The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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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