HENRY AGARD WALLACE, THE IOWA CORN YIELD TESTS, AND THE ADOPTION OF HYBRID CORN

This research report makes the following claims: 1] There was not an unambiguous economic advantage of hybrid corn over the open-pollinated varieties in 1936. 2] The early adoption of hybrid corn before 1937 can be better explained by a sustained propaganda campaign conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the direction of the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Agard Wallace. The Department's campaign echoed that of the commercial seed companies. The most prominent hybrid seed company, Pioneer Hi-Bred Company, was founded by Wallace and he retained a financial interest while serving as Secretary. 3] The early adopters of hybrid seed were followed by later adopters as a consequence of the droughts of 1934 and especially 1936. The eventual improvement of yields as newer varieties were introduced explains the continuation and acceleration of the process.

Slave Breeding

This paper reviews the historical work on slave breeding in the ante-bellum United States. Slave breeding consisted of interference in the sexual life of slaves by their owners with the intent and result of increasing the number of slave children born. The weight of evidence suggests that slave breeding occurred in sufficient force to raise the rate of growth of the American slave population despite evidence that only a minority of slave-owners engaged in such practices

One Kind of Freedom: Reconsidered (and Turbo Charged)

Since One Kind of Freedom was published in 1977 there have been enormous advances in computer technology and statistical software, and an impressive expansion of micro-level historical data sets. In this essay we reconsider' our earlier findings on the consequences of emancipation in terms of what might be accomplished using the new technology, methods, and data. We employ the entire sample of 11,202 farms collected for the Southern Economic History Project not the sub-sample used to prepare 1KF. We revisit the question of declining production of foodstuffs, examining the data this time on a farm-by-farm basis. We conclude that 30 percent of farms in the cotton regions were locked-in' to cotton production and another 16 percent were producing too much food in an effort to avoid the trap of debt peonage. Using probit methods to control for the effects of age, farm size, literacy, family workers, and willingness to assume risk, we find that race accounts for two-thirds of the gap between black and white ownership of farms. Comparing sharecropping and renting, we find that race was much less of a factor in tenure choice. We note that these efforts only scratch the surface of what remains to be done.

Resident Impacts of Immigration: Perspectives from America’s Age of Mass Migration

Elementary economic models are often used to suggest that immigration depresses the wages of native-born workers. These models assume that when immigrants enter a labour market, all other features of that market remain unchanged. Such an assumption is almost never valid. Here we explore the economic impacts of immigrants during America’s Age of Mass Migration a century ago. This was a period of dynamic structural change that witnessed the appearance of new industries, adoption of new technologies, discovery of new mineral resources, the rise of big business, and the geographic concentration of industries. We show that immigrants – and residents – selected destinations where labour demand and wages were rising. Thus, native workers experienced wage increases in the presence of heavy immigration. Models that abstract from the special characteristics of labour markets that attract immigrants misrepresent their economic impact.Immigration, Internal migration, Economic history of immigration, Counterfactual analysis

Slave Breeding

This paper reviews the historical work on slave breeding in the ante-bellum United States. Slave breeding consisted of interference in the sexual life of slaves by their owners with the intent and result of increasing the number of slave children born. The weight of evidence suggests that slave breeding occurred in sufficient force to raise the rate of growth of the American slave population despite evidence that only a minority of slave-owners engaged in such practices

Myth of the Industrial Scrap Heap: A Revisionist View of Turn-of-the- Century American Retirement

Using the census survival method to calculate net flows across employment states between 1900 and 1910, we find that approximately one-fifth of all men who reached the age of 55 eventually retired before their death. Many of these retirees appear to have planned their withdrawal from paid employment by accumulating assets, becoming self-employed, and then liquidating their assets to provide a stream of income to finance consumption in old age. This `modern' retirement behavior, we argue, has important implications for the economic history of capital and labor markets, of saving and investment, of insurance and pensions, and of the family economy.

Fixing the Facts: Editing of the 1880 U.S. Census of Occupations with Implications for Long-Term Trends and the Sociology of Official Statistics

We argue that the enumerators' occupational returns from the important census of 1880 were heavily edited prior to publication. The effect was to substantially reduce the number of individuals reported with an occupation. For youthful and older males and all women the editing was so substantial as to qualitatively affect the apparent trend in labor force participation for these groups over time. The stylized facts regarding labor market dynamics during the period of American industrialization and the historical stories constructed around them will now need to be reexamined. We contend that the editing was secretly authorized by Francis Amasa Walker, Superintendent of the Tenth Census of 1880 and one of the most prominent and decorated economists, statisticians, and public servants in America at this time. While other scholars have identified potential sources of bias in census figures, no one has heretofore suggested that the official statistics of the United States were covertly altered to present a picture different from information collected by census enumerators. If we are correct, the sociology of official nineteenth-century American statistics will require rethinking.

The Trend in the Rate of Labor Force Participation of Older Men, 1870-1930: A Review of the Evidence

We present new evidence to support our earlier finding that there was no appreciable trend in the rate of retirement for American men between 1870 and 1930. The data suggests that Jon Moen's claim that retirement increased appreciably during this period is mistaken. Moen's critique of our earlier paper is also examined point by point. We demonstrate that his doubts about our procedures are unnecessary.

Historical Perspectives on the Economic Consequences of Immigration into the United States

This paper highlights the distinctive features of the theoretical approach taken by scholars" who analyzed the impacts of the mass migration into the United States in the two decades" preceding World War I. Broadly speaking, this literature was couched in terms of the "aggregate" production function, productivity change in factor proportions. Attention was focused on the close interrelatedness among the many" diverse elements in the economy. A notable difference between the historical studies and the recent literature on the impacts" of immigration is the propensity of the current literature to concentrate only on the first-round" consequences. It is easy to show that these will be harmful to resident workers who face direct" competition. Economic historians writing about the earlier period of high immigration went" beyond the first-round effects. Taking a long-run perspective, they identified many aspects of" the mass immigration that were beneficial from the point of view of the resident population."