TERE is a letter, typical of those coming to us from all over the country. It is by a well-known citizen of Pennsylvania, and raises some very serious questions which must be answered, if democracy is to endure. Read it, as follows, and tell us the way out: "Have just finished reading 'Your Servants in the Senate.' The record of Senator Pepper is illuminating-should I say 'aluminating'? His and Senator Reed's vote on the taxation of State Bonds, etc., should damn them both as lawyers and legislators. It is particularly vile as they are advertised as two of the leading lawyers in the United States. Instead of supporting them, the profession should really disbar them. One of the great evils of the day is that the attorney has displaced the lawyer in politics, and right today the real lawyer should be more active and prominent than ever before. "Your indictment is as appalling as it is true. "And I know of no remedy. "Democracy is based on the people first knowing the truth, and then being virtuous enough to act on it. I know of no way to meet and overcome the propaganda, that is growing, and becoming more and more smothering of everything that makes for the ideals of the fathers. "The people now are debauched when born. Great trouble may awaken them. But that will merely enthrone an American Mussolini. I wish someone, or even God, could persuade me I am mistaken. But in your efforts you have my unbounded support and approval. Hoping that this is merely the dark before the dawn, I remain." If you want to get a quick picture of conditions at Washington, read "Your Servants in the Senate." Says this book: "Regardless of what these candidates for reelection may bring most vigorously to your attention, the issue in all these campaigns should be the crucial issue of Senatorial independence. "Relatively, nothing else matters." Subscription, $2.00 per year-Please send check or money order to above address. Subscription rate: $2.00 a year. Single copies 20 cents. Entered as second-class matter May 26, 1919, at the Postoffice at Washington, D. C., under the Act of March 3, 1879. The Duty of Congress Toward Agriculture T IS high time to talk plainly about the farm relief situation in Congress. No other question is a tenth part as important, because the condition of agriculture is so interwoven with the general welfare that its present plight constitutes an acute national menace. The issue and the forces for and against-are sharply defined. Moreover, the immediate controversy is about to be determined -with consequences directly and vitally affecting every citizen of the country. Throughout all our experience at the Capital, there has never been a great struggle in which the course to be followed by the servants of the people was more plainly indicated. For the first time, the farmers of two extensive sections are united in their legislative demands. They are well organized. They are represented by the ablest group ever to assemble in Washington. They know what they want. They have a program against which no valid objection can be raised. It is based upon the absolute necessities of their situation. It is inconceivable that these reconstructive demands of the farmers should not at once, and unanimously, be enacted into law. Yet, notwithstanding that necessity and justice and national welfare are on the side of this pending agricultural program, the result is in doubt as we go to press. Powerful special privilege desires to continue its exploitation of the farmers. That is the simple explanation. The present administration has the point of view of special privilege. That is the reason for the "Coolidge" opposition to the program for which the best farmer statesmanship now stands. If the Congress were functioning constitutionally, if Senators and Congressmen were free of the political corruptions of executive domination-free to act their own convictions and judgment as representatives of the people-our national legislators, with few exceptions, would give eager, enthusiastic approval to what is pending. combination But the Hoover-Jardine-Coolidge says "no." Being on the executive side, at a time and under a perverted system which makes almost a mockery of other governmental powers, they may be able to coerce Congress into submission. If the President were asked about his attitude toward this issue, doubtless he would answer: "Mr. Hoover is advising me." If Herbert Hoover was asked concerning the probability of farm relief legislation, perhaps he would say: "Never, so long as Calvin Coolidge is in the White House, will there be a presidential signature to a bill dealing with the surplus." There you have the crux of it. Mr. Hoover, in dominant control of all the super-governmental powers of the presidency, so far as agriculture is concerned, appears to be the American Mussolini of the whole crucial situation. It becomes, therefore, far more than an agrarian problem, critical as that certainly is: there is involved also, in a way that should engage the righteous attention of every patriot, the most vital of all public issues-namely, the utter degeneracy of our whole theory of representative government. The Congress should at once pass the legislation asked for by the farmers of the West and South. If the President imposes a veto, then the Congress should overwhelmingly vindicate its independence by passing the measure over the Hoover objections. This much, at least, will be accomplished: there will be a public record by which to measure each Senator and Congressman. And that record will be illuminating in two directions: (1) it will reveal the attitude of the people's delegates with respect to agricultural reconstruction; and (2) it will unmistakably identify all those members who are not representatives in a constitutional sense, but merely "me, too," pawns of the administration. The condition of agriculture and what is happening to representative government in America are the two epochically important issues before the people. Here, in the result of this farm relief controversy, you will get a clear-cut division on both of them. Consequently, the patriotic duty of all thinking citizens, irrespective of location or calling, should be more clearly charted in 1926 and 1928 than ever before in all our election history. For campaign distribution, "Your Servants in the Senate" can be secured at the following prices: Five copies, $3.75; 10 copies, $6.50; 100 copies, $55; 500 copies, $225; 1,000 copies, $400; 5,000 copies, $1,750; 10,000 copies, $2,500; 100,000 copies, $20,000. H Who's Who in the Farm Relief Situation ERBERT HOOVER'S deputy in the Department of Agriculture, Secretary Jardine, seems to have steered the administration into a lot of trouble with the farm folks. There is a definite and fundamental division in Washington between those who support an agricultural program that the farmers want, and those who support the administration program that Secretary Hoover wants. No one with more than superficial knowledge of the individuals and interests that control and motivate the Coolidge administration is ignorant of the fact that its agricultural policies are dictated by Herbert Hoover, not by the Secretary of Agriculture. The present holder of the agricultural portfolio was picked by Mr. Hoover. That was one of his duties as dictator of farm policies for the Coolidge régime. Mr. Jardine accepted the post with all of the conditions attached thereto-that he would be a good and faithful man to Hoover; and that he would remove from the department the men whom Mr. Hoover indicated were displeasing to him. This has been done; but while Mr. Jardine has been making good with Hoover, the farmers of the country have been getting his number. Mr. Jardine's predicament would entitle him to some sympathy, were it not for the fact that he has conceded to Mr. Hoover the right to do his thinking for him. There isn't much division in the farmer ranks when it comes to distrust of Hoover, and hostility to his policies. The farmers know that Hoover wants cheap food and raw material, and a protected industry. They see Hoover's brand on the Coolidge policy to speed industrialization of America at agriculture's expense. So when a man from a great farming state consents, for the sake of office, to become spokesman for the anti-farmer view, it would be idle to sympathize when he gets what is coming to him. Two years ago Mr. Hoover was forced out into the open because the late Secretary of Agriculture, Henry C. Wallace, would not accept the Hoover policy without a fight. This year he can remain in the background; he has Jardine to speak for him. It is fairly well understood among the farmers that Mr. Hoover's attitude toward the farm relief program, advanced by the farm organizations, reflects the interests of his old friend and business associate, Julius Barnes. Mr. Barnes is the leading American grain exporter. His business will be interfered with if the farm program for surplus control goes through; and Mr. Hoover isn't going to let that happen if he can help it. The interests of Barnes are to be regarded as more vital to the interests of America than the interests of the millions of our farmers, if Hoover has his way. The Barnes-Hoover-Jardine policy toward agricultural legislation is likely to have far-reaching political consequences. The defeat for renomination of Senator McKinley in Illinois was due far more to farmers' dislike of the agricultural policy of the Barnes-Hoover clique than to the World Court issue, insiders state. This feeling is deep-seated and growing in all northern states west of the Ohio river. It will be a great, probably a deciding factor, in the Congressional elections in those states this fall, and in the general election in 1928. The agricultural issue before Congress in this session is clearly defined. Farmers north and south want legislation to give them real bargaining power, and 100 per cent cooperation in controlling and managing crop surpluses, in the interest of orderly marketing, and to yield the utmost benefit of tariffs, otherwise largely worthless to domestic prices. They feel that if we are going to maintain a system of protection in this country, then protection must be made to work for agriculture. They have embodied their principles in two bills now before Congressthe Haugen bill (H. R. 11603) in the House and the Senate Committee amendment to a House bill (H. R. 7893). Both measures have favorable committee reports. After promising all farm organization spokesmen with his characteristic volubility that he "wouldn't throw any monkey wrenches" into their program, Secretary Jardine, sponsored the so-called Tincher bill (H. R. 11618), which was drafted in the Department of Agriculture, and which he supported personally before the House Committee. If anything further is needed to align the farmers solidly against the Administration's farm program, Mr. Jardine's testimony before the House Committee probably contains it. He went on record as opposed to legislation that would give farmers the benefit of protection on their surplus crops; he criticised the methods and principles of the commodity cooperative marketing associations; and a reading of his testimony discloses his advocacy of a plan which would probably devote millions of government money to the purchase of the obsolescent and money-losing Chicago grain elevators owned by the Armour and Rosenbaum Companies, who tried to sell them to the farmers, and failed, through the late Grain Marketing Company. The Tincher bill (commonly called the Jardine bill) offers cooperative marketing associations a new way to get into debt, but as a farm relief bill the farmers say it is about as potent as an arbor day proclamation. It embodies the Administration ideas on farm relief, as dictated by Mr. Hoover and Mr. Barnes, via Mr. Jardine. Mr. Jardine told the House Committee on Agriculture that the farm and cooperative marketing organizations were for his bill. What really happens is this: when the farmers call on Mr. Jardine he talks so much that he does not learn what they think or what they want, and he leaves them dazed and in doubt as to what he means, and just what he is talking about. The farm organizations whom Mr. Jardine had been consulting were not for the Tincher bill. This position they made perfectly clear both to the Secretary and the House Committee immediately following the Secretary's remarkable statement. When the farmers were in Washington presenting their program for agricultural legislation to the 68th Congress, President Coolidge seems to have been able to prevent a sharp break between the Administration and the western farmers, though later he came dangerously close to it in his Chicago speech before the American Farm Bureau. Mr. Jardine on the contrary has succeeded in talking the Administration into a hole. In three months, since the first of the year, he has forced a distinct breaking point between the Administration and the farmers. The agricultural line-up is enormously strengthened now by the enlistment of the cotton growers of the South who are in Washington standing shoulder to shoulder with the corn growers and livestock farmers and the wheat producers of the West in their campaign under the battle cry of "Equality for Agriculture." The present situation offers the Democratic party an unprecedented opportunity to take a positive stand for a national farm program in line with its New York platform, thus giving the farmers a political alternative into which the Barnes-Hoover-Jardine agricultural policies seem to be forcing them. The Republican party is riding for a political fall under the leadership of the men who are now shaping its agricultural course. One thing is perfectly clear: it will not be difficult to point out those who are responsible for it. W Foreign Loans and Our Foreign Policy E, THE PEOPLE of the United States, do not want any war based upon aggression or greed. We are against any and all governmental influence that engenders the hatred of other people, even though our unfairness to them may not go so far as to produce international conflict. In this connection, our State Department has developed and exercises an unrighteous, unwarranted interference, through the power of money, with the internal affairs of numerous helpless nations. Because this "policy" has for the most part been unchallenged, and is essentially secret, the public knows little about it. We, the people, should know all about it. Therefore, THE SEARCHLIGHT presents a most timely and illuminating discussion of the subject by Amy Woods. Miss Woods knows this field-both through extensive research and a personal observation. During the past year, she visited Central and South American countries and thus supplemented historical and textual information with a first-hand study of the situation. Her facts and conclusions are indisputable-fully corroborated by official documents. Throughout this field, America has no truer friend, no saner counsellor than Amy Woods. For years the Senate has shown occasional signs of a desire to get at the truth, to assert its constitutional duty, in moving toward more American ideals and conditions in the State Department. Hearings have been held which disclosed unbelievably indefensible domination of our international "policy" by big financial interests. Now, through the introduction of Concurrent Resolution No. 15 by Senator Shipstead, the Senate has a direct opportunity to act correctively. The text of this resolution follows: "Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), That the President be, and he is hereby, requested to direct the Departments of State, Treasury, and Commerce, the Federal Reserve Board, and all other agencies of the Government which are or may be concerned thereunder, to refrain henceforth, without specific prior authorization of the Congress, from (1) Directly or indirectly engaging the responsibility of the Government of the United States, or otherwise on its behalf, to supervise the fulfillment of financial arrangements between citizens of the United States and sovereign foreign governments, or political subdivisions thereof, whether or not recognized de jure or de facto by the United States Government; or (2) In any manner whatsoever giving official recognition to any arrangement which may commit the Government of the United States to any form of military intervention in order to compel the observance of alleged obligations of sovereign or subordinate authority, or of any corporations or individuals, or to deal with any such arrangement except to secure the settlement of claims of the United States or of United States citizens through the ordinary channels of law provided therefor in the respective foreign jurisdictions, or through duly authorized and accepted arbitration agencies." |