AGRICULTURAL RELIEF

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Now, I might use stronger language, but I am sure that it is not
necessary, and that because I do make these statements possibly in
a mild sort of way, I am none the less strenuously in favor of them
and believe in them.

In the second place——

Mr. AsweLL. Doctor, you do not mean to intimate that the
crushing payment of this fee would make chittlings out of the farmers
themselves, do you? That is what I got out of that story.

Mr. CLarkE. Tell it again. [Laughter.]

Mr. KiLGore. I think he understands it.

In the second place, I want to give you this illustration of how

the simple loan from the revolving fund or from any other loan fund
would operate. You gentlemen remember that in” the fall of 1926,
when 1t became known that we had an 18,000,000-bale cotton crop,
when the price descended from 18 cents a pound to 12 cents and then
11 and 10 cents, that the South was greatly disturbed; the Nation
was aroused. There was a big mass meeting of thousands of growers
held in Memphis, and it was proposed that 4,000,000 bales of this
cotton be taken off the market so as to steady the price. The admin-
istration through Mr. Coolidge appointed a cabinet cotton commit-
tee, made up of Secretaries Mellon, Hoover, and Jardine, and Mr.
Meyer of the then War Finance Corporation. They held confer-
ences, and they decided finally that they would set up in each cotton
State a finance corporation with sufficient capital to get loans from
the intermediate credit banks, or from the commercial banks, to take
this cotton, with liberal loans, off of the market. It had the prestige
and the force of the Government behind it. There was nothing that
was more generally known or better advertised in the South than
these loan financing corporations, with ample credit facilities for
taking cotton off the market; and yet these finance corporations, set
up in every cotton State of the South, handled practically no cotton.
It was a mere loan. And why did they not handle cotton under those
most strenuous conditions? It was this, in my analyses, that it was
proposed in these finance corporations that individuals would take
loans on their cotton. As individuals they were asked to take their
cotton off the market, to take the risk in stabilizing the price for all
of the growers. They would not take the risk.

When you ask a cooperative association to take a loan of this kind—
not exactly the same kind, but in principle the sa#me—when you ask
a cooperative association to take a loan of this kind, either through
a subsidiary or stabilization corporation, you ask a group of indi-
viduals to take risks and to perform a stabilization operation which
individuals would not do.

I have been a director in a cotton cooperative association for five
years, as the elected director from my district. My own thought
and my own feeling is that the management of a cooperative associa-
tion would be more sensitive about taking risks for their members to
whom they are responsible than individuals would be in taking risks
for themselves. And I think, therefore, it is logical and reasonable
to say that cooperative associations, or subsidiaries or other organiza-
tions that they might set up, would feel and act this way toward a
loan which would be carried in any of the loan bills to which I have
referred and which have been considered in Congress.