The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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emphasized that agricultural and rural community improvement depended upon fostering the correct relationships more than merely the adoption of up-to-date technical advice. Agricultural economics, farm management, and agricultural marketing focused on economic relationships between creditors and borrowers, between producers and consumers, and among producers of common crops. Rural sociologists described rural collective and relational units—villages, towns, and families, primarily—and offered recommendations about how to cooperatively restructure those units to promote healthier and more efficient communities. Cooperation provided a flexible rhetorical framework that encompassed a diverse swath of institutions with remarkably different goals—from agricultural cooperatives designed to lower production costs to civic organizations that offered Christian fellowship.10
Historians have correctly emphasized that agricultural marketing cooperatives were among the more popular palliatives prescribed by the USDA during the farm crisis. In 1900, the USDA had recorded only 1,167 agricultural cooperatives nationwide. By 1924, twelve thousand agricultural marketing cooperatives did business worth $2.5 billion. With the pretext of creating economic opportunities for farmers, the cooperative turn circulated the industrial ideal among smaller producers and defused radical political challenges to capitalist agriculture. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, most new marketing cooperatives integrated managerial strategies predicated on profit, efficiency, standardization, and capital-intensive production. As a result, new marketing cooperatives had a variety of institutional characteristics that ensured that they would be governed like businesses and managed exclusively for profit maximization. “There must be no politics in it—nothing but straight business from the ground up,” explained Aaron Sapiro, a prolific evangelist of the cooperative turn. “We don’t permit discussions on subjects that have nothing to do with our commercial problem.… The cooperative associations are composed wholly of business interests and are organized exactly like a bank.” The Capper-Volstead Act (1922) expanded agricultural antitrust exemptions by allowing marketing cooperatives to issue stocks and bonds and thus to finance mechanization and the hiring of marketing and management experts. The agricultural cooperatives envisioned by the USDA and the agricultural press were not so much ways for farmers to band together and defend themselves from predatory firms and the caprices of the market; they were instruments to ease farmers into management models suitable for an economy dominated by large, efficient, highly mechanized firms.11
Beyond marketing cooperatives, the cooperative turn found its clearest expression in the explosive growth of farm bureaus. Beginning in upstate New York in 1911, county extension agents and chambers of commerce urged the creation of these voluntary farmers’ associations or clubs. Ultimately, farm bureaus served simultaneously as locally rooted clearinghouses for businesslike agriculture; cooperative purchasing and marketing organizations; political muscle for the CES, USDA, and agricultural progressives; and community organizations for rural people. The Smith-Lever Act fueled the farm bureau’s flame with an accelerant of public subsidies. County extension agents—salaries and expenses paid by federal, state, and municipal agencies—did the organizational legwork and often gave free office space to farm bureaus. In return, farm bureaus provided the USDA with grassroots allies and acted as extension’s civil-society partner. On the High Plains, extension and the farm bureau allied to rout the Nonpartisan League, a radical agrarian political movement. In the South, the two broke labor and tenant organizations. By the advent of the farm crisis, the farm bureau emerged as a national political power. At its founding meeting in 1919, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), the national umbrella organization for county and statewide farm bureaus, claimed an initial membership of more than 300,000 farmers. Within five years, membership topped 1.5 million and the AFBF was the most formidable agricultural lobby in Washington.12
Farm bureaus gave the USDA and the CES consolidated access points for personal contact, further multiplying the extension’s potential for personal transformation. New York extension official and farm bureau pioneer Maurice Burritt laid out that case in his book The County Agent and the Farm Bureau (1922). Farm bureaus, by Burritt’s reckoning, permitted collective economic action but also offered a “common meeting ground” where “the farmer and the government’s agricultural employees” could be “brought closer together.” In the farm bureau office, ordinary farmers, middlemen, financiers, agricultural experts, and county agents would all commingle, “sharing agricultural statistics and records” and “information and advice as to what the best practices and methods” were. Burritt’s emphasis on shared social space underscored the trust and intimacy that farm bureaus fostered between farmers and sometimes distant sources of capital, knowledge, and technology. That cooperative spirit was also highly infectious beyond the confines of the meeting room. Describing the cooperative activities of a Maryland farmers’ club, B. H. Crocheron noted that the greatest benefit of the organization was to circulate among “the people of the country-side a concrete example and ideal of fine American citizenship and strong country manhood.” If proximity in cooperative spaces produced the necessary masculine self-possession, rationality, and comfort with external expertise and capital needed for rural leadership, that exemplar of manhood could be translated further through the daily interactions between members and the rest of the community.13
To complement the promise of better men, rural cooperative institutions also promised to improve the lot of women and children. The CES, of course, employed female home demonstration agents and invested a third of its resources in 4-H clubs. Mirroring this strategy, farm bureaus featured “home bureaus” for rural women and a variety of planned activities and events for rural youth. Beyond ensuring that the personal contact of cooperation was gender-appropriate, such activities provided additional access points, allowing the farm bureau to appeal on multiple fronts, not just to rural patriarchs. It also made use of the labor and activism of rural women, who, according to Burritt, gave their “natural” attention to “rural social and community problems and to the needs of children.” In deploying this familial rhetoric, advocates of the cooperative turn appealed to female reformers concerned with the relationship between rural family life and poor rural health. The alleged causes of poor rural health were numerous. Reformers rightly noted that distance to potable water and medical care in rural communities drove the countryside’s comparatively higher morbidity rates. Reformers pointed out that rural women engaged in strenuous labor during and immediately after pregnancies, which undoubtedly posed a serious danger to mothers and infants. But they also blamed the consequences of poverty and racism on ignorance and bad “mothering” skills. The ideal of the “farmer’s wife” circulated by home economists encouraged rural women to abandon revenue-producing labor and focus on domestic consumption, nurturing, health, and aesthetics—changes that essentially sought to transform farmwives into rural analogues of urban, middle-class housewives.14
As with male-focused agriculturalists, cooperation’s promise of enhanced social connectivity and multiplying personal contacts offered female reformers a number of new tools. Cooperation could mean broader public support for rural infrastructure improvements that shrank distances to clean water and medical care. Farm organizations worked with public health agencies on campaigns and initiatives. And women’s rural organizations provided grassroots workers for those campaigns that could do the taxing organizational and persuasive labor in scattered communities where male public health officials would not deign to travel. But social connectivity also enhanced the educational opportunities that female reformers hoped would transform coarse rural women into efficient “farmers’ wives.” Just as cooperation expanded the reach of the CES’s county agricultural agents, it did the same for their home demonstration agents, who introduced USDA-approved homemaking techniques into rural communities through public demonstrations, home visits, and clubs. Cooperation promised to break the boredom, monotony, and lonesomeness that many women candidly admitted drove them from farms to city. In this, justifications for cooperative social forms circled back to the specter of rural-to-urban migration. By making rural life more socially fulfilling for rural women, reformers could hope to retain the countryside’s most eugenically fit. For the many female rural reformers enamored of eugenics, cooperative institutions provided the means to assess and voluntarily regulate reproductive fitness. Female health reformers organized “better baby” contests at state and county fairs not far from stalls promoting cooperative livestock marketing organizations. Such a juxtaposition of standardized