The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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wealthiest farmers could enjoy the benefits of innovation. Nevertheless, the progressive agricultural movement of the late nineteenth century—a movement of agriculturalists, scientists, and commercial farmers who planned to modernize American agriculture through improved planning, education, and technology—touted agricultural innovation as a path to wise management and moral virtue. Unproductive farms, their thinking went, were symptomatic of the ignorance, sloth, and greediness of operators unable to read up on modern practices, too content to fish rather than toil, and too willing to sacrifice the long-term health of their land for one bumper crop. By the turn of the twentieth century, innovations in plant biology, animal breeding, and farming technology were encouraging agriculturalists at land-grant colleges, in the agricultural technology industry, and in the farm press to talk of a science of farming in which experts could objectively describe the correct methods to maximize yields and profit from a particular crop, as well as to organize and manage an entire farm household. Despite the lauded objectivity of their methods, poorer farmers frequently chafed at the condescension of agricultural progressives, derisively dismissing it as mere “book farming.”6
Scientific farming, mechanization, and the massive expansion of cropland bolstered the nation’s agricultural output but did little to improve living conditions across rural America relative to the cities. Throughout the settled North, many farmers barely scraped by, mixing subsistence farming with commercial farming. Homesteaders found frontier life hard and new land less fecund than promised. Even the modest amenities of rural living in the East, such as roads, common schools, and proximity to established communities were altogether absent across much of the West. Years of hard labor in miserable conditions—chronic hunger, pervasive squalor, great distances to potable water, rampant disease, and social isolation—were frequently required to turn a prairie into a profitable field. Many farmers abandoned or sold their holdings rather than persevere, or went into heavy debt to finance and modernize their operations. In large portions of the arid West, homesteaders sold their farms to holding companies when they discovered that they lacked, even collectively, the capital necessary to irrigate their land. Individuals and companies with the resources to mechanize farm operations gobbled up cheap land from the bankrupt, only to retain the broken farmers as tenants or wage laborers. Tenancy and sharecropping characterized the bulk of Southern agriculture. African American farmers toiled under the weight of vicious racism, intense poverty, and constrained labor mobility. Poor white Southern farmers fared only slightly better. In 1900, agricultural labor was abysmally compensated relative to other labor: a year of farm-work earned an average income of $260, while nonfarmworkers averaged $622.7 These factors contributed to substantial rural out-migration, particularly as rising prices for arable land in the West squeezed opportunities for rural resettlement. Growth in number of farms, cultivated acres, and rural population slowed considerably from Gilded Age breakneck paces, and the 1910 census ominously reported that, while national and urban populations had grown at 21 percent and 35 percent, respectively, the rural population had grown only 11 percent, and it was “probable that the agricultural population had increased even less rapidly.” States ringing the Great Lakes reported slight declines in rural populations for the first time in their history.8
For many elite commentators, the rough truths of rural poverty made fine clay for more sensational narratives about a civilizational decline rooted in the reproductive implications of urbanization. Capturing this perspective in a 1901 essay in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross coined the term “race suicide” to describe a reproductive crisis in which the “higher [Anglo Saxon] race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself” by failing to procreate as prolifically as members of the “inferior race[s].” Ross’s position took historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential “frontier thesis,” which held that access to the Western frontier provided both stability and dynamism to American society, and stretched it into a commentary on the invidious demographic effects of frontier closure and accompanying urbanization.9 As Ross explained it, once acclimated to the luxuries of the city, the white, middle-class “gradually delay[ed] marriage and restrict[ed] the size of the family,” allowing urban immigrants from inferior races to demographically eclipse “the prudent, self-respecting natives.” Ross consoled readers that, in the United States, recent experiences on the frontier might stave off race suicide for a time. “The American … has been chiefly a farmer and is only beginning to expose himself to the deteriorating influences of city and factory,” he wrote.10 Warnings of race suicide received wider public attention when, beginning in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt used the term in letters and speeches to condemn those who shirked their reproductive duties and became “criminal against the race.”11 In April 1903, when Roosevelt embarked on a Western speaking tour, historian Gail Bederman notes, he “grabbed the chance to encourage the American race to breed” and placed the menace of an urbanization-driven race suicide in the headlines of many American newspapers.12
Historians have often filed these sentiments under the pervasive antiurbanism of the early twentieth century in the United States, but this particular brand of anti-urbanism depended upon concomitant tales of rural degeneracy.13 The dangers to gendered and racial order posed by urbanization reiterated a well-established nostalgic agrarianism that traced back, at least, to Jeffersonian celebrations of yeoman farmers, and it capitalized on the white middle class’s discomfort with the visible ethnic and racial diversity abounding in the nation’s bustling metropolises. But for Roosevelt, Ross, and many other prophets of race suicide, the countryside’s presumed fecundity went hand in hand with the need for rural reform, and proponents of rural reform usually assumed rural degeneracy and decline in its absence. Aside from being an inveterate proponent of race suicide and eugenic theory, Roosevelt was also the nation’s most powerful rural reformer and the convener of the National Commission on Country Life in 1908, arguably the climax of the progressive agricultural movement. In the same article in which he coined “race suicide,” Ross complained about “the listlessness and social decay noticeable in many of the rural communities and old historic towns on the Atlantic slope.” For Roosevelt and Ross, concerns about the vice and immorality of the city fueled the urgency of rural reform. The ailments of city and country reinforced a downward spiral in which excessive rural to urban migration created parasitic dependencies between a decadent metropolis and its degenerate hinterlands. “Cities have the best of the human material,” complained Orator Fuller Cook, a prominent eugenics advocate and plant scientist at the USDA, in an essay arguing for rural educational reform. “But [cities] spoil [human material] in the making, and must continue to import rural talent to make good the deterioration.”14
“Folk depletion,” as Ross would later call that “import [of] rural talent” to cities, proceeded precisely because of the abundant, fecund possibilities of rural bodies assumed by nostalgic agrarianism. By folk depletion, Ross meant the tendency of the best rural youth to abandon country life for excitement and profit in the city. Those who remained on the farm, according to this narrative, were typically the least intelligent and moral, and rural isolation did little to improve the situation. Ross memorably quoted one rural informant who scoffed at the supposed “purity of the open country.… The moral conditions among our country boys and girls are worse than in the lowest tenement house in New York.” On long and lonely winter nights, the informant continued, “What is more natural than that the boys should get together in the barn and while away the long winter evenings talking obscenity, telling filthy stories, recounting sex exploits, encouraging one another in vileness, perhaps indulging in unnatural practices?” What could it mean for the farm boys to behave “naturally … unnatural”? Agrarianism held that farms were naturally more fecund and conducive to reproductivity than the sterile mechanization of the city. But, as Cook warned, “the instincts which lie at the basis of the family and the preservation and development of the race are likewise capable of endless perversions.” As uncontrolled out-migration disrupted social constraints, it also eroded the outlets that guided farm boys’ surging libidos to fruitful marriage and procreation. The natural desires of farm boys thus gave way to unnatural practices. But the situation was remediable, Ross argued, by rationalizing and managing rural out-migration. Ross’s informant’s perspective, like Cook’s, contained the seeds of both modernist and agrarian logics: they reaffirmed the countryside’s unique reproductive potential even