Financial Intimacy and Rural Manhood

      I pledge my head to clearer thinking …

      —The 4-H Pledge

      Where did the name “4-H” come from? Although the iconic clover and the “H” mnemonic originated in Iowa, before World War I the clubs were still referred to as “Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs” or “Junior Extension Clubs.” At a club conference in 1913, Mrs. Jane McKimmon, a North Carolina club organizer, pointed out the need for a catchier “brand name” that would help club members market their products to consumers. The conference pondered the question until Oscar Baker Martin, the USDA’s club agent for the South, suggested the moniker “4-H clubs.” Martin’s suggestion met with “unanimous approval,” and shortly after, an “artistic tomato label” with the name was created. “From that it was extended to other labels,” explained Martin, “not only in the Girls’ Work, but on the boxes of potatoes, seed corn, and other such thing which the boys had to sell. Then began the systematic campaign to raise and maintain standards in order that the 4-H brand might become favorably known.”¹

      The term caught fire. USDA specialist Gertrude Warren used the term in a USDA pamphlet for the first time in 1918; by 1924, the USDA had trademarked “4-H” and its four-leafed clover symbol. During the 1920s, “4-H” appeared regularly in USDA literature, congressional hearings, and the press. Meanwhile, emblazoned “upon myriads of badges, caps, aprons, pennants, flags and standards,” the 4-H clover proliferated as the symbol of the movement “to make the best better.” That motto, suggested by USDA extension specialist Carrie Harrison and in wide use by 1919, provided only a minimal description of the program’s aim. In 1927, a national assembly of club leaders offered a clearer explanation in the form of a standard national 4-H pledge: “I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, and my health to better living for my club, my community, and my country.”²

      The widespread adoption of the term “4-H,” as well as national club mottos, pledges, and symbols, was emblematic of a broader trend toward expansion and standardization of club work in the decade after the passage of the Smith-Lever Act. During that period, 4-H developed from an inchoate set of loosely affiliated clubs and contests to a well-organized network unified by a standard set of methods and symbols. Over the same period, the USDA also helped establish a set of institutions to supplement its own educational activities with fund-raising, lobbying, and leader training. These institutions—most notably, the National Committee on Boys and Girls Club Work (National Committee)—fused the publicly financed technocratic expertise of the USDA with the commercial capital of bankers, railroads, mail-order retailers, and agricultural technology firms. Through this alliance of state expertise, local voluntary labor, and private commercial capital, the 4-H clover sprouted in communities around the nation, enrolling more than 800,000 youth by the end of the decade and visibly “demonstrating” the USDA’s preferred brand of capital-intensive, debt-financed agriculture in every rural county.

      Far from an incidental detail, the famous moniker’s genesis explained much about how 4-H functioned in the decade after the passage of Smith-Lever. Despite 4-H’s avowed educational and public-spirited purposes, profit motives and commercial transactions were integral components of 4-H’s identity. 4-H was a marketing device designed by state experts to help farm kids sell agricultural products to the rural public. Experts at the USDA also used 4-H to “sell” capital-intensive, debt-financed agriculture and technocratic expertise to rural Americans. And bankers and businessmen gave cheap loans and prizes to 4-H in the belief that it would prime the sale of financial products to the next generation of farmers. Among the various actors enticed by the 4-H movement, the clover planted visions—and seeds—of multiplying transactions from which future rural prosperity would grow. All these “sales” depended upon and reproduced a range of intimate registers—trust, loyalty, friendship, and affection—that were typically re-coded through the ubiquitous buzzword “cooperation.” By offering rural youth an arena for cooperation, club work cultivated spaces where the rising generation would be brought into proximity and contact with community members, bankers, merchants, and agricultural experts. Crucially, the cumulative effect of this combined economic and cultural project provided what I call “financial intimacy” or, in other words, intimacy—in the form of knowledge and social bonds—with and through capital. Financial intimacy entailed sustained relationships with numerous adults—primarily the bankers, businessmen, and county agents who arranged and supervised loans—but it also meant intimate familiarity with financial instruments. 4-H clubs offered rural youth the opportunity to practice their finances: practical experience with capital accumulation, manipulation, and mastery.

      In the context of the critique of rural degeneracy and corresponding efforts to reform rural masculinity outlined in the previous chapter, the stakes of 4-H’s project of cultivating financial intimacy are clear: although 4-H broadened financial opportunities for farm girls, 4-H’s finance programs primarily benefited rural boys. Boys tended to enroll in the most capitalintensive projects, and club organizers usually presented the ideal subjects of loan programs as male. As controlled entrepreneurial simulations that concealed capitalist agriculture’s vices and proclaimed its virtues, 4-H projects also worked as gendering instruments. They offered everyday practices for masculine self-making and idealized specimens of adult masculinity. Loans provided rural boys with the means to buy a pig or calf, and the imperative to repay the loan encouraged efficiency, discipline, and precise financial record keeping, all characteristics deemed essential to propertied manhood. But commercial loans also laid the groundwork for sustained personal relationships with the fine examples of manhood that boys could not find at home. Club work vitally expanded the social universe of rural boys and exposed those boys to the example and influence of bankers, businessmen, and bureaucrats. From these intimacies, 4-H’s boosters dreamed, a generation of farmer-businessmen would grow.

      For many rural Americans, two words defined the decade preceding the Great Depression: crisis and cooperation. Crisis was the economic and social blight that afflicted rural America throughout the decade, with an intensity not seen since the agricultural depressions of the 1890s. Cooperation, a ubiquitous buzzword of the age, was the tonic for that malady, prescribed by countless, breathless technocrats at the USDA and in the agricultural progressive press. Many historians have noted the explosion of cooperative agricultural marketing organizations in the 1920s, but cooperation functionally encompassed a much broader variety of social forms for rural Americans. Cooperation did mean engaging in collective economic action. However, it also required openness to various elite actors who, in previous decades, had provoked anger and skepticism from rural people. In 1919, leading agricultural progressive and president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Kenyon Butterfield, famously characterized this openness to the complementary interconnections of modern life as the “New Day” in American agriculture. The dawn of the New Day would bring professionals, experts, bankers, managers, and marketers into the fabric of everyday rural life through a variety of cooperative economic and civic organizations. Once embedded within communities, cooperative institutions would also quiet the radical and populist political agitation. By aligning farmers with urban business interests and the agents of the technocratic state, cooperation promised to make the American countryside safe for capitalism.³

      Agricultural depressions in the late nineteenth century precipitated a swell of political unrest emanating from epicenters in the rural South and West. Farmers formed the core of the populist movement through agrarian organizations like the People’s Party and the Farmers’ Alliance. Populists were not reactionary antimodernists; rather, they promoted a striking agrarian futurist reform agenda. They