Butz took on these tasks with enthusiasm. But his political chores gave him the opportunity to take on a grander task: making government not the protector of farmers and consumers, but the expeditor for agribusiness, helping it become the dominant force shaping the production and distribution of the world’s food. Butz negotiated a deal to sell U.S. grains to the Soviets, leading to record rates of inflation of food prices in the United States but assuring profits for food companies. By 1975, six major corporations controlled 90 percent of the world’s $11 billion a year grain-export business. Subsequently, Butz used federal policy to favor large farms at the expense of smaller ones (his advice: “Get big or get out”) and to support subsidized production of corn, soy, and wheat, the staples of the industrial food system.
Over time, as Butz’s policies increased production, prices fell. Cheap corn, which the food writer Michael Pollan has called “the dubious legacy of Earl Butz,” became the building block of fast food, along with high-fructose corn syrup, and super-sized sodas. By allowing market forces to drive farm policy, Butz planted the seeds of the food system that is causing the current crop of diet-related chronic diseases. As it turned out, what was good for Ralston Purina and other big food companies was not so good for global health.
Public relations firms and law firms also grew enormously in this period in both number and size, largely as a result of corporate clients. The art of public relations first emerged in the 1920s. Using new insights from psychology, one of PR’s founders, Edward Bernay, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, helped corporate clients mold mass opinion. As Bernay recounts in his autobiography, George Washington Hill, the president of American Tobacco Company, asked Bernay in 1929, “How can we get women to smoke on the street? They’re smoking indoors but damn it, if they spend half the time outdoors, we’ll damn near double our female market. Do something. Act!” Bernay obliged by setting out to identify and then modify the beliefs that prevented women from smoking in public. Acting behind the scenes, he persuaded a feminist leader to invite women to march in the 1929 Easter Parade under the slogan “Women! Light another torch from freedom! Fight another sex taboo.” Young women marched down Fifth Avenue puffing Lucky Strikes, attracting wide newspaper coverage. Bernays had offered corporations a tool to manufacture, not new products, but the demand for them.