The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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the economic and biological union between a revenue-producing male “farmer” and a nurturing “farmer’s wife” and promoted it as the normal form of organization for rural life. In rural communities, in the national media, and on the floor of Congress, the USDA and advocates of club work advertised the virtues of federal planning, using images of wholesome, white 4-H’ers conducting gender-appropriate labor on family farms. At the close of the 1930s, 4-H citizenship programs merged this vision of rural normalcy with American nationalism and the language of civic obligation, casting white, commercial family farmers as the backbone of the nation.
The lily-white public presentation of 4-H conflicted with the racial diversity of the organization’s members. According to USDA statistics, African American enrollments were concentrated almost entirely in the states of the Confederacy and Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, and Maryland. In those states, the extension systems were segregated with a “negro” extension service, run out of each state’s African American agricultural college, supervising a separate system of extension agents. Serious financial disparities between the systems left black extension grossly understaffed and black extension agents poorly equipped and ill-compensated. In many counties, where insufficient funds existed to hire a black county agent or home demonstrator, white extension agents were given responsibility for serving both black and white populations, although many white extension agents simply neglected black farmers altogether. Despite regular criticism from civil rights organizations and from African American extension pioneers like Thomas Campbell, financial disparities persisted. Even by 1946, black county agents were earning, on average, only 60 percent of what their white counterparts were earning. A racial ideology that cast African American farmers as genetically incapable of mastering the complexities of scientific farming informed this financial neglect of African American extension.10
Even when figures within the extension service rejected the notions that African Americans were genetically incapable of practicing scientific agriculture or were prone to superstition, explanations of Southern race relations tended to elide the economic consequences of white racism and place unreasonable expectations on the education of “backward” black farmers. African American extension agents also tended to be constrained by this racial ideology. They focused their efforts on “break[ing] down superstitions” among black farmers and publicizing “outstanding” examples who defied the crude stereotype of the backward black tenant farmer, efforts that consistently focused on black self-improvement rather than white racism. 4-H material perpetuated that stereotype, presenting club work as a scientific curative for crippling superstition. African American extension services did their best to circulate the stories, real and fictional, of 4-H members who improved their homes and lives through club work and shattered the grip of the previous generation’s ignorance. African American extension material in the interwar period also never questioned the basic racial division foisted by white supremacists in the Jim Crow South. In Alabama, for example, the extension service insisted on printing separate runs of material for white and black 4-H clubs. Despite being otherwise identical to the white club version, ledgers for African American livestock club members came emblazoned with the word “Negro” on the cover.11 Similarly, African American 4-H members were excluded from the national 4-H events—the National 4-H Congress in Chicago and the National 4-H Camp in Washington, D.C. In general, while Southern white 4-H’ers enjoyed subsidized access to camps and social outings, there was no parallel structure for African American members. As a result of financial disparities, inattention from white extension agents and obvious racism, and despite large rural black populations throughout the South, white youth were disproportionately active in 4-H clubs.12
The Great Depression did nothing to dislodge the industrial ideal from 4-H or among farmers more broadly. The most costly and enduring component of the New Deal agricultural program, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (AAA), enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the farm bureau. The AAA sent billions of dollars in price supports to farm operators by 1940 and integrated them soundly into the emergent corporatist New Deal state. These shifting links between capital-intensive agriculture and the American state placed the USDA at the center of the New Deal political coalition. It also situated 4-H as a key instrument of state power. The New Deal and World War II emerged as two key moments of emergency for the USDA, moments when the regulation of agriculture became inseparable from broader understandings of collective social and political health. In these moments, 4-H’ers performed vital services for the state. They rallied rural folk behind government programs at public meetings. They explained to their parents and neighbors how to fill out AAA contracts. They planted trees for the Soil Conservation Service (SCS). They mapped their communities for the Rural Electrification Administration. At war, they organized resource campaigns and provided vital agricultural labor.13
In fact, World War II shifted 4-H’s focus from the task of producing farm families to the task of cultivating healthy bodies capable of laboring and sacrificing in the war effort. “4-H Club work in its daily program is building men and women to live,” declared one USDA official at the 1940 National 4-H Club Congress, “and to live the great life here and now. Its first purpose is not soldier building but man building. But, if the Nation needs men for its defense, it will find that in 4-H Club work men and women trained to live are unafraid, if need be, to die.”14 Participation in 4-H became proof of civic virtue and able-bodied sacrifice for the nation. Despite vocal protests from African Americans, the USDA circulated a public image of 4-H that elided the wartime sacrifices of nonwhite 4-H’ers and thus cemented the links between authentic, rural citizenship and healthy, white bodies.
4-H’s deployment as a selectively embodied tactic of state power coincided with the near-total integration of national corporations into the production and consumption of foodstuffs. Agribusinesses sold hybrid seeds, petrochemicals, and mechanical implements to farmers, and farmers sold unprocessed agricultural commodities to agribusinesses. Prewar reformers dreamed of a managed countryside that was politically compatible with and economically integrated into an urban capitalist order. By 1960, that dream had become reality, and the model of vertically integrated agribusinesses had come to shape every corner of life in the rural United States. Small farmers were more obsolete than ever, but the family farm enjoyed greater cultural idealization than ever before in the American popular imagination. Less a relic of an agrarian past, the family farm was now just an idealized link in an agribusiness chain that stretched from the American heartland to markets and farmers around the world. 4-H was an apparatus keeping those links in place.15
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It is inadequate to tell 4-H’s story as one only concerned with the normalization of state-subsidized, capital-intensive agriculture in rural America. A history of 4-H must also be a history of sexuality, gender, and the body: a story about the gendered production of desirable bodies through heteronormative family farms. Neither of those histories is intelligible without the other. When articulated together, these histories raise crucial questions about the means and ends of biopolitics, as well as the history of state power in the United States. I interpret 4-H as a governing network dedicated to the orchestration of both nonhuman and human bodies within the framework of agriculture, a framework that is necessarily biopolitical. In doing so, this book places two seemingly different objects—the politics of gender and sexuality as well as the politics of food and agriculture—into a single biopolitical frame.16
This move has important consequences for the objects in question as well as for the underlying political theories and disciplinary practices that have previously divided them. For scholars of the history of political economy and state building, the book demonstrates the vital necessity of an engagement with feminist and queer theories, as well as increased attention to the roles that embodiment, intimacy, and seduction play in the actual logistics of governance. For historians of gender and sexuality, it marks the urgency of connecting the gendered reproduction of human life to the dramatic transformations of the global food system. For theorists of biopolitics, it provides a precise, empirical account of how knowledge about the reproduction of nonhuman life conditions how actors approach the governance of human reproduction.
Agriculture is the governance and orchestration of life—plant life, animal life, and human life—to produce more life. In this, agriculture is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous forms of biopolitical governance. Today, agriculture’s