Letters From Uncle Henry

Back in print for the first time in over a century, the real heart and soul of the eldest Henry Wallace is revealed in his open letters to America's farm families. These homespun, secular epistles show that Wallace never lost sight of his roots even as he hobnobbed with U.S. Presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, anchored the prestigious Country Life Commission, and edited the most famous agricultural magazine of its day, Wallaces' Farmer. Who better to yoke the sacred, agrarian arts of stewardship, husbandry, and parenting than writer-philosopher-farmer-conservationist-minister-educator-public benefactor extraordinaire Uncle Henry Wallace, the man who planted the seeds of honorable public service in his own world-famous son and grandson, Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace and Vice President and Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace, respectively. Culled from more than a half dozen volumes of Wallace's writing for farm families, Uncle Henry Wallace: Letters to Farm Families captures the spirit of a man journalist Ray Stannard Baker called "a sort of oracle for advice on everything from the best ways of feeding calves to bringing up boys." Compiled and introduced by fourth-generation Iowa farmer's son Zachary Michael Jack, himself the great-grandson of famed agricultural writer Walter Thomas Jack, these timeless, down-to-earth missives that are meant to be shared, then as now, between farm-loving grandparents and grandchildren, parents and children, and teachers and students of all ages.

George Herbert Mead, one of America’s most important and influential philosophers, a founder of pragmatism, social psychology, and symbolic interactionism, was also a keen observer of American culture and early modernism. In the period from the 1870s to 1895, Henry Northrup Castle maintained a correspondence with family members and with Mead—his best friend at Oberlin College and brother-in-law—that reveals many of the intellectual, economic, and cultural forces that shaped American thought in that complex era. Close friends of John Dewey, Jane Addams, and other leading Chicago Progressives, the author of these often intimate letters comments frankly on pivotal events affecting higher education, developments at Oberlin College, Hawaii (where the Castles lived), progressivism, and the general angst that many young intellectuals were experiencing in early modern America. The letters, drawn from the Mead-Castle collection at the University of Chicago, were collected and edited by Mead after the tragic death of Henry Castle in a shipping accident in the North Sea. Working with his wife Helen Castle (one of Henry’s sisters), he privately published fifty copies of the letters to record an important relationship and as an intellectual history of two progressive thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century. American historians, such as Robert Crunden and Gary Cook, have noted the importance of the letters to historians of the late nineteenth century. The letters are made available here using the basic Mead text of 1902. Additional insights into the connection between Mead, John Dewey, Henry and Harriet Castle, and Hawaii’s progressive kindergarten system are provided by the foundation’s executive director Alfred L. Castle. Marvin Krislov, president of Oberlin College, has added additional comments on the importance of the letters to understanding the intellectual relationship that flourished at Oberlin College. Published with the support of the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation.

Excerpt from Uncle Henry's Own Story, Vol. 1 It was suggested to him that the ordinary biography, or even autobiography, fails to tell the things that people most like to learn about. That his great-grandchildren, for example, would be intensely interested in the sort of life he lived as a boy and a young man. They would like to know about the things in which he had an active part, and in which he was vitally interested. They would like to know of the manners and customs of the people with whom he grew up and lived. Why not, as he had leisure, write a series of intimate letters to the young folks, who probably would be coming on years afterwards - the sort of letters that would reveal his own personality as no biographer could do it? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.