[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 117 (Friday, August 2, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9644-S9647]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HENRY A. WALLACE
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I would like to take this
opportunity to bring to the attention of the Senate a notable speech by
one of our colleagues, and one of my fellow Iowans, Senator John C.
Culver. The subject of Senator Culver's speech is that of another
prominent Iowan, Henry A. Wallace. Both these men embody the wisdom and
insight of the residents of the great State of Iowa.
Senator Culver's distinguished speech, given March 14 at the Carnegie
Institution of Washington, marked the inaugural of the Henry A. Wallace
Annual Lecture. Sponsored by a research center named after Henry A.
Wallace, the annual lecture will address agricultural science,
technology, and public policy. Senator Culver's speech, entitled
``Seeds and Science: Henry A. Wallace on Agriculture and Human
Progress,'' held listeners spellbound as he described the life and
times of a pragmatic farmer from Iowa.
As many of you know, Henry A. Wallace served our country in many
ways: as a farmer, editor, scientist, Secretary of Agriculture,
Secretary of Commerce, and Vice-President. As a farmer, Wallace
realized the importance of environmental stewardship. As he once wrote,
``The soil is the mother of man and if we forget her, life eventually
weakens.'' While Henry A. Wallace made many contributions to this
Nation for which we thank him, it is perhaps Mother Nature who thanks
him the most.
I ask that the text of Senator Culver's speech appear in the Record.
Seeds and Science: Henry A. Wallace on Agriculture and Human Progress--
Guest Lecturer: Senator John C. Culver
Sometime in 1933, while he was battling to rescue American
agriculture from its greatest crisis, Secretary of
Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace was invited to be the
featured guest at a swanky party in New York City. It was not
the sort of thing Wallace enjoyed. A quiet, cerebral man,
Wallace often found such social functions uncomfortable. He
wasn't good at flattery or small talk, had no interest in
gossip and disdained off-color humor.
Gathered around him that evening was a group of writers,
planners, technicians and other members of the New York
intelligensia eager to take his measure. Wallace was still
something of a mystery to them, as he was to most of the
nation. At age 44, he was the youngest member of President
Roosevelt's Cabinet. The son and grandson of prominent Iowa
Republicans--his father had served in the Harding and
Coolidge cabinets--Wallace was still a registered Republican
himself. He was, by background, an editor and corn breeder;
he had never sought public office and had accepted his
current position with considerable reluctance.
Perhaps most intriguing to the people in the room was the
depth and breadth of Wallace's intellectual interests.
Wallace was not only a geneticist and journalist, he was one
of the nation's leading agriculture economists, an authority
on statistics and author of the leading text on corn growing.
His interests ranged from diet to religion, from weather to
monetary policy, from conservation to Native American
folklore. Somewhere along the line, he also found time to
start the world's first--and still the world's largest and
most successful--hybrid seed corn company.
So his small audience had much to ask Wallace about and
they peppered him with questions. Finally one of them
inquired: ``Mr. Wallace, if you had to pick the one quality
which you thought most important for a man to have in plant-
breeding work, what would it be?'' The man settled back to
enjoy a long scholarly reply but Wallace's response was brief
and startling. Without a moment's hesitation he said:
``Sympathy for the plant.''
For Wallace, the failure to understand the nature of plants
and animals--their structure and purpose, their needs and
cycles--was symptomatic of modern man's inability to
understand life itself. ``When you sweat on the land with a
purpose in mind you build character,'' he wrote. ``Watching
things grow, whether plant or animal, is all important. One
of the wisest of the old Anglo-Saxon sayings is, `The eye of
the master fattens the ox.' How, he wondered, could man grasp
the essence of life without taking into account the totality
of living things: plants and animals and human beings and the
spirit that animates their existence? He later acknowledged
that he usually liked plants better than animals, but he
appreciated the latter because ``they gave [the] manure that
nourished the plants.''
Wallace had nothing sentimental in mind when he used the
expression ``sympathy for the plant.'' Rather, he viewed
``sympathy'' as an outgrowth of rigorous observation and
exacting employment of scientific principles. Throughout his
life, beginning at an unusually early age, Wallace placed
great store in the value of scientific understanding. By
training and temperament, he was an unusually unsentimental
man.
About 1904, when Henry Wallace was in his mid-teens, he
attended a young farmer's ``corn show'' and watched as ears
of corn were judged by their appearance. The ``beauty
contest'' winners, based on their uniformity, shape, color
and size, were deemed to be the superior breeding stock.
Professor P.G. Holden, part crusading scientist and part
flamboyant showman, was the great evangelist of corn, and he
was undoubtedly the best-known corn show judge in the United
States. He was also a personal friend of the Wallace family.
Young Henry's grandfather, the beloved preacher-journalist
known to thousands of midwestern readers as ``Uncle Henry''
Wallace, had been largely responsible for bringing Holden to
his teaching position at Iowa State.
The story of what happened at that corn show was later
written by Paul de Kruif, author of a colorful book on the
great food scientist called The Hunger Fighters:
Gravely, for the instruction of youth, [Holden] held up a
great cylindrical ear that was not so good to his learned
eye. ``This ear, boys, shows a marked lack of constitution!''
cried Holden. ``And look at this one for contrast,'' said he.
``Observe its remarkably strong middle!'' And such is the
folly of teaching--that every boy, hypnotized, could do none
other than see what Holden wanted him to see. Solemnly the
professor judged and awarded the medal to the very finest ear
of all those hundreds of ears of maize, and pronounced it
champion.
A mob of disappointed farm boys straggled out of the room.
Henry stayed. The professor unbent. ``Now young man, if you
really want proof that I'm right, why don't you take thirty
or so of these prize ears? Then next spring plant them! Plant
them, one ear to a row of corn. Then harvest them next fall--
and measure the yield of them.''
The next spring Henry Wallace took those 33 fine ears,
shelled them into separate piles, stuck them under the soil,
four kernels to a hill, in 33 rows, one ear to a row, on a
little piece of land his father gave him. What he learned
from those 33 rows of corn, of course, was that Holden and
his corn shows were all wet. The ten ears of corn judged
fairest by the good professor were among the poorest yielders
in the test, and some of the ugliest
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ears produced the highest yields. Conventional wisdom or not,
Holden's personal friendship with the Wallace family
notwithstanding, the scientific experiment showed the
appearance of corn had nothing whatever to do with its yield.
As Wallace himself put it succinctly: ``What's looks to a
hog?''
Henry Wallace's first lesson in agricultural
experimentation came from his mother, May, a woman endowed
with strong religious convictions and a great love of plants.
May Wallace taught her young son how to cross-breed
pansies, to his great delight. ``It happened that in that
particular outcome, the flowers were not as pretty as
either parent, but I attributed to them unusual value
simply because they had been crossed.'' His mother also
frequently said, ``Henry, always remember, you are a
Wallace and a gentleman.'' Wallace never forgot.
From his father and grandfather he inherited his first and
last names, a tradition of progressive thinking and an
intense belief in the value of ``a distinctive and satisfying
rural civilization'' that offered ``nothing less than the
comforts and the cultural elements of the best city life
blended with the individualism and the contact with nature
that the country gives.'' His father and grandfather had
founded the family's influential farm journal, Wallaces'
Farmer, and summed up their philosophy in six words that
appeared on the cover of every issue: ``Good farming, clear
thinking, right living.''
Another important influence on young Henry, as he was
called in the family, occurred when he was a very young boy.
Wallace had moved with his family to Ames, Iowa, where his
father completed his degree at Iowa State and taught for a
few years as a professor of dairying. There the shy boy was
befriended by one of his father's students, a gangly black
man by the name of George Washington Carver, who had been
born in slavery. Together this unlikely duo--one who became
the nation's greatest secretary of agriculture, and the other
who gained international fame as a botanist and chemist--
tramped through the woods and fields around Ames exploring
nature in intimate detail. Six decades later, it was said,
Henry Wallace was still able to impress agrostologists with
the minute knowledge of grasses he learned at Carver's feet.
His lifelong fondness for grass was later evidenced by a
national radio address he made while Secretary of Agriculture
entitled ``The Strength and Quietness of Grass.''
It was Carver, Wallace said, who introduced him to the
``mysteries of botany and plant fertilization'' and who
demonstrated that ``superior ability is not the exclusive
possession of any one group or class. It may arise
anywhere,'' Wallace noted, ``provided men are given the right
opportunities.'' He also learned from Carver an approach to
science: ``Carver's search for new truth,'' Wallace later
observed, ``both as botanist and chemist, was a three-pronged
approach involving himself, his problem, and his Maker.'' He
earnestly believed that God was in every plant and rock and
tree and in every human being, and that he was obligated not
only to be intensely interested but to call on the God in
whom he so deeply believed and felt as a creative force all
around him. ``There is, of course, no scientific way of
proving Carver . . . right or wrong,'' Wallace noted. ``But
we can safely say,'' he added, ``that if a corn breeder has a
real love for his plants and stays close to them in the
field, his net result, in the long run, may be a scientific
triumph, the source of which will never be revealed in any
statistical array of tables and cold figures.''
As a boy growing up in Des Moines, there was always
available to Wallace a small plot of land on which to
experiment and ample encouragement from his family to let his
curiosity range free--provided, of course, that he had milked
the cows, fed the chickens and completed his other routine
chores. As a student at Iowa State he worked on experimental
farms operated on the county's ``poor farm'' and learned
first hand that progeny from one ear of open-pollinated corn
could yield twice as much as progeny from another ear of corn
of the same variety.
Having proved that ability to yield is more important than
appearance, he was receptive to the concept of hybrid corn.
He carefully followed scientific reports and experiments
relating to its development while graduating first in the
agricultural class of 1910, at Iowa State College.
Throughout the 1920s, Wallace worked intensely on his own
breeding projects and to promote the development and use of
hybrid corn. In the early years of that decade, he had been
influential in founding the Iowa Corn Yield Contest, which he
saw not only as a scientifically valid replacement of the
``corn shows,'' but as a means to demonstrate to farmers the
superiority of hybrid corn.
Wallace knew even then that a revolution--his word--was
coming to the Corn Belt. It was a revolution which he
predicted and, more than any other individual, led. In 1933,
six years after he started his own little company to develop
and market hybrid seed, only one percent of the corn planted
in the midwest was grown from hybrid seed. Ten years later,
more than three-fourths of corn grown in the Corn Belt came
from hybrids. Today, of course, virtually all commercial corn
comes from hybrids. Yields grew from less than 25 bushels an
acre in 1931 to 110 or more bushels today. The corn
revolution stimulated an agricultural revolution throughout
the world and transformed American agriculture from an art to
an applied science.
Wallace viewed this revolution not in the raw statistics of
yields-per-acre, certainly not in bottom-line sales and
profits, but in an intimately personal way. ``Every living
thing, whether it be plant, animal or human being, has an
individuality of its own,'' he wrote at the height of his
corn breeding work. ``Some are pleasing, some repulsive, but
all are interesting to whosoever tries to understand them.
For fifteen years, I have tried to understand corn plants,
until now the individuality of corn plants is almost as
interesting to me as the personality of animals or human
beings.''
It has been said that Henry Wallace was the only genius to
have served as Secretary of Agriculture. The period 1933 to
1940 was the golden age in the Department's history and the
creation of much of the intellectual dynamism of the New
Deal. Agricultural programs and policies were enacted which
remain the basic framework today. Under Wallace's creative
stimulus, soil conservation, to protect what his grandfather
called ``the voiceless land,'' was promoted. The ever-normal
granary, to ensure against famine, an idea which Wallace
derived from reading Confucius and the Bible, was
established. These food reserves later proved of critical
value in World War II. In addition, the REA, food stamps, the
school lunch program, and ``food for peace'' were all begun.
He was responsible for the Yearbooks of Agriculture in 1936
and 1937, which were the first devoted to agricultural
research and plant genetics. He was proud that he had
not succumbed during this period to the pressures to have
the scientific work of the department reduced. He wrote:
``Science, of course, is not like wheat or cotton or
automobiles. It cannot be over-produced. It does not come
under the law of diminishing utility, which makes each
extra unit in the stock of a commodity of less use than
the preceding unit. In fact, the latest knowledge is
usually the best. Moreover, knowledge grows or dies. It
cannot live in cold storage. It is perishable and must be
constantly renewed. Static science would not be science
long, but a mere junk heap of rotting fragments. Our
investment in science would vanish if we did not freshen
it constantly and keep training an alert scientific
personnel.''
Secretary Wallace was also directly involved with the
expansion of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Facility.
He noted in his diary on April 5, 1940, just prior to the
fall of France:
``President Roosevelt was very emphatic about moving the
Agricultural Department out of the farm at Arlington [where
the Pentagon now sits]. He wanted to bring in the rest of an
army battalion and a regiment of cavalry. The President has
the War of 1812 in mind and doesn't want some foreign nation
to come in and burn up Washington. Perhaps his ideas are
sound, although responsible people seemed to be inclined to
pooh-pooh them. The President wanted Agriculture to get in
touch with the Budget Bureau and the War Department and get
prepared to move out at once.''
President Roosevelt had developed great respect for
Wallace's counsel as a Cabinet member for eight years on a
great variety of subjects beyond agricultural policy. He
referred to him as ``old man common sense,'' and selected him
as his vice presidential candidate in 1940 because, according
to Eleanor Roosevelt, he could best carry out Roosevelt's
domestic and foreign policy if something should happen to the
president.
In December 1940, Wallace, recently elected vice president,
was sent to Mexico by President Roosevelt to attend the
inauguration of its new president. While there, Wallace, who
had learned Spanish a few years before, asked to tour the
rural areas and saw the desperate need for better
agricultural methods to improve food yields. He was impressed
by the prominent role of corn in Mexican agriculture, as well
as the reverence the people had for it. Upon his return to
the United States, he persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to
establish the first of a series of highly successful
international agricultural research centers. The Wallace
proposal was timely because the foundation had begun to
realize that its global public health programs, while
controlling diseases such as hookworm, yellow fever and
malaria, might be saving people from disease only to have
them experience slow starvation due to inadequate diets. He
was also responsible for the establishment of the Institute
of Tropical Agriculture in Costa Rica and took an active part
in the plans which led to the creation of the Food and
Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.
A fellow Iowan, Norman Borlaug, who received the Nobel
Prize for his work with the ``Green Revolution,'' once
remarked that the award should have gone to Henry Wallace,
whose leadership and inspiration was the moving force in
these efforts.
Wallace was the first vice president in American history to
be given formal executive branch responsibilities as head of
the Board of Economic Warfare. This agency was charged with
the critical task of obtaining and ensuring the availability
of vital raw resources from Latin America and elsewhere after
the United States entered World War II.
Wallace, in implementing the procurement contracts with
countries from whom materials were obtained, required the
commitment that they would in turn provide improved wages and
living conditions for the workers. His objective was two-
fold: healthy workers would best provide the supplies
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needed, and, in Wallace's view, such economic and social
developments within the society would help advance democracy,
ensure better post-war trading opportunities and good
relations with the U.S. This approach was vigorously opposed
by conservatives within the administration and the U.S.
Congress, and the practice was therefore discontinued.
Wallace typically, like his forebears, was concerned not
only with the problems of his generation, but also with those
of his grandchildren. Painfully mindful of the errors in U.S.
policy, which he felt lost the peace following World War I,
Wallace, as early as 1941, predicted with typical vision:
``The wisdom of our actions in the first three years of peace
will determine the course of world history for half a
century.''
On May 8, 1942, Vice President Wallace delivered his most
well known public address entitled ``The Price of Free World
Victory,'' but known to millions throughout the world as the
``Century of the Common Man'' speech.
The speech represented Wallace's effort to inform World War
II with a moral purpose: ``This is a fight between a slave
world and a free world,'' he declared, ``and the free world
must prevail.'' His remarks, however, went far beyond a call
for the defeat of Germany and Japan. Wallace saw the war as a
struggle against oppression everywhere. ``Victory for the
allies,'' he said, ``must lift the men and women of all
nations from the bonds of military, political and economic
tyranny.'' In short, Wallace envisioned a worldwide
revolution against the old order.
``Some have spoken of the `American Century,' '' he said,
referring to an earlier address by Henry Luce of Time
Magazine. ``I say that the century on which we are entering--
the century which will come out of this war--can and must be
the century of the common man.'' In Wallace's mind the post-
war situation should be a world free from want and
deprivation in which nations traded freely and where lawful
international order superseded national militarism. Wallace
wrote:
``When a political system fails to give large numbers of
men the freedom it has promised, then they are willing to
hand over their destiny to another political system. When the
existing machinery of peace fails to give them any hope of
national prosperity or national dignity, they are ready to
try the hazard of war. When education fails to teach them the
true nature of things, they will believe fantastic tales of
devils and magic. When their normal life fails to give them
anything but monotony and drabness, they are easily led to
express themselves in unhealthy or cruel ways, as by mob
violence. And when science fails to furnish effective
leadership, men will exalt demagogues and science will have
to bow down to them or keep silent.''
Wallace preached that Americans must be prepared to support
decolonization, international demilitarization and economic
cooperation if victory was to have any true meaning. He was,
however, frequently frustrated in these objectives. The voice
of the common man, he complained in his diary, was not heard
by the powerful elitists who ran foreign affairs. ``So long
as the foreign affairs of the U.S. are allowed to be
controlled as the sacrosanct preserve of one social class
only, the weight of this country will continue to be thrown
on the side of the `proper' people in other countries, all
lip service to democracy notwithstanding * * *.'' In an
earlier speech responding to Hitler's claim of the
superiority of the Aryan race, Wallace said that, ``As a
result of my study of genetics . . . there is nothing in
science to interfere with what might be called a genetic
basis for democracy. The seed bed of the great leaders of the
future, as of those of the past, is in the rank and file of
the people.''
As the cold was developed in March 1946, Wallace said,
``The common people of the world will not tolerate a
recrudescence of imperialism even under enlightened Anglo-
Saxon atomic bomb auspices. If English-speaking people have a
destiny, it is to serve the world, not to dominate it.'' In
light of his scientific background, Wallace had been
designated by President Roosevelt as his personal liaison to
secretly work with the group proposing the development of the
atomic bomb. It has been said that the explosion of the
atomic bomb ``changed everything but man's thinking.'' Not
true with Wallace, for he immediately understood the threat
now represented to human survival and rededicated all his
efforts from that point forward to the cause of world peace.
On September 21, 1945, in his last Cabinet meeting as
Secretary of War, Republican patrician, Henry Stimson,
proposed that information about atomic energy (not how to
make the bomb) should be shared with other members of the
United Nations, including the Soviet Union. Failing that,
Stimson argued, the Russians would view atomic energy as
another weapon in the Anglo-American arsenal that must--and
would--be matched. Wallace sided with Stimson and, in a
follow-up letter to President Truman, joined those U.S.
atomic scientists who warned that, in attempting to maintain
secrecy about these scientific developments, we will be
indulging in ``the erroneous hope of being safe behind a
scientific Maginot Line.''
Wallace was also acutely aware that another bomb was
ticking--the growing global discrepancy between rich and
poor--and that dramatic population growth, accompanied by
even greater human misery and suffering, would lead to an
explosion even more probable than the bomb itself.
For the last 17 years of his life, Wallace was retired on
his New York farm, out of public life and politics,
continuing the work he loved most--his experiments with
gladioli, strawberries, corn and chickens, as well as his
efforts to increase agricultural productivity and improve the
nutrition of the people in the less developed world with a
special emphasis on Central and Latin America.
In 1963, in a commencement address at the Pan American
School of Agriculture in Honduras, Wallace told the young
graduates that if any people wished long to survive, they
should work at least one-third of the time with their hands
and preferably in contact with soil. He urged them to invest
``their personal interest wisely,'' and the ``depth of that
interest will draw other people to you. Some of them good,
some bad. Eventually some of you will come to understand
human beings which is the most difficult job of all.'' He
went on to say that ``you are scientists who have learned to
use your hands in a practical way. In so doing you will be
intensely patriotic, serving your country in the most
fundamental way. You will not belong to the right or the left
or the center, but to the earth and those who work the earth
lovingly and effectively so that it may be preserved and
improved century after century.''
What, then, are we to make of this shy revolutionary, this
complex genius with such an elusive personality, and what can
we learn from his attitude towards plants, science,
agriculture--and human life and progress?
We might begin by asking ourselves the question he often
asked himself: ``What is worthwhile?'' This is the question
at the heart of our inner selves, part of the Presbyterian
catechism he learned as a young boy from his grandfather. It
is a question of faith. The answer given by the catechism is:
``The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him
forever.'' How is one to glorify God? The Wallaces were
believers in the ``social gospel;'' that is, one glorified
God by serving one's fellow human beings.
In his oral history, Wallace said that if he 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. The
improved quality and increased abundance of life is a
progressive matter and has to do not only with human life but
with all plants and animals as well. The highest joy of life
is complete dedication to something outside of yourself. I am
convinced that God craves and needs humanity's help and that
without that help expressed in terms of joyous vitality, God
will have failed in this earthly experiment.
This is the core of Henry A. Wallace. If these views strike
you as an odd way for a plant geneticist to talk about his
work, rest assured you are not alone. Plenty of Wallace's
contemporaries were equally perplexed. ``A senator moves
easily from corn to hogs,'' the journalist Jonathan Daniels
wrote. ``But he can be disturbed by a grinning Iowan who
moves casually from genetics to God.''
Dr. Raul C. Manglesdorf, head of the Harvard University
Botanical Museum, said, ``It was Wallace's fate to be often
regarded as a `dreamer' when actually he was only seeing in
his own pragmatic, realistic way some of the shapes of things
to come and more often than not he was right. . . . Wallace's
predictions,'' he further noted, ``were based less on
inspiration or intuition than upon an objective evaluation of
the available facts in the light of historical perspective.
As a student of history he was well aware that history often
repeats.''
During his lifetime, political opponents often derided
Wallace as a ``mystic,'' a term which they intended to
conjure up visions of crystal balls and secret ceremonies.
Wallace himself accepted the term ``practical mystic.''
``I've always believed that if you envision something that
hasn't been, that can be, and bring it into being, that is
a tremendously worthwhile thing to do.'' Wallace once co-
authored a wonderful little book with William Brown on the
history of corn, titled Corn and Its Early Fathers, at the
beginning of which he devoted an entire page to this
quotation from Jonathan Swift: ``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 essential service to his country, than the whole race
of politicians put together.''
Wallace, the ``practical mystic,'' saw a way to make the
equivalent of two or four ears of corn grow where one grew
before. This, in his view, seemed a ``tremendously worthwhile
thing to do,'' precisely because it seemed an obvious way of
improving the lot of his fellow human beings.
But there was another component to his vision. This was the
hope that hybrids would help bring about the ``distinctive
rural civilization'' of his family's dreams. He asked: ``Can
we go ahead to create a rural civilization that will give us
a material foundation solid enough so that life can be
enjoyed instead of being wasted in a chase after enough
dollars to keep the sheriff and wolf away?'' Perhaps hybrid
seed, and science in general, provided an answer.
It may be charged--certainly it was in his own time--that
such a vision is utopian. But Wallace was not intimidated by
such language. ``Our utopias,'' he wrote, ``are the
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blueprints of our future civilization, and as such, airy
structures though they are, they really play a bigger part in
the progress of man than our more material structures of
brick and steel. The habit of building utopias shows to a
degree whether our race is made up of dull-spirited bipeds or
whether it is made up of men who want to enjoy the full
savoring of existence that comes only when they feel
themselves working with the forces of nature to remake the
world nearer to their heart's desire.''
It is worth reflecting upon this comment, for it
encompasses Wallace's answer to both those who would say
science must be allowed to work its will regardless of the
consequences, and to the critics of science who would rather
forego knowledge than cope with change.
To scientists he said this:
``The cause of liberty and the cause of true science must
always be one and the same. For science cannot flourish
except in an atmosphere of freedom, and freedom cannot
survive unless there is an honest facing of facts . . . .
Democracy--and that term includes free science--must apply
itself to meeting the material need of men for work, for
income, for goods, for health, for security, and to meeting
their spiritual need for dignity, for knowledge, for self-
expression, for adventure and for reverence. And it must
succeed.''
In other words, the ends of science must always be mankind.
Scientists, no less than the rest of us, must every day ask
themselves; What is worthwhile?
To the anti-scientists, Wallace said this 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 .
. . . Science has no doubt made the surplus possible, but
science is not responsible for our failure to distribute the
fruits of labor equitably.''
In other words, the answer to society's problems lies not
in blocking progress but in guiding it to serve mankind's
ends.
And to everyone he offered this warning:
``The attacks upon science stem from many sources. It is
necessary for science to defend itself, first, against such
attacks, and second, against the consequences of its own
successes. What I mean is this: That science has
magnificently enabled mankind to conquer its first great
problem--that of producing enough to go around; but that
science, having created abundance, has now to help men live
with abundance. Having conquered seemingly unconquerable
physical obstacles, science has now to help mankind conquer
social and economic obstacles. Unless mankind can conquer
these new obstacles, the former successes of science will
seem worse than futile. The future of civilization, as well
as of science, is involved.''
Wallace also once observed ``scientific understanding is
our joy. Economic and political understanding is our duty.''
His concept of scientific research was a broad one and
included the lifting of the social sciences to the same level
as the natural sciences. In turn, he challenged these
scientists to have a greater conscience concerning the
implications of their work. Applied research would properly
involve social planning, which would enable man to have more
leisure time and thus better enjoy non-material things, such
as ``music, painting, literature, sport for sport's sake, and
the idle curiosity of the scientist himself.''
The New Republic, which he served briefly as editor after
his retirement from politics, once described his concept of
political democracy as ``. . . that of a science which would
blend political freedom with the full use of resources, both
of manpower and of technologies, for everyone's welfare.''
It is intriguing to speculate about what Wallace might say
if he were here today, about the state of agriculture in this
country and around the world, about the movement for a
sustainable alternative agriculture, about the role of
science and the march of human progress. Probably his
comments would surprise all of us, as they so often surprised
audiences during his lifetime. His was a provocative and
remarkably original mind, unfazed by popular opinion and
conventional wisdom. The absence of ``corn shows'' testifies
to that.
First, on a very contemporary note, we can assume Wallace
would be appalled and disgusted by the attack now being made
on the nation's conservation programs, especially those
related to agriculture. The efforts made to preserve land--to
remove marginal land from production and protect the
remainder from erosion and abuse--were among his proudest
accomplishments. ``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,'' he
wrote. ``The soil is the mother of man and if we forget her,
life eventually weakens.
Second, Wallace would admonish us to use our abundance more
``virtuously and wisely.'' In the long run, Wallace believed,
a healthy democracy could not tolerate the politics of
scarcity. In his own time, Wallace saw the devastating
consequences of scarcity run amuck; one-third of a nation
ill-nourished, ill-clad, and ill-housed. Today, however, we
might imagine that Wallace would see too much money, made in
unproductive ways, in the hands of too few people, too many
people without health insurance or secure and satisfying
employment, and far, far too many people leading wasted lives
in the poverty and degradation of our major cities. He would
deplore the national priorities which call for huge defense
budgets while reducing investments in education, environment,
and job training. He would be greatly troubled by the lack of
concern for the ``general welfare,'' the widespread violence
in our country, and the lack of civility and loss of
community in our national life. He would urge creative social
and economic planning to address these issues.
While he would welcome the liberalization of international
trade, he would decry the enormous expenditure of scarce
Third World resources on arms. He would advocate a stronger
U.N. military force and greater foreign assistance through
more efficient and reformed multilateral lending
institutions.
Third, we might guess that Wallace would look upon the
sustainable agriculture movement with considerable affection.
This is speculative because Wallace, like all of us, was a
man of his times, and no one would say he was close to being
``certified organic'' in his own practices. He used chemical
pesticides and fertilizers liberally, and, some would argue,
helped pave the way for a highly mechanized, industrialized
agriculture through the introduction of hybrid seed to
commercial farming.
Still, Wallace was a man who believed in facts. If the
facts argued against chemical pesticides, he would have
accepted them totally. What he sought, in his life's work,
was not prosperity for corporations, but for the men and
women living on farms, doing God's work, preserving their
land and seeing ``the fruits of their labor raise the living
standards of mankind.'' Prosperity, he often warned farmers,
was not an end but the means to an end. He wrote: ``Can we
remember that prosperity is worthless except insofar as it
gives us more freedom and strength to do good work, to love
our fellow men and to take delight in the beauty of a world
wonderful enough to give pleasure to the Workman who planned
it?''
Finally, we can guess that he would say to farmers and
scientists: ``Small is good.'' When Wallace began his corn
breeding experiments, he recalled, he ``had only a fraction
of an acre within the city limits of Des Moines on which to
work. An inbred corn capable of unusually high yield came out
of [this] backyard garden, which was but ten by twenty feet.
. . .'' He was concerned that breeders might substitute
masses of data for real understanding and pointed out that
James Logan, an 18th Century experimenter, had learned from
four hills of corn, and that the principles of heredity were
discovered by Gregor Mendel, growing peas in a monastery
garden about 15 feet wide and 30 or 40 feet long, and
finally, that George H. Shull, one of the inventors and
developers of hybrid corn, used no more than one quarter of
an acre each season in conducting his experiments.
He deplored that the modern trend in science is in exactly
the opposite direction. ``The present emphasis,'' he wrote,
``is directed toward doing things in a big way, toward large
numbers and multidisciplinary research. In many of our
educational institutions, scientific progress seems to be
measured in terms of the growth of departments and the number
and size of financial grants that can be obtained for support
of the work. . . . The great scientific weakness of America
today.'' he said, ``is that she tends to emphasize quantity
at the expense of quality--statistics instead of genuine
insight--immediate utilitarian application instead of genuine
thought about fundamentals. . . . True science cannot be
evolved by mass-production methods.''
At 75 years of age and in outwardly remarkable physical
condition, Wallace became afflicted with Amyotrophic Lateral
Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. This disease affects the
nervous system and causes muscular atrophy. There is no cure.
An experimenter to the end, he kept a careful record of his
symptoms and reactions in a memo entitled, ``Reflections of
an ALSer.'' In the final weeks of his illness, in September
1965, Wallace was visited by a friend while a patient at NIH.
The visitor noted that the flowers in his room had been sent
by President Lyndon Johnson. Wallace, who, given the
disease's progression, could no longer speak, wrote on a
notepad, ``I hope they think about decentralization as the
hope of the future. Big cities will become cesspools.''
Wallace always rose very early on his Farvue farm and, as
long as his failing health permitted, continued to type his
own correspondence with geneticists, plant breeders and
others around the world before going out to the field in a
mechanized wheelchair to work with his research plots.
One of his last letters was to a long-time friend and corn
breeder:
``Your 3306 [a hybrid seed corn code] has me all excited.
So glad you have 2,000 acres of it. . . . I was feeling
rather blue when I got up this morning, thinking the end of
the road was not far off. But when I got to thinking about
3306, I felt I just had to live to see how [it] would adapt
to the tropical program, the Argentine program, and the South
Georgia program. Yes, this is the most exciting letter I have
ever received from you.''
That was his message. Think big, plant small, work hard,
seek the truth, glorify God, and have sympathy for the
plant.
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