Corn-Makers 227 



trade and industry." This knowledge prompted him, once 

 he was in the White House, to establish a Federal Department 

 of Agriculture, which would aid the farmers in their prob- 

 lems and, not incidentally, arm the man behind the plow to 

 trade safely with men behind the desks of banks and the 

 counters of the produce exchanges. 



The second Secretary of Agriculture was "Uncle Jerry" 

 Rusk, a corn farmer from Wisconsin, who had been born on 

 a poor farm in Perry County, Ohio. Uncle Jerry knew from 

 experience drought and wheat rust and grasshopper plagues. 

 He knew that in Iowa the wheat farmers were even then 

 facing ruin. Herbert Quick, who as editor and journalist served 

 the cause of agriculture in the midwest, has told in his auto- 

 biography, One Man's Life, how the Iowa pioneers, of whom 

 his father was one, were impelled into wheat-growing on a 

 large scale by the pressing need of money to buy the necessities 

 which the prairie did not yield. "As soon as I was able to 

 work," he says, "I became a bond servant to wheat." 



At first all that the farmers had to do was to tickle the new- 

 broken prairie with a harrow, and it sang with a harvest. The 

 spring fever was a fever of seeding. Teams, seeders and har- 

 rows moved across the black fields from mornglome to dusk. 

 The golden grain went into the soil for a fortnight or so, and 

 then men went out to look for the sprouting blades. 



We grew wonderful wheat at first; the only problem was to get 

 it to market and to live on the proceeds when it was sold. . . . But 

 the worst, however, was yet to come. A harvest came when we 

 found that something was wrong with the wheat. No longer did 

 the stalks stand clean and green as of old until they went golden 

 in the sun. The broad green blades were spotted red and black 

 with rust. . . . And when it grew worse year by year, it became a 

 blight not only on the life of the grain but on human life as well. 

 Wheat was almost our sole cash crop. If it failed, what should we 

 do? And it was failing. . . . 



Of course what was happening was that the farmers were 

 paying the penalty for a one-crop system. But even the experts 



