The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ living because it reached entire households. Like other supporters of the legislation, Hughes worried about the deterioration of rural masculinity implicit in boys leaving farms for the city. But in that migration, Hughes also saw a profound threat to rural femininity, which he made clear in an extended meditation on the status of Southern soil. The “fertility” of “the mother of all” had been deteriorating because of poor practices and now needed to be “impregnated with artificial fertility.” Hughes identified the agricultural practices of African American farmers as the gravest threat to the “conservation of the soil.” African American farmers, he argued, cared little about the health of the soil, since they could leave the soil “denuded” and simply move to a different plot. “The soil is deteriorating rapidly for want of intelligent care, and it would be criminal on the part of those with whom the very destiny of the people rests to continue to delay and finally realize that they have been aroused too late,” announced Hughes. “The soil—the land—is an inheritance, handed down to man for humanity,” he concluded. “It belongs to future generations.” He articulated a gendered rationale for both Smith-Lever and an expanded federal presence in rural America: the failure of white, rural masculinity to preserve the fertility of the feminized landscape heralded civilizational decline and justified the state assuming the neglected prerogatives of farm patriarchs.⁶¹

      Hughes’s confidence that extension would benefit African American farmers was, at best, misplaced and, at worst, disingenuous. Many of the bill’s chief advocates in the Senate—Hoke Smith of Georgia, Furnifold Simmons of North Carolina, and James K. Vardaman of Mississippi—were also architects of black disenfranchisement and Jim Crow in their states. Rhetoric about assisting African American farmers belied their efforts to degrade and impoverish African American extension. Corn Belt senators, led by Albert Cummins, a leading progressive Republican from Iowa, argued that extension funds should be distributed according to the number of acres of improved farmland in a given state—a formula that would benefit northern and western states at the expense of labor-intensive Southern agriculture. Hoke Smith, the bill’s sponsor in the chamber, proposed that the funds should be released according to the size of a state’s rural population. Cummins countered that, since funds would only be spent to educate white farmers, such a formula was unjust.⁶² Smith’s funding formula prevailed, but several other amendments attempted to direct funds to African American extension as well. Wesley Jones of Washington introduced an amendment, supported by the NAACP, that explicitly directed some of the appropriations to African American land-grant institutions. Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska successfully introduced an amendment to have the work conducted “without discrimination as to race.”⁶³ From there, the debate quickly devolved into a discussion of the “backward, uninitiative, unintelligent, incapable black race,” as John Sharp Williams of Mississippi put it, and the eventual removal of language protecting African American extension.⁶⁴ The cityward drift of rural youth was too dire a threat—the greatest “menace” to “our civilization,” according to Minnesota senator Moses Clapp—to be derailed by sectional jockeying. “The great city,” Clapp reported, “is the place where vice feeds upon itself, like a great festering sore thriving upon its own rottenness.” If a federally sponsored extension program could keep rural youth out of the city, it was money worth spending.⁶⁵

      As the debate on Smith-Lever unfolded, proponents and opponents of the bill agreed to a series of revealing propositions: that the rural household was in disarray and rural fathers were an impediment to scientific agriculture; that this disarray fed the drift to the cities, rural degeneracy, and threatened the nation’s social reproduction; that the situation portended ill for American civilization; that the crisis demanded federal attention; and that the proposed plan of agricultural extension addressed itself precisely to that root ailment. At this point, legislators began to part ways. Opponents of the bill claimed that farmers were competent to rectify the situation if the state could ensure a fair market for agricultural products. Plans by the federal government to meddle directly in rural households, then, were unnecessary and potentially invidious. By usurping the role of the farmer as the father of rural society and possessor of uncontested authority within the rural home, government agents risked paternalism and the further degradation of the rural family. In contrast, supporters of the legislation considered the household-centered approach of extension one of its greatest virtues and accordingly emphasized the role of club work and domestic science in extension. From this perspective, male farmers had been obviously negligent and needed to share their authority with government agents, granting them access to their wives and children.

      * * *

      Dudley Hughes’s celebration of Southern soil located profound reproductive power beneath the cotton fields, orchards, and pastures that dotted the region’s countryside—a fecundity that needed to be jealously husbanded. This fertility crept into rural spaces and bodies, and in this way sustained alike the nation’s agriculture and vitality. Critics of the bill might quibble about who should do the husbanding, but they never contested this geography of social reproduction. With that point conceded, Smith-Lever’s proponents offered a vision of a rural future in which agricultural experts and state authorities worked with rural households to correct the damage done by negligent rural fathers. Truly unlocking the countryside’s fertility, however, was a generational project: a new generation of rural citizens was required, a generation amenable to scientific agriculture and state authority, and youth clubs for rural boys and girls were the surest means of producing it.

      Proponents of agricultural youth clubs shared their confidence in the pliability of youth and the efficacy of this generational project with numerous other movements dedicated to guiding the development of American youth in the early twentieth century. Many other major American youth organizations—Scouting, YWCA, YMCA, the Camp Fire Girls—emerged as the part of Progressive Era reform movements directed at the character and bodies of middle-class youth. Most of those organizations focused on structuring the leisure time of youth to avoid the perils of vice and unwholesome associations in the city. Athletics, crafts, and supervised recreations provided youth with social interactions that the largely white, middle-class reformers found morally and gender-appropriate. Many youth organizations used engagement with the natural world through camping and nature study as a means of reforming the character of their members, reasoning that pristine nature could counteract the corrosive effects of city life. In this way, youth organizations hoped to escort the urban middle class through troubled adolescence and into maturity.⁶⁶

      The agricultural youth clubs that eventually developed into 4-H started with the notion that youth were a vital component of a larger unit of economic production and social reproduction: the farm family. They addressed themselves first and foremost to the laboring bodies of rural youth to influence that larger unit. Other youth organizations focused on reforming the leisure activities of their participants, but agricultural youth clubs were addressed to farmwork, and their appeal was partly based on the promise of greater revenue for participants. By improving the labor practices of rural people, agricultural youth clubs could harness the true productive power of the country, stanch the drift to the city, and secure the civilization built on that labor. All participants in the debate on Smith-Lever agreed that rural society and American civilization were failing to adapt to the crucible of modernity. A crisis of modernity also mobilized other youth organizations: the notion that urban, industrial life was degraded and unwholesome was central to the missions and appeal of nearly all the organizations. Agricultural youth club work, however, depended upon a vision of that crisis focused on the countryside rather than on the city. Unlike other youth organizations, 4-H addressed itself exclusively to rural youth and concerned itself with the rural world as a physical place rather than as a nostalgic foil to urban life. Advocates of agricultural youth club work may have indulged in nostalgic agrarianism but not without being tempered by a personal knowledge of rural life: nearly every organizer hailed from the countryside and had worked on or operated a farm. Their vision emphasized that rural America could become modern and that a healthy modernity was necessarily one that integrated the knowledge and expertise that agriculturalists had developed. Rather than using the countryside as a therapeutic instrument to edify city dwellers—a taste of the premodern to make modernity bearable—agricultural youth clubs were intended to transform СКАЧАТЬ