Figure 1. The Illinois Boys’ Corn Exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

      At the turn of the twentieth century in America, such hopeful visions for the countryside mingled with disturbing reports of growing depravity, criminality, and venereal disease in decaying rural quarters previously toasted as holdfasts of national virtue and healthy reproduction. Witnessing rural “degeneration and demoralization” in 1893, Social Gospel activist Josiah Strong warned that if rural out-migration continued unabated, he could “see no reason why isolation, irreligion, ignorance, vice and degradation should not increase in the country until we have a rural peasantry, illiterate and immoral, possessing the rights of citizenship, but utterly incapable of performing or comprehending its duties.” In 1897, the poet Walter M. Rogers eulogized “the strong Green Mountain boy” in a poem called “Vermont’s Deserted Farms,” a demise marked on the landscape by “the shattered homes/ all crumbling to decay,/ like long-neglected catacombs/ of races passed away.” Reports of rural degeneracy were the nightmarish underbelly of agrarian futurism’s cheerful utopianism. Too many rural communities fell prey to out-migration and inbreeding, rural reformers complained. Rather than questioning agrarian futurism’s focus on the fertile possibilities of youthful rural bodies, tales of rural degeneracy assumed them—with a twist. If the reproductive possibilities of rural youth could be harnessed to produce a better future, what frightful perils attended their neglect? Where had the youthful virility of “the strong Green Mountain boy” gone? And would the Illinois farmer boy join him in this racial passing, littering the Corn Belt with the same “shattered homes”?²

      In a moment when the future of agricultural landscapes was linked so intimately to healthy racial reproduction, Will Otwell’s efforts were poised to render all those questions moot. He directed the construction of the corn exhibit but had also pioneered the youth contests and clubs that had produced the corn—associations that were years in the making and that Otwell reported dramatically improved interest in the scientific cultivation of corn among boys as well as adult farmers. His approach was effective but was hardly unique. Across the Corn Belt and Deep South, a similar complex of clubs and contests blossomed throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. Educators, bureaucrats, bankers, and reformers alike identified youth clubs as an effective way to reach rural youth and, through them, farmers. Propelled by the success and notoriety of youth-oriented workers like Otwell, the U.S. Congress moved to formally subsidize agricultural extension and agricultural youth club work in 1914, with the passage of the Smith-Lever Act. Debate on Smith-Lever revealed that, more than simply a system to promote scientific agriculture, youth clubs were also intended to husband the nation’s future in a time of reproductive uncertainty. On the floor of Congress, advocates of the extension bill identified clubs as a powerful tool to stanch the dysgenic flow to the city and, with it, rural degeneracy. Through such strategies, early advocates of agricultural youth clubs aligned a vision of normal racial reproduction with the presence of diffuse federal power in the countryside.

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      Federal interest in agricultural youth clubs initially emerged out of efforts to materially improve conditions in America’s rapidly expanding farmlands in the late nineteenth century, but it was tied as well to efforts to reconcile the nation’s seemingly urban destiny with its agrarian past. The increase of cultivated acreage and production across the United States during this period brought attendant concerns about pervasive rural poverty, moral and physical degeneracy, and inefficient farming techniques that complicated equally pervasive celebrations of the homesteading farmer as the source of national character. Middle-class reformers, both urban and rural, promoted “progressive” and “scientific” practices in the countryside, intending to improve rural living conditions, increase the nation’s agricultural bounty, and safeguard the countryside’s reproductive future. By the early twentieth century, agricultural progressives like Seaman Knapp were contending that existing means of rural reform—farmers’ institutes, pamphlets, and agricultural colleges—were insufficient, particularly in the impoverished South. Knapp argued that proponents of progressive country life needed to journey to the afflicted communities and farms to demonstrate their findings. He built an alliance among state experts, commercial interests, and farm families, using a method that became known as cooperative agricultural extension. Extension placed an agent of the state agricultural college in rural communities and among farmers, bringing the insights of scientific agriculture directly to farmers without intermediaries. No longer would farmers need to seek out the insights of the USDA and land-grant colleges. Agricultural extension would bring it to their doorsteps and into their homes.

      In the second half of the nineteenth century, primarily through the USDA and the Department of the Interior, the federal government subsidized agricultural expansion in a number of ways. The USDA directly assisted farmers by distributing millions of seeds, free of cost. Federal monies helped to establish a network of universities partially dedicated to agricultural research and education through the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. After the 1887 Hatch Act, agricultural scientists conducted research at experimental stations in every state. The Department of the Interior dispersed millions of acres of land to homesteaders and underwrote sundry and ambitious irrigation schemes. Congress granted millions more acres of land to railroad companies to finance the construction of a rail network that could cheaply and quickly transport agricultural commodities from remote farmlands to eastern markets. As some federal agencies provided direct and indirect subsidy for agricultural expansion in the West, federal military power worked to remove any indigenous population that threatened the power of white settlers.³

      Between 1850 and 1900, the total number of farms in the nation quadrupled and total land in farms grew from 293 million acres to 841 million, primarily driven by vast agricultural expansion west of the Mississippi. The transformation of the prairies, plains, and deserts of the West into farmland provided new opportunities for families willing to endure backbreaking labor and the grueling deprivations of homesteading. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the average size of farms in the North Central census region—an area encompassing all states north of the Mason-Dixon line from Ohio to Kansas—hovered between 121 and 145 acres, as tens of thousands of families took advantage of the cheap acreage offered by the Homestead Act and helped to create nearly 1.5 million new small farms. In the Western census region, where vast tracts of arid land could ill support more than cattle grazing absent large-scale, capital-intensive irrigation, larger farms were the norm. Nevertheless, the 1900 census recorded 242,000 farms in the Western census region, where just more than six thousand had existed in 1850.⁴

      Even as federal largesse helped push millions of acres into farm production, advances in agricultural technology and agricultural practice—tractors, commercial fertilizers, more widespread observance of crop rotation, and improved seed and animal selection—enabled some farmers to improve yields and easily farm larger tracts of land.⁵ Highly mechanized operations required a large initial investment, so smaller farms frequently did without them. As a result, scientific agriculture was