Pressure politics 113the campaign funds of Democratic candidates, but the political aims of the
unions remain limited. They wish to further the interests of their members
through political action and to defend themselves against attempts by busi-
ness interests to attack their position, but they do not wish to govern, or to
bring about fundamental changes in American society. The American labour
movement is not opposed to capitalism, it simply wishes to promote the in-
terests of the workers within a capitalistic economy.
The farmers and the government
Agriculture in the United States provides an example of the way in which
an important minority group can achieve political power out of all propor-
tion to its numbers. The farm population is much less significant in numbers
than the unions and less wealthy than the business community, yet it seems
able to fight off all attacks upon government programmes and supports that
have evolved to help the farming community as a result of earlier depressed
conditions. Farm groups, allied with congressmen and with the sections of
the administration that operate the farm programmes, seem to have cre-
ated, in the words of one observer, a private system of government in which
decisions on agricultural matters are taken exclusively by the agricultural
interests themselves. Since the 1930s the power of the farmer has become
institutionalised in the close integration of agricultural organisations with
the government machine to the point where it is difficult to draw a line be-
tween public agency and private group. Much of their power, however, stems
from the peculiar characteristics of the farm vote. The farm vote is, even in
American terms, both highly independent and highly variable. Farmers tend
to switch to the party that is currently supporting them more readily than
do other groups. Split-ticket voting is frequent, and the turnout of the farm
vote is more changeable than that of other sections of the population. This
makes the farm vote an unpredictable and potentially very important factor
in elections. Congress is, therefore, particularly sensitive to the reactions of
the farmer.
However, the success of farm groups does not mean that agriculture is
free of the divisive forces that fragment business and labour interests. The
organisations representative of agriculture are very numerous. The variety of
crops and products, many of them in competition with each other, produces
its own crop of associations to represent producers, for example, the Ameri-
can Dairy Association, the National Cotton Council of America, and the
National Association of Wheat Growers. However, three major organisations
claim to speak for agriculture as a whole: the National Grange, the American
Farm Bureau Federation and the National Farmers’ Union. Each tends to
be strongest in a particular area of the country, however, and they can come
into conflict with each other. The Farm Bureau Federation has maintained
close contact with government agencies since the New Deal period, when it
was associated with the creation of agricultural programmes to combat the