Iowa Heritage Illustrated

Swaim, Ginalie

Cora Bussey Hillis: Woman of Vision

Frese, Stephen J

Comrade Khrushchev and Farmer Garst: Summit in an Iowa Cornfield

Derr, Nancy

The Babel Proclamation

English

Iowa Heritage Illustrated, vol.85 no.4, Winter 2004

Iowa Heritage Illustrated, vol.85 no.2-3, Summer-Fall 2004

Bergman, Marvin

Reading the Past: Jane Addams Comes of Age

Farm Women & Egg Money

Hyde, John

Henry A. Wallace
Agriculturalist for the Common Man
by John Hyde
U
pon the death of Henry A. Wallace in 1965, Sec­
retary of Agriculture Orville Freeman remarked 
that "no single individual has contributed more 
to the abundance we enjoy today than Henry Wallace." 
Wallace's lifelong interest in food and agriculture was 
as much a part of his genetic makeup as his unruly au­
burn hair and big toothy grin. His beloved grandfather, 
a preacher and farm editor known to thousands of Iowa 
families as "Uncle Henry," was a passionate advocate 
of scientific farming and a vibrant agricultural civiliza­
tion. His father—first as a professor at Iowa State Col­
lege, then as an editor of the Iowa-based farm journal, 
Wallaces' Farmer, and eventually as secretary of agricul­
ture—carried the cause to a national level. Finally, Henry 
A. Wallace made the family's mission truly interna­
tional.
From an early age, Wallace was fascinated by plant 
life, and he displayed a level of intellectual curiosity 
and skepticism that remained his lifelong hallmark. As 
a boy still in his early teens, he challenged the scientific 
validity of the highly popular "corn shows"—based on 
the theory that the best-looking corn was also the
best-producing corn—and all but destroyed them within 
two decades. As a young man just out of Iowa State 
College, he began the corn-breeding experiments that 
onsumed much of his time and interest for almost 20 
years. By 1920, having absorbed the scientific work of 
pioneering plant geneticists George Harrison Shull and 
Edward East, Wallace was one of a handful of people in 
the nation who understood the huge potential of hy­
bridization.
After he took over from his father, Henry C., as 
editor of Wallaces' Farmer, Henry A. used his position as 
a bully pulpit from which he tirelessly preached the vir­
tues of hybrid seed. "There's a revolution coming," he 
told his readers. Most farmers didn't know what Wallace 
was so excited about. And even if they did grasp the
Henry A. Wallace inspects hybrid corn in his garage in Des 
Moines. In 1921 he wrote in Wallaces’Farmer, “ For fifteen years 
I have tried to understand corn plants, until now the individu­
ality of corn plants is almost as interesting to me as the per­
sonality of animals or human beings.”
70 Iowa Heritage Illustrated
H E N R Y *  W A L L A C E  P A P E R S . S P E C IA L  C O L L E C T IO N S  D E P A R T M E N T . U N IV E R S IT Y  O F  IO W A  L IB R A R IE S . IO W A  C IT Y  IO W A
Summer 2003 71
«
S H S I (IO W A  C iT Y )
Young Henry A. Wallace shows hybrid corn to his grandfather, 
“Uncle Henry” Wallace, influential editor of Wallaces' Farmer.
importance of hybridization, there was no practical sys­
tem to research, develop, and distribute hybrid seed. In 
short, farmers couldn't buy hybrid seed even if they 
wanted to. Finally, in 1926, Wallace came up with a plan 
to make this miracle product available. He formed a 
company in Des Moines that came to be called Pioneer 
Hi-Bred International and set about to develop, grow, 
and sell hybrid corn seed. Most of the money to form 
the company came from the modest inheritance of his 
wife, Ilo Wallace; banks, doubtful that farmers would 
pay for something they could hand-select for free, re­
fused to offer loans. It was the world's first hybrid seed 
company, something "entirely new under the sun," as 
Wallace put it.
This "entirely new" product was so promising that 
its sales increased even in the midst of an agricultural 
depression the likes of which the country had never 
seen. In 1933, the year of "penny auctions" and 
ten-cents-a-bushel corn, a fraction of 1 percent of all the 
farmland in Iowa was planted with hybrid seed; ten 
years later, the percentage was 99.5. Nationally, the yield
of corn per acre in 1933 was 24.1 bushels per acre, about 
the same as it was during the Civil War. Ten years later 
it was 31 bushels per acre. By 1981, it was more than 
109 bushels per acre. In 2001 in Iowa, one farmer—yes, 
using Pioneer Hi-Bred seed—produced more than 400 
bushels per acre!
William Brown, a talented young Pioneer Hi-Bred 
geneticist who eventually became the company's presi­
dent, later referred to the dramatic growth in the use of 
hybrid seed as the world's "first green revolution." "The 
introduction of U.S. hybrid maize into Europe follow­
ing World War II saved countless lives and transformed 
agriculture in that part of the world in an incredibly 
short period of time," Brown wrote. "The methodology 
of hybrid development quickly spread from the United 
States throughout the developed world, and U.S. ge­
netic materials, where adapted, greatly enhanced the 
rapid development of commercial hybrids. Many per­
sons deserve credit for this revolution, among the fore­
most of whom is H. A. Wallace."
The founding of Pioneer Hi-Bred and the popular­
ization of hybrid corn was, of course, only a part of the 
mark Wallace left on food and agriculture. As an editor 
and author he wrote important works on agricultural 
practices and economics. One of his little-noticed 
achievements was his role in introducing statistics as 
an academic discipline at Iowa State College. He re­
garded statistics as an important tool in agricultural re­
search and crop development. Through his efforts, in­
cluding his influential book, Machine Correlation and 
Calculation, written with Professor George Snedecor, 
Iowa State became world-famous for its statistics pro­
gram.
As secretary of agriculture during the New Deal, 
Wallace put in place a farm program described at the 
time as the most sweeping societal experiment ever at­
tempted by the federal government. He greatly ex­
panded the department's research and conservation 
programs and ushered in innovative social policy ini­
tiatives such as the food stamp and school lunch pro­
grams. He devised farsighted programs such as the 
"Ever-Normal Granary," whereby crops would be 
stored up in good years to be used up in lean years; that 
program, enacted into law in 1938, was the action 
Wallace was most proud of as secretary of agriculture 
and did much to enhance national food security during 
World War II.
Nor did Wallace's influence on agriculture end 
when his days on the public stage were over. After his 
disastrous run for the presidency as the candidate of 
the left-wing Progressive Party in 1948, Wallace returned 
to his New York State farm and resumed his career as a
72 Iowa Heritage Illustrated
H
E
N
R
Y
 A
 
W
A
LL
A
C
E
 P
A
P
E
R
S
. 
S
P
E
C
IA
L 
C
O
LL
E
C
T
IO
N
S
 D
E
P
A
R
T
M
E
N
T
. 
U
N
IV
E
R
S
IT
Y
 O
F
 IO
W
A
 L
IB
R
A
R
IE
S
. 
IO
W
A
 C
IT
Y
. 
IO
W
A
geneticist and experimental farmer. He had a fondness der for my country," Wallace wrote to a friend, "when 
for working with strawberries, gladioli, chickens, and, such a small percentage of our people have had child- 
of course, corn. So successful was his chicken breeding hood experience growing things." 
that at one point, half of the egg-laying hens in the world 
were genetically related to Henry Wallace's chickens.
And he retained his keen interest in policies that ta eviewing Wallace's life and contributions to ag-
would promote family agriculture, a strong rural K  ricultural production, one can hardly help but
economy, and sustainable farming practices. Even as he m.wonder how he would have viewed this or that
lay dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease in 1965, Wallace was issue of our time—specifically what he would have 
busily engaged in correspondence with President thought about the dramatic developments now taking
Johnson, setting out a vision of improving rural life place in the area of biotechnology and genetically modi-
through a policy of industrial decentralization. "I shud- fied organisms. One must be careful when speculating
about how he would respond, because 
Wallace is a particularly difficult per­
son to predict. He was an unusual, 
sometimes eccentric, man. He was a 
fiercely independent thinker, entirely 
unimpressed by conventional wisdom, 
and he was insatiably curious about al­
most everything—from the flight of 
boomerangs to the rituals of Native 
Americans. He experimented with odd 
diets, dabbled in esoteric religions, 
taught himself Spanish, and toyed with 
astrology. He sought truth down any 
path, no matter how untraveled, and 
he was completely unafraid of taking 
a wrong turn. So, having issued fair 
warning that I'm on hazardous 
ground, here are some thoughts about 
Wallace and agriculture—present and 
future.
If we know anything for certain 
about Henry Wallace, it is that he be­
lieved that all men and women in ev­
ery nation deserved to share in the 
earth's bounty. Near the end of the 
lengthy oral history that he gave to 
Columbia University, Wallace re­
marked: "If I were to draw conclusions 
from my life so far, 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 mis­
sions when he said that he came to give 
a more abundant life to humanity. The 
improved quality and increased abun-
Rudolph Martin Evans (in white hat) inspects corn with Wallace (hatless). As danct ot lift is a piogrtssix t mattei and 
special assistant to the secretary of agriculture in I 936, and administrator of the '̂nl\ to do \\ ith human life but
Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1938, Evans worked closely with with all plants and animals as well. 
Wallace, who was secretary of agriculture from I 933 to I 940. With that as the bedrock of his phi-
Summer 2003 73

losophy, my guess is that Wallace would have been for 
those scientific advances that offer the hope of better 
lives—indeed, offer the prospect of life itself—to mil­
lions and millions of people around the world. I believe 
that Wallace would have agreed with Herbert Hoover 
that food should never be used as a weapon—in ideo­
logical arguments any more than in war. 1 believe that 
Wallace would have agreed with George Washington 
Carver that science should be the servant of human­
kind and not its master. And I believe he would have 
agreed with Norman Borlaug that biotechnology and 
genetic engineering, wisely used, offer a richer and more 
abundant life to millions of people.
Having said that, I think Wallace would have found 
many aspects of contemporary agriculture troubling. He 
would, in my view, be greatly alarmed by the increas­
ing control large corporations have over the food sup­
ply, and in particular by the right of corporations to 
patent life forms. (In his own business life, Wallace never
attempted to patent his work; he believed that the way
✓
to stay successful was to keep continually ahead of your 
competition, not to stifle it.) He would see the lack of 
regard for sound environmental practices by large-scale 
agribusinesses as foolhardy at best; Wallace was not a 
sentimental man, but the thought of half of Iowa's top­
soil being washed out to sea would have made him want 
to cry. He would have been appalled by government 
policies that encourage overproduction and ongoing 
concentration of wealth and property.
But Wallace was no Luddite. Faced with a problem 
created by science, he always saw the solution as more 
science, not less. He was a great respecter of fact. He 
would have wanted to know everything that could be 
known about the environmental and public health con­
sequences of genetically modified food, and then he 
would want to address those consequences with scien­
tific research. "I have no patience with those who claim 
that the present surplus of farm products means that
HENRY A. WALLACE PAPERS. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DEPARTMENT. UNIVERSITY OF IOWA LIBRARIES. IOWA CITY. IOWA
In Asia in I 944, Wallace takes a m om ent  to tend crops. “ Eighty percent of [Asians] live on the land,” the vice president told 
conservationists. “ It is our privilege and responsibility to help them to a better way of living for . . .  ourselves as well as for them.”
Summer 2003 75
we should stop our efforts at improved agricultural ef­
ficiency/' he wrote in 1933 at the height of our country's 
greatest economic crisis. "What we need is not less sci­
ence 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."
HENRY A WALLACE PAPERS. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DEPARTMENT. UNIVERSITY OF IOWA LIBRARIES. IOWA COY. IOWA
33
IWf
life- r
.4
,  ̂ **«%• ^
V.
afi i
•cV«
,v vc.r îr; Bfe
iSStifMf
*•>'/ - • - v > .  .*e - •
^  * V , -
i»»W
4 4- V ¡£*3
A
 few months after the United States entered 
World War II, a war he vigorously sup­
ported in the hope that it would bring democ­
racy to the entire world, Wallace delivered his most 
famous speech. It was titled "The Price of Free World 
Victory," but is most often referred to as the "Century 
of the Common Man" speech after its most quoted 
phrase. Even now, some 60 years after its delivery, the 
following passage from that speech speaks to Wallace's 
vision of peace and abundance: "Modern science, which 
is a by-product and an essential part of the people's revo­
lution, has made it technologically possible to see that 
all of the people of the world get enough to eat. Half in 
fun and half seriously, I said the other day to Madame 
Litvinov [wife of the Russian ambassador to the U.S.]: 
'The object of this war is to make sure that everybody 
in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of 
milk a day.' She replied: 'Yes, even half a pint.' The peace 
must mean a better standard of living for the common 
man, not merely in the United States and England, but 
also in India, Russia, China, and Latin America—not 
merely in the United Nations, but also in Germany and 
Italy and Japan.
"Some have spoken of the 'American Century.' I 
say that the century on which we are entering—the cen­
tury which will come out of this war—can be and must 
be the century of the common man. Everywhere the 
common man must learn to build his own industries 
with his own hands in a practical fashion. Everywhere 
the common man must learn to increase his productiv­
ity so that he and his children can eventually pay to the 
world community all that they have received.... Mod­
ern science, when devoted wholeheartedly to the gen­
eral welfare, has in it potentialities of which we do not 
yet dream."
Few did more than Henry A. Wallace to use modern 
science to lay the foundations in agricultural practice 
and policy for such a century of the common man. ❖
Efforts by Central American farmers like Ignacio Vuch still 
captured Wallace’s interest late in life. Visiting Guatemala in 
February 1964, Wallace took note of Vuch’s truck garden 
crops of beans, onions, strawberries, and corn, as well as his 
practice of saving beans for seeds and growing beans on poles.
John H yde is execu tive director o f  the F und fo r  Investigative  
Journalism , a nonpro fit organiza tion  that aw ards g ra n ts  to 
freelance journ a lis ts  and independent publications. H yde is co­
author, w ith  John C. Culver, o f  American Dreamer: A Life of 
H enry A. Wallace.
NOTE ON SOURCES
The research sources for this article are the same as those used for the Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award-winning biography ofWallace. coauthored by John C. Culver and John 
Hyde: American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace (New YorlcW. W. Norton & Co., 2000).The book is fully annotated and includes a comprehensive bibliography.
The editor thanks the Herbert Hoover Presidential Ubrary-Museum, West Branch, Iowa, for permission to  publish this essay, first presented at its October 2002 symposium, 
"Four lowans Who Fed the World." (Copyright held by the Hoover Library-Museum.)
76 Iowa Heritage Illustrated


Henry A. Wallace: Agriculturalist for the Common Man

Draper, Mary

From Vassar College to Small-Town Iowa: Winning World War II

Iowa Heritage Illustrated, vol.84 no.4, Winter 2003