At least from the standpoint of folks who don't like long lectures, it may have been the best speech ever given.
Today we consider the topic, "Planting the future: Aldo Leopold and Henry A. Wallace on agriculture's next century." It is very tempting to repeat Reed's speech -- word for word -- and sit down.
For it is hardly arguable that now, 32 years after Henry A. Wallace's death, almost half a century after Aldo Leopold's untimely passing, the desire for profits is the great engine driving American agriculture.
The profit motive -- what Henry Wallace once called the "tyranny of greed" -- substantially guides the thinking of huge agricultural corporations, the transportation and banking and marketing industries that serve the agricultural sector, the great land grant colleges and universities, our state and federal politicians and policy-makers, the many commercial publications devoted to farming and, yes, the day-to-day practices of the great majority of our nation's commercial farmers.
One need look no further than the financial statements of the huge chemical corporations or the vast fields of corn -- unbroken by trees or ponds or fence rows -- or the horrendous hog factories that dot the agricultural landscape, for proof that the desire for profits rules our nation's most important and most fundamental enterprise.
"Probably the most damaging indictment that can be made of the capitalist system," Wallace wrote in 1936, "is the way in which its emphasis on unfettered individualism results in exploitation of natural resources in a manner to destroy the physical foundations of national longevity."
He continued: "Is there no way for the capitalist system to develop a mechanism for taking thought and planning action in terms of the general welfare for the long run as represented by the conservation of soil and other natural resources which are being competitively exploited?"
Six decades later, Wallace would likely still be posing the same question. Which is to say: on the subject of agriculture's next century, Wallace probably would not be sanguine.
Here it might be good to say a few words about Henry Agard Wallace, because there are probably some members of this audience who know very little about his life and public career. Others of you may associate him with politics of a vaguely radical nature. And a few of you may be thinking that Wallace himself was largely responsible for what ails American agriculture today.
First it might be said that Wallace's life does not lend itself well to brief summation. He was a complex man of unusually wide interests. He was, of course, a plant geneticist of worldwide renown. But he was also a groundbreaking statistician, a talented economist, and the respected editor of two prominent publications.
He was a man of unquenchable curiosity. His thirst for knowledge included not only plant life but extended to such diverse areas as diet and nutrition, Oriental religion and Native American ritual, astronomy and weather, genealogy and geography. He was interested in eggs, boomerangs, international trade, radiation, sheep dogs, institutional economics, languages, vitamins, symbols -- that pyramid with the eyeball peering at you from the back of the one dollar bill is there thanks to Henry Wallace.
He wrote or co-authored 17 books, scores of speeches and articles for popular and scientific journals, hundreds of editorials and many thousands of letters. His works include the first econometric study published in the United States, a book on corn-growing that was the standard textbook of its day, a study on the use of machines in statistical calculation and correlation, books on religion, constitutional theory, the history of corn, a full-employment economy, the strawberry and a defense of New Deal agricultural policy the title of which, New Frontiers, became the banner of John F. Kennedy's administration.
Along this busy journey, Wallace somehow found time to serve as secretary of agriculture during Franklin D. Roosevelt's first two terms, vice president of the United States from 1941-45, and secretary of commerce during Roosevelt's brief fourth term and for the initial 17 months of Harry Truman's presidency. In September 1946, Truman fired Wallace over their disagreement on foreign policy. In 1948, Wallace founded a third party, called the Progressive Party, and ran for the presidency on a platform opposed to the Truman Administration's Cold War and civil rights policies.
Subsequently Wallace retired from public life and returned to the great love of his life, agriculture, on a 110-acre farm he acquired in Westchester County, New York. There, while maintaining an active interest in the research activities of Pioneer Hi-Bred concentrated largely on strawberries, chickens and gladioli. He died in 1965, at age 77, of ALS, commonly called Lou Gehrig's Disease.
It should be added, for purposes of rounding out this thumbnail sketch of a complicated and brilliant man, that Wallace was a great galvanizer of other talented individuals. He was always challenging conventional wisdom and encouraging the exploration of new avenues of thought and action.
In the mid-1920s, for example, Wallace convinced a group of reluctant Iowa State professors and graduate students to attend a Saturday morning lecture series, where he taught them the basic principles of statistics. Out of these lectures grew the university's famous statistical laboratory, birthplace of the electronic computer.
Later in the 1920s, Wallace convinced his wife and a small group of friends to invest in an entirely new type of enterprise, a business devoted to the development, production and sale of hybrid seed corn. Pioneer Hi-Bred was the first company in the world to engage in the sale of hybrid seed, and it remains today a leader in the field. What followed was nothing less than an agricultural revolution.
In late 1940, Wallace fomented still another revolution. In December of that year, while still vice president-elect, he went to Mexico as President Roosevelt's personal emissary to a presidential inauguration. Afterwards he remained in Mexico for about a month, driving around with his wife Ilo, visiting farms and agricultural stations. What he saw appalled him. Mexican farmers were planting corn with pointed wooden sticks, producing ten bushels an acre with an expenditure of hundreds of man hours of back-breaking labor.
Upon returning to the United States, Wallace discussed this conditions with officials of the Rockefeller Foundation, and out of these conversations were born the international experiment stations which fostered the Green Revolution in Mexico, the Phillippines and other developing nations around the world.
These were big events -- the transformation of the government's relationship to agriculture under the New Deal, the sweeping change in agricultural practices that accompanied the popular acceptance of hybrid seed, the enormous economic and social change wrought in developing countries by the introduction of modern agricultural technology -- and in all of them Henry Wallace was a key player.
The ramifications of these events were, and continue to be, massive.
The hybrid revolution, for example, not only gave us higher yields and a more stable food supply but set in motion certain economic and environmental trends that concern all serious observers of agriculture today: increased industrialization and mechanization; the rise of monoculture and the widespread application of synthetic chemicals; the loss of genetic diversity; the continuing drain of our most precious natural resources, soil and water; and, of course, the seemingly inexorable trend toward bigger and bigger farms operated by fewer and fewer farmers.
It would be easy for me to stand here and assure you that Henry Wallace today would be on the side of the angels, bemoaning the ills of progress, or that he would have answers to the various problems raised by modern agricultural technology, or that he would express regret and long for the return of horse-drawn plows and open pollinated corn.
I cannot do so.
For one thing, Wallace was a progressive thinker to the core of his being. "The universe," Wallace said, "is a progressive universe. God is a progressive God. But there can be no progress without danger of retrogression. Genuine creative advance is only possible when man as a moral being steps in with the fiat, 'I will.' The fundamental 'I will' is 'I will accept the universe as offering to man the most joyous and extraordinary possibilities. I will cooperate with all forms of life and with my fellow man to bring these potentialities into existence.'"
This is not the call of the Luddite, who would halt technological advance and return to the good old days that never were, but of one who would shape and guide progress in ways to make the universe better for all living things.
For another thing, trying to guess what Henry Wallace would have to say today about any subject is a hazardous enterprise. He was an original thinker, self-taught to a highly unusual degree, whose mind rebelled at the conventional and doctrinaire. It is safe to say that, if Wallace were here today, he would surprise and anger and inspire and challenge us, just as he did during his years on the public stage, by questioning the accepted wisdom of the moment and pointing toward new avenues of thought and scientific inquiry.
Having said that, it is also safe to assume that Henry Wallace's remarks today would be informed by certain central values that remained unchanged throughout his lifetime. Indeed, these core beliefs were remarkably constant not only in Henry A. Wallace's life but in the lives of his father and grandfather before him, all men who devoted their careers and considerable talent to the Jeffersonian ideal of a healthy, vibrant agricultural civilization. Surely these values would guide him as he looked to agriculture's next century.
The first of these values was abundance.
"If I were to draw conclusions from my life so far," Wallace said in the oral history he gave to Columbia University in 1951, "I would say that the purpose of existence here on earth is to improve the quality and increase the abundance of joyous living. Jesus took on himself the highest of all missions when he said that he came to give a more abundant life to humanity. The improved quality and increased abundance of life is a progressive matter and has not only to do with human life but with all plants and animals as well."
Scarcity, poverty, misery, disease, malnutrition, fear, the sense of sorrow and hopelessness, there were obstacles in the path of joyous living and to be struggled against. In this, mankind's great duty, farmers have a special opportunity to serve God and their fellow man, for certainly the beginning of all abundance is sufficient food.
At the beginning of the wonderful little book on the history of corn written by Wallace and William L. Brown in 1956, an entire page is given to a single quotation from Gulliver's Travels. It reads: "And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together."
Wallace was certainly no advocate of over-production. The entire thrust of the New Deal farm program was an attempt to create a socially responsible method of controlling that constant curse of American agriculture. But neither would he have assumed, I believe, that mankind has done all it can do, that some human beings living in Africa or other poverty-stricken, over-populated regions of the world must live without adequate food and fiber because of the environmental hazards posed by the spread of modern technology. Wallace's impulse, I suspect, would be to overcome the hazards, not to live in fear of them.
This leads to another of Wallace's core beliefs: the importance of honest science and the corresponding duty of science to serve mankind honestly. Like many optimistic men of his era, Wallace placed great faith in science and assumed that problems created by science could be solved by science. But he never tired of reminding scientists of their duty "to contribute with more certainty to human welfare." The cause of "true science," he said, was ever one and the same as the cause of freedom and democracy -- that is to say, the common man -- and should never be confused with the cause of governments, ideologies, corporations and interest groups.
To serve in this fashion, Wallace said, scientists must develop what he called a "social point of view" dedicated to an improved standard of living and an enhanced quality of life. Here, for example, is Wallace talking about agricultural science in 1933: "I have no patience with those who claim that the present surplus of farm products means that we should stop our efforts at improved agricultural efficiency. What we need is not less science in farming, but more science in economics. We need economic machinery corresponding in its precision, its power and its delicacy of adjustment to our scientific machinery."
Perhaps, he speculated, scientists were too influenced by the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest to recognize their duty to mankind. Perhaps they came too much from the mold of mathematicians and physicists like Newton and Galileo, and not enough from the mold of biologists such as Pasteur. In any case, he said, "I have the feeling that it is time for the human race to devote its attention more definitely toward the life side rather than the mechanical side of things."
A third important core value, which undoubtedly Wallace would want to discuss at the Leopold Center, was conservation. Beginning with his grandfather, who was a member of Theodore Roosevelt's Country Life Commission and served as the president of the Conservation Congress, conservation of the soil and other natural resources was of paramount importance to the Wallace family.
"Of all the circumstances which have combined to make this nation different from the nations of the Old World," Wallace wrote, "rich soil and plenty of it, free or nearly so to all comers, stands first. Freeholders in a land of fabulous fertility, guarded by great oceans from foreign invasion, could erect separate strongholds of individual enterprise, free speech and free conscience. In no spread-eagle sense, but in plain truth, liberty and equality have been a natural outgrowth of our great gift of soil."
But, he added, "the dynamic quality which characterizes civilized man does not leave such a gift unmodified. If nature was prodigal with us, we have been ten times more prodigal with her. During the past 150 years, we white men have destroyed more soil, timber and wild-life than the Indians, left to themselves, would have destroyed in many thousands of years."
Wallace, I suspect, would have been attracted to Aldo Leopold's notion that conservation, to be truly successful, had to be accepted as part of the ethic of democracy. The government, Leopold said, could not serve as a husbandman of the land; only people devoted to the land could serve that task.
At the same time, it should be noted that Wallace's own experience with voluntary acceptance of conservationist values was not good. During the 1920s, for example, he began a campaign to convince farmers they and their land would benefit from restricting the planting of cash crops and increasing the use of soil-building cover crops. His slogan was "Less corn, more clover, more money." The result was a total failure; every farmer was perfectly willing to see his neighbor plant less corn, while he planted more.
This may not speak well of American social consciousness, but it taught Wallace a lesson. Government, he believed, somehow had to even the playing field. It had to make conservation -- clearly of benefit to the whole society -- somehow not economically detrimental to the individual farmer. With respect to land use, Wallace believed a certain amount of government intrusion was probably inevitable and desirable.
Finally, were Wallace here today, I suspect he would express hearty sympathy for the values encompassed by the sustainable agriculture movement. As far as I can determine, Wallace never used the term "sustainable agriculture," but the cause of keeping farm families on the land, earning an honest living in a way not destructive to the environment, was a large part of the Wallace family's mission for three generations.
The dream of a strong agricultural civilization slowly evaporated before the Wallaces' eyes, as the farm population dwindled from more than 80 percent when Henry Wallace's grandfather was a young man on a Pennsylvania farm, to 42 percent when Henry A. was born in Adair County in 1888, to 35 percent when he was a student here at Iowa State, to just over 23 percent when he left his position as Secretary of Agriculture, to 8.7 percent and falling at the time of his death.
"I shudder for my country when such a small percentage of our people have had childhood experience of growing things," he wrote to a friend.
Still, to the very end of his life, Wallace nurtured the hope that this migration off the land could be reversed -- indeed should be reversed if America was to remain a healthy and well-balanced society.
As early as 1944, he said, "Fifty years ago the slogan 'Ten acres and liberty' was a trap which made fools of most of those who fell for it. But today, with all the conveniences which rural electrification and good roads made possible, five or ten acres can furnish an enjoyable and profitable outlet for the energies of a growing family. Sunshine and fresh air, combined with good milk and eggs and the vegetables and fruits which can be preserved the year round, will make the small farm a joy forever to all of those who have an instinct for the soil and the living plants and animals which grow upon it."
In the final years of his life, Wallace devoted much effort toward plans that would encourage the decentralization of industry, enabling families to live on small amounts of land while deriving part of their income elsewhere. He died before he saw that dream realized.
But to the extent that it lives today, in groups such as this, Henry A. Wallace would truly glory in it and see hope for the future. The alternative to this vision is not a pleasant one. As Wallace said: "People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but mother nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely. The soil is the mother of man, and if we forget her, life eventually weakens."
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