Former Agriculture Secretary Earl L. Butz died Feb. 2 at age 98.
He orchestrated a major change in federal farm policy as secretary of agriculture in the 1970s but came to be remembered more for a vulgar racial comment that brought about his resignation during the 1976 presidential election race.
Butz had been in poor health recently and died during a family visit at his son’s home in Washington, said Randy Woodson, dean of the College of Agriculture at Purdue. Butz’s son Bill, whom he had been visiting, said his father died in his sleep. Butz lived in West Lafayette, IN.
Serving under President Richard M. Nixon and his successor, Gerald R. Ford, Butz was a forceful, sharp-tongued figure who promoted legislation sharply reducing federal subsidies for farmers. He was the best-known secretary of agriculture since Henry A. Wallace in the Depression days, when the federal government began to pay farmers to keep some of their cropland and livestock out of production in the face of plunging income.
Butz maintained that farmers should rely on a free market driven by exports and not federal subsidies.
Currrent Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer — in office just five days at the time of Butz’s death – stated that Butz was "a pioneer who foresaw the opportunities that global markets could offer to America’s farmers long before they became a reality.
"As Secretary of Agriculture, Butz insisted on giving farmers more freedom to manage their own businesses and more incentives to produce. He oversaw changes to government support programs that have helped create today’s robust agricultural economy," stated Schafer. "And by approving the sale of more than $1 billion of grain to the former Soviet Union in 1972, he raised farm incomes and set American farmers on the path to developing a stronger presence in export markets around the world."
Butz was an important source of political support in the Midwestern Farm Belt for the Nixon and Ford administrations. But he was criticized by Democrats in Congress who viewed him as the voice of agribusiness, the corporate agricultural interests, at the expense of small farmers and consumers.
Butz said he reflected rural values learned as an Indiana farm boy and he gave no ground to critics. When environmentalists warned against pesticides and fertilizers, he retorted, "Before we go back to organic agriculture, somebody is going to have to decide what 50 million people we are going to let starve."
When world food prices soared in the 1970s, Butz gained the acrimony of environmentalists by urging farmers to "plant from fence row to fence row." Vegetation along fence rows were plowed and planted and wetlands tiled and drained.
(Sources: The Associated Press and New York Times News Service)
