We will emerge from this struggle as the dominant power, dominant in naval power, dominant in air power, dominant in industrial capacity, dominant in mineral production, dominant in agricultural production. These are the basic resources of power.
(Ralph Watkins of the US National Resource Planning Board, November 1942)1
The position of American farmers during the Second World War was exceptional. The wartime problems which they faced were minimal in comparison to those faced by farmers in other combatant nations. There was no danger of enemy invasion or the capture of vital agricultural land. Farmers had to compete with the arms and explosives industry for labour, fertilizers and machinery, but the United States was virtually the only country in the world which had sufficient resources to spare to divert raw materials into the production of large quantities of farm machinery, fertilizers and other chemical products. The Depression had left farmers with huge surpluses of food which the unemployed urban workers could not afford to buy. By providing American farmers with a market for their food, and with a healthy income, the war pulled agriculture out of the Depression. A process of modernization, which had begun tentatively in the 1930s, was accelerated and a new agricultural revolution occurred which began to transform farming into the industry which it is today. Crucially, modernization allowed fewer farmers to feed significantly more people. The wartime boom in American agriculture meant that the United States was not only able to provide its enormous army and civilian population with plentiful quantities of food, it was also able to feed the soldiers and civilians of the Soviet Union, China and Great Britain.
The outbreak of war in Europe was, however, viewed with gloom by American agriculturalists, their outlook shaped by years of over-production, unwanted agricultural surpluses and low farm prices. They feared that, as had been the case with the First World War, a period of increased demand and production would be followed by a post-war bust and a return to the problem of surpluses. The need for textiles for uniforms did empty US warehouses of depressing piles of cotton, built up during the 1930s, but war meant that Europeans needed to husband their dollar resources and as a result they cut back on food purchases. In 1939 France reduced the amount of wheat it bought and cancelled all purchases of apples and pears. The British cut their expenditure on American food from £62 million in 1939 to £38 million in 1941. The United States Department of Agriculture warned that unless some way of selling food to Britain was found, America would be burdened by warehouses bursting at the seams with yet more unwanted food.2 America’s problem was not that the war cut off its access to imports but that it had lost a large chunk of its export market.
In March 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced lend-lease as a means by which the supposedly neutral United States could aid Britain’s war effort. Lend-lease solved the problem of the British balance of payments by ‘loaning’ Britain war materiel and food. The Agriculture Minister, Claude Wickard, urged farmers to grow as much as they could, telling them ‘this is our war and not anyone else’s war’.3 Farmers were provided with the incentive of guaranteed farm prices, fixed at 110 per cent parity with industrial goods for the duration of the war.4 Wickard was proved right. By 1942 it was clear that food production was going to be a vital and highly profitable aspect of America’s contribution to the conflict. American farmers now had plenty of customers. Even before the United States’ official entry into the war large numbers of civilians had moved into work in the war industries where they earned good money and they had little other than food to spend it on. The civilian demand for dairy products rose by 22 per cent. In April 1941 the lend-lease system was extended to the Chinese Nationalists and in November 1941 to the Soviet Union. Once America entered the war in December 1941 the expansion of the military pushed up the demand for food even further. The American military, together with Britain, China and the Soviet Red Army, swallowed up 15 per cent of American dairy products and 25 per cent of American eggs, although the British and the Russians would undoubtedly have preferred more canned meat to the dreaded powdered egg, which America over-produced.5
The United States’ agricultural administration rivalled the German Reich Food Corporation in its complexity, but it exercised far less control. This was partly due to Roosevelt’s failure to appoint a food administrator with overall authority. The obvious man for the job would have been Herbert Hoover. Hoover had played an important role in the United States Food Administration during the First World War and had organized famine relief for Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1920s. But Roosevelt loathed him.6 Instead, food issues were divided between the Ministry of Agriculture (which itself broke down into the War Food Administration, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics) and the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations. In addition, the Nutrition Division of the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services and the Office of Price Administration both had a role to play in the control of food. The antipathy between different administrators, each defending their own patch, resulted in an ineffective administration. And few bureaucratic directives were ever applied in the field. The Production Goals Committee, for example, set down guidelines as to what farmers should grow, but these had little impact on the actual planting of crops.7
Thus, American farmers continued to grow too much cotton when they could more usefully have cultivated peanuts and vegetable feed. In 1944 valuable resources were wasted when fruit farmers planted a bumper crop of water melons. The Office of Price Administration considered water melons so low in nutritional value that it was not worth setting a maximum price for them. In 1943 water melons had been so scarce and the demand for them so great that they became some fruit farmers’ most profitable crop. By planting double the quantity in 1944 the relatively control-free farmers were simply responding to market forces.8 Most importantly, the American agricultural administration failed to boost milk production as much as was needed. In order to keep the price down for the consumer, the decision was taken not to raise the price paid for milk to the farmer but to subsidize the cost of feed for the cows. The result was that farmers’ incomes increased but milk production barely rose. The United States Food Administration would have been better off adopting the British solution whereby farmers were paid well, creating an incentive for the farmer to produce more milk, while a subsidy kept down the cost to the consumer.9
The government’s relatively lax grip on farming was wasteful in a wartime context. Fortunately, American agriculture experienced a revolution in productivity which meant that the United States could afford some wastage. To many American farmers the Second World War certainly felt like a ‘good’ war. Farm incomes rose by 156 per cent.10 ‘As farm prices got better and better … farm times became good times,’ recalled Laura Briggs, raised on a small farm in Idaho in the 1930s and 1940s. ‘Dad started having his land improved, and of course we improved our home and the outbuildings. We and most other farmers went from a tarpaper shack to a new frame house with indoor plumbing. Now we had an electric stove instead of a wood burning one, and running water at the sink where we could do the dishes; and a hot water heater; and nice linoleum … It was just so modern we couldn’t stand it.’11
The war also provided a painless solution to the problem of agricultural unemployment, caused by the Depression. Rural workers were attracted to the factories by a wage double that of a farm worker and which could be earned in a mere eight hours a day.12 In the United States ex-farmers and farm labourers made up 35 per cent of wartime industry’s mechanical engineers and 30 per cent of those working in production.13 Including those called up into the military, 6 million people left the farms.14 Mordecai Ezekiel, economic adviser to the Department of Agriculture, commented dryly that ‘we will have conquered unemployment by the same means that the Fascist countries conquered it, by organizing our people and our resources into a military economy’.15
Indeed, by 1942 farming was doing so well that farmers began to regret the loss of labour to industry. Farmer’s organizations began to campaign for farm workers to be exempted from the draft. So powerful was the farm lobby in Washington that they succeeded in pushing through the Tydings Amendment to the Selective Service Law, by which means about 3.5 million farmers managed to escape the draft in 1943. In 1944 for every industrial worker who received deferment, three farm workers were exempted.16
The United States overcame the shortage of agricultural labour with relative ease by using a variety of alternative sources of farm labour. A Women’s Land Army was formed in 1943 but farmers on the Great Plains and in the Rocky Mountains resisted hiring in land girls. They preferred to rely on their wives and daughters, who extended their activities from the farmyard and vegetable-growing to working in the fields. Verda Peterson left college to work on her father’s farm in Missouri, milking cows, driving the binder to harvest the oats, and using the tractor to make hay. She replaced her older brother, who had enrolled in the naval reserve. In an article on her life in the Country Gentleman she explained: ‘I am needed there. I know how to farm and can do more for my country there than in industry.’17 Officials in Iowa estimated that farmers’ use of their wives and children to work on the farm increased from 13 to 36 per cent. One farmer summed up the general feeling: ‘If I have to have a woman helping me in the field, I want my wife, not some green city girl.’18 But those who overcame their prejudices against the Women’s Land Army were often pleased. A dairy farmer in Massachusetts enthused that ‘his [land] girls were the best of the lot’.19
In California schoolchildren were given the afternoons off to help bring in the 1942 fruit and vegetable harvest. By 1944 the state was employing 3 million schoolchildren part-time to pick fruit, milkweed and floss, which was used to make life jackets.20 Farmers discovered that German prisoners of war made good farm labourers. ‘They saved us!’ commented one rancher. Edward Pierce from Hillboro County recounted, ‘They do what they are told. They don’t work quite as fast as Americans … but they damage less fruit in orchards … We couldn’t have harvested our apple crop up here without help and the prisoners were the best solution.’21 The Germans were as delighted with their food as the farmers were with their hard work. One prisoner reported that he ate more in America in one day than he had in a whole week at home. Another commented that ‘at first we thought the Americans were making fun of us. Such a menu: Soup, vegetables, meat, fish, fruit, coffee and ice cream! Never in the army did we get such a meal.’22 When the US War Ministry, eager to get the prisoners off its hands, began to make plans for their repatriation in 1945 there was an outcry among farmers. Farmer George S. Sweet wrote to Senator Raymond E. Willis in desperation in August 1945, explaining that he would need his prisoners of war until at least ‘15 November, as the city folks will not come out and get these crops in’.23
In the summer of 1944, as the German atrocities in eastern Europe began to come to light, the German prisoners were sad to find that they were no longer fed as though they were American soldiers. Their rations were reduced but their food was still well above the standard received by any labourer on a German farm in 1945, let alone a prisoner of war or forced worker.24 Despite condemning the ‘Jewish’ liberal conspiracy of American capitalism, Hitler had held up the United States as a country which had achieved a level of wealth and mass consumerism to which Germany should aspire. When they were repatriated these German prisoners of war will have taken home to their battered and defeated country a fuller understanding of the superiority of American resources and the meaning of American abundance.
If the Americans treated their prisoners of war well, one of the least triumphant aspects of American wartime agriculture was the bracero programme. About 50,000 Mexican workers, brought in specifically to work in the vegetable and cotton fields of California and the south-west, were corralled into work gangs, housed in the most basic of barracks, and paid derisory wages. The braceros provided large-scale agribusinesses with a supply of cheap, non-unionized, fully exploitable labour.25 An even darker side of America’s war in the countryside was its treatment of Japanese-American farmers. Japanese-Americans owned only 1 per cent of Californian land but produced 10 per cent of the state’s agricultural produce. During the wave of hysterical hatred which followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Californian fruit and vegetable farmers saw their opportunity to rid themselves of the unwanted competition. C. L. Preisker, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors in the Santa Barbara district, said: ‘if we begin now to shut out the Japanese, after the war we have the chance of accomplishing something’.26 Japanese-Americans were interned in camps in 1942. Many sold their farms at bargain prices and left their fruit and vegetables to rot in the fields.27
The most effective way of compensating for the loss of farm labour was to mechanize. Mechanization had been progressing slowly in the 1930s but the lack of profits and farm capital held the process back. War guaranteed the farmers high prices for their produce but it also pushed up the wages for labour. This created an even greater incentive to replace men with machines, and increased profits enabled farmers to buy in new machinery. Steel shortages meant that agricultural machinery was rationed; nevertheless, of all the countries in the world the United States had sufficient raw materials and labour to spare in order to produce enough tractors, combine harvesters and milking machines for the number of these machines in use on American farms to double between 1941 and 1945. Maize- and cotton-pickers and threshers became commonplace.28 The rural electrification programme, which had begun in the 1930s, was extended to the point where electricity had become a standard utility for nearly half of America’s farms by 1945, allowing the introduction of electric milk-coolers, feed-grinders and heating systems for chicken coops.29
The spread of machinery was matched by increased use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. The United States, Canada and Britain combined their resources and this meant that they were the only countries in the world with sufficient raw materials to allow them collectively to increase their use of artificial fertilizers while still producing explosives. The United States government set up ten synthetic-nitrogen-processing plants and greatly increased its mining of potash and phosphoric rock. Most of the production was channelled into the explosives industry but there was enough available for American farmers to triple the amount of fertilizer they used, thus ensuring that the United States, Canada and Britain were the only countries that possessed agricultural soil which had not been severely depleted of its nutrients by over-farming by the end of the war. There were extreme shortages of pyrethrins, most of which were made in Japanese-occupied south-east Asia. They were used to manufacture insecticides for use in agriculture and for troops fighting in the tropics. But imports of pyrethrum from daisies grown in Kenya meant that American farmers were able to increase the use of arsenate and calcium arsenate insecticides.30 In addition, the widespread introduction of hybrid seeds and selective breeding for livestock allowed great strides to be made in increasing yields. Thus, while virtually every other nation struggled to maintain, let alone increase, its agricultural productivity, US agriculture ended the war with productivity having risen by somewhere between 11 and 30 per cent.31
In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt extolled the virtues of America’s farming population. He told Congress that ‘our civilization rests at bottom on the wholesomeness, prosperity, of life in the country. The men and women on the farms stand for what is fundamentally best and most needed in our American life … [W]e need the development of men in the open country, who will be in the future, as in the past, the stay and strength of the nation in time of war, and its guiding and controlling spirit in time of peace.’32 But this romanticized notion of farming as a way of life gave way as market forces reshaped farming into a business which faced the same sorts of competition and price pressures as industry, where the constant demand was that more should be produced for less.33 By rejuvenating the market for food the war enabled farmers to take advantage of new scientific improvements. But fertilizers, insecticides, machines, hybrid seeds which needed to be bought in each year (formerly farmers had saved a part of the previous crop for seed), and selective breeding for livestock, all demanded more and more capital (rather than labour) investment. Small farms had begun to disappear in the 1930s as the New Deal’s farming subsidies favoured the larger farms which agrarian reformers concluded were better able to meet efficiently the needs of the vast nation.34 This process accelerated during the war. Just as the government awarded industrial war contracts to large businesses (more than half of the $175 billion spent went to ‘just thirty-three firms’), agribusinesses were favoured by agricultural wartime spending.35 Farm and commodity lobbies, which became increasingly influential, also tended to promote the interests of large-scale farmers at the expense of the small and marginal.36 The size of America’s farms increased, while their number declined.37 In the south, large, fully mechanized agribusinesses moved in and the dispossession of the mainly black share-croppers, which had begun in the 1930s, was virtually completed.38
Seabrook Farms in New Jersey is an excellent example of the way in which, during the first half of the twentieth century, American agriculture transformed into an industry and of how this development was consolidated during the Second World War. Charles F. Seabrook, always known as C. F., took over a fruit and vegetable farm from his father in 1913. He hated the dirtiness of farming and his real ambition was to become a construction engineer. He did eventually qualify in engineering and set up a construction company. Meanwhile, he applied his engineering interests to farming. Having noticed an ingenious method whereby a neighbouring Danish farmer irrigated his vegetables by means of iron pipes, he experimented, and in 1920 Seabrook Farms possessed the largest overhead irrigation system in America. C. F. indulged his passion for construction by building a highway that linked his farm to the large customer bases in Philadelphia and New York. On the farm he built power- and food-processing plants, a cold-storage warehouse, a sawmill, water storage and pumping stations to feed the irrigation pipelines, as well as houses and a school for the workers and their families. By the First World War it was a small self-contained industrial village and the farm prospered, supplying the United States army with fresh and canned fruits and vegetables.39
C. F. failed to withstand the decline in demand once the war was over and in 1924 he went bankrupt and was bought out of the farm, only to buy it back in 1929 with the proceeds of his construction company. By then his sons Belford and Jack had joined him in the business and it was their ingenious ideas that kept the farm afloat through the difficult years of the Depression. Their strategy was to add value to low-priced and unwanted crops, which otherwise would have been left to rot in the fields. Cabbages were turned into cans of sauerkraut, and the farm bought up skinny mid-western cattle at low prices and added the meat to their potatoes and carrots to make canned beef stew. The cans were sold to the state for its programme of food distribution to the poor.40
But it was the freezing industry that really rejuvenated the farm. In the 1910s Clarence Birdseye had learnt about freezing food while living with the Innu in Labrador. General Foods patented Birdseye’s freezing technique and in the late 1930s C. F. signed a contract with them. As a result Seabrook Farms became the largest frozen foods company in America, controlling the process from seed to packages of frozen food. The farm developed new varieties of vegetables which were more suitable for freezing. The latest technology was used in the 20,000 acres of fields, from power tractors, many-disc ploughs, four-row cultivators, and the latest fertilizers, which, alongside pesticides and fungicides, were sprayed on the crops by aircraft.41 Large vegetable-processing assembly lines were built on the farm, and refrigeration and cold storage facilities expanded. The workers’ village grew into a small town.42
When America entered the Second World War Seabrook Farms was poised to take advantage of the boom in demand for food, especially easily transportable food. Stimulated by domestic demand, as a result of the shortage of canned items, the frozen food industry doubled its output during the war. Indeed the amount of vegetables grown for processing in the United States increased by a staggering 91 per cent. Many of the potatoes, carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, cabbage, beets and tomatoes were dehydrated for the military. But realizing that dehydrated vegetables were unlikely to be a roaring success after the war, the food-processing industry was much more interested in expanding its freezing capacity.43 Meanwhile, Belford Seabrook was sent to Australia to teach farmers there the art of industrialized vegetable production to feed the US troops fighting in the Pacific.
In 1943 Seabrook Farms produced 60 million pounds of vegetables and employed 7,500 workers around the clock at harvest time. The farms’ demand for labour was insatiable and the Seabrooks solved the problem of wartime labour shortages with their customary ingenuity. Every summer a group of black female college students from Atlanta were flown in, along with a contingent of chaperones. The women slept in a large barrack with bunk beds, and sorted peas, beans, spinach, strawberries, corn and beets by day. The field work was done by hundreds of men hired in from the West Indies, who earned fifty cents an hour and sent most of what they earned back home to their families.44 Once the Japanese-American internees were released from the camps in the west, Seabrook Farms took 2,500, who were joined in the summer of 1944 by German prisoners of war. In 1945 the farm found room for 600 Estonians from displaced-persons camps in Germany.45 C. F. liked to present the farm as a paternal enterprise which humanely gave work to unwanted ‘enemy aliens’. But his sons recalled a cold and rather heartless man and the memories of the workers confirm that while agribusiness was good for the farmer it was a rather less joyful development for agricultural labourers.46 As it was a long way to the nearest towns, the workers were forced to buy their food and other necessities from over-priced company stores. Their dominant memories were of long hours, poor pay – unions had been withdrawn from the workers on the farm when strikes in the early 1930s had disrupted production – and segregated, purpose-built villages of concrete block houses.47
In the post-war years, American agricultural productivity increases continued until by the late 1980s one farmer, who would have been able to feed about ten people in the 1940s, could produce enough to feed ninety.48 The face of American agriculture changed dramatically. In the south cotton was no longer the king of crops, and black farmers had virtually disappeared. In California rice became an important crop, while speciality crops (mainly fruits and vegetables) were now grown on large-scale holdings. Across the north dairy cattle remained important but in the mid-west corn, hogs, poultry and soya beans became the dominant crops.49 Before the war the Americans had used soya beans to provide protein in animal feed but it was indigestible for chickens and pigs. It was not until the 1940s that research developed a technique for deactivating the enzyme inhibitor in the meal, which allowed these animals to tolerate the feed. Their high protein content made the beans a useful meat substitute and American soya bean flour became the main ingredient in British sausages. Vere Hodgson in London commented that ‘Thursday I have an order with the Dairy for a pound of sausage. These make-do for Thursday, Friday and part Saturday. No taste much of sausage, but are of soya bean flour. We just pretend they are the real thing.’50 The United States also sent out self-heating tins of soya chunks to help feed the Indian army, which by reason of religious taboos was not very keen on corned beef or canned pork. But they went down like ‘a lead balloon’.51
Soya was given an immense boost by the loss of the vegetable-oil-producing countries in the Far East. The growing Allied reliance on margarine to compensate for the decline in butter production, and the use of glycerine (which could be extracted from the beans) to make explosives, led to the doubling of the area under soya from 5 to 11 million hectares.52 Already in 1939 Illinois was known as the ‘Manchuria’ of the United States, producing more than one-half of America’s soya beans. The farmers complained that the crop robbed the soil of nutrients but the profit motive for growing soya was too powerful. A new, fattier bean known as the Lincoln was developed by the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station, and the Secretary of State for Agriculture guaranteed a generous wartime price per bushel which amounted to twice that paid for corn.53
Until the Second World War Americans were resistant to the charms of margarine. It had been invented by a French food chemist, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, in 1869 for the French navy as a cheap and calorific butter substitute which would not go rancid on long voyages. In 1902 the German discovery of hydrogenation (by which unsaturated fat in reaction to hydrogen turns into saturated fat) meant that margarine could be made from plant oils rather than the original ingredients, which included cow’s udder, milk and sodium bicarbonate. Its name came from the Greek magarítes for pearl because of its pearly white sheen. Yellow dyes were mixed in to make it look more palatable and buttery.54 By the 1930s Germany, in particular, had become dependent on margarine as a butter substitute for the poorer sections of society.55 But in America dairy farmers did not want it to undermine butter production and they lobbied for heavy taxes on the substitute, especially the more appetizing yellow-coloured margarine, which was forbidden in some states.56 The agricultural administration’s failure to boost wartime milk production sufficiently meant that nutritionists recommended vitamin-A-fortified margarine as a replacement for butter. Housewives took to the product with enthusiasm. One reported that although ‘all had been against it at the start’, women were now ‘unanimous in their praise of oleo [as in its original French nameoleo-margarine] … Our butcher can’t keep up with the demand.’57 An Illinois state booklet, Home Budgets for Victory, recommended margarine in sixty-eight of its recipes. Surveys showed that even the households of the anti-margarine dairy farmers were using the butter substitute. In 1950 the extra taxes on margarine were abolished.58 The war had firmly established margarine as an everyday American food. In turn, this helped to establish soya as an American crop.
At the end of the war American scientists learned from their defeated German colleagues how to counter soya oil’s unpleasant smell. From then on soya’s share of the United States’ edible oil exports rose dramatically, reaching 20 per cent in 1950.59 Soya flour was also seen as a way of meeting the need for high-protein flours to feed undernourished newly liberated European civilians. Facilities for milling the beans into flour were expanded. Under the Marshall Plan soya flour, oil and feed exports to Europe were heavily subsidized as a cheap way of feeding hungry Europeans.60
This has led to largely invisible but none the less significant changes in the western diet since 1945. Soya has now become a dominant element in European animal feed and is ubiquitous in processed foods, such as bread, biscuits, cakes, chocolate bars, breakfast cereals, soups, margarine and processed meat, to which it is added in a variety of forms as soya flour, oil, lecithin, protein or as a flavour enhancer.61 From its pre-war position as a smelly and indigestible bean, soya has become one of the three staple crops eaten by Americans. Today soya provides 257 of the average contemporary American’s daily intake of calories, while wheat provides a further 768 and corn another 554 calories.62
The enormous success of the lucrative American soya business also had its more dubious side-effects. The impact of soya products on human health is a matter for some concern. While the Japanese ferment soya beans to make tofu, miso and soya sauce, western processing of soya to produce vegetable oils and soya flour does not involve fermentation. Unfermented soya products contain phytoestrogens which mimic human oestrogen and some medics fear that if unfermented soya is consumed in large quantities it can affect the development of the reproductive system and fertility.63 Soya beans also loosen the soil far more than other crops, and in the American west, which had already lost much of its soil in the 1930s, the expansion of the crop undermined a very real need to concentrate on soil conservation, especially when the problem of drought and soil erosion returned in the 1950s.64 Nowadays, soya farming is expanding in environmentally sensitive areas in Latin America, undermining the ecosystem of the Brazilian Cerrados plateau and threatening to encroach on the Amazonian forest.65
America ended the war virtually the only country in the world with a booming agriculture sector. Its civilians barely suffered any hardship with regard to food supplies and its army was the best fed throughout the war. Yet the US was still able to supply its allies with large quantities of much-needed food. In price terms the amount of agricultural exports tripled.66 In 1945 the United States War Food Administration summed up the importance of food as a ‘weapon of war. As such, it ranks with ships, airplanes, tanks and guns. Food, particularly American food, has been especially crucial in the present war, because it has been essential to the fighting efficiency of our allies as well as our own military forces, and has been required to maintain colossal industrial productivity here and in other allied countries. Modern war demands enormous food production, not only for consumption by huge forces on land and sea, but for consumption by the personnel employed in war industries, in transport, and in related occupations.’67 The United States’ ability to fill this need for food gave it a hold over its allies and an advantage over its enemies. When America ended the war with a bumper harvest in 1945 the administration was to discover that the ability to command plentiful quantities of food continued to equate with power in the post-war world.