In seventh grade, he acquired a new teacher: nineteen-year-old Sina Borlaug, the cousin who had saved his life in the blizzard. A few weeks before Norm boy’s graduation from eighth grade, Sina took it upon herself to tell his parents that their son should go to the high school in Cresco. For Henry and Clara, the decision was difficult. Cresco, thirteen miles from Saude, was too far to commute. If Norm went to high school, his family would not only lose his labor but have to pay for his room and board. Nels’s words about education echoing in their heads, the Borlaugs sent their son to Cresco.
Borlaug’s worries about depriving the family of his labor were relieved when Nels and Henry bought a tractor. Manufactured by the Ford Motor Company, the Fordson Model F was the Model T of tractors: a simply designed, solidly built machine that induced huge numbers of people to acquire a tool they had previously regarded with suspicion. As Borlaug noted, the tractor’s 20-horsepower, four-cylinder engine “worked without a feed of oats morning, noon, and night.” Its steel body did not need salves, rubdowns, or currycombs. On small farms like Henry Borlaug’s, as much as half of the land was devoted to providing feed for the animals used to cultivate the rest. No longer needing draft animals, writes biographer Vietmeyer, Henry Borlaug sold most of his cattle and horses, planted what had been their pasture, and changed the oats to maize. The extra production meant extra money, which allowed him to buy more fertilizer and better seed, further increasing production. Ultimately, Henry’s harvest quadrupled—on the same land. The extra money let him send his children to school without regret.
“Man minus the machine is a slave,” proclaimed Henry Ford, touting his new tractor. “Man plus the machine is a free man.” Decades afterward, looking back on the Model F, Borlaug agreed entirely. “Relief from endless drudgery,” he said, “equated to emancipation from servitude.”
Cresco, Iowa, 1908 Credit 25
Second Baseman
Compared to Saude, Cresco was enormous: more than three thousand inhabitants in the city proper, several hundred more commuting in from the countryside to work there. Borlaug reveled in Cresco’s size, its frenetic activity, its sense of a wider world. Its elm-lined, stone-paved streets took him past tall churches, smoke-belching factories, and crowded stockyards. Walking about in a daze, the boy encountered example after example of amazing urban exotica. A hospital. A courthouse. An opera house. Several banks. A huge house owned by an actual millionaire, the president of one of the banks. And the high school! Built during the frenzied years when Cresco was competing for county seat, it was a three-story, vaguely Romanesque monster with a heavy stone foundation and a tall hipped roof. Its ninth-grade class, eighty-eight strong, was five times bigger than the entire student body at Saude.
Borlaug continued to be a dutiful student, but spent every spare moment on athletics. Despite his thin frame—five foot ten, 140 pounds—he played football every fall, and as a senior became team captain. In the winter, he wrestled, though for his first two years skin boils prevented him from entering most competitions. But his greatest love was baseball. In a development almost as momentous as the purchase of the tractor, Grandfather Nels had acquired a radio, powered by a small windmill he installed on the roof. A Chicago station, WGN, broadcast Chicago Cubs games. Listening during summer vacation, Borlaug conceived an ambition. “Second baseman for the Chicago Cubs,” he said. “That was my objective.” Alas, Cresco had no high school baseball team—bats, balls, and gloves were too expensive.
Borlaug had a penchant for hastily deciding on some goal, heedless of its plausibility, then working relentlessly to achieve it. On impulse, he decided to organize his own baseball league, pitting kids from one local community against the next, Norwegians from Saude (Borlaug, at second base, was captain) against Bohemians from Spillville. Although the teams played in cow pastures and used burlap sacks for bases, the games quickly attracted spectators. By the time Borlaug was a senior, the Saude-Spillville baseball rivalry had become part of Spillville’s annual Fourth of July celebration.
In Borlaug’s junior year, a new principal came to Cresco. Husky and intense, David C. Bartelma had been an alternate on the 1924 U.S. Olympic wrestling team. He took over the Cresco wrestling program, as one would expect. A coach of the passionate, high-volume variety, he constantly exhorted his team to “give the best that God gave you. If you won’t do that, don’t bother to compete.” Inspired, Cresco went 8–0 in Borlaug’s senior year; Borlaug won third place in the state meet. Despite the success, Borlaug was coming to realize that he would not be able to play for the Cubs. Instead he decided to become a teacher-coach like Bartelma. Bartelma had attended Iowa State Teachers College, in Cedar Falls. After graduating in May 1932, Norm boy decided to go there, too. He worked odd jobs for a year to save up the money.
About a week before Borlaug was to leave for college, a strange automobile pulled into Henry and Clara’s driveway. George Champlin Jr. was at the wheel. A recent Cresco graduate, Champlin had been a halfback on the best football team in the school’s history, captain of the basketball team, and editor of the school newspaper. Now he was a star running back at the University of Minnesota. In Saude terms, it was as if the pope had suddenly dropped by.
Champlin had been charged by his football coach to look for players for the freshman squad. Having heard about Borlaug from Bartelma, Champlin suggested that Borlaug think about the University of Minnesota. “Ride up with me tomorrow morning,” he proposed, in Borlaug’s recollection. “It won’t cost you anything.”
“What’s the purpose? I’m going to Iowa State Teachers a week from Friday.”
“I can get you a job for your board and room.” If Borlaug didn’t like it, Champlin said, he could “hitch-hike back and go to Iowa State Teachers.”
Impetuous again, Borlaug said yes. A dormant hope had rekindled in his heart. The University of Minnesota, unlike Iowa State Teachers, had a strong baseball team. If he could win a spot on the team, he might go on to the major leagues. He threw a few clothes in a bag and left with Champlin the next morning.
In Minneapolis, he stayed in a tiny boardinghouse room with Champlin and two other Cresconians. Champlin helped him win a job as a waiter at a diner. Borlaug’s salary: one free meal per hour worked. Champlin also found Borlaug a second job parking cars. The work was unpaid but he was allowed to keep tips. Combined with Borlaug’s savings, the food from one job and the money from the other would provide just enough for him to eat, rent a room, and pay tuition for the first year. Excited, Borlaug wrote to Iowa State Teachers College to say he would not be going to Cedar Falls.
Borlaug couldn’t attend class, though, until he passed an admissions test at the end of the month. To fill the hours, he spent his days walking around the city. Minneapolis was to Cresco as Cresco was to Saude. Three-quarters of a million people! The sheer scale of the city—two cities, really, the conjoined metropolis of Minneapolis–St. Paul—was shocking. More shocking still was seeing the effects of the Great Depression. Saude had been insulated from the disaster because most of its people were subsistence farmers with little connection to the cash economy. But Minneapolis in the fall of 1933 was deep into it. The streets were lined with abandoned, ransacked buildings. On the sidewalks were homeless people wrapped in blankets. Some who could not afford blankets wrapped newspapers around their bodies. Many of these people, Borlaug learned, were dairy farmers who had lost their land and animals.
The crisis in cattle country had been building for a long time. During the First World War Washington had asked farmers to produce as much milk as possible for the troops and paid high prices for it. Duly incentivized, many farmers had increased their herds and invested in new tractors and milking machines; new safety regulations meanwhile forced them to buy pasteurization systems. Production rose, as did debt. After the war, milk prices fell, but the debt remained. Then came the Depression, and prices dropped again. Milk producers were selling every gallon at a loss. Foreclosures were pushing farmers off their land from Ohio to N
ebraska; a swarm of dispossessed families had ended up in Minneapolis.
Eastern Wisconsin was consumed by a milk strike in May 1933. Strikers overturned milk trucks, beating “scabs” who tried to sell milk. Police and National Guard troops rode on milk convoys, using clubs, rifles, and tear-gas grenades to beat through farmer blockades. The federal government began controlling farm prices nationally but left the dairy and meat industries out of its plans. Instead smaller, regional organizations—cartels in effect if not name—were supposed to set price floors to protect dairy and meat producers. The effort failed; prices continued to drop, unrest to rise.
Fighting over milk erupted in Chicago in mid-September 1933. Scattered violence occurred as far away as Minneapolis, where it was witnessed by nineteen-year-old Norman Borlaug. Walking through a zone of shuttered factories, he saw a throng of gaunt, ragged people encircling a line of milk trucks, blocking their progress. The trucks were guarded by men toting baseball bats. Protesters were berating them. Not all of the shouting men were farmers, Borlaug realized. Some of them were just hungry—famished men, women, and children, almost maddened by want. “Suddenly, a cameraman tried to get up [on a car] to get a better picture with his tripod and his foot went through the canvas top on the car and then all hell broke out,” he remembered. The guards “beat him up and busted his camera, and that triggered it.”
As if the violence were a signal, the guards rushed the protesters, bringing their clubs down in a coordinated attack. Cries of pain rose as bloodied men collapsed. Others grabbed at the milk canisters in the trucks, pulling them to the ground, splashing milk on the cobblestones. Borlaug was terrified. Abruptly the milk trucks lurched forward, into the mêlée; people fell back shouting, a panicky shuffle that pinned Borlaug against a factory wall. He couldn’t see but he could hear truck engines heaving as they drove through the gathering. The wailing was like nothing he had ever heard. When the crush eased, he ran shaking through the fight to his boardinghouse. The wounded were lying untended on the ground.
Something must be done, he thought. Those famished people were ready to tear apart the world, and who could blame them? Here began, or so he said afterward, the work that would make him the original Wizard. Everything commenced with the terrible fathomless hunger he saw explode in the street.
“I Just Liked the Outdoors”
After the riot, his life went awry, one bit after another. Borlaug showed up at the football tryouts and instantly realized that he was too small to make the team. He tried out for wrestling—and learned that the University of Minnesota had only an inexpert part-time coach who held practice for an hour or two each week. And then Borlaug flunked the university entrance exam.
Crestfallen, Borlaug was preparing to hitchhike home when Champlin pulled him into the university admissions office and asked officials there if they had some program for his friend. Lucky for Borlaug, the university had just launched a junior college for deprived and underprepared youths, and it was desperate for students. Borlaug glumly signed up for what he viewed as a “place for misfits.” Determined to lever himself into the main university, he worked hard at his courses and did well enough to be allowed to transfer. When accepted, he was told to pick a major. Borlaug chose forestry, because, he later admitted, he “just liked the outdoors.”
The University of Minnesota forestry school, founded in 1904, was one of the nation’s oldest. Minnesota’s big forest-products industry wanted the school to supply it with trained employees. In consequence, the curriculum focused almost exclusively on timber management. Students learned how to use a surveyor’s transit; construct logging roads; plant and thin tree plantations; and grade wood products. They were taught to view forests not as wild ecosystems but as slow-growing farms: organic factories for wood. Trees were a crop, one species per tract, grown for harvest. A few hours away in Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold was delivering lectures on the conservation ethic and teaching land managers about ecosystems. Meanwhile, the Minnesota forestry department did not offer a single class in conservation or ecology. Unthinkable to a Leopold disciple, there was no course on soil. Holistic perspectives were not in evidence.
Nor was Borlaug likely to acquire one on his own; he was too busy scrambling. To earn money for tuition and rent, he worked forty or more hours a week, hopscotching between janitorial duties in university laboratories, serving meals at a sorority house (the diner had folded), and working for tips at the parking lot. So much time was devoted to scraping up money that Borlaug was forced to quit the university baseball team in his freshman year. Turning in his uniform “was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever made,” he told Vietmeyer, his biographer. He remained on the college wrestling team, which demanded less time. Happily for Borlaug, he was able to persuade the university to hire a new coach—Dave Bartelma, his coach at Cresco. With Bartelma, the team improved radically; Borlaug made it to the Big Ten semifinals (he was elected to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2002).
Despite all the effort, however, Borlaug ran out of funds. But the demand for foresters meant that he “could drop out of school and make enough money so I could go back and live a little better.” Overall, he spent a year and a half on forest projects, often spending weeks alone in the woods. After he spent the summer of 1937 fighting forest fires in Idaho, the U.S. Forest Service offered Borlaug a job there following his graduation in December. He accepted immediately. Forestry school had paid off; as of January 15, 1938, he would have a steady job. He was not going to be forced to return to Saude and farming. Brimming with happiness, he returned to Minneapolis in a borrowed car. At last he would be financially stable. At last he could get married.
Borlaug had met his fiancée within weeks of leaving Saude. Margaret Grace Gibson was another waiter at the diner. Dark-haired and direct, she had the pale, lightly freckled complexion of her Scottish ancestors. Her father, Thomas Randall Gibson, was born in Glasgow in 1865, immigrated as a toddler to upstate New York, and married a girl from another Scottish immigrant family, thirty-one-year-old Isabella Skene, in 1903. At the time, homesteaders were pouring into the new state of Oklahoma, drawn by its nascent oil industry and unoccupied real estate (much of the state was created by breaking up tribal reservations). In 1910 the Gibsons moved to Medford, Oklahoma, a fast-growing town on former Cherokee land near the Kansas border. A year after their arrival most of Medford burned to the ground. Margaret, the sixth and youngest child, was born six weeks after the fire, on August 30, 1911.
Borlaug as a college wrestler Credit 26
From their first conversation, Margaret was intrigued by the quiet, wiry Borlaug and amused by his shyness around women. Margaret was his first girlfriend. Like him, she was from a poor family and had trouble paying for school. Borlaug smuggled food to her from the sorority when he could, but she often went to bed hungry. For her part, she was frightened when Borlaug’s coat was stolen and he had to wear a thin jacket through the Minnesota winter. Six months shy of graduating, Margaret quit school; her older brother Bill, who edited the Minnesota alumni magazine, found her a job as a proofreader. Someday, she hoped, she would complete her degree.
The couple decided to put off marriage until they were financially stable. With the Forest Service job promising that stability, Borlaug proposed within hours of returning from Idaho. They set the date for the following Friday: September 24, 1937. Bill Gibson lent his sitting room for the ceremony; Borlaug’s sisters came up by train. There was no money for a honeymoon; Norm and Margaret told themselves that they would soon be living among the stunning vistas of the Rocky Mountains, a honeymoon in itself. On the wedding night Norm moved into his wife’s apartment, a one-room flat with a daybed and a shared bathroom in the hall.
Borlaug’s graduation three months later should have been a capstone. Instead it coincided with the receipt of a letter from the Forest Service. Budget cuts had eliminated his job. If Borlaug wanted to reapply, he might get hired in the summer. It was precisely the situation Borlaug had tried to avoi
d: married, with no obvious means of support. Margaret told him that she could support them both on her salary. While waiting for the Forest Service, she suggested, Borlaug could take a semester of graduate school classes.
Maybe, she said, he could work with that man Stakman.
“Execute This Criminal Bush”
In one of Borlaug’s senior-year seminars the teacher had passed out samples of fungus-infected wood and asked the class to examine them. As the students were leaning over their microscopes, a middle-aged man barged into the room, sucking on a pipe. Without a word of introduction or explanation, as Borlaug later remembered it, the man began quizzing students,
not [about] the wood fungus we were looking at, but the damn structure of the wood and what species of wood was it and what’s this and what’s the other thing and why and started giving us a preliminary Ph.D. exam….He first started working on the guy next to me, and he had him all confused, and then he came over and started in on me. I never did know who the man was. I suspected, though. After he had left and thrown the whole place into confusion by his barbing and prodding, I suspected that this was Dr. Stakman.
Borlaug’s suspicion was correct: the man with the pipe was Elvin Charles Stakman, who would become a friend and lasting influence. Like Borlaug, Stakman (pronounced STAKE-man) had been raised poor in the hinterlands of the Middle West and got his degree at the University of Minnesota. He had become one of the first professors in the university’s newly established department of plant pathology (the study of plant diseases). By the time Borlaug encountered Stakman, he was a campus legend. Charismatic, ambitious, rarely modest, Stakman did not view science as a disinterested quest for knowledge. It was a tool—maybe the tool—for human betterment. Not all sciences were equally valuable, as he liked to explain. “Botany,” he said, “is the most important of all sciences, and plant pathology is one of its most essential branches.”