National Affairs: Hog Raiser & Killer

Last week Secretary of Agriculture Wallace appointed to succeed George Nelson Peek as Agricultural Adjustment Administrator a short, nervous man named Chester Charles Davis, aged 46. Good friend of both Messrs. Peek and Wallace, Chester Davis has been in Washington since May when he was appointed to decide for John Farmer just how many hogs he may raise per annum. This he was able to do by virtue of long experience as a cowhand, hog raiser and wheat grower on his father’s farm in Iowa.

At 20 he threw down his milk bucket and went to Grinnell College. When he returned to farming it was as an owner. But every time he thought of the newspaper business his left eye twitched with excitement (a habit he still retains) and finally he got a partner to manage his Iowa farm and went to Redfield, S. Dak. (pop. 2,664) to edit a newspaper. At 30 he was made editor and manager of the influential Montana Farmer at Great Falls (pop. 28.822).

In 1921 he quit the publishing business to organize the State Department of Agriculture for Montana. Then the Illinois Agricultural Association plucked him out of Helena, made him director of grain marketing at Chicago. There he fell in with George Peek’s theories of agricultural legislation and together they fought for the McNary-Haugen bill. When Mr. Peek, disgusted with the G. O. P.’s nomination of Herbert Hoover in 1928, turned Democrat, Chester Davis beamed. He was already vice chairman of the Smith Independent Organizations Committee, chief thumper for the Brown Derby among dirt farmers. After the Hoover landslide they cooled their enthusiasm by starting a company to make things out of cornstalks. Unlike George Peek, Administrator Davis is thoroughly in sympathy with the A.A.A.’s production control program, is .acceptable to Socialistic Professor Rex Tugwell.