For example, the federal government bought 6 million hogs in 1933 alone and destroyed them. Huge amounts of farm produce were plowed under, in order to keep it off the market and maintain prices at the officially fixed level, and vast amounts of milk were poured down the sewers for the same reason. Meanwhile, many American children were suffering from diseases caused by malnutrition.” (Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics [New York: Basic Books, 2007] 3rd Ed., ISBN 0465002609, p. 56) As Gene Smiley, emeritus professor of economics at Marquette University, writes in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: "Reduced production, of course, is what happens in depressions, and it never made sense to try to get the country out of depression by reducing production further. In its zeal, the administration apparently did not consider the elementary impossibility of raising all real wage rates and all real prices." One study found that such New Deal policies prolonged the Great Depression by about seven years.
  6. ↑ The Progressive Party was in fact a creation of the Communist Party, growing out of CPUSA General Secretary Eugene Dennis' February 12, 1946 order "to establish in time for the 1948 elections a national third party." Arthur Schlesinger, A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) ISBN 0618219250, pp. 455-456. In 1955, the Jenner subcommittee cited the Progressive Party on its list of subversive organizations, identified as a Communist front.
  7. ↑ Had FDR died a few months earlier, Wallace would have become President; Wallace once said if he were to become President, he would appoint Soviet agent Laurence Duggan as Secretary of State
  8. ↑ Henry Agard Wallace, “Where I Was Wrong.” This Week, September 2, 1952
  9. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 133
  10. ↑ The International Juridical Association (IJA) was a Communist front organization which "consistently followed the Communist Party line." Report on the National Lawyers Guild, legal bulwark of the Communist Party," Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, United States Congress (1950), p. 12
  11. ↑ Pressman joined the Communist Party about this time
  12. ↑ Whittaker Chambers, Witness [Washington: Regnery, 1952] ISBN 0895267896, p. 612
  13. ↑ John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2006) ISBN 0521857384, p. 94
  14. ↑ Ware, the son of American Communist Party founder "Mother" Bloor, reportedly "tricked" Soviet peasants into collective farms (Deborah Kay Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003] ISBN 0300088132, p. 161), for which he was praised by Lenin, that praise repeated by Stalin (J.V. Stalin, Works, Vol. 11: 1928-March 1929 [Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954], pp. 195-196.)
  15. ↑ FBI memorandum: Ladd to Hoover, January 28, 1949, p. 2 (FBI file: Hiss-Chambers, Vol. 44)
  16. ↑ "....Jerome Frank, the leading liberal judge on the court; Jerome Frank, the intellectual leader of the New Deal and architect of its most progressive legislation; Jerome Frank, the idol of young progressive law students and leader of the liberals when he taught law at Yale, who had led the fight against the conservatism of the old-guard faculty...." Arthur Kinoy, Rights on Trial: The Odyssey of a People's Lawyer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) ISBN 0674770137, p. 97
  17. ↑ Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1950) ASIN B0007DS43A, p. 60
  18. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 43
  19. ↑ Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1950) ASIN B0007DS43A, p. 60
  20. ↑
    Mr. COHN. Did you know Alger Hiss to be a member of the Communist party?
    Mr. WEYL. Yes, I did.
    Mr. COHN. Were you in the same Communist cell with Alger Hiss at one time?
    Mr. WEYL. That is correct.
    …
    Mr. WEYL. ...Hiss and I were among the eight or nine people who met with the first meeting of that organization, I presume. So I was in this Communist cell with him for a period of approximately nine months.
    Testimony of Nathaniel Weyl before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, February 23, 1953, pp. 619-620 (PDF pp. 658-659)
  21. ↑ Nathaniel Weyl, “I Was in a Communist Unit with Hiss,” U.S. News and World Report, January 9, 1953
  22. ↑ Nathaniel Weyl, Encounters With Communism (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2004), cited in John Earl Haynes, "Ales: Hiss, Foote, Stettinius?" johnearlhaynes.org, June 7, 2007
  23. ↑ Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), ISBN 0394495462, p. 360
  24. ↑ John J. Abt with Michael Myerson, Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer (University of Illinois Press, 1993) ISBN 0252020308, pp. 40-41. Arrested for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the communist Lee Harvey Oswald would request Abt as his attorney. Pamela J. Ray with James E. Files,Interview with History: The JFK Assassination (AuthorHouse, 2007) ISBN 142595992X, p. 64
  25. ↑ Gilbert J. Gall, Pursuing Justice: Lee Pressman, the New Deal, and the CIO (SUNY Press, 1999) ISBN 0791441032, p. 41. According to Davis, the Ware group “was used, to my knowledge, for stealing documents from government agencies.” Her husband, she said, regularly supplied “a party contact confidential information from his job.” Davis added, “Everyone in Hal Ware's group had accepted the directive to get whatever we could for the party to use in any way it saw fit.”
  26. ↑ Anatoli Sudoplatov, Pavel Sudoplatov, Leona P. Schecter and Jerrold L. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, a Soviet Spymaster (New York: Back Bay Books, 1995) ISBN 0316821152, p. 227-228. Two others also alleged to be in contact with the Ware group (George Silverman and Harry Dexter White) would likewise be identified as sources of the Silvermaster group.

External link

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