desirous of creating a domestic source of supply. A leading part in the development of this industry was taken as far back as 1912, 37 years ago, by the paint and varnish manufacturers of this country in establishing tung oil cultivation projects in the United States.

Dr. Fairchild, head of the Farm Plant Introduction Bureau of the Department of Agriculture, who planted the first tung seeds in California, delivered addresses before the Paint Manufacturers Association and the National Varnish Manufacturers Association in 1912 to, as Concannon reports, "invite their friendly interest and cooperation in domestic tung oil projects."

Favorably impressed by Dr. Fairchild's addresses, Dr. Henry A. Gardner, representing the two associations mentioned, visited the Southern Gulf States to investigate commercial possibilities of tung culture. Gardner made a favorable report on this work in 1921, and, again we quote Concannon:

It resulted in more active efforts on the part of these associations to stimulate planting in the United States.

In 1923, the report continues, the American Tung Oil Corp. was formed as a subsidiary of the American Paint and Varnish Association, primarily to demonstrate the possibilities of producing tung oil in the United States.

This companyConcannon writes

financed exclusively by leading domestic paint and varnish manufacturers, was designed and operated as a non-profit-making venture to encourage the growth of tung trees on a commercial scale in this country, and thereby ultimately to develop a domestic supply of the oil.

Several paint companies have interested themselves, directly or indirectly, in the operation of American tung mills. The first tung mill established in this country in 1928 was directed by an American paint manufacturer. A number of paint and varnish manufacturers have planted tung acreages. The "honeymoon" of the paint and varnish industry, which consumes about 80 percent of all tung oil used in this country, ended abruptly in 1948, with the dumping of Chinese tung oil on the American market after the supply had been cut off for 8 years. The change of attitude was marked by the filing of a brief with the Secretary of the Treasury opposing the invokement of the Anti-Dumping Act of 1921 by the American Tung Oil Association in an effort to halt the flooding of the American tung oil market with vast quantities of Chinese tung oil sold in this country at a price below the foreign market value and cost of production. This brief was filed in March 1948, by an organization calling itself the Bureau of Raw Materials for American Vegetable Oil and Fats Industries, "on behalf of the consumers and importers of tung oil." It is highly significant, we think, that the "honeymoon" of the United States Department of Agriculture and the American tung industry ended a few short weeks later when the Department flatly refused to grant the American industry a support price of any kind.

Why does the American paint and varnish industry now consider that the American tung-oil industry is not worth further help or development?

Why does the United States Department of Agriculture, after encouraging the growth and expansion of the American tung industry

for 43 years now absolutely refuse to grant a support price, particularly as one was granted in 1947 when the price of tung oil was higher and more particularly when it grants tung's competitors, linseed and soybean oils, support prices far above the prices of these commodities during the wartime years?

WHY THE CHANGE IN ATTITUDE?

The change of heart of the American paint and varnish industry toward the American tung industry is a comparatively simple one to understand. Our paint and varnish manufacturers are businessmen and as businessmen and users of raw materials they are quite understandably out to get their raw materials at the cheapest possible price. The matter of ethics, of simple justice in a situation where their industry promoted and encouraged the establishment of a domestic industry primarily to take care of their own needs and now turns its back on it, is one which no paint and varnish manufacturer can defend successfully. There would have been no American tung industry if the paint manufacturers had not demonstrated in a very concrete way that they needed and wanted an American supply of tung oil.

I was asked to appear before the American Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association in the early days, at a meeting of its board of directors, to make a statement with regard to the possibility of the growth of tung oil in the United States.

At that time I was starting a planting and had planted 8,600 acres, to stimulate the industry down there. They were very, very fine to me. They thought it was a wonderful thing and urged us to go ahead.

Dr. Harry Gardiner gave me letters to all of the large paint manufacturers in the United States and I visited two by appointment that they had made for me. Mr. LaMott duPont was one, who was very interested. He gave me an hour and a quarter. I told him what we were doing and he said, "We certainly do need a domestic industry that we can depend upon so that we can get pure oil."

I went over to see Mr. Patton, who was the president of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. He turned me over to his chemist. He told me that undoubtedly there was need for an American-produced tung oil, because it was pure and unadulterated and they could depend upon it. I said to him, "I hear a lot of talk about substitutes; what about that?" And he said, "Well, I do not think you will have to worry, because no matter what synthetic resins or other synthetic products come out of the paint industry, you can always be sure they will always have to use tung oil with them."

That was the type of encouragement that we received all through when we were visiting the paint manufacturers. I knew that there was a need for some new industry in the South to stabilize our economy. I gave away thousands of trees, gave them to farmers to plant tung trees around their cow rows and try them out. I covered all the way from Texas to Florida and made talks to chambers of commerce and to farmers assembled in schoolhouses, in order to get them interested in this industry. Now, returning to my brief:

Their excuse in opposing the desperate effort of the American tung oil industry to halt indiscriminate dumping and cutthroat practices of the Chinese tung oil trust is based entirely on the matter of price.

They opposed any restrictions whatsoever on China's illegal operations by fantastic statements to the effect that the American tung grower can produce tung oil in competition with coolie labor, the cheapest in the world. This statement is so ridiculous on the face of it that it needs no rebuttal beyond stating that if the American farmer is to be placed on a par with Chinese coolies, then perhaps we should ask China for help instead of sending the Chinese billions of dollars to raise their standard of living.

Nobody but a fool or a person dictated by ulterior motives could possibly contend that tung oil, or any other agricultural products, can be produced in this country for the same cost as in China.

We think it pertinent here to note that 13 of the largest paint and varnish manufacturing companies were indicted last year by the Federal Government on charges of conspiracy to jack up the price of paint and varnish faster and higher than any other commodity produced in the United States. While the price of paint and lacquer increased in this country from 75 to 100 percent, the price of tung oil has dropped 50 percent. The purpose of this brief is to ask the Congress to correct this condition through granting a parity rating to tung nuts, thus assuring our American tung farmers a return on their time, investment, and labor more in balance with the return accruing to the consumers of their product.

The change of attitude on the part of the United States Department of Agriculture is much more difficult to understand. Why has the Department and the Commodity Credit Corporation repeatedly refused to grant a support price on the 1948 crop after having granted a support price in 1947?

Is it because the various men who have headed the Fats and Oils Bureau of the Department of Agriculture for the last 8 or 9 times have come invariably from jobs in the consumer industries? We believe this situation should be corrected. The Department of Agriculture, after all, is a branch of the Government charged with developing and protecting the interests of American agriculture. Would it not be fair to this country's agricultural interests to place a man from agricultural ranks and with an agricultural viewpoint at the head of a division which concerns itself with such a vital branch of our agricultural economy? The most often repeated excuse of the present head of the Fats and Oils Division is that his department refused a support price for 1948 because it did not want to "create an unrealistic price for tung oil." Now what is the record of tung oil prices?

The price of tung oil in 1940 was 26 cents per pound, in 1941 prior to the outbreak of World War II it reached 35%1⁄2 cents per pound, in 1942 the price was pegged by the OPA at 38% cents per pound in tank car lots where it remained until the end of OPA when it climbed to 40 cents; at one point in 1947 it sold for 38% cents per pound.

At the same time that tung oil was pegged at 384 cents per pound, linseed oil was pegged at 15.8 cents per pound, and never sold for more than 181⁄2 cents per pound all during the war. The United States. Department of Agriculture after refusing to grant any sort of support price on tung in 1948 gave linseed oil a support price of 27.8 cents per pound on a basis of $6 per bushel for flaxseed. This was done, we are told, to prevent Argentina from gouging linseed-oil-consuming industries in this country. Isn't it strange that a Government bureau can feel so keenly for the plight of an industry which it indicts as a postwar

profiteer that it is willing to spend in 1 month alone the sum of $125,000,000 to aid it, yet cannot spare a single dollar for a vital American agricultural endeavor, fighting with its back to the wall to keep from being totally destroyed?

How can the United States Department of Agriculture justify its contention that a support price of 25 cents per pound as granted in 1947 is "unrealistic" or, in other words, unfair to the paint and varnish industry when that same industry was glad to pay 40 cents a pound for tung oil in 1946-47 when costs of production were lower than they are now? No one has been able to find out from the Department just what a "realistic" price is, but it is significant that the Chinese Government, which controls China's tung oil supply recently placed a floor of 20 cents on tung oil, C. and F. New York, to keep the bottom from entirely dropping out of the market. Is the American tung farmer forever to remain at the mercy of foreign manipulators? To put it even more bluntly, does this country want a tung industry or does it prefer to remain dependent on other countries for supplies of a product whose value as an essential war material cannot be gauged in terms of dollars and cents?

American tung farmers and millers have been repeatedly informed by the Commodity Credit Corporation that it would not grant a support price for the 1948 crop of tung nuts because of its "experience" with the 1947 support price program for tung. Interests within the industry were considerably mystified by this statement because the CCC did not elucidate further on its "experience."

CCC explained that it purchased 71⁄2 million pounds of American tung oil under the 1947 support program at the support price of 25 cents per pound. Most of this oil, it later developed, was resold by the CCC, some to the United States Army for building airplane runways in Japan, some to Germany, and the remainder to industries consuming tung oil, the price ranging from 24 to 241⁄2 cents per pound.

If the CCC had turned thumbs down on the 1948 crop of tung nuts on the grounds that it had lost too much money on the 1947 transaction such an explanation would certainly have appeared strange indeed considering the fact that on the outside CCC could not have lost more than $300,000 with some authorities contending that the actual loss was only about $78,000. Even if the CCC had lost its entire investment in tung oil, the cost to this country for aiding a vitally important and essential industry would have been but $1,875,000. Consider this investment in developing such a strategic commodity in comparison with the vast sums spent by this same agency in supporting the prices of such commodities as Irish potatoes-49 million dollars annually; figs and raisins-171⁄2 million dollars in 1947; dehydrated eggs-21⁄2 million dollars a day, with 60 million dollars pledged in 1949 to keep up the price of peanuts.

America's tung growers were further mystified and shocked at a statement appearing in the Oil, Paint and Drug Reporter, leading publication of the paint and varnish industry, in which an unidentified official of the CCC was quoted:

Commodity Credit Corporation decided "sometime ago" against a price-support program for the 1948 crop of tung nuts, an official of the agency said last week. A support program has been in operation since the war in order to enable producers to adjust their production to postwar conditions, and officials feel that ample time has been allowed to make this adjustment.

Such a statement was tantamount to saying that now that Chinese tung oil had appeared back on the American market in volume our American tung farmers should either cut down or abandon their orchards. In what other way could they adjust their production to "postwar conditions"?

This attitude seemed so unbelievably harsh and un-American that a group of tung growers, composing the Special Tung Growers Committee, delegated Mr. and Mrs. John Watts, publishers of Tung World magazine, to go to Washington and question CCC officials, as well as other Government bureau heads, in an effort to clarify the situation.

Mr. and Mrs. Watts visited Washington in October 1948, and conferred with Frank Woolley, deputy administrator of the CCC, George L. Prichard, head of the Fats and Oils Division of the Department of Agriculture. Asked the point-blank question if the statement above referred to was the official attitude of the CCC, Mr. Woolley admitted that it was. Asked by Mr. Watts if it was a recommendation of the CCC that the American tung farmers abandon their orchards, Mr. Woolley refused to comment. He expressed himself as being opposed to the entire support-price program, and declared that it was thespinelessness of our Congressmen in being unable to say "No" to the Nation's farmers that had gotten this country into the support-price program in the first place.

We believe this is a remarkable attitude for an official of an agency charged with administering the laws of Congress to take, regardless of whether or not tung oil is considered. We believe the Congress should look into the views of Mr. Woolley and Mr. Prichard to see whether these gentlemen intend to administer regulations promulgated by the Congress or whether they are so totally out of sympathy with the parity and support-price programs as to be stumbling blocks in the way of a fair and impartial administration as set down by Congress.

Recently an occurrence came to light which we believe sheds some light on the unexplained and repeated statement of the CCC regarding its "experience" with the 1947 tung support-price program. It was revealed in the public prints that an American miller, Earl Wallis, had purchased four tank cars of American tung oil from the Commodity Credit Corporation and had sold it to a manufacturing client. The client paid Mr. Wallis for the oil, about $69,000, but Mr. Wallis failed to pay the CCC in turn in some sort of banking transaction. The CCC pressed Mr. Wallis for its money, and the latter was forced to post as collateral on a note to the CCC stock in two American tung mills in the amount of about $125,000. After two extensions of the note CCC foreclosed, seized the stock, and took control of both mills, one being located in Florala, Ala., and the other in Gulfport, Miss.; the stock was recently sold to officials of two paint companies, and they are now operating the mills.

Can it be that this is the "experience" which led the CCC to turn thumbs down on the American tung industry's request for a 1948 support price?

Granted that the experience with Wallis was an unpleasant one, is it just or reasonable that the CCC penalize the entire American