year. Having gotten in pretty tight circumstances, I wanted some of that money that President Ike put out for relief of the storm sufferers. I went to the man who is supposed to handle it. He referred me to the Small Business Administration in Wilmington, N. C. I wrote them and they answered back that they were very sorry, there was no provision made for the farmer to get any of that money.

A man who makes cotton, tobacco, foods, no provision for him to get a scent of that money. That was written to me.

Senator JOHNSTON. How many of your curing houses were damaged?

Mr. MANNING. The storm damaged most every tobacco barn I had, blew down one house entirely, and damaged dozens of houses and pack houses. The storm cost me around, I spent eight or nine thousand this year repairing and have to spend three to five more to get where I was on repairs. Farming is such a hazardous business. It will take 2 to 3 years of good income now to make back what I lost in 1954.

The CHAIRMAN. Did any of your neighbors get any of this money? Mr. MANNING. I don't know of a one that got it. Most were not damaged as much as I was.

The CHAIRMAN. This damage payment is not a gift. It is a loan that is made at cheap interest. There were no gifts made. Mr. MANNING. I didn't mention interest. It would be cheap. The CHAIRMAN. Cheap interest.

Mr. MANNING. They didn't let me have a dime. I have a good reputation for paying debts. It wasn't for anything like that.

The CHAIRMAN. Another provision in the law, as I understand it, if it is the same law I am thinking about the Government won't assist a farmer who is able to get the money locally.

Mr. MANNING. I have had to get a bit.

The CHAIRMAN. Maybe you are able and that is why you were eliminated.

Mr. MANNING. They just said there was no provision for farmer to get any money for that storm relief. That is what they wrote me. Senator JOHNSTON. Did you ask for a loan?

Mr. MANNING. Yes, sir. I wanted some of the money and they wrote me back no provision made. It was for the boys with plenty of money there. I am not critical of that because you have done a very great lot of good things for the farmer, gentlemen; I am not unaware of that, in the Congress.

Senator JOHNSTON. There is a possibility you couldn't qualify under it. Knowing you as I do, you could probably go to the bank and borrow all you want. That may be the hitch.

The CHAIRMAN. _That is probably the hitch.

Mr. MANNING. I want you all to remember I am stressing the fact that cotton can be handled different from these perishable products. A bale of cotton in storage, Senator, in a dry place, I have no doubt will keep a hundred years without deterioration. There is a man up here near Senator Johnston's county has a bale of cotton made in the 1800's and is apparently in as good condition as it was then. No deterioration in stored cotton in a dry place, approximately none, might be some technical deterioration. You can handle our cotton situation a whole lot better with a whole lot more assurance than perishables.

You could set this 10 million bales aside. Don't forget that cotton is wealth, cotton is not like money, a medium of exchange, cotton is pure wealth. It turns into 78 times its value, 10 million bales of cotton is worth a billion and a half dollars today. But at interest it is worth 10 to 12 billion dollars. You can take a long-term use and do something for it.

The CHAIRMAN. You don't have to talk to me about that. But we like to have it in the record.

Mr. MANNING. There are 3 or 4 things you could do to help our cotton farmers. The first is you get together and put somebody like you and Senator Johnson on the committee that reaches a parity price. Anybody that has an ounce of brains knows that the parity price that they have set is fair to us, which is now around 33 or 34 cents, doesn't give any American his just share of our national income, as President Eisenhower said on the statehouse steps. Any man that thinks cotton at 33 cents a pound gives the farmer his just share of the national income they ought to be put in the insane asylum, or else he is a man with an impure heart. I am talking from 40 years' experience, not just 10 days.

So get you a parity concept that takes into account the labor of producing cotton and put that labor down just like the preacher, the teacher, the lawyer, doctor, the labor-union men, all the railroad employees, everybody in America, clerks in the stores, everybody, and be sure they get that $1 minimum that you put for everybody.

The CHAIRMAN. Hired labor is included in the formula now.
Mr. MANNING. Not at 34 cents, not at $1 an hour.

The CHAIRMAN. It is given weight, maybe not sufficient weight.
Mr. MANNING. Not at $1 an hour.

The CHAIRMAN. The dollar an hour won't take effect until next January.

Mr. MANNING. I am not talking about the best farmers on the best land in America. I am talking about the average cotton farmer in South Carolina. That is all I am familiar with.

I would suggest after you get that parity concept changed-while we are on parity wasn't it based on the years 1909 to 1914?

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Mr. MANNING. That came in the years I was going to college. I went to college in 1910. And I made up my mind in those 4 years as I got older and got out of the sticks and went to town a few times, went to Columbia and Spartanburg and Richmond and New York, that in spite of the fact my father was a big farmer in his day, 1,500 bales of cotton a year, I said God deliver me from the farm.

The only reason I am here today is instead of going to Harvard and studying law I developed tuberculosis and the people up in New York, the best doctor in the land, says stay on the farm, the rest of your life. I would rather live on the farm than die in the President's chair. I am here for that reason. That is when I made up my mind, 1909-14, those favorable years-and God knows I had a favorable start as far as finances-that is why I am here today. I am bringing those out because those are supposed to be the favorable years that we based parity on.

The CHAIRMAN. They were only favorable to this extent, that it gave to the farmer what they considered a fair purchasing power at that time.

Mr. MANNING. It didn't do it, though, at that time.

The CHAIRMAN. It did at that time. In other words, as they put it, if a farmer was able to buy a pair of pajamas or pair of overalls for a bushel of wheat, don't you see, as the pajamas or overalls increased in price, so did the wheat.

Mr. MANNING. I am glad you brought that out. I know that is what it is supposed to do.

The CHAIRMAN. It does do that.

Mr. MANNING. You mentioned the fair price. I want to call your attention now, I don't think you need anything else except the next statement I am going to make to show you where we are. Of course you know it without being told.

In 1932 and 1933 the greatest stress we have all ever been in in America, the appropriation that you made in Washington was $4 billion a year. We owed practically $20 billion. We had been reducing it from thirty down to twenty. Cotton brought 6 cents a pound in 1933. Today, as you well know, your appropriations are $70 billion a year, practically. Cotton today is quoted in New York last Friday from 28.75 to 33.50. And that is 5 times 6 or 30 cents. We have appropriations 17 times as high and your debts are 15 times as high. Any intelligent man in the world, that is all that is necessary to tell you all where the cotton farmers are because we buy and trade and do business in the same channels, in the same stores that everybody else does.

As a result of those high appropriations and taxes you have had to raise the price that you pay every soldier, every marine, every Air Force man, every Coast Guard man, post-office employee, civil-service employee, every manufacturing company is paying 12 to 2 and 3 times as much for labor they paid before, and we have to buy against them.

So that is all you have got to consider, consider the condition we are in. We are on the way to bankruptcy as fast as we can go. We would have been there this year if it had not been for support prices, under cotton and tobacco in South Carolina.

We would have made the grade this year if it had not been for support prices. In 1951 I bought a Buick Roadmaster for $3,124.26. I was getting 45.39 for cotton. That was the limit that Chester Bowles put on it. We were the only people in the world getting under 75 cents then. Everybody in the world was getting 75 cents except the Americans, and we were getting 45.39. A bale of cotton, the seed alone, would give me a check for ginning for $25 above ginning in 1951. Today, due to stormy weather, most of mine I pay $3 a bale to get it ginned instead of getting $25 a bale out of it. I pay $3 a bale to get it ginned today. They bill me $3 for every bale. And I went down and asked the boy what the Buicks were, and he said $4,200. It is up 35 percent and all farming, so the U. S. News & World Report says, is down 34 percent. I am certain my cotton is down from 45.39 to 30 cents on the exchange in New York yet that Buick is up 35 percent, as is all other implements for the farm, trucks, tractors, every implement you can name, household goods and appliances, everything in the world we use.

The doctor's bill is up just as much and the hospitals have doubled, quadrupled and quintupled. If you have a tenant that makes cotton alone and let him have a spell of sickness for 30 days, there is not a farm in South Carolina on the average that can make the bill. Thirty

days in the hospital, it will range from $50 to $500 a week doctor's bills and hospital.

Everything—it is not just one thing up on us everything in the world is up except the price of cotton, and it is down 34 percent.

if

Now that is the status. What can you do? When you get that parity say to the cotton mills and when you figure that parity justly you will find it 40 to 50 cents a pound under present conditions. Say to the cotton mills, you pay 40 cents a pound minimum for every pound of cotton. The mills won't mind that if you set that price and maintain it there. Now they will squawk and will have a right to squawk you set it at 4 cents a day and turn around and lower it next month or next year where a fellow can underbuy them and undersell them, but if you make the price constant the Treasury of the United States will not have to pay one dime of expense. Just like the labor, the Treasury didn't lose any money; they made money because the income tax will bring in money. But the same way with the cotton mills. They don't care what you set the price at provided you firmly fix it and don't let it vary under them.

Today, with cotton selling at 30 cents on the exchange, the price is from 28.75 to 33.50; the 80 by 80 print cloth, most popular cloth sold at 17 to 172 cents a yard, which made approximately 70 cents a pound. That was when cotton was 45. Today 80 by 80 print cloth 4 yards to the pound, is bringing 20 cents a pound. It is up from 70 to 80 cents a yard and my cotton is down from 45 cents to 30.

The mills can pay this money. Three leading millmen in America: Mr. Love, Mr. Cannon, and Mr. Lowenstein, one other, Mr. Milligan, the 4 biggest producers in America, they have been in public print in the last 30 days saying they were getting along fine and they hoped and expected it to continue through 1956. That is what they expected, continued prosperity through 1956. That is the biggest. The little men are suffering; can't compete against those big enterprises.

Burlington industries, by their own statement, sold $301 million worth of cotton products year before last, and this last year, by his own statement, $450 million worth. You can be the judge of how he is getting along. That is Mr. Spencer Love's figures in the Wall Street Journal. Yet we are getting 15 cents a pound less for cotton than we were when they were getting less for their products.

Another thing is when you get that parity fixed and tell those fellows we don't want-I don't see how any intelligent farmer would want to sell one bale of cotton abroad.

I have in my pocket right here a clipping cut out of a paper published in the last 3 weeks, an article written from Bombay, India. It tells us that the women working in the cottonfields in Bombay are making 15 cents a day-not an hour, mind you, gentlemen—15 cents a day. And the men are getting the big sum of 20 cents a day. It doesn't take any Solomon or financial wizard to know that there is no earthly way that Americans with their high standard of living can compete with the Hindu and Chinamen and those other foreigners so underfed and underclothed and undernourished. Neither can the cotton-mill men compete with them. They can't compete with those fellows. There is no way it can be done.

There is but one way in my opinion they can possibly export cotton. Have a two-price system; and I am opposed to that. We should make cotton farmers in America make cotton for Americans to wear.

There

is no percentage what they cost to make goods compared to ours. How are we going to compete against them? It is impossible. There is no way to do it unless you want to have a giveaway.

Let me pay my respects to our Secretary of Agriculture. When he was first appointed, I went to Darlington, S. C., to hear him make a talk. I thought he was as sweet and fine a Christian gentleman as ever lived just to hear him talk. I wasn't so much impressed with his brain, but I did give him that. But when he went all over this land as every one of you gentlemen know, and tried to make it appear to all the housewives and all the consumers of farmers' goods what the supporting prices at 90 percent of parity was bringing the Government of the United States, I knew he was a liar and the truth was not in him.

That couldn't be so because that isn't all he did. When he got in that cheese deal the President of the United States should have fired him that day; the first inkling he got of it he ought to have fired Ezra. You know with Ezra coaching him, not you gentlemen, because every one of you voted, with Ezra coaching the Congress joined with him on price supports. Ninety percent is not right; 75 percent will cure you. Has any greater fallacy ever been put before the people since the world began? His system would work, but after my farm is transferred to someone else. It will work but it will put the present farmer out and give it to some man who made some money manufacturing. It will work in time.

You all have done a lot of good things for us that will help us. Give us 25 or 30 years and they will come along but today it will take price advances to hold cotton farmers in the business. That is all there is to it.

You all know that Mr. Benson tried to make it appear that it cost nearly $20 billion to support the price of our commodities for 10 years. When he got under his oath where the perjury law would get him he came out that it cost $1,111 million in 20 years, or the sum of $55 million a year. That is what he understood his oath had to come out with. That man that said $20 billion all over America. Now $55 million seems like a lot of money but when you are appropriating $70 billion a year and donating $10 billion down to $4.5 billion abroad, $55 million will serve to relieve the cotton farmers and the farmers of America of that charge that we are bankrupting the Government.

The Government may be bankrupt but it is not the $55 million a year that is doing it, as you well know.

Gentleman, in 1952 a candidate for President of the United States, Ike Eisenhower, spoke on our statehouse steps right over there. I don't pretend to tell you what the President said in Dakota or Minnesota. I read about it. I heard with my own ears. He spoke of his attitude toward the farming situation. These are his words, not part of what he said. He said:

There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it, I am for 90 percent parity for our farmers, and more, too, if necessary, to give them their just share of our national income.

Those are his words. And the saddest thing of my life, gentlemen, except I was sending our boys to Korea, but with that exception the saddest thing is to see a fine man like Ike Eisenhower, a man I put up $750 to elect, I want to say, Senator, I didn't do that following James