I am delighted to have this very brief opportunity to meet with the members of the Southeastern Peanut Association, and to extend my best wishes for the success of your meetings. Some of you may wonder what a "city-boy" from Massachusetts is doing at this meeting, and what he could possibly say that would be of interest to you. So let me say that I did not come here to tell you or teach you anything - I came here to learn. I am in Georgia to deliver the Commencement Address at the first state university in the country, and one of the greatest - and my old colleague in the House Steve Pace was kind enough to ask me to drop down to your meeting. I have enjoyed talking with him and with your officers about the problems you face - and I can assure you that I will give sympathetic attention to those problems when I go back to Washington.
Georgia and Massachusetts are not as far apart on the problems of the farmer as some would have you believe - and, if I may be permitted a slightly partisan note, this is particularly true of the Democrats of Massachusetts and Georgia. In the votes on the Farm Bill last year, I voted with your distinguished Senior Senator, Richard Russell, one of the greatest spokesmen the farmers of this nation ever had, in supporting an amendment to give small farmers, with commodity loans of less then $5,000 a year, support at the 90% of parity level. I supported Senator Russell's own amendment to limit the amount of price support going to any one farmer, to make certain that this assistance went where it was really needed; and we both supported an amendment to increase the relief given farmers hard-hit by drought or other natural disaster, an amendment to assure a fair price for all supported commodities, and an amendment which set aside recent surpluses in fixing the support price on basic commodities to bring it close to 90%.
I repeat all of this not in order to claim may special credit for myself but because I have found many people to be surprised at how really united we are on farm policy. Our unity is not so much a matter of formula as it is a matter of principle and approach. Nearly all of us agree that agriculture needs protection from violent downswings in farm prices - and that that protection is not provided by the empty reassurances of the Secretary of Agriculture. Nearly all of us agree that farmers should not be discriminated against in favor of other segments of the economy - and that farm families ought to be regarded as the backbone of our economy and our way of life, not simply as votes to be purchased around election time with soil banks and special programs.
I will be frank with you - I'm a city boy who has never plowed a furrow. I do not pretend to be an expert on all the problems of agriculture and I suppose some of my constituents are opposed to letting their tax dollars aid Southern peanut farmers. But I will say this: When a serious decline in farm income takes millions of dollars out of the pockets of your farmers and your towns, not only here in Georgia but all over the country, that is not just a local. problem - that is a national problem. It should not be of concern only to Georgia, it should be of concern to Massachusetts. For we can sell you tools and watches only when you have the farm income to pay for them. We can share in on expanding national economy only when it is not held back by declining income in your region. And we can get an administration in Washington sympathetic to our hard-hit areas of labor surplus only when you get one concerned about your problems of farm surplus.
Just as no town here in Georgia can go on indefinitely without the farmer being prosperous, neither can any state in the United States go on indefinitely without our farm states being prosperous. Massachusetts and Georgia may from time to time have different needs and different interests - but when a man's livelihood and way of life are at stake, those differences must be set aside.
I have also learned in talking to farmers in various parts of the country that they are interested in more than the issue of crop price supports. One farmer told me that he doesn't know what or how much to plant each year until he's gone to the county library to read up on world conditions, the domestic economy, consumer trends, the U.S. census and the latest predictions of Ezra Taft Benson. Farmers necessarily are concerned with research that will help their crops, electric power that will lighten their burdens and highways, schools and hospitals that will make their part of the country a better place in which to live and work. They are concerned about developing markets abroad and reducing freight rates at home. But more than this, despite what some of the experts say, I have found that farmers have the same feelings and the same concerns that all citizens do. They are interested in a secure nation in a peaceful world, in the cost of the goods their families buy, in the cost of their government in Washington and the kind of government they are getting. In the last analysis, the peanut farmer of Georgia and the mill worker in Massachusetts are much more alike in their interests and in their needs, and much more dependent upon each other, than either of them usually realizes. . . .
Robert Frost . . . [...]
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