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Health Boundaries Bite
My Grandfather Kline
taken from:
Current Biography 1948
taken from:
Current Biography 1948
KLINE, ALLAN B(LAIR) 1895- Farm organization leader
In December 1947 Allan B. Kline of Iowa was elected to
succeed Edward A. O'Neal of Alabama as president of the
American Farm Bureau Federation. He heads an organization
representing 1,200,000 farm families throughout the United
States--a federation with Fortune in 1944 called “quite the best
lobby in the business,” and which has a quasi-governmental
connection with the Department of Agriculture county agent
service.
Born in Nebraska in 1895, Allan Blair Kline is the son of
Charles Elmer and Mary Elizabeth (Allen) Kline. His mother’s
family had come to northeastern Nebraska from New York, and
his father’s, to Ohio from Pennsylvania; his paternal grandfather
made the trek from Ohio to Nebraska in a covered wagon.
Reared on the family farm, Allan attended public schools in the
neighboring towns of Dakota and South Sioux City. After his
graduation in 1910 the fifteen-year-old boy entered Morningside
College in Sioux City, Iowa where he majored in German and
minored in English and philosophy. Kline said in 1948, “but it
also had seemed wise to get some education before taking up the
technical work in agriculture.” He continued to work on his
father’s farm during week ends and during vacations of his five-
year attendance at Morningside.
Graduated with honors in the spring of 1915, the new holder
of the B.A. Degree returned to school in the fall of 1917, this
time as a student of animal husbandry at Iowa State College.
There he sand in the glee club and was elected to membership in
the agricultural honor society, Gamma Sigma Delta. Kline’s
studies were interrupted in World War I by a yar of war service
with the Sixty-first Infantry as a sergeant in the Medical Corps;
but he returned to classes in the fall of 1919 and was granted his
B.S. degree at the end of the scholastic year. Then, in 1920,
Kline was married to Gladys Remer, and he began farming for
himself in Benton county, Iowa, near Vinton. According to
Marquis W. Childs, Kline made his way first as a tenant farmer,
and then obtained ownership of the farm he operated.
Kline specialized in hog raising, putting as much as one-third
of his acreage into hog pasture and fattening as many as one
thousand pigs each year. The soil of the farm, which in 1948
consists of 560 acres, was not highly productive, says a Farm
Bureau release, but heavy applications of limestone and some
phosphorus, together with the practice of grown large acreages of
legumes, raised the crop yields “amazingly.” During the
depression when he and most other farmers experienced financial
difficulties, Kline decided to build tennis courts and a swimming
pool on his farm, using family labor and a neighbor’s scraper.
The water which is pumped into the pool overflows into a
livestock watering trough. These facilities, to which a string of
riding horses were later added, made the Kline farm the
recreation center of the neighborhood.
Through the years the Iowan took an active part in Farm
Bureau programs: he served for four years as township director,
ten years as president of the Benton County Farm Bureau, and
rose to become a member of the board of the Iowa Farm Bureau
Federation. In 1947 he was voted the title of “Master Farmer”
by a committee representing the Department of Agriculture, the
State agricultural school, the farm press, and farmers. The title,
sponsored in Iowa by Wallace’s Farmer and Iowa Homestead, is
awarded for skill and success in farming and for community-
building spirit. In 1945, similarly, Kline was named an honorary
“Master Swine Grower” by a committee sponsored by radio
station WHO.
About 1941, after serving as vice-president of the Iowa
federation, Kline moved to Des Moines to take up his work as
president, a post he held until he moved on to national activities
four years later. In 1944 the Iowan was sent to Great Britain for
two months under the auspices of the Office of War
Information, to tell British audiences about the farm population
of the United States, particularly the Middle West, and to
describe the war effort. The next year Kline was a consultant at
the San Francisco conference at which the United Nations
organization was set up. In 1946, as vice president of the
American Farm Bureau Federation and “Ed O’Neal’s right hand
man,” he attended the organization meeting of the International
Federation of Agricultural Producers in London. A year later
Kline went to the Netherland for the formal opening of the
organization, of which he is chairman of the policy committee.
While abroad he toured German and other Western European
countries.
Appearing before a Senate Agriculture subcommittee hearing
in the Middle West in 1947, Kline “talked with such knowledge
and ease on world affairs,” reported columnist Childs, “that
chairman George Aiken of Vermont remarked he did not sound
like a dirt farmer. But Kline established his pedigree.” Childs
described him as “one of the most exceptional farm leaders in the
country . . . aware that farming is only a segment of the national
economy. He knows that the farmer cannot be prosperous for
long unless the nation and the world are prosperous.” Later that
year, when the Farm Bureau Federation’s twenty-ninth annual
convention elected Allan Kline to succeed President O’Neal,
Time wrote, “An enthusiastic student of philosophy, economics,
and history . . . Kline believes in a relatively low level of parity
and a thriving foreign trade as the basis for continuing farm
prosperity.” (“Parity” is the ratio of farm product prices to
industrial prices which the Government is required by law to
maintain; strictly defined, it is the economic basis for computing
agricultural prices so that they will be equal, in the matter of
purchasing power, to the prices prevailing in 1909-14, when they
were at their highest level.)
The presidency of the American Farm Bureau Federation, a
$15,000-a-year post, requires Kline to live in Chicago, to spend
much time in Washington, to travel throughout the United States
and to make visits abroad. His duties, in Kline’s words, “are
primarily to carry out programs adopted by the official delegate
body and subject to board of directors interpretation. The job
involves the responsibility of leadership with various States,
understanding national problems of all sorts. It also involves the
duty of exercising influence with other groups to get acceptance
of ideas. This covers agricultural policies primarily but, also,
more general matters, political, social, and economic, domestic
and international.” In January 1948 Kline filed a statement with
the House Ways and Means Committee opposing material
reductions in the income tax, but advocating the extension of
community-property benefits to all married couples and the
elimination of excise taxes on transportation and
communications. At the National Farm Institute meeting in Des
Moines that February, he stated: “The farmers are interested in
leveling off the spiral and stopping inflation all around.” And he
is said to have summed up his fellow Iowans’ viewpoint when he
said that European recovery, not American relief for Europe,
was the necessity – “We can’t feed Europe; Europe has got to
feed Europe.” With other leaders of farm organizations, Kline in
July 1948 declared his support of the International Wheat
Agreement, a measure seeking stabilization of world grain
markets through the medium of quotas on exports and
establishment of price ranges. When the possibility of rationing
arose during the 1948 election campaign, Kline remarked at the
Kansas Farm Bureau convention that meat rationing is “a cruel
delusion and a step toward worthless money.” A subsequent
announcement by the Soviet Government of a fifteen-year
conservation program led Kline to observe, “The record of the
American farmer proves that greater conservation can be attained
only through the minimum of centralized control.” Kline is the
author of “What the Farmers Want,” an article in the September
issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science.
At the annual convention of the American Farm Bureau
Federation held in Atlantic City in mid-December 1948, Kline, an
advocate of flexible agricultural support prices, came into
opposition with the cotton and tobacco bloc of the organization,
which was in favor of high parities. Before a vote was taken,
Kline stated in an interview with a Christian Science Monitor
reporter: “I believe that the plan of flexible price supports
providing for a minimum of 60 per cent and a maximum of 90
per cent, in preference to the continuation of rigid supports at 90
per cent of parity as they now stand for the basic crops, will be
reaffirmed by the convention this year.” Since the vote was
almost a deadlock, with a one-ballot margin, the matter was
passed to the group’s board of directors for consideration.
“Deliberate, shrewd, shaggy-browed” Allan B. Kline stands
five feet ten and a half inches tall, weighs 180 pounds. One
reporter described the gray-eyed, brown-haired farm leader as “a
big man, well groomed, quick-thinking . . . known among farm
people as both a person of action and a thinker.” He is a trustee
of the National Planning Association, a member of the Des
Moines Foreign Relations Committee, secretary-treasurer of the
Iowa Council on Co-operation, and has appeared as an expert on
the University of Chicago Round Table broadcasts. He was a
member of the executive committee of the National Health
Assembly in 1948. In politics he is an independent Republican; in
religion, a Presbyterian. The Kline farm is now operated by his
son Robert Allan; the other son, Charles Elmer, lives in Des
Moines, and the married daughter, Winnifred Lois, in Spokane.
Kline is described as abstemious in his habits: for several years
he has not eaten breakfast, and he gave up smoking entirely
when he decided that he was smoking too much. According to
associates, Kline reads exceptionally fast and makes hundreds of
speeches a year without the use of notes. A bass-baritone, he is
fond of singing. When he packs his bag for travel, the farm
leader takes along a tennis racket.
In December 1947 Allan B. Kline of Iowa was elected to
succeed Edward A. O'Neal of Alabama as president of the
American Farm Bureau Federation. He heads an organization
representing 1,200,000 farm families throughout the United
States--a federation with Fortune in 1944 called “quite the best
lobby in the business,” and which has a quasi-governmental
connection with the Department of Agriculture county agent
service.
Born in Nebraska in 1895, Allan Blair Kline is the son of
Charles Elmer and Mary Elizabeth (Allen) Kline. His mother’s
family had come to northeastern Nebraska from New York, and
his father’s, to Ohio from Pennsylvania; his paternal grandfather
made the trek from Ohio to Nebraska in a covered wagon.
Reared on the family farm, Allan attended public schools in the
neighboring towns of Dakota and South Sioux City. After his
graduation in 1910 the fifteen-year-old boy entered Morningside
College in Sioux City, Iowa where he majored in German and
minored in English and philosophy. Kline said in 1948, “but it
also had seemed wise to get some education before taking up the
technical work in agriculture.” He continued to work on his
father’s farm during week ends and during vacations of his five-
year attendance at Morningside.
Graduated with honors in the spring of 1915, the new holder
of the B.A. Degree returned to school in the fall of 1917, this
time as a student of animal husbandry at Iowa State College.
There he sand in the glee club and was elected to membership in
the agricultural honor society, Gamma Sigma Delta. Kline’s
studies were interrupted in World War I by a yar of war service
with the Sixty-first Infantry as a sergeant in the Medical Corps;
but he returned to classes in the fall of 1919 and was granted his
B.S. degree at the end of the scholastic year. Then, in 1920,
Kline was married to Gladys Remer, and he began farming for
himself in Benton county, Iowa, near Vinton. According to
Marquis W. Childs, Kline made his way first as a tenant farmer,
and then obtained ownership of the farm he operated.
Kline specialized in hog raising, putting as much as one-third
of his acreage into hog pasture and fattening as many as one
thousand pigs each year. The soil of the farm, which in 1948
consists of 560 acres, was not highly productive, says a Farm
Bureau release, but heavy applications of limestone and some
phosphorus, together with the practice of grown large acreages of
legumes, raised the crop yields “amazingly.” During the
depression when he and most other farmers experienced financial
difficulties, Kline decided to build tennis courts and a swimming
pool on his farm, using family labor and a neighbor’s scraper.
The water which is pumped into the pool overflows into a
livestock watering trough. These facilities, to which a string of
riding horses were later added, made the Kline farm the
recreation center of the neighborhood.
Through the years the Iowan took an active part in Farm
Bureau programs: he served for four years as township director,
ten years as president of the Benton County Farm Bureau, and
rose to become a member of the board of the Iowa Farm Bureau
Federation. In 1947 he was voted the title of “Master Farmer”
by a committee representing the Department of Agriculture, the
State agricultural school, the farm press, and farmers. The title,
sponsored in Iowa by Wallace’s Farmer and Iowa Homestead, is
awarded for skill and success in farming and for community-
building spirit. In 1945, similarly, Kline was named an honorary
“Master Swine Grower” by a committee sponsored by radio
station WHO.
About 1941, after serving as vice-president of the Iowa
federation, Kline moved to Des Moines to take up his work as
president, a post he held until he moved on to national activities
four years later. In 1944 the Iowan was sent to Great Britain for
two months under the auspices of the Office of War
Information, to tell British audiences about the farm population
of the United States, particularly the Middle West, and to
describe the war effort. The next year Kline was a consultant at
the San Francisco conference at which the United Nations
organization was set up. In 1946, as vice president of the
American Farm Bureau Federation and “Ed O’Neal’s right hand
man,” he attended the organization meeting of the International
Federation of Agricultural Producers in London. A year later
Kline went to the Netherland for the formal opening of the
organization, of which he is chairman of the policy committee.
While abroad he toured German and other Western European
countries.
Appearing before a Senate Agriculture subcommittee hearing
in the Middle West in 1947, Kline “talked with such knowledge
and ease on world affairs,” reported columnist Childs, “that
chairman George Aiken of Vermont remarked he did not sound
like a dirt farmer. But Kline established his pedigree.” Childs
described him as “one of the most exceptional farm leaders in the
country . . . aware that farming is only a segment of the national
economy. He knows that the farmer cannot be prosperous for
long unless the nation and the world are prosperous.” Later that
year, when the Farm Bureau Federation’s twenty-ninth annual
convention elected Allan Kline to succeed President O’Neal,
Time wrote, “An enthusiastic student of philosophy, economics,
and history . . . Kline believes in a relatively low level of parity
and a thriving foreign trade as the basis for continuing farm
prosperity.” (“Parity” is the ratio of farm product prices to
industrial prices which the Government is required by law to
maintain; strictly defined, it is the economic basis for computing
agricultural prices so that they will be equal, in the matter of
purchasing power, to the prices prevailing in 1909-14, when they
were at their highest level.)
The presidency of the American Farm Bureau Federation, a
$15,000-a-year post, requires Kline to live in Chicago, to spend
much time in Washington, to travel throughout the United States
and to make visits abroad. His duties, in Kline’s words, “are
primarily to carry out programs adopted by the official delegate
body and subject to board of directors interpretation. The job
involves the responsibility of leadership with various States,
understanding national problems of all sorts. It also involves the
duty of exercising influence with other groups to get acceptance
of ideas. This covers agricultural policies primarily but, also,
more general matters, political, social, and economic, domestic
and international.” In January 1948 Kline filed a statement with
the House Ways and Means Committee opposing material
reductions in the income tax, but advocating the extension of
community-property benefits to all married couples and the
elimination of excise taxes on transportation and
communications. At the National Farm Institute meeting in Des
Moines that February, he stated: “The farmers are interested in
leveling off the spiral and stopping inflation all around.” And he
is said to have summed up his fellow Iowans’ viewpoint when he
said that European recovery, not American relief for Europe,
was the necessity – “We can’t feed Europe; Europe has got to
feed Europe.” With other leaders of farm organizations, Kline in
July 1948 declared his support of the International Wheat
Agreement, a measure seeking stabilization of world grain
markets through the medium of quotas on exports and
establishment of price ranges. When the possibility of rationing
arose during the 1948 election campaign, Kline remarked at the
Kansas Farm Bureau convention that meat rationing is “a cruel
delusion and a step toward worthless money.” A subsequent
announcement by the Soviet Government of a fifteen-year
conservation program led Kline to observe, “The record of the
American farmer proves that greater conservation can be attained
only through the minimum of centralized control.” Kline is the
author of “What the Farmers Want,” an article in the September
issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science.
At the annual convention of the American Farm Bureau
Federation held in Atlantic City in mid-December 1948, Kline, an
advocate of flexible agricultural support prices, came into
opposition with the cotton and tobacco bloc of the organization,
which was in favor of high parities. Before a vote was taken,
Kline stated in an interview with a Christian Science Monitor
reporter: “I believe that the plan of flexible price supports
providing for a minimum of 60 per cent and a maximum of 90
per cent, in preference to the continuation of rigid supports at 90
per cent of parity as they now stand for the basic crops, will be
reaffirmed by the convention this year.” Since the vote was
almost a deadlock, with a one-ballot margin, the matter was
passed to the group’s board of directors for consideration.
“Deliberate, shrewd, shaggy-browed” Allan B. Kline stands
five feet ten and a half inches tall, weighs 180 pounds. One
reporter described the gray-eyed, brown-haired farm leader as “a
big man, well groomed, quick-thinking . . . known among farm
people as both a person of action and a thinker.” He is a trustee
of the National Planning Association, a member of the Des
Moines Foreign Relations Committee, secretary-treasurer of the
Iowa Council on Co-operation, and has appeared as an expert on
the University of Chicago Round Table broadcasts. He was a
member of the executive committee of the National Health
Assembly in 1948. In politics he is an independent Republican; in
religion, a Presbyterian. The Kline farm is now operated by his
son Robert Allan; the other son, Charles Elmer, lives in Des
Moines, and the married daughter, Winnifred Lois, in Spokane.
Kline is described as abstemious in his habits: for several years
he has not eaten breakfast, and he gave up smoking entirely
when he decided that he was smoking too much. According to
associates, Kline reads exceptionally fast and makes hundreds of
speeches a year without the use of notes. A bass-baritone, he is
fond of singing. When he packs his bag for travel, the farm
leader takes along a tennis racket.
- References
- Christian Sci Mon p4 F 8 ’48 por
Time 50:14 D 29 ’47 por
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