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“WHO WANTS WHITE CARROTS?”: CONGRESSIONAL SEED DISTRIBUTION, 1862 TO 1923

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2018

Kathy J. Cooke
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Abstract

From 1862 to 1923, congressional seed distribution was among the most important functions of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). One of the largest agricultural programs in the late nineteenth century, the practice itself stayed in place until 1923. The subject of little historical research, the seed distribution project is usually viewed as a failure of the scientific agricultural establishment, or as vote mongering by Congress, and its demise as the simple culmination of Progressive Era reform. However, this episode in American history reveals much more than debates over science and agriculture by highlighting the many cultural, economic, scientific, and political questions about the proper role of government in a democracy. By examining heated contemporary political exchanges and published critiques, this article assesses what different constituencies viewed as good in government as they argued for or against free seed distribution, even as the USDA used seed as a vehicle for consolidating the place of science and knowledge in agriculture and in government.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 475 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2018 

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Footnotes

My thanks to Mary Summers and the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as insights from Daniel J. Kevles and David A. Valone. I am grateful for funding from the National Science Foundation, the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, and Quinnipiac University. Nicholas Federn, Janet Valeski, and Ronda Kolbin provided invaluable research support.

References

NOTES

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20 Kloppenburg, First, 65, quoting the United States Department of Agriculture, Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture, 1887 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1888), 653.

21 Vick's Illustrated Magazine (Mar. 1884): 65. There was a great deal of opposition to the program; this farmer may have been engaging in amusing hyperbole to discredit free seed. Many others, including Kloppenburg, argue that by 1886 the government distributions were among the more reliable seeds available in the country; First the Seed, 64.

22 Hayter, Earl W., The Troubled Farmer, 1850–1900: Rural Adjustment to Industrialism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1968), 187Google Scholar; and True, History, 54–56. In 1906 Beverly Galloway testified to the House Committee on Agriculture and provided some explanation for poorer quality of earlier seed—seed often had been purchased according to a sliding price scale based on quality. The department also was subject to unexpected shortfalls that had in the past forced it to accept whatever alternative the grower offered. U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture of the Hon. Secretary of Agriculture and Chiefs of Bureaus and Divisions of the Department of Agriculture on the Estimates of Appropriations for the Department of Agriculture for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1907; Also of Members of Congress and Other Interested Persons on Bills Relating to the Department of Agriculture, 1906, 59th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: GPO 1906), 234–36.

23 Vick's Illustrated Magazine (Mar. 1884): 65–66.

24 Klose, America's Crop Heritage, 54 and 57–58.

25 Fowler, Cary, “The Plant Patent Act of 1930: A Sociological History of its Creation,” Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society 82 (Sept. 2000): 630–42Google Scholar, on 632; Coulter, “Looking Backward: Launching the ASTA,” part 3, manuscript obtained from the ASTA; W. Atlee Burpee in Francis C. Coulter, “Looking Backward—(2nd Series): Not So Very Far,” manuscript obtained from the ASTA, on the 13th annual convention. The trade also opposed the distribution of seeds by agricultural journals. Clifford Corneli, ed., “Notes and Anecdotes of 75 Years, 1883–1958, American Seed Trade Association,” copy obtained from the ASTA, p. 5; See also Coulter, “Looking Backward: Launching,” on the fourth annual convention. Quotation found in White, Leonard Depree, The Republican Era: A Study in Administrative History, 1869–1901 (New York: Free Press, 1958), 238–39Google Scholar.

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27 Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 63; Hayter, The Troubled Farmer, 187; Fairchild, David, The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer (New York: Scribner's, 1938), 104–5Google Scholar.

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30 J. Sterling Morton, “Report of the Secretary,” Yearbook of Agriculture 1894, 61. Also in Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 67. Marcus, Alan I., “From State Chemistry to State Science: The Transformation of the Idea of the Agricultural Experiment Station, 1875–1887” in Busch, Lawrence and Lacy, William B., eds., The Agricultural Scientific Enterprise: A System in Transition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 4Google Scholar; and Conover, Milton, The Office of Experiment Stations: Its History, Activities, and Organization, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1924), 56Google Scholar.

31 Coulter, “Looking Backward—(2nd Series): Not So Very Far.”

32 Morton, J. Sterling, “Report of the Secretary,” Yearbook of Agriculture 1895 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1896), 43, 59–60Google Scholar.

33 Morton, J. Sterling, “Report of the Secretary of Agriculture,” Report of the Secretary of Agriculture Being Part of the Messages and Documents Communicated to the Two Houses of Congress at the Beginning of the Second Session of the Fifty-Third Congress (Washington, DC: GPO, 1895), 19–20Google Scholar; Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 63; Compiled Statutes of the United States, 1913, 821. {NOTE: in Five Volumes}; “Report of the Chief of the Division of Accounts and Disbursements,” 723.

34 Francis Fukuyama argues that Wilson “was critical in shifting the department from a seed-distribution agency to a forward-looking, science based organization.” Fukuyama, Francis, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015)Google Scholar.

35 Coulter, “Looking Backward—(2nd Series): Not So Very Far,” on the 11th annual convention.

36 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1898 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1899)Google Scholar, xxxv.

37 Fairchild, The World Was My Garden, 104–5; and Klose, America's Crop Heritage, 111.

38 Salaries accounted for $26,591. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1898, (Washington, DC: GPO 1899), 4Google Scholar.

39 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports, 1898, 5.

40 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1901 (Washington, DC: GPO 1901), xxxv–xxxixGoogle Scholar.

41 U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture of Chiefs of Bureaus and Divisions, and Other Officers of the Department of Agriculture on the Estimates of Appropriations for the Department of Agriculture for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1908, Also of Seedsmen and Other Persons on Free Seed Distribution and Other Matters Relating to the Department of Agriculture, 59th Cong, 2nd sess., Dec. 12, 1906 to Jan. 19, 1907, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1907), 122.

42 Wilson, James, “Report of the Secretary,” Yearbook of Agriculture 1902 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1903), 32Google Scholar; Klose, America's Crop Heritage, 111; and Stevenson, John A., in “Plants, Problems, and Personalities: The Genesis of the Bureau of Plant Industry,” Agricultural History 28 (Oct. 1954): 155–62Google Scholar. Stevenson dismisses congressional seed distribution—“Congressional seed distribution, even at this time, was an old and painful subject. It had, perhaps necessarily, loomed large in the work of the department and its predecessors through the years, but no scientific results were expected or obtained. Further mention is therefore unnecessary except …” (159).

43 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30 1906, (Washington, DC: GPO 1907), 421Google Scholar, 427, 441–47. R. J. Griesbach—in an otherwise extremely useful report—erroneously claims that in 1902 Wilson introduced a new program that eliminated the distribution of common seed. See 150 Years of Research at the United States Department of Agriculture: Plant Introduction and Breeding (Agricultural Research Service, June 2013), 13.

44 U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture … for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1907, 1906, 142–43, 161, 231.

45 Carleton, Mark Alfred, “Improvements in Wheat Culture,” Yearbook of Agriculture 1896, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1897), 495–96Google Scholar; and True, A. C. and Clark, V. A., The Agricultural Experiment Stations in the United States, USDA Office of Experiment Stations, Bulletin No. 80 (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 1900), 76Google Scholar.

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48 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports, 1905, 167–68; Cooke, Kathy J., “Expertise, Book Farming, and Government Agriculture: The Origins of Agricultural Seed Certification in the United States,” Agricultural History 76 (2002): 524–45Google Scholar.

49 Giesen, James G., Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 19–20Google Scholar; and Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 212–17.

50 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1906 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1907), 49, 251–52Google Scholar; U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture … for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1907, 234–36.

51 “The Free Seeds Distribution,” The Outlook, 79 (Apr. 8, 1905): 863–64Google Scholar.

52 William Smith testified that “until the House Committee on Agriculture voted to omit this item from the bill none of the seedsmen entertained the hope that Congress would abandon the practice at this time.” U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, Hearings before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry of the United States Senate on the Bill HR 18537 Making Appropriations for the Department of Agriculture for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1907, 59th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: GPO 1906), 77Google Scholar.

53 U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee, Hearings 1907, 51–53, 77–81. For support, Landreth pointed out that the government distributed forty million packets of seed while industry sold seventy-five million. He was not criticizing the quality, but the varieties—they did not benefit agriculture.

54 U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee, Hearings 1907, 54–56.

55 Hartley, C. P., “Improvement of Corn by Seed Selection,” Yearbook of Agriculture 1902 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1903), 540Google Scholar. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports, 1906, 18–19, 40, 257.

56 U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture … Appropriation Ending June 30, 1908, Dec. 12, 1906 to Jan. 19, 1907, 122, 140–41.

57 According to the Country Life movement, industrialization was a threat to the nation that could only be repelled by good character that resulted from country living and farming. The Country Life Commission that claimed, through Moore, in 1911, that the “growing and selling of select seeds” could be a “means of keeping hundreds of young men on the farms.” Moore, “Wisconsin Pure Bred Seed Grains,” 60. Historian David Danbom argues that “the industrialization of agriculture … had been aimed at helping the cities and the nation by making agriculture an efficient supplement to industry which would supply it with cheap food.” Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979), 26, 43. Quote is from page 142. On farmers and the character of the American nation see also Marcus, “Wisdom of the Body Politic,” 9.”

58 U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture … for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1907, 1906, 223.

59 U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture … Appropriation Ending June 30, 1908, Dec. 12, 1906 to Jan. 19, 1907, 134–44. The laughter is not recorded in all printings.

60 U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture … Appropriation Ending June 30, 1908, Dec. 12, 1906 to Jan. 19, 1907, 12–13, 26, 35–36, 54–55, 67.

61 Despite his lack of discretion with flowers and bacteria, Lamb did make an astute prediction in the Dec. 1906, Richmond Dispatch. He said that the House Committee on Agriculture would again reject common seed, and that it would again be added from the floor of the House. U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture…Appropriation Ending June 30, 1908, Dec. 12, 1906 to Jan. 19, 1907, 27, 140–41.

62 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports, 1911, 595–96.

63 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports, 1907, 58. George H. Dacy provides a full explanation of how the process had become systematized—and mechanized—in the twentieth century in George H. Dacy, “Millions in Free Food from Federal Free Seed: The Story of 240,000 Acres of Gardens, and $192,000,000 Worth of Vegetables,” Scientific American 127:6 (1922): 398–99.

64 U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture, 60th Cong., 2nd sess., Dec.1907 to Jan. 1908 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1909), 239Google Scholar.

65 Galloway also was planning to decrease allotment of seeds from 20,000 to 17,000, due to increase in membership. When the Committee inquired, he explained that it would take an increase of $30,000, bringing the full appropriation to $293,900, to keep the allotment at 20,000 per member, 101–2. Hearings started on Dec. 9, 1912. Lamb also asked about procedural points—“can it be stricken out on a point of order”—acknowledging the process by which congressional seed often was kept in the budget. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture on the Estimates of Appropriations for the Fiscal year ending June 30, 1914, 62nd Congress 3rd sess. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1913), 100–102Google Scholar. Appropriations for free seed typically went through a complicated process and depending on the year they were eliminated in the House Appropriations Committee, added in House floor debates, eliminated in Senate Hearings, and then emerged from conference with the appropriation for congressional seed. Iowa Senator William Kenyon explained “when it comes out of conferences, [Congressional seed] is generally inserted.” Kenyon recounted this process in the Senate on July 3, 1916, in testimony opposing free seed. See the Congressional Record, Senate (July 3, 1916), 10374.

66 House Reports Public Dec. 2, 1912–Mar. 4, 1913, 62nd Congress 3rd Session V. 1 GPO 1913. “Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Appropriation Bill,” House Report No. 1348 Committed to Committee of the Whole House Report to accompany HR 28283 for year ending (June 30, 1914), 7.

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72 Seed World 2 (1916). The seed industry highlighted this burning in its testimony. The seed had been sent out under the frank of Congressmen Charles Towne and I. E. Rider, put other congressmen on the defensive. U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture … Appropriation Ending June 30, 1908, Dec. 12, 1906 to Jan. 19, 1907, 29–31.

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74 Probably due to wartime seed prices, the distribution dropped to 8,072,791 packages of vegetable seed and 883,136 packages of flower seed.

75 United States Department of Agriculture, Department Circular 50, issued June 16, 1919, 1.

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77 Feb. 15, 1920 “Seed News from the National Capitol,” Randolph Nelson, American Seedsman. Nelson pointed to Congressman Langley, who was “responsible for the revival this year of the free seed appropriation item which is faithfully strangled every year in Congress by the conscientious ones and as faithfully resurrected by the other faction.” Ironically, Wilson had made the same point in 1906, faulting the poor quality of seeds from the industry for his inability to convince Congress to end the process. He wrote to seedsmen complaining about free seed “the pressure for seeds comes from the people because they can not buy from seedsmen generally as good seeds as this Department sends out. The ‘laboring oar’ is in the hands of the seedsmen; let them take the care that we take in the growing and testing of seeds, and the people will be very satisfied to buy from them.” U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee, Hearings 1907, 57.

78 “Seed News from Washington,” Seed World 7 (1920): 68.

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87 U.S. Congress, Discussions of Agricultural Appropriation Bill, 1924, 179–80.

88 Dacy, “Millions,” 398–99. Dacy's former position was a matter of discussion in House Committee Hearings in 1923. See U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, Free Seeds: Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture, 67th Cong., 4th Session, Feb. 12, 1923 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1923), 18Google Scholar.

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93 “‘Seed Trust’ Did It,” Seed World 13:5 (1923): 25Google Scholar.

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95 U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Langley Free-Seed Bill, 27–32.

96 U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Langley Free-Seed Bill, 35; “Dumm and Dummer Deplore Recent Vote to End Free Seed Distribution,” Seed World 13:13 (1923): 17Google Scholar.

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98 Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 63; Hayter, The Troubled Farmer, 187; Fairchild, The World Was My Garden, 104–5.

99 Burke reintroduced the bill, which by this time had been variously numbered HR 9468, HR 9460, HR 9890, and HR 9891 again in 1977 with no more success.

100 U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, Seeds and Plants for Home Gardens: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Domestic Marketing and Consumer Relations of the Committee on Agriculture on H.R. 280, 94th Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 11, 1975, 14–16, 3–6, 13–14.

101 U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, Seeds and Plants for Home Gardens: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Domestic Marketing and Consumer Relations of the Committee on Agriculture on H.R. 280, 94th Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 11, 1975, 14–16, 3–6, 13–14.

102 U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Seeds and Plants for Home Gardens, 14–16.

103 U.S. Congress, House, Committee, Seeds and Plants for Home Gardens, 15.