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Selected Works of Henry A. Wallace

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Soil and the General Welfare

Henry A. Wallace

Chapter VIII of Wallace's Whose Constitution?, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1936.
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 111.

1. Of all the circumstances which have combined to make this nation different from the nations of the Old World, rich soil and plenty of it, free or nearly so to all comers, stands first. Freeholders in a wide land of fabulous fertility, guarded by great oceans from foreign invasion, could erect separate strongholds of individual enterprise, free speech and free conscience. In no spread-eagle sense, but in plain truth, liberty and equality have been a natural outgrowth of our great gift of soil.

2. But the dynamic quality which characterizes civilized man does not leave such a gift unmodified. If nature was prodigal with us, we have been ten times more prodigal with her. During the past 150 years, we white men have destroyed more soil, timber and wild-life than the Indians, left to themselves, would have destroyed in many thousands of years.

3. It is easy to excuse the farmers of one hundred years ago for the way in which they mismanaged their farms. In the first place most of them didn't know there was such a thing as soil erosion. There was available very little scientific knowledge about methods of soil building or of avoiding soil depletion. In the second place, in a land so vast and with a population so thin, the easiest course oftentimes was to wear out a farm and then move on west. No one worries about conserving the air. Why should anyone give a thought to saving the land when there is plenty of it?

4. On the basis of their record it would be easy to indict the people of the United States as killers, looters and exploiters. Several species of wild life have completely disappeared, others have been greatly reduced, and fish cannot live in many of our streams because of pollution. We have wastefully slashed down our forests and have exploited our oil and mineral resources. Pastures and hillsides have been plowed. But in all of this I am convinced that the American people were thoughtless rather than willfully destructive. They were victims of the customs of the immediate past, when the important thing was to fill up a continent with people as rapidly as possible, even though the result might be exploitation rather than conservation.

5. Today we have come to a time when the continuation of the exploitive frame of mind can easily be disastrous. Already we have allowed erosion by water to destroy more than fifty million acres, representing an area equal to all of the arable land in New York and Pennsylvania. Another fifty million acres have been damaged almost to the point of ruination for productive use, and an additional zoo million acres have been seriously impoverished. The process of erosion is rapidly gaining headway on still another 100 million acres, some of it the most valuable farm land remaining in the United States. Wind erosion has nearly ruined four million acres and is active on about sixty million acres; largely in the High Plain regions. People who have not studied the results of investigations made at soil erosion experiment stations in central and western United States cannot appreciate how terribly real is soil erosion. At these stations arrangements are made for carefully weighing the soil which is removed from the land by the rain under different systems of cropping. On many slopes, one exceedingly hat in will remove as much as an inch of soil from land in corn or in cotton.

6. Nearly half of our land is farmed by tenants who stay on the average only two or three years on the same farm and whose chief concern is getting together enough money to pay the rent this particular year. The landlords, on the other hand, are driven by the necessity of getting enough money out of the land to pay the taxes and interest on the mortgage and they oftentimes have only slightly more interest in the land than the tenants. In other words, it would seem that on at least a million farms the landlords and tenants are forced by their economic situation to enter into a conspiracy which in effect promotes erosion rather than prevents it.

7. People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years; but mother nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely. The soil is the mother of man and if we forget her, life eventually weakens.

8. When the cotton gin came into extensive use there began in the South an expansion of the cotton crop which resulted in the destruction of millions of acres of plow land in southeastern United States. When machinery was invented for the more rapid plowing, disking and cultivating of corn land, the farmers in parts of the Middle West entered upon a period of promoting soil erosion which put the farmers of the Southeast to shame as mere beginners in the art of soil exploitation. At the time of the World War tractors and combines came into the picture. Millions of acres of pasture were plowed. In the humid parts of the grain belt the sloping fields became greatly subject to erosion, and in the drier parts wind erosion became a serious problem, especially during March and April of the drier years. Drainage became an obsession, at the same time that the grass was plowed. Rivers were straightened, and the spring and summer rains were sent to the sea with the greatest possible speed. Lake levels and water tables dropped. Underground water reserves declined to a point which made it almost impossible to obtain well water in many farm areas when the dry seasons came along.

9. If the climate shifts to the dry side, dust storms, failing wells and lack of subsoil moisture will become an exceedingly serious problem in many areas. If the climate shifts to the wet side, the excess of drainage will not prove at all embarrassing but the planting of too much land in crops will result in sending the surface soil either to silt up the streams or to move on to the ocean.

10. Yes, the white man is learning that in a land with a continental climate of high winds and sudden dashing rains and rather violent extremes of weather from one year to the next, it is the part of wisdom to leave a higher percentage of the land in grass and trees than has, been, the custom in the United States so far.

11. The floods of March, 1936, made millions of city people conscious of the need for better management of the headwaters of our great rivers. Part of the problem is the erection of dams, reservoirs and levees; part of it is reforestation; and another important part is the holding of the soil in place on individual farms, In fact, engineering structures without simultaneous corrective action taken by the owners of land in the watershed maybe made useless in a relatively short time because of the filling up of reservoirs through deposit of silt.

12. The life of a flourishing civilization demands recognition by landowners and the national government of the necessity of co-operating in behalf of the general welfare to prevent soil erosion and floods. This problem runs across state lines.

13. We may well take a lesson from northwestern China and Asia Minor. It took several hundred years for the people of these lands to reduce them to deserts. We in the United States are moving faster because we have the advantage of machinery. Thus far the damage has not been completely ruinous, but in another thirty or forty years we may do irreparable harm.

14. Probably the most damaging indictment that can be made of the capitalistic system is the way in which its emphasis on unfettered individualism results in exploitation of natural resources in a manner to destroy the physical foundations of national longevity. Is there no way for the capitalistic system to develop a mechanism for taking thought and planning action in terms of the general welfare for the long run as represented by the conservation of soil and other natural resources which are being competitively exploited?

15. The experience of Sweden would seem to suggest that excessive exploitation can be avoided, if the competitive spirit is restrained by reasonable regulatory laws and if the nation does a certain amount of national planning for the general welfare. Sweden has long led the world in the care and maintenance of its forest resources, and more recently has pursued an enlightened policy with respect to other natural resources, such as mines and water-power. Its forest laws require that all industries and persons engaged in timber cutting must replace the timber removed within a reasonable length of time and that no forest lands be left bare or unplanted with good new stock. In the case of mining industries, Sweden requires that private companies look to the long-time welfare of the people dependent on these industries by, establishing welfare funds which can take care of workers and their families after the mines have been exhausted in any given locality. Sweden's efforts prove that a nation's natural resources may be used with, regard to the long-time general welfare, rather than exploited merely for temporary profits. The United States is many years behind Sweden in this respect and might well profit from its example.

16. So far as soil resources are concerned, however, the problem is related to the business cycle and to unemployment in the cities as well as to practices of farming in themselves. For example, between 1930 and 1934 about two million young people were raised on the farm who normally would have gone to the cities but who stayed at home to go into the farming business. Largely as a result of these two million young people backed up on the farm, five hundred thousand new farms came into existence between 1930 and 1935. Many of these new farms are on hilly land and poor soil. The young people are certain to eke out a miserable existence on this poor land and the land is certain to be harmed.

17. Thus the soil problem is urban as well as rural. If city industry were to proceed at its normal rate of activity, it could absorb the excess young people from the farms and put them to work doing things much more profitable far the general welfare of the United States than the cultivation of land which ought to be in grass and trees. Nevertheless, I am convinced it, is better for the young people of the farms to eke out a miserable existence on poor soil than to come to the cities to burden the relief rolls or sit around in idleness.

18. But it is not only the desperate farming of poverty-stricken individuals, burdened by the necessity of selling crops at low prices to pay rents, taxes or mortgages, that destroys the land. Large scale lumbermen, cattle-men and grain farmers are almost equally responsible. Big men as well as little men are soil destroyers. Sometimes the local or state taxation policy forces exploitation, especially in timber. Yes, we are all of us guilty in one way or another of neglecting the soil or fostering its exploitation in a manner which may prove to be exceedingly embarrassing for our children and grandchildren. Should regulatory methods be adopted? In some cases, yes, but in other cases it may be necessary to offer financial incentive to induce individuals to act in the public interest.

19. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Administration there were financial incentives for shifting millions of acres of farm land producing crops no longer needed (crops which were hard on the soil) into soil-enriching legumes and sail-binding grasses. The new Conservation and Allotment Act, we believe, will promote such shifts on an even broader and more permanent basis. Under the Soil Conservation Service needed experiments are being carried out and technical aid and services given to help farmers in 41 States to prevent erosion and remedy soil wastage on 141 damaged watershed areas. The Resettlement Administration is making readjustments of the use of land too poor for farming and helping families to find better land or occupation. The Tennessee Valley Authority is trying to control erosion and bad land practices in the entire watershed of the Tennessee River which embraces parts of seven States. These various programs are steps in the direction of wiser use and protection of our resources. But all of these efforts will be inadequate until we solve the problem of farm tenancy and the problem of unemployment, the twin problems of human erosion which strike so deeply into the heart of our national life. It is no mere figure of speech to say that we will not get rid of soil erosion until we also get rid of human erosion. . . .

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Selected Works of Henry A. Wallace