Dorothy Thompson

St. Louis Post-Dispatch/April 1, 1936

SPEAKING before a Senate subcommittee Morris Cooke, one of the administration’s experts on soil conservation, drew a startling picture of the conditions of the nation’s land. Mr. Cooke was trying to persuade Congress (and his own administration) not to go in for any more huge dams like the TVA projects. “We have been trying to get the water off the land, into the big rivers, and out of the way. We’ve got to hold it on the fields, or wherever it falls, and do it quickly, if disastrous floods, dust storms, and other calamities are to be stopped.” The warning was timely. Within the last two years dust, storms, and now the floods have blown or washed away forever incalculable millions of tons of our most fertile soil. The dust storm of May 11, 1934, swept 300,000,000 tons off the wheat plains in one day; in normal years nearly half a million more are washed into the Gulf of Mexico. Water and wind erosion together carry off 3,000,000,000 tons of soil every year of our lives. The money value of this loss in normal years is nearly half a billion dollars, and the rate is increasing. Mr. Cooke was not exaggerating when he said, “Our country is afflicted with earth disease. We are like a man well gone with cancer or tuberculosis. We cannot remain a virile nation for another 100 years unless something is done.”

The pioneer was the first villain. For the sake of his own generation he sacrificed the future. He leveled forests; mined the soil; impoverished resources. Water engineering on false principles helped carry the process farther. This has not yet stopped. Lumber companies, uncontrolled by law, also assisted. The great war did its part. To feed our troops and those of the rest of the world and to make large profits we plowed in the years 1914-18 millions of acres whose sod should never have been turned; it upset the whole agricultural economy of the world.

That’s not the whole story. The cotton, tobacco and corn economy of the South is depleting the land there. That economy Is the result of another war, the Civil War, which has never been liquidated. The system of land tenure and land work in the cotton and tobacco states is an inheritance of slavery.

The system of land taxation helps, The farmer’s overhead has been growing steadily. Farm real estate is subject to a relatively higher tax payment than the rest of income producing property. We desperately need a revision of our state, county and town taxation systems, which are overlapping and wasteful in the extreme. It also ought to be considered whether farm taxes should not be based upon income from land rather than upon more or less artificial land values. Many European countries have made this change. Add to this our tariff policy, which has further reduced the farmer’s income, besides contributing to the world chaos which accounts for much of what is happening in Europe.

And the farmer Is to blame, too, for sharing our universal speculative frenzy and buying land to hold for a rise.

I think it unfortunate that the new agricultural adjustment act is tied to a conservation program. It unites a questionable means of increasing the farmer’s buying power to an unquestionable national necessity. Soil conservation is something which must be planned for long range, over decades. Soil conservation has been the pretext under which the Government is continuing a policy, which, under the AAA, was declared unconstitutional and may be so declared again. But radical conservation measures can be taken which would nowhere encounter the Constitution. In the South, for instance, the cotton economy, which ought to be changed, is being kept intact by the benefits to plantation owners. Nothing fundamental Is being done to attack the tenancy question, although the experience of the whole world shows that there is no good agriculture under such a system. Seventy-one per cent of cotton is grown by share-croppers, 9,000,000 of them, who are as bad an agricultural proletariat as you can find in the Western world.

Yet Government has the power to change all this. It could, for instance, use its credit resources more constructively, for the main agricultural credits come from the Federal Land Banks and the intermediate credit banks. Credit to cotton farmers is still Issued almost exclusively against cotton crops; changing this basis, making credit depend upon giving the share-croppers land for personal agricultural, a cow, etc., would effect great reforms without any cumbersome administrative machinery. Laws can affect changes, especially laws to guarantee tenancy rights. Why should a Southern tenant improve the property on which he lives when he can be evicted without any guaranteed refund for his improvement?