After spending over ten years writing a book ["How's the book coming, Joel" ringing in my ears], I thanked everyone. The Acknowledgements are the best part of the book.
Here are the first two paragraphs. The rest await your pleasure.
For a certain kind of help that cannot be expressed, I thank my wife Diana and our daughter Joanna Marie.
For their friendship and assistance through all the drafts and for listening to me talk for hours on end about the Sugar Act of 1948 (as amended), rice fields in Arkansas, commodity futures trading, and whatever agriculture policy madness afflicted me without notice at 8:45 on a Saturday night when we were simply going out for a pizza, I thank David F. Phillips and Andrew Jay Schwartzman.
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Acknowledgements
For a certain kind of help that cannot be expressed, I thank my wife Diana and our daughter Joanna Marie.
For their friendship and assistance through all the drafts and for listening to me talk for hours on end about the Sugar Act of 1948 (as amended), rice fields in Arkansas, commodity futures trading, and whatever agriculture policy madness afflicted me without notice at 8:45 on a Saturday night when we were simply going out for a pizza, I thank David F. Phillips and Andrew Jay Schwartzman.
For patiently contributing to my agriculture education year in and year out, I thank William Gahr and all Gahr’s employees at the Food Group of the General Accounting Office who without warning were called upon to explain parity or modularization of food containers or soil erosion or whatever subject on which I needed educating, and I thank Philip Moery, who taught me about the bottom line in agriculture—both financially and politically.
For creating this book, I thank Robin Mayers, who read and argued with me about every word; the late Marie Rodell, my agent, who before she died was pleased to see me settled down and working on this project, who couldn’t quite believe that she’d ever have a client call her from Stuttgart, Arkansas (“Rice and duck calling capital of the world”), and who counseled me to keep my opinions of pesticides to myself when farmers were kind enough to let me see their farms, and whose concern about pesticides led her to support and make possible a wider audience for Rachel Carson; my agent Frances Collin, of the Marie Rodell-Frances Collin Literary Agency, for her belief in this book; Daniel Moses, of Sierra Club Books, whose quiet perseverance coaxed me to let go of this book (even though it will never really be ready because of a new development which might mean…. ); and my copy editor Mary Lou Van Deventer who made my prose less difficult to read and whose persistent questioning about why I did not write more about ecology and less about how nifty the commodities market is made me reexamine my motiviation for writing this book.
The remainder of my thanks I cannot adequately categorize; so I thank: The District of Columbia public library system, especially the Martin Luther King Memorial Library and the West End, Southeast, and Northeast branches; the Library of Congress, the congressional research service, the reference librarians at the Library of Congress, especially those who staff the telephones and the main floor reading room, all those anonymous gophers who brought down books of statistics when I’m sure they wished for more exciting searches; the USDA libraries, both the reading room downtown and the National Agriculture Library in Beltsville, Maryland; the scores of experts on agriculture at USDA who through the years put aside their other duties to tell me how many bushels of corn were in carryover, how many migrants did agricultural work in six given counties in California in the month of March, and other statistical questions, including questions on elementary mathematics; all the mathematics teachers I ever had, especially those who taught me the little I had the good sense to retain; the United States Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and its offspring Health and Human Services; the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Treasury, State, Transportation, and Energy and the Office of the Special Trade Representative, the Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; the White House press office under the administrations of Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan; the Congress of the United States and especially the House and Senate Agriculture committees; the House and Senate periodical press galleries; Howard Bray of the Fund for Investigative Journalism for his continual encouragement and the Fund for its support; The New Republic, The New York Times, Skeptic, et al. for publishing and republishing my articles on agricultural policy; Patric Mullen for buying me Bloody Marys, introducing me to members of Congress, and for his friendship; the Media Access Project; Linda Lazarus; The Washington Post library and Dan Morgan, Jody Allen, and Michael Barone; the National Journal library and especially Robert J. Samuelson; Michael P. Andrews; my mother Miriam P. Schmerler; my father Isadore; my grandmother Celia Pell; my sister Sarah Schmerler; Alvin and Theresa Demick and Arts Magazine; Craig Berrington; Jack Brock; the Migrant Legal Action Program; Cesar Chavez, Earl Butz, Hubert H. Humphrey, Dick Clark, William Proxmire, Thomas Foley, David Bowen, and others who granted me interviews; Paul Boertlein; Werner Brandt; former Under Secretary of Labor Robert J. Brown for his encouragement and friendship; David Brody; Ben Simpson of Capitol Hill Gulf; Central Delivery Service; Morris M. Cohen; National Public Radio; Miriam Daniel-Wolff; Susan Dankoff Menick; Michael and Robin Demick; Norman and Phyllis Demick; Julie Dillingham and her family; Theodore F. Brophy; Helen Ericson and the Journal of Commerce; Marcia, Barnet, Jonah, and Lee Eskin; my lawyer Susan Chaires; Colin Frank; Richard Gilmore; Jack Halpert; the Japan Uni Agency and especially Tatsuko Nagasawa and Yoshio Taketomi; Robert Leahy; Norma Lewin; Lee Avery Rosenhouse; Gary
Lucken; Barbara Machtiger; Lynn McReynolds; Jonathan Miller of Communications Daily; Linda B.R. Mills; Lisa, Sophy, and Phillipa Moery; David Mont; Donald, Michele, Katherine, and Peter Moore; Eunice, Janice, and Kevin Alexander; Curtis T. White and Andrea Engler; Howard Simister and Judith Soderholm; the gang on E Street; the Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Cooperative; David Moyer of Paul Stafford Associates; Agnes Mravcak; Lynne Murphy; David Schneiderman; Wendy Moonan; the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials; the Office of Technology Assessment and its Food Group; the National Press Club; Andrew L. Rothman; Dorothy Row; Cathy Kouts of Sierra Club Books; Edward Sacks; Amiel Segal, among other things for saving my life; Donald Hutter; Paul Bresnick; Eileen Shanahan; Ida Solkoff; Benjamin and Lil Solkoff; Leon and Gerda Zolko; Rona, Joe, and Allison Spiegel; Stationers Inc. of Richmond, Virginia, for making the reporters notebooks I carry everywhere; Diana McLellan, “The Ear”; David Sanford; Deborah Matz; Rita Jenrette; the Legal Services Corporation; Roger Rosenblatt; Martin Peretz; Eliot Marshall; Robert J. Myers; Michael Kinsley; Philip Terzian; the late John Osborne; Leslie B. Seagrave; Gwen Somers; Joan Tapper; Raphael Sagalyn; Paul S. Weisberg, for worrying about this book as if it were his; Jack Raher; Jack Limpert of The Washingtonian; Walter Shapiro; Donald Dunnington; Zookie Bass Solkoff; Betty, Jeff, and Elizabeth Laxague; the farmers in California, Arkansas, Louisiana, Arizona, Virginia, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Vermont, Massachusetts, and other states who took me around their operations and answered lots of questions; the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the New York Coffee & Sugar Exchange, and other futures and cash markets for giving me permission to see the action on the floor (even when I sometimes got in the way); the People’s Republic of China; the staff of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress; the late Frank Norris; Calvin Beale, USDA’s population guru; the U.S. Sugar Corporation; The Palm Beach Post; the government of Jamaica; the United Farm Workers Union; the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Chauffeurs Warehousemen & Helpers; former Secretaries of Agriculture Clifford Hardin and Bob Bergland; the Continental Grain Company; Cook Industries; the Bunge Corporation; William Robbins; Worldwatch Institute; Commodity News Service; Michael Jacobson and the Center for Science in the Public Interest; the United Nations; Business Week; the staff at CARE; The Wall Street Journal; the brokers at Conti Commodity Services, at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, et al.; the Des Moines Register, especially its Washington bureau chief James Risser; former Rep. Fred Richmond; Marc Grossman; the library of The Los Angeles Times; The Yuma [Arizona] Daily Sun; the National Farmers Union; Riceland Foods; the National Association of Wheat Growers; the American Farm Bureau Federation; the National Grange; the National Farmers Organization; Rural America Inc.; Rodale Press; Secretary of Agriculture John Block; Senator Bob Dole; the American Agriculture Movement; the American Bankers Association; former Sen. Herman Talmadge; former Rep. W.R. Poage; Sen. Edward Kennedy; Congressional Quarterly, especially Elizabeth Wehr, its first-rate agriculture reporter, and Hank Donnelly; Catherine Nicholson; Allison Masson; Yukiko Mori; Peter Hannaford; Michael Chinworth; Jun Fushimi, and the many others who through choice or misadventure remain anoymous.