Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,657

This is the grave of Frank Lever.

Born outside of Springhill, South Carolina, in 1875, Lever grew up on farms. His father was fairly prosperous though and Lever attended Newberry College. He graduated in 1895 and moved to Washington, becoming the private secretary of J. William Stokes, who had won the district after the state finally disfranchised Black voters entirely. While there, Lever also went to law school at Georgetown. He was admitted to the bar in 1899, but never practiced.

Instead, Lever went into politics. I hardly need to say he was a white supremacist Democrat because of course he was. When Stokes died in 1901, Lever ran in the special election to replace him and won. Over the next 18 years, Lever became perhaps the strongest support of rural interests in Congress. Or at the very least, he was the one doing the work to get legislation passed to support farmers. That was especially true from 1913 onward, when he became chair of the House Committee on Agriculture. There, he fought for legislation that would help the poorest farmers and move people away from tenancy and toward ownership.

In 1914, he, along with Hoke Smith, shepherded through the Smith-Lever Act, which created the cooperative extension services at land grant schools. This meant that agricultural educators could meet the farmers where they are at–their homes and small towns, not just in the university towns. There has long been tension between farmers who considered agricultural education important and farmers who thought these college-educated fancy pants people didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. Smith-Lever intended to build bridges to the farmers. There’s something to this from a political standpoint today–what if we actually tried to engage rural America in useful ways in their own language? Lever very much framed farming as a profession of the highest order, requiring the expertise that all professions required by the early 20th century. Smith-Lever also guaranteed at least 6 percent of the funds to go to Black agricultural colleges too, which wasn’t a lot, but it was something. Lever was also largely responsible for the Cotton Futures Act of 1914, which put the government in charge of grading cotton to prevent corrupt speculators.

Lever was behind the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 that aimed to increase credit to farmers by creating a federal farm loan board and then local branches of that. This is the precursor to the New Deal’s Farm Credit Administration, which still exists today. He also was behind the Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917 that created the food related programs of World War I. This is reasonably well known today because any teaching of World War I discusses things like “Meatless Mondays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays” that asked everyday people to sacrifice a bit for the boys abroad. Plus all that stuff has good images thanks to the propaganda effort of the war.

Another of Lever’s big projects was rural health. He worked closely with the American Public Health Association to implement ideas coming out of the Public Health Service in World War I to build cooperative health work, especially around malaria prevention. Moreover, this by necessity had to be for all races, one of the few areas where Lever or any other white southerner had some realization that they had put their racism aside for a second if they wanted to solve a problem. However, Lever’s bill around this issue did not pass, due to Republican opposition, mostly around their desire to roll back the size of the government after the war.

Legislatively, this is all quite impressive. Lever became one of the key figures in reforming American farming that eventually led to Henry Wallace and the Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933, but Republicans howled about all of this at the time. But with Woodrow Wilson as president, who supported all of these measures, he could express a good bit of his vision for American farmers.

Now, Lever wasn’t great on race, but compared to other South Carolina politicians, he was less insane about it. He thought about running for the Senate in 1918 and even briefly put his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination. But Pitchfork Ben Tillman, who held the seat but was finally retiring from it, hated him. He thought Lever was a squish on race. Lever did not want to cross Tillman, who was simply more powerful and could have potentially destroyed his career. So he stepped out of the race almost as fast as he came in when Tillman criticized him. Ironically, Tillman died shortly after and if he had stuck it out, he wouldn’t have had the old racist to attack deal with anymore.

But let’s not fool ourselves either. This was a white man from South Carolina. He definitely was racist. Take for his example his language from a letter a constituent wrote him about labor shortages in his district during the war. He wrote, law enforcement should “enforce vigorously the vagrancy law and construction of the law be rather unlimited. There are a lot of darkies hanging around towns and cities, and on farms even, that should be put to work either on the farms and in places they are needed or on the public works of the state.” So yeah, yikes.

Lever stepped down from Congress in 1922 to follow his agricultural policy forward by working for the Federal Farm Loan Board. During the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt placed him as the director of public relations for the Farm Credit Administration for the southeast region, which he would hold until his death. He did briefly consider a return to politics, running for governor of South Carolina in 1930, but his health wasn’t great and so he dropped out of the race. Lever was also a trustee at Clemson College (now University), built on John C. Calhoun’s plantation in northwestern South Carolina.

Lever died in 1940, at the age of 65. Shortly after he died, the Navy decided to name a ship for him. Should have been strictly used to send American agricultural produce around the world if you ask me.

Frank Lever is buried in Woodland Cemetery, Clemson, South Carolina. This is not only on the campus of Clemson University, it is the family burial plot of John C. Calhoun’s people, though he is not there. It is also completely dominated by its next-door neighbor on campus, the football stadium. It’s a real wonder that Dabo Swinney has been so comfortable at that school, I’ll tell you what.

If you would like this series to visit other heads of the House Committee on Agriculture, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Lamb is in Richmond, Virginia and Charles Scott is in Iola, Kansas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.