©2013 Matthew D. Roth ALL RIGHTS RESERVED MAGIC BEAN: THE QUESTS THAT BROUGHT SOY INTO AMERICAN FARMING, DIET AND CULTURE by MATTHEW D. ROTH A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History Written under the direction of T.J. Jackson Lears And approved by _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey OCTOBER, 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Magic Bean: The Quests That Brought Soy into American Farming, Diet and Culture by MATTHEW D. ROTH Dissertation Director: T.J. Jackson Lears In 1900, the soybean was a nonentity in American farming. By 2000, 87 million metric tons were grown each year and soy was the country’s most valuable agricultural export. A less concrete but perhaps more telling difference was the soybean’s increased presence in American culture: in 1900, a small number of Asian immigrants, adventuresome farmers, and agricultural researchers thought about soybeans on a regular basis. By 2000, that number had expanded to include chemical, nutritional and medical researchers; commodities traders; lobbyists; vegetarians and millions more buying tofu or soy health-foods; sufferers of soybean allergies; and countless others. Magic Bean charts the diverse paths of the soybean into American farming, diet and culture over the course of the twentieth century. These pathways were enmeshed in systems of knowledge and cultural transfer that themselves underwent enormous transformations in that time: immigrant networks, missionary enterprises, agricultural science, laboratory chemistry, commodities markets, spiritual pilgrimages, and marketing techniques. In tracking the career of the soybean in America, Magic Bean takes a broadly ecological approach that highlights the interconnections between the environment, science and culture, while never losing sight of the aspirations of individuals whose quests drove the process forward. ii Table of Contents Introduction: A Century of Soybeans ............................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Crossings .....................................................................................................................22 The Picture Bride: Tsuru Yamauchi The Missionary: Harry Miller The Plant Explorer: Frank N. Meyer Chapter 2: Footholds .....................................................................................................................71 The Agronomist: William J. Morse The Emissary: Yamei Kin The Missionary Chapter 3: Field Days ................................................................................................................129 The Extension Specialist: J.C. Hackleman The Salesman: A.E. Staley The Agronomist Chapter 4: Manifold Uses ..........................................................................................................197 The Industrialist: Henry Ford The Chemist: Percy Lavon Julian The Board: Chicago Board of Trade The Missionary Chapter 5: Wartime Substitute ...................................................................................................280 The Picture Bride The Nutritionists: Clive and Jeanette McCay The Investigator: Warren Goss Chapter 6: Hidden Ingredient ......................................................................................................348 The Congressman: William Poage The Breeder: Edgar E. Hartwig The Middleman: Dwayne Andreas The Chemist Chapter 7: Soytopia ....................................................................................................................425 The Writer: Harry Harrison The Guru: Stephen Gaskin The Artisans: William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi The Picture Bride Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................494 iii 1 Introduction: A Century of Soybeans The story of the soybean in the United States is the story of a highly successful commodity. Over the course of a century, its career followed the mythical American trajectory from obscurity to prominence. In quantitative terms alone, it was an impressive rise. Nobody knows how much U.S. land was planted in soybeans in 1900, because nobody was keeping track at the time, but it may have been as high as 50,000 acres. One hundred years later, the number was upwards of 70 million acres, more than a thousand-fold increase and an acreage second only to that devoted to corn. To put it another way, the area expanded from 78 square miles, roughly two townships, to just under 122,000 square miles, an area slightly larger than New Mexico, the fifth largest state.1 One might also cite its raw economic value: $12 billion paid to farmers for the nearly 3 billion bushels they harvested, and this a dip from almost $18 billion in 1996, when prices were higher. And this was before the initial buyers – exporters and crushers, who processed the beans into oil and residual meal, as well as tofu makers and other food manufacturers – added any value. Exports alone of beans, oil and meal brought in on the order of $7 billion, making it by far the nation’s largest agricultural export; much of this went to China, with which the U.S. otherwise ran a trade deficit but which had fallen to fourth place among soybean producing countries. In fact, the U.S. was now the world’s leading producer of the crop, producing almost double that of the runner-up, Brazil.2 Something exotic at the outset of the 1900s, the soybean was now a thoroughly American crop and had been for decades. 1 American Soybean Association (ASA), “Soy Stats 2001,” http://www.soystats.com/2001/.. 2 Steven T. Sonka, Karen L. Bender and Donna K. Fisher, “Economics and Marketing,” in Soybeans: Improvement, Production, and Uses, Third Edition, H. Rogers Boerma and James E. Specht, eds. (Madison, WI: American Society of Agronomy, 2004), 922-924. 2 The story of the soybean in the United States is also a case study of commodification. The soybean was widely used in Asia, and certain soy products were objects of regional and global trade, but soybeans were not the commodity that they would become in America. A commodity, in business terms, is a bulk good, typically grown in or removed from the soil for the purpose of exchange, which is not readily distinguished by source. Rather, the separate outputs of producers join a collective pool that is, in turn, sorted into grades, with prices determined by the supply of and demand for each grade.3 As early plant explorers in China noted, on the other hand, soybeans were primarily grown and consumed by farmers who saved their seeds year after year, resulting in a baffling array of local soybean varieties. Likewise, in their earliest uses by American farmers, soybeans stayed on the farm in the form of green fertilizer or animal feed, typically in a manner that used the whole plant. Beans were harvested mainly for seed. By the mid-1920s, however, use of soybeans as oilseeds became more widespread and, its botanical classification as a legume notwithstanding, the soybean became a grain. In 1925, the federal government accordingly established grades for soybeans. By the early 1930s, farmers harvested more soybeans for grain than for seed, and the Chicago Board of Trade consummated their status as a commodity by first trading them as a cash grain, with rules modeled on those for corn, and then in the futures market. The establishment of futures trading in particular marked the maturation of the soybean market as the Board overcame fears that it was too small to avoid being cornered. By the early 1950s, futures trading was underway as well for the soybean’s two primary products, oil and meal. 3 See William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), 112-116, for a famously evocative description of the genesis of commodity wheat, as something removed from sacks that identified individual farmers in order to become a veritable river of grain. 3 Although these milestones heralded the soybean’s arrival as a commodity, however, they do not capture the underlying process of commodification. It is important to note, first of all, that this process did not begin in the private sector, but rather within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Arguably at its creation in the Civil War era, and certainly by the turn of the century, the USDA’s central goal was to increase the incomes of American farmers by establishing new applications for their produce, whether that meant discovering new marketable uses for existing crops or introducing new crops. Other public institutions, including land-grant colleges and agricultural experiment stations, joined in this mission. By 1900, the USDA’s newly founded Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction sponsored international expeditions with the intent of establishing new industries through the introduction of new crops; soybeans were not an initial focus, but soon became prominent among the imported crops. Various offices of the USDA’s Bureau of Plant Industry, including Forage Crop Investigations, which employed William J. Morse, collaborated with experiment stations to test them at locations throughout the nation. And it is in fact Morse’s work that offers the best opportunity to grasp how the early stages of commodification worked. This is best glimpsed