U.S. Agriculture secretary ousted over racist joke

Earl L. Butz, the outspoken U.S. Agriculture secretary forced from office in 1976 for making a racist joke, died Saturday morning. He was 98.

Butz was found dead in his bed at his son Bill’s Washington, D.C., home, said Randy Woodson, dean of Purdue University’s College of Agriculture.

Woodson said Butz had traveled to his son’s home last week for a visit and had been in poor health recently.

Butz, a free-market advocate and longtime dean of agriculture at Purdue, had a relaxed and earthy style that won him acclaim as an after-dinner speaker but caused problems in his public life.

Controversy began dogging him after President Nixon appointed him secretary of Agriculture in 1971. The farm economist figured in public disputes ranging from foreign grain sales to high meat prices.

He was forced to resign his Cabinet post in October 1976 after telling an obscene joke that was derogatory to blacks. The slur was overheard by John Dean, Nixon’s former counsel who was jailed in the Watergate scandal, and Dean’s report on it was published in Rolling Stone magazine.

Two years earlier, Butz apologized to the Vatican after criticizing the Roman Catholic Church’s stand on birth control by using a mock Italian accent while referring to the pope.

“Let’s be honest, I’m controversial. I don’t hesitate to speak my mind,” he said at the time.

When Butz left the Cabinet, President Ford said: “I have accepted the resignation of this decent and good man.”

Butz maintained during his career that farmers should rely on a free market driven by exports, not federal subsidies.

As Agriculture secretary, he angered unions and consumer groups when he worked out long-term agreements on the sale of grain to Eastern European nations and Japan. The sales led to a jump in grain prices at home and pleased the farmers who benefited.

When world food prices soared in the 1970s, Butz drew the acrimony of environmentalists by urging the nation’s farmers to “plant from fence row to fence row.” That policy resulted in vegetation along fence rows being plowed and planted and wetlands tiled and drained.

As Agriculture secretary, Butz also proclaimed that farming “is now a big business” and that the family farm “must adapt or die” by expanding into large operations reliant on industrial pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.

In the years after his resignation, Butz became one of the nation’s most sought-after Republican speakers, in part because of his salty, humorous delivery.

As a private citizen, Butz pleaded guilty in 1981 to federal charges of failing to report $148,000 of taxable income for 1978.

“I’m guilty of the crime charged. There’s no justification for what has happened,” he told a federal judge just before his sentencing.

He was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000. Butz served only 25 days, however, because the judge commuted all but 30 days to probation and Butz got five days off for good behavior.

Butz was born July 3, 1909, and raised on a 160-acre livestock farm in northeastern Indiana’s Noble County.

His long affiliation with Purdue started in 1927 when he began studies on a 4-H scholarship. He earned the school’s first doctorate in agricultural economics 10 years later, then joined the agricultural economics faculty and eventually became head of the department.

Butz married Mary Emma Powell in 1937; she died in 1995. They had two sons, Bill and Thomas.

Butz was assistant secretary of Agriculture from 1954 to 1957, during the Eisenhower administration. He then returned to Purdue and was dean of the School of Agriculture for the next 10 years.

He unsuccessfully campaigned for the Republican nomination for Indiana governor in 1968, his only run for elective office.

After leaving the Cabinet, he was named dean emeritus of Purdue’s School of Agriculture.