a decadent metropolis and its degenerate hinterlands. “Cities have the best of the human material,” complained Orator Fuller Cook, a prominent eugenics advocate and plant scientist at the USDA, in an essay arguing for rural educational reform. “But [cities] spoil [human material] in the making, and must continue to import rural talent to make good the deterioration.”14
“Folk depletion,” as Ross would later call that “import [of] rural talent” to cities, proceeded precisely because of the abundant, fecund possibilities of rural bodies assumed by nostalgic agrarianism. By folk depletion, Ross meant the tendency of the best rural youth to abandon country life for excitement and profit in the city. Those who remained on the farm, according to this narrative, were typically the least intelligent and moral, and rural isolation did little to improve the situation. Ross memorably quoted one rural informant who scoffed at the supposed “purity of the open country.… The moral conditions among our country boys and girls are worse than in the lowest tenement house in New York.” On long and lonely winter nights, the informant continued, “What is more natural than that the boys should get together in the barn and while away the long winter evenings talking obscenity, telling filthy stories, recounting sex exploits, encouraging one another in vileness, perhaps indulging in unnatural practices?” What could it mean for the farm boys to behave “naturally … unnatural”? Agrarianism held that farms were naturally more fecund and conducive to reproductivity than the sterile mechanization of the city. But, as Cook warned, “the instincts which lie at the basis of the family and the preservation and development of the race are likewise capable of endless perversions.” As uncontrolled out-migration disrupted social constraints, it also eroded the outlets that guided farm boys’ surging libidos to fruitful marriage and procreation. The natural desires of farm boys thus gave way to unnatural practices. But the situation was remediable, Ross argued, by rationalizing and managing rural out-migration. Ross’s informant’s perspective, like Cook’s, contained the seeds of both modernist and agrarian logics: they reaffirmed the countryside’s unique reproductive potential even as they insisted that such human fertility be larded as jealously as the soil’s.15
Ross’s concerns about farm boys’ “unnatural practices” dovetailed with broader worries about the mounting perversity and degeneracy of the white, rural poor. Rather than calling attention to the extreme material deprivations of rural life, these narratives often reframed the unsightliness of rural poverty as a moral, mental, and genetic pathology. A host of eugenic family studies depicted the rural remnants as thoroughly perverse and degraded, partly to justify the more rational governance of human desire and reproduction. Studies of the Jukes (1877 and 1916), the Kallikaks (1912), the Nams (1912), and the Hill families (1912), among others, identified white, poor rural families as wellsprings of congenital “idiocy,” criminality, and mental disease wrought of extensive incest and poor breeding.16 In their 1919 study of Ohio country churches, Gifford Pinchot and Charles Otis Gill echoed concerns about inbreeding when they noted pervasive sexual immorality in rural communities with “inefficient churches.” Pinchot and Gill warned: “Syphilitic and other venereal diseases are common and increasing over whole counties. While in some communities nearly every family is afflicted with inherited or infectious disease. Many cases of incest are known, inbreeding is rife. Imbeciles, feebleminded, and delinquents are numerous.”17 Doctors also pointed to the surprising prevalence of venereal diseases among rural residents. One study of Michigan, for example, found that syphilis infections were present in nearly a third of all the autopsies of rural residents, a rate of prevalence considerably higher than those found in urban communities. (Other doctors argued that the study’s conclusions were an artifact of a less rigorous diagnostic standard.) By 1920, medical authorities cited pervasive degeneracy and venereal disease to explain why, during World War I, rural men had been disproportionately found unfit for military service.18
Although such reports of rural degeneracy made broad generalizations about the collective pathologies of rural spaces, rural reformers typically used tales of malformed reproduction to justify personal rather than structural reform. “These sad stories of rural degeneracy must not make us pessimists,” warned George Walter Fiske, a junior dean at the Oberlin Theological Seminary, in The Challenge of the Country (1912). “These communities however warn us that even self-respecting rural villages are in danger of following the same sad process of decay unless they are kept on the high plane of wholesome Christian living and community efficiency.”19 Fiske linked the “rural problem” to “social and economic adjustment,” noting that degeneracy was most acute “in the isolated places among the hills or in unfertile sections which have been deserted by the ambitious and intelligent, leaving a pitiable residuum of ‘poor whites’ behind.” Solutions to rural degeneracy encompassed a broad variety of rural reforms, from encouraging scientific agriculture to better recreational opportunities in rural communities. At the heart of all these efforts, however, resided the unifying assumption that personal transformation was both the object and the instrument of rural reform. As Liberty Hyde Bailey, a leading agricultural progressive and dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, wrote in The State and the Farmer (1908): “The great country problems are now human rather than technically agricultural.” To ensure that the rural labor force could meet the needs of progressive agriculture, reformers schemed to modernize all elements of rural living—first and foremost, through education. “We much need to know how to use our increasing technical knowledge,” Bailey continued, “and to systematize it into practical ideals of personal living.”20
Such a strategy of education hinged on the transformative possibilities of youth. Uprooted youth were at the heart of Ross’s theory of folk depletion. Turn-of-the-century education reformers and child-development theorists spoke of youth as the key moment of personal development, the period when individual personality was cast irrevocably toward normalcy or aberrance, health or perversion.21 Their supposed flexibility made young people both ideal subjects for personal reform and potent threats to social stability, and that double bind only intensified the focus on youth in discussions of the “rural problem.” For example, Fiske emphasized youth by including “the country boy,” smiling and towheaded, in The Challenge of the Country’s frontispiece. “Why does he want to leave his father’s farm to go to the city?” wondered the picture’s caption. “He ought to be able to find his highest happiness and usefulness in the country, his native environment, where he is sadly needed.” Fiske summarized his youth-oriented approach to the “peril of rural depletion and threatened degeneracy” as a call to “consecrated young manhood and womanhood” to become the agents of a “reconstructed rural life.”22
A reconstructed rural life might keep the best youth on farms, but it demanded better methods that extended expert lessons into rural communities and homes. Proponents of agricultural extension argued that their innovative methods effectively circulated the advice of university professors and USDA officials in rural communities and, in the process, discredited their homespun skeptics, scoffers, and critics. Federal support for agricultural extension was eventually forthcoming, thanks in no small part to the work of Seaman Knapp. Knapp was born in upstate New York in 1833 and educated at Union College. Over the course of five decades, he became one of the nation’s most prolific agriculturalists. He served as the second president of Iowa State Agricultural College before leaving the position in 1886 to operate a rice plantation in Louisiana. His time in Iowa also introduced him to “Tama” James Wilson, the future secretary of agriculture in the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1898, Knapp journeyed to Japan, China, and the Philippines on behalf of the USDA to gather exceptional rice seed and study rice cultivation practices. He made similar trips to East Asia for the USDA in 1901 and to Puerto Rico in 1902. In 1902, he was appointed “Special Agent for the Promotion of Agriculture in the South” for the USDA.
Figure 2. “The Country Boy,” frontispiece to George Walter Fiske’s The Challenge of the Country (1912).
Knapp believed that educating Southern farmers about correct agricultural practices
