The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ rural reproduction. A 1912 article in Wallaces Farmer explicitly linked the absence of social interactions among rural boys and girls through planned recreation and amusements back to the greatest rural menace, warning that “a playless countryside marks the beginning of degeneracy in that section.”⁴⁶

      Rural reformers could not remove the menace of bad rural parents entirely, but Benson reasoned that youth clubs, at the very least, could entice parental cooperation. Without youth clubs, Benson memorably put it, the county agent was worse off than the greenest traveling salesman. Salesmen always knew to “first give attention to the children as they enter the door yard or the household by chanting to, rocking and kissing the babies, before the[y] introduce themselves and their subject to the adult members of the family.” This approach was commonsense enough to be called “orthodox business practice.” It was difficult “to go direct to the farmer and convince him of the necessity for a change of practice.” If the farmer is “approached through his boy or girl,” however, “a welcome is at once extended” because “every normal parent loves the man or woman who will give attention, direction, and leadership to the children.” Some would call this “exploitation,” Benson noted, but club work brought “maximum returns in net profits, yields, [and] economic adjustment of project[s] into the farm unit.” While it advanced the goals of the USDA and agricultural progressives, it did so, according to Benson, through bettering the participant, the family, and the community.⁴⁷

      Working with youth offered an immediate entry point for reformers, but the structure of the corn contest promised a longer-term pecuniary interest to skeptical farmers. The “corn club acre” could valuably, and deceptively, advertise the USDA’s preferred agricultural methods. Benson insisted on one-acre clubs as the basis for corn work because it would “limit work to a piece of land that can be properly prepared, fertilized, and managed during the growing season.”⁴⁸ This limiting principle enabled one-acre projects to be intensively farmed in ways that were not feasible or efficient for larger plots. Seduced by premiums and promises of impressive yields, farmers often offered their sons their best acre and ample fertilizer to farm it. Club organizers secured adequate supplies of premium seed. The boys, for their part, lavished far more attention on their single acre than most farmers could afford to spend on any individual acre. The results were corn yields that simply could not be replicated on a larger scale. A Monroe County, Indiana, corn club, for example, managed an average yield of 91 bushels per acre in 1918. The statewide average for corn yields was only 35 bushels per acre in the same year. A 1911 issue of Ohio Farmer boasted that the hundred best corn-club boys from around the nation had achieved an average yield of 133.7 bushels per acre, with the nation’s yield champion, Jerry Moore of South Carolina, obtaining an astounding yield of 228.7 bushels per acre. Prizewinning one-acre yields like those, circulated widely in newspapers, provided valuable publicity for progressive agriculture, though they seldom revealed the limitations implicit in the one-acre method. Club organizers hoped to impress or shame farmers into adopting their preferred methods, as well as to curry favor with other farmers by directly assisting their children. When the promise of amazing yields faltered, donated prizes and awards, worth $40,000 in 1911 alone, incented boys—and their fathers—to participate.⁴⁹

      The astounding yields of the club acre were only the means; “a man for every boy,” as Benson put it, were the ends. For every child that was enrolled in club work, organizers endeavored to interest a parent or neighbor in club work and to have that adult regularly attending meetings and reading club literature. In this way, club work could accomplish more than simply improving the local school system. More ambitiously, club work transformed rural children into extensions of the USDA and made any adults who assisted them the same. “The boy, as a corn club member,” wrote Benson, “is a demonstrator for the State and the United States Department of Agriculture.… [T]he cooperator is a man who will agree to cooperate with the boy and the State and Government authorities in getting the best possible results from this club work.” By 1914, O. B. Martin’s clubs in the South and Benson’s clubs in the North and West enrolled more than 120,000 boys and girls and provided the USDA with access to farm households across the nation.⁵⁰

      Club work evolved as a strategic adaptation for the promoters of progressive agriculture as well as a vital supplement to the troubled country school-house. Club work gave educators access to entire rural families and blurred the boundaries between agricultural and educational expertise. While those same families, particularly adult males, might reject the USDA’s book farming, club work enticed them by appealing to their pride and pocketbooks. Agricultural progressives hoped that club work could save households impoverished by the ignorance of negligent farm patriarchs. As debate surrounding the 1914 Smith-Lever Act makes clear, concern about rural social reproduction licensed and shaped the expansion of state authority in rural America. If agricultural extension was to reverse the withering of the countryside and carve out the rot of the cities, it would do so only by providing what rural fathers did not, remaking the fragile rural home, and bringing the state back into the farm.

      * * *

      The publicity and achievements generated by Benson’s and Knapp’s clubs helped agricultural progressives make the case for an institutionalized system of agricultural extension subsidized by federal monies. On the floor of the U.S. Congress, their congressional allies echoed Benson’s formulation of the problem, noting that, through agricultural extension, scientific agriculture could reach entire rural families. Congressmen argued that other efforts to promote scientific agriculture faltered because they could not penetrate the farm household and, thus, left the next generation of rural citizens unprepared for farmwork and unhappy with country living. Both advocates and critics of agricultural extension cited the ability of government agents to supplement patriarchal authority in rural communities. Its advocates did so by gesturing to the revolutionary potential of youth clubs; its critics, by decrying the bill’s “paternalism.” Frank Lever, the House sponsor of the Smith-Lever Act, announced in his committee report to the House, “If rural life is to be readjusted and agriculture dignified as a profession the country boy and girl must be made to know … that successful agriculture requires as much as does any other occupation in life.… The farm boy and girl can be taught that agriculture is the oldest and most dignified of the professions.”⁵¹

      In 1914, a bipartisan alliance of legislators overcame a decade’s worth of opposition and finally passed the Smith-Lever Act through the United States Congress. The Smith-Lever Act provided the first standing federal appropriation for agricultural extension and, through it, for agricultural youth clubs. Pressure had been building on Congress to provide a regular appropriation for agricultural extension for several years. Knapp and Spillman had received public accolades for their extension work and eventually commanded the support of both agrarian and labor interests. Western populists worried that an extension system that traded on the USDA’s reputation but was financed with Rockefeller money gave private interests undue influence.

      Multiple extension bills had floated through the 61st and 62nd Congresses—most notably, the McLaughlin Bill in 1909, the Dolliver Bill in 1910, and the Page Bill in 1912—but the chambers never managed to agree on a single piece of legislation. After Democrats ascended to control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency in the 1912 elections, supporters of extension in both chambers rallied around a bill authored by South Carolina Democrat Frank Asbury Lever. Lever first introduced his bill in 1913. It passed both chambers but died in conference. In 1914, he reintroduced it with additional support from Senate Republicans. The bill passed the House and Senate overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Woodrow Wilson on May 8, 1914. In the first year, it appropriated a flat sum of $10,000 to each state, as well as an additional $600,000 that would be distributed proportionate to each state’s share of the total national rural population. In seven succeeding years, the appropriation for the “proportionate” pool would increase by $500,000, until it reached a permanent annual appropriation of $4.1 million. In addition, states were required to appropriate matching funds to have any access to the proportionate pool. The total amount of funding was significant, given the size of the federal budget in the early twentieth century. The ultimate $4.7 million per annum price tag of СКАЧАТЬ