Chapter 9
Wheat is civilization.
—Jay Franklin
I FELL asleep in the plane from Seattle to Spokane, and woke up thinking that I must be dreaming. I could not believe what I saw; it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in nature. Below us throbbed the wheat. This is undulating country, and the wheat, planted along the hills in eccentric rings and ovals, climbs up one slope and down another. We were flying very low, and the tops of the wheat were intermittently touched by wind; it looked as if somebody were running a gentle invisible thumb over orange plush.
And the colors! The whole rippling blanket underneath might have been the palette of an artist painting sunsets. The colors are fantastically variegated because the wheat, planted at different times, is ripening at different stages of growth; they run from a deep red-copper through a buttery chrome to gamboge to fawn. Some fields looked like maple leaves and some like richly scrambled eggs. Think of all the red-headed girls you ever met; they are all down there in the wheat—auburn, russet, titian, chestnut, sandy. Then throw in the blondes.
But these are not the only colors. Look at the browns and greens. The deep sienna brown is just earth. This is because half the acreage must be left fallow each year in this dry part of the world. The green stripes and pools may be mustard, tumbleweed, or thistle. One convoluted pasture, with the green curling through the yellow in fine twisting lines, resembled nothing so much as an omelette aux fines herbes.
I arrived in Spokane—wide awake—and wanted badly to see what this wheat looked like on the ground. Nelson Hazeltine of the Bonneville Power Administration drove me 110 miles through the wheat to the town of Hooper, where the MacGregor family has a ranch.
This Big Bend country between Spokane and Yakima—also the Palouse area nearby—is probably the most prolific wheat region in the world. If you own enough land and have four successive good years, you can retire a millionaire. The Big Bend has now had several years in a row of superbumper crops, with yields like forty bushels and up per acre.
Four factors, it seems, make this Washington area so prodigal. First, it has a good and consistent snow cover during the winter, while the wheat is growing, and yet isn’t cold enough for winterkill. Second, the sunlight is unspoiled during late spring, with comfortable warmth but no great destroying heat. Third, hail—a savage enemy to wheat—is rare, and very heavy rains just before the harvest, which can do great damage, are unusual. Fourth, the hilly terrain makes the wheat less vulnerable to fire. A whole county planted in wheat can burn out, seemingly in an hour or so; one county, Whitman, did so four years ago when a number of lightning fires struck simultaneously. Wheat burns like cellulose. It makes one of the hottest and most avid of all fires.
We drove out to look, through solid seas of wheat, green on one side of a hill, and mushroom-colored beige on the other, rolling and twisting like desert sand. In some places there are acid spots—perhaps the site of an old fence line or haystack that has poisoned the soil—where wheat won’t grow. We passed pools of platinum—oats and barley. We passed pools of emerald—alfalfa planted in the gullies to hold the topsoil down, to check wind erosion. We passed some bad burns in wheat the color of yellow cabs, and saw the long green firebreaks and the side strips where the combines need room for turning. It seems unbelievable that a combine can climb hills as steep as some of these. Above all, we saw the fallow pools, dead brown except for green weeds and “trash,” which are the key to everything. Precipitation in this part of Washington is only about twelve inches; it is definitely a semiarid area, though the top soil—literally—may be eighty feet thick or thicker. Because of the lack of rain each farmer sows only half his land; the fallow sections are resting, absorbing moisture, sucking it in, waiting to be put to work next year.
There were other things besides wheat. This is all lava country, and we saw the basalt buttes and outcroppings of scab rock. A twister—dust storm—followed us for half an hour, moving right along in the shape of a spinning top, and porcupines and ground hogs crossed the road. The squat shining towers carrying electricity to the farms still strode along our route. Every once in awhile came a house, which forms a kind of self-contained island in the ocean of wheat—a pool of dark green, cottonwoods and poplars, a windmill, the house always painted white, the barn always painted red.1 We passed wild-West villages like Colfax where horse thieves were hanged not so many years ago, and Ritzville which is settled by, of all things, Volga Germans. The main streets of the towns are identical, with silly square false fronts on the houses to conceal their perfectly legitimate peaked roofs.
A word now on wheat in general. The main thing to say is that it gives energy to all mankind; without it, man could not easily live, which cannot be said of any other commodity except air and water. Nobody Knows who discovered wheat; probably it was known to nomadic tribesmen in Central Asia ten thousand years ago as a sort of wild grass, and certainly the use of bread is as old as recorded history. Wheat is not indigenous to North America; the Spaniards brought it in, and then British settlers planted it in Virginia as early as 1618. Oddly enough corn, on its side, is not indigenous to Europe; Europe gave us wheat, and we gave Europe corn in exchange. Wheat is still the world’s premier crop, the essential barometer of its agricultural well-being; it is not, however, the biggest crop in the United States—corn is—though one-third of all American farmers plant wheat, and it covers something like 59,000, 000 acres. On the price of wheat the fate of continents may depend. When wheat hit an all-time low of 37¢ a bushel in 1932, this country was sagging under the worst depression ever known; when wheat sells at better than $1.50, as of the moment, life takes on a bonanza glow.
One ton of wheat, in the form of bread flour, makes 1,932 one-pound loaves, or 2,400,000 calories; fed to livestock, it is the equivalent of 249 dozen eggs, 841 quarts of milk, and 207 pounds of beef.2 More time, effort, and expert skill have gone into research on wheat than any other comparable substance in the world. Agricultural scientists spend their lives crossing its varieties, and in the United States alone there are at least five hundred wheat breeding stations. Wheats are named almost as remarkably as race horses. Among the hard red spring wheats are Red Fife, Sea Island, Montana King; among the durums (used in macaroni and the like) Kubanka, Mindum, Monad; among the hard red winters, Eagle Chief and Early Blackhull; among the soft red winters, Harvest Queen, Red Rock, Climax, Imperial Amber, and Prosperity; among the whites (the type mainly grown in the Northwest), Goldcoin, Hard Longberry No. 1, Oregon Zimmerman, Little Club, Wilhelmina, and Surprise.
Wheat has diseases, as everybody knows, just as has man. An epidemic of rust in 1935 cost one hundred million dollars in North Dakota alone. One wheat illness has the fine aromatic name of bunt or stinking smut.
Fall, winter, and spring wheat are, of course, named for the time of planting; all are harvested in midsummer and the harvest lasts about six weeks. About, three-quarters of American wheat is winter wheat. Spring wheat is much more vulnerable, both to winter frosts and to hot winds in summer. What the breeders do is try to develop strains with a quick life cycle—for instance a celebrated type called Marquis matures in 110 days as against 140 for other varieties—and that will resist bad weather. The Russians, much to the admiration of our own Department of Agriculture, have done some astonishing work in this field. They have for example developed a chemical treatment of winter wheat whereby they can plant it in spring, thus avoiding any hazard of winter-kill, and harvest it in August exactly as if it had been planted the previous fall. Also they are trying hard to breed a variety that will grow, mature, and grow again after harvest, like grass, so that no plowing or seeding will be necessary.
Wheat is a ponderous operation in the Northwest. It has to be, since only half the land is used each year. Five thousand acres are scarcely enough room to move around in. “We no longer raise wheat here,” Carey McWilliams quotes a Washington farmer as saying, “we manufacture it.”3 This process reaches its apogee, as we shall see, in such mastodonic farms as that of Colonel Tom Campbell in Montana.
The MacGregor ranch at Hooper, where I had the pleasure of delving into these mysteries, is operated by the MacGregor Land & Livestock Company, which was founded by four brothers of Scottish descent. The family came originally from the Isle of Mull. My hosts were Alexander Campbell MacGregor—who was once a schoolteacher and a druggist in Chicago—and his nephew John M. MacGregor. The ranch covers 33,000 acres, as big as a township in Connecticut. The rainfall averages only twelve inches (in 1944 only nine and a half); yet the MacGregor property grows forty bushels to the acre or more. Everything is pretty much mechanized, and three tractors do what two hundred horses did twenty years ago; six “cat skinners,” four combine operators (wages eighteen to twenty-five dollars per day), six truck drivers, and a “roustabout” replace a staff that once numbered sixty-four. Among the wheats produced are Rex, with a huge kernel like an acorn, and Orofed, a new cross between Turkey Red and Federation. The harvest, when it comes, is a twenty-four-hour business; the combines chew up and down the hills day and night.
I saw a hillside of pale luminous green; it was mustard. This is a curious “contract” crop. Two or three companies control all the mustard seed in the United States, and they let it out to individual farmers by a kind of lease arrangement.
Also I saw the sheep. These are a good stock to keep in this part of the world, because they eat wheat stubble. The MacGregors have eight thousand head. The trouble with sheep, I heard it said, is that they are a frontier industry, and the Northwest is no longer a frontier. Sheep need more handling than cattle, because they are not “run under fence”; they have to be “migrated” each year, and this costs money. The sheep stay on the ranges in winter and spring, and then travel in escorted “bands” (not flocks) of about 1,200 to 2,000 to the mountains every summer—a kind of holiday. The men who take them are, incidentally, not called shepherds, but herders. The sheep business could not, I heard, survive except for the duty on imported wool (thirty-four cents a “clean” pound) and the domestic bounty fixed by the Commodity Credit Corporation, twenty cents. The result of both is that the American wool grower gets about ten cents a pound more than the “normal” world price. Some ranchers in the Northwest are liquidating their sheep these days in favor of cattle, since the latter are more lucrative. Not only in the Northwest but all over the United States this trend to cattle—and consequent shift in the livestock population—is going on.
When I visited Hooper, wheat, the peg on which everything in the whole region hangs, was worth about $1.35 a bushel.4 The government’s price—established by the nightmare-complex institution known as parity—was $1.30. The technique of selling wheat was—and is—roughly as follows. The farmer delivers his harvest to the elevators and the Commodity Credit Corporation, through the local bank, lends him its value calculated at $1.30. Or it will pay this in cash if the farmer wants to sell outright. On a designated day the following spring the farmer, if he has taken his proceeds in the shape of the loan, can cash the loan, and the government takes title to the wheat. Or, if the open market price is higher, say $1.35, the farmer can sell for this, repay his loan, and keep the margin as a tidy profit. This procedure, which was developed during the New Deal, has been bitterly attacked by farmers, and as bitterly defended. But it cannot be denied that it gives the wheat grower a guaranteed price. He is never at the mercy of a falling market, unless the government should withdraw its support. The biggest hazard in wheat has not been frost, winds, or grasshoppers; it has been price. And farmers today have more security in price than ever before in the history of the nation.
In 1945 the total U. S. wheat harvest hit an all-time high, 1,123,000,000 bushels. Of the 1946 crop—final figures for which are not yet available—one-quarter, which will probably amount to more than 250,000,000 bushels, was under requisition order by the government, earmarked for famine relief abroad. There was shocking delay, muddleheadedness, and plain selfishness and cowardice in putting this program into action. A major difficulty was lack of storage space and box cars; in September, not less than three million bushels were lying roofless in the Spokane area. But it did finally get under way and the American citizen in 1946 began to eat and drink less wheat and other grains, whether in the form of bread, cake, beer, whisky, or odd things like breakfast cereals.
Words on Wood
The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God, because they were the best He ever planted.
—John Muir
Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.
—Henry Ford
We sat on a terrace in Seattle, and looked across the dancing blue saucer of Lake Washington; on the far shore were banks of trees, and I began to learn a new vocabulary. Halfway down the slope the tree line stops, and patches in the forest are bare, like bald spots, but with a few trees left standing—“seed blocks” as they are called. Then I heard two phrases, sustained yield and selective logging, the keys to the future of the lumber industry in the United States, a future uncertain in the extreme.
Selective logging means simply that a “stand” of timber should not be cut down in sections willy-nilly, but that only mature trees should be chosen, and that enough growing trees should remain to bear seed and produce, in time, their successors. Such a process will, in the end, make for sustained yield, which means just what it says. It will keep the forests going, instead of destroying them; it will preserve this precious and indispensable natural resource, instead of throwing it away.
The timber tycoons had a slogan once—“trees are a crop.” As a matter of fact they are not. The only authentic crop from a tree is the cone. It takes a minimum of 80 years for a Douglas fir to reach saw-log size, from 140 to 180 for a ponderosa pine. So, in a sense, these trees do make a crop—every 80 to 180 years. But the lumber industry was based for a couple of generations on the philosophy of harvesting a “crop” that was not renewed.
Timber was the first of the great beneficent American heritages. This country is unique—it still has virgin “old growth” timber that was here when the white man came. Almost everywhere else in the world, the virgin timber had disappeared by the time people got around to trying to manage it. We in the United States have actually been able to put virgin stands under management, but we have been very late to do so. The United States still has virgin timber left—but not so much. In the thirty years prior to 1938, according to the Forest Service, the “total volume of standing saw timber was reduced almost 40 per cent.” Virgin forests were cut from an original acreage of 820,000,000 to about 100,000,000. Since 1938—what with enormous military demands for timber during the war—the loss has been even more acute. From 1941 to 1945 the country as a whole cut about 16 billion cubic feet of timber per year, whereas new growth only amounted to 11 billion cubic feet; in the Northwest, the drain was even worse, amounting to about three times the growth. At the moment of writing—when timber is very scarce and desperately needed for such projects as housing-—the United States is still consuming, i.e. destroying, half again as much as it grows. This fact is shocking enough to be worth repeating. “Timber cut or destroyed is 50 per cent more than total growth.”
The lumber tetrarchs came in with the railroads, and their holdings in the Northwest grew enormously; in those days timber did indeed seem inexhaustible and one private property was once as big as Delaware. In theory the owners, to keep their business going on in perpetuity, should have harvested each year a maximum of one-eightieth of the “crop,” since it takes a Douglas fir eighty years to become mature. Of course they did nothing of the kind. Some companies simply cut and ran. They calculated that their mills would last thirty-five years or so; they ripped the land clean in that time, and then moved out. Also there were—and are—the “gypo-loggers,” the real hit-and-run cutters, men with “teapot mills” in deserted stump land, who had no more regard for conservation than a hyena. For many years the timber business was a race between the timber cutter and the tax assessor. A company would log off its land, then abandon it, since this saved them taxes. The faster taxes were raised on timbered land, the faster the cutters cut.
Tying in with this is a seemingly foreign and anomalous factor, the public schools. The schools possess a great deal of forest land in Washington and Oregon, out of which they naturally want as much revenue as they can get. So a kind of alliance exists between the big timber interests and the parent teachers association. Consider the strange business of Referendum No. 27. The state’s timber resources—and 62 per cent of Washington’s total income derives from lumber, directly or indirectly, in normal times—were formerly controlled by seven different agencies, among them the regents of the university, the State Land Board, the Department of Conservation, and the like. A law was passed in 1945 unifying all this into a Timber Resources Board and setting forth a conservation program that gave the state additional authority over private logging. This law was challenged the next year by a referendum, and the state’s whole forestry program imperilled because of political pressure from big timber interests and the schools.
Another factor is the gradual absorption of small timber properties by big. Suppose a retired merchant or doctor, say, owns a few thousand acres of Douglas fir. His taxes are going up and he has no incentive to think in terms of long-range reforestation, nor has he the resources to log the land himself. So a big company buys him out, and proceeds to cut.
The lumber companies may pay lip service to the principle of sustained yield—usually after having logged a property off—and they may profess a conscientious interest in conservation, but not many think in terms of maintaining a whole forest as a living entity in perpetuity. The Forest Service says flatly, “Some eighty per cent [italics mine] of the cutting in private lands is still done without conscious regard to future crops.”
Another complaint against big-money lumber is about right of way. The lumber companies, with millions of bare acres behind them, continue to hold this “logged-off” land and to buy new land particularly along the highways in order to block access to unlogged land that lies beyond. Or a company will buy around a stand of state-owned timber, so that nobody else can easily get access. One more complaint has to do with minerals. The timber owners control subsurface rights, and what may be mineral resources of unprecedented value has never been explored or made useful to the state or the people as a whole.
More than 10 per cent of every milled log is sawdust, and a tremendous development has taken place recently in timber by-products. You can make everything from molasses to aspirin tablets out of sawdust. But the new pulp factories have created new and pressing problems. For one thing the discharge of waste products from the riverside plants kills the fish, and as a result a fine local war is that between the timber industry and the fisheries. Of course the chemical and pulp and plastics industries will have to shut up shop if the millers continue indefinitely to saw up everything they can lay hands on. For, again in the words of the Forest Service, “Half the sawmills, pulp, shingle, veneer, and other log-using plants in Oregon and Washington have private timber in sight for not more than five years.”5
Four companies control about 95 per cent of Northwest lumber. These are Long-Bell, Blowdell-Donovan, the Crown Zellerbach Pulp and Paper Company, and the Weyerhaeusers, who are of course the biggest single force in the industry. Their sales in 1943 amounted to $77,775,195, and their net profits $8,360,797.6 The Weyerhaeusers—a fascinating family about which a whole chapter might be written—derive from Minnesota, and though the company headquarters are in Tacoma, most surviving members still live in St. Paul. The company saws not less than 4 per cent of all the lumber in America. It has, after a buccaneer past, had vision enough lately to think very seriously about conservation, and it has built and maintains immense tree farms to encourage sustained yield.
We have talked much of public power. There is also—perhaps the reader should brace himself—such a thing as public timber. Most distinctly the United States government is in the lumber business. The origin of this goes back to Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and the early conservationists. The national forests and national parks were established, and the Forest Service began its admirable work. Of the total American forest lands, about one-third are national today and under scientific management; the government cut and sold about $1,500,000,000 worth of timber in 1944.
Public timber has been dominated by the concept of sustained yield from the beginning. What the government cuts, it cuts selectively. And the Forest Service believes firmly that there should also be public regulation of private forest land.
Silver Wings at Renton
Having seen where electricity was made, at Bonneville and Grand Coulee, I wanted also to see how it was used; having seen ships mass-produced by Kaiser at Richmond, I wanted to see airplanes mass-produced too. So I visited the Boeing headquarters at Seattle and its great B-29 assembly plant at Renton, seven miles away on the glistening waters of Lake Washington.
The dominant impression is silveriness; I kept thinking of Walter de la Mare’s lovely poem called “Silver.” The wings, the fuselages, slowly moving into place on the assembly lines, shine and shimmer like silver foil. In most factories you see grease and waste, oil stains on the floor, and grubby, funguslike walls and corridors; you hear metallic clamor. But Renton is silent, graceful, and sleekly caparisoned in aluminum.
Renton itself fabricates nothing but spar chords, which are the biggest aluminum products ever extruded; the aluminum is squeezed out like tooth paste or spaghetti. Renton gets its bomb bays from Vancouver, its nacelles from Fisher Body in Detroit, its wing tips from Cleveland, its landing gear from Milwaukee, and its engines from the prodigious Dodge factory in Chicago which was especially built to make power plants just for the B-29.
What we watched was the process whereby these various parts—and a thousand others, including eleven miles of wire and 147 different electric motors—become an airplane. The plant was, when I was there, turning out six B-29’s a day; each takes about five days to make and Renton has produced 6,983 in all. There are two assembly lines in each of two massive bays. We saw a “raw” wing, just arrived from Seattle, slide into place on a powered track; it comes in sideways, riding on a dolly. Ahead of us, neatly in line, each waiting its turn, were twenty-eight other similar wings, ready for assembly. The wiring of each wing is already complete—all you have to do is turn a button—and the landing gear and motors are bolted on. The wing is “energized,” and the landing gear tested in a pit under the assembly. Each motor weighs three thousand pounds, but it is fixed to the ship by only six half-inch bolts. We moved on to see each “station” in the assembly. At position No. 1 the fuselage is a carapace of metal, bare and naked. But at position No. 4, only a few yards and a few man-minutes farther on, the body is finished except for the tail; and at No. 6 it is a complete airplane, and could fly, except that the propellers have not been fitted to the motors. The last detail is paint. The B-29’s I saw took three hundred pounds of black paint each—for the underwings—and this takes three hours to dry. The plane then comes out on the apron on the lake front, stretches its muscles in a little jaunt around a circle, and is ready to take off.
At peak Boeing employed 55,000 workers—of whom 46 per cent were women—hired in twenty-three states. The average wage was $1.07 per hour. The shop is 100 per cent AF of L. This huge labor pool was, I heard, of a “very peculiar and unstable class.” At one period not less than 12 per cent of all workers had criminal records of one kind or another—an interesting commentary on the state of civilization in the United States. But Boeing kept them on, and was glad to have them. During the height of the B-29 program, an official told me, “We hired anybody who had a warm body and could walk inside the gate.”
After Renton, I was allowed in Seattle to see something very special—the life-size mock-up (i.e. model) of a plane then known as the XC 97, and also the plane itself, one of the three in existence at that time. This plane, the Boeing Stratocruiser, is the civilian variant of the B-29. It looks like a Zeppelin with a razor back, and it can hold seven jeeps, four ambulances, two ton-and-a-half trucks, or two baby tanks. It will carry 120 passengers, and it has a cocktail lounge—as all assiduous readers of Boeing advertisements know. The thing is so big that I asked irreverently where the bowling alley was. The cruising speed of this monster is 340 miles an hour, and on January 9, 1945, it broke the world’s speed record for coast-to-coast flight, covering the 2,323 miles between Seattle and Washington in 6 hours 3 minutes 50 seconds, which cut 54 minutes from the record previously held by the Lockheed Constellation. It flew at 30,000 feet, and to land at Washington it had to start letting down at Pittsburgh. Incidentally it made Pittsburgh-Washington in twenty minutes. So the war has, it would seem, produced at least one thing useful to mankind and its uncertain future, if mankind wants to fly securely from New York, say, to London in 11 hours.
. . . . . . .
We conclude now with the Pacific coast. No section of the country has a more intense vitality or a greater promise than this Western rim.
1 Traditionally because red is the cheapest paint.
2 Fortune, May, 1946.
3 111 Fares the Land, p. 301.
4 Late in 1946 it reached $1.85.
5 This quotation is from a useful little pamphlet, A Forest Conservation Program, p. 5. Of course forest wastage is not confined to the Northwest. For instance in 1943 the entire town of Weirgate, Texas, “was sold to a wrecking company after a life of only 25 years in which some 100,000 acres of virgin long-leaf pine were stripped.” Similarly, lack of timber “forced the closing of the last big sawmill in Rhinelander, Wis., at the very time when the nation’s need for lumber was most acute.”
6 Fortune, West Coast number, February, 1945.