The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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education. “We have been spending 50 years trying to find an efficient agency for spreading this information throughout the country,” he complained before the House. “We have tried the Farmers’ Bulletin. We have tried the press. We have tried the lecture and the institute work.” These had “done good” but always fallen short of the desired end. By contrast, the bill would “set up a system of general demonstration” that addressed itself to the entire farm household. The genius of this approach was that it did not depend upon “writing to a man and saying that this is a better plan than he has or by standing up and talking to him and telling him it is a better plan.” Rather, agents of progressive agriculture proceeded “by personal contact.” They traveled to the farmer and “under his own vine and fig tree” demonstrated correct practices to “the man and woman and the boy and girl.”54 Citing boys’ corn clubs and girls’ tomato clubs, Lever argued that extension reached rural youth directly, without interference from adults and parents. His gendering of this dynamic was highly revealing. Previous efforts—the bulletin, institute, and press—had failed partly because they were directed only to adult males. Those males resisted or ignored the knowledge provided by scientific agriculture, and their families suffered as a result. Agricultural extension, however, considered the fathers as only a single piece of the puzzle. Successful agricultural education would supplement patriarchal authority, reach women and children, and effectively address the fulcrum around which rural societies pivoted: the farm family.
Other advocates of the bill emphasized that only assistance to all members of farm households could stanch the drift to the city. Echoing concerns about rural degeneracy, Representative John Adair of Indiana noted that “many farms have already been deserted,” a serious cause for concern, considering the centrality of country life to human civilization. “You may burn down and destroy our splendid cities,” he said, paraphrasing William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, “and the wealth of the farms will rebuild them more beautiful than before; but destroy our farms, and our cities will decay and our people will starve.” Rural life needed to be “revolutionize[d].” It needed to be made “as attractive and as profitable as city life and this can be done only through a systematic effort to redirect rural methods and ideals.” Agricultural scientists possessed sufficient knowledge to enact the needed reforms but had no way of communicating it to rural people. This, Adair announced, was the genius of cooperative extension. Through “personal contact,” it “carr[ied] the truths of agriculture and home economics to the door of the farmer” and “ma[de] the field, the garden, the orchard, and even the parlor and the kitchen the classrooms.” The county agent and demonstrators would provide “leadership … along all lines of rural activity—social, economic, and financial” and become “the instrumentality through which the colleges, stations, and Department of Agriculture will speak.”55
Opponents of the bill chafed at the alleged “paternalism” of government agents entering rural homes. Senator John Works of California worried that recent trends in legislation would produce a “spineless citizenship” utterly dependent upon “paternalistic aid.” Proponents of the bill, Works charged, were erecting a “paternalized government” and the United States was “on the downward road, not only to paternalism, but ultimately to socialism.”56 Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut called it “paternalism” and an unprecedented exercise of federal power.57 Representative John Joseph Fitzgerald, a conservative Democrat from New York, had no great objection to the idea of “a man of scientific attainments” going to farms and teaching agricultural techniques there. He objected, however, to a plan “by which an agent of the Federal Government shall be sent to every farm in the United States … to go into the farmer’s household and there to demonstrate, for his wife or for other female members of his family in charge of his household, the most practical and best methods of promoting domestic economy.” Fitzgerald considered such a plan “wholly obnoxious to our theory of government.”58
By inveighing against government access to rural women and children, opponents of the act suggested that the “paternalism” that rankled was not simply government treating farmers like children but government supplanting farmers as the fathers of rural society. The farmer, Senator Franklin Lane quipped, “does not need some scientific person to come around and teach his wife how to stretch the beefsteak for supper in order to meet the demands of the family so much as he needs free access to the markets of the country and a fair price for his product after he raises it.”59 Senator Thomas Sterling of South Dakota fumed about the bill’s displacement of rural paternal authority, calling the bill “the extreme of paternalism…. [N]othing like it has ever been attempted in Federal legislation.” Federal agricultural extension would “permit the enforced interference of the Federal Government in problems so commonplace, so everyday, so local and so individual as knowing how to plow and plant and fertilize, and knowing how to cook and sew and having a care for cleanliness and sanitation.” Government ownership of railroads was a minor intrusion by comparison. “The Government,” announced Sterling, “will not in owning and operating any railroad be in the business of fathering the enterprise and directing the conduct and work of the individual citizens.”60
If few legislators found this argument compelling, it was perhaps because proponents of the legislation deployed even more dramatic gendered appeals. Like Adair and Lever, Representative Dudley Hughes of Georgia believed that extension would manifestly improve all elements of rural living because it reached entire households. Like other supporters of the legislation, Hughes worried about the deterioration of rural masculinity implicit in boys leaving farms for the city. But in that migration, Hughes also saw a profound threat to rural femininity, which he made clear in an extended meditation on the status of Southern soil. The “fertility” of “the mother of all” had been deteriorating because of poor practices and now needed to be “impregnated with artificial fertility.” Hughes identified the agricultural practices of African American farmers as the gravest threat to the “conservation of the soil.” African American farmers, he argued, cared little about the health of the soil, since they could leave the soil “denuded” and simply move to a different plot. “The soil is deteriorating rapidly for want of intelligent care, and it would be criminal on the part of those with whom the very destiny of the people rests to continue to delay and finally realize that they have been aroused too late,” announced Hughes. “The soil—the land—is an inheritance, handed down to man for humanity,” he concluded. “It belongs to future generations.” He articulated a gendered rationale for both Smith-Lever and an expanded federal presence in rural America: the failure of white, rural masculinity to preserve the fertility of the feminized landscape heralded civilizational decline and justified the state assuming the neglected prerogatives of farm patriarchs.61
Hughes’s confidence that extension would benefit African American farmers was, at best, misplaced and, at worst, disingenuous. Many of the bill’s chief advocates in the Senate—Hoke Smith of Georgia, Furnifold Simmons of North Carolina, and James K. Vardaman of Mississippi—were also architects of black disenfranchisement and Jim Crow in their states. Rhetoric about assisting African American farmers belied their efforts to degrade and impoverish African American extension. Corn Belt senators, led by Albert Cummins, a leading progressive Republican from Iowa, argued that extension funds should be distributed according to the number of acres of improved farmland in a given state—a formula that would benefit northern and western states at the expense of labor-intensive Southern agriculture. Hoke Smith, the bill’s sponsor in the chamber, proposed that the funds should be released according to the size of a state’s rural population. Cummins countered that, since funds would only be spent to educate white farmers, such a formula was unjust.62 Smith’s funding formula prevailed, but several other amendments attempted to direct funds to African American extension as well. Wesley Jones of Washington introduced an amendment, supported by the NAACP, that explicitly directed some of the appropriations to African American land-grant institutions. Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska successfully introduced an amendment to have the work conducted “without discrimination as to race.”63 From there, the debate quickly devolved into a discussion of the “backward, uninitiative, unintelligent, incapable black race,” as John Sharp Williams of Mississippi put it, and the eventual removal of language protecting African American extension.64 The cityward drift of rural