When Franklin D. Roosevelt's agriculture secretary and vice-president, Henry A. Wallace, had completed his junior year at Iowa State College in 1909, his family sent him on a western tour "in search of the Corn Belt farmer". Young Henry was to report to the family journal, Wallace's Farmer, how former Corn Belt farmers were prospering in the districts newly irrigated under public or private auspices, such as Arizona's Salt River, Idaho's Boise-Payette and Twin Falls, and farms on the Arkansas River near Garden City, Kansas. Wallace's articles, collected and reprinted here for the first time, are descriptions of up-and-coming western locales such as Amarillo, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; the orange groves of southern California; the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys; and the Greeley District of Colorado. Along the way, the young reporter and agriculturist critiqued dry farming in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and wrestled calves on a Matador Land Company ranch in the Texas panhandle.
Henry Wallace made a specialty of down-home conversation with farmers and their wives and of cross-examining the real-estate agents who profited from government's commitment to sell water rights to the new property owners. He wrote what today we call New History, concentrating on the impact of irrigation on individuals more than technology, law or institutions. Wallace an analysis of the different environments that he visited and his farmer-conservationist ethic. He explains how the closer proximity of irrigated farms and greater abundance of neighbours would produce prosperous communities with schools, roads, and social institutions better than most that then prevailed in America's rural regions, and shows how the cooperative aspects of irrigation farming tempered the independence of the immigrants from the Corn Belt.
- ISBN10 080612332X
- ISBN13 9780806123325
- Publish Date 1 September 1991
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Oklahoma Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 240
- Language English