The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg

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СКАЧАТЬ Upon his return to Iowa as superintendent of education for Wright County, Benson merged some of Dewey’s principles with the teachings of “corn evangelist” P. G. Holden, using the “club acre” on the farm to be “the laboratory for the rural school.”⁴⁰ William J. Spillman, the head of the Office of Farm Management for the northern and western states at the USDA, impressed with Knapp’s work in the South, hoped to replicate a similar extension system across the North, including the now-famous Southern corn and canning clubs. Benson captured Spillman’s attention and, in 1910, Benson was hired by the Bureau of Plant Industry to supervise and promote club work throughout the North. Working in cooperation with county superintendents of education, USDA field agents, and agricultural specialists at land-grant colleges, Benson concentrated on spreading corn clubs for boys and canning clubs for girls.⁴¹

      According to Benson, corn clubs advanced a host of objectives, both practical and abstract. He argued that corn clubs promoted efficient, profitable corn agriculture by stimulating the competitive interests of rural boys and providing them with the needed intellectual and material support. Boys were urged to cultivate no less than one acre of corn and to lavish it with as much care, attention, and fertilizer as they could spare. They were also required to “follow instructions,” regularly attend club meetings and sponsored talks, and keep detailed records of their work, which would be submitted to club organizers. The results would be placed in competition and premiums awarded on the basis of a formula that took into account yield, profit, quality of their county fair exhibit, and quality of their project records. Exceptional results would be entered in a national contest, known as the “All Star Corn Clubs.” Benson believed that the competitive instincts of participants would push them to integrate “the best known methods of soil-building, selection of seed, [and] seed tests” to secure the highest yield and greatest profits. The practice of scientific agriculture could then “offer a medium through which interest, inspiration, and careful direction can be given to the average boy now in rural life.” More abstractly, corn clubs “adapt[ed] the boy to his agricultural environments and ma[d]e him capable of self-expression within th[o]se environments.” Clubs provided “intellectual guidance” and promoted “careful observation, cultural comparison and investigation.” Together, these features transformed education previously defined by sterile lectures into a dynamic experience that spanned schoolhouse, farmhouse, and field. “The ‘club interest,’” Benson wrote, “becomes the connecting link between parent and teacher, farm and school, and last but not least it forms a cooperative atmosphere in which rural boys may be saved to the highest ideals of rural life.”⁴²

      Unlike reformers who sought to remasculate the increasingly urban American white, middle class through sport, conservation, and wilderness excursions, Benson promoted rural-focused solutions to the drift to the city, grounded in his abiding faith in scientific agriculture and Christian devotion. “I am a profound believer in the sacredness of God’s earth,” he told a gathering of the South Carolina State Teachers’ Association in 1911. “My kind of religion means a consecration of our ‘acres of soil,’ our bodies, and the soul within. And this kind of religion will not permit the continuation of our national waste in soil fertility and the criminal desecration of our great agriculture.” This “desecration of ‘Holy Ground’” proceeded, Benson argued, because the “depopulation of rural communities and the rapid growth of our already congested centers of population” had left few desirable youth to take over farming. Rather, the ignorant and ignoble tended crops as farms increasingly drew their labor from a “few technical schools in large cities, reformatories, [and] penitentiaries.” “[I]t would seem impossible,” Benson complained, “to conserve our industrial interests and our American agriculture without increasing in youthful crime.” Rural youth needed to be educated in practical agriculture and to be taught the values that would make them excellent farmers. Anything less risked not only the health of the countryside but the vitality of the entire American civilization.⁴³

      Rural parents—particularly, stubborn farm fathers—posed a serious obstacle to Benson’s planned “conservation” of rural fertility. “You may work with the father from now until doomsday and never wholly succeed in changing his bad habits and getting him to adopt 100 percent value of your recommendations,” Benson complained in 1915. “[The farmer] will vote for you,” he continued, “endorse what you say, and go right back to his home farm and barnyard, put into practice perhaps a part of your instructions, but in the main he will cling to many of his old ones.” Adult educational programs unaccompanied by club work, according to Benson, were “a great waste … because after you have spent your millions of dollars to train the adult farmer and his wife you will have to begin all over again in the next generation.”⁴⁴

      When Benson noted the intractable stubbornness of farmers, he invoked a stock figure from progressive agricultural literature: the stubborn rural patriarch who mistreated his son and drove him to the city. In this figure, agricultural progressives slyly moralized poor farming practices, casting them as a sure route to the exploitation of rural children and the dissolution of rural families. Inefficient dairy operations, complained Wilbur Fraser in the Berkshire World and Corn Belt Stockman, generated drudgery that “drives all the bright boys from the farm.… The only way a man with a herd as poor as this can hold the business together at all is by having his children do a large amount of work … for which they receive no compensation.” A 1910 article in the Prairie Farmer quoted a number of city-bound country lads. One blasted “the narrow-minded and selfish attitude of farmers toward their sons.” Another young man complained about overwork, noting that it was “not the fault of farm life” but of rural fathers who practiced “unbusinesslike management and unscientific operation.” A third young man indicated that he would like to stay on the farm, but his “unresponsive … very poor” father “could not agree” to his modern techniques, and so he departed. A short narrative called “Why One Boy Left the Farm” dramatized the situation succinctly. Jim, a boy with a particularly tyrannical father, fled to the city, though his “whole nature revolted against the surroundings.” Physically depleted by the bad air and dim light of a tenement house and morally depleted by his job delivering ice to saloons, Jim nevertheless had the financial independence that his father had denied him. Concluding his narrative, he wrote to his mother and suggested that he might return only “if father will do the right thing by me.”⁴⁵

      Jim’s story underscored how, as rural reformers saw it, negligent rural parents interfered with even the most basic elements of rural reproduction and contributed to rural degeneracy. By impoverishing and degrading their sons, stubborn fathers made it impossible for them to court young ladies and create their own families. City-bound boys—at least, the adults who spoke for them in the progressive agriculture press—complained frequently about the hopeless conditions for romance on the farm. For example, Jim reported that his family had become disgusted when he scraped together enough money to purchase a Christmas gift for a “little black-eyed miss.” The present “made hard feelings at home” because his sister, Florence, “had no beau” and Jim was expected to “act in that capacity.” With hardly enough money or time to court any other girls, Jim felt pressured to romance his sister, a twist to the story that simultaneously deployed the twin rural menaces of incest and poverty. Rural reformer Warren H. Wilson implied a different unsavory outcome. Noting the widespread exploitation of the countryside’s “crop of boys,” he relayed the story of one “exploiting father” who refused to let his son marry “because the old man was accustomed to collect the boy’s wages.… [The boy] had to become a woman’s husband to escape from being his father’s property.” Wilson suggested that treating boys like “work-cattle” in this way had disturbingly literal consequences: “When a boy smells like a cow every time he comes into a closed room his mother, instead of scolding him, should help him to find associates among ladies rather than bovines. That boy is in danger of leaving the farm for hatred of it, or sinking to an animal level and ceasing to care. In the former case the farm loses him. In the latter case the church loses him; the school, the grange and the social gathering lose him, and the stable gets him.” Wilson posited a startling trade-off: boys could have romance “among ladies” or associations in the stables, but never both. Rural romance battled in a zero-sum СКАЧАТЬ