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use of fertilizer. There are great varieties and kinds of fertilizer for different kinds of land.

I learned from listening to Henry Wallace, the President, and others, talk that there are some kinds of land that are so poor that it's not worth the money that it costs to put fertilizer into them and labor onto them. They're submarginal lands and should be taken out of production. I learned that from Wallace because he mentioned it in Cabinet meeting. I heard it from other people, undoubtedly also from Rex Tugwell, from Moley even. I was being instructed, but it was an agricultural problem. The labor part of it was only incidental.

Improving the way of life of farming people so that they get more comfort out of their way of life is not a labor problem. At the time I never thought of the whole issue as being a labor problem. They were poor people, but they were poor people who were poor because of their connection with agriculture, but not because of their connection with a regular weekly wage- paying job. The prevailing sharecropping and tenant farmer business obscured the fact that one man owned the land and the other didn't, that one man used his capital and land to hire other men to work on it. He didn't hire them really. He didn't make a contract to hire them. They were not wage earners in that sense.