BOOK REVIEW

James Howard and the Farm Bureau

Robert P. Howard. James R. Howard and the Farm Bureau.
Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1983. $18.95.

ROBERT HOWARD said he wanted to write a substitute for the autobiography his father — James Raley Howard, first president of the American Farm Bureau Federation — never got to write. He has done that.

He also has done more. He has chronicled the birth and development of the American Farm Bureau, the largest, the most powerful and the first truly national farm organization in the United States.

The biographical material in author Howard's book clearly shows the admiration he holds for his father and his father's accomplishments. And it reads much as one would expect an autobiography to read: an anecdotal account of growing up on the Iowa frontier, a discussion of formative years in local positions of leadership and rarely a discouraging word.

Howard's look at the Farm Bureau, however, surpasses that. It is a study of the men and social forces that meshed to create a new power in American agriculture, American economics and American politics.

The American Farm Bureau was born at the grass roots level. Farming was coming out of its tradition-laden, haphazard past and was developing as a scientific endeavor. Farmers sought to help themselves by cooperating to support county farm agents who could bring the latest in agricultural research results to their farms.

This fostered a more-than-cozy relationship between the Farm Bureau and the fledgling Cooperative Extension Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state land grant colleges which sponsored county farm agents. In fact, county extension agents often found themselves recruiting Farm Bureau members and helping with Farm Bureau accounts — justified on the basis of the organization being the local leg in the federal-state-local cooperative triad of support for their programs.

Before the direct Farm Bureau connections were broken in the 1950s, the government stood accused of subsidizing the creation and operation of a private farmer organization.

Robert Howard's look at this phase in the development of the Farm Bureau breaks no new ground; but it helps him build his case for why the new bureau was different from other farm organizations when the county and state associations sought to form a national federation in 1919.

The Farm Bureau was different, he says, because it was responsive to more than short-term economic pressures and marketing problems. It dealt with those topics, but it also involved itself in the growing field of agricultural education and in the first effective national lobbying effort by a farm organization.

Howard's account of the men who overcame regional factionalism to create this national organization and who molded it into an economic and political force in the United States is the true achievement of this book.

The achievement is limited only by author Howard's attempt to explain the development through the eyes of his father, rather than on broader terms. He lets his father say, for instance, that the early lobbying victories of the Farm Bureau exceeded in importance all previous farm legislation in this country.

James Howard must surely have been excepting the legislation that created homesteading, the land grant colleges, agricultural experiment stations, extension services and vocational agriculture programs — all of which preceded the Farm Bureau.

Still, the limits Robert Howard placed on his book do it little harm. The vision of his father James Howard was, after all, an expansive one.□

Gordon Biltingsley is public information specialist for the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale School of Agriculture. He is author of the weekly "SIUC Country Column" distributed to more than 300 newspapers in four states.

May 1983 | Illinois Issues | 25