White House Press Release, Rear Platform Remarks of President Harry S. Truman at Terre Haute, Indiana

276 IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 17, 1948 Rear Platform Remarks of the President at Terre Haute, Indiana, 4.45 p.m.,c.s.t. Mr. Mayor, ladies and gentlemen of this great Indiana City of Terre Haute, I am certainly glad to see you, and happy to see so many of you out here today. I have been through this city and stopped here on numerous occasions. When I was in the Senate, and I was there for ten years, I used to drive back and forth from Independence, Missouri, to Washington by way of highway number forty -- usually always stayed on that highway in Terre Haute going one way or another, so I am very well familiar with your city and its environs. And I like the location. This city is located in the richest farming area in the world. This city is interested in the products of the farm as well as in manufactures, many of which are located here in this town. When you come right down to fundamentals, it takes the agricultural background to make any country great. And this country has made a contribution to agriculture unequaled by any other country in the history of the world. We raised enough food during the war years to feed our own people, our own forces, and to contri- bute immensely to the forces of our Allies. Since the war we have been feeding not only ourselves and many of our Allies, but we have been keeping people alive in the devastated areas, where otherwise millions of these people would have starved to death. Now the agricultural situation in this country is the outgrowth of a policy which was pursued over the last 12 years. In 1932 the income of the farmers of the United States was 4 billion, 700 million dollars, and last year it was 30 billion dollars -- 30 billion dollars! More than five times as much as it was in 1932. The farmers had on deposit in banks in the United States in 1947, 23 billion dollars. In 1932 they didn't have much of anything but mortgages that were-coming due SO fast we couldn't even pay them. And insurance companies who owned the mortgages were taking the farms over so fast, the farmers didn't know which way to turn. Now the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the policies pursued by the Administration over the last 12 years are the reason for the prosperity of the farmers, as well as the immense demand for food. The farm support program will expire on December 31, 1948. I have been asking the Congress to remedy that situation. Nothing so far has been done. The farm bill has been passed by the House. I don't know whether it will pass the Senate or not. If it isn't passed, the farm support program which has done SO much to help make the farmer prosperous in the last 12 years will expire; that is, the floor under prices for the farmer will come to an end, just as the ceiling on prices for the consumers came to an end on June 30, 1946. These two situations balance each other. A floor under farm prices and a floorunder wages, and a consumer price control, has been necessary to prevent inflation in this country. We can't stand inflation in this country. We shouldn'thave it. This country never passed through a more pros- perous three years than the last three years, and everybody said we wouldn't have any jobs, or that we would be on the edge of a depression. The national income in the last year was more than 200 billion dollars, and I had hoped while we were prosperous that we might reduce the national debt from the surplus which we had been accumulating over the last two years. But this Congress saw fit to pass a rich man's tax bill which will wipe out that surplus in 1949, and in all OVER