William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural Economics (review)

This is a superb book about an extraordinary individual whose activities ranged well beyond those suggested by the title. William J. Spillman was a polymath who made significant contributions to science, technology, and rural culture. Yet, for all this, as Laurie Winn Carlson aptly puts it, he remains elusive: "Although his name is recognized by scientists and economists, the man and his life have faded from memory" (p. 1). If anything, Carlson overstates our knowledge of Spillman; her book therefore fills a significant gap, and admirably so.

Spillman was born in 1863 and raised on a farm in Missouri. He worked his way through the University of Missouri, where he "particularly enjoyed mathematics and languages" as well as public speaking. Graduating in 1886, he held a series of teaching posts in science before accepting a position in agriculture at the new Washington State Agricultural College in 1894. There, in Pullman, Washington, he initiated a wheat-breeding program, one of the first in the country, in 1899. He soon began to notice patterns in the frequency of appearance of plant characteristics. In November 1901, he presented his findings to a meeting in Washington, D.C., that clearly showed that "traits combined and recombined rather than blending together as most scientists had believed" (p. 20). Unbeknownst to him, three Europeans had independently reported similar conclusions earlier that spring, in effect rediscovering Mendel's laws. But Spillman was the first to make this rediscovery in the United States, and he gained considerable international recognition when his paper was reprinted in the United Kingdom. This led to a job offer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1902.

Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson believed in hiring extraordinary people and giving them a relatively free rein. Spillman prospered, becoming head of the new Office of Farm Management in 1905. He displayed a talent for leadership and emphasized cost-of-production studies, crop diversification, and soil conservation. He also demonstrated skills in the graphic presentation of statistical data, helped establish the extension service, edited the heredity section of the American Naturalist, became the first president of the American Farm Management Association, and received an honorary doctorate from Temple University.

Although there had been talk of Spillman becoming secretary of agriculture, in 1913 the post went instead to David Houston, a political scientist with whom Spillman would clash repeatedly—once, for example, over a study showing that the large tractors then in use were uneconomic compared to smaller, more versatile ones. But after this study was published in 1915, Henry Ford embarked on the manufacture of the Fordson, "which was exactly what Spillman and his colleagues had in mind" (p. 85). Houston continued to downgrade Spillman's role and resist his ideas, however, and Spillman resigned in June 1918.

In a new position as editor of Farm Journal, he had free rein to develop and extend his ideas nationally, as well as to critique Houston's management of the agriculture department. But with Houston's departure in 1920 and the appointment as secretary in 1921 of Henry C. Wallace (editor of Wallace's Farmer and father of Henry A.), Spillman received an offer he couldn't refuse: to act "as a freelance to do whatever interested him . . . to the maximum salary the law allowed." He "was free from executive duties and totally unencumbered by restrictions" (pp. 98–99), an extraordinary arrangement that appears to have continued until his death in 1931.

For ten years, Spillman prospered in research, as a public speaker, and as a lecturer at Georgetown University. His most important study concerned the utilization of fertilizer, which had long been applied without considering its most effective and economic use. This suited manufacturers, but not farmers. Spillman analyzed extensive farm-management data and developed mathematical formulas that were presented, along with his translation of a German study, in a remarkable little book titled The Law of Diminishing Return. Published...