The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
Читать онлайн книгу.
communities across the United States in the twentieth century.
* * *
At the turn of the twentieth century, most farming in the United States still obeyed a simple maxim of production: labor poor, land rich. Abundant land in the western United States, guaranteed by federal military power, and patterns of internal migration led landowners to develop particular labor strategies. Small farmers in the North, the Corn Belt, the Upland South, and the High Plains made extensive use of familial labor. The resulting operations frequently mixed some amount of subsistence farming with commercial-oriented staple production. Early twentieth-century Americans rarely, if ever, used the term, but such farms loosely resembled the contemporary ideal of “family farms,” though the families in question—sprawling, contingent, and multigenerational—bore little resemblance to a nucleated “farmer and farmer’s wife” model that featured rigid divisions of gendered labor. Regardless, even by the late nineteenth century, most Northern farmers had integrated into commodity markets of varying scales with non-market-oriented and subsistence farming appearing only at the margins. Meanwhile, in the South, the crop lien system, discrimination in hiring and public accommodations, sanctioned vigilante violence, and pervasive vagrancy laws constrained black labor mobility. By the turn of the twentieth century, Southern land tenure had stabilized around tenant farmers and sharecroppers, forming the basis of a “neo-plantation” system that matched and then exceeded the South’s prodigious antebellum cotton output.4
Although relatively limited at the twentieth century’s turn, agriculture in the Far West offered the key to farming’s future in the United States. While the South concocted an extensive legal regime to retain its agricultural labor force, Californian landowners sought workers from Central America, China, and the Philippines (and then supported legal measures to constrain the employment opportunities of their new labor force). With productive land clustered primarily around costly irrigation systems in the Central Valley, California reversed the usual maxim of production. California was land-poor and labor-rich: its farms mechanized first and were soon viewed as sound investment vehicles by bankers and speculators.5 In other regions, such as the High Plains, similar experiments in capital-intensive farming proved less successful. Nevertheless, massive, highly mechanized farms stoked the imaginations of investors, reformers, and technocrats, who idealized “large scale production, specialized machines, standardizations of processes and products, reliance on managerial (rather than artisanal) expertise, and a continued invocation of efficiency as a production mandate.” Proponents of this “industrial ideal” invoked “efficient,” “progressive,” “businesslike,” and “scientific” agriculture nearly interchangeably to describe this prescriptive model of agriculture that privileged capital- and technology-intensive modes of production.6
Wealthier landed farmers—those who could most easily absorb capital costs and afford luxuries that better accorded with reformers’ sense of order, aesthetics, and hygiene—joined the fold first. Initially, poor farmers, including tenants, sharecroppers, and wage laborers, critiqued the enterprise vociferously and used the vestiges of the populist movement as a vehicle for structural reform of the agricultural economy that, in turn, vexed reformers and investors alike. Whatever momentum structural reforms like the nationalization of the railroads enjoyed in the first two decades of the twentieth century, however, the agrarian Left had lost momentum by the 1920s. Instead, a legislative “farm bloc” coalesced around the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), an organization that further institutionalized capital-intensive modes of production and made them central to the collective political identity of farmers. By the end of the 1920s, the notion that farming should be organized primarily along industrial lines had achieved broad consensus among both farmers and reformers. Southern farm owners, however, evinced a notorious lack of interest in capitalization, and Southern agriculture remained predominantly labor-intensive until the development of the mechanical cotton harvester and the transition to industrial poultry production after World War II.7
4-H developed as an integral part of this broader push toward mechanized, industry-backed agriculture and the politics of progressive agricultural reform that eventually rendered rural America safe for agribusinesses. Stymied by adult farmers, agricultural progressives targeted rural youth through clubs, contests, and home demonstrations. These youth-oriented methods were flexible enough to be used in racially and geographically diverse communities, and their emphasis on voluntary labor enrolled local allies and provided an organic, nonthreatening image for technocratic expertise. On the strength of this system of “agricultural extension,” Congress created a permanent appropriation for the USDA’s Cooperative Extension Service (CES) in 1914. By the 1920s, 4-H clubs were circulating the USDA’s preferred technical farming methods and had created robust alliances of technocratic expertise, private capital, and local voluntary labor in every corner of rural America.
Buoyed by its relationship to the farm bureau and champions of progressive agriculture, 4-H grew considerably between 1914 and 1930. 4-H’s prevalence in areas with the most labor-intensive agriculture reflected its transformational role in guiding farmers from labor-intensive methods to capital-intensive mono-cropping. With the farm bureau’s support, 4-H aimed to take youth laboring on inefficient farms and teach them how to farm—and live—like businessmen. 4-H provided the technical details and mental instruments necessary for capital-intensive production. 4-H also provided local spaces where rural youth could network with farmers, businessmen, and agricultural experts. In these spaces, the USDA sponsored the circulated information, subsidized the salaries of county agents, and provided training for club leaders. In return, rural youth became accustomed to accepting the expert prescriptions of state agents as trustworthy and public-minded. In the wider community, the successes of club members advertised the advantages of scientific agriculture as well as the authority of the USDA. Club activities—daily labor, public demonstrations, fair exhibits, and community talks—constituted a form of everyday state building. Quotidian activities long accepted as constitutive elements of rural living, such as raising calves or sewing dresses, slowly and subtly insinuated state expertise into communities.
4-H clubs, and agriculture extension more generally, enjoyed their greatest influence in regions where rural populations were densest and where agriculture was most labor-intensive. In those communities, shorter travel times gave extension agents more contact with community members and made attendance at regular meetings manageable for club members. In addition, extension agents drew from larger target populations. 4-H clubs enrolled the highest percentages of rural youth in New England, states in the Deep South, and eastern Corn Belt states. The states ringing the Great Lakes, in particular, achieved impressive club enrollments, enrolling, on average, between a quarter and a third of farm youth by 1940. As the scale of farming increased west of the Mississippi and the land was less densely populated, club enrollments shrank—hovering in the Dakotas, for example, at less than 15 percent of the farm youth. Additionally, some western states with highly concentrated farm populations and efficient extension services—Oregon and Nevada, most notably—managed to enroll high percentages of their farm populations, even though, in raw numbers, their enrollments were comparatively smaller.8
4-H organizers believed that they could better secure the attention and cooperation of rural people if they catered to the gendered interests and labor of farm youth. Accordingly, and with increasing uniformity from the 1920s on, most 4-H projects were segregated by sex. Few girls participated in male agricultural projects that focused on revenue production. Even fewer boys learned about home economics. Organizers encouraged girls to enroll in homemaking projects, which could hypothetically provide valuable knowledge to the entrepreneurial girl. But by the late 1920s, they were focusing primarily on the relationship of domestic labor to the care and cultivation of the self and family. By contrast, male 4-H enrollments clustered almost exclusively around crop and animal husbandry projects. While boys spread their attention among the various agricultural projects, there was almost no male involvement in home economics projects.9
That sex-segregated structure allowed club organizers to turn their attention from the technical details of agriculture and home economics and to focus on the gendered bodies and psychologies of their youthful charges. By the 1930s, 4-H health programs had pushed rural youth to produce healthy bodies capable of laboring and reproducing for the nation and had positioned technocratic authority at