Edward Asbury O'Neal III was born on October 26, 1875, on a plantation near Florence, Alabama, the son of Edward Asbury O'Neal II, a lawyer, and of Mary Coffee. His paternal grandfather, Edward Asbury O'Neal, had been governor of Alabama from 1882 to 1886, and an uncle, Emmett Asbury, also had held that office.
Edward O'Neal graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1898. His interest in scientific farm management prompted further study at the State Agricultural and Mechanical College at Auburn and the University of Illinois, and also attracted him to the modernizing program of the federal Agricultural Extension Service, established in 1914.
After graduating from Washington and Lee University in 1898, O'Neal toured Europe for a year, then returned to assume management of the 1, 900-acre cotton plantation near Florence that belonged to his family. In 1921, shortly after the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) was established as a voluntary auxiliary organization to the extension service, O'Neal became president of the Lauderdale County chapter. In 1922 he became vice-president, and in 1923 president, of the Alabama Farm Bureau Federation. Farm politics, not farming, became his central interest for the rest of his life.
During the 1920's, O'Neal pressed for creation of a fertilizer production complex at the abandoned Muscle Shoals hydroelectric facility, located near his home. He was a late convert to George Norris' plan to utilize Muscle Shoals as a nucleus for a regional water-power and electric-power development that eventually took shape as the Tennessee Valley Authority.
By 1925, O'Neal was recognized as spokesman within the AFBF for the minority faction of cotton producers in an organization dominated by corn and livestock producers of the Midwest. He served as national vice-president from 1924 to 1931. O'Neal succeeded to the presidency of the AFBF (the only Southerner ever to hold the office) in 1931, on the eve of the most severe crisis in American agricultural history. He and his organization enthusiastically endorsed the agricultural reform program of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, embodied in the acreage reduction and parity price goals of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). With exaggerated pride, O'Neal credited the AFBF with having inspired the program. During the early New Deal years O'Neal, as spokesman for the AFBF, worked closely with the president and Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. An effective lobbyist, he flexed the considerable political muscle of the AFBF to win added appropriations for farm programs, and he participated in restructuring the AAA following invalidation of the original act by the Supreme Court in 1936.
During O'Neal's long tenure as president of AFBF, he was an effective mediator who forged an alliance within AFBF between the cotton-producing Democratic farmers of the South and the Republican livestock producers of the Middle West. This cooperation had to overcome such obstacles as the conflict between the free-trade preferences of export-conscious cotton producers and the protectionist tendencies of Midwesterners. O'Neal engineered some of the subtle compromises that set price supports at a level acceptable both to cotton producers, who marketed their crop directly, and to corn producers, who fed most of their crop to livestock.
O'Neal considered his greatest achievement while president of AFBF to have been the increase in its membership from 276, 000 when he assumed the presidency to 1, 128, 000 when he retired in 1946. Much of this increment was due to vigorous organizing activity in the South. O'Neal also presided over a policy transformation that changed the AFBF from advocate to opponent of Democratic party farm policies. During World War II, AFBF backed higher price supports and objected to price ceilings that might curtail wartime profits of the large commercial producers who made up the bulk of its members. When the Agriculture Department sought, through the Farm Security Administration and other programs, to extend assistance and to create grass-roots organizations among poorer farmers, the AFBF, seeing a challenge to its rural hegemony, allied with conservative congressional farm interests to emasculate the programs. Fearful of wage increases not accompanied by corresponding gains in prices for commercial farmers, the AFBF in the later years of O'Neal's presidency took a militant stand against labor unions. By 1946, O'Neal's disenchantment with federal controls, and his increasing interest in international markets as a profitable outlet for the products of the large, mechanized farms that now dominated American agriculture, presaged the policy positions the AFBF would advocate consistently after 1950.
A lifelong Democrat, O'Neal nevertheless urged farmers to elect Dwight D. Eisenhower as president in 1952. O'Neal died in Florence, Alabama.
Edward O'Neal was a member of the Democratic party and president of the American Farm Bureau Federation (1931-1946).
Although Edward O'Neal was viewed by some as a southern aristocrat of the "old school, " O'Neal's devout Presbyterianism seemed at times incongruous with his fondness for hard liquor and his proclivity for racy language. He was not a "dirt farmer, " and he never concealed his contempt for barely profitable subsistence operations.
On November 23, 1904, Edward O'Neal married Julia Camper; they had three children.
