Life's Pleasures Quote by David F. Houston

“Corn” here isn’t just a plant; it’s a claim about national stability. David F. Houston, a politician and longtime agricultural administrator (including as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of Agriculture), is speaking in the register of Progressive Era governance: measure the country, rank its outputs, manage the essentials. The sentence stacks metrics - “geographic range,” “acreage,” “quantity” - like an accountant building an argument that can’t be argued with. Numbers become patriotism.

The intent is plainly directive. Houston isn’t admiring corn’s abundance; he’s justifying intervention and discipline. “Properly cared for” is the tell. It smuggles in a whole worldview: farmers need instruction, land needs supervision, and production is a civic duty rather than a private gamble. The phrase “therefore…obvious” is political muscle disguised as common sense. If the conclusion is “obvious,” dissent starts to look irresponsible.

Context sharpens the stakes. In the early 20th century, US agriculture was modernizing fast - extension services, scientific farming, federal data collection, and the emerging belief that food supply is a matter of national security. Corn sat at the center of an expanding industrial food chain: feed for livestock, raw material for processed goods, a backbone for prices and rural livelihoods. Houston’s calm, technocratic tone is doing rhetorical work: it reassures the public that the state can manage the farm economy without sounding coercive.

Subtext: grow more, waste less, follow the program. The crop becomes a proxy for order.