The Annals of Volume 67, Number 1 Iowa Winter 2008 A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF HISTORY In This Issue DAVID L. SEIM, visiting assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, tells the complicated story of a controversy during World War II involving agricultural organizations, watchdog groups, and economists and college administrators at Iowa State College. The controversy focused specifically on a pamphlet recommending that citizens consider substi- tuting margarine for butter as part of the war effort. But it involved much larger issues, most notably, perhaps, the role and legitimacy of policy- oriented social science research at a land-grant institution. JOANNE ABEL GOLDMAN, associate professor of history at the Uni- versity of Northern Iowa, describes the emergence of Frank Spedding as a new breed of scientist—a science manager—as he shaped the develop- ment of the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State College during and after World War II. MARK FINLAY, professor of history at Armstrong Atlantic State University, reviews two new books about meat production. Front Cover In this 1937 image, the Iowa State College Campanile presides over a bucolic landscape on the campus. But the college was anything but a peaceful place in the ensuing decade, as the two feature articles in this issue show. A college economist’s recommendation that households substitute margarine for butter as part of the war effort sparked a bitter controversy. At the same time, scientists on campus were actively in- volved in work that supported the famous Manhattan Project, which was developing the means to explode an atomic bomb. Photo courtesy Special Collections, Iowa State University Library. Editorial Consultants Rebecca Conard, Middle Tennessee State R. David Edmunds, University of Texas University at Dallas Kathleen Neils Conzen, University of H. Roger Grant, Clemson University Chicago William C. Pratt, University of Nebraska William Cronon, University of Wisconsin– at Omaha Madison Glenda Riley, Ball State University Robert R. Dykstra, State University of Malcolm J. Rohrbough, University of Iowa New York at Albany Dorothy Schwieder, Iowa State University The Annals of Third Series, Vol. 67, No. 1 Winter 2008 Iowa Marvin Bergman, editor Contents 1 The Butter-Margarine Controversy and “Two Cultures” at Iowa State College David L. Seim 51 Frank Spedding and the Ames Laboratory: The Development of a Science Manager Joaanne Abel Goldman 82 Mastering the Vocabulary of Meat: A Review Essay Mark Finley 89 Book Reviews and Notices 122 New on the Shelves A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF HISTORY FOUNDED IN 1863 Copyright 2008 by the State Historical Society of Iowa ISSN 0003-4827 Book Reviews and Notices 89 TOM SAVAGE, A Dictionary of Iowa Place-Names, by Sarah S. Uthoff 89 WILLIAM BRIGHT, Native American Placenames of the United States, by W. Raymond Wood 90 MARK E. STEINER, An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln BRIAN DIRCK, Lincoln the Lawyer by Kenneth Winkle 93 H. ROBERT BAKER, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War RUBY WEST JACKSON AND WALTER T. MCDONALD, Finding Freedom: The Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Runaway Slave by Rebekah Mergenthal 95 JEREMY NEELY, The Border between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas- Missouri Line, by Derek R. Everett 97 PHILIP E. WEBBER, Zoar in the Civil War, by Kristen Anderson 98 GEORGE S. BURKHARDT, Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War, by David Brodnax Sr. 99 STEVEN CONN, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century, by Michael J. Sherfy 101 CARROLL ENGELHARDT, Gateway to the Northern Plains: Railroads and the Birth of Fargo and Moorhead, by Eric J. Morser 103 ROBERT V. HINE AND JOHN MACK FARAGHER, Frontiers: A Short History of the American West, by Mark R. Scherer 104 RUDY J. FAVRETTI, Jacob Weidenmann, Pioneer Landscape Architect, by Heidi Hohmann 106 THOMAS LESLIE, Iowa State Fair: Country Comes to Town, by Chris Rasmussen 108 MARY LOU NEMANIC, One Day for Democracy: Independence Day and the Americanization of Iron Range Immigrants, by Frank Van Nuys 110 STEPHEN W. HINES, ED., Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks, by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg 111 DOROTHY SCHWIEDER AND GRETCHEN VAN HOUTEN, EDS., A Sesquicentennial History of Iowa State University:Tradition and Transformation, by John L. Rury 113 GERALD R. BUTTERS JR., Banned in Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915–1966, by Jerold Simmons 115 MIKE AND VICKI WALKER, Cinemental Journeys: An Uncommon Guide to Classic Movie Theaters: Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, by Jennifer Fleeger 115 ROYDEN LOEWEN, Diaspora in the Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities and Mid-Twentieth-Century Rural Disjuncture, by Steven D. Reschly 118 WILLIAM BARLOW QUARTON III, Lucky Man: Memories of a Life in Communications, by Stephen C. Coon 119 LOLLY PARKER EGGERS, Iowa City’s Irving Weber: A Biography, by Jan Olive Nash 120 JOHN PRICE, Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands, by Thomas K. Dean The Butter-Margarine Controversy and “Two Cultures” at Iowa State College DAVID L. SEIM DURING WORLD WAR II, economists, college administrators, and citizens of Iowa battled over the purposes of social science. One particular debate in Iowa was a frontline event in a struggle to establish safeguards allowing policy research at public col- leges and universities. In a conflict over a proposed policy to temporarily produce less butter, one side declared that econo- mists at Iowa State College (ISC) must limit themselves to ad- vocating policies directly supporting Iowa interests, while an opposing group advocated policy research to win the war (even if that policy temporarily disadvantaged state interests). Between about 1930 and 1945 an “Ames School” of econom- ics arose at ISC. At the University of Wisconsin, economists tra- ditionally advised government officials on “progressive” policy, but Wisconsin’s economists were often criticized for injecting personal values into what should be rigorous and impartial sci- ence. ISC’s economists wanted policy relevance while escaping such trouble. They avoided Wisconsin-style “collaboration” be- tween academic researchers and government policymakers and took their policy proposals directly to the public.1 I am grateful for a research grant from the State Historical Society of Iowa. 1. On the “Wisconsin Idea” (or “Wisconsin School”), see John P. Henderson, “Political Economy and the Service of the State: The University of Wisconsin,” in Breaking the Academic Mould: Economists and American Higher Learning in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William J. Barber (Middletown, CT, 1988), 318–39; and THE ANNALS OF IOWA 67 (Winter 2008). © The State Historical Society of Iowa, 2008. 1 2 THE ANNALS OF IOWA What eventually happened at ISC was that financial donors and college administrators insisted on social science devoid of policy arguments; ISC’s social scientists wanted a more realistic standard. The defining moment in the debate took place during 1943 and 1944, when a series of events resulted in a conflict over the possibilities and limitations of policy-oriented social science.2 In 1943 Iowa was second in the nation in dairy production. In April of that year, ISC’s agricultural economists published a pamphlet titled “Putting Dairying on a War Footing,” the fifth installment in the school’s Wartime Farm and Food Policy series. The dairying pamphlet analyzed conditions that had resulted in a shortage of dairy products for soldiers. The report recom- mended, among other solutions, having American households substitute more margarine for butter.3 Dairy interests vigorously objected to “Pamphlet No. 5.” Dairy industry leaders contacted the college president, applying pressure to retract the pamphlet. After the president gave in, more than half of the faculty in the Department of Economics Malcolm Rutherford, “Wisconsin Institutionalism: John R. Commons and His Students,” Labor History 47 (2006), 161–88. The “Ames School” of economics sought to connect agricultural economics to broader economic issues by em- ploying multiple research methods. See brief mentions in Leonard Silk, The Economists (New York, 1974), 208; and Richard H. Day, “Toward a Dynamical Economic Science: An Autobiographical Reflection,” in The Makers of Modern Economics, vol. 4, ed. Arnold Heertje (Cheltenham, UK, 1999), 1–31, esp. p. 3. 2. Debates about objectivity in social science predate the 1940s. See Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington, KY, 1975); Mark Blaug, “The Formalist Revolution or What Happened to Orthodox Economics after World War II?” in From Classical Economics to the Theory of the Firm: Essays in Honour of D. P. O’Brien, ed. Roger E. Backhouse and John Creedy (Northampton, MA, 1999), 257–80; Mary S. Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford, eds., From Interwar Plural- ism to Postwar Neoclassicism (Durham, NC, 1998). An underappreciated factor in the shift toward emphasizing formal approaches in economics was a reac- tion to the question whether public colleges and universities are “research arms” of private industry—what Jim Hightower once called the “land-grant college complex.” See Jim Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: A Report of the Agribusiness Accountability Project on the Failure of America’s Land-grant Col- lege Complex (Cambridge, MA, 1973). 3. Dairy Record, 4/28/1943, 16; O. H. Brownlee, “Putting Dairying on a War Footing,” Wartime Farm and Food Policy Series, no. 5 (Ames, 1943). A copy of the original pamphlet is in file 8/4, Robert E. Buchanan Papers, Special Collec- tions, Iowa State University Library (hereafter cited as Buchanan Files). Butter-Margarine Controversy 3 Iowa’s first creamery was built at Spring Branch, near Manchester, in 1872. Spring Branch butter took first place at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. From Iowa Farm Economist, June 1940. and Sociology eventually resigned in protest, interpreting the retraction as a violation of academic freedom and a develop- ment that endangered the social sciences at ISC.