Documents | Photos | Features | Classroom | Links | Listserv | About Us | Search
Selected Works of Henry A. Wallace
Introduction | Essay | Documents | Resources
The Farm Crisis
Henry A. Wallace
A speech delivered by radio, March 10, 1933.
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 41.
- I have just come from a meeting that began two hours ago in my office and that will continue into the afternoon. The purpose is to reach an immediate agreement on a farm relief program that will affect this year's crops. The agreement will have to be immediate. We can't legislate next June for a crop that was planted in April.
- There are honest conflicts of opinion. No plan can be perfect. One plan, for example, turns out to be unconstitutional. Another plan has administrative difficulties that defy the wisdom of a Solomon. Another plan may help the wheat people a little more than it helps the cotton people, or vice versa. Our job will be to get a compromise—to combine the most satisfactory features of each into a program.
- The problem is clearly revealed. During the few years just preceding 1929, we were selling in foreign markets the product of roughly sixty million acres of land. The value of those exports this past fiscal year was sixty percent below that of 1929. We must reopen those markets, restore domestic markets, and bring about rising prices generally; or we must provide an orderly retreat for the surplus acreage, or both.
- For twelve years American agriculture has suffered, and suffered cruelly. This has been largely because the government could not, or would not, formulate the policies that would enable the United States to act as a nation should which is owed money by other nations.
- We would not let people who owe us pay their debts in the only way they could—in goods and services. High tariffs prevented that. For a while we loaned our debtors additional funds with which to buy goods from us, but after a few years that method of lifting ourselves by our bootstraps collapsed. We could not sell our surplus farm products to them, partly because they could not sell enough to us, partly because of retaliatory tariffs, and partly because of the drive for economic self-sufficiency among European nations.
- Today in this country men are fighting to save their homes. That is not a figure of speech. That is a brutal fact, a bitter commentary on agriculture's twelve years' struggle. What do we propose to do about it? The least we can do is to stay the cruel process of dispossessing farmers from their homes. In adjusting this farm-debt load, creditors also must expect to share in the losses.
- It will take time to bring about an effective demand for our surplus products at home and abroad. There is little likelihood of an effective demand abroad for our surplus farm products during the next two years. Negotiating reciprocal tariffs may restore a part of this market, but those negotiations will take time. The European nations, making desperate efforts to act as debtor nations logically must, have increased their tariffs on American farm products and have handled their currency exchanges so as to make almost impossible any large purchases of American farm products. Furthermore, they have increased their wheat and hog production as much as possible.
- Meanwhile, we must adjust downward our surplus supplies until domestic and foreign markets can be restored.
Introduction | Essay | Documents | Resources