When one Agriculture Department official, Alger Hiss, in early 1935 wrote up a directive to ensure that Southern landlords were paying sharecroppers for their labor (which most of them did not), Senator Ellison D. Smith stormed into his office and shouted: "Young fella, you can't do this to my niggers, paying checks to them".[122] The Agriculture Secretary, Henry A. Wallace, sided with Smith and agreed to cancel the directive.[123] As it turned out, the most effective way for Black sharecroppers to escape a life of poverty in the South was to move to the North or California.