In 1944, Mrs J. W. Hayward wrote a poem about soybeans. We do not know much about her, but she was probably not a writer. Nonetheless, her verse grasped key aspects of the history and use of soy in mid-twentieth-century America. It began by posing a simple question to a single soybean, which in turn offered a perhaps surprising response.
Little soybean who are you
From far off China where you grew?
I am wheels to steer your cars,
I make cups that hold cigars,
I make doggies nice and fat
And glue the feathers on your hat.
I am very good to eat,
I am cheese and milk and meat.
I am soap to wash your dishes,
I am oil to fry your fishes,
I am paint to trim your houses,
I am buttons on your blouses,
You can eat me from the pod.
I put pep back in the sod.
If by chance you're diabetic
The things I do are just prophetic.
I'm most everything you've seen
And still I'm just a little bean.Footnote 1
The verse was published in the Chemurgic Digest, a specialized periodical for experts on questions of how to obtain more than food from agricultural products. Such interests were promoted after the Great Depression by the chemurgy movement.Footnote 2 Guided by the aspiration to make the American economy autarchic from imports, chemurgy's advocates campaigned for more chemical research on agricultural products such as soy and their possible uses in industry. Mrs Hayward and her husband, director of the nutritional research division at the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, one of the largest soybean processors in the US at the time, were both engaged with these ideas. Against this background, the publication of an ode to the soybean begins to make sense.
Mrs Hayward's verse and the circumstances of its genesis underline three important aspects of the history of soy in the first half of the twentieth century. First, the question at the beginning of the poem shows an uncertainty about soy that stemmed from its Chinese origins. Soy had been known in Asia as a nourishing food for several centuries, but not until the beginning of the twentieth century did it gain significant attention in the industrialized regions of Europe and North America. Beginning in 1908, soy was imported from Northeast China, where it rapidly became the region's cash crop. But it also led ‘Manchuria’,Footnote 3 as the region was commonly referred to, into semi-colonial dependency. I shall explore the crucial nexus between Western demand for soybeans, the region's agricultural development and its political impact in the first part of this article.
Second, Mrs Hayward's poem points towards the crop's versatility in terms of the wide range of products that it could be turned into. This was another important aspect of soy's history in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of the products mentioned in the poem were made from soy's two main components, oil and protein. At only 16%, the amount of oil in soy was small compared to other oil-bearing crops; nevertheless, the attention the soybean garnered on the world market at the beginning of the twentieth century arose from the promise of its oil.Footnote 4 Vegetable oils for industrial, nutritional, and beauty products were in high demand, and soybean oil was both cheap and versatile, allowing a wide range of uses. Nevertheless, it was mainly used in the production of soap and margarine. Besides the oil, contemporary varieties of soy contained approximately 38% protein. In fact, however, today's strong economic interest in soy as an animal fodder because of this protein is the result of previous intensive demand for soy oil. In the second part of this article, I shall analyse the use of soybean oil for the production of soap and margarine in Europe, focusing especially on Germany. That country is part of this story because it became a major consumer and processor of soy. It was Europe's largest importer of raw soybeans in the interwar period.
Third, Mrs Hayward's cheerful words and the global history of soybeans must be understood in the context of the Second World War, when the global production of soybeans shifted with breathtaking speed from China to the US. In 1944, when the poem was published, American civilian and military production had already adapted to wartime needs, which entailed the rationing of many everyday products and foodstuffs. As a result of governmental measures, American-grown soybeans achieved great success and became the nation's agricultural ‘star performer during the war’.Footnote 5 From almost nowhere, soy's production value rose to number eight in US agriculture by 1944.Footnote 6 By the war's end, in fact, farmers in America's Midwest cultivated more soy than their counterparts anywhere else in the world did. In the third part of this article, I shall analyse how soybeans became Americanized. In doing so, I shall also come back to the idea of chemurgy. The carmaker and soy-enthusiast Henry Ford was one of the movement's leading actors, and in 1941 he even produced a soy car.
The speed and vigour with which the ‘little bean’ spread outside Asia in the first half of the twentieth century are astonishing. This article therefore seeks to unfold the complex and shifting organization of soy's production and consumption from Asia to Europe and North America. Analysing the role of soy in Northeast China, Germany, and the US, I focus on a set of national and transnational actors with differing interests in the global and national spread of soybeans. These actors included trading companies; scientists specialized in chemistry, agriculture, and botany; soap and margarine manufactures; and above all policymakers. I argue that the combination of these actors in certain spatiotemporal contexts enabled a fundamental transformation in soy from an Asian to an American cash crop. In particular, I stress the important role that the US federal government played in this shift.
Thus far, soybeans have not found a place in global historiography. It has mainly been the bean's value for human nutrition in Asian-style diets that has gained scholarly attention. For about forty years, Willam Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi have been collecting material on the history of soy and especially soy foods. Their initial interest lay in tofu, miso, and tempeh, both inside and outside Asia, but their focus has widened ever since. Their online collection of soy-related material, including bibliographies, source excerpts, and pictures, forms an excellent starting point for further historical research.Footnote 7
In an illuminating though short article, David Wolff has made an initial attempt to place soybeans grown in Northeast China into a global context.Footnote 8 The region was deeply bound up with the imperial ambitions of Russia and Japan, and it was inhabited by a complex and shifting multicultural population. The semi-colonial structure and consequent social and cultural entanglements have been analysed, but their impact on industrial and agricultural developments remains largely uncertain.Footnote 9 Undoubtedly, most of the soybeans cultivated in Northeast China were shipped to Japan or the southern provinces of China.Footnote 10 However, Japanese companies also controlled most of the trade to Europe and North America, and the extent and importance of this trade for global economic entanglements still requires further research.
While soy itself has received relatively little historiographical attention, the global trade in fats and oils, which grew dramatically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has attracted more significant scholarly interest. The rising importance of fats and oils in European economies was triggered by the industrial and agrarian revolutions. New machinery ran at ever higher speeds and required lubricants with increasingly precise tolerances. Furthermore, Napoleon III's request for an economical and healthy fat spread led to the invention of margarine. For these and other purposes, such as the manufacture of soap, countries in northern and central Europe relied largely on imports of oil-bearing plants and fruits: palm kernels from western Africa, copra (dried coconut meat) from India, and peanuts (groundnuts) from Senegal. Scholarship on the nineteenth-century fats and oils trade of various European states has examined commercial monopolies, colonial entanglements, and protectionist measures.Footnote 11 For the twentieth century, Ayodeji Olukoju highlights the history of Nigerian palm oil on the global market in the aftermath of the Great Depression, thereby pointing towards the increasing significance of oils and fats in the global economy even in times of general decline.Footnote 12 Analysing the consumption of margarine and soap, the business historian Geoffrey Jones makes the same point, thereby linking the history of vegetable oils to that of modern businesses and consumer societies.Footnote 13 However, we do not yet know the extent to which the availability of these vegetable oils affected marketing strategies and consumer behaviour.Footnote 14 In the case of margarine, a certain homogenization of taste made various types of vegetable oil all but interchangeable, so buyers made their choices on the basis of price rather than taste.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, a more detailed picture of the role of oils and fats in ideas of beauty and diet habits, and of companies engaged in both businesses, would be most desirable.
Since the end of the Second World War, more soy has been grown in the US than in any other country in the world.Footnote 16 It has transformed American agriculture in many ways, especially in terms of regional specializations, the domestic production of vegetable oils, livestock feeding practices, and changes in the environment. In the process, the economic value of the US soy crop has increased tremendously, reaching the third-highest rank after maize and cotton in the 1960s and continuously gaining ground against cotton thereafter.Footnote 17 Even in recent years, soy's ranking in terms of the value of crop production continues to astonish. In 2011, soybeans were second only to maize in American agriculture and more than three times the value of wheat, which ranked third.Footnote 18
In view of soy's spread and economic value in the twentieth-century US, it is unfortunate that historical studies usually overlook the role of soybeans in American agriculture.Footnote 19 In their study on the role of biological innovation in American agricultural development, Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode acknowledge the overwhelming historiographical interest in some farm products such as cotton and wheat or in certain mechanical developments such as the advent of the tractor. These authors stress the lack of historical research on related topics – including livestock raising and biotechnological innovations – despite the obvious cultural, political, and economic significance of these topics. To explain this imbalance, Olmstead and Rhode point to the influence of scholarly fashions that are often hard to overcome.Footnote 20 Although this interpretation might appear dissatisfying at first, it points to the close relationship between historical research, politico-economic interests, and public attention more generally. Owing to strong interest groups, US agricultural policymakers long focused on cotton, maize, and wheat.Footnote 21 For most of the twentieth century, the policy relied on supply and production controls for those crops, whereas other farm products received limited governmental attention. Nowadays, a growing global interest in animal husbandry is finally leading to more media attention for soy, albeit almost exclusively as a form of animal fodder.Footnote 22
The ‘Manchurian’ cash crop
The soybean was a staple crop in Asia for centuries before serious European and American interest in the crop developed, and no particular region specialized in soy cultivation more than others. One of the areas of cultivation was Northeast China, that is, in the three provinces of Heilongjiang, Fengtian/Liaoning, and Jilin, albeit primarily along that region's fertile valley of the Liao. Not until the beginning of the twentieth century did the coincidence of several regional changes and global economic and political developments make Northeast China the main cultivation area for soybeans worldwide.Footnote 23 Before this development, the crop was used mainly to make fermented or otherwise processed foods, but there were other uses as well. Soy is a legume with such excellent nitrogen-fixing characteristics that Chinese farmers usually did not need to leave land fallow but simply included soybeans in their crop rotation. After the crop's harvest, it was common to extract its oil, which was used for cooking, lubrication, and lighting, among other possibilities. The residue of the oil extraction process, so-called bean cake, still possessed a nitrogen-fixing capability and was therefore also traded as a fertilizer for crops with greater nitrogen needs, such as cotton, rice, and sugar. By about 1750, bean cake from the Liao valley was shipped as a fertilizer to the Lower Yangzi region, a major producer of soil-depleting cotton.Footnote 24 From the mid nineteenth century, whole beans or bean cake were also shipped even further south in China to fertilize the soil on sugar plantations.Footnote 25 Like all other crops or raw materials intended for trade, the whole beans or the slightly processed products (soy oil and bean cake) came down the Liao towards the port of Yingkou.Footnote 26 This port opened to international trade as a consequence of the Second Opium War and was then relocated and renamed Newchwang (Niuzhang) by the British.
At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Northeast China was caught between the Qing dynasty's attempt to transform the region into a more Chinese territory and the growing encroachments of Russian and Japanese imperialism.Footnote 27 In short, tensions between Russia – backed by Europe – and Japan led to so-called railway imperialism, which rendered this part of China semi-colonized.Footnote 28 Regions under such outside influence usually came to depend on a single raw material for export, a cash crop, which in this case was soy. The Western demand for soybeans and the Qing policy of suddenly settling the region stimulated its agricultural development, but also led to further semi-colonial dependency, in particular for transport, trade, and export. Nevertheless, the shift marked the beginning of a global history of soybeans and soy-related products.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Qing dynasty had weakened because of internal wars and foreign invasions. The growing Japanese desire to expand territorially, with the particular goal of gaining a foothold on the Asian continent, generated great tensions that culminated in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Japan surprised most observers by winning a decisive victory over much larger Chinese forces. Meanwhile, Russia had been planning and building its Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok since 1891, and it was considering an alternate route through the Chinese provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin that would shorten the distance by 550 kilometres and, even more importantly, strengthen its strategic and economic position in north-east Asia. In the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, Russia took advantage of China's weakness and offered a Sino-Russian alliance against Japan in exchange for a railway concession in Northeast China.Footnote 29 The alliance was sealed in June 1896 and the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) built between 1897 and 1903.
The Sino-Japanese War had been fought in Northeast China, where it soon spurred the region's agricultural development because of the sudden presence of many hungry soldiers.Footnote 30 The area's economic growth was also stimulated by Japanese farmers’ need for nitrogen-rich fertilizer for staple crops such as rice. These farmers usually applied fish manure as fertilizer, but herrings along the coast had become scarce, forcing farmers to limit their use of this fertilizer.Footnote 31 The manufacture of chemical nitrates had not yet been invented, but bean cake from Northeast China fitted the bill, and Japan began to import this soy by-product in large quantities.
In 1898, when Niuzhang was the only north-eastern port open to foreign commerce, the three provinces’ trade volume had a value of about 40 million Haiguan taels.Footnote 32 Exported goods amounted to some 19 million taels, of which soybeans, bean oil, and bean cake made up nearly 15 million taels. Most of these products went to either southern China or Japan. In other words, 78% of exports from Northeast China were already soybeans and soy products. In the following year, the region's total trade volume soared to approximately 62.6 million taels and, for the first time, Japan's purchases of bean cake alone exceeded the total export of soy products to southern China, which had hitherto been the greatest consumer of north-eastern soy. Impressive as these numbers are, however, trade statistics from this time should be used with caution. One of the most diligently produced sources was Alexander Hosie's 1904 book, Manchuria. A British consul in Niuzhang from 1894 to 1897 and again in 1899 and 1900, Hosie knew the circumstances and conditions in Northeast China fairly well, but he admitted to preparing his own figures by estimating and projecting, owing to the lack of accurate statistics.Footnote 33
In 1905, Japan astounded the world with its victory over Russia, which provided Japan with a strong foothold in Northeast China, particularly in its southern part. Russia lost control of the South Manchurian Railway (SMR), which had been built running south from the CER towards the Liaodong Peninsula. Furthermore, Japan leased the peninsula from China and renamed it Guandong (Kwantung). Ryojun, the former Port Arthur, served as the Japanese military's administrative seat, but Dairen turned into the region's economic centre.Footnote 34 When Japan took control of the SMR, not only did international trade in Northeast China increase but patterns of selling, transporting, manufacturing, and distributing commodities – above all soy – shifted too. In the years following, the SMR became the strongest actor for transporting and distributing soy, and the Japanese controlled almost the entire international soy trade. Japan's interest in China became more and more complex. It affected many economic and political questions for which bean cake and the SMR formed a strong anchor.Footnote 35 The Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War clearly demonstrated Japan's preference for pursuing its own imperialist ambitions in Northeast China against the British and American open-door policy.Footnote 36 Without formal sovereignty over the region, but firmly in control of it, Japan used private companies and banks such as the SMR, the Tokyo Takushoku Company, the Bank of Chosen, and the Yokohama Specie Bank to carry out its imperialist policy.Footnote 37
Soybeans entered global trading patterns in late 1908 because of a persistent demand for vegetable oils suitable for the steadily rising production of margarine, shortening, and soap in Europe and the US. A long-globalized commodities market with fast communication pathways and streamlined supply chains enabled European producers to solve the problem quickly with soy oil from Northeast China. Soybeans are harvested in October and November, depending on their variety and intended use, and thus the first experimental load shipped by Mitsui & Co. of Dairen reached the English port of Hull in November 1908.Footnote 38 There were many more to follow, and Mitsui & Co., an established Japanese business already operating in Europe, became one of the first successful firms in this East–West trade. Great Britain, with Liverpool and Hull as the principal ports, became the leading importer of soybeans in Europe during the first year that soy appeared on its market.
The quantity of either whole beans or oil was still too small to be reflected in trade statistics, and we do not know whether the very first trial shipments from Mitsui & Co. included whole beans or bean oil or maybe even both. Sources for 1909 indicate that, throughout that year, Great Britain preferred to import whole beans, which were then crushed in British mills. The policy of importing raw materials instead of (even slightly) processed goods was typical of late imperialism and world economic structures at this time. As for processing, Northeast China was no exception compared to other semi-colonial regions and their cash crops or raw materials. Chinese mills processed soybeans almost exclusively for the local market. To protect their own industries, powerful nations placed high duties on the importation of processed products, preferring to process raw materials in their urban centres and export the finished goods themselves.Footnote 39 This trend was reinforced by the circumstance that European oil mills generally processed a wide range of oil crops such as copra, palm kernels, peanuts, sesame seeds, flaxseeds, and cottonseeds, and they could handle soybeans without much modification to their machinery. The Economist was one of the first periodicals to report on the newly established trade in soy. According to one 1909 article, many large British mills had devoted their entire plants to the crushing of soybeans – to the exclusion of other oleaginous seeds.Footnote 40
The trial shipment by Mitsui in 1908 and the loads in the following year ‘literally put Manchuria on the map of international trade’, as Kinnosuke Adachi, a Japanese-American observer put it in 1925.Footnote 41 After all, he noted elsewhere in the same book, ‘the story of [Manchuria's] export trade is largely the epic of her humble bean’.Footnote 42 It is challenging to support such general statements with concrete numbers, mainly because of the region's semi-colonized status, which interfered with the production of usable statistics. In the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, Northeast China was separated into two spheres of influence. Generally speaking, Heilongjiang and the northern part of Jilin were influenced by Russia, but this imperial power concentrated its attention on Siberia, the CER, and the Sungari valley, with Harbin as the largest city in the region.Footnote 43 The Japanese, meanwhile, held sway in Fengtian/Liaoning and the southern part of Jilin. Up to 1917, most soybeans grown in the north were shipped on the CER to Vladivostok for export, whereas beans cultivated in the southern part were usually exported via Newchwang or Dairen. This separation into a northern, Russian-controlled part and a southern, Japanese-controlled part was officially neither confirmed nor recognized. And the division might not have been important for the Chinese farmers in either part because the entire region largely depended on agriculture and soybeans. However, the distinction between north and south affected all areas of administration and therefore trade statistics, which are difficult to collate because of differing measurement units and currencies.
We nonetheless know, for example, that Dairen quickly became one of the most important trade centres on the Pacific and that this happened mainly thanks to the soybean. The city was opened for international trade in 1907, and, in contrast to all other ports in the region, it was ice-free year-round. Soy was still transported by ship on the Liao towards the port of Newchwang, but over the years the tracks of the SMR and the port of Dairen became a more important commercial route. In 1908, Dairen ranked fifth among ports in China open for foreign trade. Ten years later, it reached the second position, surpassed only by Shanghai, though the latter's trade volume was twice as high.Footnote 44
In 1920, the Bank of Chosen published the annual exports of beans, bean cake, and bean oil between 1907 and 1917.Footnote 45 The numbers were compiled by Mitsui & Co. of Dairen, one of the most important Japanese exporters of soy and soy-based products. Besides Dairen and Newchwang, their statistics included Vladivostok and allow at least a rough comparison between the northern and southern parts of the region, as well as some general assertions about its trade patterns. According to Mitsui, Europe was the main consumer of whole beans during the period, followed by Japan. Up to 1917, however, whole beans for Europe were mainly shipped from Vladivostok, whereas soybean oil was generally exported to Europe via Dairen. Japan's rice paddies received their fertilizer almost exclusively from Dairen. Most of the remaining bean cake went to southern China.
After 1917, Dairen's importance for international trade and Japan's own position in trade and distribution grew tremendously. Both trends were only partly due to the increasing European and American demand for soy during the First World War. Beans grown in the north were usually shipped on the CER to Vladivostok; however, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, the position of the Russians in Northeast China began to change, and so did conditions on the CER.Footnote 46 General disorganization of traffic on the CER after 1917 led many Chinese to choose the traditional cart over the Russian railway as the safer mode of transport. They brought goods for export such as soybeans and wheat to Changchun, which was already in the Japanese sphere of influence. From there, these products were transported to Dairen on the SMR.Footnote 47 Soy still brought to the Russian railway by Chinese farmers was now collected in Harbin, from where the CER ‘exported’ most of it to the SMR instead of shipping it to Vladivostok.Footnote 48
This complex trade pattern reflected the weakness of the Chinese government and economy. Chinese companies were hardly involved in the international soy trade. In fact, the Chinese participated only as farmers and workers in the labour-intensive production and distribution of soy. They cultivated the soybeans mainly along the steadily expanding railway tracks, with one exception in the north, where the Sungari valley proved fertile and the river navigable.Footnote 49 The beans generally joined a three-crop rotation with wheat or barley and sorghum.Footnote 50 In fact, sorghum ranked first in terms of quantity produced and area cultivated, but this cereal was chiefly grown for domestic consumption.Footnote 51 On average, farmers kept about half their fields for crops intended for export (such as beans and wheat) and half for crops meant for domestic consumption. Depending on the precise region, between 20% and 30% of all cultivated land was sown with soybeans in the 1910s and 1920s.Footnote 52
Soybeans and other soy products in Germany
Soy became known to certain experts in nineteenth-century Europe, mainly agro-scientists, biologists, and physicians. Writing in several professional journals, many tirelessly accentuated the bean's value for human consumption, but outside these circles soy remained largely unknown.Footnote 53 Climatic conditions hindered the crop's cultivation in northern and central Europe, and neither processors nor the general public became interested in importing the crop from Asia. The situation began to change at the beginning of the twentieth century, when European oil mills discovered soybeans as an oil crop. Oilseeds, nuts, and vegetable oils – including copra, palm kernels, cottonseed, peanuts, and soybeans – were largely, though not completely, interchangeable; however, the cost and oil yield of these crops varied widely. Traditional sources of vegetable oil such as copra produced an oil yield of 60–75%, and poppyseeds and peanuts were approximately 50% oil. Contemporary varieties of soybean yielded oil at a rate of only 13–21% by weight, but this figure compared competitively with cottonseed (c. 17%) and flaxseed (16–30%).Footnote 54 If the oil content of sunflower seeds and rapeseed compared favourably with that of soybeans, soy's price nonetheless made it attractive to European oil mills and their customers.
Furthermore, soy oil found a market because the demand for vegetable oils was growing rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 55 This increase was a consequence of technical and chemical developments that triggered a steadily rising appetite for oil in industrial applications, but it was also caused by improving living conditions, which led to a higher amount of fat in human nutrition and a rising demand for soap and detergent. Within this general pattern of oil consumption, soybeans initially entered the product lines of mainly margarine, shortening, and soap. Given that neither the two world wars nor the Great Depression could halt the growth of the beauty market for more than a few years, the persistent demand for vegetable oils even for toiletries made sense.Footnote 56 Soy's versatile usage as one of the most affordable sources of vegetable oil brought it a constantly broader distribution, which made it a success story even in times of general decline.
Soon after the first shipments of soybeans had docked at Hull in 1908, the US Department of Labor and Commerce requested that American consular officers in Northeast China and Europe investigate the crop's potential as a competitive alternative to American-grown cottonseed on the European market.Footnote 57 Most of the counsels who responded in Europe highlighted the use of cheap soybean oil in the manufacture of soap and margarine, but some pointed to the difficulties in marketing the bean cake left over from soy oil extraction. Robert P. Skinner, consul general in Hamburg, reported that bean cake fed to cattle would produce ‘evil effects’, that is, colic. At the same time, many consuls in Europe were unable to assess the situation reliably because they lacked sufficient information. Nevertheless, the Department concluded in its report that the soybean had strong commercial potential.Footnote 58
This report reveals two important aspects of the global history of soybeans. First, it illustrates the close attention that US governmental actors paid to global economic entanglements even at this early stage in soy's European presence. In other words, it demonstrates the involvement of national interests in a process of globalization. Second, the report in general, and the quoted words from Skinner in particular, attest to the willingness of European companies to experiment with unfamiliar agricultural products, as long as these goods fitted into existing production chains and their price was right.
Soybeans found a place on the European and American markets because of their oil, but they also proved useful in other ways. In times of crisis, soy and even the protein-rich residue from the milling process became a universal ersatz product in Western foodstuffs. During the First World War, soybean flour was often declared by Western countries to be a nutritious substitute for animal proteins and animal fat in human consumption. In 1918, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a brochure for American housewives on the use of soybean flour to save meat, fat, and wheat. The booklet contained a recipe for ‘victory bread’, a special ‘war bread’ in which wheat flour was partly substituted by soybean flour.Footnote 59 Related developments occurred in Germany during the First World War. Soy was praised there for its nutritious value in human diets and as a palatable coffee substitute.Footnote 60 Admittedly, the availability of Chinese soybeans in Germany was limited by the British blockade, but experiments in domestic cultivation also increased in order to reduce the country's dependency on oil crop imports.Footnote 61
Developments in the demand for soybean oil in Europe were reflected in Japanese trade statistics. After peaking in 1915, the export of whole beans from Northeast China by Japanese companies that traded them outside Asia declined by half and fully recovered only in the 1920s.Footnote 62 During the interwar period, most soybeans were imported by Germany, Great Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands.Footnote 63 The total amount imported by European countries annually changed over time, as did the ratio of whole beans to oil, depending on national import tariffs and the availability of any cheaper sources of vegetable oils. Rough numbers nonetheless confirm basic trading patterns with protectionist European countries, which desired raw materials instead of only slightly processed goods. Whole-bean exports from Northeast China to Europe skyrocketed through the 1920s, while the export of soybean oil declined. In 1919, approximately 772,000 US tons of whole beans were exported from the southern, Japanese-controlled part of Northeast China. Ten years later, the amount of exported beans was almost four times as high (3 million US tons). In contrast, about 153,000 US tons of soybean oil were exported in 1919 and only some 130,000 US tons a decade later.Footnote 64
To increase their competitiveness and profitability, the oil mills usually concentrated on improving the extraction process to boost the quantity and quality of their oil. In this context, the German Hermann Bollmann (1880–1934) offered a crucial departure. He played a pioneering role in increasing the demand for soybeans by accidentally separating lecithin from soy oil. Lecithin is a softener used in many foodstuffs; made from egg yolks at the time, it was costly.Footnote 65
During the 1920s, some 100 large oil companies, and several hundred smaller oil mills operated in Germany, processing all sorts of oil seeds, including soybeans, which they obtained from Northeast China via Amsterdam or London.Footnote 66 German companies found it particularly attractive to import whole beans instead of the oil because, unlike other European countries, Germany could not exploit any colonies and so had hardly any access to affordable sources of vegetable oil. Having re-established import duties on vegetable oils in 1925, Germany increased the domestic processing of raw materials such as soybeans and developed a notable export trade in soy oil. While the sale of oil and lecithin was easy throughout Europe, mills had to make more effort to market the residue, which they usually offered as a concentrated feed for livestock breeding. Bollmann, for instance, advertised the product under the brand name Vita, and he published several brochures with instructions for feeding it to different animals.Footnote 67 Such efforts indicate that farmers needed to be convinced of the nutritious value of the cake; however, the mills succeeded not least because soybeans (and therefore both oil and meal) were always a little cheaper than any other source of animal feed.Footnote 68 In 1926, bean cake from German mills accounted for approximately 19.5% of the country's animal feed; the rest came mainly from peanut, flax, and palm kernel cake. Only two years later, soybean cake constituted up to 32.6% of German farmers’ animal feed, and the agricultural consumption of other oil cakes remained constant or decreased.Footnote 69
In extracting the oil, the mills simultaneously supported a trend of suppressing soy in human consumption. An advertising brochure from Bollmann's Hansa-Mühle wanted its readers to believe that the reason consumers did not eat tofu and other Asian foods made of soy was because those products were not appealing to the European palate.Footnote 70 Elsewhere, the mill declared that the process of fermenting soy, as in Asia, was inconvenient and time-consuming.Footnote 71 However true these declarations might have been, they were influenced by commercial interests. Consuming soybeans in an Asian manner – in tofu, for example – would have meant an end to separating the oil from the protein, which might have made the oil mills redundant. In other words, by marketing soybean oil and bean cake as two separate commercial products, the oil mills secured their futures.
Beginning in the mid 1920s and throughout the 1930s, Germany was by far the main importing country of whole soybeans in Europe.Footnote 72 Between 1928 and 1933, at a time of general decline, Germany was even the largest exporter of soy oil in Europe.Footnote 73 In the face of the Great Depression, European and American vegetable oil imports of all kinds decreased immediately in 1929.Footnote 74 But companies such as the British-Dutch Unilever successfully offered cheap margarine and soap made from soybean oil instead of from preferred (but also more expensive) oils. Soybean oil – next to whale oil and nut oil – turned out to be an all-round, nearly universal substitute.Footnote 75
After 1933, National Socialist agricultural policies focused on achieving autarky, and this goal affected the German oil and fat market. For the production of vegetable oils, Germany depended mainly on the import of several raw materials, a problem thought to be solvable by regulating the market. Imported oil seeds and the foodstuffs made from them – first and foremost margarine and shortening – were much cheaper than butter, lard, and other animal fats. To overcome this disparity and save vegetable oils for industrial use, Germany applied a tax to food products made of vegetable oils and also curtailed their production.Footnote 76 Furthermore, it supported the domestic cultivation of established oilseeds, such as rape and sunflowers, and it encouraged experiments on others, including soybeans. As a part of their autarky efforts, the Nazis tried to fill the gap in fats and proteins with soybeans grown in south-east Europe.Footnote 77 Germany could not abandon the import of vegetable oils altogether, however, because certain tropical crops contained high amounts of glycerine, which was used in the production of explosives.Footnote 78
Before the Second World War began in Europe, Germany's adjustments to its consumption and production of oils and fats did not interfere with the trade patterns that it had previously established with Japanese companies. Nor did the political changes in Germany and Northeast China in the early 1930s. On the contrary, in 1936, Germany and Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet-state into which the three north-eastern provinces of China had been incorporated, signed their first trade agreement, which they expanded in 1937.Footnote 79 This agreement focused on the purchase of soybeans grown in Manchukuo and on a boost to heavy industry in Manchukuo through the purchase of German machinery. Although Manchukuo could not meet the agreement, it was extended in 1938.Footnote 80 These measures were undertaken to meet Germany's increasing need for vegetable oils, whose shortage the forthcoming war would exacerbate.
American-grown soybeans
US agriculture at the beginning of the twentieth century was guided primarily by the market economy. However, the overproduction of certain crops – cotton, wheat, and maize – had shaken American agriculture in the years following the First World War, and it was in severe need of modernization and coordination. Up to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, national agricultural policy concentrated on education and research, tariff protections, and some agribusiness regulations to solve the problems of overproduction and soil depletion due to monoculture.Footnote 81 To fulfil its education and research mandates, the USDA ran agricultural experiment stations throughout the country, and it sponsored expeditions overseas to find new crops, plant varieties, and cultivation methods. Soy seemed promising because it might be able to solve soil depletion and was useful in both agriculture and industry. Starting around 1910, the Bureau of Plant Industry, a USDA agency, increased its efforts to investigate the plant. Unlike Europe, the US had several regions with climates suitable for its cultivation. To make the plant attractive to farmers, experts within the Bureau of Plant Industry tirelessly pointed to the legume's outstanding ability to increase the soil's nitrogen content.Footnote 82 In fact, soy's ability to fortify the earth was why some American farmers grew it in the first place.Footnote 83
Soy also featured prominently in botanical expeditions that the Bureau of Plant Industry conducted in Asia. Most important for the acquisition of further knowledge on soy was the Oriental Agricultural Exploration Expedition, carried out by P. Howard Dorse and William J. Morse from 1929 to 1931, which the USDA had explicitly funded in the context of steadily declining, no longer profitable cotton and maize earnings.Footnote 84 Its members returned to the United States with a total of 9,000 distinct specimens constituting some 4,500 different types of soybean for agricultural experiments in the US. The pioneering work of the Bureau of Plant Introduction could not immediately cushion the effects of the impending agricultural crisis, however. Only with federal interventions in the New Deal era did soy cultivation increase significantly. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 imposed production controls on certain crops to raise their value. Although soybeans were not among the commodities explicitly addressed by the programme, their cultivation expanded as a side effect of the limits on cotton, maize, and wheat.
At the same time, as Mrs Hayward's ode to soy suggests, the increase in soy cultivation was due to more than governmental policies alone. During the Great Depression, some agriculturalists, chemists, farmers, industrialists, and policymakers became interested in transforming American agriculture into a source for more chemical components for consumer goods instead of as a source for food alone. ‘Chemurgy’ became a magic word in the 1930s. The Chemurgic Council, founded in 1935, possessed the protectionist ambition to revive US agriculture and reduce the country's dependence upon foreign sources of industrial raw materials. The movement encouraged industrial and governmental interest in new uses of various plants and their residues, and soybeans were among the plants that it found promising.Footnote 85 In 1938, and spurred by the spirit of chemurgy, the USDA established four so-called Regional Research Laboratories, which conducted little research on agriculture and chemistry themselves, but instead awarded research contracts to companies. The northern laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, together with several companies, explored the uses of soybean oil and soybean meal.Footnote 86 One of the best-known representatives of the chemurgic movement was Henry Ford, who in 1941, on company grounds in Dearborn, Michigan, unveiled a plastic-bodied car for which soy was one of the main components.Footnote 87 Owing to the movement's intensive publicity, it generally helped boost domestic cultivation and use of the plant in the 1930s. Soy cultivation rose steadily from three million acres in 1930 to more than eleven million in 1940, mostly in the Corn Belt – Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, and Missouri.Footnote 88
The cultivation of soybeans soared when the US entered the Second World War – from 11.3 million acres planted in 1941 to 14.9 million acres in the following year.Footnote 89 This jump was a consequence of governmental support aimed at a critical wartime fat and oil shortage. In 1941, before the US entered the war, around 65% of the domestic fats and oils were of animal origin and 35% came from vegetable sources, primarily cottonseed, flaxseed, and soybeans. Approximately 10% of the total consumption of vegetable oils was imported from regions in the Pacific.Footnote 90 Taking the production of explosives, and also synthetic rubber, into consideration, the shortage of vegetable oils from Southeast Asia was more serious than this 10% seems to suggest. Coconut from the Philippines and palm kernels from the Dutch East Indies and Malaya contained a high amount of glycerine, which was needed to produce explosives. And rubber served both military and civilian needs because it was vital in the production of tyres for cars, bicycles, and aeroplanes. Now at war in the Pacific, the US found itself cut off from its main rubber sources because about 97% of the nation's usual imports came from areas currently under Japanese control.Footnote 91 The stagnation of tropical oil imports exacerbated the rubber problem because the special properties of these oils permitted their use in the manufacture of synthetic rubber. Against this background, fats and oils gained a central position in wartime agricultural and industrial policy. In fact, they were treated as one of the war's pressing problems.Footnote 92
In January 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt established the War Production Board as an agency of the US government to supervise production for war purposes.Footnote 93 The Board immediately addressed the complex fats and oils situation by restricting related materials and commodities. The use of glycerine was prohibited except for military purposes. Tropical oils still in stock were reserved for the manufacture of materials in which glycerine was recovered as a by-product. Coconut, palm, and palm kernel oil, for example, were no longer permitted in the production of margarine, shortening, and soap.Footnote 94 Soybean oil, on the other hand, was not an exact substitute for the oils from the Pacific because it was less useful in the extraction of glycerine for explosives. Nevertheless, soy oil's chemical characteristics allowed a wide range of uses, especially in foodstuffs and toiletries. Therefore, it could relieve the pressure on tropical oil supplies by replacing them in the manufacture of margarine, shortening and soap. In this way, boosting the cultivation of domestic soybeans could work hand in hand with restrictions on the use of tropical oils.
The USDA had, in fact, already drastically raised production goals for certain crops shortly before the US entered the war, and they increased these targets after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In June 1941, an amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act by Representative Henry Steagall made more commodities eligible for price support, including soybeans.Footnote 95 In 1942, the Stabilization Act increased price support which was guaranteed for the duration of the war plus two years. These measures explain the dramatic rise in American soy cultivation in only one year from approximately 11 million to almost 15 million acres. Thereafter, during the war, acreage cultivated with soybeans remained constant or decreased slightly because of unfavourable weather at seeding time and labour shortages. Thanks to the Stabilization Act and further governmental support programmes, however, numbers remained impressively high even after the war: 12.4 million acres in 1946 and 15.6 million in 1950.
Besides experiencing a critical shortage of tropical oils during the war, the US also saw a decline in the amount of butter available to civilians, which in turn boosted the civilian consumption of soybean oil. Diminished butter supplies were caused in part by an increased use of milk in fluid consumption and manufacturing. Moreover, the federal government reserved a lot of butter for military requirements.Footnote 96 These circumstances shifted the use of soybean oil in 1943 and made it more important in the production of margarine and shortening than in the manufacture of soap.Footnote 97 Numbers for the use of soybean oil in the production of soap increased during the first years of the Second World War, but fell drastically from 15.4 million pounds in 1943 to 3.3 million pounds in 1944.Footnote 98 At the same time, the quantities of soybean oil used for margarine and shortening rose dramatically. In 1941, some 76 million pounds of soybean oil went into margarine; more than three times as much was used for the same purpose in 1944, namely 211 million pounds. A similar increase occurred for shortening. In other words, from 1943 onwards, approximately 80–85% of all domestic soybean oil went into margarine and shortening. Only the remaining 15–20% was used in the manufacture of soaps, paints, drying oils, and other non-food products.
Seen in terms of soy's statistical increase in cultivation and its use as an oil-bearing plant, federal policy responses to the urgent demand for domestically produced oils were successful, those oils helping to make up for plant oils no longer imported from the Pacific. Cultivation of soybeans rose because their oil was widely used for human nutrition, which in turn freed up other oils for industrial purposes. Or, as Walter W. Wilcox, an expert on agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin, put it: ‘Had it not been for our general knowledge and success in growing soybeans, wartime increase in fats would have been largely limited to the expansion in lard production, and far more severe rationing of food fats would have been required.’Footnote 99
If the history of soy's rise in the United States can be seen as a steady march to success in such terms, that is, only one side of the coin because there was more to soy than its oil. Large amounts of residue remained after the beans had been crushed into oil. Out of every bushel of soybeans processed at the time, less than 20% of the resultant product was crude soybean oil and more than 80% was a protein-rich by-product usually referred to as meal, cake, or – in the case of human consumption – flour. From a nutritional perspective, more calories could have been gained for public consumption by encouraging the population to eat soy itself, instead of settling for only the oil in margarine. In the United States, however, soybeans were not seen as attractive as either a vegetable or a meat substitute, even though their protein possessed similar properties to that of animals.Footnote 100
From the late 1930s onwards, USDA specialists, food companies, and nutritionists started to disseminate knowledge about soy, in particular soy flour, for human nutrition in the country. Comprehensive compendiums, recipe books, and brochures on varieties suitable for human consumption were published to inform merchants, consumers, and farmers about soy proteins.Footnote 101 As soy production increased in the 1940s, American oil mills still faced the serious problem of marketing the by-product.Footnote 102 To improve sales for human consumption, the Staley Company published a pamphlet in 1944 with a bold subtitle: The story of a revolutionary and important development in the history of American foods.Footnote 103 Containing nutritional value charts, recipes, pictures, and comparisons with other protein sources, the pamphlet's sole purpose was to increase the consumption of soybean flour. In 1944, Demetria M. Taylor, author of several recipe and household books, wrote a 200-page Soy cook book that was explicitly labelled a ‘wartime book’. In the preface she wrote, ‘It took a global war, with consequent food shortages, to arouse this nation to the possibilities of using soybeans to supplement und substitute for the protein foods that are rationed, scarce, or expensive.’Footnote 104
Although there was no doubt that the value of soy's protein was comparable to that of animals in terms of its chemical composition and nutritional value, soy retained the role of a mere substitute. In fact, even farmers needed to be convinced of bean cake's value before they would take the by-product in large enough quantities. The impact of feeding bean cake to animals was the subject of countless agro-scientific experiments, each quantifying the effects of a soy-based diet on the quality of meat, butter, or milk.Footnote 105 The success story of bean cake as animal fodder was thus as much the result of intensive demand for soy oil as for the cake itself.
Since the distribution of soy protein remained difficult, the American government bought much of the flour. Special army meals designated as emergency rations for paratroopers, for example, were made of soybean flour.Footnote 106 During and just after the war, some of the surplus was also used to make soups, such as Pea Soya, and fed to refugees in Europe and Asia.Footnote 107 After the Second World War, the economic position of soy in the United States changed once again. Americans did not consume enough soy and needed to export the surplus. In 1937, the United States had imported 30 million bushels, the largest amount ever brought into the country. Soon after, however, the US began to export soy. In 1941, soy exports totalled only 0.5 million bushels, but they grew to 3 million bushels the next year. This number increased multiple times over the decade, reaching 27.8 million bushels in 1950.Footnote 108 The trend towards export was a result of the United States’ emergence as the world's foremost soy-producing country, but it also reflected how much soybeans had become ‘Americanized’.
Conclusion
At the beginning of the twentieth century, soybeans caught the attention of European countries because the crop's oil content proved useful and economical for the manufacture of many products, chief among them margarine, shortening, and soap. Within only a few decades, soy went from being a plant important only in Asia to one with significant strength in the world economy. Western demand was served by Northeast China, a semi-colonized region in which Japan and Russia had strong footholds. Comprising more than 50% of the three north-eastern provinces’ total exports from the late 1910s to the late 1930s, soybeans became the region's cash crop, mainly cultivated for export to Japan, Europe, and the United States. Soy was exported as whole beans or – lightly processed – as oil and bean cake. The crop was transported on either the CER towards Vladivostok or the SMR towards Dairen, which, thanks to the soybean, became one of the most important trading centres on the Pacific. The railways primarily existed to expedite the transfer of domestic resources to seaports for worldwide export. In many ways, however, the two railways stimulated the further dynamic development of the region and its rising strategic and economic importance. They enabled the transport of people and goods, spurred industrial and agricultural development, and boosted economic growth, thereby attracting millions of Han Chinese migrants to settle in the Northeast.
Important for the emergence of soy on the global market was the constantly rising demand for vegetable oils suitable for human consumption and the manufacture of other consumer commodities. During the interwar years, Germany became the main importer in Europe of whole soybeans from Northeast China. Its interest in soybeans arose from its lack of affordable access to other oil-bearing plants. Consequently, it specialized in soybean processing and developed a remarkable trade in soy oil and bean cake within Europe. This development was aided by Hermann Bollmann's discovery of how to obtain the softener lecithin during the milling process.
In the 1920s, experts in search of ways to modernize American agriculture learned that certain regions of the United States were suitable for cultivating soy, and a significant increase in the domestic production of the crop occurred in the following decade. This shift was primarily a side effect of federal agricultural measures during the New Deal era.
National interests and politically defined markets were crucial to the further history of soy in the United States. US cultivation and use of soybeans came about only because of the significant role that governmental and other national actors played in order to fulfil agricultural, economic, and political needs in wartime. After 1941, soybeans attracted a marked increase in attention from American federal policymakers owing to the critical situation regarding oils and fats. The federal government therefore encouraged the domestic cultivation of soy and channelled the beans into the production of margarine.
The history of the soybean enables us to analyse the interconnectedness of the world through the lens of a single crop. It casts light on the transfer of commodities and what happens to their associated social practices along the way. The transfer of goods connects people, but the social and cultural flows that accompany these goods find their own paths, which – in the case of soy – can be linked less to the exchange of a good than to its usage. It is striking to discover how much the use of soybeans in Europe and the United States differed from Asian habits. Following its extensive distribution throughout the industrialized countries at the start of the twentieth century, soy became important as a source of cheap vegetable oil in the production of certain consumer goods, but it found its way into the human diet only by secondary means. The soybean has therefore followed completely different channels in the West from those within Asia, where the crop long served as a palatable food in its own right. Such global distinctions were not exclusively caused by differing consumer behaviours and tastes, but instead were brought about, first, by the demand for vegetable oils and, second, by governmental measures in a regulatory environment. Thus, soy was a raw material that connected continents but separated cultures.
Ines Prodöhl is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. Her main field of research is global history, and she is currently writing a book on the worldwide economic and cultural entanglements of soybeans.
