In Memoriam

Wayne E. Fuller

Wayne E. Fuller, Emeritus Professor of History, the University of Texas, El Paso, passed away on June 21, 2004. He was a combat veteran of World War II, sustaining a severe and crippling injury in the fighting in Normandy in 1944. Nevertheless, and despite many painful surgeries, his love of history and passion for writing led him to enter graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received the doctorate in American History in 1954. He bagan teaching at Texas Western College (now U.T., El Paso) in 1955. He was an inspiring teacher receiving several university awards for teaching excellence. Wayne’s research interests centered on nineteenth century rural America. The result was five books, beginning with a study of Rural Free Delivery, his doctoral dissertation. A pioneering work on the rural one-room school house, The Old Country School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) came next, followed by The American Mail (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1972) a volume in the Chicago History of American Civilization Series. His love of rural schooling led to his fourth publication, One Room Schools of the Middle West: An Illustrated History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994). His last book, Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) was published just a few months before his death. The rapidly declining health of his beloved wife Billie must have made this his most burdensome undertaking. But all who knew him understood that perseverance against all obstacles was his essential character trait. Wayne was a member of the OAH for over fifty years. He was also an active member of the Agricultural History Society, the Western History Association, and the American Historical Association. A devout Christian and devoted family man, he and Billie, who preceded him in death, were married for sixty years. His passing leaves a void in the lives of his children, Jamie, Doug, and Bryan, his colleagues in the university community, and many El Pasoans, especially those who were his students.

Wayne David Rasmussen

Wayne David Rasmussen died at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, on April 30, 2004. He died from pneumonia but had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for a number of years. He served as chief historian of the United States Department of Agriculture for thirty-four years, secretary-treasurer of the Agricultural History Society for thirty-eight years, and earned the honorary title Dean of Agricultural Historians for his accomplishments and service to agriculture and scholarship. He was the epitome of the public historian before that term was coined. He was a gentleman and a gentle man; historians, of all ages, but particularly young historians found him friendly, interested, always helpful.

Wayne David was born February 5, 1915, on the family homestead near Ryegate, Montana. After leaving home, he worked at a series of jobs while earning a history degree at the University of Montana where Paul C. Phillips encouraged him to pursue graduate studies. After finishing his BA degree in 1937, he moved to Washington, DC, and joined the USDA as a clerk typist, working primarily in records management. Out of several available job possibilities, this one had been in a location where graduate education was possible. Determined to pursue his interest in history, he earned an MA degree at nearby George Washington University in 1939 for his thesis: “Chinese Coolie Emigration to Peru.” At George Washington University, Rasmussen met fellow student Marion Fowler. They married in 1939 and bought a small house in Bethesda, Maryland. Shortly thereafter, Rasmussen transferred to the history unit in USDA’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics&emdash;one of the pioneering history offices in the federal government.After serving in the army during the second World War, Rasmussen returned to his work in the history office in 1946 and continued studies at nearby George Washington University, which culminated in the Ph.D. degree, earned under the direction of Wood Gray in 1950, for the dissertation “United States Plant Explorers in South America During the Nineteenth Century.” When Everett Edwards died suddenly in 1952, BAE leadership selected Rasmussen to head the history office. In an interview with the Public Historian, Rasmussen recalled that the history office, at the time he became its leader, needed a reorientation of its efforts. Although he felt contributions to academia should not to be neglected, he also believed the office’s historians needed to spend more time meeting the needs of people in USDA. The size of the history branch (at one time consisting of ten historians and five support staff) made it possible for Rasmussen to enforce one dictum: that at least one of the branch’s professional historians should be available by telephone during working hours. Furthermore, he insisted the branch maintain a healthy reference collection to answer most questions immediately without having to refer the patron to the library or archives. For himself, Rasmussen adopted the credo that, “My job as historian for the Department of Agriculture was to bring historical perspective to bear on current problems.” Rasmussen became a valued advisor to secretaries of agriculture, and worked especially closely with Orville Freeman on World Without Hunger (1).

Alongside the USDA history office had grown up the discipline of agricultural history, its professional society, the Agricultural History Society, and its quarterly journal, Agricultural History. The office, the discipline, and its professional society and journal maintained an almost symbiotic relationship through the years. Rasmussen doubted that agricultural history would have emerged as a field of study without Everett Edwards’s editorship of Agricultural History, on the very practical rationale that the journal provided a publishing venue for agricultural historians. Rasmussen built on that foundation and served as the Society’s secretary-treasurer from 1953-1963 and 1965-1993. During 1963-1965, he was Vice President and then President of the Society. Rasmussen also played a critical role in organizing some of the periodic, topical symposia that resulted in special issues of the journal generally published as stand-alone volumes. He encouraged new trends in agricultural history, welcoming journal articles in such methodological approaches as cliometrics and publishing articles by “rural historians,” that included the new social history sweeping the broader discipline to agricultural history (2).

Rasmussen’s writings might be classified in three broad categories: unpublished staff and briefing papers, collaborative publications of the USDA history office, and individual scholarly publications. Like other historians in the federal government, Rasmussen provided administrators and policy-makers with historical analysis. Most of these documents remained unpublished and available only to USDA policymakers. Other analyses became government publications. A regularly updated history of the price support programs proved particularly popular in USDA as it helped to navigate the maze of legislation and administrative decisions. Rasmussen functioned as the public face of the office in presenting the collaborative works of the historians to secretaries of agriculture and agency heads.

In addition to the studies produced primarily for a USDA audience, Rasmussen won plaudits in the academic world. His graduate studies at George Washington University had emphasized South America. His history of the Emergency Farm Labor Program, written for the War Records Project after World War II, remains useful to scholars decades after its publication. History office colleague Douglas Bowers, who succeeded Rasmussen as head of the office, recently summarized Rasmussen’s main contribution to historical scholarship, remembering that “what solidified his reputation among historians outside USDA was his work on agricultural technology, especially his analysis of the first agricultural revolution during and after the Civil War.” Rasmussen developed the arguments in the Agricultural History article, “The Civil War: A Catalyst of Agricultural Revolution,” and extended it in “The Impact of Technological Change on American Agriculture, 1862-1962” in the Journal of Economic History. He was particularly proud of a version that appeared in the more popular Scientific American, “The Mechanization of Agriculture,” and jokingly told this writer that it represented everything he knew about agricultural technology (3).

Rasmussen retired from USDA in 1986. His brief tenure on a survey party of the General Land Office and work for the Army Corps of Engineers prior to joining the department in 1937 made him eligible for the fifty-year service pin. Earlier, USDA had awarded him the department’s Superior Service Award (1964) and the Distinguished Service Award (1973). Frederick V. Cartstensen and others who had benefited from Rasmussen’s counseling organized a one-day symposium in his honor. The papers presented by agricultural history scholars appeared as Outstanding in His Field: Perspectives on American Agricultural History in Honor of Wayne D. Rasmussen. Freed of the daily responsibilities of supervising the history branch, Rasmussen had time for research and writing. In 1989 Iowa State University Press published Taking the University to the People: Seventy-Five Years of Cooperative Extension, and USDA issued Farmers, Cooperatives, and USDA: A History of the Agricultural Cooperative Service in 1991. Rasmussen and former colleagues in the history office suffered a major shock in 1994 when the Economic Research Service closed the history office in a downsizing reorganization to address serious budget cuts to the agency. Rasmussen’s appeals and those of former secretaries of agriculture failed to persuade the USDA leadership to reverse this decision (4).

Wayne and Marion Rasmussen moved from Annandale, Virginia, to Concord, Massachusetts, in November 1995, to be closer to their daughters Linda and Karen and their families.

1. Arnita Jones and Wayne D. Rasmussen, “Wayne Rasmussen and the Development of Policy History at the United States Department of Agriculture,” Public Historian 14 (Winter 1992): 17. Rasmussen provided a written account of some of the stories that he often told friends and colleagues. In addition, he elaborated on the role of federal historian and obligations to both the federal agency and the historical community.

2. William N. Parker, ed., The Structure of the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South (Washington, DC: Agricultural History Society, 1970), preface.

3. Douglas Bowers to Dwight Gadsby, May 4, 2004, email.

4. Frederick V. Carstensen, et. al., eds., Outstanding in His Field: Perspectives on American Agricultural History in Honor of Wayne D. Rasmussen (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993). Louis Ferleger provided a bibliography to the collection, “Writings of Wayne D. Rasmussen: Bibliography,” 148-54.