US farming in crisis

Do you remember that little boy who, in a survey of children's tastes in television and radio, said he preferred radio to television because the pictures are better? He had a point and I appreciate that in asking you to imagine two short scenes, your imagination will be quicker and less clumsy than the same scenes done on television. In fact, they are the same scene played 20 years apart. They happened. They happened to me.

First – this was in 1960 – we're on a television set in New York and I have a little talk to do to camera before we can close down for the day. Television taping had just come in so it was possible, for the first time, to do things over till they came out just right. Well, we'd had delays and odd interruptions and the clock was at five minutes to five and if we ran beyond five o'clock, the crew had the contractual right to go on to double pay. Well, we did it once, we did it twice, a camera went on the blink, it was ten past five.

The director said, 'Fellas, let's get this thing over now, right?' There was no objection. We did it over and we got it right and it was twenty past five. No extra pay. 'Thank you, men!' the director said. 'You're welcome!' said the crew in several cordial variations and we all went home.

We're now in the late 1970s, different town, Boston, different studio, different programme, but much the same scene. For simplicity, make it the same time of day. I'm winding up the programme with another little two-minute speech. We have five minutes left. I said, 'Please! Let's go!' The chief cameraman, the union sergeant-major in this company looked at the clock. He called in the producer, the director tagged behind. There was a meeting. The stage, what they call the floor, manager was called in. We still had three minutes but the sergeant-major's word was law. He checked the studio clock with his wristwatch. 'What do you think?' they asked the second cameraman. By that time, of course, it had become impossible. Sergeant-major apologised to me, the producer and the director allowed that, 'Well, that's the way it is!' 'OK, men,' said the director, 'sadly, it's a wrap!'

So, we – the producer, director and I – got out our diaries and fixed on a date. I flew home to New York and back again two weeks later to do that two-minute bit on the first day that a studio was available. It had, incidentally, by the union rule, to be booked for no less than an hour. Of course it cost our show a whacking sum to rearrange the whole bit – cost of studio, cost of crew for an hour and so on. Why didn't they prefer to go over five o'clock the first time and go on double pay for an extra hour, about 40 minutes of which would have been, as they say, money for jam?

Well, one member of the crew could veto going over and he was the sergeant-major, and he, no doubt, had personal reasons for getting away at five o'clock sharp. Now this 1970s crew was not less sporting or meaner. They were just as considerate as the 1960s crew. They were simply a different generation. The first generation had its union rules, too, though they were a good deal more flexible then than now, but to the 1970s crew, the rule was the rule. They were sorry about it, too bad about our inconvenience, what it would cost the show, the company, too bad!

What is the moral of this improving anecdote? The moral is that the ethics have changed. We are a people now of fixed expectations. One generation has been bred in a different tradition of work from another. It's certainly true of television and it's true of journalism, except, I like to believe, among reporters out on a story on their own. I can vouch from long experience that the idea of a foreign correspondent's clocking in at 9 am and clocking out at five would very soon produce newspapers with many empty columns.

I remember when, in the late 1930s, the first newspapermen's union was formed in this country – the American Newspaper Guild. There was a tremendous hassle between the reporters and the printers and the desk men with old H. L. Mencken roaring away in Baltimore, 'An eight-hour day for a reporter makes no more sense than an eight-hour day for an archbishop!' Of course, the guild won and its victory was well-deserved, if only for the sake of the underpaid printers, compositors, truckers and so on. And, not least, for the desk men who received the incoming copy and whose working hours were at the mercy of phone calls from reporters out on the road and, as often as not, out on the town.

The Newspaper Guild was formed during the great pioneer days of union organising. First in the craft unions and then in the basic industries – the miners, the steel workers, the automobile workers, the clothing workers – when the frightful pinch of the Great Depression and the thwackings of Franklin Roosevelt at the bankers and the steel corporations and the motor car manufacturers, through a merciless, sharp light on sweat shops and the closed shop and all the other old, taken-for-granted conditions of labour that had forced millions of people to work at rates of pay dictated by the company.

The movement spread to unlikely places. In Hollywood, the actors, a minuscule minority of whom then, as now, was doing very nicely, but the great majority was on relief or close to it. The actors formed a Screen Actors' Guild and, under a zealous leader, president, forced the muttering, the reluctant, studio heads to pay fixed minimums, to prescribe decent hours for filming, to write contracts at the guild's dictation and not at their own whims. By the way, the driving force of these overdue reforms, the president of that guild, was one Ronald Wilson Reagan.

And, throughout the huge, so-called Farm Belt which stretches across a third or more of this country, the farmers, the mortgage foreclosed, watching crops rotting to the horizon, flooding the highways with milk they could not sell, the farmers needed desperate relief more than anybody and they got it with the invention of a government bureau called the AAA – the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.

'Adjustment' meant paying the farmers a guaranteed price for their crop. If it was a scant crop, they got a high price. If it was a bulging crop, they got the same price and the unsaleable surplus was then stored in government bins. When a run of good weather and bounteous crops produced groaning harvests, they were systematically destroyed and then the government paid such good farmers not to plant, not to harvest, to let good ground go fallow.

There was much scornful irony about the AAA at the time from old-time Republicans and the talented Roosevelt-haters in the press, but the old timers died off and long before Roosevelt was gone, there was a generation of farmers that evoked no irony at all. And for 30 years, thereafter, on into 1980, the Roosevelt system of adjusting farm prices, that is, guaranteed subsidies come sunshine, wind or high water, was no longer a desperate remedy. It was American gospel. It was, to coin a worn-out phrase, what American farming was all about.

The old generation of farmers, like the old generation of television crews, had lived by taking the rough with the smooth, by sometimes, so to speak, going overtime for no extra pay. Well, in 1980, along came an old timer, that same Ronald Wilson Reagan, into the White House and he said about American farming what he said about many other well-established American institutions like far-reaching welfare, like student loans for young people whose parents earned $50,000 a year. He said for 50 years we've been living under an economic system of government subsidy and loans and grants, Big Daddy subsidising everybody, we've been living beyond our means and spending money that isn't there and it's got to stop.

Whatever else may be said for or against Ronald Reagan, his biographer, who is sympathetic but critical, said the main thing in one sentence – 'After 50 years, he changed the nature of the political discourse'.

But now, if the farmers have been cushioned so dependably with subsidies for crops, with rewards for not planting, why are so very many of them in dire shape, and many in despair?

Well, the government sets them a price for their crops at the going market rate, sometimes a little higher. Now clearly there's a point where even that subsidy will not pay for their needs, their feed, their machinery if the market price drops very low. And what's happened in the past three years is that the strong dollar has made their stuff too expensive for the overseas' buyer and good weather and bumper crops mean that they get less in the domestic market.

And, unfortunately, in these recent, fat years of low inflation and high consumer spending, many farmers bought up more land and over-produced and now find the land values slumped and a billion bushels of wheat and 13 billion pounds of cheese and other dairy products unsold in government warehouses. A little less than half of all farm income goes to paying the interest on loans. Worst of all – and it's true of farmers who neither took out big loans for more land nor over-produced – the cost of their machinery has doubled and tripled in three years. So the farm banks are failing. One middle-sized farmer in ten is going bankrupt.

What the farmers want from the Reagan administration is help with their debts and a higher price. Or, at least, a guaranteed better price for their crops than they've been getting. They're not going to get it. The president has said that there have to be cuts in everything except the defence budget if we're going to lower the dreadful federal deficit. By the way, the defence budget will gobble up 28 per cent of the whole. In Kennedy and Johnson's day, it gobbled up over 50 per cent, but it's interesting to recall nobody screamed 'Warmonger!'

Well, the farmers' subsidies cost $19 billion last year. It's got to come down. So has the cost of all the social services. Reagan is not trying to liquidate the welfare state. He's trying to see if it can pay its way – an outrageous proposition that will raise howls of indignation from everybody, except the Pentagon.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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