Clifford Verne Gregory was an American agricultural journalist and farm leader.
Background
Gregory was born on October 20, 1883, in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, the eldest of three children - two sons and an adopted daughter. His father, Elmer Olmstead Gregory, whose forebear Henry Gregory had emigrated from Scotland to Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1633, was a native of New York state; he had lived in Illinois before settling in Iowa by 1878. Although he owned a substantial farm, he preferred to work as a carpenter or contractor, leaving much of the farm work to his sons. Gregory's mother, Millie E. (McFarlin) Gregory, a native of Michigan, had been a schoolteacher.
Education
In 1906 Gregory began the study of animal husbandry at Iowa State College in Ames. There he also developed an interest in journalism and helped support himself by acting as a local correspondent of the Mason City Globe-Gazette and selling articles to Country Life magazine. He taught journalism during his junior and senior years, and after graduating in 1910 he stayed on for a further year as an instructor in journalism and bulletin editor for the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station.
Career
Gregory moved to Chicago in 1911 to become editor of the Prairie Farmer. This struggling periodical, one of the oldest farm papers in the United States, had been bought a few years earlier by Burridge D. Butler, former publisher of the Minneapolis Daily News. Gregory soon reestablished the Prairie Farmer's reputation as a major farm journal. He encouraged communications from farm people. His wit enlivened the paper's columns; he early inaugurated a regular feature, "The Song of the Lazy Farmer, " which amused thousands of readers for a quarter of a century, and created characters such as Senator Hiram Cornborer and the homespun philosopher John Turnipseed, through whom he could express his ideas. Gregory urged a progressive, adaptive agriculture. He advocated better business methods, the use of limestone and rock phosphate to maintain soil fertility, and soybeans as a cash crop; he sponsored tractor demonstrations and urged the vaccination of calves to fight brucellosis. With his friend and former classmate Henry A. Wallace, he popularized cornhusking contests to glamorize an arduous Midwestern task, and in 1925 he began the program of Master Farmer awards, which soon became a national institution. Gregory involved himself directly in efforts to develop greater cooperation among farmers. He gave strong support to the Illinois Agricultural Association when it was formed in 1916, became a vice-president in 1918, helped place the association on a sound financial basis, and urged that it emphasize economic services rather than agricultural education. He also participated in the organization of the American Farm Bureau Federation in 1919, and the next year worked in its study of the grain market and cooperative sales programs. In 1937, after a long conflict with Butler over the Prairie Farmer's finances and editorial policy, Gregory resigned to become associate publisher of Wallaces' Farmer and Iowa Homestead and of the Wisconsin Agriculturalist. An active Methodist and a Mason, he found time for golf and other outdoor recreations. He died in 1941, at the age of fifty-eight, at the Iowa Methodist Hospital in Des Moines following an appendectomy. He was buried in the Wheaton Cemetery.
Achievements
Gregory is chiefly remembered as agricultural journalist, who advocated better business methods, sponsored tractor demonstrations and urged the vaccination of calves to fight brucellosis.
Politics
Gregory was a leader in the movement to mobilize Congressional support for the McNary-Haugen bills. He was mentioned as a possible choice for Secretary of Agriculture after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, but gave his full support to Henry Wallace, who received the appointment. Gregory endorsed the New Deal agricultural programs and helped write the Agricultural Adjustment acts of 1933 and 1938; he served on the National Corn-Hog Committee of the first Agricultural Adjustment Administration, on the President's Commission on Rural Cooperatives (1936), on the Agricultural Priorities Division of the National Defense Council, and on the Agricultural Advisory Committee of the Department of Agriculture.
Membership
Vice-president of the Illinois Agricultural Association (1918); director of the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago; President of the Agricultural History Society (1935-1936)
Personality
Five feet nine inches tall and prematurely bald, Gregory was a poised and humorous speaker. He was also a skilled mediator.
Connections
On June 29, 1910, Gregory married Edna Laura Springer of Revere, Minnesota. They had 6 children.
