ogical orientation. Eisenhower sought to reduce the role of the federal government in the business of America and to develop policies and programs that would benefit working class Americans as well as the middle class. Under his administration, Congress replaced rigid farm price supports "with a flexible system that ranged from 82 + to 90 percent of parity on the so-called basic commodities (corn, cotton, peanuts, rice, tobacco, and wheat)."
President Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture was Ezra Taft Benson, himself a farmer, who would reorganize the entire Department of Agriculture and abolish the Production and Marketing Administration of the Department. Benson characterized the "farm problem" as a problem requiring the federal government to aid farmers in gaining their fair share of the national income. Specifically, Benson recognized that farmers in the early 1950s "had been caught in a post-war price-cost squeeze; the price which he receives has gone down and the cost which he pays has gone up."
The Eisenhower administration attempted to eliminate governmental price and acreage control policies that Benson and his president believed were responsible for many of the problems that agriculture faced in the 1950s. While Benson recognized that guaranteed prices called forth greater production responses, competition in the sector had intensified and in his view it was time to eliminate government-mandated price manipulations and production controls.
According to Don Paarlberg, from 1953 to 1960, "the Eisenhower administration sought to reduce price supports to bring more rationality into our farm policy." This particular policy was not, however, particularly well received by many farmers who had come to rely upon government price supports and other incentives. As the 1960 presidential election approached, Republican strategists, "lived in fear and trembling of a 'farm revolt.'" Generally, the so-called ...