The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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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