Bigger Basket

Franklin Roosevelt named a U.S.-British Combined Food Board last week and told a little story to explain its purpose.

In England during World War I, he recalled, he spent one evening listening to grim tales of British belt-tightenings. But for his next breakfast he got a heaping platter of bacon, which he devoured with gusto. To his hostess he explained that at home he had gone without bacon for 18 months so the British could have it.

The new board, said Mr. Roosevelt, will prevent that kind of thingQ+ts job is to make a giant food basket for all the United Nations, to dole out the contents fairly among fighters and civilians.

The basketeers are R. H. Brand, chief of the British Food Mission, and Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard, who believes that food will win the war and write the peace.

Busy Wickard began combing the block-long, cubicled corridors of his department for a second-in-command, an operations chief to help him as Milo Perkins runs BEW for Henry Wallace. Wickard found the man in his own secretariat: drawling, hard-working Sam Bledsoe.

From Farming to Agriculture. Samuel Benton Bledsoe came up all the way from a Bogota, Tenn. farm where he was born 43 years ago. He graduated from Valparaiso (Ind.) University in 1919. Cotton farming busted him in a year. For three years he played catcher in Midwest semi-pro baseball--he "wasn't even good enough to make the minor leagues." Then he did newspaper work on the old Memphis Press-Scimitar, moved to Washington to cover agriculture and national affairs for A.P., left that in 1935 to write press handouts for the Agriculture Department.

In Washington he rose fast. Henry Wallace, as Secretary, discovered that Sam was a shrewd politician, an expert on cotton, a deft trouble shooter in & out of the Department. Sam Bledsoe has a soft Tennessee twang, is extremely popular with newsmen (he is always fair), and doesn't need too much sleep. He knows bureaucracy, publicity, lobbying; he gets things done but sees that the credit goes to the boss.

The Wickard-Bledsoe team wants to "operate with a minimum of interference with normal channels of food distribution." First hurdle is the Congressional provision against cutting the wheat-acreage allotments. Wickard would like to reduce sharply the 1943 wheat acreage: "It seems awful foolish to go ahead encouraging another big wheat crop when we can't dispose of what we have on hand."

Heavy Schedule. Wickard and Bledsoe have a full season ahead: to try to get Canadian wheat growers to plant other more urgently needed crops; to estimate accurately the jigsaw of military, Lend-Lease and domestic food needs this year and next; to set up a central purchasing agency to find shipping space for food for the Allies; to plan 1943 production in the light of food needs plus labor, fertilizer, transportation and processing problems; to see that farmers get harvest hands, tires, gasoline, trucks. On their side are prospects of record-breaking crops. "I hope rationing can be avoided with very few exceptions," said optimistic Wickard. Most pressing problem is how to get more fats & oils--"We are digging into our reserves too fast now."

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