Passage 1

President Roosevelt‟s administration suffered a devastating defeat when on January 6, 1936, the Agricultural Adjustment Act was declared unconstitutional. New Deal planners quickly pushed through Congress the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1935, one purpose of which was conservation, but which also aimed at controlling surpluses by retiring land from production. The law was intended as a stopgap measure until the administration could formulate a permanent farm program that would satisfy both the nation‟s farmers and the Supreme Court Roosevelt‟s landslide victory over London in 1936 obscured the ambivalent nature of his support in the farm states. Despite extensive government propaganda, many timers still refused to participate in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration‟s voluntary production control programs, and the burdensome surpluses of 1933 were gone—not the result of the AAA, but a consequence of great droughts.
In February of 1937, Secretary of Agriculture Wallace convened a meeting of farm leaders to promote the concept of the ever-normal granary, a policy that would encourage farmers to store crop surpluses (rather than dump them on the market) until grain was needed in years of small harvests. The Commodity Credit Corporation would grant loans to be repaid when the grain was later sold for a reasonable profit. The conference chose a Committee of Eighteen, which drafted a bill, but the major farm organizations were divided. Since ten of the eighteen members were also members of the American Farm Bureau Federation, the measure was quickly labeled a Farm Bureau bill, and there were protests the small, but highly vocal, Farmers‟ Holiday Association. When debate on the bill began, Roosevelt himself was vague and elusive and didn‟t move the proposed legislation into the “desirable” category until midsummer. In addition, there were demands that the New Deal‟s deficit spending be curtailed, and opponents of the bill charged that the AAA was wasteful and primarily benefited corporations and large-scale farmers.

The Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act had failed to limit agricultural production as the administration had hoped. Farm prices and consumer demand were high, and many farmers, convinced that the drought had ended the need for crop controls, refused to participate in the AAA‟s soil conservation program, Without direct crop controls, agricultural production skyrocketed in 1937, and by late summer there was panic in the farm belt that prices would again be driven down to disastrously law levels. Congressmen began to pressure Roosevelt to place a floor under farm prices by making loans through, the CCC, but Roosevelt made such loans contingent upon the willingness of Congress to support the administration‟s plan for a new system of crop controls. When the price of cotton began to drop, Roosevelt‟s adroit political maneuver finally forced congressional representatives from the South to agree to support a bill providing for crop controls and the ever-normal granary. The following year Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938.

The primary purpose of the passage is to ______.

According to the passage, the Roosevelt administration wanted agricultural legislation with all of the following characteristics except ______.

The author implies which of the following conclusions?

It can be inferred, from the passage that the Farmers‟ Holiday Association opposed the bill drafted by the Committee of Eighteen because ______.

It can be inferred from the passage that under the policy of an ever-normal granary ______.