160

AGRICULTURAL RELIEF
I have come as a farmer to the only power that can put me on the
American level of earning and living. This is an artificial level,
created by you, and as an individual I can not reach it unless you
devise a means by which each commodity that I share in raising can
act as a freely bargaining unit in determining its real value to the
other great units that constitute the modern capitalistic States.

The economic unit is the group or commodity, not the individual.

The economic behavior of wheat and cotton depends not at all on
the individual who raised them. If the stockholders of the United
States Steel Corporation should receive their dividends in rails and
billets and other products and sell them in competition with each
other, it would furnish a fair parallel to our agricultural anarchy.

I saw the statement the other day from a British banker that the
dollar had superseded gold as the ruler of the world, and also this
comment from a Washington paper:

What then shall be said of American big business which rules the dollar?

Is that all, or has the farmer a higher court of equity to which he
can appeal for protection from destruction by the great economic
forces by which he is being slowly crushed? If there is such a court
of appeals, it is the Congress of the United States.

Now, gentlemen, with that in mind—and I want to say paren-
thetically here, Mr. Ketcham, that your questions have always been
constructive. You have always talked here as a friend of the farmer.
I did not mean to bring this up at this time, but you see from that
point of view, that I work down toward the idea of centralization,
to meet a centralized world, and I can not see that we can meet it
with the dispersion type, which simply gives the farmer a little more
for his products, as in the export debenture plan.

It is not because I want to be for one or another, it is because I
believe we have got to meet a condition of concentratoin, and we have
got to meet it with concentration also.

Mr. Kercuam. I think you have approached one phase of this more
openly and more frankly than any other witness who has appeared
in behalf of the McNary-Haugen Lill. If I understand your view-
point correctly, it is this: That we Lave come to the time when we
can no longer expect the individual units, the 6,000,000 farmers, to
unite themselves and therefore, if you could have your way about it,
you believe that we ought to set up a board somewhat similar in its
powers and possibilities, say, to the Federal Reserve Board and other
great boards that have been set up in connection with other lines of
business?

Mr. CavEerno. You will see from what I have said that that is
the working of my mind—not that I wish it. I have made this
statement frequently. I could talk two hours to any farmers’
meeting on any daily paper that was ever published.

I picked up this morning a Washington paper and found this:

Coal strike inquiry is voted by the Senate. :

Coal—even it with its possibilities of i
nelplossly 10 the Senate, p concentration has appealed

Mr. AswerLL. Have they started t..eir investigation?

N Mr. Caverno. They will investicate, just exactly as you are

mmvesticatine here.