AGRICULTURE
(See Cover)
Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together. —Gulliver's Travels
"Thunderation!" he muttered indignantly, as the Illinois Central's crack Panama Limited slowed for a laggard signal. From his starched collar to his shiny black shoes, the stocky, craggy-faced passenger was obviously a farmer returning from the city, impatient to see how many inches the corn had grown in his absence, begrudging every precious second of daylight lost in transit. Finally, 172 miles and 155 minutes out of Chicago, the train glided to a halt at Mattoon, III., and the fretful passenger hopped off.
Half an hour later, Charles Baker Shuman was standing in a jungle of cornstalks that towered four feet above his 5-ft. 11½-in. frame, and would tickle a 20/20 elephant eye. Beyond the corn, a new crop of tomatoes was ripening; the cattle were fattening nicely; the flower garden was a colorplate right out of Burpee's seed catalogue. For Farmer Shuman, walking the rich brown soil and caressing its bounty last weekend, God was in his heaven—even if all, as usual, was far from right with the world.
Standing in the fields at dusk in his faded blue denim coveralls, Charlie Shuman draws new strength from his ally, the earth. His adversary for most of his 58 years has been the agricultural bureaucracy in Washington, which Shuman regards as a kind of socialistic Santa Claus engaged in a monstrous plot to make the nation's farmers live off "sugarplum subsidies" rather than the honest fruits of the soil. Unfashionably, by today's standards, Shuman distrusts government in any form, spurns its handouts. "Farming's Freedom Fighter," as he is often called, Shuman is president of the 1,647,455-member American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation's largest and most influential general farm organization.
Lost Prototype. Shuman and the Farm Bureau want far more than greater freedom or higher prices for the farmers. Essential to their philosophy is a dream of restoring the U.S. farmer's lost image as the prototypical American, the sturdy pioneer who fed the nation's body and nourished its spirit with his fierce independence, his self-reliance, his courage. It is an image that burns brightly in the American imagination, an ideal rooted in the precepts of Jeffersonian democracy and articulated in the economics of Adam Smith—and it is sadly lacking on the U.S. scene today. Dour, plainspoken Charlie Shuman is himself a prototype of that image. "I'm an American conservative," he says with pride. As such, Shuman abominates the whole diabolic concatenation of controls and subsidies that is making the U.S. farmer "a member of a permanently subsidized peasantry."
Some peasantry! The American farmer is the nation's biggest industry, owns assets totaling $230 billion, which equals two-thirds of the value of all U.S. corporations, three-fifths of the market value of all corporate stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. Each year he spends $3.1 billion for new tractors, trucks, machinery and equipment; $3.3 billion for fuel, oil and maintenance; $1.6 billion for