AGRICULTURE: Hunger

(See Cover) Every nation of Europe last week knew it was in a war of food. Food was rationed in every one of its 24 countries. Judged by the calory yardstick—that each active, mature male needs 3-4,000 calories a day merely to sustain health; 2,500 for a sedentary female—Europeans were not merely scantily nourished but acutely undernourished. The Poles were getting only 800 calories a day, the Belgians 960, Norwegians 1,500, Hollanders 1,900, the Germans from 2,250 to 2,600, the British 2.800. These figures, based on the average daily rations permitted, overlooked the larder-bare fact that actually very few people in any of the countries are lucky enough to find or be able to buy the amount of food they are entitled to.

Food, the most important single element in morale, is a crucial factor in World War II, and the struggle for it was one of the major battles last week. The plantings and the harvests of 1941 and 1942, if their power were understood and they were properly geared into the major strategy of the war, might be the determining factor. Certainly the nation which won the Battle of Food would sit at the head of the peace-conference table.

This struggle made the biggest battlefront in World War II—everywhere over the earth between sea level and timber line, wherever things grow and men eat. The Battle of Food was being fought as bitterly as the Battle of the Atlantic, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of Russia. Not many men yet realized that victory in the other great battles would never be as conclusive as a victory in the Battle of Food. But to those who did realize it, the fact was as sharp as a hunger pang. In the U.S. there was as yet no general awareness of the importance of food. But U.S. citizens were due for an awakening.

The man who was going to wake them up was Claude Raymond Wickard, generalissimo of the U.S. forces in the Battle of Food. He is a 48-year-old Indiana hog farmer. As Secretary of Agriculture he has the most widely developed system of alarm in the history of the earth: his 101,000 agents can personally reach 6,000,000 farmers in the U.S. within 48 hours. And within this week or next, every one of them will be reached.

The 30,000,000 farm people who participate in the nation’s No. 1 industry will be told of the international emergency. They will be advised to change their crop plans from the five great domestic basic crops—cotton, wheat, corn, tobacco, rice —over to the produce the world needs more desperately—dairy products (milk, eggs, butter, cheese), pork (and lard), beef, fruits, vegetables. They will not be told that they are entering the first phase of the most drastic change in U.S. farm economy since the invention of the harvester.

Claude Wickard (who regularly regrets that he was not named Andrew Jackson Wickard, like his father and his father’s father) has been Secretary of Agriculture since last Sept. 5, was Under Secretary from February to September 1940, before that was a director in the new AAA. But though his job is one of the most important in the Cabinet, though his decisions this year will change the lives of the 30,000,000 farm population and affect the lives of other millions on millions throughout the world, he is nationally unknown. A public that is widely aware that Mickey Rooney’s real name is Joe Yule Jr. has scarcely heard of Claude Wickard. But it is probable that he will not long remain unknown; in fact, the name of Claude Wickard may well become a household word in the next twelvemonth. For through him will be worked this part of the world’s economic earthquake.

Devastation. The world’s food supply was in a hellish mess. Hunger rode down the wind through the greenest Valley of Plenty in all the history of the world. There was more food on earth than ever before, and more people starving than ever before. And things would get worse before they got better.

The world’s system of food distrlbution —foreign trade—was tangled, disrupted, or dead still. In the places of peace, the world’s production of food was enormous, but out of balance (men went on growing record crops of wheat to add to record carry-overs which could not be shipped).

Europe’s food-producing areas had suffered in multiple ways. The war had drained off many farm workers; mass flights of refugees and waves of Nazi-compelled migration had drained off thousands more. In war zones, bombs, battles and defensive inundation had devastated miles of crops, tons of stores. As the Germans spread over Europe, suffering multiplied itself mile by mile, under the rigid Nazi system of food priorities: the Army first, then skilled workmen in Germany, German civilians, then the new subjects of the Nazis, with prisoners, the insane, Poles and Jews at the bottom.

Jews, Poles, Spanish, French, Belgians, and now the Greeks and Yugoslavs were on their way to starvation. The Dutch, the Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Italians, Swiss and Russians were not far behind. The Germans were feeding on the margin of nutrition; so were the British. If the way to men’s hearts was still through the stomach, food would win the war, decide the peace. If food were under international control after the war, that peace could be kept permanent.

Those were the ideas of Claude Wickard. Time & again he had trumpeted: “Food will win the war and write the peace.”

And Wickard’s ideas work. If they don’t work he gets another idea. As Secretary of Agriculture he has been charged by Franklin Roosevelt with one vast responslbility: to feed the U.S. and Great Britain during the defense emergency and the war. He has gone beyond that charge already, to take the steps which he believes will put the U.S. in a position to write the peace.

He thinks that the war can be won by feeding Britain and starving Europe. He thinks that then a peace can be written as the U.S. wants it written, by the formation of a sort of International Triple-A, based on world-trade agreements. He further thinks that this Peace of Plenty can then be enforced by the club of threatened U.S. production and subsidies.

The Fate of the Farmer. This is a large order. Most of Claude Wickard’s fellow citizens don’t know that this program is already under way. Still less do they know that feeding Great Britain involves changing the entire agricultural structure of the U.S. It further means that farming will now be brought wholly under Government control—as a matter of fact, has been already, except for details.

The first revolutionary reversal is that of the economy of scarcity. By last week the U.S. farmers were only beginning to realize that the lid is off. Production is now to be encouraged, not discouraged. Henry Wallace’s Ever-Normal Granary now becomes Claude Wickard’s Ever-Normal Granary for Ever-Normal Food Supply.

But the five basic crops which have always dominated U.S. farming, although they make up only one-quarter of the nation’s entire agricultural business, will no longer dominate it. Wickard wants less wheat, less cotton; more meat, more fats, more fruits and vegetables, more dairy products.

To effect this huge transition, complete control is necessary. Last week Claude Wickard had that control, and the signs of it were manifest in a wheat farmers’ revolt that was spreading throughout the Midwest. The AAA tells every farmer how many acres of wheat he can plant. Penalty for planting more: 49¢-a-bushel for all excess. A farmer cannot sell that excess to anybody until he pays the fine—which is about 50% of the price. He may not even feed that excess to any steer or hog which is to be sold off the farm, or to a cow whose milk is to be sold off, or a chicken whose eggs are to be sold. Without a marketing card, no dealer will buy a farmer’s wheat, for fear it is bootlegged. The only way in which a farmer can escape paying the fine is to give his wheat to the AAA, or to store it, which is merely postponement of the penalty.

This is the law of the land, and many a farmer last week, seeing the disappearance of his Constitutional, God-given right to plant what he pleased, groaned or raged under the burden of the law. But there was a reason for Wickard’s cracking down on wheat. The world has too much of it. The U.S. has 400,000,000 bu. now carried over from last year. This year’s crop, fifth largest in history, will be 923,600,000 bu. adding 913,000,000 bu. more to the carryover. Canada alone has a surplus of 529,000,000 bu., has another enormous crop coming along this year. Wheat is rotting on Argentine docks. If the dislocation were not too painful, the U.S. could get along indefinitely with half as much wheat as is now in production.

Cotton is a similar tragedy of overproduction and underconsumption. Here the U.S. is a little better off: this year’s crop, partly due to spring rains, partly to AAA control, is 5.4% less than last year’s.

Wickard and his aides, Milo Perkins, short, tweedy, slit-eyed ex-gunny-sack manufacturer from Texas, and handsome, iron-grey Rudolph M. (“Spike”) Evans, AAAdministrator, want to transform the useless miles of wheat and cotton into the things the world desperately needs. By tying the U.S. farmer tightly into the international war economy, they expect to succeed—and succeed not too gradually, either.

The world needs vitamins and fats. The world can take all the pork and beef, milk, eggs, cheese, butter, beans, tomatoes the U.S. can grow. Wickard and Perkins and Evans long ago saw the need coming; in many a speech they have boasted that the tragedy of underestimation (aluminum, transportation, critical materials), which has dealt the defense program almost mortal blows, has not happened and will not happen in U.S. agriculture. Last autumn Wickard urged U.S. farmers not to kill sows, this spring took the lid off hogs. Now the sky is the limit. Hog production may be up as high as 5% this autumn; 1942’s pig crop will be the biggest ever. Said Spike Evans: “One boar can spread himself a lot.”

Britain wants now and from now on: pork (and lard), eggs, milk, cheese, canned tomatoes and dried beans, dried fruits and concentrates of any kind. The Department began buying food for Britain even before the Lend-Lease Bill was signed, spent $75,000,000 through the Sur plus Marketing Administration by June 30. The rate of expenditure is climbing like a morning-glory in a hot dawn. Unofficial purchase figures for Britain since March 15: 153,019.615 lb. of lard; 49,727,118 lb. of canned pork; 88,318,500 lb. of cured and frozen pork; 70,004,500 yd. of sausage; 37,704,674 lb. of cheese; 2,766,300 cases of evaporated milk; 12,000,000 lb. of dry skim milk; 1,609,050 lb. of dried eggs; 21,766.690 lb. of frozen eggs; 1.354,661 cases of canned tomatoes; 172,368,400 lb. of dry beans. Secret food dumps have been established along the Atlantic seaboard; out of the caches food is being shipped steadily to British ports. In the next twelve months, rough estimates show the British will want from four to five times as much—$500.000,000 is not a bad guess at the total British purchases of U.S. food by July 1942.

Forclble Feedings. At first, Wickard and his aides almost had to shove U.S. food down the throats of the unimaginative Britons in charge of food buying. Asked for requests, the Britons (usually called “those pigheaded Britishers” in Washington) politely asked for cotton and wheat, which they did not need. Impatient, the President and Wickard dispatched U.S. experts to England. Then things began to straighten out. But for many weeks cooperation was poor to the point of stupidity. Typical conversation —U.S. official: “How would you like a couple of boatloads of beans?” British official: “We would like them very much, thank you.”

But by last week two cooperative Britons, alert and intelligent, lanky Robert H. Brand, shrewd international troubleshooter, and chinless, affable Maurice Hutton, were in the saddle and riding the U.S. kitchen range. With Wickard, Perkins, Evans, and dark, silent, shrewd, young Leslie A. Wheeler (Harry Hopkins’ man), they make up the Anglo-American Food Committee, which meets daily in Wickard’s office.

Perkins holds the whip over prices, through the power of his surplus-buying. Any time he quits buying, he can wreck the market. This power kills food specula tion. Outside of cotton, wheat and tobacco, they consider that there is no surplus problem except storage space—because they can always dump extra purchases into the daily free school lunches of 9,000,000 undernourished U.S. children, or into the tremendous maw of the food-stamp pro gram, feeding reliefworkers.

They are unanimous in their aim: feed Britain, starve Europe. Starving Europe is a matter of diplomacy, and thus is the province of the State Department, but Wickard sees eye-to-eye with Secretary of State Cordell Hull: occasional token ship ments of food to occupied countries, doled out solely for diplomatic effect.

They all see eye-to-eye on a bigger problem, too—the International Triple-A. Last week the first International Wheat Conference, pointing to that goal, was held in Washington. To spokesmen of the U.S., Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Great Britain, Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles made two points: 1) in another year wheat surpluses totaling 1½ billions of bushels will hang over the international markets; 2) mere discussion will not suffice. The members agreed, and knuckled down to work.

In the U.S. the international effects will show: 1) through the Government price-pegging of all major crops under the parity bills, and through Commodity Credit Corporation; 2) through Government accumulation of surpluses; 3) through Government encouragement, or even compulsion, of a changeover from the “basic crops” of the past to the new basic crops; 4) through a rising cost to the nation, annually totaling at least $2,000,000,000, of this farm program; 5) the establishment of this program as permanent, not temporary.

The Government will take the risks. Controls will spread into industry through controls on dealers, then on processors (as in the marketing agreements), on into distrlbution. The goal is more production, more consumption, a higher national—and eventually international—standard of living.

The flaw in this plan last week: German starvation was a long, long way off. In some ways British starvation was likelier, until the Battle of the Atlantic went the other way.

Therefore the transition in the U.S. farm economy must be as rapid as posslble, must accompany step by step the enormous transition that the defense program is gradually forcing into the U.S. industrial economy. The shape of the nation now must change unrecognizably. Claude Wickard, thinking of the present U.S. scale of living, and looking overseas at the hunger of the world, thought this change would be for the better.

Hog Farm to Cabinet. The change would be, to a large extent, in his hands. They are large hands, strong, thick, sure. He is a man of few nerves; doubts seldom gnaw his mind. Even the pressing fog of worry that hangs over Washington rolls back before his full smile. He is solid, his feet on earth, and his roots go deep into the middle of the U.S.

Last week he was on his farm in Indiana, the international emergency forgotten for a local crisis: his hogs had diarrhea. He hurried home to his farm in north central Indiana’s Carroll County. There his maternal great-grandfather was the first white settler, on a grant signed by Vice President Martin Van Buren in 1835. His paternal grandfather, Andrew Jackson Wickard, his worldly goods slung across his back, rode his one-eyed bay mare, “Chubby,” into the county’s Section 29 on a day in 1845.

In 1873 the elder Wickard himself built the gabled house in which Claude was born to young Andrew and Iva Leonora Kirkpatrick in 1893. Here Claude lived, married and raised two daughters—the only home he knew until he moved to Washington in 1933. At 17, Claude got fancy notions about going to Purdue University’s School of Agriculture at Lafayette, 25 miles away. He graduated in 1915, with old-fangled resolve and new-fangled ideas, went back to Section 29. He tested the soil, found it sour, made a homely epigram: “We’re mining the soil—not farming it.” He began experimenting. Heedless of neighbors’ alarms that he would kill the soil forever, he strewed phosphorus on the fields. He did nothing but farm, talked only about farming. His horizon stretched as far as he could see from his hog pastures; no farther.

In 1918 he married pretty, blue-eyed Louise Eckert, daughter of a Logansport saloonkeeper, moved her into the green-trimmed white farmhouse. The downstairs was expanded and slicked up a bit, but the old overstuffed furniture with the carefully placed antimacassars remained, and is there still.

Wickard became a good farmer, won ten gold medals from the Farm Bureau for coaxing a yield of 100 bushels to the acre from his cornfields. He went in heavily for hogs, got into the ton-litter competition, won another half-dozen medals. In five years he had bought another 100 acres abutting his ancestral 280 and had paid off a $5,000 mortgage. In 1926 he became the second Carroll County farmer to be singled out for the Prairie Farmer’s widely recognized distinction of “Master Farmer.”

In 1927 he became County President of the Farm Bureau, helped organize a farmers’ cooperative, which he headed.

Hired Man. Claude Wickard was growing beyond his own soil. Wickard began working in extension projects, traveling the State, talking to farmers. In Indiana, farm politics and State politics are often the same thing. In 1932 Wickard became Democratic precinct captain. A slim, dark young fellow, Wayne Coy, then publisher of the Delphi Citizen (now rapidly becoming President Roosevelt’s No. 1 trouble-shooter), got Wickard’s friends to persuade him to run for the State Senate. Wickard ran, won.

In July 1933 the corn-hog problem was a big chunk of the whole farm problem. Wickard became a member of a committee representing the corn-hog States, talked so earnestly in Des Moines that Al G. Black, then head of the Department’s corn-hog section, was impressed. He asked Wickard to come to work in Washington.

This was a stunner to Claude Wickard. He knew what it was to walk all day behind a plow pulled by a restless team; to pick corn with cold fingers and an aching back, to spread manure by hand, to shock wheat all day under a hot sun. He knew that hogs could suddenly stop getting fat and die of cholera; that if they didn’t die they could sell so cheaply there was no profit in the year’s long work. He wanted to do something about that. He wanted to help make farm life better.

He told Al Black that he wanted to ask his wife and to get his oats threshed. Black was impatient; oats were cheap then, and Wickard’s whole crop wouldn’t come to more than $200. But Wickard needed that $200. The rain held off, and he threshed his oats. His wife said Yes without a second’s hesitation. “She always had some fancy idea that I was going to work up to something big some day,” he said. Leaving extremely minute instructions on how to handle every posslble problem in his absence, he packed and drove to Washington—a hired man for the first time in his life.

Farmer into Secretary. Claude Wickard has a resonant baritone voice with the gravy-thick Indiana accent familiar to all the U.S. since Wendell Willkie went campaigning. Unimpressive, with neither the bashful charm nor the fog of mystical profundity that shrouds Henry Wallace, Wickard is a straightforward, balding, apple-cheeked farmer with a weather-bronzed, red-neck color that will last him all his days. He is five-feet-eight, weighs 180 lb., has to watch his weight. He looks more Irish than German, has a jaw so square and solid that it looks as if it had been laid out by a brick mason. His shoulders, neck and torso are wrestler-heavy.

He smoked for a while, but gave it up three years ago—it made him cough; drinks beer (not much) and wines. He is a bouncing, lusty, easy-smiling man, lighting into his work each morning with something of the same sort of heavy, rolling eagerness that his big Hampshire porkers show in running for the day’s first trough. He has a rich country sense of humor, loves long, involved, chronicle jokes, and has the heartiest laugh in the Cabinet—a booming roar that makes other people chuckle all the way out the White House lobby.

He is also humble, sincere and earnest; he believes everyone else is trying to do his best; he is still somewhat awed by the august company he keeps. When the Wickards moved into a larger apartment in Washington—The Westchester—he and his wife bought carpets carefully, with an eye to cutting them down some day to fit the rooms in the house on Indiana’s Section 29.

This was the man who stood last week on his ancestral acres in Carroll County. In his sun-faded blue workshirt and khaki trousers, his feet planted firmly in the manure-padded earth of his own barnyard, he looked out across the clover field in which hogs rooted and snuffled, across to the yellow sheen of his ripe wheat, on to the horizon. He saw a farther horizon than Carroll County’s—a horizon bounded by war but boundless with the promise of a better world. What he thought about now was not the rain clouds that might hurt the wheat but the dream of enough food for the whole world. In the words of his friend Milo Perkins:

“In every civilization of the past, bar none, if you took the most that it was posslble to produce and divided it among all who were alive to share it, the answer was always a lousy standard of living. . . . [But] if we produced all that we could and divided it among the people who are here to share it, we would come out with a very good standard of living for the first time in all history. That’s the most important material thing that’s happened to the human race since the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel.”