When government was neighborly.

• Author: Berry, Wendell

BECAUSE I WAS BORN IN THE middle of the Depression of the 1930s, I am a child of the New Deal. Because I was born to a farming family in Henry County, Kentucky, I am in particular a child of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association, which was renewed in January 1941 Under the federal Agricultural Adjustment Act. Starting in early childhood, I learned the purposes and the politics of this program from my father, who served the Burley Association as vice president and as president for thirty-four years.

Because this has to do with tobacco, I must immediately beg your indulgence. Though the crop can no longer be defended, I do still defend the program, for it was right in principle, generously conceived, well organized, and effective. It was politically and economically sound because it solved, at minimal cost, one of the worst problems for farmers: the problem of overproduction, which always works to the advantage of the buyer of the product, never to that of the producer.

From early in the last century, efforts were made in various regions to form cooperatives, "pool" the crop, and so gain bargaining power against the tobacco companies. Through a disorderly and sometimes violent history, these efforts repeatedly failed.

Under the New Deal, the cooperative effort finally succeeded. The federal program established production quotas, based on each farm's history of production; it established support prices, according to grade and based on expected demand; and it provided a federal loan "against the crop" to fund the purchase, by the program, of tobacco that fell below the support price on the auction market.

This was not "big government." It was implemented and operated by regional leaders and by farmers. Its farmer members voted for its continuation time after time. In 1955, in the face of damaging surpluses, they imposed on themselves, by their votes, an acreage reduction of 25 percent. Because it controlled production, the program did not involve a subsidy or any government...