[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

[[Page S9645]]

     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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