(See Cover)
On the land where the U.S. grows its food and fiber, the majestic checkerboard of spring was beginning to form. The plains and rolling hills of Illinois and Iowa, where farmers were turning the soil for this year's crop of corn, were a geometric pattern of black and brown and green. On to the West and South, through Kansas and into Texas, the spreading, endless fields of wheat were coming green and beginning to ripple softly in the wind. In the Deep South, across the bottom of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, green shoots were peeking out of the ridges in the cotton fields.
It seemed like any other spring, but in Washington there was angry and fearful talk about a revolt on the farm. Grasping for an issue to use in the November elections, Democratic leaders were playing the farm issue at campaign pitch, and some farm state congressional Republicans were almost as keyed up. The Democrats kept studying the charts of the 1948 elections, in which Harry Truman carried four Republican farm states (Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa) plus border Missouri. They figured that if—just if—they could catch all five, hold the South plus all that Stevenson won in 1952, they could squeak in to victory next November.
All week long congressional Democrats marched up and down the hill trying to find a way to outmaneuver the President so they might emerge as the true champions of the farmer. Answering Eisenhower's radio-television speech on the farm-bill veto (TIME, April 23), Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson held out the simple lure of more money for farmers. Republicans, he said, worry about the economic problem and the percentage points and dollar symbols, but the Democrats worry about people.
Forces of Change. Before it fanned out across the country, most of the political furor swirled around one man: Ezra Taft Benson, Secretary of Agriculture. He took it calmly. Seated firmly behind his Washington desk, listening to politicians warn him that his policies are going to lose the election, Secretary Benson glanced often at a motto, in small type, pasted to the marble base of his pen and pencil set, where only he could see it. "Oh Lord," it says, "give us men with a mandate higher than the ballot box."
Ezra Benson needed to be calm and prayerful, for he is presiding over the agricultural economy of the U.S. at a time of revolution, not revolt. Caught up in the forces of change, most U.S. farmers are worried, many are angry, a few are giving up. The revolution that besets them started slowly more than a generation ago, when U.S. farming began to change from a family way of life to a specialized indu try. Through the years new machines— tractors, trucks, combines, multiple plows, multi-row cultivators, a whole catalogue of farm equipment—made it possible for a man to farm more acres of land, to raise more and better livestock (see BUSINESS). That meant the need for fewer people on the farm. It meant (and continues to mean) fewer small, "family" farms, and bigger expertly-managed farms.