The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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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.
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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