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Earl Butz

US politician brought down by racist remark

Earl Butz, who has died aged 98, was the oldest surviving member of a US cabinet, having served (1971-1976) as secretary of agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He will be remembered primarily for the racist comment which led to his resignation. In 1976, during the presidential campaign, he was asked, in a private conversation on a commercial flight, why more black people were not attracted to his Republican party. Butz replied that "the coloureds" wanted: "first a tight pussy, second loose shoes, and third a warm place to shit". Butz had not realised that his former colleague, the ex-White House counsel John Dean, who testifed against Nixon during the Watergate hearings, was sitting nearby. He was covering the campaign for Rolling Stone magazine and went public. The Associated Press put it on the wire.

The resulting uproar forced Butz's resignation, in part because his card had been marked years earlier, when, responding to a reporter's question about the Pope's position on birth control, he had quipped, in a mock Italian accent, "You no play-a da game, you no make-a da rules".

Butz eventually acknowledged that "sometimes my quotes may be too colourful", but in an interview with a student paper he attributed that to the fact that he "understood public relations and always maintained a high profile".

Although his message to American farmers was always that things would have to change, his appeal as "one of us" came naturally, as he was an Indiana farm boy himself, born in Albion. He received two degrees in agriculture from Purdue University, where he then taught and became dean of the college of agriculture. Among his students was the future Indiana senator Birch Bayh.

He quickly became vice president of both the American Agricultural Economic Association and the Society of Farm Managers, and as such was a natural appointment in 1954 by President Eisenhower as an assistant secretary of agriculture, and representative to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. In 1957, he returned to Purdue, eventually becoming vice president for research, supervising the business of chasing grants for the university, as well as dean of continuing education.

Nixon appointed Butz secretary of agriculture with a brief to make food cheaper to the consumer. Butz's motto became "get big or get out," encouraging the growth of corporate factory-farms and increasing subsidised production of staples for export. These policies benefited the burgeoning fast-food industry, as well as makers of processed foodstuffs.

As corn crops multiplied, high-fructose corn syrup replaced cane sugar in processed food and drinks. He also encouraged large-scale importation of palm oil, or "tree lard", a cheaper but less healthy cooking fat. According to Greg Critser, author of Fat Land, these policies resulted directly in the larger and larger portions offered by fast food outlets and soft drink producers, helping make America the world's fattest nation.

When Nixon resigned in 1974, Butz stayed on to serve Ford. He contrasted the men, saying "you worked for Nixon, but with Ford", whom he characterised as "warm and friendly". Nixon, on the other hand, "was a kind of a loner; he had a cold personality". Nevertheless, Butz was one of the speakers at the former president's funeral.

A shrewd investor, with an eye for luxury living (once insisting on a private jet which bankrupted a Republican fund-raiser in Michigan) Butz was convicted, in 1981, of income tax evasion. A decade later he endowed a $1m chair at Purdue.

His name will live on in other ways: in Jane Smiley's novel Moo a prize 700lb cream hog is named Earl Butz, and the conservationist Sierra Club presents an annual award for doublespeak named after him.

His wife, Mary Emma, predeceased him, but he is survived by two children.

· Earl Lauer Butz, farmer, academic and politician, born July 3 1909; died February 2 2008

· This article was amended on Thursday February 7 2008. The career-ending racist comment made by former US agriculture secretary Earl Butz was during the 1976 presidential election campaign and not, as we said in the article above, in 1975. This has been corrected.

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