Husbandman

As it must to all men, Death came to Henry Cantwell Wallace, in the 59th year of his life and the fourth of his administration of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. An apparently successful operation for appendicitis was followed by intestinal poisoning and inflammation of the gallbladder.

After a state funeral at the White House, the body was taken to Des Moines. Flags on all public buildings in the land remained at half-mast by order of the President until after the interment.

Son of a husbandman, fellow of husbandmen, writer for and teacher of husbandmen, Henry Cantwell Wallace brought to his office a practical and scientific knowledge of agriculture second to none. His understanding of the devices and desires of farmers was gained at first hand--in the days when his father took to the soil in Adair County, Iowa, and later when, as a youth of 20, he was obliged to interrupt his course at the Agricultural College, at Ames, and put in five years raising corn and hogs on one of his father's tenantless farms.

The elder Wallace, a Presbyterian minister, known to a neighborly countryside as "Uncle Henry,"was part owner of a county newspaper, and the son learned printing along with tilling as he grew to manhood. When lean years came, young Wallace studiously and scientifically applied himself to the task of inducing the indurate soil to yield him his livelihood. His experiments and solutions he then reported in articles for farm journals in Iowa and Illinois; and it was these writings that paved his way to greater things than struggling to support a wife with corn at 10c and 15c a bushel and hogs at 2 3/4c a pound.

In 1893, the Professor of Agriculture at Ames was one James Wilson, destined four years later to enter upon a 16-year service as Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft. Professor Wilson had seen young Wallace's articles, talked with him, induced him to return to Ames and finish out his two remaining years of study. This Wallace did --in a twelvemonth--and in 1893 he was appointed Professor Wilson's assistant.

In 1894, the young farmer-professor launched Farmer and Dairyman, later known as Wallace's Farmer when it was merged with the elder Wallace's Iowa Homestead. At the masthead of Wallace's Farmer is this motto, invented by the Presbyterian pastor: "Good Farming, Clear Thinking, Right Living."

Warren G. Harding did not know his future Secretary before the campaign of 1920, when Senator Capper brought them together. Upon his appointment, Mr. Wallace succeeded his friend of long standing, Edwin Thomas Meredith of Des Moines. In office, Mr. Wallace conducted the Department's affairs with quiet industry and without notable occurrences other than his staunch opposition to the proposed transfer of Alaskan forest reserves to the control of Secretary Fall's Department of the Interior. This fight was long and bitter. In his speech of July, 1923, President Harding let it be known that he sided with Mr. Wallace and against Secretary Fall. The Alaskan forest reserves still appertain to the Department of Agriculture.

Between President Coolidge and Mr. Wallace all harmony existed, despite the fact that Mr. Wallace, ever the husbandman, did not share the President's disapproval of the Haugen-McNary bill for farm relief.

Charles F. Marvin, Chief of the Weather Bureau, was the President's appointee for Acting Secretary of Agriculture.