The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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.
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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 the countryside into a site of modernity and to retain and grow rural populations.
More than merely a personal transformation, agricultural youth clubs were designed to effect a much broader collective transformation of rural America. The ambition of that transformation demanded state action and support. It envisioned state power as an enduring and pervasive influence over rural life and in farm households, enacted by agricultural youth clubs, the USDA, the extension service, and land-grant colleges. Not surprisingly, while other youth organizations abetted government schemes over the years—all major youth organizations, for example, participated in wartime resource drives—no other major youth organization was directly administered by a federal agency nor was any predicated on the fundamental ideological acceptance of state authority and expertise. Whether it was appropriate for the state to intervene in rural households was the most basic and divisive question for those debating Smith-Lever. The passage of Smith-Lever—and the very existence of 4-H—affirmed the proposition that the federal government should be a source of scientific and cultural authority for rural Americans and that the vitality of American civilization depended upon that affirmation.
Six years after the passage of Smith-Lever, the national conversation was still dominated by pervasive fears of the degeneracy of rural society and the reproductive decline of white American civilization. In late September of 1920, the Census Bureau announced that the urban population had, at last, surpassed the population of the countryside, according to the results of the decennial census. This announcement unleashed another wave of worry and anxiety about the health of the countryside and the nation. “Evidently something is wrong with country life, its occupations and amusements, when so many cannot resist the ‘lure’ of the city,” opined the New York Times. Others wondered if the rise of the cities also meant the political ascendance of immigrants. The Chicago Daily Tribune “hope[d] that the balance of power in the affairs of the nation may remain for some time in the hands of a class of citizens of proved stability, strong in national feeling, not carried away by waves of alien sympathies.”67 Frederic J. Haskin, writing in his regular column for the Los Angeles Times, was less oblique. “The America of our grandfathers,” he asserted, “was a land of blond men of Nordic or so-called Anglo-Saxon blood, who lived outdoors, herded cattle, tilled the soil, hunted, fished and sailed the seas from Arctic to Antarctic.” The new America, he continued, would be “a heavily populated country of short dark-skinned men, living … [in] crowded, complicated and enormous cities.” This was America’s troubling destiny, Haskin claimed, unless “the government gets down to the necessary work of creating more farms.”68
Haskin would find little disagreement from club work experts at the Department of Agriculture. By 1920, the USDA employed a national staff of seventeen full-time specialists dedicated to club work, even as hundreds of county agents around the nation directly supervised club work increasingly under the name “4-H” and the symbol of the four-leafed clover. Led by Benson and O. B. Martin, club work specialists concurred with Haskin’s assessment that rural society was in decline and argued that the government needed