Events and Activities : HENRY A. WALLACE, FORGOTTEN CORN YIELD PIONEER, AT CP LIBRARY APRIL 19

Henry A. Wallace in a Victory Garden

We Iowans owe a bunch of our routine 200-bushel-plus corn yields to fellow Iowan Henry A. Wallace (1881-1965) who started the hybrid corn revolution in the early 20th century.

The Center Point Historical Society is sponsoring a free Henry A. re-enactment by Amana actor Tom Milligan on Sunday, April 19, at 2 p.m. at the Center Point Library little basement.

When Wallace was a smart little central Iowa kid, farmers were saving their own open-pollinated corn for seed. Popular varieties were based on corn “beauty contests.” Young Wallace wondered, “What’s it look like to a hog?” and did his own corn yield experiments. He graduated from Iowa State and later helped start the Iowa State Corn Yield Tests. In 1926, he founded Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn—this year is Pioneer’s 100th birthday. (Pioneer is now a subsidiary of Indianapolis-based Corteva Agriscience.)

Hybrid corn wasn’t his only claim to fame. He edited his family's "Wallaces Farmer" magazine for more than a decade before becoming Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, helping keep American farmers from going under during the Depression.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger called Henry A. “the best Secretary of Agriculture the country has ever had.” The U.S. Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland was renamed in Wallace’s honor in 2000. (The Trump administration is now closing the Center.)

Wallace was FDR’s vice-president in the third term. He ran for president against Truman as the Progressive Party candidate and was badly defeated in 1948.

President Roosevelt once told him, “You know, Henry, the things you believe in are all going to come some day. Your problem is you’re just too far ahead of your time.”