by Adam Cohen
Harry was also active in politics. In 1920, he helped Warren Harding’s campaign for the presidency. When Harding was elected, he appointed Harry secretary of agriculture, the job Uncle Henry had not been interested in. Harry arrived in Washington during a crisis. The Farm Belt was already in the grip of a depression, a decade before it hit the rest of the country. During the World War, American farmers had planted 40 million new acres to compensate for the reduced production in Europe. At the war’s end, European farmers began producing large harvests again, creating a global surplus and driving down crop prices. While American farmers’ incomes plunged, the amount they had to pay for mortgages, taxes, and consumer goods remained the same. Caught in the “scissors” of falling income and constant expenses, farmers were struggling. Harry lobbied Harding to do something about it, but Hoover, who was now secretary of commerce, insisted that the federal government should not get involved. Just as Harry thought he was on the verge of prevailing, Harding died unexpectedly. Calvin Coolidge, who served out the remainder of Harding’s term, was a champion of Eastern interests, and more implacably opposed than Harding to farm relief.14
In the Farm Belt, a movement was forming. The rallying cry was “parity.” Farmers saw the era before the World War as a golden age, when rural Americans had been on an equal footing with city dwellers. Throughout the 1920s, urban salaries had risen steadily while farm income dwindled, due to economic factors outside the farmers’ control. Farmers wanted the government to restore crop prices to the level that would bring their income back to the same ratio to urban salaries as before the war. The leading proposal for achieving “parity” of this sort was the McNary-Haugen bill, named for Senator Charles McNary, Republican of Oregon, and Representative Gilbert Haugen, Republican of Iowa. It called for the federal government to dump surplus crops overseas, driving up prices at home. McNary-Haugen’s supporters argued that since the government propped up the prices of industrial goods through high tariffs, it was only fair for there to be a similar government program dedicated to driving up the prices of farm products. For much of the 1920s, McNary-Haugenism was the great populist dream of the Farm Belt, and the Wallaces were true believers.15
That Farm Belt dream “beat its head in vain against the imperturbable Mr. Coolidge,” as one journalist noted. Coolidge, a believer in laissez-faire, opposed the McNary-Haugen bill as an unjustified intrusion on the free market, and made clear that if it passed Congress he would veto it. Coolidge’s opposition did not stop Harry from testifying before Congress in favor of the bill. Back in Iowa, Wallaces’ Farmer was urging its readers to start a “prairie fire” of enthusiasm for the McNary-Haugen bill. But the Farm Belt’s excitement could not overcome the entrenched opposition of business interests. When the bill came to a vote in the House on June 3, 1924, it failed by a 224-154 vote. There was widespread speculation that Coolidge would fire his rebellious agriculture secretary after the November election, but he never had to. With his McNary-Haugen campaign defeated and his Cabinet position in peril, Harry’s health declined. After an operation to remove his gallbladder, he died on October 25, at the age of fifty-eight. Beleaguered farmers lost a fierce advocate, and the Wallace family mantle passed to the next generation.16
Henry Agard Wallace was the eldest of Harry and May’s six children. He had many of the Wallace family attributes, including love of farming, spirituality, and iconoclasm. He would later say, however, that his mother had a more profound influence on him than his father. An heir to her family’s flinty New England traditions, May Wallace did not smoke or drink, and she liked things that were simple and traditional. Henry would later recall that she resisted salads as “some new-fangled notion that was being foisted on the American people by women’s clubs.” May was as much of an agriculturalist as her husband. It was May, an enthusiastic gardener, who taught Henry how to crossbreed pansies.17
Henry grew up doing farm chores, including caring for a cow, a horse, a sow, and piglets. He had the good fortune as a child to come under the influence of George Washington Carver, an Iowa State teaching assistant who would grow up to become a world-famous botanist. Carver, the son of slaves from Missouri, had moved north to escape racial discrimination, finding Iowa more tolerant than the other places he had lived. When he visited the Wallace home, he took six-year-old Henry on “botanizing expeditions,” in which he pointed out flowers and parts of flowers. Henry would later say that his mother and Carver were “responsible for my acquiring a love of plants at a very early age,” while his father was somewhere “in the background of it.” One day, Henry found a seed catalogue and ordered six kinds of strawberries. It was the beginning of his passion for plant breeding. Henry was convinced he had found his life’s calling. His interest in agriculture was not merely intellectual, or even professional. He would later write in Wallaces’ Farmer that “the individuality of corn plants is almost as interesting to me as the personality of animals or human beings.” For Henry, plants had an almost spiritual significance. Later in his life, after becoming secretary of agriculture, he would deliver a speech entitled “The Strength and Quietness of Grass.”18
At the age of fifteen, Henry attended a corn show put on by Perry G. Holden, an Iowa State teacher and “corn evangelist” who traveled the Farm Belt. At his corn shows, Holden invited farm boys to help him pick out the most beautiful ears, which he insisted would produce the highest yields. Henry did not believe that the most attractive corn was the most productive, and when he challenged the relationship, Holden invited him to take home the highest- and lowest-rated ears, plant them, and compare the crops they produced. Henry planted them, and at harvest time he found that the most beautiful corn had not produced the largest crops. He wrote up his results in Wallaces’ Farmer and began a crusade against what he called “pretty ear” shows. He succeeded in discrediting the idea that attractive corn was productive corn, and put an end to corn shows.19
In 1906, Wallace enrolled at Iowa State. He continued his plant studies, including more breeding experiments, and began to extend his love of experimentation to his own body. He put himself on unusual diets, including a regimen of corn, soybeans, and cottonseed and linseed meal. After reading a magazine article on fasting by Upton Sinclair, the muckraking journalist, Wallace went a week without eating at all. It was in college that Wallace’s views on agricultural policy began to take shape. He studied with Benjamin Hibbard, a maverick economist who was skeptical of laissez-faire economics. Hibbard taught that market competition hurt farmers, pitting them against each other and driving down prices. He got Wallace thinking about ways to insulate farmers from the ravages of the free market.20
After graduation, Wallace went to work full-time at Wallaces’ Farmer. He proved to be the family’s most talented journalist. Wallace wrote on a wide range of agricultural issues, often breaking new ground, as he did with his exposé on corn shows. In 1913, Wallace met Ilo Wilson, the daughter of a prosperous local businessman, at a picnic in Des Moines. Wallace was taken with her immediately, and they married the following year.21
Wallace’s agrarianism, like Thomas Jefferson’s, had a strong political component. He believed that rural America was a repository of virtue, and that it played a crucial role in counterbalancing the corruption of the cities. Wallace worried that farm life was being overwhelmed by fast-spreading urban culture. By the end of the 1920s, about 25 percent of the nation’s 123 million people would be living on farms, down from more than 40 percent at the turn of the century. Wallace saw the encroaching urbanism as a threat to the farmer’s way of life. “We want to prevent our countryside being merely a field for the extension of town habits,” he said.22
Wallace developed an interest in farm pricing, and soon became an expert. His first book, Agricultural Prices, argued that the free market interfered with farmers’ ability to make a living. If they were ever going to get a fair price for their crops, he maintained, they would have to take control over the amount that they produced. The book laid the groundwork
for the New Deal agricultural programs to come.23
While working at the newspaper, Wallace continued with his agricultural experiments. He was particularly interested in hybridization, crossing different seed types to produce new varieties. Hybrid vigor, the idea that a cross of plant breeds often produces heartier, higher-yielding plants, was still a radical idea at the time, and Wallace became one of the nation’s foremost advocates for hybrid seeds. He regularly extolled the virtues of hybridization in Wallaces’ Farmer, explaining hybrid vigor and reporting on his discussions with researchers from across the country. In 1926, he founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company with the backing of family and friends. Using the slogan “Developed—not discovered, made to fit—not found by chance,” the company made hybrid corn widely available. Wallace’s efforts paid off handsomely. Within fourteen years, 90 percent of the corn being sold in the farm belt was hybrid, and the Hi-Bred Corn Company was the source of much of it. In the late 1990s, the company, which had been renamed Pioneer Hi-Bred, would be sold for more than $9 billion, about one-quarter of which went to Wallace’s descendants.24
Wallace’s other great passion, along with agriculture, was spirituality. “Fundamentally I am neither a corn breeder nor an editor but a searcher for bringing the ‘Inner Light’ to outward manifestation,” he once said. That search for the “inner light” took Wallace away from the Presbyterianism of his grandfather and father and set him on a lifelong religious quest. Wallace’s far-ranging journey took him to meetings of the Theosophy Society, the free-thinking movement that embraced pantheism, and into a lifelong fascination with mysticism. Later in life he would fall under the influence of Nicholas Roerich, a Russian-born mystic, and Charles Roos, a Finnish-American who fancied himself a Native American medicine man. Wallace’s experiments in spirituality—he once described himself as a “practical mystic”—would provide considerable grist for his critics later in his career.25
Wallace’s years at Wallaces’ Farmer coincided with the postwar farm depression that his father confronted as agriculture secretary. Wallace did not excuse farmers from all responsibility for their condition. He believed in the “gospel of success,” and constantly preached the importance of hard work and good farming practices. “It would be interesting,” he wrote, “to search out the fourteen unluckiest farmers in Iowa. We could make out a score card for them, giving points to ignorance, laziness, slack business methods, lack of conveniences and out-of-date machinery.” At the same time, Wallace insisted that the farmers’ biggest problems were due to factors beyond their control. The farm and nonfarm economies had diverged, he believed, and farmers had been left behind. “The population of a great democratic nation can not indefinitely remain ‘half slave and half free,’ as is the case today,” he wrote, “with city labor getting twice the pre-war wages and the farmer getting little more than enough to pay his interest and taxes.” Wallace wrote articles in Wallaces’ Farmer supporting his father’s efforts to get government help for struggling farmers. He was convinced that the Republican Party, with its devotion to laissez-faire economics, would not be the farmers’ savior. In the 1924 presidential election, weeks after his father’s death, Wallace broke with family tradition and voted for Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette, the Progressive Party nominee.26
After the election, which Coolidge won handily, Wallace continued his campaign for farm relief. He traveled across the Farm Belt, speaking directly to farm families, to augment the campaign he was waging in print. He went to grange meetings, churches, and state fairs, explaining farm issues and urging his audience to demand that the government take action. His message was a simple one: that “a greater percentage of the income of the nation” should “be turned back to the mass of the people.” Wallace started out as a “terrible speaker,” a Wallaces’ Farmer colleague recalled, with a “bad platform presence.” He “wriggled” and either “tucked his chin in his collar and talked to the floor,” or “looked at the rafters and talked to them.” Wallace improved with practice, though he never became a riveting orator, and he was prone to speak for as long as an hour and a half. What he excelled at was explaining complex issues like the tariff or monetary policy to ordinary people. Wallace would look out at a room full of farmers and their wives, lean forward, and say: “This is a little hard to understand. It’s complicated. But we need to know about it to know what we have to do next.”27
As Wallace saw it, the farmers’ plight stemmed from a single problem: oversupply. Manufacturers could cut back on their production when prices were low, but farmers planted and harvested as much as they could, no matter how bad the market was. A decade before it became a popular view, Wallace argued that limits on production were the key to increasing crop prices and rescuing the farm economy. Writing in Wallaces’ Farmer under the slogan “Less Corn, More Clover, More Money,” he urged farmers to voluntarily reduce production. “There is such a thing as over-production,” he argued in 1922, “and if the farmers of the corn belt don’t believe it, they can soon convince themselves . . . if they continue to produce 3,000,000,000-bushel corn crops year after year.” Ultimately, though, Wallace understood that voluntary reduction was problematic, because the economic incentives worked against it. It was in the interest of farmers as a group to reduce their production to drive up prices, but it remained in the interest of any individual farmer to produce as much as he could. For crop reduction to be effective, Wallace concluded, the government would have to get involved.28
Although he believed crop reduction was the best solution to the farmers’ problems, Wallace also supported McNary-Haugenism. Despite the bill’s setbacks, farmers were still flocking to its promise of “equality for agriculture.” McNary-Haugenism had another important constituency: the businesses that made money on agriculture, which wanted the farm economy to revive but did not want to see a reduction in the amount of crops harvested. Two of the leading advocates for McNary-Haugenism were George Peek, the president of Moline Plow Company, and his colleague Hugh S. Johnson. The two men, who were close associates of the financier Bernard Baruch, freely admitted that they were motivated largely by financial self-interest. “You can’t sell a plow to a busted customer,” Peek liked to say. In 1927, Congress yielded to the Farm Belt pressure and passed the McNary-Haugen bill. President Coolidge vetoed it, as he promised he would. The following year, Congress passed it a second time. Wallaces’ Farmer printed the full text of the bill and made an urgent appeal to Coolidge to sign it, but he vetoed it again.29
Coolidge’s resistance to McNary-Haugen pushed Wallace even further from the Republican Party. The veto, he wrote, “has made it impossible for any farmer with self respect to vote for Coolidge or for any candidate who, like Hoover, supports [the] Coolidge policy toward agriculture.” When Coolidge decided not to run again in 1928 and the Republicans nominated Hoover, Wallace began giving serious consideration to supporting the Democratic nominee. Al Smith, the governor of New York, was good on farm issues, and he supported the McNary-Haugen bill. Many farmers, however, could not look past Smith’s Irish-Catholic background and his origins in the slums of the Lower East Side. Wallace went to hear Smith speak in Iowa and came away impressed. He did not make up his mind to support Smith, he later said, until the next day, when he went to a restaurant and heard his fellow diners make bigoted comments. Wallace supported Smith in Wallaces’ Farmer and campaigned for him. Despite his efforts, Hoover carried Iowa by a nearly two-to-one margin on his way to a landslide victory.30
Wallace returned from a trip to Europe in the fall of 1929 to watch the stock market crash and the farm economy go into free fall. Crop prices, which had been depressed for most of the decade, plunged further. There was no longer much hope for McNary-Haugenism, since Hoover had made clear that he would veto it, and the bill’s supporters did not have the votes for an override. Hoover’s response to the farm depression was to establish a Federal Farm Board, with a $500 million budget. It was authorized to help farmers store crops and market them, but it was n
ot allowed to buy crops or pay farmers to produce less. The farm board went further than Hoover’s Republican predecessors had been willing to go, but it did not address farming’s fundamental flaws, and its impact was minimal. Any modest good that Hoover did for farmers was more than outweighed by his disastrous tariff policy. In June 1930, Congress passed the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs on manufactured goods to historic levels. When more than one thousand economists had signed a petition urging Hoover to veto the bill. Wallace joined them, calling Smoot-Hawley “iniquitous.” The bill would hurt farmers as consumers, he argued, because high tariffs would drive up the price of the manufactured goods they bought. It would also hurt them as producers because it would invite other countries to impose their own tariffs, making it harder for American farmers to sell their crops overseas. Hoover signed Smoot-Hawley, and it set off the round of retaliatory tariffs that Wallace and others had feared, cutting into the export market for American farm products.31
In 1931, Wallace began to turn to “domestic allotment,” a new plan for farm relief being developed by M. L. Wilson, a professor at Montana State College, and other agriculture experts. It took the approach that Wallace had long favored, inducing farmers to work together to reduce their production, and since its creators were readers of Wallaces’ Farmer, his own writings may have helped to inspire it. The goal of domestic allotment, as with McNary-Haugenism, was to return agricultural prices to prewar “parity” levels. It proposed to do this by having the government pay farmers to take some of their land out of production. Farmers could choose to participate or not. The funds to pay farmers not to grow would come from a tax on agricultural “processors”—flour mills, canneries, packinghouses, and other businesses that acted as middlemen between farmers and consumers. The plan’s creators saw the processor tax as the best way of ensuring that domestic allotment would be self-financing. The processors would protest, but the plan’s drafters envisioned that they would have no trouble passing the cost on to consumers. Wallace became one of the leading proponents of domestic allotment, arguing for it in the pages of Wallaces’ Farmer and in his speaking tours across the Farm Belt.32