AGRICULTURAL RELIEF 
285 
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.