Word: pitchforked
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Into Secretary Wallace's hands the farm bill puts a three-pronged pitchfork with instructions to try to toss farm prices high up on to the wagon of better days. No doltish hired man, the Secretary is expected to start his price-pitching slowly and easily, watching his aim, studying his effects, conserving his power. Farmers who expect to see a sharp overnight rise in commodity values are ill-informed...
Prong No. 1 of the Wallace pitchfork authorizes the Secretary to reduce production by contracting with farmers to rent the land they leave idle. What that rental will be has yet to be determined but estimates have ranged around $3 per acre. In theory the farmer who last year harvested 1,000 acres of wheat will get more by raising only 700 this year and collecting Government rent on 150. Declares Secretary Wallace: "The taking out of acreage on a wide scale is one necessary line of attack. I don't contemplate such reduction of acreage as meaning that...
Prong No. 3 was welded on to the pitchfork by South Carolina's cotton-minded Smith who devised a price-upping scheme especially for cotton planters. Under it Secretary Wallace takes control of 2,144,937 bales of stabilization cotton from the old Farm Board. John Planter, who normally raises 90 bales of cotton, steps up and promises to raise only 60 this year. Secretary Wallace gives him an option on 30 bales of Government cotton at 6? per lb., the current market price. When hundreds of thousands of John Planters repeat this process, cotton demand starts to exceed...
...Handle of the Wallace pitchfork is the Secretary's power to tax. To raise money to pay land rents and Domestic Allotment "benefits" he may levy on every bushel of wheat the miller turns to flour, on every pound of pork and beef the packer turns to ham and steak, on every quart of milk and cream that go into butter and cheese, on every pound of cotton the spinner makes into cloth. This processing tax, heart of the Roosevelt relief scheme, is a variable quantity which the Secretary of Agriculture adjusts to bring farm prices...
...Hint of Ham" While cities were begging for Federal aid and Henry Ford was preaching back-to-the-soil, Congress was grappling doggedly with the question of relief legislation. Before the House Ways & Means Committee lay Speaker Garner's three-pronged proposal to pitchfork the country up to better times: 1) a billion dollars for the R. F. C. to loan to all-comers; 2) a hundred million of what he called "mercy money" for the President to give away; 3) about a billion and a quarter's worth of public works. Speaker Garner appeared before the committee to declare...