(7 of 8)
This was a stunner to Claude Wickard. He knew what it was to walk all day behind a plow pulled by a restless team; to pick corn with cold fingers and an aching back, to spread manure by hand, to shock wheat all day under a hot sun. He knew that hogs could suddenly stop getting fat and die of cholera; that if they didn't die they could sell so cheaply there was no profit in the year's long work. He wanted to do something about that. He wanted to help make farm life better.
He told Al Black that he wanted to ask his wife and to get his oats threshed. Black was impatient; oats were cheap then, and Wickard's whole crop wouldn't come to more than $200. But Wickard needed that $200. The rain held off, and he threshed his oats. His wife said Yes without a second's hesitation. "She always had some fancy idea that I was going to work up to something big some day," he said. Leaving extremely minute instructions on how to handle every posslble problem in his absence, he packed and drove to Washington—a hired man for the first time in his life.
Farmer into Secretary. Claude Wickard has a resonant baritone voice with the gravy-thick Indiana accent familiar to all the U.S. since Wendell Willkie went campaigning. Unimpressive, with neither the bashful charm nor the fog of mystical profundity that shrouds Henry Wallace, Wickard is a straightforward, balding, apple-cheeked farmer with a weather-bronzed, red-neck color that will last him all his days. He is five-feet-eight, weighs 180 lb., has to watch his weight. He looks more Irish than German, has a jaw so square and solid that it looks as if it had been laid out by a brick mason. His shoulders, neck and torso are wrestler-heavy.
He smoked for a while, but gave it up three years ago—it made him cough; drinks beer (not much) and wines. He is a bouncing, lusty, easy-smiling man, lighting into his work each morning with something of the same sort of heavy, rolling eagerness that his big Hampshire porkers show in running for the day's first trough. He has a rich country sense of humor, loves long, involved, chronicle jokes, and has the heartiest laugh in the Cabinet—a booming roar that makes other people chuckle all the way out the White House lobby.
He is also humble, sincere and earnest; he believes everyone else is trying to do his best; he is still somewhat awed by the august company he keeps. When the Wickards moved into a larger apartment in Washington—The Westchester—he and his wife bought carpets carefully, with an eye to cutting them down some day to fit the rooms in the house on Indiana's Section 29.
This was the man who stood last week on his ancestral acres in Carroll County. In his sun-faded blue workshirt and khaki trousers, his feet planted firmly in the manure-padded earth of his own barnyard, he looked out across the clover field in which hogs rooted and snuffled, across to the yellow sheen of his ripe wheat, on to the horizon. He saw a farther horizon than Carroll County's—a horizon bounded by war but boundless with the promise of a better world. What he thought about now was not the rain clouds that might hurt the wheat but the dream of enough food for the whole world. In the words of his friend Milo Perkins: