William Joseph Morse

William Joseph Morse was an American botanist and agriculturalist with the United States Department of Agriculture who is widely credited as a founding figure of modern American soybean agriculture. He joined the USDA in 1907 under Charles Vancouver Piper and became the department's soybean specialist, and from around 1910 the two worked to transform the soybean into what was later called a golden bean, building it into one of the country's largest and most nutritious farm crops. His most significant fieldwork was the 1928 to 1931 Dorsett-Morse Oriental Agricultural Exploration Expedition through Manchuria and China, undertaken with fellow USDA explorer Palemon Howard Dorsett, which produced an extensive seventeen volume report now held at the USDA National Agricultural Library. Morse served as president of the American Soybean Association in 1923 and 1924, again in 1925, and again in 1931, and remained active in the organization until his retirement from the USDA in 1949, having helped establish soybeans as a major American crop by the time of his death in 1959.