only on a curriculum of writing, reading, and arithmetic. Educational reformers derided that focus as inadequate for the needs of rural students and as unlikely to attract their interest. To accommodate demand for child labor on farms, many country schools were in session for only twenty to thirty weeks during the year. To make matters worse, distances and parental apathy meant that some farm children avoided school altogether. Even as educational reformers identified serious problems with rural schools, their solutions—school consolidation, mandatory attendance, professionalization, and more extensive state and federal oversight—expanded the prerogatives of agents of the state at the expense of parental and local control. As educational reformers depicted their programs as technocratic, apolitical solutions to rural social problems, many rural people bitterly resisted them as the political encroachments of meddling outsiders.29
Rural reformers comfortable with increasing the state’s rural reach, however, found convenient common cause with school reformers. For example, the National Commission on Country Life placed the improvement of rural schools at the forefront of its recommendations to the nation. President Theodore Roosevelt asked Liberty Hyde Bailey to chair the commission and appointed to it sundry prominent agricultural progressives, including “Uncle” Henry Wallace, a successful Iowa commercial farmer and publisher of Wallaces Farmer; Kenyon Butterfield, president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College; and Gifford Pinchot, the prolific chief of the U.S. Forest Service and later coauthor of Six Thousand Country Churches and governor of Pennsylvania. The commission solicited input from around the nation, sending out half a million circular letters and holding public hearings in thirty locations across the country. In January 1909, it issued its findings. “The subject of paramount importance in our correspondence and in the hearings is education,” stated the commission. “In every part of the United States there seems to be one mind, on the part of those capable of judging, on the necessity of redirecting the rural schools. There is no such unanimity on any other Subject” Poor rural schools, the commission reported, were responsible for virtually all the problems of rural life, “ineffective farming, lack of ideals, and the drift to town.”30
Rural schools were not deteriorating, the report contended; rather, they were in a state of “arrested development” and were failing to adapt themselves to the evolving needs of rural people. This was most acutely apparent in the absence of instruction in agriculture and home economics in rural schools. The commission recommended several changes to address these problems. There would need to be a greater curricular emphasis on the “real needs of the people” in rural schools—agriculture and the “home subjects,” in particular. A significant part of the solution would also come from restructuring the system of rural education entirely, making rural schools only a small part of a larger comprehensive educational program. Rural educators needed to tear down the barrier between homes and schools and the similarly false division between work and learning. Rural educational reformers should better integrate schoolteachers into rural communities and create a complementary system of “continuing education” outside schools through extension. The USDA, the commission concluded, provided the “best extension work now proceeding in this country,” and its program, including “boys’ and girls’ clubs of many kinds,” should be emulated and systematized nationwide.31
The “boys’ and girls’ clubs” that the report referenced had initially blossomed without the benefit of explicit federal support but had instead been the innovation of rural school superintendents. By the time the Louisiana Purchase Exposition asked Will Otwell to hold a statewide contest and to exhibit the results in the Palace of Agriculture in 1904, eight thousand boys were enrolled in his corn contests. Educators quickly recognized that these contests offered an entry point for a more elaborate vocational education in the form of regular youth clubs. “The State College of Agriculture, the Illinois Farmers’ Institute, and the county institute secretaries and county superintendents of schools” encouraged corn contestants to form clubs where they could meet to discuss their methods and results under the supervision of master farmers and expert agriculturalists. O. J. Kern, a school superintendent in Winnebago County, founded the first such club in the state in February 1902 and attracted thirty-two members.32 By 1905, two thousand boys across the state belonged to “corn” or “experiment” clubs. The clubs connected promoters of progressive agriculture with individual farmers and rural youth. Traveling libraries regularly visited the clubs and offered the boys access to a “liberal sprinkling of standard agricultural books, and the bulletins and other publications of the State experiment station and of the United States Department of Agriculture.” Club leaders invited successful farmers, professors of agriculture, and other agricultural experts to speak to their members. Clubs also toured the more prosperous farms in their counties and occasionally embarked on longer trips to institutes, experiment stations, and agricultural colleges. At the conclusion of the year, club leaders awarded exemplary members a “diploma or other certificates” to mark their efforts. While most clubs focused on the cultivation of corn, the clubs also provided a venue to discuss other crops and more generic farming issues. Though organized in coordination with educational professionals, the early Illinois boys’ club movement fused state subsidies with private support to promote progressive agriculture outside the benighted country schoolhouse.33
Similar efforts developed simultaneously across the Corn Belt and in the Deep South, winning attention and support from Seaman Knapp.34 While early clubs were similar to “nature study” clubs in some ways, they focused on practical problems involved in agricultural production. A. B. Graham organized corn and tomato clubs in western Ohio, holding the first meetings in the basement of the Springfield public building in January 1902. He explained that the clubs would teach boys “elementary knowledge” about agriculture, just as girls would learn “the simplest facts of domestic economy,” and would “inspire young men and young women to further their education in the science of agriculture or domestic science.”35 William H. Smith, superintendent of education in Holmes County, Mississippi, organized corn clubs for boys and “culture study” clubs for girls in 1906. His work caught Knapp’s eye, and, after 1907, Knapp promoted similar programs in all states where his cooperative demonstrators worked.36
From the start, the Southern clubs interested adults in the agricultural activities of their children and created a new channel of communication between farmers and agricultural experts. Earlie Cleveland of Decatur, Mississippi, reported that his previously indifferent father was now invested in the practices of scientific agriculture. Papa Cleveland could be found “hustling Round for seed corn” to help his son improve his contest acre of corn. The Boykin brothers of Maury, Virginia, wrote that “Papa and Mama are both interested in this work. They both help us and are proud of our efforts.” Loucas Puckett of Dresden, Tennessee, proudly announced that he had his “father and mother interested in the Agricultural work” through his club activities. At other times, the corn clubs pitted rural children against their parents. Perry T. Dill of Taylor, South Carolina, provided Knapp with his father’s address and requested that, though his father was not in demonstration work, the Department of Agriculture should write to him and give him “any thing you have to help him in his farm work.” Though Paul Burtner’s father was “simply not on our side,” the Harrisonburg, Virginia, boy thought that his father would “gratefully receive any bulletins or other literature.… I am hopeful of winning him over.” In these cases, the clubs created persistent allies inside rural homes.37
Although Knapp’s support was important, Oscar Herman Benson, the USDA’s club expert in the Northern states, honed Knapp’s philosophy further by explaining how youth work, more than any other phase of extension, had the potential to convert farmers to the gospel of scientific agriculture. Benson played a crucial role in the early formation of the agricultural youth club movement, presiding over Northern club work for almost a decade before leaving to run the Junior Achievement Bureau in 1920. Benson, born and raised on a farm in southwest Iowa, studied at the University of Iowa, Iowa State Teachers’ College, and, eventually, the University of Chicago.38 At the turn of the century, the University of Chicago was a hive of progressivism and home to some of the leading advocates of educational reform, including John Dewey, George Herbert Mead,
