Henry A. Wallace - Early Life

Early Life

Henry A. Wallace, son of Henry Cantwell Wallace, a farmer, journalist, and political activist, was born on October 7, 1888, at a farm near the village of Orient, Iowa, in Adair County. Wallace attended Iowa State College at Ames, Iowa. At Iowa State he became a friend of George Washington Carver, and they spent time together collecting botanical specimens. Wallace graduated in 1910 with a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry. He worked on the editorial staff of the family-owned paper Wallaces' Farmer in Des Moines from 1910 to 1924, and he edited this publication from 1924 to 1929. Wallace experimented with breeding high-yielding hybrid corn, and he wrote a good number of publications on agriculture. In 1915, he devised the first corn-hog ratio charts indicating the probable course of markets. Wallace was also a self-taught "practicing statistician", co-authoring an influential article with George W. Snedecor on computational methods for correlations and regressions and publishing sophisticated statistical studies in the pages of Wallaces’ Farmer. Snedecor eventually invited Wallace to teach a graduate course on least squares.

With an inheritance of a few thousand dollars that had been left to his wife, the former Ilo Browne, whom he married in 1914, Wallace founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company in 1926, which later became Pioneer Hi-Bred, a major agriculture corporation, acquired in 1999 by the Dupont Corporation for approximately $10 billion.

Wallace was raised as a Presbyterian, but left that denomination early in life. He spent most of his early life exploring other religious faiths and traditions. For many years, he had been closely associated with famous Russian artist and writer Nicholas Roerich. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "Wallace's search for inner light took him to strange prophets.... It was in this search that he encountered Nicholas Roerich, a Russian emigre, painter, theosophist. Wallace did Roerich a number of favors, including sending him on an expedition to Central Asia presumably to collect drought-resistant grasses. In due course, H.A. became disillusioned with Roerich and turned almost viciously against him." Wallace eventually settled on Episcopalianism.

Henry Wallace was also a Freemason and attained the 32nd Degree in the Scottish Rite.