Читать книгу The 4-H Harvest - Gabriel N. Rosenberg - Страница 10

CHAPTER ONE

Agrarian Futurism, Rural Degeneracy, and the Origins of 4-H

For this educational work now being carried on through the Department of Agriculture will be like leaven in the meal, leavening the whole lump; for new ideas have the quality of reproduction.… We are just at the beginning of this movement, which will make a transformation in the minds of young men equal to that which machinery has made in the methods of older men.

—“A Little Child Shall Lead Them,” Wallaces Farmer, December 3, 1915

Will Otwell built a pyramid of corn. In the Palace of Agriculture of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, the commissioner of education for the Illinois World’s Fair Commission arranged ears of corn into a great ziggurat ten thousand ears large, each ear gathered from the prizewinning entries of the Illinois boys’ corn contests that Otwell had been organizing in Illinois since 1901. In front of this pyramid, perhaps as homage to an Egyptian obelisk, Otwell erected a single towering ear of corn assembled from the same entries. Thousands of fairgoers passed through the Palace and marveled at King Corn given architectural form, and Otwell’s exhibit invited each spectator to take home a packet’s worth of fine seed corn. Through these careful arrangements, Otwell made a monument “to the industry and intelligence of 8,000 Illinois farmer boys,” one representative of the USDA remarked, on witnessing the exhibit.¹

The exhibit, like the World’s Fair around it, exposed the agrarian futurist impulses underwriting America’s burgeoning empire. Framed around the hundred-year anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, the fair commemorated a century’s worth of agricultural expansion and visually linked the nation’s rise as an international power to the successful internal conquest of nature through settled agriculture. Near exotic ethnological exhibits of primitives drawn from far-flung colonial possessions and peripheries, individual states displayed bounties in the Palace of Agriculture grown on their most impressive, modern farms. For Illinois, the intricate corn structures, built from ears selected for their even rows and plump kernels, figuratively testified to the enduring virility of Illinois’s corn farmers. Through its hopeful invocation of youth, the exhibit envisioned a national future of abundance bred of technocratic expertise and rural fertility. Alongside that figurative assertion of virility, the accompanying seed samples intended a literal dissemination—a plan for the strong seed of the Illinois farmer boys to impregnate fertile soil from Grand Island to Canton.

Figure 1. The Illinois Boys’ Corn Exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

At the turn of the twentieth century in America, such hopeful visions for the countryside mingled with disturbing reports of growing depravity, criminality, and venereal disease in decaying rural quarters previously toasted as holdfasts of national virtue and healthy reproduction. Witnessing rural “degeneration and demoralization” in 1893, Social Gospel activist Josiah Strong warned that if rural out-migration continued unabated, he could “see no reason why isolation, irreligion, ignorance, vice and degradation should not increase in the country until we have a rural peasantry, illiterate and immoral, possessing the rights of citizenship, but utterly incapable of performing or comprehending its duties.” In 1897, the poet Walter M. Rogers eulogized “the strong Green Mountain boy” in a poem called “Vermont’s Deserted Farms,” a demise marked on the landscape by “the shattered homes/ all crumbling to decay,/ like long-neglected catacombs/ of races passed away.” Reports of rural degeneracy were the nightmarish underbelly of agrarian futurism’s cheerful utopianism. Too many rural communities fell prey to out-migration and inbreeding, rural reformers complained. Rather than questioning agrarian futurism’s focus on the fertile possibilities of youthful rural bodies, tales of rural degeneracy assumed them—with a twist. If the reproductive possibilities of rural youth could be harnessed to produce a better future, what frightful perils attended their neglect? Where had the youthful virility of “the strong Green Mountain boy” gone? And would the Illinois farmer boy join him in this racial passing, littering the Corn Belt with the same “shattered homes”?²

In a moment when the future of agricultural landscapes was linked so intimately to healthy racial reproduction, Will Otwell’s efforts were poised to render all those questions moot. He directed the construction of the corn exhibit but had also pioneered the youth contests and clubs that had produced the corn—associations that were years in the making and that Otwell reported dramatically improved interest in the scientific cultivation of corn among boys as well as adult farmers. His approach was effective but was hardly unique. Across the Corn Belt and Deep South, a similar complex of clubs and contests blossomed throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. Educators, bureaucrats, bankers, and reformers alike identified youth clubs as an effective way to reach rural youth and, through them, farmers. Propelled by the success and notoriety of youth-oriented workers like Otwell, the U.S. Congress moved to formally subsidize agricultural extension and agricultural youth club work in 1914, with the passage of the Smith-Lever Act. Debate on Smith-Lever revealed that, more than simply a system to promote scientific agriculture, youth clubs were also intended to husband the nation’s future in a time of reproductive uncertainty. On the floor of Congress, advocates of the extension bill identified clubs as a powerful tool to stanch the dysgenic flow to the city and, with it, rural degeneracy. Through such strategies, early advocates of agricultural youth clubs aligned a vision of normal racial reproduction with the presence of diffuse federal power in the countryside.

* * *

Federal interest in agricultural youth clubs initially emerged out of efforts to materially improve conditions in America’s rapidly expanding farmlands in the late nineteenth century, but it was tied as well to efforts to reconcile the nation’s seemingly urban destiny with its agrarian past. The increase of cultivated acreage and production across the United States during this period brought attendant concerns about pervasive rural poverty, moral and physical degeneracy, and inefficient farming techniques that complicated equally pervasive celebrations of the homesteading farmer as the source of national character. Middle-class reformers, both urban and rural, promoted “progressive” and “scientific” practices in the countryside, intending to improve rural living conditions, increase the nation’s agricultural bounty, and safeguard the countryside’s reproductive future. By the early twentieth century, agricultural progressives like Seaman Knapp were contending that existing means of rural reform—farmers’ institutes, pamphlets, and agricultural colleges—were insufficient, particularly in the impoverished South. Knapp argued that proponents of progressive country life needed to journey to the afflicted communities and farms to demonstrate their findings. He built an alliance among state experts, commercial interests, and farm families, using a method that became known as cooperative agricultural extension. Extension placed an agent of the state agricultural college in rural communities and among farmers, bringing the insights of scientific agriculture directly to farmers without intermediaries. No longer would farmers need to seek out the insights of the USDA and land-grant colleges. Agricultural extension would bring it to their doorsteps and into their homes.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, primarily through the USDA and the Department of the Interior, the federal government subsidized agricultural expansion in a number of ways. The USDA directly assisted farmers by distributing millions of seeds, free of cost. Federal monies helped to establish a network of universities partially dedicated to agricultural research and education through the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. After the 1887 Hatch Act, agricultural scientists conducted research at experimental stations in every state. The Department of the Interior dispersed millions of acres of land to homesteaders and underwrote sundry and ambitious irrigation schemes. Congress granted millions more acres of land to railroad companies to finance the construction of a rail network that could cheaply and quickly transport agricultural commodities from remote farmlands to eastern markets. As some federal agencies provided direct and indirect subsidy for agricultural expansion in the West, federal military power worked to remove any indigenous population that threatened the power of white settlers.³

Between 1850 and 1900, the total number of farms in the nation quadrupled and total land in farms grew from 293 million acres to 841 million, primarily driven by vast agricultural expansion west of the Mississippi. The transformation of the prairies, plains, and deserts of the West into farmland provided new opportunities for families willing to endure backbreaking labor and the grueling deprivations of homesteading. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the average size of farms in the North Central census region—an area encompassing all states north of the Mason-Dixon line from Ohio to Kansas—hovered between 121 and 145 acres, as tens of thousands of families took advantage of the cheap acreage offered by the Homestead Act and helped to create nearly 1.5 million new small farms. In the Western census region, where vast tracts of arid land could ill support more than cattle grazing absent large-scale, capital-intensive irrigation, larger farms were the norm. Nevertheless, the 1900 census recorded 242,000 farms in the Western census region, where just more than six thousand had existed in 1850.⁴

Even as federal largesse helped push millions of acres into farm production, advances in agricultural technology and agricultural practice—tractors, commercial fertilizers, more widespread observance of crop rotation, and improved seed and animal selection—enabled some farmers to improve yields and easily farm larger tracts of land.⁵ Highly mechanized operations required a large initial investment, so smaller farms frequently did without them. As a result, scientific agriculture was frequently both a cause and an effect of affluence: only the wealthiest farmers could afford to innovate, and thus, only the wealthiest farmers could enjoy the benefits of innovation. Nevertheless, the progressive agricultural movement of the late nineteenth century—a movement of agriculturalists, scientists, and commercial farmers who planned to modernize American agriculture through improved planning, education, and technology—touted agricultural innovation as a path to wise management and moral virtue. Unproductive farms, their thinking went, were symptomatic of the ignorance, sloth, and greediness of operators unable to read up on modern practices, too content to fish rather than toil, and too willing to sacrifice the long-term health of their land for one bumper crop. By the turn of the twentieth century, innovations in plant biology, animal breeding, and farming technology were encouraging agriculturalists at land-grant colleges, in the agricultural technology industry, and in the farm press to talk of a science of farming in which experts could objectively describe the correct methods to maximize yields and profit from a particular crop, as well as to organize and manage an entire farm household. Despite the lauded objectivity of their methods, poorer farmers frequently chafed at the condescension of agricultural progressives, derisively dismissing it as mere “book farming.”⁶

Scientific farming, mechanization, and the massive expansion of cropland bolstered the nation’s agricultural output but did little to improve living conditions across rural America relative to the cities. Throughout the settled North, many farmers barely scraped by, mixing subsistence farming with commercial farming. Homesteaders found frontier life hard and new land less fecund than promised. Even the modest amenities of rural living in the East, such as roads, common schools, and proximity to established communities were altogether absent across much of the West. Years of hard labor in miserable conditions—chronic hunger, pervasive squalor, great distances to potable water, rampant disease, and social isolation—were frequently required to turn a prairie into a profitable field. Many farmers abandoned or sold their holdings rather than persevere, or went into heavy debt to finance and modernize their operations. In large portions of the arid West, homesteaders sold their farms to holding companies when they discovered that they lacked, even collectively, the capital necessary to irrigate their land. Individuals and companies with the resources to mechanize farm operations gobbled up cheap land from the bankrupt, only to retain the broken farmers as tenants or wage laborers. Tenancy and sharecropping characterized the bulk of Southern agriculture. African American farmers toiled under the weight of vicious racism, intense poverty, and constrained labor mobility. Poor white Southern farmers fared only slightly better. In 1900, agricultural labor was abysmally compensated relative to other labor: a year of farm-work earned an average income of $260, while nonfarmworkers averaged $622.⁷ These factors contributed to substantial rural out-migration, particularly as rising prices for arable land in the West squeezed opportunities for rural resettlement. Growth in number of farms, cultivated acres, and rural population slowed considerably from Gilded Age breakneck paces, and the 1910 census ominously reported that, while national and urban populations had grown at 21 percent and 35 percent, respectively, the rural population had grown only 11 percent, and it was “probable that the agricultural population had increased even less rapidly.” States ringing the Great Lakes reported slight declines in rural populations for the first time in their history.⁸

For many elite commentators, the rough truths of rural poverty made fine clay for more sensational narratives about a civilizational decline rooted in the reproductive implications of urbanization. Capturing this perspective in a 1901 essay in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross coined the term “race suicide” to describe a reproductive crisis in which the “higher [Anglo Saxon] race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself” by failing to procreate as prolifically as members of the “inferior race[s].” Ross’s position took historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential “frontier thesis,” which held that access to the Western frontier provided both stability and dynamism to American society, and stretched it into a commentary on the invidious demographic effects of frontier closure and accompanying urbanization.⁹ As Ross explained it, once acclimated to the luxuries of the city, the white, middle-class “gradually delay[ed] marriage and restrict[ed] the size of the family,” allowing urban immigrants from inferior races to demographically eclipse “the prudent, self-respecting natives.” Ross consoled readers that, in the United States, recent experiences on the frontier might stave off race suicide for a time. “The American … has been chiefly a farmer and is only beginning to expose himself to the deteriorating influences of city and factory,” he wrote.¹⁰ Warnings of race suicide received wider public attention when, beginning in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt used the term in letters and speeches to condemn those who shirked their reproductive duties and became “criminal against the race.”¹¹ In April 1903, when Roosevelt embarked on a Western speaking tour, historian Gail Bederman notes, he “grabbed the chance to encourage the American race to breed” and placed the menace of an urbanization-driven race suicide in the headlines of many American newspapers.¹²

Historians have often filed these sentiments under the pervasive antiurbanism of the early twentieth century in the United States, but this particular brand of anti-urbanism depended upon concomitant tales of rural degeneracy.¹³ The dangers to gendered and racial order posed by urbanization reiterated a well-established nostalgic agrarianism that traced back, at least, to Jeffersonian celebrations of yeoman farmers, and it capitalized on the white middle class’s discomfort with the visible ethnic and racial diversity abounding in the nation’s bustling metropolises. But for Roosevelt, Ross, and many other prophets of race suicide, the countryside’s presumed fecundity went hand in hand with the need for rural reform, and proponents of rural reform usually assumed rural degeneracy and decline in its absence. Aside from being an inveterate proponent of race suicide and eugenic theory, Roosevelt was also the nation’s most powerful rural reformer and the convener of the National Commission on Country Life in 1908, arguably the climax of the progressive agricultural movement. In the same article in which he coined “race suicide,” Ross complained about “the listlessness and social decay noticeable in many of the rural communities and old historic towns on the Atlantic slope.” For Roosevelt and Ross, concerns about the vice and immorality of the city fueled the urgency of rural reform. The ailments of city and country reinforced a downward spiral in which excessive rural to urban migration created parasitic dependencies between a decadent metropolis and its degenerate hinterlands. “Cities have the best of the human material,” complained Orator Fuller Cook, a prominent eugenics advocate and plant scientist at the USDA, in an essay arguing for rural educational reform. “But [cities] spoil [human material] in the making, and must continue to import rural talent to make good the deterioration.”¹⁴

“Folk depletion,” as Ross would later call that “import [of] rural talent” to cities, proceeded precisely because of the abundant, fecund possibilities of rural bodies assumed by nostalgic agrarianism. By folk depletion, Ross meant the tendency of the best rural youth to abandon country life for excitement and profit in the city. Those who remained on the farm, according to this narrative, were typically the least intelligent and moral, and rural isolation did little to improve the situation. Ross memorably quoted one rural informant who scoffed at the supposed “purity of the open country.… The moral conditions among our country boys and girls are worse than in the lowest tenement house in New York.” On long and lonely winter nights, the informant continued, “What is more natural than that the boys should get together in the barn and while away the long winter evenings talking obscenity, telling filthy stories, recounting sex exploits, encouraging one another in vileness, perhaps indulging in unnatural practices?” What could it mean for the farm boys to behave “naturally … unnatural”? Agrarianism held that farms were naturally more fecund and conducive to reproductivity than the sterile mechanization of the city. But, as Cook warned, “the instincts which lie at the basis of the family and the preservation and development of the race are likewise capable of endless perversions.” As uncontrolled out-migration disrupted social constraints, it also eroded the outlets that guided farm boys’ surging libidos to fruitful marriage and procreation. The natural desires of farm boys thus gave way to unnatural practices. But the situation was remediable, Ross argued, by rationalizing and managing rural out-migration. Ross’s informant’s perspective, like Cook’s, contained the seeds of both modernist and agrarian logics: they reaffirmed the countryside’s unique reproductive potential even as they insisted that such human fertility be larded as jealously as the soil’s.¹⁵

Ross’s concerns about farm boys’ “unnatural practices” dovetailed with broader worries about the mounting perversity and degeneracy of the white, rural poor. Rather than calling attention to the extreme material deprivations of rural life, these narratives often reframed the unsightliness of rural poverty as a moral, mental, and genetic pathology. A host of eugenic family studies depicted the rural remnants as thoroughly perverse and degraded, partly to justify the more rational governance of human desire and reproduction. Studies of the Jukes (1877 and 1916), the Kallikaks (1912), the Nams (1912), and the Hill families (1912), among others, identified white, poor rural families as wellsprings of congenital “idiocy,” criminality, and mental disease wrought of extensive incest and poor breeding.¹⁶ In their 1919 study of Ohio country churches, Gifford Pinchot and Charles Otis Gill echoed concerns about inbreeding when they noted pervasive sexual immorality in rural communities with “inefficient churches.” Pinchot and Gill warned: “Syphilitic and other venereal diseases are common and increasing over whole counties. While in some communities nearly every family is afflicted with inherited or infectious disease. Many cases of incest are known, inbreeding is rife. Imbeciles, feebleminded, and delinquents are numerous.”¹⁷ Doctors also pointed to the surprising prevalence of venereal diseases among rural residents. One study of Michigan, for example, found that syphilis infections were present in nearly a third of all the autopsies of rural residents, a rate of prevalence considerably higher than those found in urban communities. (Other doctors argued that the study’s conclusions were an artifact of a less rigorous diagnostic standard.) By 1920, medical authorities cited pervasive degeneracy and venereal disease to explain why, during World War I, rural men had been disproportionately found unfit for military service.¹⁸

Although such reports of rural degeneracy made broad generalizations about the collective pathologies of rural spaces, rural reformers typically used tales of malformed reproduction to justify personal rather than structural reform. “These sad stories of rural degeneracy must not make us pessimists,” warned George Walter Fiske, a junior dean at the Oberlin Theological Seminary, in The Challenge of the Country (1912). “These communities however warn us that even self-respecting rural villages are in danger of following the same sad process of decay unless they are kept on the high plane of wholesome Christian living and community efficiency.”¹⁹ Fiske linked the “rural problem” to “social and economic adjustment,” noting that degeneracy was most acute “in the isolated places among the hills or in unfertile sections which have been deserted by the ambitious and intelligent, leaving a pitiable residuum of ‘poor whites’ behind.” Solutions to rural degeneracy encompassed a broad variety of rural reforms, from encouraging scientific agriculture to better recreational opportunities in rural communities. At the heart of all these efforts, however, resided the unifying assumption that personal transformation was both the object and the instrument of rural reform. As Liberty Hyde Bailey, a leading agricultural progressive and dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, wrote in The State and the Farmer (1908): “The great country problems are now human rather than technically agricultural.” To ensure that the rural labor force could meet the needs of progressive agriculture, reformers schemed to modernize all elements of rural living—first and foremost, through education. “We much need to know how to use our increasing technical knowledge,” Bailey continued, “and to systematize it into practical ideals of personal living.”²⁰

Such a strategy of education hinged on the transformative possibilities of youth. Uprooted youth were at the heart of Ross’s theory of folk depletion. Turn-of-the-century education reformers and child-development theorists spoke of youth as the key moment of personal development, the period when individual personality was cast irrevocably toward normalcy or aberrance, health or perversion.²¹ Their supposed flexibility made young people both ideal subjects for personal reform and potent threats to social stability, and that double bind only intensified the focus on youth in discussions of the “rural problem.” For example, Fiske emphasized youth by including “the country boy,” smiling and towheaded, in The Challenge of the Country’s frontispiece. “Why does he want to leave his father’s farm to go to the city?” wondered the picture’s caption. “He ought to be able to find his highest happiness and usefulness in the country, his native environment, where he is sadly needed.” Fiske summarized his youth-oriented approach to the “peril of rural depletion and threatened degeneracy” as a call to “consecrated young manhood and womanhood” to become the agents of a “reconstructed rural life.”²²

A reconstructed rural life might keep the best youth on farms, but it demanded better methods that extended expert lessons into rural communities and homes. Proponents of agricultural extension argued that their innovative methods effectively circulated the advice of university professors and USDA officials in rural communities and, in the process, discredited their homespun skeptics, scoffers, and critics. Federal support for agricultural extension was eventually forthcoming, thanks in no small part to the work of Seaman Knapp. Knapp was born in upstate New York in 1833 and educated at Union College. Over the course of five decades, he became one of the nation’s most prolific agriculturalists. He served as the second president of Iowa State Agricultural College before leaving the position in 1886 to operate a rice plantation in Louisiana. His time in Iowa also introduced him to “Tama” James Wilson, the future secretary of agriculture in the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1898, Knapp journeyed to Japan, China, and the Philippines on behalf of the USDA to gather exceptional rice seed and study rice cultivation practices. He made similar trips to East Asia for the USDA in 1901 and to Puerto Rico in 1902. In 1902, he was appointed “Special Agent for the Promotion of Agriculture in the South” for the USDA.

Figure 2. “The Country Boy,” frontispiece to George Walter Fiske’s The Challenge of the Country (1912).

Knapp believed that educating Southern farmers about correct agricultural practices could ensure prosperity even amid the boll weevil blight. He established an experimental farm in Terrell, Texas, where local farmers could cultivate plots using his methods. Local elites contributed to a guaranty fund that would cover the risks for participants, while Knapp and the USDA provided advice and instruction. The scheme worked beautifully. One demonstrator, Walter Porter, claimed a $700 profit, a result that was widely publicized. Wilson solicited an emergency appropriation from Congress for $40,000—loosely justified by the continuing advance of the boll weevil—which Knapp spent, with Wilson’s approval, on the creation of more demonstration farms and the hiring of “cooperative demonstration agents.” Knapp built an ambitious network of agricultural extension throughout the South, broad enough to reach all rural residents, young and old, white and black. He also hired African American home demonstrators, starting with Thomas Campbell of Alabama. By 1910, the General Education Board, flush with Rockefeller money, had matched the USDA’s contributions, which it eventually exceeded, all the while leaving Knapp fully in control of the administration of the network. In 1911, when Knapp died, the USDA employed 450 cooperative demonstrators in twelve states.²³

Knapp instructed his agents to work with youth in addition to adults. Such an approach attended to the problem of restless farm youth and offered satisfaction to those boys and girls most likely to contribute to Ross’s folk depletion. But it rested as well on the strategic possibilities of targeting youth. Knapp recognized that, by working with youth, his agents could bypass his most resistant rural critics altogether. He hired county superintendents to oversee youth clubs at the local level and enlisted other educators to organize club work across entire states. In 1909, for example, he hired Luther N. Duncan, a young professor of agriculture at Alabama Polytechnic, to supervise club work across the state. In 1913, the USDA claimed seventy thousand “boy demonstrators” and thirty thousand “girl demonstrators” in the South working under the supervision of O. B. Martin, the agriculturalist in charge of boys’ and girls’ club work. As political scientist Daniel P. Carpenter notes, “Knapp set out to transform southern agriculture through the systematic education of farm youth.”²⁴ It is the “through” in Carpenter’s description that needs emphasis. In its fully developed form, extension made rural youth into conduits for federal power and capital-intensive agriculture. In that scheme, a focus on children created a peculiar dependency. By firmly planting children in country soil, a government agency promised healthy reproduction to rural America. But the multiplication of healthy boys and girls on American farms also multiplied points of contact, allies, and agents for an expanding technocratic state, extending its reach into scattered parlors, orchards, and barns. As youth became a strategy of development in those spaces, normal social reproduction increasingly aligned with the robust capacity of the federal state, particularly the USDA.

* * *

Cultural anxieties about rural degeneracy and dreams of perfected futures converged in the figure of the rural child, and they took shape as practical problems of the education, rearing, and development of rural children. The first rural youth clubs emerged from an alliance drawn from school superintendents, wealthy farmers, country bankers, and university professors, with the USDA only later joining as the institution best situated to mediate among the potentially conflicting interests of those varied players. In the earliest, experimental iterations, rural youth clubs supplemented ailing country schoolhouses, to the delight of agricultural and educational reformers. In addition to blending agricultural and educational expertise in a single unified network, rural youth clubs depended upon a reexamination of rural homes, families, and parenting: What role did the internal dynamics of rural families play in the problem of rural degeneracy? Were rural parents to blame? How could reformers correct parents already unwilling to accept the tested, profitable wisdom of agricultural experts? Rural youth clubs promised to bypass two rotten players driving rural degeneracy: bad parents and bad schools.

Seaman Knapp’s focus on rural youth offered the first federal support for rural youth clubs. He expanded on a class of programs in which agricultural progressives proposed to address two lingering problems: the reluctance of farmers to accept the suggestions of agricultural experts; and the inability of rural schools to meet the vocational needs of rural youth. Agricultural progressives tended to regard these problems as interrelated. Because rural schools failed to address the needs of rural youth, farmers dismissed the insights of education in general and the rigorous scientific thinking required of modern agriculture. Because farmers sneered at book farming, they also refused to recognize the potential of a comprehensive education system. While rural public schools could hardly be done away with, agricultural extension programs could reach rural youth on the farm directly. Extension programs for youth began with the notion of attracting youth through contests but quickly expanded into more comprehensive club programs in which rural youth gathered in small groups to receive instruction in agriculture and home economics. Through these programs, agricultural progressives believed that they could insinuate themselves into ordinary farm households that were otherwise resistant to modern methods, create new allies, and shape the next generation of rural people.

By 1900, Will Otwell had witnessed the frustrating apathy of farmers in his community toward the recommendations of scientific agriculture. As secretary of his county farmers’ institute in central Illinois, he assisted the president of the institute in organizing a meeting. After running ads in thirteen papers throughout the county, the president opened the doors several hours early in anticipation of a great audience of farmers. Attendance disappointed. The institute chaplain led the crowd of three, a count that included Otwell, the president, and the chaplain, in “a fervent prayer for the officers of the organization.” For the next meeting, the president changed tactics. He commissioned the printing of five hundred “gilt-edged programmes” and mailed them, “like wedding invitations, in nice square envelopes,” to the farmers of the county. Attendance improved to only two dozen. The president resigned in embarrassment.²⁵

Otwell succeeded to the presidency of the institute and tried an entirely different approach. First, he contacted successful corn growers from around the region and “procured 12 samples of first-class seed corn.” Next, he summoned the leading farmers of the county and arranged for them to produce from the samples, at two dollars per bushel, a supply of seed corn. After some fund-raising, Otwell offered as much of the seed as could be sent for one cent of postage to any boy under eighteen, with the promise of forty one-dollar premiums and one two-horse plow awarded to the most outstanding results. The boys were instructed to attend the farmers’ institute so that they could have their corn scored by a professor from the college at Champaign. The entire county buzzed in anticipation of the institute. When the appointed day arrived, scores of boys with bushels of corn and more than five hundred adult farmers flooded the meeting. The next year, Otwell repeated the contest—this time, with more lavish prizes. Fifteen hundred boys competed for the prizes in each of the successive years, and Otwell’s contest drew attention and praise all over the state. His method attracted to the institute farm boys and “[f]armers who two years before would not attend, and who boldly asserted that ‘they had forgotten more than those speakers would ever find out.’” The USDA’s Dick Crosby glowed that “the problem of arousing an interest in farmers’ institutes … has been solved. The farmers were reached through their children, and the interest thus aroused will be handed down to their children’s children.”²⁶ While corn contests were not Otwell’s unique innovation, his experiences were representative of many agricultural progressives who found children more receptive to their lessons than parents were.

Educational reformers identified rural schools as an unusually thorny problem in the national educational landscape. Because of low population density, rural schools usually enrolled fewer than several dozen students spread over twelve grades, all of whom were instructed by a single teacher in a single room—frequently a dilapidated room. As late as 1920, half of the nation’s schoolchildren lived in rural sections; in the same year, nearly 200,000 one-room schools still operated in the American countryside.²⁷ The low pay, unattractive living conditions, and even more miserable working conditions associated with rural teaching made attracting and retaining qualified educators difficult. Desperate for teachers, Horace Culter and Julia Madge Stone lamented in 1913, rural schools often employed newly minted educators who, “if they are successful … go into the city, simply because the city would pay more than the country was willing to pay.”²⁸ Even with competent teachers, rural schools often focused only on a curriculum of writing, reading, and arithmetic. Educational reformers derided that focus as inadequate for the needs of rural students and as unlikely to attract their interest. To accommodate demand for child labor on farms, many country schools were in session for only twenty to thirty weeks during the year. To make matters worse, distances and parental apathy meant that some farm children avoided school altogether. Even as educational reformers identified serious problems with rural schools, their solutions—school consolidation, mandatory attendance, professionalization, and more extensive state and federal oversight—expanded the prerogatives of agents of the state at the expense of parental and local control. As educational reformers depicted their programs as technocratic, apolitical solutions to rural social problems, many rural people bitterly resisted them as the political encroachments of meddling outsiders.²⁹

Rural reformers comfortable with increasing the state’s rural reach, however, found convenient common cause with school reformers. For example, the National Commission on Country Life placed the improvement of rural schools at the forefront of its recommendations to the nation. President Theodore Roosevelt asked Liberty Hyde Bailey to chair the commission and appointed to it sundry prominent agricultural progressives, including “Uncle” Henry Wallace, a successful Iowa commercial farmer and publisher of Wallaces Farmer; Kenyon Butterfield, president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College; and Gifford Pinchot, the prolific chief of the U.S. Forest Service and later coauthor of Six Thousand Country Churches and governor of Pennsylvania. The commission solicited input from around the nation, sending out half a million circular letters and holding public hearings in thirty locations across the country. In January 1909, it issued its findings. “The subject of paramount importance in our correspondence and in the hearings is education,” stated the commission. “In every part of the United States there seems to be one mind, on the part of those capable of judging, on the necessity of redirecting the rural schools. There is no such unanimity on any other Subject” Poor rural schools, the commission reported, were responsible for virtually all the problems of rural life, “ineffective farming, lack of ideals, and the drift to town.”³⁰

Rural schools were not deteriorating, the report contended; rather, they were in a state of “arrested development” and were failing to adapt themselves to the evolving needs of rural people. This was most acutely apparent in the absence of instruction in agriculture and home economics in rural schools. The commission recommended several changes to address these problems. There would need to be a greater curricular emphasis on the “real needs of the people” in rural schools—agriculture and the “home subjects,” in particular. A significant part of the solution would also come from restructuring the system of rural education entirely, making rural schools only a small part of a larger comprehensive educational program. Rural educators needed to tear down the barrier between homes and schools and the similarly false division between work and learning. Rural educational reformers should better integrate schoolteachers into rural communities and create a complementary system of “continuing education” outside schools through extension. The USDA, the commission concluded, provided the “best extension work now proceeding in this country,” and its program, including “boys’ and girls’ clubs of many kinds,” should be emulated and systematized nationwide.³¹

The “boys’ and girls’ clubs” that the report referenced had initially blossomed without the benefit of explicit federal support but had instead been the innovation of rural school superintendents. By the time the Louisiana Purchase Exposition asked Will Otwell to hold a statewide contest and to exhibit the results in the Palace of Agriculture in 1904, eight thousand boys were enrolled in his corn contests. Educators quickly recognized that these contests offered an entry point for a more elaborate vocational education in the form of regular youth clubs. “The State College of Agriculture, the Illinois Farmers’ Institute, and the county institute secretaries and county superintendents of schools” encouraged corn contestants to form clubs where they could meet to discuss their methods and results under the supervision of master farmers and expert agriculturalists. O. J. Kern, a school superintendent in Winnebago County, founded the first such club in the state in February 1902 and attracted thirty-two members.³² By 1905, two thousand boys across the state belonged to “corn” or “experiment” clubs. The clubs connected promoters of progressive agriculture with individual farmers and rural youth. Traveling libraries regularly visited the clubs and offered the boys access to a “liberal sprinkling of standard agricultural books, and the bulletins and other publications of the State experiment station and of the United States Department of Agriculture.” Club leaders invited successful farmers, professors of agriculture, and other agricultural experts to speak to their members. Clubs also toured the more prosperous farms in their counties and occasionally embarked on longer trips to institutes, experiment stations, and agricultural colleges. At the conclusion of the year, club leaders awarded exemplary members a “diploma or other certificates” to mark their efforts. While most clubs focused on the cultivation of corn, the clubs also provided a venue to discuss other crops and more generic farming issues. Though organized in coordination with educational professionals, the early Illinois boys’ club movement fused state subsidies with private support to promote progressive agriculture outside the benighted country schoolhouse.³³

Similar efforts developed simultaneously across the Corn Belt and in the Deep South, winning attention and support from Seaman Knapp.³⁴ While early clubs were similar to “nature study” clubs in some ways, they focused on practical problems involved in agricultural production. A. B. Graham organized corn and tomato clubs in western Ohio, holding the first meetings in the basement of the Springfield public building in January 1902. He explained that the clubs would teach boys “elementary knowledge” about agriculture, just as girls would learn “the simplest facts of domestic economy,” and would “inspire young men and young women to further their education in the science of agriculture or domestic science.”³⁵ William H. Smith, superintendent of education in Holmes County, Mississippi, organized corn clubs for boys and “culture study” clubs for girls in 1906. His work caught Knapp’s eye, and, after 1907, Knapp promoted similar programs in all states where his cooperative demonstrators worked.³⁶

From the start, the Southern clubs interested adults in the agricultural activities of their children and created a new channel of communication between farmers and agricultural experts. Earlie Cleveland of Decatur, Mississippi, reported that his previously indifferent father was now invested in the practices of scientific agriculture. Papa Cleveland could be found “hustling Round for seed corn” to help his son improve his contest acre of corn. The Boykin brothers of Maury, Virginia, wrote that “Papa and Mama are both interested in this work. They both help us and are proud of our efforts.” Loucas Puckett of Dresden, Tennessee, proudly announced that he had his “father and mother interested in the Agricultural work” through his club activities. At other times, the corn clubs pitted rural children against their parents. Perry T. Dill of Taylor, South Carolina, provided Knapp with his father’s address and requested that, though his father was not in demonstration work, the Department of Agriculture should write to him and give him “any thing you have to help him in his farm work.” Though Paul Burtner’s father was “simply not on our side,” the Harrisonburg, Virginia, boy thought that his father would “gratefully receive any bulletins or other literature.… I am hopeful of winning him over.” In these cases, the clubs created persistent allies inside rural homes.³⁷

Although Knapp’s support was important, Oscar Herman Benson, the USDA’s club expert in the Northern states, honed Knapp’s philosophy further by explaining how youth work, more than any other phase of extension, had the potential to convert farmers to the gospel of scientific agriculture. Benson played a crucial role in the early formation of the agricultural youth club movement, presiding over Northern club work for almost a decade before leaving to run the Junior Achievement Bureau in 1920. Benson, born and raised on a farm in southwest Iowa, studied at the University of Iowa, Iowa State Teachers’ College, and, eventually, the University of Chicago.³⁸ At the turn of the century, the University of Chicago was a hive of progressivism and home to some of the leading advocates of educational reform, including John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Colonel Francis Parker. Dewey and other progressive education reformers rejected the distinction between “ethical consciousness (concerned with ends)” and “practical execution (the employment of means)” in education.³⁹ Upon his return to Iowa as superintendent of education for Wright County, Benson merged some of Dewey’s principles with the teachings of “corn evangelist” P. G. Holden, using the “club acre” on the farm to be “the laboratory for the rural school.”⁴⁰ William J. Spillman, the head of the Office of Farm Management for the northern and western states at the USDA, impressed with Knapp’s work in the South, hoped to replicate a similar extension system across the North, including the now-famous Southern corn and canning clubs. Benson captured Spillman’s attention and, in 1910, Benson was hired by the Bureau of Plant Industry to supervise and promote club work throughout the North. Working in cooperation with county superintendents of education, USDA field agents, and agricultural specialists at land-grant colleges, Benson concentrated on spreading corn clubs for boys and canning clubs for girls.⁴¹

According to Benson, corn clubs advanced a host of objectives, both practical and abstract. He argued that corn clubs promoted efficient, profitable corn agriculture by stimulating the competitive interests of rural boys and providing them with the needed intellectual and material support. Boys were urged to cultivate no less than one acre of corn and to lavish it with as much care, attention, and fertilizer as they could spare. They were also required to “follow instructions,” regularly attend club meetings and sponsored talks, and keep detailed records of their work, which would be submitted to club organizers. The results would be placed in competition and premiums awarded on the basis of a formula that took into account yield, profit, quality of their county fair exhibit, and quality of their project records. Exceptional results would be entered in a national contest, known as the “All Star Corn Clubs.” Benson believed that the competitive instincts of participants would push them to integrate “the best known methods of soil-building, selection of seed, [and] seed tests” to secure the highest yield and greatest profits. The practice of scientific agriculture could then “offer a medium through which interest, inspiration, and careful direction can be given to the average boy now in rural life.” More abstractly, corn clubs “adapt[ed] the boy to his agricultural environments and ma[d]e him capable of self-expression within th[o]se environments.” Clubs provided “intellectual guidance” and promoted “careful observation, cultural comparison and investigation.” Together, these features transformed education previously defined by sterile lectures into a dynamic experience that spanned schoolhouse, farmhouse, and field. “The ‘club interest,’” Benson wrote, “becomes the connecting link between parent and teacher, farm and school, and last but not least it forms a cooperative atmosphere in which rural boys may be saved to the highest ideals of rural life.”⁴²

Unlike reformers who sought to remasculate the increasingly urban American white, middle class through sport, conservation, and wilderness excursions, Benson promoted rural-focused solutions to the drift to the city, grounded in his abiding faith in scientific agriculture and Christian devotion. “I am a profound believer in the sacredness of God’s earth,” he told a gathering of the South Carolina State Teachers’ Association in 1911. “My kind of religion means a consecration of our ‘acres of soil,’ our bodies, and the soul within. And this kind of religion will not permit the continuation of our national waste in soil fertility and the criminal desecration of our great agriculture.” This “desecration of ‘Holy Ground’” proceeded, Benson argued, because the “depopulation of rural communities and the rapid growth of our already congested centers of population” had left few desirable youth to take over farming. Rather, the ignorant and ignoble tended crops as farms increasingly drew their labor from a “few technical schools in large cities, reformatories, [and] penitentiaries.” “[I]t would seem impossible,” Benson complained, “to conserve our industrial interests and our American agriculture without increasing in youthful crime.” Rural youth needed to be educated in practical agriculture and to be taught the values that would make them excellent farmers. Anything less risked not only the health of the countryside but the vitality of the entire American civilization.⁴³

Rural parents—particularly, stubborn farm fathers—posed a serious obstacle to Benson’s planned “conservation” of rural fertility. “You may work with the father from now until doomsday and never wholly succeed in changing his bad habits and getting him to adopt 100 percent value of your recommendations,” Benson complained in 1915. “[The farmer] will vote for you,” he continued, “endorse what you say, and go right back to his home farm and barnyard, put into practice perhaps a part of your instructions, but in the main he will cling to many of his old ones.” Adult educational programs unaccompanied by club work, according to Benson, were “a great waste … because after you have spent your millions of dollars to train the adult farmer and his wife you will have to begin all over again in the next generation.”⁴⁴

When Benson noted the intractable stubbornness of farmers, he invoked a stock figure from progressive agricultural literature: the stubborn rural patriarch who mistreated his son and drove him to the city. In this figure, agricultural progressives slyly moralized poor farming practices, casting them as a sure route to the exploitation of rural children and the dissolution of rural families. Inefficient dairy operations, complained Wilbur Fraser in the Berkshire World and Corn Belt Stockman, generated drudgery that “drives all the bright boys from the farm.… The only way a man with a herd as poor as this can hold the business together at all is by having his children do a large amount of work … for which they receive no compensation.” A 1910 article in the Prairie Farmer quoted a number of city-bound country lads. One blasted “the narrow-minded and selfish attitude of farmers toward their sons.” Another young man complained about overwork, noting that it was “not the fault of farm life” but of rural fathers who practiced “unbusinesslike management and unscientific operation.” A third young man indicated that he would like to stay on the farm, but his “unresponsive … very poor” father “could not agree” to his modern techniques, and so he departed. A short narrative called “Why One Boy Left the Farm” dramatized the situation succinctly. Jim, a boy with a particularly tyrannical father, fled to the city, though his “whole nature revolted against the surroundings.” Physically depleted by the bad air and dim light of a tenement house and morally depleted by his job delivering ice to saloons, Jim nevertheless had the financial independence that his father had denied him. Concluding his narrative, he wrote to his mother and suggested that he might return only “if father will do the right thing by me.”⁴⁵

Jim’s story underscored how, as rural reformers saw it, negligent rural parents interfered with even the most basic elements of rural reproduction and contributed to rural degeneracy. By impoverishing and degrading their sons, stubborn fathers made it impossible for them to court young ladies and create their own families. City-bound boys—at least, the adults who spoke for them in the progressive agriculture press—complained frequently about the hopeless conditions for romance on the farm. For example, Jim reported that his family had become disgusted when he scraped together enough money to purchase a Christmas gift for a “little black-eyed miss.” The present “made hard feelings at home” because his sister, Florence, “had no beau” and Jim was expected to “act in that capacity.” With hardly enough money or time to court any other girls, Jim felt pressured to romance his sister, a twist to the story that simultaneously deployed the twin rural menaces of incest and poverty. Rural reformer Warren H. Wilson implied a different unsavory outcome. Noting the widespread exploitation of the countryside’s “crop of boys,” he relayed the story of one “exploiting father” who refused to let his son marry “because the old man was accustomed to collect the boy’s wages.… [The boy] had to become a woman’s husband to escape from being his father’s property.” Wilson suggested that treating boys like “work-cattle” in this way had disturbingly literal consequences: “When a boy smells like a cow every time he comes into a closed room his mother, instead of scolding him, should help him to find associates among ladies rather than bovines. That boy is in danger of leaving the farm for hatred of it, or sinking to an animal level and ceasing to care. In the former case the farm loses him. In the latter case the church loses him; the school, the grange and the social gathering lose him, and the stable gets him.” Wilson posited a startling trade-off: boys could have romance “among ladies” or associations in the stables, but never both. Rural romance battled in a zero-sum game with a exploitative, parent-driven bestialization, the stakes of which were healthy boys and healthy rural reproduction. A 1912 article in Wallaces Farmer explicitly linked the absence of social interactions among rural boys and girls through planned recreation and amusements back to the greatest rural menace, warning that “a playless countryside marks the beginning of degeneracy in that section.”⁴⁶

Rural reformers could not remove the menace of bad rural parents entirely, but Benson reasoned that youth clubs, at the very least, could entice parental cooperation. Without youth clubs, Benson memorably put it, the county agent was worse off than the greenest traveling salesman. Salesmen always knew to “first give attention to the children as they enter the door yard or the household by chanting to, rocking and kissing the babies, before the[y] introduce themselves and their subject to the adult members of the family.” This approach was commonsense enough to be called “orthodox business practice.” It was difficult “to go direct to the farmer and convince him of the necessity for a change of practice.” If the farmer is “approached through his boy or girl,” however, “a welcome is at once extended” because “every normal parent loves the man or woman who will give attention, direction, and leadership to the children.” Some would call this “exploitation,” Benson noted, but club work brought “maximum returns in net profits, yields, [and] economic adjustment of project[s] into the farm unit.” While it advanced the goals of the USDA and agricultural progressives, it did so, according to Benson, through bettering the participant, the family, and the community.⁴⁷

Working with youth offered an immediate entry point for reformers, but the structure of the corn contest promised a longer-term pecuniary interest to skeptical farmers. The “corn club acre” could valuably, and deceptively, advertise the USDA’s preferred agricultural methods. Benson insisted on one-acre clubs as the basis for corn work because it would “limit work to a piece of land that can be properly prepared, fertilized, and managed during the growing season.”⁴⁸ This limiting principle enabled one-acre projects to be intensively farmed in ways that were not feasible or efficient for larger plots. Seduced by premiums and promises of impressive yields, farmers often offered their sons their best acre and ample fertilizer to farm it. Club organizers secured adequate supplies of premium seed. The boys, for their part, lavished far more attention on their single acre than most farmers could afford to spend on any individual acre. The results were corn yields that simply could not be replicated on a larger scale. A Monroe County, Indiana, corn club, for example, managed an average yield of 91 bushels per acre in 1918. The statewide average for corn yields was only 35 bushels per acre in the same year. A 1911 issue of Ohio Farmer boasted that the hundred best corn-club boys from around the nation had achieved an average yield of 133.7 bushels per acre, with the nation’s yield champion, Jerry Moore of South Carolina, obtaining an astounding yield of 228.7 bushels per acre. Prizewinning one-acre yields like those, circulated widely in newspapers, provided valuable publicity for progressive agriculture, though they seldom revealed the limitations implicit in the one-acre method. Club organizers hoped to impress or shame farmers into adopting their preferred methods, as well as to curry favor with other farmers by directly assisting their children. When the promise of amazing yields faltered, donated prizes and awards, worth $40,000 in 1911 alone, incented boys—and their fathers—to participate.⁴⁹

The astounding yields of the club acre were only the means; “a man for every boy,” as Benson put it, were the ends. For every child that was enrolled in club work, organizers endeavored to interest a parent or neighbor in club work and to have that adult regularly attending meetings and reading club literature. In this way, club work could accomplish more than simply improving the local school system. More ambitiously, club work transformed rural children into extensions of the USDA and made any adults who assisted them the same. “The boy, as a corn club member,” wrote Benson, “is a demonstrator for the State and the United States Department of Agriculture.… [T]he cooperator is a man who will agree to cooperate with the boy and the State and Government authorities in getting the best possible results from this club work.” By 1914, O. B. Martin’s clubs in the South and Benson’s clubs in the North and West enrolled more than 120,000 boys and girls and provided the USDA with access to farm households across the nation.⁵⁰

Club work evolved as a strategic adaptation for the promoters of progressive agriculture as well as a vital supplement to the troubled country school-house. Club work gave educators access to entire rural families and blurred the boundaries between agricultural and educational expertise. While those same families, particularly adult males, might reject the USDA’s book farming, club work enticed them by appealing to their pride and pocketbooks. Agricultural progressives hoped that club work could save households impoverished by the ignorance of negligent farm patriarchs. As debate surrounding the 1914 Smith-Lever Act makes clear, concern about rural social reproduction licensed and shaped the expansion of state authority in rural America. If agricultural extension was to reverse the withering of the countryside and carve out the rot of the cities, it would do so only by providing what rural fathers did not, remaking the fragile rural home, and bringing the state back into the farm.

* * *

The publicity and achievements generated by Benson’s and Knapp’s clubs helped agricultural progressives make the case for an institutionalized system of agricultural extension subsidized by federal monies. On the floor of the U.S. Congress, their congressional allies echoed Benson’s formulation of the problem, noting that, through agricultural extension, scientific agriculture could reach entire rural families. Congressmen argued that other efforts to promote scientific agriculture faltered because they could not penetrate the farm household and, thus, left the next generation of rural citizens unprepared for farmwork and unhappy with country living. Both advocates and critics of agricultural extension cited the ability of government agents to supplement patriarchal authority in rural communities. Its advocates did so by gesturing to the revolutionary potential of youth clubs; its critics, by decrying the bill’s “paternalism.” Frank Lever, the House sponsor of the Smith-Lever Act, announced in his committee report to the House, “If rural life is to be readjusted and agriculture dignified as a profession the country boy and girl must be made to know … that successful agriculture requires as much as does any other occupation in life.… The farm boy and girl can be taught that agriculture is the oldest and most dignified of the professions.”⁵¹

In 1914, a bipartisan alliance of legislators overcame a decade’s worth of opposition and finally passed the Smith-Lever Act through the United States Congress. The Smith-Lever Act provided the first standing federal appropriation for agricultural extension and, through it, for agricultural youth clubs. Pressure had been building on Congress to provide a regular appropriation for agricultural extension for several years. Knapp and Spillman had received public accolades for their extension work and eventually commanded the support of both agrarian and labor interests. Western populists worried that an extension system that traded on the USDA’s reputation but was financed with Rockefeller money gave private interests undue influence.

Multiple extension bills had floated through the 61st and 62nd Congresses—most notably, the McLaughlin Bill in 1909, the Dolliver Bill in 1910, and the Page Bill in 1912—but the chambers never managed to agree on a single piece of legislation. After Democrats ascended to control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency in the 1912 elections, supporters of extension in both chambers rallied around a bill authored by South Carolina Democrat Frank Asbury Lever. Lever first introduced his bill in 1913. It passed both chambers but died in conference. In 1914, he reintroduced it with additional support from Senate Republicans. The bill passed the House and Senate overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Woodrow Wilson on May 8, 1914. In the first year, it appropriated a flat sum of $10,000 to each state, as well as an additional $600,000 that would be distributed proportionate to each state’s share of the total national rural population. In seven succeeding years, the appropriation for the “proportionate” pool would increase by $500,000, until it reached a permanent annual appropriation of $4.1 million. In addition, states were required to appropriate matching funds to have any access to the proportionate pool. The total amount of funding was significant, given the size of the federal budget in the early twentieth century. The ultimate $4.7 million per annum price tag of extension amounted to around 2.1 percent of the $226 million in federal outlays, excluding defense and pension spending, in 1914. Because of the rapid expansion of federal budgets during and after World War I, the actual percentage of spending on extension was considerably less—only around 0.6 percent of federal spending, excluding defense and veterans’ pensions in 1923—but in 1914, the cost of extension constituted a considerable federal outlay.⁵²

In its final form, Smith-Lever provided for an extension system that largely institutionalized Knapp and Spillman’s existing program. The bill contained several controversial provisions that departed significantly from previous extension legislation. First, the administering department for the bill was the USDA rather than the Department of the Interior. Second, the bill authorized a cooperative demonstration agent system over a “farmers’ institute” model. (In the latter model, farmers traveled to an institute, usually at the state agricultural college, for a short course taught by professors of agriculture.) Third, rather than a model organized around towns, districts, or even states, the organizing unit for extension would primarily be the county—ideally, every county would have its own extension agent. Fourth, the bill excluded a broader program of vocational education, which had been present in earlier bills. Finally, while the extension system was to be administered in cooperation with the land-grant colleges, the colleges needed budgetary and programmatic approval from the USDA. Departments at the land-grant colleges managed day-to-day operations of the extension service, but the USDA retained ultimate control over the system. The legislation was a vital piece of state building that provided early twentieth-century national government with a means to monitor and regulate America’s sprawling rural spaces.⁵³

From its inception, supporters of a national agricultural extension program touted extension’s ability to transform rural society by reaching inside the farm household. County agents would become members of local communities, diagnosing its unique needs, forming deeper relationships with neighbors than professors could with students, and, generally, using their proximity to farmers as a way to strengthen the reputation of extension. This method relied on a collapse of the public and private and a desire to bring the forces of education directly into the home of the farmer to reach his wife and children. Club work exemplified this approach because it provided the apostles of progressive agriculture with access to individuals who, according to republican ideology, were excluded from public life. The state’s previous access to rural children had been strictly mediated by rotten country schoolhouses. If, as those apostles also held, the rural home was the fundamental unit of both agricultural production and rural social reproduction, reformers needed to insinuate themselves into farm households to reform not only agricultural practices but also domestic labor, hygiene, child rearing, and a host of other activities that determined the wholesome nature of the rural home.

The leading proponents of Smith-Lever in Congress emphasized that extension touched the farmer’s wife and children. Frank Asbury Lever contrasted this approach with previous efforts at agricultural education. “We have been spending 50 years trying to find an efficient agency for spreading this information throughout the country,” he complained before the House. “We have tried the Farmers’ Bulletin. We have tried the press. We have tried the lecture and the institute work.” These had “done good” but always fallen short of the desired end. By contrast, the bill would “set up a system of general demonstration” that addressed itself to the entire farm household. The genius of this approach was that it did not depend upon “writing to a man and saying that this is a better plan than he has or by standing up and talking to him and telling him it is a better plan.” Rather, agents of progressive agriculture proceeded “by personal contact.” They traveled to the farmer and “under his own vine and fig tree” demonstrated correct practices to “the man and woman and the boy and girl.”⁵⁴ Citing boys’ corn clubs and girls’ tomato clubs, Lever argued that extension reached rural youth directly, without interference from adults and parents. His gendering of this dynamic was highly revealing. Previous efforts—the bulletin, institute, and press—had failed partly because they were directed only to adult males. Those males resisted or ignored the knowledge provided by scientific agriculture, and their families suffered as a result. Agricultural extension, however, considered the fathers as only a single piece of the puzzle. Successful agricultural education would supplement patriarchal authority, reach women and children, and effectively address the fulcrum around which rural societies pivoted: the farm family.

Other advocates of the bill emphasized that only assistance to all members of farm households could stanch the drift to the city. Echoing concerns about rural degeneracy, Representative John Adair of Indiana noted that “many farms have already been deserted,” a serious cause for concern, considering the centrality of country life to human civilization. “You may burn down and destroy our splendid cities,” he said, paraphrasing William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, “and the wealth of the farms will rebuild them more beautiful than before; but destroy our farms, and our cities will decay and our people will starve.” Rural life needed to be “revolutionize[d].” It needed to be made “as attractive and as profitable as city life and this can be done only through a systematic effort to redirect rural methods and ideals.” Agricultural scientists possessed sufficient knowledge to enact the needed reforms but had no way of communicating it to rural people. This, Adair announced, was the genius of cooperative extension. Through “personal contact,” it “carr[ied] the truths of agriculture and home economics to the door of the farmer” and “ma[de] the field, the garden, the orchard, and even the parlor and the kitchen the classrooms.” The county agent and demonstrators would provide “leadership … along all lines of rural activity—social, economic, and financial” and become “the instrumentality through which the colleges, stations, and Department of Agriculture will speak.”⁵⁵

Opponents of the bill chafed at the alleged “paternalism” of government agents entering rural homes. Senator John Works of California worried that recent trends in legislation would produce a “spineless citizenship” utterly dependent upon “paternalistic aid.” Proponents of the bill, Works charged, were erecting a “paternalized government” and the United States was “on the downward road, not only to paternalism, but ultimately to socialism.”⁵⁶ Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut called it “paternalism” and an unprecedented exercise of federal power.⁵⁷ Representative John Joseph Fitzgerald, a conservative Democrat from New York, had no great objection to the idea of “a man of scientific attainments” going to farms and teaching agricultural techniques there. He objected, however, to a plan “by which an agent of the Federal Government shall be sent to every farm in the United States … to go into the farmer’s household and there to demonstrate, for his wife or for other female members of his family in charge of his household, the most practical and best methods of promoting domestic economy.” Fitzgerald considered such a plan “wholly obnoxious to our theory of government.”⁵⁸

By inveighing against government access to rural women and children, opponents of the act suggested that the “paternalism” that rankled was not simply government treating farmers like children but government supplanting farmers as the fathers of rural society. The farmer, Senator Franklin Lane quipped, “does not need some scientific person to come around and teach his wife how to stretch the beefsteak for supper in order to meet the demands of the family so much as he needs free access to the markets of the country and a fair price for his product after he raises it.”⁵⁹ Senator Thomas Sterling of South Dakota fumed about the bill’s displacement of rural paternal authority, calling the bill “the extreme of paternalism…. [N]othing like it has ever been attempted in Federal legislation.” Federal agricultural extension would “permit the enforced interference of the Federal Government in problems so commonplace, so everyday, so local and so individual as knowing how to plow and plant and fertilize, and knowing how to cook and sew and having a care for cleanliness and sanitation.” Government ownership of railroads was a minor intrusion by comparison. “The Government,” announced Sterling, “will not in owning and operating any railroad be in the business of fathering the enterprise and directing the conduct and work of the individual citizens.”⁶⁰

If few legislators found this argument compelling, it was perhaps because proponents of the legislation deployed even more dramatic gendered appeals. Like Adair and Lever, Representative Dudley Hughes of Georgia believed that extension would manifestly improve all elements of rural living because it reached entire households. Like other supporters of the legislation, Hughes worried about the deterioration of rural masculinity implicit in boys leaving farms for the city. But in that migration, Hughes also saw a profound threat to rural femininity, which he made clear in an extended meditation on the status of Southern soil. The “fertility” of “the mother of all” had been deteriorating because of poor practices and now needed to be “impregnated with artificial fertility.” Hughes identified the agricultural practices of African American farmers as the gravest threat to the “conservation of the soil.” African American farmers, he argued, cared little about the health of the soil, since they could leave the soil “denuded” and simply move to a different plot. “The soil is deteriorating rapidly for want of intelligent care, and it would be criminal on the part of those with whom the very destiny of the people rests to continue to delay and finally realize that they have been aroused too late,” announced Hughes. “The soil—the land—is an inheritance, handed down to man for humanity,” he concluded. “It belongs to future generations.” He articulated a gendered rationale for both Smith-Lever and an expanded federal presence in rural America: the failure of white, rural masculinity to preserve the fertility of the feminized landscape heralded civilizational decline and justified the state assuming the neglected prerogatives of farm patriarchs.⁶¹

Hughes’s confidence that extension would benefit African American farmers was, at best, misplaced and, at worst, disingenuous. Many of the bill’s chief advocates in the Senate—Hoke Smith of Georgia, Furnifold Simmons of North Carolina, and James K. Vardaman of Mississippi—were also architects of black disenfranchisement and Jim Crow in their states. Rhetoric about assisting African American farmers belied their efforts to degrade and impoverish African American extension. Corn Belt senators, led by Albert Cummins, a leading progressive Republican from Iowa, argued that extension funds should be distributed according to the number of acres of improved farmland in a given state—a formula that would benefit northern and western states at the expense of labor-intensive Southern agriculture. Hoke Smith, the bill’s sponsor in the chamber, proposed that the funds should be released according to the size of a state’s rural population. Cummins countered that, since funds would only be spent to educate white farmers, such a formula was unjust.⁶² Smith’s funding formula prevailed, but several other amendments attempted to direct funds to African American extension as well. Wesley Jones of Washington introduced an amendment, supported by the NAACP, that explicitly directed some of the appropriations to African American land-grant institutions. Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska successfully introduced an amendment to have the work conducted “without discrimination as to race.”⁶³ From there, the debate quickly devolved into a discussion of the “backward, uninitiative, unintelligent, incapable black race,” as John Sharp Williams of Mississippi put it, and the eventual removal of language protecting African American extension.⁶⁴ The cityward drift of rural youth was too dire a threat—the greatest “menace” to “our civilization,” according to Minnesota senator Moses Clapp—to be derailed by sectional jockeying. “The great city,” Clapp reported, “is the place where vice feeds upon itself, like a great festering sore thriving upon its own rottenness.” If a federally sponsored extension program could keep rural youth out of the city, it was money worth spending.⁶⁵

As the debate on Smith-Lever unfolded, proponents and opponents of the bill agreed to a series of revealing propositions: that the rural household was in disarray and rural fathers were an impediment to scientific agriculture; that this disarray fed the drift to the cities, rural degeneracy, and threatened the nation’s social reproduction; that the situation portended ill for American civilization; that the crisis demanded federal attention; and that the proposed plan of agricultural extension addressed itself precisely to that root ailment. At this point, legislators began to part ways. Opponents of the bill claimed that farmers were competent to rectify the situation if the state could ensure a fair market for agricultural products. Plans by the federal government to meddle directly in rural households, then, were unnecessary and potentially invidious. By usurping the role of the farmer as the father of rural society and possessor of uncontested authority within the rural home, government agents risked paternalism and the further degradation of the rural family. In contrast, supporters of the legislation considered the household-centered approach of extension one of its greatest virtues and accordingly emphasized the role of club work and domestic science in extension. From this perspective, male farmers had been obviously negligent and needed to share their authority with government agents, granting them access to their wives and children.

* * *

Dudley Hughes’s celebration of Southern soil located profound reproductive power beneath the cotton fields, orchards, and pastures that dotted the region’s countryside—a fecundity that needed to be jealously husbanded. This fertility crept into rural spaces and bodies, and in this way sustained alike the nation’s agriculture and vitality. Critics of the bill might quibble about who should do the husbanding, but they never contested this geography of social reproduction. With that point conceded, Smith-Lever’s proponents offered a vision of a rural future in which agricultural experts and state authorities worked with rural households to correct the damage done by negligent rural fathers. Truly unlocking the countryside’s fertility, however, was a generational project: a new generation of rural citizens was required, a generation amenable to scientific agriculture and state authority, and youth clubs for rural boys and girls were the surest means of producing it.

Proponents of agricultural youth clubs shared their confidence in the pliability of youth and the efficacy of this generational project with numerous other movements dedicated to guiding the development of American youth in the early twentieth century. Many other major American youth organizations—Scouting, YWCA, YMCA, the Camp Fire Girls—emerged as the part of Progressive Era reform movements directed at the character and bodies of middle-class youth. Most of those organizations focused on structuring the leisure time of youth to avoid the perils of vice and unwholesome associations in the city. Athletics, crafts, and supervised recreations provided youth with social interactions that the largely white, middle-class reformers found morally and gender-appropriate. Many youth organizations used engagement with the natural world through camping and nature study as a means of reforming the character of their members, reasoning that pristine nature could counteract the corrosive effects of city life. In this way, youth organizations hoped to escort the urban middle class through troubled adolescence and into maturity.⁶⁶

The agricultural youth clubs that eventually developed into 4-H started with the notion that youth were a vital component of a larger unit of economic production and social reproduction: the farm family. They addressed themselves first and foremost to the laboring bodies of rural youth to influence that larger unit. Other youth organizations focused on reforming the leisure activities of their participants, but agricultural youth clubs were addressed to farmwork, and their appeal was partly based on the promise of greater revenue for participants. By improving the labor practices of rural people, agricultural youth clubs could harness the true productive power of the country, stanch the drift to the city, and secure the civilization built on that labor. All participants in the debate on Smith-Lever agreed that rural society and American civilization were failing to adapt to the crucible of modernity. A crisis of modernity also mobilized other youth organizations: the notion that urban, industrial life was degraded and unwholesome was central to the missions and appeal of nearly all the organizations. Agricultural youth club work, however, depended upon a vision of that crisis focused on the countryside rather than on the city. Unlike other youth organizations, 4-H addressed itself exclusively to rural youth and concerned itself with the rural world as a physical place rather than as a nostalgic foil to urban life. Advocates of agricultural youth club work may have indulged in nostalgic agrarianism but not without being tempered by a personal knowledge of rural life: nearly every organizer hailed from the countryside and had worked on or operated a farm. Their vision emphasized that rural America could become modern and that a healthy modernity was necessarily one that integrated the knowledge and expertise that agriculturalists had developed. Rather than using the countryside as a therapeutic instrument to edify city dwellers—a taste of the premodern to make modernity bearable—agricultural youth clubs were intended to transform the countryside into a site of modernity and to retain and grow rural populations.

More than merely a personal transformation, agricultural youth clubs were designed to effect a much broader collective transformation of rural America. The ambition of that transformation demanded state action and support. It envisioned state power as an enduring and pervasive influence over rural life and in farm households, enacted by agricultural youth clubs, the USDA, the extension service, and land-grant colleges. Not surprisingly, while other youth organizations abetted government schemes over the years—all major youth organizations, for example, participated in wartime resource drives—no other major youth organization was directly administered by a federal agency nor was any predicated on the fundamental ideological acceptance of state authority and expertise. Whether it was appropriate for the state to intervene in rural households was the most basic and divisive question for those debating Smith-Lever. The passage of Smith-Lever—and the very existence of 4-H—affirmed the proposition that the federal government should be a source of scientific and cultural authority for rural Americans and that the vitality of American civilization depended upon that affirmation.

Six years after the passage of Smith-Lever, the national conversation was still dominated by pervasive fears of the degeneracy of rural society and the reproductive decline of white American civilization. In late September of 1920, the Census Bureau announced that the urban population had, at last, surpassed the population of the countryside, according to the results of the decennial census. This announcement unleashed another wave of worry and anxiety about the health of the countryside and the nation. “Evidently something is wrong with country life, its occupations and amusements, when so many cannot resist the ‘lure’ of the city,” opined the New York Times. Others wondered if the rise of the cities also meant the political ascendance of immigrants. The Chicago Daily Tribune “hope[d] that the balance of power in the affairs of the nation may remain for some time in the hands of a class of citizens of proved stability, strong in national feeling, not carried away by waves of alien sympathies.”⁶⁷ Frederic J. Haskin, writing in his regular column for the Los Angeles Times, was less oblique. “The America of our grandfathers,” he asserted, “was a land of blond men of Nordic or so-called Anglo-Saxon blood, who lived outdoors, herded cattle, tilled the soil, hunted, fished and sailed the seas from Arctic to Antarctic.” The new America, he continued, would be “a heavily populated country of short dark-skinned men, living … [in] crowded, complicated and enormous cities.” This was America’s troubling destiny, Haskin claimed, unless “the government gets down to the necessary work of creating more farms.”⁶⁸

Haskin would find little disagreement from club work experts at the Department of Agriculture. By 1920, the USDA employed a national staff of seventeen full-time specialists dedicated to club work, even as hundreds of county agents around the nation directly supervised club work increasingly under the name “4-H” and the symbol of the four-leafed clover. Led by Benson and O. B. Martin, club work specialists concurred with Haskin’s assessment that rural society was in decline and argued that the government needed to remake the rural home in order to save it. They concentrated their efforts on improving the agricultural practices of rural boys and the home-making labor of rural girls, operating under the theory that even if adults dismissed their lessons, youth would adopt them and create healthy and attractive households where the previous generation had failed. To make this operation as effective as possible, however, club specialists argued that they needed to make club work more uniform. The following decade witnessed efforts to expand 4-H club work and, at the same time, to strengthen the USDA’s power in the American countryside.