The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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was accountable to the interests of rural white landholders and integrated their knowledge and expertise in regulatory institutions. Nor were most populists anticapitalists. Rather, they hoped to reorient national institutions to create more favorable market conditions for agricultural commodities and to reinforce their own political influence. Populists, however, did agitate vociferously against urban capitalists. They accused bankers, railroad barons, major industrialists, and political toadies—often correctly—of graft, corruption, collusion, monopoly, and price-fixing. Populists sought electoral reforms to increase their own political clout and regulatory measures that would ease the terms of loans and rail-fare schedules.4
The legacy of the populist rebellion conditioned how agricultural progressives approached reform in the New Day. The modernist ambitions and populist rhetoric of agricultural progressives may have had superficial appeal for poorer farmers who, only two decades earlier, supported populist candidates. But the agricultural progressive vision fundamentally diverged from the populist vision in crucial respects. While populists sought to construct an alternative modernity around the political and economic influence of white rural smallholders, agricultural progressives sought to integrate the agricultural sector with the existing metropolitan order. In this, agricultural progressives presumed shared interests between rural and urban elites. Populists promoted a silver standard to remove the financial yoke borne by farmers, but agricultural progressives designed programs to educate and encourage debt-financed mechanization and expansion. If populists had been openly antagonistic to urban capital, agricultural progressives preached amicable relationships between town and country, farmers and bankers. The primary structuring division of the populist rebellion had been the diverging interests of rural debtors and urban lenders. By contrast, the terrain of rural reform after World War I pitted the most affluent rural (and former rural) people against the rural poor. Targets of reform included those smallholders and tenants whom the populists had once mobilized and the marginal nonwhite tenants, sharecroppers, and wage laborers whom the populists had excluded. By the 1920s, the rural poor often instead gravitated toward radical agrarian political movements like the Nonpartisan League, the Farmers’ Union, and the Farm-Labor Party. Despite a similarly modernist orientation, these organizations levied critiques of urban capital that placed their members in uneasy alliance with Socialist Democrats and communists rather than the bankers and businessmen whom agricultural progressives hailed.5
Even as enthusiasm for the New Day swelled, agricultural progressives argued that the success of this strategy would hinge on the personal transformation of rural men. In contrast to rugged, atomized pioneers and stubborn patriarchs, new rural men needed to be intensely social creatures—men who could swim with ease through the labyrinthine channels of knowledge and capital that modern agriculture demanded. “Leaders of this awakened rural manhood,” proclaimed Albert Mann, dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, “must be clear-thinking, direct, and of superior intelligence; and their foundations must be laid in a sure understanding of economic and social laws and of folk psychology superimposed on reliable farm knowledge.” The new rural man would be a community and church leader, a learned correspondent of professors of agriculture and economics, and a friend of bankers and merchants. He mixed the characteristic practical experience and folksy charm of the farmer with the “clear-thinking,” rational efficiency of the businessman. He could as easily hold court among a council of economists as at a county fair. In the blossoming of those expanded relationships, new rural men could take real responsibility for the affairs of their communities and cease to demand special privileges from the state. “The sound farmer-businessman does not seek legislation to fix prices or regulate details,” Secretary of Agriculture William Jardine explained in 1925, for he knew that “legislation cannot annul economic laws.” The farmer-businessman, steeped in the ever objective and rational laws of economy, demanded only what was due to him as an adult male. “The farmer does not want to be a ward of the state,” Jardine continued. “He doesn’t want to be babied or pitied by other people.”6
Jardine’s rhetoric elided the degree to which legislation, more than personal failings, had played a dramatic role in creating the dismal rural conditions of the early 1920s. In 1917, anticipating the strategic military value of crop surpluses, Congress enacted a series of measures to boost agricultural production, among them a large emergency appropriation for extension. With $6.8 million in emergency wartime appropriations in 1918 alone, the CES dramatically expanded its operations. In 1914, the CES employed about 2,600 persons; by 1918, it had grown to about 6,700. The CES encouraged farmers to do whatever they could to increase production, whether it meant taking out loans to mechanize or employing short-term labor. Under the authority of the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917, county agents purchased and distributed fertilizer to farmers free of charge. The U.S. government, the largest domestic consumer of agricultural commodities during the war years, intentionally paid above-market prices, a policy that effectively acted as an indirect system of price supports. Wartime policies, a decline in European production, and the contraction of Atlantic shipping lanes all caused agricultural commodity prices to skyrocket between 1917 and 1919.7
This wartime agricultural boosterism set the stage for a stark and painful reversal. Following peak prices during and immediately following World War I, prices for agricultural commodities cratered, precipitating a “farm crisis,” as some newspapers dubbed it. In 1920 alone, the price of wheat, for example, crumbled by 85 percent. Many farmers had responded to high wartime prices, cheap credit, and the USDA’s insistent nudges by borrowing heavily to expand production. The ensuing price collapse scuttled overleveraged farms and sent other farmers scrambling to boost production to make up for lost income. Faced with tightening budgets, rural people—particularly, rural women—searched for work in nearby towns. Others fled farms altogether, intensifying both the “drift to the city” and anxieties about rural degeneracy. Farmers abandoned 2 million acres of land by the middle of the decade, and the farm population had declined from one-third to one-quarter of the nation’s population by 1930.8
Many elites, like Jardine, merely shrugged at the structure of economic incentives that had induced the spiraling price situation. The more proximate problems, they reasoned, were ignorance and a lack of organization: farmers failed to understand how to use credit responsibly, to record their expenses properly, to monitor market conditions, to grow crops suitable for both soil and market, to take advantage of premiums, value-added crops, and niche marketing possibilities, and, most crucially, to engage in cooperative economic endeavor where it might pad their margins and stabilize prices. This elite consensus held that, far from being farmer-businessmen, few American farmers knew how to run their farms like businesses. As historian Deborah Fitzgerald argues, the USDA and agricultural progressives doggedly promoted an “industrial ideal” as a tonic for the farm crisis under a variety of deceptive monikers. Extension officials and the farm press used “efficient,” “progressive,” “businesslike,” and “scientific” agriculture nearly interchangeably to describe a prescriptive model that privileged capital- and technologyintensive agricultural practices.9
This industrial model shared important rhetorical and intellectual similarities to the prevailing reform rhetoric in the previous three decades. In particular, industrial idealists in agriculture evinced a lockstep enthusiasm for technical fixes and expert knowledge that hardly distinguished them from earlier proponents of scientific agriculture. However, in privileging large-scale agricultural operations, proponents of the industrial ideal diverged from earlier thinkers who contended that scientific agriculture could save any farm, large or small, and who, indeed, had considered small farms the greatest beneficiaries of their insights. The industrial model, by contrast, designated atomized small farmers as destined for failure because of the laws of the market. Small farms could not capture the economies of scale to compete with larger operations, nor could they afford the expensive “specialized machines” that would minimize production costs. Without cooperation, farmers could never effectively curb overproduction but would be forever at the mercy of the market’s whims. Absent cooperation, farms would stay small and would die small. This recognition, so central to elite advice to farmers in the 1920s, hinted at an important ideological development. When previous generations spoke in hushed tones of scientific farming, they tended to narrowly mean methods informed by the natural sciences. By contrast, with the launch of agricultural economics, rural sociology, and farm management,