Cowed?

In the men of Iowa who churn butter from the state's 5,000,000-odd cows, the word oleomargarine induces not the scientific but the fighting temper. Last week, Iowa State College, which Hawkeyes proudly call a cow college, faced the consequences of having shared the butter-makers' feelings. The college was charged with having sidetracked a Rockefeller Foundation-supported study which said a good word for margarine. The American Association of University Professors threatened to investigate.

The trouble began last March when the college published Researcher Oswald H. Brownlee's pamphlet, Putting Dairying on a War Footing. The fifth in a series of frank and popularly written studies of wartime farm economics, this pamphlet stated that margarine is as palatable and nutritious as butter, is more sensible to produce in wartime because it requires less manpower.*

When buttermakers in the Iowa Farm Bureau bellowed that such a disinterested oleopus as Brownlee's might befit scholarly Harvard but was disloyal in a cow college, Iowa State President Charles Edwin Friley junked the Brownlee pamphlet. When he spoke of drafting a revised text, the packer-minded Chicago Journal of Commerce said he was trying to "bamboozle" the public.

Concluding that the college's scholarly reputation was jeopardized, Brownlee's department chairman, Theodore William Schultz, resigned and joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. Numerous episodes, said he, proved undue Farm Bureau influence over the College.

Over the Iowa pastures the storm raged on. Two eminent U.S. economists defined the issue: a cow college must get funds from a cow legislature but shall its loyalty be to the cows or to science?

* Present U.S. Government policy is substantially what Brownlee advocated. U.S. margarine production has boomed to 54,047,000 Ib. this year, almost double the previous annual average. Margarine, made largely of vegetable oils (from cottonseed, peanuts', corn, palms, cocoanuts), has become an important sideline of leading U.S. meatpackers.

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