GET THOSE BOYS OFF THE FARM! - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 4

considered “excess labor” by the captains of industry—workers who should be shifted into factories, while
large, highly capitalized farms produced all the foods needed for domestic consumption and for the global
trade they envisioned.
In 1942, several businessmen and an advertising executive had created an organization that was to have
a powerful role in shaping the post-World War II economy and society—an influence that continues to
this day. They aimed to make the Committee for Economic Development (CED) a place where leaders of
business could hammer out their differences on economic policy, and then use the new technique of pub-
lic relations to promote their agreed-upon agenda. Among the founders were Paul Hoffman, president of
Studebaker; William Benton, the inventor of modern consumer research and polling; and Marion Folsom,
an Eastman Kodak executive.
All three eventually were placed in high government positions. Hoffman was appointed by President
Truman to administer the Marshall Plan, the large-scale economic aid program designed to rebuild war-
torn Europe and to combat communism. Later, as president of the Ford Foundation and administrator of
the United Nations Development Programme, he became one of the architects of the “Green Revolution.”
Benton eventually left public relations and was instrumental in organizing the United Nations. He pub-
lished the Encyclopedia Britannica and became a senator representing Connecticut. Folsom staffed the
U.S. House Special Committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning. He was instrumental in devel-
oping the first tax law revision since 1874 as Eisenhower's undersecretary of the Treasury Department in
1953 and was later appointed by Eisenhower as secretary of health, education, and welfare.
In the early 1960s the very influential CED, at that time a think tank headed by men representing Ford
Motor Company and Sears, had released a report declaring that there were too many farmers. The corpor-
ate solution: get farm boys off the farm and into vocational training for industrial skills and relocated to
where their labor was needed. 4
So, in August 1962, when twenty thousand farmers convened for the annual NFO convention in Des
Moines, Iowa, they were fighting mad. The CED report had only added insult to injury. Agribusiness, the
food-processing industry, and the nation's banks had been lining up over the previous decade to depress
farm prices.
The release of the CED's screed against farmers during the summer of 1962 stirred the NFO to organize
“catalog marches” in seven cities, where protesters dumped Sears catalogs in front of their stores. Long
caravans of Ford cars and trucks drove in circles around Ford establishments in several cities. Shortly
thereafter, both companies disavowed the report, and hearings were held in the U.S. Senate and House
agriculture committees to discredit the proposed solution to the so-called farm problem that the CED had
been peddling.
The CED, operating in a quasi-public sphere, represented the most powerful economic interests in the
nation. Its members called “for action by government working with the free market, not against it.” 5 Dur-
ing its first fifteen years of existence, thirty-eight of its trustees held public office and two served as presid-
ents of the Federal Reserve Bank. The organization maintained strong relationships with the Truman, Eis-
enhower, and Kennedy administrations, helping to direct government research dollars as well as to provide
funding for academic research. The strong ties to academia resulted in policy prescriptions shrouded in
sophisticated economic rhetoric and focused on weakening the reform-liberalism of the New Deal. They
couched their proclamations on shrinking the farm population as moving “labor and capital where they will
be most productive.” 6
A demonstration of the group's power took place in 1962, when a conflicted President Kennedy was
debating with his staff the merits of a massive tax cut. Kennedy was influenced to support the tax cut by
a CED report that called for “a prompt, substantial and permanent reduction” that the White House legis-
lative liaison's office distributed to members of Congress. 7 The CED then helped organize the Business