(7 of 10)
Humphrey soon learned that despite all the ranting against inflation, the U.S. had come to like it in small doses. While it had meant a cheapening dollar (worth 52¢ last year v. 100¢ in 1939), inflation had also spelled more jobs and better living. So when it looked as if the nation's special form of inflation might be halted, people immediately assumed that the good things might disappear as well. No one seemed to want a dollar that was worth more if there were to be fewer of them around. So Humphrey quickly changed his course, assuring the nation of a flexible fiscal policy that would change to the shifting needs of the economy.
For all his troubles, said George Humphrey, "when I say my prayers at night, I thank God I am not Ezra Taft Benson." Ezra Benson, Apostle of the Mormon Church, needed all the divine guidance he could get in his new job as Agriculture Secretary. He inherited enormous problems—falling farm prices, huge surpluses, a price support system that encouraged still more overproduction. Like his businessmen associates in the Cabinet, Benson thought that what the U.S. needed was more freedom, notably in agriculture.
He thought this could be obtained by gradually dropping the support level for crops until the farmer was on his own, except for what Benson termed "disaster" conditions. But the farmers did not want freedom if it meant lower prices; they preferred controls and proved it by voting overwhelmingly to let the Government tell them exactly how much wheat and cotton they could plant and market in 1954.
While farm prices dropped 10% and farm income 7% (to $13 billion), it was still the seventh best year for farmers—and they were a long way from disaster. One cattleman, for example, who went to Washington to plead for support prices for beef, said that the drought and falling prices had caused him to lose $100,000 in 1953; if that went on for another three or four years, said he, he would be broke.
But at year's end, it was plain as a grain elevator in Kansas that the present program of rigid supports is unworkable. The U.S. had $4.5 billion tied up in crop surpluses, the highest on record, and a rise of $2.5 billion in a year. In short, in the greatest boom in history, the U.S. had produced $2.5 billion more food than needed, largely because production was not for market but for Government purchase under the support program. The year proved that Free-Marketeer Benson could take no steps toward solving the farm program until the farmers themselves wanted freedom.
Change in the Weather
As 1953 ended, there was no doubt that the economic weather was changing. But what was it changing to? Did the clouds mean a mere shower or a furious storm?
Most businessmen, looking at their own sales and order charts, saw only a shower. Even those who had once talked loudly of depression now spoke of a "rolling readjustment," a "mild recession" or a "lull." The new cliché was "let's be realistic." Being "realistic" meant a drop, at most, in the gross national product of 5% to 10% (or back to about the level of 1952) and a rise in unemployment to 3,500,000. But such "realism" did not necessarily mean that the economy would be much shaken.