The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and after World War I, the actual percentage of spending on extension was considerably less—only around 0.6 percent of federal spending, excluding defense and veterans’ pensions in 1923—but in 1914, the cost of extension constituted a considerable federal outlay.⁵²

      In its final form, Smith-Lever provided for an extension system that largely institutionalized Knapp and Spillman’s existing program. The bill contained several controversial provisions that departed significantly from previous extension legislation. First, the administering department for the bill was the USDA rather than the Department of the Interior. Second, the bill authorized a cooperative demonstration agent system over a “farmers’ institute” model. (In the latter model, farmers traveled to an institute, usually at the state agricultural college, for a short course taught by professors of agriculture.) Third, rather than a model organized around towns, districts, or even states, the organizing unit for extension would primarily be the county—ideally, every county would have its own extension agent. Fourth, the bill excluded a broader program of vocational education, which had been present in earlier bills. Finally, while the extension system was to be administered in cooperation with the land-grant colleges, the colleges needed budgetary and programmatic approval from the USDA. Departments at the land-grant colleges managed day-to-day operations of the extension service, but the USDA retained ultimate control over the system. The legislation was a vital piece of state building that provided early twentieth-century national government with a means to monitor and regulate America’s sprawling rural spaces.⁵³

      From its inception, supporters of a national agricultural extension program touted extension’s ability to transform rural society by reaching inside the farm household. County agents would become members of local communities, diagnosing its unique needs, forming deeper relationships with neighbors than professors could with students, and, generally, using their proximity to farmers as a way to strengthen the reputation of extension. This method relied on a collapse of the public and private and a desire to bring the forces of education directly into the home of the farmer to reach his wife and children. Club work exemplified this approach because it provided the apostles of progressive agriculture with access to individuals who, according to republican ideology, were excluded from public life. The state’s previous access to rural children had been strictly mediated by rotten country schoolhouses. If, as those apostles also held, the rural home was the fundamental unit of both agricultural production and rural social reproduction, reformers needed to insinuate themselves into farm households to reform not only agricultural practices but also domestic labor, hygiene, child rearing, and a host of other activities that determined the wholesome nature of the rural home.

      The leading proponents of Smith-Lever in Congress emphasized that extension touched the farmer’s wife and children. Frank Asbury Lever contrasted this approach with previous efforts at agricultural education. “We have been spending 50 years trying to find an efficient agency for spreading this information throughout the country,” he complained before the House. “We have tried the Farmers’ Bulletin. We have tried the press. We have tried the lecture and the institute work.” These had “done good” but always fallen short of the desired end. By contrast, the bill would “set up a system of general demonstration” that addressed itself to the entire farm household. The genius of this approach was that it did not depend upon “writing to a man and saying that this is a better plan than he has or by standing up and talking to him and telling him it is a better plan.” Rather, agents of progressive agriculture proceeded “by personal contact.” They traveled to the farmer and “under his own vine and fig tree” demonstrated correct practices to “the man and woman and the boy and girl.”⁵⁴ Citing boys’ corn clubs and girls’ tomato clubs, Lever argued that extension reached rural youth directly, without interference from adults and parents. His gendering of this dynamic was highly revealing. Previous efforts—the bulletin, institute, and press—had failed partly because they were directed only to adult males. Those males resisted or ignored the knowledge provided by scientific agriculture, and their families suffered as a result. Agricultural extension, however, considered the fathers as only a single piece of the puzzle. Successful agricultural education would supplement patriarchal authority, reach women and children, and effectively address the fulcrum around which rural societies pivoted: the farm family.

      Other advocates of the bill emphasized that only assistance to all members of farm households could stanch the drift to the city. Echoing concerns about rural degeneracy, Representative John Adair of Indiana noted that “many farms have already been deserted,” a serious cause for concern, considering the centrality of country life to human civilization. “You may burn down and destroy our splendid cities,” he said, paraphrasing William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, “and the wealth of the farms will rebuild them more beautiful than before; but destroy our farms, and our cities will decay and our people will starve.” Rural life needed to be “revolutionize[d].” It needed to be made “as attractive and as profitable as city life and this can be done only through a systematic effort to redirect rural methods and ideals.” Agricultural scientists possessed sufficient knowledge to enact the needed reforms but had no way of communicating it to rural people. This, Adair announced, was the genius of cooperative extension. Through “personal contact,” it “carr[ied] the truths of agriculture and home economics to the door of the farmer” and “ma[de] the field, the garden, the orchard, and even the parlor and the kitchen the classrooms.” The county agent and demonstrators would provide “leadership … along all lines of rural activity—social, economic, and financial” and become “the instrumentality through which the colleges, stations, and Department of Agriculture will speak.”⁵⁵

      Opponents of the bill chafed at the alleged “paternalism” of government agents entering rural homes. Senator John Works of California worried that recent trends in legislation would produce a “spineless citizenship” utterly dependent upon “paternalistic aid.” Proponents of the bill, Works charged, were erecting a “paternalized government” and the United States was “on the downward road, not only to paternalism, but ultimately to socialism.”⁵⁶ Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut called it “paternalism” and an unprecedented exercise of federal power.⁵⁷ Representative John Joseph Fitzgerald, a conservative Democrat from New York, had no great objection to the idea of “a man of scientific attainments” going to farms and teaching agricultural techniques there. He objected, however, to a plan “by which an agent of the Federal Government shall be sent to every farm in the United States … to go into the farmer’s household and there to demonstrate, for his wife or for other female members of his family in charge of his household, the most practical and best methods of promoting domestic economy.” Fitzgerald considered such a plan “wholly obnoxious to our theory of government.”⁵⁸

      By inveighing against government access to rural women and children, opponents of the act suggested that the “paternalism” that rankled was not simply government treating farmers like children but government supplanting farmers as the fathers of rural society. The farmer, Senator Franklin Lane quipped, “does not need some scientific person to come around and teach his wife how to stretch the beefsteak for supper in order to meet the demands of the family so much as he needs free access to the markets of the country and a fair price for his product after he raises it.”⁵⁹ Senator Thomas Sterling of South Dakota fumed about the bill’s displacement of rural paternal authority, calling the bill “the extreme of paternalism…. [N]othing like it has ever been attempted in Federal legislation.” Federal agricultural extension would “permit the enforced interference of the Federal Government in problems so commonplace, so everyday, so local and so individual as knowing how to plow and plant and fertilize, and knowing how to cook and sew and having a care for cleanliness and sanitation.” Government ownership of railroads was a minor intrusion by comparison. “The Government,” announced Sterling, “will not in owning and operating any railroad be in the business of fathering the enterprise and directing the conduct and work of the individual citizens.”⁶⁰

      If few legislators found this argument compelling, it was perhaps because proponents of the legislation deployed even more dramatic gendered appeals. Like Adair and Lever, Representative СКАЧАТЬ