The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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the State
Fretting about the countryside is a great American pastime. And contemporary anxieties about the state of rural America run as high as ever. Current worries range from industrial meat production and use of pesticides to depopulation and the scourge of methamphetamines, and they issue from across the political spectrum. Despite this anxious mood, politicians of all stripes and most voters are still deferential toward agrarian political rhetoric: the Jeffersonian ideal of the small, independent yeoman farmer and the belief that a virtuous rural past offers a model for a better future. In a time when increasing globalization pushes people to focus on local and small-scale action, the rhetoric of family farms is appealing. Yet that rhetoric sidesteps how, when, and why the current rural idyll came to such prominence. This book revises that political mythology by providing an overdue history to a key piece of agrarian Americana: 4-H, the homespun youth clubs that, over roughly a century of existence, taught millions of rural children how to be farmers and homemakers.
For my own part, rural places have rarely been a source of anxiety. Growing up in the Midwest, I was never a member of 4-H but was also never far from farms. Many of my most cherished experiences with the countryside, however, were linked to family vacations. Every summer, my parents hauled my siblings and me to a remote rented cabin near the western shore of Michigan for a week or two of swimming in frigid lake waters. We drove in the family minivan on U.S. 31 to a little town called Montague, cutting through endless fields of corn and soy on the way but missing any cities larger than South Bend. Travel with young children being what it was (and is), my parents made ample stops in the towns and businesses scattered along our route. We ogled an enormous stuffed steer in Kokomo—the world’s largest!—and paused for ice cream in Rochester. My mother still swears that we stopped at corn stands—sweet corn, boiled, dipped in butter, salted, and served hot enough to burn your fingers—but I don’t remember that. I do recall the many fresh produce stands as we drew closer to our destination in the heart of Michigan fruit country. At those stands, my mother bought enough tart cherries to bake a half-dozen pies and pints and pints of blueberries that we promptly devoured. At the cottage, I split time between the beach and riding my bicycle on country back roads, where I lost myself in the late summer fields of wheat and corn and occasional orchards. My sense of what was “beyond the city” was formed in this delightful milieu of lush agricultural landscapes, scrumptious treats, frenzied excitement, and the asphalt lanes that stretched to the horizon, dotted occasionally with peculiar road signs emblazoned with four-leafed clovers.
Deciphering those signs tells us much about the complicated political culture that guides their placement. Across the country, rural communities welcome visitors with signs much like the one in Tillman County, Oklahoma: “Tillman 4-H Club Welcomes You.” The term “4-H” and its emblematic clover appear ubiquitously in American popular culture as quiet totems of rural life. Many readers of this book will be familiar with 4-H. Some may have been part of the 70 million Americans who, in the past century, joined a 4-H club. Other readers may have had only a vague understanding of the organization. 4-H clubs are voluntary associations for youth between the ages of ten and twenty. Through most of 4-H’s history, the clubs were predominantly rural and focused on agriculture and home economics. 4-H’ers, the term for club members, worked hard on a specific project through spring and summer, with the ambition of producing something—a hog, a bushel of corn, a dress, a can of tomatoes—to show at the county fair at the end of the growing season. And if they produced something of exceptional quality, they might even win a ribbon and the chance to compete at the state fair. 4-H’ers, as both spectators and participants, are a ubiquitous presence at state fairs. Some may even be garbed in paraphernalia featuring the clover. Given the number of signs along county roads, 4-H and its clover stand not just narrowly for the club but for a broader sense of rural authenticity and pride, so much so that farm towns across America choose to express their civic identity in 4-H’s voice.
If you look closely at an official 4-H clover, you will find the mysterious characters “18 USC 707” in the lower right-hand corner of the emblem. “18 USC 707” refers to the portion of the federal code that gives the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) full ownership of the 4-H name and emblem. It is this portion of the federal code that makes the unauthorized use of that name and emblem a felony. 4-H is a USDA program, now administered by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. At a time when rural political culture has become synonymous with skepticism of Big Government, the most ubiquitous symbol of rural civil society is the full legal property of an immense federal bureaucracy. How could this relationship between an icon of rural America and the leviathan of the American state be hidden so effectively?
The existence of this relationship is not exceptional but rather constitutive of the modern rural world. Contrary to the assumption that rural communities are the last bastions of an authentic American culture untainted by government bureaucracy, you can see the imprint of the state on every rural landscape. Rows of subsidized cornfields, once homesteads, are crisscrossed by interstate highways. They grow from hybrid seeds using technologies developed at public land-grant universities, purchased through a subsidized credit program, and vouchsafed by federal crop insurance. Along those highways, semis roll past federal penitentiaries and U.S. army bases, and they roll over irrigation ditches fed by massive dams. The semis are loaded with surplus commodities, purchased for distribution abroad under the USDA’s Food for Peace program. Each of these images summons an intimate connection to state infrastructure that punctures cherished national myths about the American heartland—its robust independence, its nostalgic embodiment of a purer past. Rural America is not a resistant rump to the state’s modernizing impulses; it is the outcome of those impulses. Yet in rural America, the state still hides in plain sight.
Seeing rural America as an embodiment of modern political economy structures my approach to 4-H’s history. I take rural people and culture seriously, not as the remnants of a decaying past but as the keystones of modern industrial agriculture. At times, this demands accounting for 4-H’s relationship to broader structures of violence related to commercial agriculture, racialized patterns of farm tenancy, and labor exploitation. At other times, however, it means examining how 4-H was positioned as a way to avoid direct violence—how 4-H worked as a strategy of alliance, an object of affection, and an instrument of sociability mutually constituted among rural people, urban capitalists, and federal bureaucrats. In all these instances, 4-H functioned as a mode of governance implemented through the bodies of participating children. In this, 4-H’s iconic clover unlocks the unexpected history of the American biopolitical state. By biopolitics, I mean the political strategy that takes the management of life as both its fundamental object and means.1 By tracking the 4-H clover, inscribed on the chests of millions of youth around the world, we find the American state insinuating itself into the intimate spaces of the rural world and connecting national projections of population and crop yields to the vigor and health of individual bodies. Far from a benign feature of a bucolic past, 4-H is a sophisticated biopolitical apparatus—a state infrastructure built out of youth instead of concrete.
This book tells three stories as one. First, it is an institutional history of 4-H. Readers curious about the most critical dates, names, and events in 4-H’s history will find them in this book. Given the size of the program, its centrality to the social experiences of many people, and its colorful and fascinating history, this is a task I tackle with pleasure. Notably, this is a task never before undertaken by a professional historian.2 Second, the book offers a cultural interpretation of the history of the political economy of agriculture in the United States.3 By this, I mean broadly the process of producing and regulating markets for agricultural commodities. My cultural perspective on political economy attends to structures of governance and capital, material conditions, labor relations (informal and formal, public and private), particular technologies of capital production and reproduction, and the gendered assumptions that formed and conditioned those various factors. Third, this book is a history of a biopolitical apparatus—how it came to be assembled and to what ends. I map the interlocking series of biopolitical units produced by and constitutive of that apparatus in an arc that proceeds successively from the gendered bodies of rural youth, to the familial and community bodies in which their productive and reproductive capacities were elaborated, and to the national and global bodies that defined their reproductive horizons. To comprehend 4-H’s status as biopolitical apparatus, we must