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Secretary Freeman, a congenital optimist, has high hopes for the bill's long-range effects. If it is passed by the Senate as a four-year program, he says, "by 1970 we'll have Agriculture's house in order." Not likely, says Shuman. "It is bad legislation," he maintains. "From the standpoint of farmers, this complicated monstrosity won't increase income. It will simply increase the dependence of farmers on an annual dole of payments and subsidies from Congress."
The Farm Bureau argues that acreage allotments for wheat and feed grains should be dropped, that support prices should be pegged to the equivalent of the average world market price for the past three years (for wheat, $1.38 a bushel; for corn, $1), and that the Government should be prohibited from selling its surplus stocks at less than 125% of the support price, allowing the market price to rise above the support level. The Bureau even faults the new cropland retirement plan, though that has long been one of the organization's pet schemes for whittling down surpluses. "It can't possibly work satisfactorily," Shuman believes.
On F.D.R.s Lap. In scope and philosophy, Charlie Shuman's outfit today has little in common with the Farm Bureau that set out 45 years ago as a "wedding of corn and cotton"—meaning farm interests of the Middle West and the South. In the dire early days of the New Deal, when the bottom had dropped out of farming, the Farm Bureau cheered virtually every program it now condemns. It sat on Franklin Roosevelt's lap, busily buried pigs for Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace —even had a loose alliance with labor (in exchange for labor's support of farm programs). By the late 1930s, its ardor for the New Deal had cooled, and with the start of World War II the Farm Bureau's break with the Roosevelt Administration was com plete. In 1947, the election of Iowa Corn and Hog Farmer Allen Kline as president signaled the organization's move to the right. "Kline brought us to look at the economic issues in agriculture," Shuman explains. "His administration said, 'We want less government, not more.' It was a simple change, but pretty fundamental. I can't claim credit for that. If I can claim any credit, it is that I stuck with it."
What Shuman can claim overwhelming credit for is the defeat of the 1963 nationwide wheat referendum, which shook the Kennedy Administration to its socks. It was the Gettysburg of the war between farmer and bureaucrat—and Shuman was its General Meade. The referendum's Robert E. Lee was Willard Cochrane, then Freeman's director of agricultural economics, a tough-minded theoretician whose ideas proved politically unacceptable.
Farmers were asked to vote between a $2-a-bu. support price coupled with strict, mandatory quantitative controls (Cochrane's plan) or no program at all —and, warned Freeman, "$1 wheat." Shuman fired the opening shot at a Farm Bureau convention in Atlanta before the referendum, said that Washington seemed "determined to either rule or ruin American agriculture." Who, he asked, "will run the farms of America? Will it be the farmers or political bureaucrats?" The clincher was his