The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg

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СКАЧАТЬ caused agricultural commodity prices to skyrocket between 1917 and 1919.⁷

      This wartime agricultural boosterism set the stage for a stark and painful reversal. Following peak prices during and immediately following World War I, prices for agricultural commodities cratered, precipitating a “farm crisis,” as some newspapers dubbed it. In 1920 alone, the price of wheat, for example, crumbled by 85 percent. Many farmers had responded to high wartime prices, cheap credit, and the USDA’s insistent nudges by borrowing heavily to expand production. The ensuing price collapse scuttled overleveraged farms and sent other farmers scrambling to boost production to make up for lost income. Faced with tightening budgets, rural people—particularly, rural women—searched for work in nearby towns. Others fled farms altogether, intensifying both the “drift to the city” and anxieties about rural degeneracy. Farmers abandoned 2 million acres of land by the middle of the decade, and the farm population had declined from one-third to one-quarter of the nation’s population by 1930.⁸

      Many elites, like Jardine, merely shrugged at the structure of economic incentives that had induced the spiraling price situation. The more proximate problems, they reasoned, were ignorance and a lack of organization: farmers failed to understand how to use credit responsibly, to record their expenses properly, to monitor market conditions, to grow crops suitable for both soil and market, to take advantage of premiums, value-added crops, and niche marketing possibilities, and, most crucially, to engage in cooperative economic endeavor where it might pad their margins and stabilize prices. This elite consensus held that, far from being farmer-businessmen, few American farmers knew how to run their farms like businesses. As historian Deborah Fitzgerald argues, the USDA and agricultural progressives doggedly promoted an “industrial ideal” as a tonic for the farm crisis under a variety of deceptive monikers. Extension officials and the farm press used “efficient,” “progressive,” “businesslike,” and “scientific” agriculture nearly interchangeably to describe a prescriptive model that privileged capital- and technologyintensive agricultural practices.⁹

      This industrial model shared important rhetorical and intellectual similarities to the prevailing reform rhetoric in the previous three decades. In particular, industrial idealists in agriculture evinced a lockstep enthusiasm for technical fixes and expert knowledge that hardly distinguished them from earlier proponents of scientific agriculture. However, in privileging large-scale agricultural operations, proponents of the industrial ideal diverged from earlier thinkers who contended that scientific agriculture could save any farm, large or small, and who, indeed, had considered small farms the greatest beneficiaries of their insights. The industrial model, by contrast, designated atomized small farmers as destined for failure because of the laws of the market. Small farms could not capture the economies of scale to compete with larger operations, nor could they afford the expensive “specialized machines” that would minimize production costs. Without cooperation, farmers could never effectively curb overproduction but would be forever at the mercy of the market’s whims. Absent cooperation, farms would stay small and would die small. This recognition, so central to elite advice to farmers in the 1920s, hinted at an important ideological development. When previous generations spoke in hushed tones of scientific farming, they tended to narrowly mean methods informed by the natural sciences. By contrast, with the launch of agricultural economics, rural sociology, and farm management, agricultural progressives increasingly capitalized on a rural turn in the social sciences. These subdisciplines emphasized that agricultural and rural community improvement depended upon fostering the correct relationships more than merely the adoption of up-to-date technical advice. Agricultural economics, farm management, and agricultural marketing focused on economic relationships between creditors and borrowers, between producers and consumers, and among producers of common crops. Rural sociologists described rural collective and relational units—villages, towns, and families, primarily—and offered recommendations about how to cooperatively restructure those units to promote healthier and more efficient communities. Cooperation provided a flexible rhetorical framework that encompassed a diverse swath of institutions with remarkably different goals—from agricultural cooperatives designed to lower production costs to civic organizations that offered Christian fellowship.¹⁰

      Historians have correctly emphasized that agricultural marketing cooperatives were among the more popular palliatives prescribed by the USDA during the farm crisis. In 1900, the USDA had recorded only 1,167 agricultural cooperatives nationwide. By 1924, twelve thousand agricultural marketing cooperatives did business worth $2.5 billion. With the pretext of creating economic opportunities for farmers, the cooperative turn circulated the industrial ideal among smaller producers and defused radical political challenges to capitalist agriculture. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, most new marketing cooperatives integrated managerial strategies predicated on profit, efficiency, standardization, and capital-intensive production. As a result, new marketing cooperatives had a variety of institutional characteristics that ensured that they would be governed like businesses and managed exclusively for profit maximization. “There must be no politics in it—nothing but straight business from the ground up,” explained Aaron Sapiro, a prolific evangelist of the cooperative turn. “We don’t permit discussions on subjects that have nothing to do with our commercial problem.… The cooperative associations are composed wholly of business interests and are organized exactly like a bank.” The Capper-Volstead Act (1922) expanded agricultural antitrust exemptions by allowing marketing cooperatives to issue stocks and bonds and thus to finance mechanization and the hiring of marketing and management experts. The agricultural cooperatives envisioned by the USDA and the agricultural press were not so much ways for farmers to band together and defend themselves from predatory firms and the caprices of the market; they were instruments to ease farmers into management models suitable for an economy dominated by large, efficient, highly mechanized firms.¹¹

      Beyond marketing cooperatives, the cooperative turn found its clearest expression in the explosive growth of farm bureaus. Beginning in upstate New York in 1911, county extension agents and chambers of commerce urged the creation of these voluntary farmers’ associations or clubs. Ultimately, farm bureaus served simultaneously as locally rooted clearinghouses for businesslike agriculture; cooperative purchasing and marketing organizations; political muscle for the CES, USDA, and agricultural progressives; and community organizations for rural people. The Smith-Lever Act fueled the farm bureau’s flame with an accelerant of public subsidies. County extension agents—salaries and expenses paid by federal, state, and municipal agencies—did the organizational legwork and often gave free office space to farm bureaus. In return, farm bureaus provided the USDA with grassroots allies and acted as extension’s civil-society partner. On the High Plains, extension and the farm bureau allied to rout the Nonpartisan League, a radical agrarian political movement. In the South, the two broke labor and tenant organizations. By the advent of the farm crisis, the farm bureau emerged as a national political power. At its founding meeting in 1919, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), the national umbrella organization for county and statewide farm bureaus, claimed an initial membership of more than 300,000 farmers. Within five years, membership topped 1.5 million and the AFBF was the most formidable agricultural lobby in Washington.¹²

      Farm bureaus gave the USDA and the CES consolidated access points for personal contact, further multiplying the extension’s potential for personal transformation. New York extension official and farm bureau pioneer Maurice Burritt laid out that case in his book The County Agent and the Farm Bureau (1922). Farm bureaus, by Burritt’s reckoning, permitted collective economic action but also offered a “common meeting ground” where “the farmer and the government’s agricultural employees” could be “brought closer together.” In the farm bureau office, ordinary farmers, middlemen, financiers, agricultural experts, and county agents would all commingle, “sharing agricultural statistics and records” and “information and advice as to what the best practices and methods” were. Burritt’s emphasis on shared social space underscored the trust and intimacy that farm bureaus fostered between farmers and sometimes distant sources of capital, knowledge, and technology. That cooperative spirit was also highly infectious beyond the confines of the meeting room. Describing the cooperative activities of a Maryland farmers’ club, B. H. Crocheron noted that СКАЧАТЬ