Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, Born (1888)

Remember the adage that “if we see farther, it is because of the giants on whose shoulders we stand?” Today’s entry is about a man for whom that saying could have been written, at least for the broad fields of agriculture, conservation and natural resources.

Henry Agard Wallace was born on October 7, 1888 (died 1965) on a farm in Orient, Iowa. Iowa is the birthplace of several great conservationists, but more about that later. The Wallace family was an agricultural dynasty. Both his father and grandfather played large roles in the development of modern agriculture, through crop breeding, publishing, and public service. The young Wallace did the same. He learned about crop breeding from George Washington Carver, the African-American innovator of peanut crops and products, who lived with the Wallace family. Wallace went to Iowa State, where his father taught agriculture, and both father and son helped establish several new agricultural science programs over the years. When his father went to Washington as President Coolidge’s Secretary of Agriculture, the younger Wallace took over editing the family’s farm journal, Wallace’s Farmer.

Wallace was an even better crop breeder than his father. He developed the first commercial hybrid corn variety to be marketed widely in the U.S., a product that laid the foundation for his company, Pioneer Hi-Bred, once the largest seed-corn producer in the world Later, he had similar success with hybrid egg-laying chickens (you might have eaten an egg from one of his company’s chickens this morning at breakfast).

Wallace grew up a Republican, but he became disillusioned with Republican farm policies during the Great Depression. He became a Democrat and served as an agricultural advisor to presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt. When Roosevelt was first elected in 1933, he brought Wallace to Washington as his Secretary of Agriculture. Wallace kept that job for eight years, before becoming Roosevelt’s vice-president in 1941.

Most biographies focus on Wallace’s years as vice-president (a checkered outcome), but his role as Secretary of Agriculture is our interest. Wallace believed that the world of commerce, agricultural and beyond, needed to be regulated by government so that it did not destroy the very basis on which it depended—that is, natural resources. He expressed his viewpoint in 1936: “Probably the most damaging indictment that can be made of the capitalistic system 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.”