COOPERATION WITH STATES IN IMPROVING LEASES

The Committee recommends, therefore, that the Farm Security Administration be given authority and necessary funds to enable it to aid State governments in drafting proper regulatory measures regarding tenant contracts and to stimulate and cooperate in State research and extension work aimed at improving lease contracts.

It is obvious that in the extension of the new ownership and rehabilitation policies recommended above, the Federal Government has a direct interest not only in encouraging better lease provisions and improved landlord-tenant relationships, but also in assuring itself that the basic legislation of the States makes possible the accomplishment of the objectives of its own broad program. As recommended above, therefore, adequate funds should be appropriated by the Federal Government to the land-grant colleges and universities to enable them to cooperate.

It is recommended also that in selected local areas consideration be given to trying the experiment of including improvements in leases among the conditions of benefit payments under the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act. Improvement of existing leases is one important manner of encouraging soil conservation. If the experiment succeeds, its extension on a broad scale may be worth while.

NEED FOR EDUCATION AND HEALTH SERVICES

Ignorance, no less than poverty and instability, forces many tenant and other disadvantaged families into an inferior relationship to the community. Ignorance, as well as insecurity, is often responsible for failure to adopt enlightened methods of farm operation, particularly of self-help to improve the family's mode of life.

Education can go far toward enabling these poorer farm groups to apply family labor intelligently in improving home, school, and community-by repairing, cleaning, and decorating rooms and buildings; repairing and making furniture and equipment; planting public grounds and home dooryards; properly selecting, preparing, and serving home-produced food.

It is strongly recommended that the rural educational systems of the various States be more definitely aimed at providing the kind of training needed by adult members of disadvantaged farm families as well as children.

The

At the same time, the needs of the children should not be neglected. elementary rural schools in many areas are such as to offer little opportunity to children of low-income families. Tax bases are inadequate; school terms are short; attendance legislation is not well enforced; teachers are poorly trained and even more poorly paid; too often methods of instruction are routine and ill-calculated to equip the children to improve their environment.

This Committee prefers to leave to educational specialists the question as to the proper contribution of the Federal Government to a better equalization of educational advantages. A number of considerations appear to justify substantial Federal aid. The classes of farm families now below the margin of security are a principal source of the Nation's population, by reason of the high birth rates prevailing among them. The congregation in given areas of large numbers of such families frequently results in a collective poverty that is a primary obstacle to the provision, from local resources alone, of adequate educational advantages.

It has been noted that large numbers of farm families are severely handicapped by debilitating diseases, malnutrition, and general morbidity. Much so-called laziness and shiftlessness trace back to a low level of vitality and the resulting mental habits and attitudes. No fundamental attack on the problem of the disadvantaged classes of farmers would be complete without inclusion of measures to improve their general level of health. To a large extent this is a matter of education in improved dietary practices and personal hygiene, supplemented by more adequate medical service and more ample provision of clinics and publichealth nursing. The grouping of counties into public-health districts appears to be a promising way of improving such services. It is urged that adequate funds be made available under the Social Security Act to take care of the health needs of rural communities, especially in areas of excessive tenancy.

NECESSITY FOR ACTION

In the preceding pages the Committee has made recommendation for action both by the Federal Government and by the governments of the several States. Sturdy rural institutions beget self-reliance and independence of judgment. Sickly rural institutions beget dependency and incapacity to bear the responsi

bilities of citizenship. Over wide areas the vitality of American rural life is daily being sapped by systems of land tenure that waste human and natural resources alike. Security of tenure is essential to the development of better farm homes and better rural communities.

Vigorous and sustained action is required for restoring the impaired resources on whose conservation continuance of the democratic process in this country to no small extent depends.

The final emphasis of this report is consequently on the necessity for action; action to enable increasing numbers of farm families to enter into sound relationships with the land they till and the communities in which they live.

SPECIAL STATEMENTS BY INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON FARM TENANCY

MINORITY REPORT OF W. L. BLACKSTONE, REPRESENTING THE SOUTHERN TENANT FARMERS' UNION ON THE PRESIDENT'S FARM TENANCY COMMITTEE

As representative of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union on the President's Committee on Farm Tenancy I wish that I might unqualifiedly endorse the report of that Committee. I speak for our union in saying that we deeply appreciate the earnestness with which members of the Committee have approached the problem. There is much in the report with which we thoroughly concur, especially the analysis of the problem. Rather than listing our agreement in detail we confine our observations to a few major points on which we disagree with the majority of the Committee. In setting forth these observations we do not believe we can be accused of making undue claims when we state that we workers in the fields, through our unions, through our strikes, and through our willingness to stand up against beatings, espionage, and all manner of terror in our fight to improve our shamefully depressed conditions, have brought the attention of the country to our problems and led to the appointment of the President's Committee. As the specimens now under the microscope (and the presumed beneficiaries) we ought to know better than others what is wrong with us and our situation.

Our first major point of disagreement with the recommendations of the report is its proposal that the Farm Security Administration and the Farm Security Corporation be placed under the Department of Agriculture, with the Secretary and Under Secretary as two members of the proposed board of five. We note with interest and hope recent speeches of Secretary Wallace in which he states that the Department of Agriculture has heretofore throughout its history been concerned primarily with the top third of the farmers in the country and that it must turn its attention to the others from now on. But our experience has been such that we cannot believe the Department of Agriculture will be able in any near future to remove itself from domination by the rich and large landowning class of farmers and their political-pressure lobbies. The county agricultural agent, often paid in part by chambers of commerce or the Farm Bureau Federation, is a symbol of such domination. We recall vividly our inability in the days of the A. A. A. to get adequate redress of our grievances as to the disposition of benefit payments and as to dispossessing us from our slight foothold on the land in violation of the cotton contract. Ample evidence of these violations was in the hands of the A. A. A. Very little was done about it, to say nothing of any genuine attack on the problems of agricultural labor. We consequently strongly urge that the Farm Security Administration and its operating corporation be established as an independent Federal agency and that tenants, sharecroppers, and farm workers be given representation on the central board of control.

As a direct corollary of the above suggestion we urge that a special bureau or division of the Department of Labor be established to bring to bear the investigating, reporting, and conciliating services of the Department in the field of agricultural labor, sharecropping, and tenancy where the latter falls within a degree of insecurity making the tenant virtually on a par with the wage laborer. Such services by the Department of Labor could and should be of great aid to the proposed Farm Security Administration while it is working out its program. Tenant farmers, croppers, and farm workers, shifting back and forth from one class to another-though mostly in the direction of the latter class as the report shows are very much in the same category as industrial workers who, because they do not possess the tools and equipment essential for industrial enterprise, must work in factories owned by others. And as the Department of Labor represents the industrial worker instead of the Department of Commerce which speaks

for business and industry, so the Department of Labor should represent agricultural workers rather than the Department of Agriculture which serves the landowning farmers.

We believe the report should affirmatively recommend that the Wagner Labor Relations Act be amended to include agricultural labor in its provision and likewise the Social Security Act. The report as it now stands merely says that serious consideration should be given to such proposed amendments.

Of primary importance do we consider the question of local administration under the proposed Farm Security Administration. But our experience under both the Resettlement Administration and the A. A. A. has proved to us that any program will fail unless the Federal administration exercises strong enough supervision and selects local agents sympathetic enough with its policies to put them into effect. Again and again orders issued in Washington in our behalf have not been carried out. Complaints made by our people to Washington have been turned over to the officials in the field against whom the complaints were made. In numerous instances penalites have thereafter been meted out to the complainants. The county agent, as indicated before, is, generally speaking, the servant of the landowning and business interests from whom he gets a large portion of his pay, rather than the servant of the mass of the people in the farming areas.

This is particularly true in the South and in the areas where there are large bodies of agricultural labor, such as the Pacific coast with its large fruit and vegetable operations; the beet fields of Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and other beet-growing States; the onion fields of Ohio and elsewhere; the citrus fields of Texas and Florida. We earnestly believe the report should include, therefore, an unequivocal assurance that strict Federal control of the proposed program will be maintained and that only local agents affirmatively sympathetic to its purposes will be appointed to the end that it may not be rendered futile through the political pressure of the landowning and business interests.

Stemming directly from the above suggestion is our recommendation that the section dealing with local boards of arbitration on tenant-landlord relationships be modified. While we welcome the proposal that tenants be represented on these boards-the first time such a proposal has even been made officially-we feel strongly that the report should specify that representation on these local boards (presumably county) should be in proportion to the number of tenants, share croppers, and agricultural workers involved as compared with the number of landlords or landowners. That clearly would be in keeping with true democratic processes.

Related to the foregoing recommendations is our contention that the section on civil liberties is not adequate. As those who have been beaten and terrorized (and some of us forced to flee for our lives) in our struggle to pull ourselves up out of our slough of misery, we know that a few words from responsible Federal officials on behalf of our constitutional civil rights would have helped in our past battles and will help in the ones we know are yet to come. The problem should not be passed over to the States so lightly. We believe firmly, in this connection, that the report should contain a positive statement that the program will be administered without discrimination as to race, religious or political affiliation, or organizational membership. As members of a union which has consistently been discriminated against, we have reason to feel deeply the need of such a statement in the report.

While heartily concurring in the objectives of that section of the report advocating continuation of the rehabilitation-loan program carried on by the Resettlement Administration, we believe that a continuation of the program of grants is also necessary, especially for those of our members who have been washed out by the flood. The fact is that thousands of our members have never received the benefits of the rehabilitation program, partly due to discriminatory action against them because of their union membership and partly due to the highly selective method of choice of the beneficiaries. The rehabilitation program seems to us the heart of the proposed measures and must be administered on the basis of those who need it most. It will, if thus administered, keep the mass of the agricultural dispossessed going while the other methods are tried out.

In this connection we believe the report's references to cooperative activity are wholly inadequate. They seem only incidental, almost accidental. We believe that in the cotton South the small homestead visioned in many of the present proposals is an economic anachronism, foredoomed to failure. We strongly dissent, therefore, from the "small homestead" philosophy as the solution for the majority of the southern agricultural workers. It is the more readily accepted by

the present landlords because they know it to be relatively ineffective and consequently harmless from their point of view. It runs contrary to generations of experience of croppers and farm workers in the South-experience which, we believe, could be capitalized in cooperative effort under enlightened Federal supervision.

While approving the report's recognition of the urgent need of educational and health facilities among the tenants, croppers, and agricultural workers, we believe that more concrete proposals for immediate action in spreading these facilities could and should be made.

We are naturally strong in our conviction that the report should contain a section endorsing the unionization of these workers in the field as a means of providing an instrumentality through which all the objectives expressed in the report can best be obtained, for through unionization can and will be developed responsibile leadership and the ability to pull together for common betterment.

In concluding, we cannot refrain from expressing our genuine approval of those sections of the report seeking to prevent the land of the beneficiaries getting into mortgage-holding or other speculative hands, especially the 40-year lease provision-sections which the American Farm Bureau Federation vehemently opposes. The earnestness with which the majority of the committee has approached the land-speculation problem and the problem of the price of agricultural commodities is a cause for encouragement. We feel, however, that there should have been a similar amount of thought and study given to the problem of marketing and distribution because we believe the latter is quite as prime a factor in general farm conditions as commodity price and land.

FEBRUARY 12, 1937.

Dr. L. C. GRAY,

United States Department of Agriculture,

Washington, D. C.

MY DEAR SIR: I desire to restate the objections I so frequently made during the discussion of the proposed findings and recommendations to be made by the President's Farm Tenancy Committee. The American Farm Bureau Federation, which I represent, through its executive committee, has outlined the position it desires to take in respect to the general subject of alleviating tenancy conditions prevailing in various parts of the United States. I am bound by the statement heretofore issued and I cannot, therefore, approve any recommendations or mode of procedure for administration contained in the proposed report which go beyond the limits of the announced policy of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

If my signature is to be attached to the report, I desire that it be noted in such manner as to call the attention of the reader to the limitations our organization policies and this letter require. In the event this is not deemed advisable, then I prefer not to be a signer of the report.

In addition to the limitation above described, I cannot approve the principle of withholding the transfer of title to any purchaser who is able to pay the principal indebtedness for which he obligated himself at any time that he is able to make such payment. I regard the proposed restriction on alienation of lands as contrary to sound American jurisprudence and deem it in conflict with the desired policy regarding land ownership. By and large, I am of the conviction that a man who owns a proper equity in a farm or has accumulated the amount available to own such an equity is capable of the responsibilities of such ownership. Other policies relating to the use of agricultural lands should be approached from the standpoint of education and demonstration rather than through limitations on the right of ownership.

That part of the report which indicates the use of credit as a basis for carrying on the program I deem of great importance. I have grave doubts that credit can carry the burden of such a program.

Without attempting further to define my attitude toward the report, I desire to state that I prefer not to be a signer of the report except on the condition stated in a foregoing paragraph.

Very truly yours,

AMERICAN FARM BUREAU FEDERATION,

EDW. A. O'NEAL, President.

Dr. L. C. GRAY,

Secretary, Special Tecnhical Committee,

The President's Committee on

Farm Tenancy, Washington, D. C.

FEBRUARY 12, 1937.

DEAR SIR: While in full accord with the thesis and special recommendations of this report, experience dictates that any measures developed in the direction of decentralizing the administration of the programs proposed should be carefully accompanied by safeguards to insure the full inclusion in the benefits of these programs of Negro tenants and sharecroppers. For, while it is true that only one-third of the sharecroppers and tenants in the South are Negroes, four-fifths of all Negro farm operators are tenants and sharecroppers.

Very truly yours,

Dr. L. C. GRAY,

Resettlement Administration:

CHARLES S. JOHNSON.

CHICAGO, ILL., February 12, 1937.

Please insert following statement as my comment upon the report as a member of the President's Special Tenancy Committee: "None of the proposals in this report should be carried forward other than on a strictly experimental basis until their merits have been thoroughly tested. The proposals contain the possibility of doing more harm than good to the farming population of the United States, particularly in reducing thrift by making the entry into land ownership too easy and by increasing competition in agriculture by encouraging people to be farmers who should enter other occupations. Too much encouragement to enter upon farming will make it all the more difficult to secure parity incomes for farmers. There should be a clear line drawn between a farm-tenancy policy and a poorrelief policy and they should be separately administered."

HENRY C. TAYLOR.

MEMBERS OF SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON FARM TENANCY

Henry A. Wallace, Chairman, Secretary of Agriculture.

L. C. Gray, Executive Secretary, Assistant Administrator, Resettlement Adminis

tration.

Will W. Alexander, executive director, Commission on Inter-Racial Cooperation.
Mrs. Fred S. Bennett, vice president, Council of Women for Home Missions.
Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, president, Bethune-Cookman College.

A. G. Black, Chief, Bureau of Agricultural Economics.

W. L. Blackstone, Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.

Carl Bailey, Governor of Arkansas.

Mrs. Curtis Bok, Jr.

Louis Brownlow, director, Public Administration Clearing House.
W. H. Brokaw, director, Nebraska Agricultural Extension Service,
Xenophon Caverno.

James Chappell, editor, Birmingham News-Age-Herald.

Edwin R. Embree, president, Julius Rosenwald Foundation.

Mark Ethridge, publisher, Louisville Courier-Journal.

Lee M. Gentry, manager, Sinissippi Farms.

Fred Hawley.

Charles S. Johnson, professor of sociology, Fisk University.
Mrs. Una Roberts Lawrence, Southern Baptist Convention.
Murray D. Lincoln, secretary, Ohio Farm Bureau Federation
A. R. Mann, provost, Cornell University.

A. G. Pat Mayse, publisher, Paris (Tex.) News.

Edward F. McGrady, Assistant Secretary of Labor.

W. I. Myers, Governor, Farm Credit Administration.

Lowry Nelson, director, Utah Agricultural Experiment Station.

Mrs. W. A. Newell, superintendent, Women's Missionary Council, Methodist Episcopal Church.

Howard W. Odum, director, Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina.

Edward A. O'Neal, president, American Farm Bureau Federation.