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Garst was born in 1898, ten years after Wallace, to the pioneer
Coon Rapids merchant Edward Garst. Edward's brother Warren, a partner
in the Coon Rapids store founded in 1869, also served for a time
as governor of Iowa. . The collective interests of the Garsts centered
on land and commerce but also encompassed a family ethic of civic
responsibility, political reform, activism and ambition. Like Wallace,
Garst was raised a Republican, but over the years increasingly involved
himself in liberal and libertarian issues, feeling at times the
tension between traditional conservative social and economic values
and the new kind of thinking that, like Wallace, he believed essential
to meet the needs of the mid-twentieth century.
Garst married Elizabeth Henak in 1922, after a courtship as unorthodox
in its salesman-like dimension as Wallace's had been in his cerebral
wooing of Ilo Brown. After four years as a dairyman in Coon Rapids,
he moved to Des Moines in 1926 to pursue a career as a salesman
of lots in a new subdivision of Des Moines. However, he did not
embrace city life as completely as Elizabeth; he kept in close touch
with his farm and Coon Rapids and travelled regularly around the
countryside. He talked agriculture with his new friend Henry Wallace,
who would occasionally print tidbits in Wallaces' Farmer from Roswell
about new farming practices and other observations on rural life.
It was through Wallace that Garst discovered a focus for the apparently
disparate threads of his abilities and interests. In the infant
hybrid seed corn industry he found a challenge for his salesmanship,
a means to bring agriculture back into the center of his life, and
ultimately the opportunity to discover and fulfill his potential
as educator and innovator. Through Wallace he would awaken to the
economic and political issues posed by the decline of the farm economy
since World War I and begin to view agriculture in its international
context. Garst considered his brother Jonathan Garst and Henry Wallace
as the two most brilliant men he had ever known. 'All of the economic
theories I ever learned,' Garst once remarked to Iowa governor Clyde
Herring, 'I learned from the editorial page of Wallaces' Farmer
when he was editing it.' Hybridization, the corn-hog ratio, the
problem of high tariffs and the challenge of surplus production
were at the core of Garst's intellectual life during these years,
and, along with his personal devotion to Wallace, formed the basis
for much that he achieved later.
Beginning in 1927, Garst had his tenant in Coon Rapids grow a bushel
per year of Wallace's new corn, and by 1930 was sufficiently convinced
of its worth to move back to Coon Rapids, and to ask Wallace for
foundation stock so that he could make the final cross and produce
hybrid seed under franchise. Garst's arrangement with Hi-Bred Corn
called for a lowering of the royalties paid on a sliding scale up
to 50,000 bushels. 'Bob ... you are such an optimist,' Garst recalled
Wallace saying at the time. 'There won't be 50,000 bushels of hybrid
corn sold in your lifetime or mine.' 'I'll hit 50,000 bushels in
five years,' Garst replied. The agreement on the franchise was concluded
with a handshake. A simple contract was drafted and signed a year
later. Thus there began in 1930 an extraordinary sales odyssey by
Garst that took him thousands of miles over his western corn belt
territory in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado. Fuelled by his
great energy, his brilliant sales technique of distributing samples
and asking for only half the increase from the farmer's increased
yield as payment, his successful campaign to get the land-owning
insurance companies to buy his corn, and by the dedicated efforts
of his sales team, Garst achieved his 50,000-bushel goal, and then
some. Garst's contribution to the popularization of the new-fangled
corn helped greatly to bring commercial viability to the technological
and scientific revolution of the thirties that had been unleashed
by Wallace's genius as a plant breeder.
In 1933, while Garst and Pioneer Hi-bred struggled to sell an expensive
corn to farmers who were burning their old fashioned corn simply
to keep warm, Wallace set in train the Agricultural Adjustment Administration,
his other revolutionary venture that further transformed agriculture.
Again, in Garst he found a willing servant who had been schooled
by Wallace himself in the new program, had once helped Wallace lace
a campaign speech with adjectives one evening in front of the fireplace
of the Garst farm, and eagerly awaited the appearance of the program
that would regulate the production of corn and hogs. When Garst
found out from Jim Russell of the Des Moines Register that nothing
had happened yet because Wallace wanted farmers to take the initiative
in organizing a response to his proposals, he paired up with Russell
to initiate a campaign that put Garst in the forefront of the program.
In brief, Garst's political odyssey in the summer and fall of 1933
took him from chairmanship of the Iowa Corn-Hog Committee to hearings
in Washington and, with his fellow Iowa committee members and under
Wallace's instructions, to other states in the midwest to organize
the national corn-hog program that finally came to fruition in October
of that year. It was, as Richard Wilson of the Register described
it, 'the greatest agricultural control measure yet undertaken,'
calling for a 20 per cent reduction in corn acreage and a 25 per
cent reduction in hog farrowing, already punctuated by the controversial
slaughter of 4 million little pigs. Garst's brief but deep immersion
in the New Deal agricultural program brought him life-long friends
in Washington, and the continuing ear of the agricultural establishment.
It also posed the choice of whether to take a political job in the
new administration or return to the hybrid seed corn business, and
to the excitement of new frontiers in agricultural production. Garst
chose the latter alternative.
At this point in his career--the late thirties--Garst's direct dealings
with Wallace diminished, but the legacy of his mentor's teaching
remained, as well as their friendship. A case in point was Garst's
realization after the outbreak of war in Europe that the Ever-Normal
Granary, Wallace's provision for consistently balanced supplies
of fodder in good years and bad, risked serious depletion. Using
his knowledge of the corn-hog ratio--another Wallace innovation
that refined the traditional formula for controlling quantity by
means of price in both commodities--and his own talent for interpreting
production figures, Garst turned from the support of scarcity to
the support of full production when it was a very unpopular thing
to do. He conducted a sustained letter-writing and lobbying campaign
to change the wartime price freeze on corn and hogs, although largely
unsuccessful, enjoyed the delicious feeling of having been right
when there was indeed a serious shortage of feed grains by late
1943.
In the Forties and Fifties, Garst initiated successful experiments
to prove the efficacy of feeding properly supplemented cellulose
to cattle, and demonstrated that heavy applications of fertilizer--especially
nitrogen--dramatically from Wallace to stay in touch with research.
He maintained an active relationship with researchers in several
land grant universities, Iowa State pre-eminent among them. As he
wrote to an agriculturalist at the University of Missouri in 1946,
said 'to absorb as much as possible from the things you have learned.'
increased corn yields. He was able to be a player on the cutting
edge of agricultural change because he had learned enquiring about
their work with fertilizers, he wanted, he said, 'just a curious
farmer who likes to know the reasons behind things.'
Finally, there is the case of Wallace's legacy and Garst's relations
with Russia and Eastern Europe. In September of 1946, Wallace made
a speech critical of the developing cold war mentality which, in
President Truman's view, undermined the increasingly aggressive
American stance towards Russia, and threatened to undercut negotiations
in progress over emerging geopolitical division of postwar spoils
in Europe. Wallace lost his job as Secretary of Commerce. As a result
of Wallace's speech and its dramatic consequences, newspapers reprinted
an earlier letter Wallace had written to the president in July of
1946, a portion of which reads as follows:
'It is of the greatest importance that we should discuss with the
Russians in a friendly way their long-range economic problems and
the future of our cooperation in matters of trade. The reconstruction
program of the USSR ... offer[s] tremendous opportunities for American
goods and American technicians ... War with Russia would bring catastrophe
to all mankind, and therefore we must find a way of living in peace.'
Although Garst would later be critical of Wallace's participation
in the Progressive Party in 1948 and his bid for the presidency,
in 1946 he was deeply moved both by Wallace's speech and the letter,
and wrote Wallace to congratulate him on his contribution to the
cause of peace.
The seed thus planted lay dormant in Garst's mind until 1955, when
a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial by the Register's Loren Soth
set in motion an agricultural exchange with Russian agriculturalists
that afforded Garst an opportunity to entice the Soviet delegation
to his farm, and be invited in turn to visit Russia. His approach
to Russia, Hungary and Romania was unique in the manner in which
he created and responded to his new role on the stage of East-West
relationships, but was entirely consistent with views expressed
by Wallace over the years of their relationship.
As a capitalist in the Wallace tradition, Garst welcomed the chance
to sell hybrid seed corn behind the Iron Curtain, but at the same
time saw himself as an agricultural apostle bringing modern American
practice to an audience keen to reap the benefits of modern technology.
Above all, he saw the opportunity to make agricultural cooperation
a means for reducing the confrontational mentality of the Fifties
and the concomitant threat of nuclear annihilation. In later years,
his position as chief western mentor to eastern European agriculture
would be taken up by John Chrystal, who carried on the work begun
by Garst until the year 2000.
Garst's desire to eliminate hunger from the world, an aspiration
as much influenced by his brother Jonathan as by Wallace, was not
confined to eastern Europe. In the Sixties he toured Central America
at the behest of the Agency for International Development, and was
responsible for initiating the Mass Fertilizer Demonstration Program
in El Salvador, conducted during 1965 and 1966. He had also hoped
to work in India and China, but these projects never materialized.
The desire of both Wallace and Garst to create agricultural plenty
throughout the world brings me to my final observation on the subject
of Garst and the Wallace legacy. Like Wallace, Garst saw in the
explosion of American technology and abundance an inevitable trend
to larger farms and a declining farm population. In 1941, corresponding
with and playing host to Paul Taylor, an economist at UC Berkeley
who viewed the technological explosion with foreboding, Garst defended
the trend on the grounds of commercial necessity and defended the
creation of abundance as a social good. 'Greater efficiency must
give the world greater plenty,' he argued.
Although these remarks come to an end with this confident assertion
by Garst, his pronouncement raises a topic that is still central
to discourse on world farming as we confront the complexities of
the 21st Century legacy of Wallace's agricultural revolution.
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