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Claude Wickard (who regularly regrets that he was not named Andrew Jackson Wickard, like his father and his father's father) has been Secretary of Agriculture since last Sept. 5, was Under Secretary from February to September 1940, before that was a director in the new AAA. But though his job is one of the most important in the Cabinet, though his decisions this year will change the lives of the 30,000,000 farm population and affect the lives of other millions on millions throughout the world, he is nationally unknown. A public that is widely aware that Mickey Rooney's real name is Joe Yule Jr. has scarcely heard of Claude Wickard. But it is probable that he will not long remain unknown; in fact, the name of Claude Wickard may well become a household word in the next twelvemonth. For through him will be worked this part of the world's economic earthquake.
Devastation. The world's food supply was in a hellish mess. Hunger rode down the wind through the greenest Valley of Plenty in all the history of the world. There was more food on earth than ever before, and more people starving than ever before. And things would get worse before they got better.
The world's system of food distrlbution —foreign trade—was tangled, disrupted, or dead still. In the places of peace, the world's production of food was enormous, but out of balance (men went on growing record crops of wheat to add to record carry-overs which could not be shipped).
Europe's food-producing areas had suffered in multiple ways. The war had drained off many farm workers; mass flights of refugees and waves of Nazi-compelled migration had drained off thousands more. In war zones, bombs, battles and defensive inundation had devastated miles of crops, tons of stores. As the Germans spread over Europe, suffering multiplied itself mile by mile, under the rigid Nazi system of food priorities: the Army first, then skilled workmen in Germany, German civilians, then the new subjects of the Nazis, with prisoners, the insane, Poles and Jews at the bottom.
Jews, Poles, Spanish, French, Belgians, and now the Greeks and Yugoslavs were on their way to starvation. The Dutch, the Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Italians, Swiss and Russians were not far behind. The Germans were feeding on the margin of nutrition; so were the British. If the way to men's hearts was still through the stomach, food would win the war, decide the peace. If food were under international control after the war, that peace could be kept permanent.
Those were the ideas of Claude Wickard. Time & again he had trumpeted: "Food will win the war and write the peace."
And Wickard's ideas work. If they don't work he gets another idea. As Secretary of Agriculture he has been charged by Franklin Roosevelt with one vast responslbility: to feed the U.S. and Great Britain during the defense emergency and the war. He has gone beyond that charge already, to take the steps which he believes will put the U.S. in a position to write the peace.