Word: bensons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Benson succeeded in winning approval of his basic idea in the 1958 farm bill, which set subsidy rules for the 1959 corn crop. It abolished acreage controls, lowered price props toward the level set by the market (support price: $1.12 per bu.). But instead of cutting surplus production, as Benson unswervingly predicted, the no-control formula encouraged farmers to raise a bumper crop. And, as Benson's own department admitted last week, it swamped by 600 million bushels the previous all-time corn record set in 1958. Reason: farmers boosted production to make up for lower prices. Result: more...
Professing to be unshaken by the surplus corn, ailing (gall bladder) Ezra Benson last week got President Eisenhower's approval for the legislative proposals he will make to Congress early next year. Chief aim: to extend to wheat the same program that failed in corn, abolish acreage controls while lowering price supports from $1.77 to $1.40 per bu. Because the plan links support prices to the average market prices for the preceding three years (abandoning the old parity ratio based on 1910-14 figures), the Benson program will admittedly lead to a gradual downstep of prices each year. Benson...
Disowned. Among hard-pressed Republican politicians, Benson's proposals landed with a dismal thud. "It is serious. It is fantastic," said one top G.O.P. campaign boss in Washington, and noted that Benson's efforts have raised both subsidies and surplus, bringing nothing but blame for the Republicans. "Our men are going to have to disown it." Benson's plan was long since disowned by such party stalwarts as Ben Franklin Jensen, eleven-term G.O.P. Congressman from southwestern Iowa's Seventh District. By last week Ben Jensen, already fighting desperately to hold the seat that was once...
...political strength in Republican farm strongholds. Presidential Aspirant Stuart Symington proclaimed a program to aid the small farmer, Jack Kennedy called for some original Democratic thinking, and Hubert Humphrey (who has never delivered on the new farm program he promised at the last session of Congress) predicted that the Benson wheat program would bring "lower prices and the largest crop in the history of the world." Iowa's Governor Herschel Loveless, vice-presidential hopeful recently picked to be a farm expert by the Democratic Advisory Council, worked away in Des Moines on a Brannan-style farm plan that will...
Neither were they cheered by the fact that Agriculture Secretary Ezra Benson, who has enough trouble with the farmers, performed a kind of ritual sacrifice by gulping down a bowl of cranberries in public to show that he was behind the industry. In Wisconsin, Presidential Hopeful Jack Kennedy loyally tossed off a couple of glasses of cranberry juice, and Vice President Nixon cheerfully ate four helpings of sauce. (Afterward, agents seized a tainted Wisconsin batch...