558 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



who acted as secretary of the Corn Belt Meat Producrs' Associa- 

 tion for sixteen years and then was called into the cabinet of the 

 President of the United States to become Secretary of Agriculture, 

 and I with pride tonight take pleasure in introducing to this audience 

 our old secretary, the Hon. Henry C. Wallace, who is now Secretary 

 of Agriculture of the United States. (Applause, audience rising.) 



ADDRESS OF HON. HENRY C. WALLACE, SECRETARY OF 

 AGRICULTURE 



Mr. Chairman, Friends: Mr. Sykes has told you of the birth of this 

 organization and its age. I have attended every meeting and every ban- 

 quet, and I always enjoy them immensely, but I don't think I ever attended 

 a banquet before under circumstances of — well, of a certain embarrass- 

 ment. You know, I have talked to you at different times at the banquets 

 in an informal way, but when I come with the expectation on your part 

 that I am going to make a speech, I feel just about as I would feel if I got 

 up before my own family and undertook to make a speech. (Laughter and 

 applause.) I simply cannot do it! (Laughter.) All I can do is just talk 

 informally, feeling that there is in this audience a bond which will not 

 expect anything more than that, and, in fact, I suspect you yourselves 

 would take offense if I undertook to orate before you. 



I am also under a little bit of embarrassment to know just what to say 

 to you. Of course, you ought to know what they are doing down there to 

 help in this period of agricultural depression, and I shall say something 

 about that. Perhaps you may be interested, to begin with, in the sort of 

 life we found down there; and what I am saying now I am not saying for 

 the purpose of being quoted or reported, and if there are any newspaper 

 men here I don't expect them to report any of the personal matters. It is 

 different from the life of the secretary of the Corn Belt Meat Producers' 

 Association. (Laughter.) It is like being torn up by the roots and trans- 

 planted into an entirely new field where the soil is somewhat different and 

 the climatic conditions are not wholly the same. And yet it is a pleasant 

 soil, and I can well understand how, under normal conditions in the coun- 

 try, there would be a lot of enjoyment and some considerable leisurely 

 pleasure in it. That is, the government has built up there a pretty well 

 organized machine in each of the departments. There are a lot of splendid 

 men who have grown up in government service mostly under civil service 

 now. They are well trained. The machine will run right along almost 

 of its own momentum, except in unusual times. I think the expectation in 

 the past has been that cabinet members would not work themselves very 

 hard, that they would comport themselves with dignity, that they would 

 not keep abnormally long hours. The government employes go to work 

 at 9 o'clock and quit at 4 or 4:30, so that the hours are not severe. 



But these are not usual times. When the present administration went 

 into power, we were just coming out of our war experience, and wholly 

 without regard to what administration might have been in power during 

 the war, there was bound to be a great deal of disorganization. War is a 

 wasteful enterprise, it tends to disrupt orderly ways of doing things, and 



