The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg

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СКАЧАТЬ the bankers, businessmen, and county agents who arranged and supervised loans—but it also meant intimate familiarity with financial instruments. 4-H clubs offered rural youth the opportunity to practice their finances: practical experience with capital accumulation, manipulation, and mastery.

      In the context of the critique of rural degeneracy and corresponding efforts to reform rural masculinity outlined in the previous chapter, the stakes of 4-H’s project of cultivating financial intimacy are clear: although 4-H broadened financial opportunities for farm girls, 4-H’s finance programs primarily benefited rural boys. Boys tended to enroll in the most capitalintensive projects, and club organizers usually presented the ideal subjects of loan programs as male. As controlled entrepreneurial simulations that concealed capitalist agriculture’s vices and proclaimed its virtues, 4-H projects also worked as gendering instruments. They offered everyday practices for masculine self-making and idealized specimens of adult masculinity. Loans provided rural boys with the means to buy a pig or calf, and the imperative to repay the loan encouraged efficiency, discipline, and precise financial record keeping, all characteristics deemed essential to propertied manhood. But commercial loans also laid the groundwork for sustained personal relationships with the fine examples of manhood that boys could not find at home. Club work vitally expanded the social universe of rural boys and exposed those boys to the example and influence of bankers, businessmen, and bureaucrats. From these intimacies, 4-H’s boosters dreamed, a generation of farmer-businessmen would grow.

      For many rural Americans, two words defined the decade preceding the Great Depression: crisis and cooperation. Crisis was the economic and social blight that afflicted rural America throughout the decade, with an intensity not seen since the agricultural depressions of the 1890s. Cooperation, a ubiquitous buzzword of the age, was the tonic for that malady, prescribed by countless, breathless technocrats at the USDA and in the agricultural progressive press. Many historians have noted the explosion of cooperative agricultural marketing organizations in the 1920s, but cooperation functionally encompassed a much broader variety of social forms for rural Americans. Cooperation did mean engaging in collective economic action. However, it also required openness to various elite actors who, in previous decades, had provoked anger and skepticism from rural people. In 1919, leading agricultural progressive and president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Kenyon Butterfield, famously characterized this openness to the complementary interconnections of modern life as the “New Day” in American agriculture. The dawn of the New Day would bring professionals, experts, bankers, managers, and marketers into the fabric of everyday rural life through a variety of cooperative economic and civic organizations. Once embedded within communities, cooperative institutions would also quiet the radical and populist political agitation. By aligning farmers with urban business interests and the agents of the technocratic state, cooperation promised to make the American countryside safe for capitalism.³

      Agricultural depressions in the late nineteenth century precipitated a swell of political unrest emanating from epicenters in the rural South and West. Farmers formed the core of the populist movement through agrarian organizations like the People’s Party and the Farmers’ Alliance. Populists were not reactionary antimodernists; rather, they promoted a striking agrarian futurist reform agenda. They envisioned a powerful governing network independent of metropolitan capital that was accountable to the interests of rural white landholders and integrated their knowledge and expertise in regulatory institutions. Nor were most populists anticapitalists. Rather, they hoped to reorient national institutions to create more favorable market conditions for agricultural commodities and to reinforce their own political influence. Populists, however, did agitate vociferously against urban capitalists. They accused bankers, railroad barons, major industrialists, and political toadies—often correctly—of graft, corruption, collusion, monopoly, and price-fixing. Populists sought electoral reforms to increase their own political clout and regulatory measures that would ease the terms of loans and rail-fare schedules.⁴

      The legacy of the populist rebellion conditioned how agricultural progressives approached reform in the New Day. The modernist ambitions and populist rhetoric of agricultural progressives may have had superficial appeal for poorer farmers who, only two decades earlier, supported populist candidates. But the agricultural progressive vision fundamentally diverged from the populist vision in crucial respects. While populists sought to construct an alternative modernity around the political and economic influence of white rural smallholders, agricultural progressives sought to integrate the agricultural sector with the existing metropolitan order. In this, agricultural progressives presumed shared interests between rural and urban elites. Populists promoted a silver standard to remove the financial yoke borne by farmers, but agricultural progressives designed programs to educate and encourage debt-financed mechanization and expansion. If populists had been openly antagonistic to urban capital, agricultural progressives preached amicable relationships between town and country, farmers and bankers. The primary structuring division of the populist rebellion had been the diverging interests of rural debtors and urban lenders. By contrast, the terrain of rural reform after World War I pitted the most affluent rural (and former rural) people against the rural poor. Targets of reform included those smallholders and tenants whom the populists had once mobilized and the marginal nonwhite tenants, sharecroppers, and wage laborers whom the populists had excluded. By the 1920s, the rural poor often instead gravitated toward radical agrarian political movements like the Nonpartisan League, the Farmers’ Union, and the Farm-Labor Party. Despite a similarly modernist orientation, these organizations levied critiques of urban capital that placed their members in uneasy alliance with Socialist Democrats and communists rather than the bankers and businessmen whom agricultural progressives hailed.⁵

      Even as enthusiasm for the New Day swelled, agricultural progressives argued that the success of this strategy would hinge on the personal transformation of rural men. In contrast to rugged, atomized pioneers and stubborn patriarchs, new rural men needed to be intensely social creatures—men who could swim with ease through the labyrinthine channels of knowledge and capital that modern agriculture demanded. “Leaders of this awakened rural manhood,” proclaimed Albert Mann, dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, “must be clear-thinking, direct, and of superior intelligence; and their foundations must be laid in a sure understanding of economic and social laws and of folk psychology superimposed on reliable farm knowledge.” The new rural man would be a community and church leader, a learned correspondent of professors of agriculture and economics, and a friend of bankers and merchants. He mixed the characteristic practical experience and folksy charm of the farmer with the “clear-thinking,” rational efficiency of the businessman. He could as easily hold court among a council of economists as at a county fair. In the blossoming of those expanded relationships, new rural men could take real responsibility for the affairs of their communities and cease to demand special privileges from the state. “The sound farmer-businessman does not seek legislation to fix prices or regulate details,” Secretary of Agriculture William Jardine explained in 1925, for he knew that “legislation cannot annul economic laws.” The farmer-businessman, steeped in the ever objective and rational laws of economy, demanded only what was due to him as an adult male. “The farmer does not want to be a ward of the state,” Jardine continued. “He doesn’t want to be babied or pitied by other people.”⁶

      Jardine’s rhetoric elided the degree to which legislation, more than personal failings, had played a dramatic role in creating the dismal rural conditions of the early 1920s. In 1917, anticipating the strategic military value of crop surpluses, Congress enacted a series of measures to boost agricultural production, among them a large emergency appropriation for extension. With $6.8 million in emergency wartime appropriations in 1918 alone, the CES dramatically expanded its operations. In 1914, the CES employed about 2,600 persons; by 1918, it had grown to about 6,700. The CES encouraged farmers to do whatever they could to increase production, whether it meant taking out loans to mechanize or employing short-term labor. Under the authority of the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917, county agents purchased and distributed fertilizer to farmers free of charge. The U.S. government, the largest domestic consumer of agricultural commodities during the war years, intentionally paid above-market prices, a policy that effectively acted as an indirect system of price supports. СКАЧАТЬ