Earl Butz

Earl Lauer "Rusty" Butz (July 3, 1909 – February 2, 2008) was a United States government official who served as the secretary of agriculture under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

His policies favored large-scale corporate farming and an end to New Deal programs.

Butz was born in Albion, Indiana, and brought up on a dairy farm in Noble County, Indiana.

He was the eldest of five children and worked on his parents' 160 acre farm while growing up.

He attended a one-room country school through eighth grade and graduated from high school in a class of seven.

Butz was an alumnus of Purdue University, where he was a member of Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity.

Butz met the former Mary Emma Powell (1911–1995) from North Carolina in 1930, at the National 4-H Camp in Washington, DC.

He received a bachelor of science degree in agriculture in 1932, and then a doctorate in agricultural economics in 1937.

He was the uncle of American football player Dave Butz.

They were married on December 22, 1937.

They had two sons, William Powell and Thomas Earl Butz.

In 1948, Butz became vice president of the American Agricultural Economics Association, and three years later was named to the same post at the American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers.

In 1954, he was appointed Assistant Secretary of Agriculture by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

That same year, he was also named chairman of the United States delegation to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Butz was Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in Washington, DC, from 1954 to 1957 under President Dwight Eisenhower.

He left both of the aforementioned posts in 1957, when he became the Dean of Agriculture at his alma mater, Purdue University.

In 1968, he was promoted to the positions of Dean of Education and vice president of the university's research foundation.

In 1968, he also ran for Governor of Indiana, but came in a distant third at the Republican state convention to eventual winner Edgar Whitcomb and future governor Otis R. Bowen.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon appointed Butz as Secretary of Agriculture, a position in which he continued to serve after Nixon resigned in 1974 as the result of the Watergate scandal.

He was Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976 under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

In his time heading the USDA, Butz drastically changed federal agricultural policy and re-engineered many New Deal-era farm support programs.

For example, he abolished a program that paid corn farmers to not plant all their land.

(See Henry Wallace's "Ever-Normal Granary".) This program had unsuccessfully attempted to prevent a national oversupply of corn and low corn prices.

His mantra to farmers was "get big or get out", and he urged farmers to plant commodity crops such as corn "from fencerow to fencerow".

These policy shifts coincided with the rise of major agribusiness corporations, and the declining financial stability of the small family farm.

Butz took over the Department of Agriculture during the most recent period in American history that food prices climbed high enough to generate political heat.

In 1972, the Soviet Union, suffering disastrous harvests, purchased 30 million tons of American grain.

Butz had helped to arrange that sale in the hope of giving a boost to crop prices to bring restive farmers tempted to vote for George McGovern into the Republican fold.

He was featured in the documentary King Corn, recognized as the person who started the rise of corn production, large commercial farms, and the abundance of corn in American diets.

In King Corn, Butz argued that the corn subsidy had dramatically reduced the cost of food for all Americans by improving the efficiency of farming techniques.

By artificially increasing demand for food, food production became more efficient and drove down the cost of food for everyone.

At the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome, Butz made fun of Pope Paul VI's opposition to "population control" by quipping, in a mock Italian accent: "He no playa the game, he no maka the rules."

A spokesman for Cardinal Cooke of the New York archdiocese demanded an apology, and the White House requested that he apologize.

Butz issued a statement saying that he had not "intended to impugn the motives or the integrity of any religious group, ethnic group or religious leader."

Through a spokesman, he stated that media outlets had taken this portion of his statement out of their original context, which was that of retelling a joke.

News outlets revealed a racist remark he made in front of entertainers Pat Boone and Sonny Bono and former White House counsel John Dean while aboard a commercial flight to California following the 1976 Republican National Convention.

The October 18, 1976, issue of Time reported the comment while obscuring its vulgarity:

"Butz started by telling a dirty joke involving intercourse between a dog and a skunk. When the conversation turned to politics, Boone, a right-wing Republican, asked Butz why the party of Lincoln was not able to attract more blacks. The Secretary responded with a line so obscene and insulting to blacks that it forced him out of the Cabinet last week and jolted the whole Ford campaign. Butz said: 'I'll tell you what the coloreds want. It's three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.”

After some indecision, Dean used the line in Rolling Stone, attributing it to an unnamed Cabinet officer.

But New Times magazine enterprisingly sleuthed out Butz's identity by checking the itineraries of all Cabinet members."