Leslie A. Wheeler

Leslie Allen Wheeler (1899–1968) was a U.S. Government official and diplomat whose efforts contributed to broad liberalization of international trade in agricultural products, creation of the International Wheat Council, and creation of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Leslie Allen Wheeler was born in Ventura, Iowa, on December 20, 1899. He lived in the Imperial Valley of California in his youth, attending and graduating from high school there. Wheeler served in the Army for a few months in 1918. He earned a B.A. at Pomona College in 1921, and an M.B.A. at Harvard University in 1923. He married Louise Price Webster in 1927.

From 1923 to 1926 Wheeler worked as a research assistant at the Foodstuffs Division of the U.S. Department of Commerce at a pay rate of $1,600 per year. His job consisted of rewriting consular reports into "bulletins on international trade in particular agricultural products."

In 1926 he moved to the Foreign Markets Section of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wheeler quickly rose through the ranks, first to chief agricultural economist, and then as a branch chief in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. In 1930 he was assigned to the newly created Foreign Agricultural Service as the de facto Assistant Chief, though without the formal title. In 1931 Wheeler became acting Chief upon Asher Hobson's resignation, at a salary of $3,800 per annum. Wheeler was to head the Foreign Agricultural Service, and its wartime incarnation, the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations, for the next 17 years.

For the first few years of the Foreign Agricultural Service's existence, it was primarily occupied with statistical reporting and commodity analysis. According to USDA document published in 1940,

Coincidentally, in 1934 Wheeler was appointed Chief of the Foreign Agricultural Service.

The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act was passed shortly after Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in order to deal with the consequences of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Smoot-Hawley had raised U.S. import tariffs to an average of over 50 percent ad valorem. This sparked retaliatory, prohibitive tariff increases from trading partners that led to a catastrophic collapse of export sales, worsening already-bad economic conditions during the Great Depression. The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act empowered the President to reduce import tariffs on products from countries that agreed to do the same for U.S. products. Congress realized that if tariffs could be reduced in return for a quid pro quo from each trading partner, U.S. exports might have a chance of returning to earlier levels. The bill was largely written in the Treaty Division at State Department, and Wheeler contributed to its drafting.

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