University Place

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Tom Zinnen

Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work at the Biotechnology Center at UW-Madison. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other sponsors, Wisconsin Public Television and the Wisconsin Alumni Association, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday, 50 times a year. We don't do this every Wednesday night, however, because this is leap day. We won't have another leap day on Wednesday until 2040.

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Tom Zinnen

Whew, I hope to be here.

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Tom Zinnen

Keeping with such a fitting date, I get to introduce to you two splendid people who are going to talk to you about the John Steuart Curry murals tonight. Dave Nelson is professor of biochemistry here at UW Madison where he has served for 40 years. His interests include the history of science, and he's currently one of a group of senior UW professors teaching a course on historic research breakthroughs here at Wisconsin. His bachelor's is in chemistry and biology from St. Olaf's. His PhD is from the Stanford Medical School and is in biochemistry. Before coming to Madison, Dave spent two years as a fellow at the Harvard Medical School. His research interest is in the biochemistry of biological signaling in microorganisms. Nobody has given more Wednesday Nite at the Labs than Dave Nelson, and nobody does it better.

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Tom Zinnen

Lauren Kroiz is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History here at UW-Madison. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before moving to Madison in 2010 she was a visiting professor at Bowdoin College and a postdoctoral fellow at the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art in Washington, DC. Her first book manuscript,

entitled Creative Composites

Race, Modernism, and the Stieglitz Circle, was awarded the 2010 Phillips Book Prize and will be published by the University of California Press in the fall of 2012. She told me how to pronounce it. I mispronounced it. It's Bowdoin. >> It's okay. I'm not there anymore. I'm here.

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entitled Creative Composites

>> Please join me in welcoming Lauren to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

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entitled Creative Composites

>>

Lauren Kroiz

Thanks, Tom. So I want to thank Tom for inviting me to speak, and also Robin Davies who will take many of the pictures that you will see in my talk today. And I also want to thank Dave Nelson from biochemistry. They've all been extremely welcoming to me even though it's been quite some time since I've been in a lab. So I'm excited to be here today. I also, of course, want to thank everyone who worked so hard to save these murals before I arrived on campus. So, I'm in the middle of my second here at UW, and I'm an art historian. And we tend to write out our talks, so I'm just going to try and talk from notes today and we'll see how it goes. I've been working on the project I'm going to talk about today, which I think is a fascinating history of John Steuart Curry's time at Wisconsin. I've been working on this project for about six months, and for me it's part of a larger story about Midwest regionalism, arts education, and citizenship in the 1930s and '40s in what we think of as the Roosevelt New Deal era. So I feature my email up here quite prominently and I have lots of cards in my pocket because I know a lot of you have been here far longer than me and have a lot of information about the projects I'm going to talk about today that I haven't been able to dig out of the archives. So I really welcome your knowledge here. So today I'm going to focus on the story of how John Steuart Curry came to be at the University of Wisconsin and also what he did here. Then I'll talk briefly about the newly restored murals, which, to my mind, are really unique examples of the way working on campus influenced John Steuart Curry. And then I'll turn it over to professor Dave Nelson who will tell us more. So, to begin, I only have time for a crash course in art history today, so I just wanted to point out that John Steuart Curry is one of a trio of famous regionalist painters. Here you see him. I've been told to try to use this track pad. So here you see him with Thomas Hart Benton, who's the other one, and Grant Wood. And you can see them, again, to your right making music. So in the 1930s these three artists became well known for their regionalist, or it's also known as American scene style painting. Although their work looks quite different, you won't, for example, confuse the murals that you'll see tonight with Grant Wood's most famous painting, American Gothic. We can say that they share realist style, which celebrates subjects from the nation's agricultural heartland, so from the Midwest. And you can see here that in addition to be artistic allies, these three were really good friends. In the mid-1930s they begin to become increasingly famous. Benton is on the cover of Time magazine, and there are large spreads devoted to Curry's artwork also in Life. So, in addition to making art, each of these painters was also interested in teaching artwork. Curry and Benton teach at The Art Students League in New York during the 1920s and early '30s, while Wood co-founds an art colony in Stone City, Iowa, in 1932. So here I show you some pictures of that. Curry comes, as you can see on the right, he comes and visits Wood there and apparently has a quite good time. Unfortunately, Wood taught for free at Stone City, and even with that the school lost money, so it folded in 1933. It's kind of a truism that there's not that much money in teaching art. But by 1934 Wood was able to capitalize on his fame and his mural commissions to land a teaching job at the University of Iowa. And Iowa is the state where Wood is born. So he comes to teach at his state university. And in 1935, Benton is also able to capitalize on his fame, and he gets invited to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri, the state where he was born. So for Wood, it seems to have been sort of an embarrassment that Curry wouldn't join them in the Midwest. He was still living on the east coast in West Port, Connecticut, rather than in the Midwest that the regionalists claim to represent. So Wood began to look around for a place for Curry, for a place that he could work. It's nice to have good friends. But they decided that there's no way that Curry was going to get hired at the University of Kansas, which was the state where Curry was born. People in the art department there apparently really didn't like him, and the citizens of Kansas were slightly offended by the fact that Curry always painted them being afflicted by cyclones. His most famous paintings were of tornadoes.

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Lauren Kroiz

So Wood didn't give up though. And eventually he succeeded in getting Curry to the Midwest. And he gets him hired as an artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin in our College of Agriculture. So here you can just see some images of Curry mugging in front of the Madison landscape. And this is a painting entitled Madison Landscape from 1941, which some of you may have seen. It's still around Madison. I'll not now that in my presentation you might see a bit of overprinting. You might see it in the photograph on the far left here. And that's just a security marker from the Archives of American Art where I've downloaded a lot of these images, and I just say that because you, too, can go to the Archives of American Art online and download a lot of these images if you want Curry, for example, as the background for you computer. So, to give you a sense of why Wisconsin would have been a welcoming place for Curry, and just as a little plug for my art history department, I know we don't get over to Wednesday Nite at the Lab that often, I'm going to give you a brief sense of what's going on here in the late 1930s when Curry's looking for a place to land. So our art history department was founded by Oscar Hagen in 1925, and on the left, of course, you see a portrait of Dr. Oscar Hagen and his cat by John Steuart Curry in 1942. And he was, apparently, a very red-faced man, but this portrait was controversial even when it was painted for being slightly unflattering. But Hagen is an immigrant from Germany, and he was quite eager to understand American art. The first graduate alumni of the art history department here is Porter Butts who some of you probably know both for his important book, this 1936 account of Wisconsin art, as well as the gallery that's named for him here on campus. So Hagen and Curry quickly became friends, and Hagen actually inscribes a copy of his Birth of the American Tradition in Art, which is one of the first accounts of American art, to Curry. And here you can see it says, "To John Steuart Curry, first of the Americans, in friendship and admiration." So he has allies in the art history department, Hagen and Butts, in addition to James Watrous, who would go on to be a really important member of the art history department. Here you see him painting his Paul Bunyan murals in 1936. These are murals that Curry evidently admired when he arrived on campus, and they are too still extant, of course, in the Union. Watrous was also really interested in advancing experimental methods for teaching art history in what he called the art history laboratory. So students there studied old master drawing by mimicking old master methods, including the creation of materials. So I tell you this just to give you a sense of the kind of experimental worth that's going on on this campus as Curry's arriving. But, of course, more important than these art historians to Curry's arrival on campus was the dean of the agriculture school, Chris Christensen, who you see here in both a photograph and Curry's painted portrait. So plans for Curry to move to Wisconsin really began in earnest in the summer of 1936 when Wood approached Glen Frank, who was president of the university, and Dean Christensen to ask if they would hire Curry. Both of them were extremely enthusiastic about Curry joining the university, especially Christensen. It seems that Christensen may have already known Wood through the National Country Life Association which they were both active in. This was an organization that was trying to idolize rural life around America. So Christensen had actually been looking for a way to interest farmers in art. Christensen had been trained at an agriculture school in Denmark where one period source explained that he had experienced the "wide spread and consuming pleasure that Danish tillers of the soil derive from paintings." So he thought that American farmers could also share this consuming pleasure if art would just approach them with subjects that they as farmers could understand. And this is the project that he's trying to advance when he brings Curry to campus. So Curry moves from West Port, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, to fill this new novel position at the university. There's really no precedent in this period for an artist in residence. One newspaper described Curry as undertaking a "do as I please job."

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Lauren Kroiz

So it seemed to be that he could just sort of do whatever he wanted. His contract stipulated only that he would work as an artist in residence "for development of regional as a force for rural culture." And it seems that Oscar Hagen was the one who initially offered the model of the artist in residence, and he was drawing on something that was happening in the period. They were beginning to have academic writers in residence, so he advances this idea of an artist in residence as something that would be better than having Curry actually officially join the faculty. So he's not here as part of the art department or part of the art history department, but rather the artist in residence in the agriculture college. So his position, Curry's position, was officially authorized in September of 1936, and the artist accepts just days later. He seems to be really on board. His salary isn't funded by the university but is, rather, funded by the Wisconsin Trust Fund of the Brittingham Estate. And the university secured a $400,000 grant from the State Emergency Fund to build him a studio. So he gets a studio, he gets $4,000 a year, and he holds this position for a decade, from 1936 until his death in 1946. So, what people called Curry's elastic plans for what he was going to do with his time included murals and also paintings of agriculture topics. And he was charged particularly to focus on soil erosion which was a pet subject of Dean Christensen's. And here you see a painting called Erosion and Contour Cropping from circa, around, 1936-1940. And this in the Chazen Art Museum's collection. So Curry was quick to clarify that he wasn't going to paint propaganda, but he said instead that he would "cull the drama, destruction, and spirit from the subject and represent it pictorially in his own style." So he's really careful to say that what he's doing is not propaganda for any particular kind of agriculture or any particular way of living, but, rather, and attempt to cull the drama from rural life. So as an artist in residence, Curry didn't teach classed but he did plan to attend art appreciation classes for informal discussions. And he was also supposed to give instruction and encouragement to those who wanted to paint. So he was hired, of course, though, by the College of Agriculture, and he had an appointment in rural sociology. So here I show you another interaction with Christensen. Here it's actually Dean Christensen here who's holding the reigns to this horse, a Belgian stallion named Badger --, which the title is given the part of the article that's above. So this is the kind of thing that Curry did around campus as artist in residence for the ag school. His most important charge was "to establish and develop a feeling for art among the agricultural students by discussing with them agricultural as well as art problems." He wants to eliminate the inhibitions which non-urban residents look upon painting. So the idea was that agriculture students were scared of painting, that they were inhibited from enjoying this thing that could bring such pleasure to their lives. So by having this very manly interaction, you can see he's dressed in a suit, he's got his pipe, and he's painting this horse which they all understood, it was thought that with the support of the dean that he would be able to spread this love of art to the agriculture students. This is such a weird idea, like why should farmers know how to paint or be interested in painting? But really for Christensen and for Curry there was a sense in which teaching these farmers about art would make them better citizens. So you can see, he does this kind of thing all over campus. So he's teaching, here you can see he's instructing a group of students doing preliminary drawings of a horse. In the photograph on the left he's out in a field sketching sheep. So he's spreading this idea that even farmers should appreciate art, something that's difficult for American audiences to embrace in the same way that those at the Danish folk school had. He's doing that by being present on campus and working among these students. He also goes to football games. Here you can see the text reads that Curry was appointed an artist in residence, and this photograph shows him being upset by members of the university's football team as he was sketching them during a scrimmage.

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Lauren Kroiz

Apparently, through the spring and fall of 1937 the artist would appear regularly on the sidelines during practice. And this kind of thing was actually part of Curry's regionalism. He told audiences that he would like to reach the extent where sections of the country, he said, would take the same pride in their local painters as they do in their ball teams. So really trying to put art on the same level as sports, especially impressive task at Wisconsin, I will say.

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Lauren Kroiz

Football. Okay, so these paintings that he made of football do exist. This is him standing next to the All-American. This is a photograph from circa 1945. and this is a painting that was actually originally painted for reproduction. So it was originally painted for Abbott Laboratories to be reproduced in this magazine that they put out. And then Curry suggested that they donate the original painting to the athletic department. And it's somewhere in Camp Randall. I'm not sure exactly where. If anybody knows, you can tell me later. So still existing, the All-American. Okay, so in his art practice, Curry was supposed to act as a kind of living museum. This is part of his charge, to be a living museum. And on the left, you see him in his studio here on campus. So he was supposed to enable Wisconsinites to witness an artist in the midst of creation. And in some ways I think this was probably the most important part of his decade here as an artist in residence. He gave a lot of people their first chance to interact with, to be encouraged by, and to also see their lives reflected by an artist. So some art historians have critiqued the work that he did on campus. Here I show you his activities on the right of a drawing of a group of students on Bascom Hill. So some students have critiqued this kind of work as illustration, and they say that it's not as good as the kind of powerful work that Curry did when he was still looking to Kansas work, like probably one of his most famous paintings Baptism in Kansas from 1928. So they say that Curry's most powerful work was actually behind him by the time that he reached Wisconsin. Now, I'm interested, instead, in the way that his project here actually calls for thinking about art in a new context, that there are ways to think about Curry beyond his paintings. So what I'm interested in is the paintings but also the ways that he's trying to think about the importance of art during the Depression. So to understand Curry's role at Wisconsin, my claim is that it necessitates looking outside the history of art, looking instead to rural sociology. And this is the group with whom he worked on a rural arts program that had him accompany sociologists throughout the state in search of amateur artists. And Curry's strongest ally at Wisconsin was actually in rural sociology. It's John Rector Barton, who you see here with Curry. And then here's Curry. And they're at a rural art show. So Barton was the director of Wisconsin's Farm Short Course, and he was also a professor in the Department of Rural Sociology. So Christensen, Dean Christensen, had also hired Barton, and he brought Barton back from Denmark where he had been the director of the International Peoples College. And Barton arrives on campus from Denmark, which has this strong tradition of the rural folk school, he arrives at the same time that Curry does in 1936. So they become close friends and really close allies. Here you can see a flier for their rural art show, which I think these cows are adorable. So you can see this flier for this event which was started in 1940. And to mount this event, Curry and others sociologists traveled throughout the Wisconsin countryside recruiting artists, and they were aided by county extension agents. So the same people who you wee supposed to talk to about your farm problems you could also talk to about your art problems.

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Lauren Kroiz

It's totally fascinating, I think. So Curry shared Christensen and Barton's beliefs about the power of art to create a more vital world for rural people. He spread these beliefs in local radio interviews. You see one in the upper left. I don't know who the guy is with him. So if anybody knows, I would love to know. So he's interviewed during shows like The Homemaker's Hour, and he argues that along with improved farming methods should go the joy of having good pictures to look at, good music to hear, and good books to read. The thought is that country families as well as city families should have the advantages of culture that are found in art galleries, concert halls, and libraries. So this is kind of a radical claim. His claim is that art should be viewed as a practical thing, that everybody should have art. And he encouraged people to hang paintings of their communities in their homes, in their schools, in their libraries rather than prints of famous buildings or prints of famous paintings. So he wanted people to have original artwork that represented their own place. He believed, he said, that "if a community which has raised a well-bred and excellent herd of cattle or a prize-winning horse or developed an unusual food product could have these celebrated and good paintings on the walls of community buildings, we will be a better nation." So there this idea that if you have a good horse, you should have a painting of it on the wall, which is kind of quite a radical claim. And with Curry's collaboration, the Department of Agriculture also introduced arts practice into agricultural instruction. So there a period that if you went to the short course, the farm winter short course, you would also learn how to paint in addition to learning how to fertilize.

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Lauren Kroiz

In addition to spread this and encourage this even farther, they started that rural art exhibition that I was talking about. And this ran as part of farm and home week at Madison. And that's what I like to image that he's inventorying on the right with the sort of conflicted expression, we'll just say, scratching his head. So these exhibitions, these rural art exhibitions, collected the work of amateur rural artists for display in Madison. And these exhibits were extremely popular and incredibly successful. They attracted national attention. This is a page from Life magazine which prominently featured my personal favorite artist and also the artist that Curry called the most versatile, Earl Sugden, who's a farmer who enjoys painting country landscapes with brushes that he makes from the tails of his own horses. So this is, again, sort of trying to figure out how to be a farmer artist. He also creates sand painting landscapes, which you might be able to see up here, and all the different species of birds in Wisconsin. And, of course, he's playing this shepherd's pipe, which he carved himself from a butternut tree. On the left is one of Sugden's paintings and, on the right, a painting by Lord --, just to give you a sense of what the work that these kinds of rural artists was creating looked like. It inspired one enthusiastic viewer, the enthusiastic viewer from Life magazine, to proclaim "when art can hold its own with prize cows, it is in a healthy state." So this equation of aesthetic expression with livestock, I think in some ways smacks of a sort of philistinism. But I think that we can really take these words seriously to frame productive news ways in which we might understand art's relationship with healthy states. Curry dies somewhat unexpectedly in 1946, but Barton continues their project, producing this book, Rural Artists of Wisconsin, in 1948. The artists were chosen by Curry, and it prominently features Sugden's sand paintings. So we can talk in more detail about the murals when we get to them. But here I just want to point out some of the similarities with the work that I've showed you up until now. So you can see this is the farm and biochemistry in the south wall of the conference room, and it's meant to show the values that biochemistry can have on the farm. Here you see that same kind of contoured plowing, contour cropping, that you see in this earlier painting. I would say that in some ways in this mural Curry's depiction of this is much more resolved. It creates a kind of picturesque landscape. He's much more successful at making these new weird methods of contour plowing picturesque, integrating them into the landscape. And that's really what I want to claim is part of the power of these murals, their ability to make these scientific breakthroughs seem natural. So here, in this bad photo that I took myself, you can see Babcock, or someone, showing us how vitamin D is synthesized, and then that's right next to a Native American woman cooking meat over a fire. So showing that the scientific is linked to this much longer tradition. Let's skip that because I'm running out of time. Okay. So finally, in the large panel in the hallway, you can see the way that this is a family who's suffering. The little boy, on the left, the little boy has rickets, the girl has pellagra. So it's certainly about the power. These murals are certainly about the power of agricultural chemistry to help rural people. But I want to claim that it's also about the power of art to cultivate engaged citizens. So it's also about the way that prized cows and prized artwork shouldn't be considered all that different. So I'll just conclude by thanking the conservators and all you guys who helped preserve these murals and who couldn't be here, as well as the archivists and librarians who have helped me. So thank you.

APPLAUSE

Lauren Kroiz

Next up, Dave Nelson. >>

Dave Nelson

Thank you, Lauren. I think I learned more about Curry's paintings in a half hour than I've learned by living next to them for 30 years. Let me just have a second here to switch gears. Switching gears isn't as easy as it used to be.

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Dave Nelson

There we go. As you walked in tonight, if you came in the front door of this building, you walked passed this bronze plaque commemorating the work of Stephen Babcock who was one of the first and most prominent members of the department of what was then called agricultural chemistry, which has since been called biochemistry. And I've walked by that myself a thousand times now, I suppose, in 40 years. I've had students walk by it 40 times a semester to come hear my lectures, and many of them, at the end of 40 lectures, still can't tell you what Stephen Babcock did to get his plaque on the wall there. They think perhaps he invented ice cream. But it was nothing nearly so simple as that. There was a group of scientists here that worked, essentially, under his guidance in the early period right at the turn of the 20th century who did experiments aimed at aiding agriculture. So the college was trying very hard to do things, a real practical import, and he did so in ways that were fundamentally good science. So we have a combination of those things. The college at that time, this is 1915, was pretty sparsely populated, both with people and with buildings. There were fields and sheep grazing where there are now tall buildings. This was, and is, the dairy barn, which is down, as you go along Campus Drive, you drive right by it there. This is the site of the experiments that I'm going to tell you about that were conducted by Hart, Steenbock, McCollum, Elvehjem, but essentially planned by and inspired by Stephen Babcock. The work that I'm describing actually began before this building was built. This was constructed in 1913. The department came into existence long before that. And for a while the small number, two or three members, of the department, agricultural chemistry, were housed in South Hall. And then there was a time when they were housed in Ag Hall. And, finally, they came to this place in 1912 or 1913. The characters that I want to tell you about here include these on the list and one more, which I decided to talk about a few minutes before I came here. They were Armsby, who was the first of the people who was hired to start an agricultural chemistry department here. He stayed rather briefly but got the place started. Babcock was hired to bring it to fruition, and he certainly did so. He came here in 1888. I'll tell you a bit more about his career in a few moments. But Babcock must have been a great chooser of people because he quickly accumulated a group around him that included Hart and McCollum and Steenbock and, eventually, Elvehjem, a very powerful group of people who did very important science. He was aided in this by working with the dean, Harry Russell, who took seriously the college's responsibility to farmers, but also their responsibility to do good, solid, well-documented science. Russell, himself, had been a very well-respected scientist, and when he came here as the dean of the college, one of the first things he told his small faculty was do it right, do good fundamental research, and it will have a fallout that goes into practical things in agriculture. So let's just take, quickly, a look at these three or four people that constituted the nucleus of agricultural chemists then. Babcock was born in New York state on a sheep farm. Everybody was born on a farm then. He went to school at Tufts. He had planned to go to graduate school but his father died young, and so Babcock actually ran the family farm for almost 10 years. Eventually he went to Europe, studied in Gottingen, and at that time, in Gottingen as well as in the United States, the real goal of agricultural chemistry was to use chemistry to figure out what it took to make animals, and to some extent people, healthy. And I want to tell you about the way that the thinking about what it took progressed and, as a result of Stephen Babcock's work, changed dramatically. So Babcock spent some time at the Agricultural Experiment Station at Cornell. He was briefly at the New York Agricultural Experiment Station where he began the work that became his life's work on dairy products. And then he came here in 1888 as, essentially, the Department of Agricultural Chemistry. Babcock did two things that would have each made him world famous. The first, I'm not proposing to talk about tonight except really to tell you that Babcock had, as his first assignment, to figure out a way for farmers and dairies to be able to measure the butterfat content of milk so that the farmers and the dairies could deal honestly with each other when they sold milk. The farmers had, until that time, sold milk primarily by weight. There was a powerful temptation to put a little water in the milk and up the weight just a little bit. And one could get around that subterfuge if he simply determined the butterfat content. It was also possible by determining the fat content of each cow on your farm to figure out which of the cows was really giving the best milk, and, thus, to breed cows to improve the breed and to get better milk production. So he did that. He invented a method that was very simple, a device that was very simple. I could hold it here in my hands. It was a Babcock centrifuge, and a schoolboy could easily, in a few minutes, determine the fat content of milk from each cow in a dairy herd. That made him world famous, and it was something he did without attempting to patent it, a fact that he, at that time, felt was the right thing to do and, subsequently, later he regretted. I'll tell you a bit about that later. At this time, there was a clear understanding of how one assessed the goodness of food for animals. We knew that there were three kinds of stuff in food, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, that animals needed all three kinds, that if they got enough of each kind they would be healthy. That was the party line, the paradigm for examining feats, and the tools that chemists, agricultural chemists, had then were well-suited to this paradigm because they had tools to measure the contents of nitrogen, content of protein, nucleic acid, not nucleic acid, fat, and carbohydrate. And the only problem was the farmers reported anecdotally that this wasn't true. That not all diets containing these three things were equally good. And Babcock had begun to suspect that this might be the case as a young man on the farm, and while he was here, he developed a program to test this paradigm to see if, in fact, this was a suitable way to assess the value, the goodness, of food. He chose to help him, EB Hart, Edwin Hart, also born on a farm and grown up on a farm. Went to school in Michigan, and he spent time in Kossel's laboratory in Germany. Kossel subsequently won the Nobel Prize for his work in biochemistry. Hart, like several other of the people who came here, spent a brief period at the New York Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva where he, too, like Babcock, had looked at things like cheese ripening and the role of phosphorus in cheese nutrition, I'm sorry, in animal nutrition. He came here in 1906. Babcock came in 1888. Hart came in 1906 to become the chairman of the agricultural chemistry department. Babcock remained a guiding spirit, but he was no longer the driving force behind these experiments. And Hart actually retired many years later, 1945. Over that time he made important contributions to science and also tremendously important contributions by training a serious of extremely productive and successful scientists. Elmer McCollum was a young many who came here not as a graduate student but as sort of an instructor, I guess that's the closest title we would have for him today. Born on a Kansas farm, educated there and at Yale, he came here in 1907 and spent 10 very productive years. He left here to go to Johns Hopkins where he spent another 50 years doing extraordinarily important work. One of the things he did was to establish the McCollum-Pratt Institute for the study of micronutrients. He became a student of human nutrition out of the background here of agricultural/animal nutrition. McCollum and Steenbock, the next person we'll look at here, never got along well, and, in fact, McCollum's departure may have been occasioned by the fact that McCollum and Steenbock couldn't stand to be in the same town with each other. When McCollum left, the story is that he turned loose all of Steenbock's experimental animals.

LAUGHTER

Dave Nelson

Which is not a great way to say goodbye to somebody you care about. So here's Harry Steenbock, who's name is certainly familiar to anybody who grows up and lives around here. Steenbock grew up in New Holstein, studied here as an undergraduate, worked with EB Hart as an assistant, and before he did his PhD work, he spent a year in Europe with a very famous biochemist, Carl Neuberg, came back and was one of the first students to get his PhD with Hart and began with Hart work that he continued the rest of his life investigating the nature of vitamin D, the role of vitamin D in nutrition, the effects of vitamin D deprivation. He became world famous for this work, published an enormous string of papers, trained an unbelievable number of students and people in laboratories around the country. One of his last students was Hector DeLuca who has just now retired from biochemistry at the age of 80 or so after having continued Steenbock's work in vitamin D in a dramatic, remarkable way. Babcock's experiment, which is a very simple one, and the point of it was a very simple question, namely is it true that if you give an animal, in this case it was a cow, a heifer, the appropriate amount of carbohydrate, fat, and protein, then nothing else matters. The cow will be healthy. He divided 16 cows into 4 groups. They were all heifers that never calved. He started them on diets that all contained the same amount of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins but provided from either all corn, all wheat, or all oats. And then the fourth group the animals got a third of each kind of grain in their diet. And in this experiment, which Babcock conceived and Hart and Steenbock and McCollum carried out, the idea was to see if over a long period of time it mattered. Much to complain about earlier studies of this sort was that nobody actually followed the animals for a long time to see what the long-term effects of the diet were. So they followed these animals. The animals calved. They went through another year and calved again. They recorded for all these animals their weight gain, their health in general, the health of the calves, the kind of milk that they produced, and so on. And by the end of this experiment they had a very clear result which was reported in what may have been the most famous bulletin that ever came out of the Ag Experiment Station, bulletin 17 in 1911, which was published by Hart, McCollum, Steenbock, and Humphrey. Humphrey was the animal husbandry professor who helped immensely to take care of the animals that were in this study. You'll notice that Babcock's name is not here. He didn't sign all these papers even though he provided the brain work for a lot of them. But the experiment can be summarized with just a couple of pictures. There was, on the left here, a cow and calf grown on oats. Another one, on the right, grown on the mixture of three things. In both cases, the cows prospered for the first year, the heifers did, but the calves were not healthy. In the third case, the cow on the left here grown entirely on wheat, became early in the first year, and by the second year gave birth to a dead calf. On the right is a cow that was feed entirely on corn and the calf of that cow. And although the calf looks to me like he got a bad paint job, at least he was a healthy calf, and the result was that the diet of all corn was clearly superior to these other diets, and it wasn't, therefore, true that just getting enough carbohydrate, fat, and protein was good enough. There was something else, and this forced a complete rethinking of the whole business of how to determine what to feed animals and with it, not at the same moment, but with it came the realization that talking about human nutrition also was going to require more than just the very simplistic old paradigm. The new paradigm was that if you want to know what's good for an animal, you have to give the animal a diet that is suboptimal and then figure out what you can add to that diet that will make it optimal. And those things that you add will constitute a fourth thing that wasn't suspected before. It's not carbohydrates or fats or proteins. It is, it turns out, vitamins. Now, how to find this out. The trick was to raise animals, first it was cows, later it was rats for reasons I'll show you in a moment, feed them a diet that you knew was not wholly adequate and then take some material, butter was one of the things, milk was another, which when added to the inadequate diet made it fully adequate. And then ask can I fractionate this butter, can I fractionate the milk and figure out what it is in here, what's the ingredient that is making the animals healthier. McCollum, very early on, recognized that doing this with heifers was going to be hopeless and expensive and endless job, and so he went to Babcock and said I think we should go to the dean and propose that we use rats as experimental animals. And they did. The two of them went to the dean, who was Russell then. They asked him for a little money to build rat cages in the basement of the building. The dean thew them out, said if the farmers of this state ever heard that I was spending their money encouraging people how to nourish rats...

LAUGHTER

Dave Nelson

It wouldn't work. So, in fact, he wouldn't give them a dime for this. The two of them, Babcock and McCollum, came back here to talk it over. Babcock said you take this money and go to Chicago and get some rats.

LAUGHTER

Dave Nelson

And so McCollum did. He went to Chicago, he bought a couple of pairs of mating rats, the kind that don't gnaw your arm off if you cross them, and brought them back here. They became the source of rats for all experiments that went on here and for experiments all over the world. There was a long time during which Madison had the two largest rat farms in the world. It still has a very large such farm. Rats had the tremendous advantage that they were cheaper to feed, easier to house, took much less room, could be handled in much larger numbers so that the experiments were statically more significant, and, therefore, one could really get a good answer to these questions without spending two lifetimes at it. And with that new paradigm, with that introduction of the new experimental animal, the rest became history. There was a very quick recognition all around the world of the importance of this new paradigm. I should say that this discovery of vitamins here was coincident with the discovery of vitamins in two other places. So it's not fair to say that this was a unique discovery here, but it took the world's biochemists and nutritionists by surprise, and suddenly everybody jumped in here to see if they could figure out what it was that made pretty good food real good. McCollum made a fairly important discovery early on when he found that he could take the butter that was good when supplemented to the bad food and fractionate it into one fat he called fat-soluble, he called it fat-soluble A, and the other water-soluble B. It turned out that what he called fat-soluble A is we now know vitamins A, E, D, and K, all which are indeed soluble in fat, and what he called water-soluble B were the vitamins that we now call vitamin B1, B6, B12, thiamine, folate, niacin, and so on. So right away you had two different sets of things to look at, and investigators all over the world began to look at them in more detail to see if they could resolve the factors in these foods that conferred good health. McCollum essentially is focused on vitamin A, and we have, today on this campus, several people whose research is the direct continuation of his original work in vitamin A. Steenbock tackled vitamin D, and has spent the rest of his life on it. We have, on this campus, a number of people whose work is a direct descendent of his work. Elvehjem and Strong, Strong was still here when I came in 1971, took the water-soluble fraction and fractionated it and eventually discovered that the vitamin niacin, unrecognized until then, was the cure for an extremely serious disease called pellagra which was common in prisons and orphanages and any place else that had diets that were invariant. Esmond Snell looked at vitamin B6. The group of Link and Phillips and Bowman and Suttie studied over the years vitamin C and K and E. And then there was group started by Hart but joined by Elvehjem, Steenbock, and -- who looked at the mineral elements that were present in various good rations which, when added to bad rations, made them better. So it took a while because there were a lot of elements, not just one thing, to be added back, and little by little they were resolved. Their chemical structures were determined. Their roles were understood. And by early 1940s, say 1940 itself, there was a pretty clear understanding of what vitamins were and what they did. Around the campus here, when the construction finally ends, there will again be these brass plaques that describe the work that went on in various places around this end of the campus, and they include this plaque that talks about the experiments under the direction of EB Hart that set the stage for discovery of vitamins and essential trace minerals. Single grain experiments inspired by biochemist Babcock changed forever the way scientists viewed diet and nutrition in humans and animals. The vitamin A and vitamin B story is attributed primarily to the early work that was done by McCollum. The vitamin D work, we could easily talk for a whole hour about the historical importance of that work, but it turned out that there was, at this time in the 1920s and '30s, a very serious disease in this part of the country called rickets. And the disease, as we now understand it, is the result of our not having enough vitamin D, and that is, in turn, a result of our not being in the sun enough during the winter when we're enclosed and don't get sun on our skin. So Steenbock discovered a way that one could irradiate food. Instead of having the sun shine on the people, you could have the sun shine on the food, and that would make the food be a source of good vitamin D, and that transformed a whole human disease. There was no longer any reason that anybody should suffer from this debilitating disease rickets. Here's Steenbock holding this very sophisticated piece of equipment that he used to determine this. This is a UV lamp in his left hand and the switch in his right hand and a rat's cage that is irradiating. When we had to clear out of this building there was a room up in that corner of the building, 1913 building, that had a little side room that had the UV lamp hanging there where Steenbock did this. And there was a sign on the wall that said don't look at the lamp, stupid. It's not good for your eyes.

LAUGHTER

Dave Nelson

We had to, of course, move that, but I still have the lamp. There was a discovery of an important for iron deficiency, anemia, of copper in the diet. There were several human diseases and one serious animal disease attributable to the lack of iron, and it turned out that you couldn't make the diseases better by feeding more and more iron, you had to also feed a whiff of copper, and this cured that disease and made Hart and Elvehjem and Steenbock, again, famous for their work. People on the east and west coast who ate plenty of seafood never had a problem called goiter, but people in the Midwest had lots of that problem, especially before refrigerated transport was possible. Your thyroid gland, located right here, is in charge with making thyroid hormone, and it can't do that unless it has iodine. There's plenty of iodine in seawater, and so people who eat fresh fish from the sea never have problems with this, but those of us who lived in the Midwest didn't get enough iodine, our thyroid glands would enlarge trying to make thyroid hormone, and you ended up with somebody who looked like this. And it was the simple discovery that a whiff of iodine, just the slightest bit of iodine, completely transformed that. And so now when you buy salt, you always buy iodized salt. This was a development that Hart actually introduced. Elvehjem and his colleague Frank Strong tackled a problem that had been a very serious problem throughout the world. As I said, in the 1900s, early, it was still a problem here as well. Pellagra was rampant in jails and orphanages. Half the people who lived in places like this sometimes had this disease, and it was a fatal disease if the diet wasn't improved eventually. They studied a disease in dogs which was the analog of this disease in humans. The dog disease was called black tongue. The dogs were housed up under the roof right up here in the third story of this building. Terrible place. I can't imagine having 50 dogs up there all barking at the same time with no air conditioning and no water. It must have been wonderful. But they used these dogs as the bioassay. They could feed these dogs fractions of good food to see what fraction was it that made the dogs healthy again. And they discovered by this way that it was niacin, the vitamin niacin, something that can be synthesized very cheaply by a chemist and something which, therefore, was available to anyone who needed it and which, therefore, cured this terrible disease pellagra. So here was Curry. He arrived about the end of this heroic period of vitamin research, and he celebrated that in this painting that you see in front of you. And the celebration was of the process but also, I think, of the people. Let's see if I can point these out to you. There are, in this drawing, scientists. There's one right there. A second. A third and a fourth. All dressed in suits and ties, so presumably they're not capable of actually working but they were scientists.

LAUGHTER

Dave Nelson

Then there is this woman who is right square in the middle of the art, right square in the middle of the design, and it's hard for me to believe that that's an accident. All around her are the signs of poor and good health. Over here, as Lauren pointed out, there's a child that has the characteristic bowed legs of rickets. Over here you don't see any bowed legs. The animals over here are unhealthy; the ones to the right are healthy. So Curry encapsulated in one mural the social benefits of research. Although the thing is called biochemical research, I think it would have been better to name it agricultural chemistry research because that's what it was. This is in the hallway. As we go out, you'll be able to see this right away. But then in a room next door to it, there's this painting which Lauren also showed you. So here's a fifth scientists. I thought it would be interesting for us to see if we could guess who these scientists were. So here they are. Here's the guy with the goatee and the wire-rimmed glasses, and I think there is no question at all that that's Stephen Babcock. There is actually facial recognition software now that a computer can use to find.

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Dave Nelson

I think it might be fun to attempt this, but I'm confident that that was intended to be Babcock. Babcock lived until 1931 so, of course, he didn't meet Curry, but there were plenty of images, including the one right out here in the hallway, that he could have worked from, the one in the upper right-hand corner. McCollum may be this one. The face looks about right. There's a good head of hair. It's parted on the right side. There's a good, strong jaw and a high cheek bone. And if I had to guess, I'd guess maybe that's McCollum. Hart is not hard to recognize. I'm sure this is Hart. Looks like every picture I've seen of him. There's an interesting fact about this, the Curry mural, that I've always wondered about, and that is that it always looked to me as if somebody tried to paint over a bald spot on his head.

LAUGHTER

Dave Nelson

It may have been Hart himself. He lived until 1953.

LAUGHTER

Dave Nelson

Then there's no doubt whatever about who the man with the UV lamp is. That's Steenbock. And there he is on the left and on the right with his lamp in the picture with the milk bottles that contain the milk that he has irradiated. There are in the picture then two other people who aren't identified. One is this woman that I pointed out to be right square in the middle, and the other is this scientist over here. And I think it's possible that the scientist is George Humphrey who is not sited any place else in the picture but he was an essential part of this early experiment. Humphrey was the man from animal husbandry that did this work. I'm curious to know if Humphrey might have had red hair. It's a little hard to find out looking at old black and white pictures whether he had red hair or not. In this picture it looks as if he's just recently come through a fist fight with a right-handed slugger. The left eye doesn't look great. And then the other, this is the face of the woman I said was sort of a mystery woman. And I wonder if this might be the woman Margaret Davis who is sort of unsung but a hero of this time. She was the right-hand man for McCollum, and he always said he couldn't have done what he did without her. She went on to a career in nutrition, although she didn't get an advanced degree. So she actually was quite widely regarded for that work. And when she was 80 she looked like this over here which is a very handsome woman and could easily have been the same as this one. In any case, we probably won't know unless we can discover something that the artist wrote that hasn't been found yet. Do you know something about this? >> No, no. >> Okay, all right. The last thing I want to just mention to you is that 15 years ago or so Mrs. Curry, who was then 99 years old, let the department know that she had the original charcoals that were used to draw this mural out here and that she was willing to sell them for a price. And so we had a dealer bring them to us and we looked at them and they really are very beautiful charcoals, much more beautiful than this looks like here, but they were too expensive. So we sent them back. Then I wrote a letter to Mrs. Curry and I said I'm an impoverished professor whose office is right next to that mural and I've loved them all my career, is there any chance that you could talk to me as a private citizen about selling these things? Well, she did and I bought them and we have them. And some day soon we hope to hang these full sized charcoals somewhere where you can look at them at the same time you see the Curry murals. I hope that you'll enjoy looking at them now. Is that what's next on the schedule is to walk over here? All right, then if there are questions, why don't you ask them here, and is there a microphone some place?

APPLAUSE