microgramos, suspensión inyectable en jeringa precargada Vacuna antihepatitis B (DNA recombinante)

The study of interwar relations between industrial America and farm interests is generally viewed only as a battle between populism and market liberalism. This is perhaps unsurprising as this (apparent) struggle between grain interests and the people was, and in some cases still is,

ingrained in the social and cultural fabric of the US. In a popular novel published in 1903, Frank Norris wrote:

91 Wayne Broehl, Cargill, Trading the World’s Grain (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1992); William Falloon and Patrick Arbor, Market Maker: A Sesquicentennial Look at the Chicago Board of Trade (Chicago: Chicago Board of Trade, 1998).

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Think of it, the food of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people just at the mercy of a few men down there on the Board of Trade. [...] They say just how much the peasant shall pay for his loaf of bread. If he can’t pay the price, he simply starves.⁹²

The Granger uprisings and the subsequent populist movements, such as the Farmer’s Alliance, had provided agrarians a voice against speculators in agriculture futures.⁹³ Grain prices were low throughout the Long Depression and beyond, and during this time there were several attempts to regulate the growing grain futures markets in the Midwest, yet none were passed into law.⁹⁴ The rhetoric of the Grangers and their successors was strongly anti-grain trade. As late as 1914, Minnesota Representative Manahan stated at the House Committee on Rules:

Controlling [exchange] members […] depress or raise the price of wheat to suit the purpose of their gambling operations; that the prices are by such combination and manipulation depressed while the farmers are compelled to market the heavy portion of each crop and raised and manipulated so as to tempt speculative investors after the bulk of each crop is in [their] control.⁹⁵

However, there are a number of problems with an agrarian populist theory of futures regulation.

In the first instance, it is unclear that the populist movement’s campaign for anti-trust busting of railway and storage monopolies originated with farmers. George Miller argues that the few laws against anti-competitive behavior that were passed at the turn of the century appear to have been instigated ‘to assist individual shippers in their judicial struggles with giant corporations’.⁹⁶ Indeed, it can be ‘demonstrated that the Granger advocacy of regulation was dominated by merchants and shippers […] rather than by dirt farmers themselves’.⁹⁷ That is, medium sized businesses were fighting for free markets against the larger monopolists, with both groups represented in industry organisations.

The timing of agrarian power in government does not correspond with the timing of the early futures regulation. John Mark Hansen argues that:

92 Frank Norris, The Pit (New York: Penguin, 1994 [1903]).

93 Jonathan Lurie, The Chicago Board of Trade, 1859-1905: The Dynamics of Self-regulation (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1979).

94 Jerry W. Markham, The History of Commodity Futures Trading and its Regulation (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1987), pp. 10-11.

95 US Congress, House, Hearings Before the Committee on Rules: HR 424, 63^rd Cong. 2^nd Sess. (5-7 March 1914), p. 3.

96 Georde Hall Miller, Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971).

97 Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 126.

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The competitive advantage of the farm groups in Midwest was ambiguous until about 1926, despite the creation of the Farm Bloc in 1921, despite agrarian unrest in the 1922 elections and despite the advent in 1923 of a well-orchestrated pressure campaign for the McNary-Haugen subsidy bill.⁹⁸

For example, President Coolidge was anti-interventionist enough to veto the McNary-Haugen Bill on numerous occasions. Additionally, the mismatch between the (re)emergence of Midwest agrarian power in Washington by 1926 and futures legislation in 1922 and 1936 needs explaining.

Jonathan Lurie in 1980 made the common error of identifying the 1921-22 Acts with farmer discontent, yet the simple dichotomy is more confusing than useful in understanding the evolution, if not the origins, of this earliest legislation. This study argues that the producer had no voice in the development of the legislation, was not a user of the futures markets, and did not have an organised campaign on Capitol Hill or in the public eye with respect to futures

regulation. During the 1920s, in committee after committee, for every politician who came across as a ‘dangerous populist’, numerous legislators and bureaucrats who utilised the discourse of the futures industry were seen as benign bastions of efficient free market capitalism. Representative Ellis, for example, argued frequently against the 1922 Bill, thus: ‘There is nothing in it to praise;

there is everything to condemn. The bad features of the old [1921] bill are made distinctly worse […] More than all, and worse than all, this bill reeks of populism’.⁹⁹ But just how much did the Act ‘reek of populism’? To answer this question, it is important to understand the role of the bipartisan Farm Bloc. The Bloc picked up the cause of agrarians in the early 1920s and two of its members introduced the Capper-Tincher Bill to supervise the exchanges. But Representative Tincher, according to Lurie, ‘admitted the [original tougher] bill fell far short of [that] called for by more militant agrarian spokesmen’.¹⁰⁰ The final legislation was even less controlling than that already criticised by some as being powerless, as is shown in Chapter Three, which describes Senator Arthur Capper as not attempting to look after the interests of the farmers. In fact, he

98 John Mark Hansen, Gaining Access: Congress and the Farm Lobby 1919-1981 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 20.

99 Representative Ellis in 62 Cong. Rec. 9420 (1922) as quoted in John H. Stassen, “Propaganda as Positive Law: Section 3 of the Commodity Exchange Act (A Case Study of How Economic Facts Can Be Changed by Act of Congress),” Chicago-Kent Law Review, 58 (1982): 635-656, p. 647.

100 Jonathan Lurie, “Regulation of the Commodity Exchanges in the 1920s: The Legacy of

Self-Government,” in Farmers, Bureaucrats, and Middlemen: Historical Perspectives in American Culture, ed. Trudy H.

Peterson (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980), p. 237.

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simply claimed that the Act would eliminate activities that were for the ‘benefit of the speculator and against the producer and consumer’.¹⁰¹

Robert Gallman in his comments on Lurie’s 1980 work observed, ‘why the farm bloc should be concerned with [gambling on exchanges] is not altogether clear’.¹⁰² Pashigian, who stated that

‘some regulation can be explained by opposition by special interest groups’, correctly concludes that:

The most easily identified group is the farm sector. [But] not all segments of the farm sector have opposed futures trading, and the position of some groups of farmers has changed over time. While some farmers have opposed futures markets, the underlying reasons for this opposition have never been satisfactorily explained.¹⁰³

The farm lobby can not be assumed to be a unified interest group, and it is in any case unclear why farmers would oppose futures markets. While he was Secretary of Agriculture, Henry C Wallace was very supportive of Farm Bloc efforts. Yet it should not automatically be assumed that either the Secretary or the Bloc was anti-futures in practice. In fact, Wallace was a firm believer in the free markets as determinants of agricultural prices, even if he was no friend to the grain trade.¹⁰⁴ In the CEA, the fact that a farmer’s organisation was at the heart of lobbying efforts and co-wrote the Bill once again causes observers to equate futures regulation with agrarian populism. However, the new archival data in no way suggests that the goal of the farmer’s organisation was to extract benefits for the farmers, as is shown in Chapter Five.

This study disentangles the history of futures markets regulation from farm relief efforts, successes and failures. The fact that some grain futures regulation occurred at roughly the same time as significant efforts to aid the farmer and were often supported by the same legislators should not allow one to assume that all legislation had the same goals and were aimed at the same constituents.

101 Capper’s Speech, National Wheat Conference Program, 19-20June 1923. CME III.657.1.

102 Robert E. Gallman, “Commentary,” in Farmers, Bureaucrats, and Middlemen: Historical Perspectives in American Culture, ed. Trudy H. Peterson (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980), p. 274.

103 B. Peter Pashigian, “The Political Economy of Futures Market Regulation,” The Journal of Business, 59 (1986): S55-S84, p. 556.

104 Donald L. Winters, “The Persistence of Progressivism: Henry Cantwell Wallace and the Movement for Agricultural Economics,” Agricultural History, 41 (1967): 109-120.

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