The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
Committee and safeguard rural youth from the corrosive effect of urban commercialism. From 1930 to 1940, 4-H expanded from about 800,000 members to more than 1.4 million, growing in visibility and reach. During that period, the variety of activities available to 4-H members and the concomitant connections between technocratic expertise and rural youth also multiplied. By the end of the decade, 4-H members were serving their communities by cooperating with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the SCS, the Rural Electrification Administration, and a host of cultural programs designed to edify entire rural communities. The sum of these activities “conserved the youth,” as one USDA expert put it, and reinforced links between the bodies of 4-H members, farm families, rural communities and landscapes, and the modern bureaucratic state. Even as mechanization and “production control” weakened the economic justification for the farm family, club experts at the USDA presented the wholesome 4-H movement as a reason for and a means to conserve the family farm, rural society, and national fertility. Just as perfected 4-H specimens advertised the broader extension program in the 1920s, the belief that 4-H created happy marriages and healthy heterosexual relations offered powerful proof of the wisdom of federal authority in 1930s rural America. Emboldened by this cultural force, club experts finally moved to protect 4-H clubs at the end of the decade from the crass commercialism and “exploitative” behavior of the National Committee that threatened to upend federal authority and its conservation of rural youth.
The growing threat of totalitarianism and probability of war in the late 1930s led the USDA to ponder how 4-H could prepare rural America for war and inoculate rural Americans against the virus of totalitarianism. As Chapter 5 shows, by the beginning of the 1940s, many states had launched 4-H citizenship programs and sought to provide rural youth with democratic practice. Citizenship programs mixed democratic procedure with nationalist ritualism and emphasized that rural youth needed to be ready to make bodily sacrifices for the good of the nation. With the outbreak of World War II, 4-H programs encouraged rural youth to cultivate healthy bodies and copious agricultural commodities as proof of national allegiance and good citizenship.
Contrasts between the fit, vigorous bodies of all-American, white 4-H’ers and depleted foreign bodies continued in the immediate postwar moment and provided embodied evidence of the virtue of American leadership in a global age. Even as such contrasts strengthened the case for American postwar hegemony, they also shifted the focus of rural youth away from pervasive inequalities in the United States. African American critics identified the hypocrisy of promoting democracy abroad while countenancing segregation at home, and they pilloried 4-H in the national press for racial exclusion at national 4-H events. In contrast to their vigorous efforts to contain the gendered threat of the National Committee in the previous decade, USDA officials hid behind a states’-rights argument when faced with criticism from leading African American civil rights activists. Although this criticism did little to change 4-H’s policies, it revealed the larger symbolic politics at work in public discussions of 4-H, which, by 1950, had become synonymous with authentic rural living and white, middle-class commercial farmers.
In the postwar period, the USDA parlayed its modernizing expertise into a broad agenda of anticommunist development in the global South. Chapter 6 surveys the growth of international 4-H programs after World War II and contends that youth-oriented development programs constituted a vital piece of that broader agenda. Based on the precedent of 4-H’s experiment in the rural U.S., American-trained and -financed development technicians crafted 4-H programs for the developing world that imagined American capital, technology, and knowledge flowing into and enriching the bodies of rural youth in the global South—the fecund soil from which a cultivated future would blossom. In seventy-six countries, on every inhabited continent, 4-H programs created robust alliances between modernizing technocrats, agribusiness firms, the U.S. military, and millions of rural youth. The chapter explores three particular international 4-H programs in detail: the Japanese Agricultural Training Program, a youth exchange program that brought thousands of rural Japanese youth to labor on farms in rural America; the Programa Interamericano para la Juventud Rural, a development agency financed by the American International Association that coordinated 4-H programs across Latin America; and 4-T, the Vietnamese 4-H affiliate financed and run by the U.S. military. Across the vast expanses that separated these three Cold War battlegrounds, the unique pliability of 4-H members promised to coordinate between the contradictory elements of America’s modernizing agenda: agribusinesses premised on both capitalist enterprise and statist technocracy; democracies built on both liberal tolerance and violent anticommunism; and an international order structured by both the equality of nations and U.S. interventionism. Youth’s coordinating power served as a black box through which development technicians could bridge the gaps between the contradictions of the impoverished present and the prosperity of an imagined future.
4-H aspired to crossbreed technocratic expertise with country life—scientific agriculture with rural social reproduction—to produce a countryside both fertile and modern and a state both powerful and hidden. A 1909 article in the farm journal The Homestead described the agricultural and homemaking clubs being organized by Oscar Benson, then-superintendent of schools for Wright County, Iowa, but soon to be a paid agent of the USDA, charged with organizing 4-H clubs across the Northern states. The article laid out 4-H’s agrarian futurist agenda in no uncertain terms. Benson could “give the entire corn belt pointers on how to raise a crop of young farmers who will increase the fertility of the soil and solve the problem of how to keep farm boys and girls on the farm.”29 By imagining Benson as a breeder selecting for the countryside’s future and fertility, the article exposed a raw reproductive concern. That anxiety, in turn, forged a tangled relationship between 4-H’s futurist ambitions and a commitment to farming as a privileged occupation in American life that persists.
Driving on U.S. Route 31 now, my eyes catch things I missed as a youth. We once drove past Grissom Air Base, just outside Kokomo. Today, the air base has been shuttered and converted into a prison. Most of the small towns I drive through are economically depressed. Northern Indiana and southern Michigan still suffer from some of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. The last three decades have been unkind to automobile manufacturing and agricultural production in this corner of the Rust Belt. There are still fruit stands, but some operators will candidly tell you that they are selling produce grown in California or abroad and shipped in at prices that undercut locally grown produce. If grown locally or in California, Latino migrant laborers, many of them undocumented, do most of the fruit picking. (The proliferation of Mexican bars and restaurants in small Indiana towns subtly signals this fact.) Aside from these new details, there is, however, a constant. Those same signs—the ones with the four-leafed clover—cheerfully greet travelers up and down U.S. Route 31. Agrarian futurism still binds peripheries and centers, humans and animals, reproduction and governance even as the American century now fades beyond the last row.
CHAPTER ONE
Agrarian Futurism, Rural Degeneracy, and the Origins of 4-H
For this educational work now being carried on through the Department of Agriculture will be like leaven in the meal, leavening the whole lump; for new ideas have the quality of reproduction.… We are just at the beginning of this movement, which will make a transformation in the minds of young men equal to that which machinery has made in the methods of older men.
—“A Little Child Shall Lead Them,” Wallaces Farmer, December 3, 1915
Will Otwell built a pyramid of corn. In the Palace of Agriculture of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, the commissioner of education for the Illinois World’s Fair Commission arranged ears of corn into a great ziggurat ten thousand ears large, each ear gathered from the prizewinning entries of the Illinois boys’ corn contests that Otwell had been organizing in Illinois since 1901. In front of this pyramid, perhaps as homage to an Egyptian obelisk, Otwell erected a single towering ear of corn assembled from the same entries. Thousands of fairgoers passed through the Palace and marveled at King Corn given architectural form, and Otwell’s exhibit invited each spectator