Roscoe Filburn: The Wheat Farmer Who Went Against the Grain
“I never worked for another man in my life,” Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburn once proudly declared.
That turned out to be not quite true. Thanks to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Filburn in 1941 found himself involuntarily working for Uncle Sam, who dictated how many acres of wheat he could plant and fined him for growing too much and using the excess to feed his family and animals, claiming the power to do so under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Filburn refused to pay, but the Supreme Court, in the case of Wickard v. Filburn, held that the Roosevelt administration’s policy and the law undergirding it were perfectly constitutional, paving the way for unbridled federal intervention in the name of regulating interstate commerce.
Roscoe Curtiss Filburn was born August 2, 1902, in his parents’ brick farmhouse near Dayton, Ohio. His great-grandfather, Johann Peter Fillbrunn, immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1818, the first member of the Fillbrunn family to do so. The Fillbrunns had an apparent fondness for changing their names: Johann Peter Fillbrunn became Peter Fillbrun upon his arrival in America, and later dropped yet another consonant in his surname. Roscoe, having inherited the last name of Filbrun, would find it misspelled as Filburn on his famous lawsuit and eventually have it legally changed to match.
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