ment to the farm. In that manner we froze ordinarily about 20 percent of our cotton allotment on farms where they did not want to plant it and planted half of the allotment 1 year out of 3 in order to keep it. We feel if we are going to have an effective adjustment program we have to get the allotments following with the producers who are planting the cotton so when we come up to the top and put on a reduction from the total acreage, that will be reflected all the way down to the bottom.

Mr. POAGE. Let us go back to just what is really the basic objection to allotments of cotton or any other crop. Is the basic objection of the farmer not that they do not want to have so many Government controls, that they want a minimum of interference with their personal activities? That is the basic reason people object to these programs, is it not?

Mr. BELL. I thought they like them pretty well.

Mr. POAGE. You say they do like them pretty well?

Mr. BELL. They are given an opportunity each year to vote on them.

Mr. POAGE. They are always given an opportunity to vote for the program just like Hitler always gave the German people an opportunity to vote for Hitler or to vote for Hitler. You can vote and cut your throat by a reduction of acreage or you can vote and cut your throat by a reduction of price. You can take your choice. That is all the choice we have ever given people. Do not misunderstand me. I am in favor of a reduction program because I know I will cut my throat in price if I do not take it in a reduction of acreage and every farmer in my district is smart enough to know that. You say they have a choice between losing money one way or the other. You do not give the farmer a choice as to whether he likes this thing or not. He takes it because he has to do it to make a living. He objects to it primarily because of Government interference. Why should we not do everything we can to minimize that Government interference, even though you are not going to get exact justice? It is utter folly for us to sit here and think we can pass a law that is going to act with exact justice to every one of the 6,000,000 families growing cotton. Your system will not do it and no system that has ever been devised is going to give exact justice. If we get a system that does substantial justice and eliminates a large part of this detailed control of the individual's operations, are we not going to get a system that is going to be at least more generally acceptable? Did we not get a system more generally acceptable when we changed that law in 1939?

Mr. BELL. We possibly got a system which was a little more acceptable than the old system which tied you 100 percent to history. We do not think you get a system that is more acceptable than it would be if you tied it to old history and gave some latitude for adjustments between farms.

Mr. POAGE. Your assumption may be correct, but I want it understood it is not the same as mine. I do not assume the farmer generally criticized the old system because he was tied to history nearly as much as he criticized it because he was subject to the personal decision of too many different Government officials. There are no human beings. who are smart enough to make all those decisions for the people of the United States. They cannot do it. They will do it with injustice just as surely as they attempt it. You have a lot of trouble when you

try to give that personal power. It becomes a government of men and not a government of laws, where one man is treated one way and a second man is treated another way.

Then the individual certainly has a right to complain. If I am any judge of human nature, he is going to complain loud and long and break the whole program if you try to put it on that sort of basis.

Mr. WOOLLEY. Mr. Chairman, could I comment on that? The reason I interject myself in this conversation is that that very subject. that you have touched upon has raged very strong throughout the halls of the Department of Agriculture. Our people out in the States have discussed it with us. We have discussed it very seriously. You know this whole argument of high price supports versus the flexible sliding scale and so on. Our people are very strongly in favor of high price supports but they say, after talking to the farmers, that their farmers realize full well that if they are to have high price supports they must necessarily have strict controls to go along with them and if they do not have strict controls to maintain supply in line with demand it will result in such an expenditure of Federal funds that it will bankrupt the Commodity Credit Corporation and as a result we will have a bigger and better fiasco along the lines of the old Farm Board. They do not believe, nor do we, that you can set up a program whereby you really maintain controlled production without having it react on the individual in a way which is not going to be entirely pleasing to him. They say the farmers are willing to make that choice, that they will agree for high price supports, to have strict control, and they are equally mindful of the fact that if they do not do it we will probably go broke in the process.

That is the reason why we have pleaded so earnestly with this committee not to put gadgets in the writing of this law so that it will have the effect of forcing up the allotments and bringing about the excess production of any of these commodities.

Mr. POAGE. Mr. Woolley, the very reason that we have to put gadgets on the law is because we recognize that in order to protect certain groups of farmers, to wit, the very small farmer, the man who has just started in on the cultivation of new land and other similar groups, we have to write some kind of specific law rather than leaving it solely to the discretion of the administrative officers. Were we in some other nation of the world, the legislative body would do nothing more than decree that the Secretary of Agriculture might control the production of cotton in such manner as he saw fit and in such way as he thought most effective. I do not doubt a bit that you gentlemen could establish a system far more effective than any system that we will establish. However, I would doubt seriously if it would give the protection to the individual farmer that these gadgets and provisions of law have given. We all know that an absolute dictatorship is the most effective form of government ever devised by man but it is certainly the most undemocratic. It is not necessarily the best form of government. You may achieve efficiency with this type of system but you do not achieve any type of democracy. It is not necessary to go this far. We did make a success in 1939 and 1940 and 1941. We did hold the production down to what we said we wanted to hold it to. I know of no reason why you cannot hold it down in the future. You did do it in the past where you did not go into every individual back yard and create

dissension between each and every neighbor and disputes as to why a farm on one side of the fence should get more cotton allotment than one on the other side.

You and I know that in every one of those cases the more discretion you give to your local committee the more disliked they will be. If I get cut down you know I am going to say that your committee was prejudiced against me and I am going to believe it and I am going to do my best to make my neighbor believe it. You know that is going to go on. The more discretion you leave the more of that hard feeling you are going to create.

I do not think you build a firm foundation by arraying neighbor against neighbor. I think you will get a much firmer proposition if you say to everyone living in one county that they will all be treated alike. You have got to have some kind of administrative areas. I know that county lines are arbitrary lines. If you want to have the power to establish differentials within counties, possibly that is all right. I know in some counties, half is bottom land and the other half hill land and that you have entirely different situations. in them.

I can see the justification for establishing administrative areas, possibly, that do not follow the county lines. But you propose to go back to the old system, as I see it, of complete lack of uniformity with the added objection that you are going to say to the individual that this committee had the right to give him more but they did not do it.

Mr. WOOLLEY. I would like to comment on that because Mr. Poage has raised a fundamental question.

Mr. PACE. Mr. Woolley, let me say this, with all due respect. I am going to ask the Department to withdraw that recommendation for two reasons, in which I believe you will agree.

The first is, it cannot be done because you have no record of any kind, character or description, even a BEA guess, as to the individual farm plantings of cotton in the past. Secondly, it would be most unfair under the present law to tell the farmers, "You do not have to plant cotton every year. You do not have to plant more than onetenth of an acre once each 3 years to maintain your history" and then to come now and say we are going to put into effect a law making their allotments dependent upon that one-tenth of an acre that they have been planting under the present law in order to maintain their histories.

Certainly the Department would not want to be a party to such a proposal. As my friend Mr. Poage said, we must not only have a program that has as little control as possible, but above everything else, we must have a program that is going to be fair to the producer. Certainly the Department does not think in the operation of the present law we are going to come in 1950 and tell John Smith, "We are going to quit giving you a percentage of your tilled land." are going to give you an allotment of what you have planted in the last 4 years. He will say, "I have not planted any. I planted an acre year before last."

"Well, you get one-fourth of an acre.'

We

Mr. Bell and Mr. Woolley, do you want that? You may want to consider this thing 5 years from now. Wait 5 years until you have put the farmer on notice of what is going to happen to him. Do not

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put him to sleep as we have done here and then come and cut his throat.

Mr. WALKER. Mr. Chairman, could I say just a word?

Mr. PACE. Yes.

Mr. WALKER. I would say that in withdrawing this we are withdrawing just about as near a unanimous agreement by members of the State committees, including Mr. Vance, of Texas, who voted for history and several others who voted the same way, as we will ever reach. At the time of this other I was operating my farm and was a member of the State committee. I was also a cotton buyer, among other things, and I talked with many farmers. Of course, it is all a matter of opinion, as Mr. Poage said, but in my opinion we had a lot more dissatisfaction, Congressman Poage, after we changed this to cropland than we had before.

I know it was true in my district. It is not hearsay. Personally, I think a fellow has more freedom the other way because in 1942, one of the last years, we had an allotment of 4,100,000 acres of cotton more than was planted. Suppose we get up to a figure like that that is frozen again and suppose all of a sudden they decide they wanted to plant that and we had a sudden increase. It seems to me if you give everybody the same percentage of their cropland that you are more of a dictator, Congressman Poage, than you are if you say "If you want cotton and you want to continue to plant it, you will get allotments and if you do not want to plant it, you can plant other crops.'

I believe the vote was about 12 to 5 strictly in favor of history. Mr. POAGE. Mr. Walker, when you suggest that we establish a more dictatorial policy in following the 1940 system than we did in the 1938 system you are not taking into consideration the fact that the system of a uniform percentage in the county treats every individual in that county alike, that the law applies to the high and to the lowly, and the law applies to all without regard to what some self-appointed petty dictator may decide. But when you say some board or commission or committee is going to sit here in secret and decide tomorrow Mr. Abernethy is entitled to a larger percentage of his land than Bob Poage, that minute I am going to feel that somebody has mistreated me and I am going to begin saying it. So is every other farmer who has been treated that way. There will be no harmony in your committees when you do that thing. You start the whole program by rewarding perjury. Your whole program must be based upon what a farmer says he grew a good many years ago. You saw and I saw under the old system that those farmers who claimed to have grown lots of cotton were rewarded regardless of the truth or falsity of their claims. You know that farmers were given far more cotton acres than they had ever planted because they misrepresented their past plantings. You saw counties in Oklahoma, and I saw them on the south side of the Red River, where the county committee decided, "Well, we have got more acres reported in cotton than there is in cultivation in this county and there is no way to do this thing except to give everybody 50 percent of what they claim they are planting."

The man who told the truth got cut 50 percent below the truth. The man who falsified got the advantage of his falsification and part of his neighbor's in addition to that.

Now, you start your program on a basis of that kind of false statement, you pay a premium to the man who comes in and makes a false statement. That is the basis of your program. You do not have any written history. You do not have any history in your office. You have no history in the world except the testimony that you invite that man to give. You cannot start an honest program on that sort of a basis, Mr. Walker.

Mr. WALKER. You realize, though, when this started in the period of 1928 to 1932, Mr. Poage, that the fellow was getting a tremendous payment for that. He got a payment for several years on that. This way whether he wants to plant cotton or does not is a different thing. you assume that every farmer in a county or administrative area is identical and they all want to plant the same crops and that we will soon have such controls on wheat and corn, they do not all want to plant the same.

If

I happen to know and you know of cases like this. I have one section of land. There is another section adjoining that belongs to two brothers. They raised Cain about ever establishing a cotton allotment. They said they did not want to plant it but they gave them the same cotton allotment I would have liked to have had if it had been possible.

Mr. POAGE. That is right and you know how it was frozen. It was roughly 20 percent, was it not?

Mr. WALKER. It amounted to about that; yes.

Mr. POAGE. That becomes a matter of record. You can estimate the amount of acres that will be frozen just about as well as you can estimate next year's production or next years' consumption. Yet in order to avoid making that estimate we most always base the entire allotment program on an estimate of both production and future consumption. You can also estimate how much of the cotton acreage you do allot will be frozen. Obviously if you want to grow 10,000,000 bales of cotton and you figure half a bale to the acre, you would allot 20,000,000 acres to do that. But if you knew that 20 percent of that land was going to be frozen you would obviously allot 24,000,000 acres of cotton acreage and get exactly the same amount of production that you would get when you had 20,000,000 acres, all of which was put in cotton. It is not a thing that it takes the BAE to calculate. Any fourth-grade student of arithmetic can calculate it. Mr. WALKER. But Congressman, what I am saying is this: Maybe I am a poor hand at explaining anything but I have never yet been able to explain to one of my close neighbors and farmers why if he wanted to plant more cotton than a fellow with an allotment who never planted any and does not want any and does not want it anyway, this other fellow should have an allotment and he cannot have an acre more. I am saying to you frankly that caused more dissatisfaction between my own neighbors than anything prior to that. Mr. POAGE. I can tell you how you can explain it. You can explain that the law gives the same to every man in the county. But if the law does not give the same to every man in the county, then you have to explain that John Jones, Henry Smith, and the other members of your county committee just got together and decided that this fellow was entitled to more than the other fellow.