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You go into the column on per capita income of the farmer and again you have the same thing, that you do not under any of the years of the agreements approach anything like the income that was earned by the farmers during the years during which they were operating under the Fordney-McCumber and the Hawley-Smoot tariff. Now, there is another careful demonstration of paralleling the figures produced by the United States Tariff Commission and prove the case.

Now, may I ask that that tabulation appearing on page 554 of Agricultural Statistics of 1941, table 685, be printed in the record at this point?

I will also ask that the table appearing on page 561 of the same volume, table No. 692, be printed in the record at this point.

I assume that since there is no objection that that is so ordered. The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, so ordered. (The tabulations referred to are as follows:)

TABLE 685.-Cash income from farm marketings: Total, per farm, and per capita United States, 1910-401

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TABLE 692.-Farm wage rates: Annual rates, by classes, and index numbers of average rates, United States, 1909-401

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1 Yearly averages from 1909 to 1923 are from reports by crop reporters, giving average rates for the year in their localities. From 1924 to date, weighted average of quarterly reports.

Calendar years 1910-14-100.

Source: Agricultural Marketing Service. Data for earlier years in 1928 Yearbook, table 531.

Mr. GEARHART. Now, this is a table showing the farm wage rates and annual rates by classes, and index numbers of average rates, United States, 1909 to 1940.

Now, when you pick out the so-called Fordney-McCumber, HawleySmoot tariff years down to the depression of 1930, and pick it up again after 1934, when the agreements go into effect, you find that the per-month earned wages paid with board under the agreements were never as high as they were under the tariff years.

In the next column the same thing is reenacted, going into the perday column, with board, the same result.

In the other column, with board, we find the same conclusion. Now, in view of the fact that these two tabulations absolutely prove the point that I made in offering the original tabulation of the United States Tariff Commission, I am now ready to hear your explanation. Mr. SAYRE. Very good.

In the first place, the figures of that same table, I have that same table but for a later year, 1942, so that I think that I can squarely meet your comments.

Those figures have nothing to do, of course, with proving or disproving the previous statistics which you mentioned. I do not question at all those Tariff Commission figures which you submitted in

your previous statement. I have no doubt they are accurate, but they prove something very different from what you were seeking to prove by them.

Now, as to these figures showing the farm income for successive years, again I think that these figures are very instructive.

If I understand you correctly, Mr. Gearhart, you sought to make the point that the tariff was the cause of the size of the farm income, that if I understood you correctly, under the Hawley-Smoot tariff we had a high tariff and high agricultural income and that now that some of the excesses of that high tariff have been lopped off we are getting lower farm income, if I caught the drift of your remarks, it was, I think, to that effect.

Mr. GEARHART. I am perfectly willing to agree with you that there are other factors that enter into these conclusions that I have made but I want to point out that when we had the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act without reciprocal trade agreements, the farmer experi enced far better years and better returns, and the farm worker had better wages and a better standard of living, and when you go into reciprocal trade agreements under the promise to bring back high wages, to destroy unemployment, and to reestablish the American standards of living, objectives not yet achieved. You failed miserably, you fell far short of the objective which was the promise that you made when you asked us to put this on the statute books in the original year.

Mr. SAYRE. May I ask you, Mr. Gearhart, in what year, in your table, was the highest farm income, that is, the total cash income from farm marketings was highest in what year?

Mr. GEARHART. Well, in 1929.

Mr. SAYRE. How about 1919?

Mr. GEARHART. You are going away back into the World War No. 1 economy; you are in a war economy.

Mr. SAYRE. I am looking at the highest year or the year in which the highest farm marketings were received as shown on this table.

Mr. GEARHART. And if you did not have lend-lease, 1942 would be a grand year for you to point to now, but that is exactly the point that I have made, that until you have war economy displacing peacetime economy, you have not come anywhere near improving the condition of the farmer and you have not come anywhere near to achieving it and the attaining of the objective which was the promise you made to the American people when you induced them acting through their representatives to enact the reciprocal-trade-agreement law.

Mr. SAYRE. Are we in agreement that the year 1919 was the highest farm cash income received as shown in the years in this table dating from 1910?

Mr. GEARHART. Yes; I think that that is right.

Mr. SAYRE. I think so. Now, did we have a high tariff then, in 1919? Mr. GEARHART. In 1919 we were feeding the entire world as a consequence of the war.

Mr. SAYRE. In other words, it does look as though the height of the tariff had nothing to do, or let me rephrase it, it looks as though the height of the tariff was not the cause of the size of farm income; it looks as though there were other factors.

Mr. GEARHART. I have freely admitted that.

Mr. SAYRE. We agree to that, then, so that there is no point in mentioning the Fordney-McCumber tariff as being the prime factor determining these figures.

Mr. GEARHART. The Fordney-McCumber tariff was on the statute books then, and it was influencing all American business, industrial, and farm life.

Mr. SAYRE. But we had higher farm income before it was enacted. Mr. GEARHART. You must remember that you have knocked down the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill by 41 percent.

Mr. SAYRE. Not then.

Mr. GEARHART. You have now.

Mr. SAYRE. However, let me complete my comment on the tables in the latter years; that is, the years since our depression.

Remember how everything tumbled between 1929 and 1932, everything tumbled together-farm prices, industrial wages, national income, and trade?

We took a sudden parachute drop.

Now, let us look at the figures of recovery in the years following 1932: In this table to which you refer, which appears on page 660 of Agricultural Statistics, 1942, in 1932 we struck the bottom in cash income from farm marketings of $4,743,000,000.

Then you started going up. In the year 1934 farm cash income had reached $6,334,000,000.

In the year 1935 it had reached $7,086,000,000.
In the year 1936 it had reached $8,367,000,000.
In the year 1937 it had reached $8,850,000,000.
It was going up right along.

Then came the year of recession in 1938, when it dropped slightly, to $7,686,000,000, and then it started going up again in 1939 to $7,877,000,000.

In 1940 to $8,379,000,000.

In 1941 to $11,000,000,000 and some million.

Now, the point I made is that the farmers have done pretty well under our trade-agreements program.

Mr. GEARHART. Yes; and they would do a whole lot better if they did not have this competition from abroad.

Mr. SAYRE. They were able to sell a lot of their surpluses abroad which they never in the world would have been able to do without the trade-agreements program.

Mr. GEARHART. People buy what they need.

Mr. SAYRE. And we want to enlarge our markets.

The real problem, and I am sure that you and I both see this alike, the real problem is how can we dispose of more American cotton, more American wheat, more American rice and tobacco, more American radios, automobiles, sewing machines, and office equipment, and so forth and so on.

Mr. GEARHART. I will tell you how to do that.

Just exclude these competitive agricultural products and put to work 30,000,000 more farm acres, providing homes for millions more farmers, who will earn and grow prosperous and become a great consuming force in this United States, a great group of people with a high purchasing power.

Develop that within the United States by taking away this outside competition.

Mr. SAYRE. And growing what crops, sir?

Mr. GEARHART. I said competitive agricultural products, the things which are brought into this country which we have not only produced some of, a lot of, or are entirely capable of producing on Âmerican soil.

Mr. SAYRE. You mean silk, or what kind of things do you mean? There are so many things.

Of course, the great majority of those agricultural imports were things like silk and tropical products.

Mr. GEARHART. Nobody would classify silk as a competitive article unless you are going to call it competitive to nylon which is a new thing in the American market.

Mr. SAYRE. You are not referring to that.

Mr. GEARHART. I am not referring to silk and I am not referring to rubber when I say that.

Mr. SAYRE. We have got synthetic rubber.

Mr. GEARHART. I am going to get to that before we get through discussing the subject with you. I am talking about the ordinary things.

Mr. SAYRE. But the real problem, Mr. Gearhart, which honest men must fear is how to dispose of these surpluses. It is a very difficult and profound problem.

Mr. GEARHART. That is the way to dispose of them; give the people of the United States a chance to produce those things and to consume them.

Mr. SAYRE. But they are producing them in greater quantity than they can sell them.

Mr. GEARHART. Yes, and they could consume them if you give them a chance to make a living.

Convert them into alcohol for industrial purposes.

That is swine, pork, bacon, fruits, nuts, grains, cereals, milk, cream, eggs, potatoes, canned and fresh fruits, and things of that type.

Mr. SAYRE. I do not think that you would make a great hit with many of our farmers if you throw increased employment and increased production into such fields as those which you have mentioned. Mr. GEARHART. If you would just put the American farmer to work raising those kinds of things in the proportion that they are brought into the United States you will put to work 30,000,000 acres.

Mr. SAYRE. You remember what Secretary Wallace said. He said, with respect to the year of which he spoke, that it would take only 10,000,000 acres to produce the things which were being imported, that we would lose thereby 35,000,000 to 45,000,000 acres devoted to exporting agricultural products, and his remark was, "Who would want to trade the 10,000,000 for 35,000,000 to 45,000,000?”

Are farmers fools enough to trade dollars for quarters?

Mr. GEARHART. Is the man who wants to put a quart of milk in every child's hand in the world every day-at Uncle Sam's expense?

Mr. SAYRE. I am quoting the quotation which I think is sound and true, and I do not think that it can be denied. I think it is pretty profound.

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