The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg

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СКАЧАТЬ of fine American citizenship and strong country manhood.” If proximity in cooperative spaces produced the necessary masculine self-possession, rationality, and comfort with external expertise and capital needed for rural leadership, that exemplar of manhood could be translated further through the daily interactions between members and the rest of the community.¹³

      To complement the promise of better men, rural cooperative institutions also promised to improve the lot of women and children. The CES, of course, employed female home demonstration agents and invested a third of its resources in 4-H clubs. Mirroring this strategy, farm bureaus featured “home bureaus” for rural women and a variety of planned activities and events for rural youth. Beyond ensuring that the personal contact of cooperation was gender-appropriate, such activities provided additional access points, allowing the farm bureau to appeal on multiple fronts, not just to rural patriarchs. It also made use of the labor and activism of rural women, who, according to Burritt, gave their “natural” attention to “rural social and community problems and to the needs of children.” In deploying this familial rhetoric, advocates of the cooperative turn appealed to female reformers concerned with the relationship between rural family life and poor rural health. The alleged causes of poor rural health were numerous. Reformers rightly noted that distance to potable water and medical care in rural communities drove the countryside’s comparatively higher morbidity rates. Reformers pointed out that rural women engaged in strenuous labor during and immediately after pregnancies, which undoubtedly posed a serious danger to mothers and infants. But they also blamed the consequences of poverty and racism on ignorance and bad “mothering” skills. The ideal of the “farmer’s wife” circulated by home economists encouraged rural women to abandon revenue-producing labor and focus on domestic consumption, nurturing, health, and aesthetics—changes that essentially sought to transform farmwives into rural analogues of urban, middle-class housewives.¹⁴

      As with male-focused agriculturalists, cooperation’s promise of enhanced social connectivity and multiplying personal contacts offered female reformers a number of new tools. Cooperation could mean broader public support for rural infrastructure improvements that shrank distances to clean water and medical care. Farm organizations worked with public health agencies on campaigns and initiatives. And women’s rural organizations provided grassroots workers for those campaigns that could do the taxing organizational and persuasive labor in scattered communities where male public health officials would not deign to travel. But social connectivity also enhanced the educational opportunities that female reformers hoped would transform coarse rural women into efficient “farmers’ wives.” Just as cooperation expanded the reach of the CES’s county agricultural agents, it did the same for their home demonstration agents, who introduced USDA-approved homemaking techniques into rural communities through public demonstrations, home visits, and clubs. Cooperation promised to break the boredom, monotony, and lonesomeness that many women candidly admitted drove them from farms to city. In this, justifications for cooperative social forms circled back to the specter of rural-to-urban migration. By making rural life more socially fulfilling for rural women, reformers could hope to retain the countryside’s most eugenically fit. For the many female rural reformers enamored of eugenics, cooperative institutions provided the means to assess and voluntarily regulate reproductive fitness. Female health reformers organized “better baby” contests at state and county fairs not far from stalls promoting cooperative livestock marketing organizations. Such a juxtaposition of standardized animal and human bodies was far from accidental. Rather, those reformers transposed to the problem of rural health the grammar, values, and organizational techniques of the industrial ideal.¹⁵

      For all its victories, proponents of the cooperative turn recognized a fundamental obstacle to their ambitions: the atomized patriarchs most in need of the cooperative spirit were also those most unwilling to enter the institutions that fostered it. Experts at the USDA, such as William Lloyd, the USDA’s representative at the organizational meeting of the AFBF, worried that adult farmers, poorly educated and accustomed to the social isolation of rural living, would never accept the USDA’s recommendations, no matter how many pamphlets county agents pushed into their hands or how much they promoted farm bureaus. A decade earlier, the conflict had focused on the integration of modern planting techniques; now agricultural progressives bemoaned the overly individualistic, stubborn farmers who refused to “cooperate” or who, in the case of the Nonpartisan League and the Farmers’ Union, cooperated in ways dangerous to capitalist enterprise. As with scientific farming before it, the acceptance of a cooperative spirit would require serious cultural work beginning in youth, when rural residents were most pliable. According to Lloyd, club work was essential to effective cooperation and farm bureaus. Part of the solution to stubborn patriarchs was to train a generation of boys in “community leadership and cooperative efforts” that combined cooperation with “self-reliance” and the rudiments of businesslike agriculture. Like Mann, who announced an “awakened rural manhood,” Lloyd envisioned 4-H boys grown into splendid manhood as the key to future rural leadership. But producing such splendid manhood required a careful balance: on the one hand, boys needed to be trained to participate in collective action; on the other, they needed to cherish the spirit of commercial competition. Even by 1920, the USDA believed that 4-H, with an approach both competitive and cooperative, trained rural boys to be the extraordinary examples of rural capitalism who would, in time, grow into a generation of farmer-businessmen drawn from Jardine’s dreams.¹⁶

      Before 4-H could be expected to promote cooperation, businesslike agriculture, and awakened manhood in rural America, the club system needed to be reinforced. In fact, the events of World War I had dangerously overextended the 4-H network and left it in need of serious organizational attention from the USDA. In the decade after World War I, experts at the USDA and the land-grant colleges attempted to “standardize” club work, particularly through the introduction of what O. H. Benson, the USDA’s 4-H architect, termed the “club cycle.” Experts at the USDA hoped to create “standard” 4-H clubs at the local level—clubs that shared a uniform structure and set of goals in every rural community in America. To ensure that 4-H clubs were locally supported and considered organic elements of their communities, organizers also worked hard to enroll individual farm bureaus in the organization and operation of the clubs. Within a decade of the Smith-Lever’s passage, the USDA had created a network of standard clubs, interwoven with the farm bureau, that were conducive to financial intimacy and the promotion of healthy rural manhood.

      The sharp increase in agricultural production during World War I created a rural labor shortage and pulled millions of youth into agricultural production. Given considerable wartime migration to urban areas and the enlistment of potential agricultural workers, the CES recognized the need to access new sources of labor beyond just gardening. To that end, the CES focused on utilizing the labor of youth, both rural and urban. As a part of that wartime food-production program, the CES encouraged youth to enroll in a variety of agricultural clubs, framing agricultural labor in the language of national service. Many youths tended small victory gardens of produce for subsistence and local sale, but the program was often even more elaborate. To promote club work, O. H. Benson envisioned a massive “mile-long” “Boys’ and Girls’ Club Interstate Pageant.” The pageant would feature farm machinery presented as “Our 4-H Machine Guns” and the “Corn Club Cavaliers”—“40 boys mounted on horse back … bedecked with corn stalk gun, ear of corn pistol tied to belt and corn husk decorations of uniform arrangements on hats.” Youth from towns and cities also joined the effort, by converting open urban lots into gardens or by taking a work holiday in the country to help with the harvest. “Boys of Connecticut! Help the farmers with the harvest!” implored a propaganda poster. In total, more than a million youth joined clubs organized by the USDA in 1918, including more than 364,000 in garden clubs, and hundreds of thousands of urban youth traveled into the countryside at the harvest.¹⁷

      Like high commodity prices, massive club enrollments were an artifact of war and fell back to earth with peace. Recognizing that the appropriations would not survive the war, many agricultural colleges had employed temporary or part-time club agents with limited experience in extension work and virtually no experience with club work. This “constantly shifting personnel,” in turn, had СКАЧАТЬ