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Selected Works of Henry A. Wallace
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A Declaration of Interdependence
Henry A. Wallace
A speech delivered by radio, May 13, 1933.
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 43.
- The new Farm Act, which the President signed yesterday, initiates a program for a general advance of buying power. It is not an isolated advance in a restricted sector; it is part of a large attack on the whole problem of depression.
- Agriculture and tradesmen must make their way together out of a wilderness of economic desolation and waste. This new machinery will not work itself. The farmers and the distributors of foodstuffs must use it, and make it work. The government can help map lines of march, and can see that the interest of no one group is advanced out of line with the interest of all. But government officials cannot and will not go out and work for private businesses. A farm is a private business; so is a farmers' cooperative; and so are all the great links in the food distributing chain. Government men cannot and will not go out and plow down old trails for agriculture, or build for the distributing industries new roads out of the woods. The growers, the processors, the carriers and sellers of food must do that for themselves. Following trade agreements, openly and democratically arrived at, with the consumer represented and protected from gouging, these industries must work out their own salvation. This emergency Adjustment Act makes it lawful and practical for them to get together and do so. It provides for a control of production to accord with actual need, and for an orderly distribution of essential supplies.
- In the end, we envision programs of planned land use; and we must turn our thought to this end immediately; for many thousands of refugees from urban pinch and hunger are turning, with little or no guidance, to the land. A tragic number of city families are reoccupying abandoned farms, farms on which born farmers, skilled, patient, and accustomed to doing with very little, were unable to make a go of it. In consequence of this back-flow there are now thirty-two million people on the farms of the United States, the greatest number ever recorded in our history. Some of those who have returned to farming will find their place there, but most of them, I fear, will not. I look to a day when men and women will be able to do in the country the work that they have been accustomed to doing in the city; a day when we shall have more industrial workers out in the open where there is room to live. I look to a decentralization of industry; but in this respect we shall have to make haste slowly. We do not need any more farmers out in the country now. We do need there more people with some other means of livelihood, buying, close at hand, farm products; enriching and making more various the life of our open-country and village communities.
- The Act authorizes the Secretary of Agriculture to apply, excise taxes on the processing of these products, and to pay the money thus derived to farmers who agree to enter upon programs of planned production, and who abide by that agreement. These processing taxes will be put on gradually. Few, if any, will be levied before fall; and then we shall make them as light as we can and yet bring about the required reduction in acreage. In no case will taxes be levied on products purchased for the unemployed.
- What it amounts to is an advance toward higher prices all along the line. Current proposals for government cooperation with industry are really at one with this Farm Act. Unless we can get re-employment going, lengthen payrolls, and shorten breadlines, no effort to lift prices can last very long. Our first effort as to agriculture will be to adjust production downward, with safe margins to provide enough food for all. This effort we shall continue until such time as diminishing stocks raise prices to a point where the farmer's buying power will be as high as it was in the pre-war years, 1909 to 1914.
- The reason that we chose that period is because the prices farmers got for their crops, in those years, and the prices they paid for manufactured goods and urban services most nearly approached an equitable relationship. There was thus a balance between our major producing groups. At that time there was not the terrific disparity between rural and, urban purchasing power which now exists and which is choking the life out of all forms of American business.
- We do not propose to reduce agricultural production schedules to a strictly domestic basis. Our foreign trade has dwindled to a mere trickle; but we still have some foreign customers for cotton, tobacco, and certain foodstuffs; we want to keep that trade and to get more foreign trade, if we can. The immediate job is to organize American agriculture to reduce its output to domestic need plus that amount which we can export at a profit. If the world tide, turns and world trade revives, we still can utilize to excellent advantage our crop adjustment and controlled distribution setup. We can find out how much they really want over there, and at what price; and then we can take off the brakes and step on the gas.
- The first sharp downward adjustment is necessary because during the past years we have defiantly refused to face an overwhelming reality. In consequence, changed world conditions bear down on us so heavily as to threaten our national life.
- Ever since 1920, hundreds of thousands of farm families have had to do without civilized roads and services which in normal times they were glad and eager to buy. Since 1929, millions of farm people have had to patch their garments, store their cars and tractors, deprive their children of educational opportunities, and cease, as farmers, to improve their practices and their property. They have been forced to let their homes and other buildings stand bare and unpainted, eaten by time and the weather. They have been driven toward peasant, or less than peasant, standards; they have been forced to adopt frontier methods of bare sustenance at a time when, in the old surging, unlimited sense of the word, we have no longer a frontier.
- When the farmer gets higher prices, he will start spending. He will have to. He needs things. He needs new shoes and clothing for all the family, so that his children can go to school in any weather with dry feet, protected bodies, and a decent American feeling of equality and pride. He needs paint and roofing, fencing, machinery and so on, endlessly.
- To reorganize agriculture, co-operatively, democratically, so that the surplus lands on which men and women now are toiling, wasting their time, wearing out their lives to no good end, shall be taken out of production—that is a tremendous task. The adjustment we seek calls first of all for a mental adjustment, a willing, reversal, of driving, pioneer opportunism and ungoverned laissez-faire. The ungoverned push of rugged individualism perhaps had an economic justification in the days when we had all the West to surge upon and conquer; but this country has filled up now, and grown up. There are no more Indians to fight. No more land worth taking may be had for the grabbing. We must experience a change of mind and heart.
- The frontiers that challenge us now are of the mind and spirit. We must blaze new trails in scientific accomplishment, in the peaceful arts and industries. Above all, we must blaze new trails in the direction of a controlled economy, common sense, and social decency.
- There have been delays in the passage of this Act. Meanwhile the planting season has advanced, and our assigned task of adjusting production to effective demand has become infinitely more difficult. We cannot proceed as if this were the middle of winter. Perhaps our wisest course will be to concentrate on those commodities most in need of adjustment, and on which the adjustment decided upon, this late in the season, can be practical and effective.
- To help us in these determinations, we shall have here in Washington within a few days representatives of agriculture and representatives of the processing and distributing trades. Bearing their recommendations in mind, we shall decide just what action to take, and when to take it. As each decision is made we shall get it out directly and publicly to the farmers affected, and launch organization efforts throughout the Nation.
- Unless as we lift farm prices we also unite to control production, this plan will not work for long. The only way we can effectively control production for the long pull is for you farmers to organize, and stick, and do it yourselves. This Act offers you promise of a balanced abundance, a shared prosperity, and a richer life. It will work, if you will make it yours, and make it work. I hope that you will come to see in this Act, as I do now, a Declaration of Interdependence, a recognition of our essential unity and of our absolute reliance one upon another.
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