The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois, 1890–1940 by Deborah Fitzgerald

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1117 compare Edison’s innovation strategies, such as his product diversifi­ cation in the 1890s, to later strategies developed at innovative companies in the forefront of industrial research in the 1920s. If the relationship between business strategy and laboratory is a strength of the book, the reader is nonetheless left wishing for a clearer sense of the fiscal state of Edison’s businesses (although the complex nature of the records available for accurately assessing their status will likely require more in-depth study of particular companies than Millard could undertake while researching this book). Readers of Technology and Culture may be disappointed as well by the lack of detailed examination of the actual technical and scientific work of the laboratory at West Orange. This problem is exacerbated by Millard’s failure to provide illustrations of mechanical details. The very inter­ esting photographs that are found in the book too often do not provide information necessary for understanding technical details discussed in the text. Because Millard intends his book to provide “guide posts to the new territory” (p. xiii) he has explored, he can be criticized for not providing a more detailed index and more expansive archival references in the notes. Readers may also wish for a chro­ nology to help them follow the complex trail of changes that took place at the laboratory and in its relationship to Edison’s industrial empire over more than four decades. It is a mark of how much new information is found in this study that the reader wishes for more. Millard has accomplished all that can be asked of a first book on this subject by raising new and important questions for those who follow him into the “vast reaches of the Edison archives” (p. xiii). Paul Israel Dr. Israel is an editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois, 1890—1940. By Deborah Fitzgerald. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Pp. xi + 247; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95. Farming is a complicated business. Its complexity originates in the “nature” of living things and in human attempts to exert biological control. Economic rivalries arise between farmers, as well as among farmers, middlemen, and consumers. And, in various forms, public policy breeds a perplexing mix of interests. Agricultural history, when done well, explains relationships among these three distinct sets of variables—biology, economics, and law—and Deborah Fitzgerald has accomplished this in The Business ofBreeding. On the larger stage, her story of hybrid corn in Illinois is a metaphor for modern agriculture, where science has brought sudden 1118 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE change. Fitzgerald says that in 1933, hybrid corn accounted for only .4 percent of total corn acreage in the United States, while a dozen years later it made up 90 percent. In area, that amounted to a rise from some 400,000 acres to nearly seventy-eight million acres, a staggering change by any measure. During the first half of the 20th century, Illinois was the leading corn-producing state, and, not coincidentally, its agricultural college and experiment station made the advance of corn culture its chief mission. Illinois also was home to three private seed companies—Funk Brothers, Pfister, and DeKalb— that helped turn a biological curiosity into a commercial bonanza. Since antiquity, corn growers had known how to cross-pollinate (i.e., take the pollen from the tassels of one plant and sprinkle it on the ear silks of another). Hybridization occurred when crosses between two unrelated races took place—the five races of corn being dent, flint, flour, pop, and sweet. Each race had certain qualities; so, hybrids amalgamated desirable features (and undesirable ones too). In the 1870s, Charles Darwin discovered that it was not the simple act of breeding that produced vigorous progeny but rather the crossing of unrelated varieties. Inbreeding, he observed, increased the frequency of a characteristic’s heredity. Darwin’s book, The Effects ofCross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876), appeared just as the agricultural experiment station movement was taking hold in the United States. This was the spark. An intellectual pedigree exists...