AGRICULTURE: A Responsible Lobby

The farm policies of the New Deal were, as much as any man's, the handiwork of an affable Alabama cotton farmer named Ed O'Neal. As president of the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation, O'Neal's influence was instrumental in pushing ever higher support prices and ever stricter production controls through Congress. The natural history of lobbies indicated that the Farm Bureau would feed on success, ask for more and more and more.

After World War II, however, the Farm Bureau began to have second thoughts. In 1947, when aging Ed O'Neal retired, the strongest...

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