The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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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.
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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.
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