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CHAPTER TWO

Financial Intimacy and Rural Manhood

I pledge my head to clearer thinking …

—The 4-H Pledge

Where did the name “4-H” come from? Although the iconic clover and the “H” mnemonic originated in Iowa, before World War I the clubs were still referred to as “Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs” or “Junior Extension Clubs.” At a club conference in 1913, Mrs. Jane McKimmon, a North Carolina club organizer, pointed out the need for a catchier “brand name” that would help club members market their products to consumers. The conference pondered the question until Oscar Baker Martin, the USDA’s club agent for the South, suggested the moniker “4-H clubs.” Martin’s suggestion met with “unanimous approval,” and shortly after, an “artistic tomato label” with the name was created. “From that it was extended to other labels,” explained Martin, “not only in the Girls’ Work, but on the boxes of potatoes, seed corn, and other such thing which the boys had to sell. Then began the systematic campaign to raise and maintain standards in order that the 4-H brand might become favorably known.”¹

The term caught fire. USDA specialist Gertrude Warren used the term in a USDA pamphlet for the first time in 1918; by 1924, the USDA had trademarked “4-H” and its four-leafed clover symbol. During the 1920s, “4-H” appeared regularly in USDA literature, congressional hearings, and the press. Meanwhile, emblazoned “upon myriads of badges, caps, aprons, pennants, flags and standards,” the 4-H clover proliferated as the symbol of the movement “to make the best better.” That motto, suggested by USDA extension specialist Carrie Harrison and in wide use by 1919, provided only a minimal description of the program’s aim. In 1927, a national assembly of club leaders offered a clearer explanation in the form of a standard national 4-H pledge: “I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, and my health to better living for my club, my community, and my country.”²

The widespread adoption of the term “4-H,” as well as national club mottos, pledges, and symbols, was emblematic of a broader trend toward expansion and standardization of club work in the decade after the passage of the Smith-Lever Act. During that period, 4-H developed from an inchoate set of loosely affiliated clubs and contests to a well-organized network unified by a standard set of methods and symbols. Over the same period, the USDA also helped establish a set of institutions to supplement its own educational activities with fund-raising, lobbying, and leader training. These institutions—most notably, the National Committee on Boys and Girls Club Work (National Committee)—fused the publicly financed technocratic expertise of the USDA with the commercial capital of bankers, railroads, mail-order retailers, and agricultural technology firms. Through this alliance of state expertise, local voluntary labor, and private commercial capital, the 4-H clover sprouted in communities around the nation, enrolling more than 800,000 youth by the end of the decade and visibly “demonstrating” the USDA’s preferred brand of capital-intensive, debt-financed agriculture in every rural county.

Far from an incidental detail, the famous moniker’s genesis explained much about how 4-H functioned in the decade after the passage of Smith-Lever. Despite 4-H’s avowed educational and public-spirited purposes, profit motives and commercial transactions were integral components of 4-H’s identity. 4-H was a marketing device designed by state experts to help farm kids sell agricultural products to the rural public. Experts at the USDA also used 4-H to “sell” capital-intensive, debt-financed agriculture and technocratic expertise to rural Americans. And bankers and businessmen gave cheap loans and prizes to 4-H in the belief that it would prime the sale of financial products to the next generation of farmers. Among the various actors enticed by the 4-H movement, the clover planted visions—and seeds—of multiplying transactions from which future rural prosperity would grow. All these “sales” depended upon and reproduced a range of intimate registers—trust, loyalty, friendship, and affection—that were typically re-coded through the ubiquitous buzzword “cooperation.” By offering rural youth an arena for cooperation, club work cultivated spaces where the rising generation would be brought into proximity and contact with community members, bankers, merchants, and agricultural experts. Crucially, the cumulative effect of this combined economic and cultural project provided what I call “financial intimacy” or, in other words, intimacy—in the form of knowledge and social bonds—with and through capital. Financial intimacy entailed sustained relationships with numerous adults—primarily the bankers, businessmen, and county agents who arranged and supervised loans—but it also meant intimate familiarity with financial instruments. 4-H clubs offered rural youth the opportunity to practice their finances: practical experience with capital accumulation, manipulation, and mastery.

In the context of the critique of rural degeneracy and corresponding efforts to reform rural masculinity outlined in the previous chapter, the stakes of 4-H’s project of cultivating financial intimacy are clear: although 4-H broadened financial opportunities for farm girls, 4-H’s finance programs primarily benefited rural boys. Boys tended to enroll in the most capitalintensive projects, and club organizers usually presented the ideal subjects of loan programs as male. As controlled entrepreneurial simulations that concealed capitalist agriculture’s vices and proclaimed its virtues, 4-H projects also worked as gendering instruments. They offered everyday practices for masculine self-making and idealized specimens of adult masculinity. Loans provided rural boys with the means to buy a pig or calf, and the imperative to repay the loan encouraged efficiency, discipline, and precise financial record keeping, all characteristics deemed essential to propertied manhood. But commercial loans also laid the groundwork for sustained personal relationships with the fine examples of manhood that boys could not find at home. Club work vitally expanded the social universe of rural boys and exposed those boys to the example and influence of bankers, businessmen, and bureaucrats. From these intimacies, 4-H’s boosters dreamed, a generation of farmer-businessmen would grow.

For many rural Americans, two words defined the decade preceding the Great Depression: crisis and cooperation. Crisis was the economic and social blight that afflicted rural America throughout the decade, with an intensity not seen since the agricultural depressions of the 1890s. Cooperation, a ubiquitous buzzword of the age, was the tonic for that malady, prescribed by countless, breathless technocrats at the USDA and in the agricultural progressive press. Many historians have noted the explosion of cooperative agricultural marketing organizations in the 1920s, but cooperation functionally encompassed a much broader variety of social forms for rural Americans. Cooperation did mean engaging in collective economic action. However, it also required openness to various elite actors who, in previous decades, had provoked anger and skepticism from rural people. In 1919, leading agricultural progressive and president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Kenyon Butterfield, famously characterized this openness to the complementary interconnections of modern life as the “New Day” in American agriculture. The dawn of the New Day would bring professionals, experts, bankers, managers, and marketers into the fabric of everyday rural life through a variety of cooperative economic and civic organizations. Once embedded within communities, cooperative institutions would also quiet the radical and populist political agitation. By aligning farmers with urban business interests and the agents of the technocratic state, cooperation promised to make the American countryside safe for capitalism.³

Agricultural depressions in the late nineteenth century precipitated a swell of political unrest emanating from epicenters in the rural South and West. Farmers formed the core of the populist movement through agrarian organizations like the People’s Party and the Farmers’ Alliance. Populists were not reactionary antimodernists; rather, they promoted a striking agrarian futurist reform agenda. They envisioned a powerful governing network independent of metropolitan capital that was accountable to the interests of rural white landholders and integrated their knowledge and expertise in regulatory institutions. Nor were most populists anticapitalists. Rather, they hoped to reorient national institutions to create more favorable market conditions for agricultural commodities and to reinforce their own political influence. Populists, however, did agitate vociferously against urban capitalists. They accused bankers, railroad barons, major industrialists, and political toadies—often correctly—of graft, corruption, collusion, monopoly, and price-fixing. Populists sought electoral reforms to increase their own political clout and regulatory measures that would ease the terms of loans and rail-fare schedules.⁴

The legacy of the populist rebellion conditioned how agricultural progressives approached reform in the New Day. The modernist ambitions and populist rhetoric of agricultural progressives may have had superficial appeal for poorer farmers who, only two decades earlier, supported populist candidates. But the agricultural progressive vision fundamentally diverged from the populist vision in crucial respects. While populists sought to construct an alternative modernity around the political and economic influence of white rural smallholders, agricultural progressives sought to integrate the agricultural sector with the existing metropolitan order. In this, agricultural progressives presumed shared interests between rural and urban elites. Populists promoted a silver standard to remove the financial yoke borne by farmers, but agricultural progressives designed programs to educate and encourage debt-financed mechanization and expansion. If populists had been openly antagonistic to urban capital, agricultural progressives preached amicable relationships between town and country, farmers and bankers. The primary structuring division of the populist rebellion had been the diverging interests of rural debtors and urban lenders. By contrast, the terrain of rural reform after World War I pitted the most affluent rural (and former rural) people against the rural poor. Targets of reform included those smallholders and tenants whom the populists had once mobilized and the marginal nonwhite tenants, sharecroppers, and wage laborers whom the populists had excluded. By the 1920s, the rural poor often instead gravitated toward radical agrarian political movements like the Nonpartisan League, the Farmers’ Union, and the Farm-Labor Party. Despite a similarly modernist orientation, these organizations levied critiques of urban capital that placed their members in uneasy alliance with Socialist Democrats and communists rather than the bankers and businessmen whom agricultural progressives hailed.⁵

Even as enthusiasm for the New Day swelled, agricultural progressives argued that the success of this strategy would hinge on the personal transformation of rural men. In contrast to rugged, atomized pioneers and stubborn patriarchs, new rural men needed to be intensely social creatures—men who could swim with ease through the labyrinthine channels of knowledge and capital that modern agriculture demanded. “Leaders of this awakened rural manhood,” proclaimed Albert Mann, dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, “must be clear-thinking, direct, and of superior intelligence; and their foundations must be laid in a sure understanding of economic and social laws and of folk psychology superimposed on reliable farm knowledge.” The new rural man would be a community and church leader, a learned correspondent of professors of agriculture and economics, and a friend of bankers and merchants. He mixed the characteristic practical experience and folksy charm of the farmer with the “clear-thinking,” rational efficiency of the businessman. He could as easily hold court among a council of economists as at a county fair. In the blossoming of those expanded relationships, new rural men could take real responsibility for the affairs of their communities and cease to demand special privileges from the state. “The sound farmer-businessman does not seek legislation to fix prices or regulate details,” Secretary of Agriculture William Jardine explained in 1925, for he knew that “legislation cannot annul economic laws.” The farmer-businessman, steeped in the ever objective and rational laws of economy, demanded only what was due to him as an adult male. “The farmer does not want to be a ward of the state,” Jardine continued. “He doesn’t want to be babied or pitied by other people.”⁶

Jardine’s rhetoric elided the degree to which legislation, more than personal failings, had played a dramatic role in creating the dismal rural conditions of the early 1920s. In 1917, anticipating the strategic military value of crop surpluses, Congress enacted a series of measures to boost agricultural production, among them a large emergency appropriation for extension. With $6.8 million in emergency wartime appropriations in 1918 alone, the CES dramatically expanded its operations. In 1914, the CES employed about 2,600 persons; by 1918, it had grown to about 6,700. The CES encouraged farmers to do whatever they could to increase production, whether it meant taking out loans to mechanize or employing short-term labor. Under the authority of the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917, county agents purchased and distributed fertilizer to farmers free of charge. The U.S. government, the largest domestic consumer of agricultural commodities during the war years, intentionally paid above-market prices, a policy that effectively acted as an indirect system of price supports. Wartime policies, a decline in European production, and the contraction of Atlantic shipping lanes all caused agricultural commodity prices to skyrocket between 1917 and 1919.⁷

This wartime agricultural boosterism set the stage for a stark and painful reversal. Following peak prices during and immediately following World War I, prices for agricultural commodities cratered, precipitating a “farm crisis,” as some newspapers dubbed it. In 1920 alone, the price of wheat, for example, crumbled by 85 percent. Many farmers had responded to high wartime prices, cheap credit, and the USDA’s insistent nudges by borrowing heavily to expand production. The ensuing price collapse scuttled overleveraged farms and sent other farmers scrambling to boost production to make up for lost income. Faced with tightening budgets, rural people—particularly, rural women—searched for work in nearby towns. Others fled farms altogether, intensifying both the “drift to the city” and anxieties about rural degeneracy. Farmers abandoned 2 million acres of land by the middle of the decade, and the farm population had declined from one-third to one-quarter of the nation’s population by 1930.⁸

Many elites, like Jardine, merely shrugged at the structure of economic incentives that had induced the spiraling price situation. The more proximate problems, they reasoned, were ignorance and a lack of organization: farmers failed to understand how to use credit responsibly, to record their expenses properly, to monitor market conditions, to grow crops suitable for both soil and market, to take advantage of premiums, value-added crops, and niche marketing possibilities, and, most crucially, to engage in cooperative economic endeavor where it might pad their margins and stabilize prices. This elite consensus held that, far from being farmer-businessmen, few American farmers knew how to run their farms like businesses. As historian Deborah Fitzgerald argues, the USDA and agricultural progressives doggedly promoted an “industrial ideal” as a tonic for the farm crisis under a variety of deceptive monikers. Extension officials and the farm press used “efficient,” “progressive,” “businesslike,” and “scientific” agriculture nearly interchangeably to describe a prescriptive model that privileged capital- and technologyintensive agricultural practices.⁹

This industrial model shared important rhetorical and intellectual similarities to the prevailing reform rhetoric in the previous three decades. In particular, industrial idealists in agriculture evinced a lockstep enthusiasm for technical fixes and expert knowledge that hardly distinguished them from earlier proponents of scientific agriculture. However, in privileging large-scale agricultural operations, proponents of the industrial ideal diverged from earlier thinkers who contended that scientific agriculture could save any farm, large or small, and who, indeed, had considered small farms the greatest beneficiaries of their insights. The industrial model, by contrast, designated atomized small farmers as destined for failure because of the laws of the market. Small farms could not capture the economies of scale to compete with larger operations, nor could they afford the expensive “specialized machines” that would minimize production costs. Without cooperation, farmers could never effectively curb overproduction but would be forever at the mercy of the market’s whims. Absent cooperation, farms would stay small and would die small. This recognition, so central to elite advice to farmers in the 1920s, hinted at an important ideological development. When previous generations spoke in hushed tones of scientific farming, they tended to narrowly mean methods informed by the natural sciences. By contrast, with the launch of agricultural economics, rural sociology, and farm management, agricultural progressives increasingly capitalized on a rural turn in the social sciences. These subdisciplines emphasized that agricultural and rural community improvement depended upon fostering the correct relationships more than merely the adoption of up-to-date technical advice. Agricultural economics, farm management, and agricultural marketing focused on economic relationships between creditors and borrowers, between producers and consumers, and among producers of common crops. Rural sociologists described rural collective and relational units—villages, towns, and families, primarily—and offered recommendations about how to cooperatively restructure those units to promote healthier and more efficient communities. Cooperation provided a flexible rhetorical framework that encompassed a diverse swath of institutions with remarkably different goals—from agricultural cooperatives designed to lower production costs to civic organizations that offered Christian fellowship.¹⁰

Historians have correctly emphasized that agricultural marketing cooperatives were among the more popular palliatives prescribed by the USDA during the farm crisis. In 1900, the USDA had recorded only 1,167 agricultural cooperatives nationwide. By 1924, twelve thousand agricultural marketing cooperatives did business worth $2.5 billion. With the pretext of creating economic opportunities for farmers, the cooperative turn circulated the industrial ideal among smaller producers and defused radical political challenges to capitalist agriculture. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, most new marketing cooperatives integrated managerial strategies predicated on profit, efficiency, standardization, and capital-intensive production. As a result, new marketing cooperatives had a variety of institutional characteristics that ensured that they would be governed like businesses and managed exclusively for profit maximization. “There must be no politics in it—nothing but straight business from the ground up,” explained Aaron Sapiro, a prolific evangelist of the cooperative turn. “We don’t permit discussions on subjects that have nothing to do with our commercial problem.… The cooperative associations are composed wholly of business interests and are organized exactly like a bank.” The Capper-Volstead Act (1922) expanded agricultural antitrust exemptions by allowing marketing cooperatives to issue stocks and bonds and thus to finance mechanization and the hiring of marketing and management experts. The agricultural cooperatives envisioned by the USDA and the agricultural press were not so much ways for farmers to band together and defend themselves from predatory firms and the caprices of the market; they were instruments to ease farmers into management models suitable for an economy dominated by large, efficient, highly mechanized firms.¹¹

Beyond marketing cooperatives, the cooperative turn found its clearest expression in the explosive growth of farm bureaus. Beginning in upstate New York in 1911, county extension agents and chambers of commerce urged the creation of these voluntary farmers’ associations or clubs. Ultimately, farm bureaus served simultaneously as locally rooted clearinghouses for businesslike agriculture; cooperative purchasing and marketing organizations; political muscle for the CES, USDA, and agricultural progressives; and community organizations for rural people. The Smith-Lever Act fueled the farm bureau’s flame with an accelerant of public subsidies. County extension agents—salaries and expenses paid by federal, state, and municipal agencies—did the organizational legwork and often gave free office space to farm bureaus. In return, farm bureaus provided the USDA with grassroots allies and acted as extension’s civil-society partner. On the High Plains, extension and the farm bureau allied to rout the Nonpartisan League, a radical agrarian political movement. In the South, the two broke labor and tenant organizations. By the advent of the farm crisis, the farm bureau emerged as a national political power. At its founding meeting in 1919, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), the national umbrella organization for county and statewide farm bureaus, claimed an initial membership of more than 300,000 farmers. Within five years, membership topped 1.5 million and the AFBF was the most formidable agricultural lobby in Washington.¹²

Farm bureaus gave the USDA and the CES consolidated access points for personal contact, further multiplying the extension’s potential for personal transformation. New York extension official and farm bureau pioneer Maurice Burritt laid out that case in his book The County Agent and the Farm Bureau (1922). Farm bureaus, by Burritt’s reckoning, permitted collective economic action but also offered a “common meeting ground” where “the farmer and the government’s agricultural employees” could be “brought closer together.” In the farm bureau office, ordinary farmers, middlemen, financiers, agricultural experts, and county agents would all commingle, “sharing agricultural statistics and records” and “information and advice as to what the best practices and methods” were. Burritt’s emphasis on shared social space underscored the trust and intimacy that farm bureaus fostered between farmers and sometimes distant sources of capital, knowledge, and technology. That cooperative spirit was also highly infectious beyond the confines of the meeting room. Describing the cooperative activities of a Maryland farmers’ club, B. H. Crocheron noted that the greatest benefit of the organization was to circulate among “the people of the country-side a concrete example and ideal of fine American citizenship and strong country manhood.” If proximity in cooperative spaces produced the necessary masculine self-possession, rationality, and comfort with external expertise and capital needed for rural leadership, that exemplar of manhood could be translated further through the daily interactions between members and the rest of the community.¹³

To complement the promise of better men, rural cooperative institutions also promised to improve the lot of women and children. The CES, of course, employed female home demonstration agents and invested a third of its resources in 4-H clubs. Mirroring this strategy, farm bureaus featured “home bureaus” for rural women and a variety of planned activities and events for rural youth. Beyond ensuring that the personal contact of cooperation was gender-appropriate, such activities provided additional access points, allowing the farm bureau to appeal on multiple fronts, not just to rural patriarchs. It also made use of the labor and activism of rural women, who, according to Burritt, gave their “natural” attention to “rural social and community problems and to the needs of children.” In deploying this familial rhetoric, advocates of the cooperative turn appealed to female reformers concerned with the relationship between rural family life and poor rural health. The alleged causes of poor rural health were numerous. Reformers rightly noted that distance to potable water and medical care in rural communities drove the countryside’s comparatively higher morbidity rates. Reformers pointed out that rural women engaged in strenuous labor during and immediately after pregnancies, which undoubtedly posed a serious danger to mothers and infants. But they also blamed the consequences of poverty and racism on ignorance and bad “mothering” skills. The ideal of the “farmer’s wife” circulated by home economists encouraged rural women to abandon revenue-producing labor and focus on domestic consumption, nurturing, health, and aesthetics—changes that essentially sought to transform farmwives into rural analogues of urban, middle-class housewives.¹⁴

As with male-focused agriculturalists, cooperation’s promise of enhanced social connectivity and multiplying personal contacts offered female reformers a number of new tools. Cooperation could mean broader public support for rural infrastructure improvements that shrank distances to clean water and medical care. Farm organizations worked with public health agencies on campaigns and initiatives. And women’s rural organizations provided grassroots workers for those campaigns that could do the taxing organizational and persuasive labor in scattered communities where male public health officials would not deign to travel. But social connectivity also enhanced the educational opportunities that female reformers hoped would transform coarse rural women into efficient “farmers’ wives.” Just as cooperation expanded the reach of the CES’s county agricultural agents, it did the same for their home demonstration agents, who introduced USDA-approved homemaking techniques into rural communities through public demonstrations, home visits, and clubs. Cooperation promised to break the boredom, monotony, and lonesomeness that many women candidly admitted drove them from farms to city. In this, justifications for cooperative social forms circled back to the specter of rural-to-urban migration. By making rural life more socially fulfilling for rural women, reformers could hope to retain the countryside’s most eugenically fit. For the many female rural reformers enamored of eugenics, cooperative institutions provided the means to assess and voluntarily regulate reproductive fitness. Female health reformers organized “better baby” contests at state and county fairs not far from stalls promoting cooperative livestock marketing organizations. Such a juxtaposition of standardized animal and human bodies was far from accidental. Rather, those reformers transposed to the problem of rural health the grammar, values, and organizational techniques of the industrial ideal.¹⁵

For all its victories, proponents of the cooperative turn recognized a fundamental obstacle to their ambitions: the atomized patriarchs most in need of the cooperative spirit were also those most unwilling to enter the institutions that fostered it. Experts at the USDA, such as William Lloyd, the USDA’s representative at the organizational meeting of the AFBF, worried that adult farmers, poorly educated and accustomed to the social isolation of rural living, would never accept the USDA’s recommendations, no matter how many pamphlets county agents pushed into their hands or how much they promoted farm bureaus. A decade earlier, the conflict had focused on the integration of modern planting techniques; now agricultural progressives bemoaned the overly individualistic, stubborn farmers who refused to “cooperate” or who, in the case of the Nonpartisan League and the Farmers’ Union, cooperated in ways dangerous to capitalist enterprise. As with scientific farming before it, the acceptance of a cooperative spirit would require serious cultural work beginning in youth, when rural residents were most pliable. According to Lloyd, club work was essential to effective cooperation and farm bureaus. Part of the solution to stubborn patriarchs was to train a generation of boys in “community leadership and cooperative efforts” that combined cooperation with “self-reliance” and the rudiments of businesslike agriculture. Like Mann, who announced an “awakened rural manhood,” Lloyd envisioned 4-H boys grown into splendid manhood as the key to future rural leadership. But producing such splendid manhood required a careful balance: on the one hand, boys needed to be trained to participate in collective action; on the other, they needed to cherish the spirit of commercial competition. Even by 1920, the USDA believed that 4-H, with an approach both competitive and cooperative, trained rural boys to be the extraordinary examples of rural capitalism who would, in time, grow into a generation of farmer-businessmen drawn from Jardine’s dreams.¹⁶

Before 4-H could be expected to promote cooperation, businesslike agriculture, and awakened manhood in rural America, the club system needed to be reinforced. In fact, the events of World War I had dangerously overextended the 4-H network and left it in need of serious organizational attention from the USDA. In the decade after World War I, experts at the USDA and the land-grant colleges attempted to “standardize” club work, particularly through the introduction of what O. H. Benson, the USDA’s 4-H architect, termed the “club cycle.” Experts at the USDA hoped to create “standard” 4-H clubs at the local level—clubs that shared a uniform structure and set of goals in every rural community in America. To ensure that 4-H clubs were locally supported and considered organic elements of their communities, organizers also worked hard to enroll individual farm bureaus in the organization and operation of the clubs. Within a decade of the Smith-Lever’s passage, the USDA had created a network of standard clubs, interwoven with the farm bureau, that were conducive to financial intimacy and the promotion of healthy rural manhood.

The sharp increase in agricultural production during World War I created a rural labor shortage and pulled millions of youth into agricultural production. Given considerable wartime migration to urban areas and the enlistment of potential agricultural workers, the CES recognized the need to access new sources of labor beyond just gardening. To that end, the CES focused on utilizing the labor of youth, both rural and urban. As a part of that wartime food-production program, the CES encouraged youth to enroll in a variety of agricultural clubs, framing agricultural labor in the language of national service. Many youths tended small victory gardens of produce for subsistence and local sale, but the program was often even more elaborate. To promote club work, O. H. Benson envisioned a massive “mile-long” “Boys’ and Girls’ Club Interstate Pageant.” The pageant would feature farm machinery presented as “Our 4-H Machine Guns” and the “Corn Club Cavaliers”—“40 boys mounted on horse back … bedecked with corn stalk gun, ear of corn pistol tied to belt and corn husk decorations of uniform arrangements on hats.” Youth from towns and cities also joined the effort, by converting open urban lots into gardens or by taking a work holiday in the country to help with the harvest. “Boys of Connecticut! Help the farmers with the harvest!” implored a propaganda poster. In total, more than a million youth joined clubs organized by the USDA in 1918, including more than 364,000 in garden clubs, and hundreds of thousands of urban youth traveled into the countryside at the harvest.¹⁷

Like high commodity prices, massive club enrollments were an artifact of war and fell back to earth with peace. Recognizing that the appropriations would not survive the war, many agricultural colleges had employed temporary or part-time club agents with limited experience in extension work and virtually no experience with club work. This “constantly shifting personnel,” in turn, had constructed ad hoc “costly” and “ruinous” club organizations that diverged broadly from club to club.¹⁸ Training new leaders was laborious and expensive. Inexperienced leaders made more mistakes, and too many mistakes could damage the broader reputation of the program. A bad calf club might produce a dead calf. “It takes a long time to overcome the prejudice thus established,” pointed out one Wisconsin club leader. As nationalist sentiments began to recede and the extension service laid off its temporary agents, club enrollments sank to prewar levels. The war brought an enormous expansion of club enrollments but had left the program badly overextended, even as the deteriorating agricultural situation demanded, more than ever, a vigorous and efficient club network.¹⁹

Extension officials in Washington and club workers in the states argued that the club network needed structural improvement and that individual club workers needed better training. After a conference on club standardization in 1918, the USDA circulated a definition of a “standard” club to bring clubs in line with its educational philosophy. A “standard” club required a minimum of five members “working on the same project” under the charge of an adult leader. Each club would elect a set of officers from its members, and the clubs would follow a program of work over the course of the year. If the club achieved that basic standard, the USDA issued it an official charter. Clubs might also acquire a “seal of achievement” if they met an even more rigorous standard. To acquire the seal, clubs needed to hold a minimum of six meetings, to publicly exhibit project results, and to organize a team to give “public demonstrations” of the club’s production methods. The club needed to secure a project completion rate of 60 percent from its membership, to file a concluding report with the extension service of its activities, to organize “a judging team” for fair competitions, to host “an achievement day program,” and to integrate its members “in the farm bureau or other county extension organization.”²⁰ The USDA circulated material that defined the standard components and practices involved in club work.²¹ In addition to this uniform structure, the more rigorous training of leaders established a standard procedure, or club “cycle,” as O. H. Benson put it.²²

The USDA insisted that the clubs be organized according to “democratic” principles that emphasized the clubs’ voluntary nature and their deliberative structure. Farm youth joined individual clubs organized on a community-by-community basis by state club specialists, county extension agents, or, in counties that employed one, a club agent. The organization of a club began early in the year, with an enrollment campaign by county agents. Once a base level of enrollments had been achieved, club members elected officers—usually a president, vice president, treasurer, secretary, and historian—who were charged with running individual meetings and keeping collective records (individual club members were responsible for keeping personal project records). The club elected the voluntary adult leader, a responsible adult who attended meetings, regularly checked in with the county agent, distributed material provided by the CES to club members, planned and chaperoned club social events, and regularly made home visits to check the progress of projects. “A carefully planned system of follow-up work contemplates a visit from a leader not less than once a month, [and] a brief letter, giving timely advice should be sent by the local leader to each member,” Benson explained.²³ In the first decade of club work, teachers constituted a large portion of club leaders. By 1925, fewer than a quarter of club leaders were teachers, as farmers, bankers, merchants, and homemakers replaced them.²⁴