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Book Review
| William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural Economics. By Laurie Winn Carlson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. 210 pp. Illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. $39.95.
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| Agricultural economics is a field that holds great potential for scholars interested in the environmental effects of agriculture. As Henry C. Taylor defined it in his canonical textbook Agricultural Economics (The Macmillian Company, 1920, p. 6), the field embraces "the selection of land, labor, and equipments for a farm, the choice of crops to be grown, the selection of live stock enterprises to be carried on, and the whole question of the proportions in which all these agencies should be combined." Laurie Winn Carlson's biography of W. J. Spillman adds a long-neglected chapter to the history of the development of agricultural economics, tracing the career of one of the pioneers of farm management from the 1880s through the early 1930s. |
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Carlson's biography places Spillman's life and work into context, explaining the seemingly disparate trajectories of his professional life; particularly how this "farm evangelist" who traveled the farm circuit promoting diversified family farms also could have had a pioneering impact as a plant geneticist and as a leading figure in the creation of the economic principles of the law of diminishing returns. Spillman's career began with his experiments breeding wheat in eastern Washington's Palouse, and his research on plant hybridization landed him a job at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1902. From his post in the Bureau of Plant Industry, Spillman made a name for himself in the science of farm management, and he spent most of his career in the USDA. |
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Overall, this is an engaging book, well written and grounded primarily in the secondary literature of the field. It has thorough accounts of the European and American research of Mendelian genetics, of the challenges of industrialization to American farms, and of the internal politics in the USDA during the Progressive Era. Too rarely, however, does the reader hear Spillman's voice or those of his colleagues as they reflected upon the developments that influenced his career, although his writings are cited throughout. |
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Carlson suggests that Spillman was the "founder of agricultural economics" (dust jacket), but more convincing is her treatment of Spillman's development of the "new science" of farm management (p. 130). Spillman is clearly a leading player in the history of agricultural studies, and one whose biography is long overdue. Modern environmental historians will find much that is familiar among his contributions to agricultural science: his commitment to promoting diversified farms, his concerns about the overfertilization of American crops, and his contribution to the plan for voluntary allotments that defined the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and are the root of today's commodities subsidy system. It seems that a broader perspective, and perhaps a greater familiarity with the writings of other agricultural thinkers of the era, would have permitted Carlson to see Spillman for the visionary among visionaries that he was, rather than a solitary figure fighting against entrenched interests to save the American farmer. |
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Sara M. Gregg is an assistant professor of history at Iowa State University. She is working on a book entitled Contested Commons: Subsistence Farms, the New Deal and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia. |
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