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 to remake the rural home in order to save it. They concentrated their efforts on improving the agricultural practices of rural boys and the home-making labor of rural girls, operating under the theory that even if adults dismissed their lessons, youth would adopt them and create healthy and attractive households where the previous generation had failed. To make this operation as effective as possible, however, club specialists argued that they needed to make club work more uniform. The following decade witnessed efforts to expand 4-H club work and, at the same time, to strengthen the USDA’s power in the American countryside.
CHAPTER TWO
Financial Intimacy and Rural Manhood
I pledge my head to clearer thinking …
—The 4-H Pledge
Where did the name “4-H” come from? Although the iconic clover and the “H” mnemonic originated in Iowa, before World War I the clubs were still referred to as “Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs” or “Junior Extension Clubs.” At a club conference in 1913, Mrs. Jane McKimmon, a North Carolina club organizer, pointed out the need for a catchier “brand name” that would help club members market their products to consumers. The conference pondered the question until Oscar Baker Martin, the USDA’s club agent for the South, suggested the moniker “4-H clubs.” Martin’s suggestion met with “unanimous approval,” and shortly after, an “artistic tomato label” with the name was created. “From that it was extended to other labels,” explained Martin, “not only in the Girls’ Work, but on the boxes of potatoes, seed corn, and other such thing which the boys had to sell. Then began the systematic campaign to raise and maintain standards in order that the 4-H brand might become favorably known.”1
The term caught fire. USDA specialist Gertrude Warren used the term in a USDA pamphlet for the first time in 1918; by 1924, the USDA had trademarked “4-H” and its four-leafed clover symbol. During the 1920s, “4-H” appeared regularly in USDA literature, congressional hearings, and the press. Meanwhile, emblazoned “upon myriads of badges, caps, aprons, pennants, flags and standards,” the 4-H clover proliferated as the symbol of the movement “to make the best better.” That motto, suggested by USDA extension specialist Carrie Harrison and in wide use by 1919, provided only a minimal description of the program’s aim. In 1927, a national assembly of club leaders offered a clearer explanation in the form of a standard national 4-H pledge: “I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, and my health to better living for my club, my community, and my country.”2
The widespread adoption of the term “4-H,” as well as national club mottos, pledges, and symbols, was emblematic of a broader trend toward expansion and standardization of club work in the decade after the passage of the Smith-Lever Act. During that period, 4-H developed from an inchoate set of loosely affiliated clubs and contests to a well-organized network unified by a standard set of methods and symbols. Over the same period, the USDA also helped establish a set of institutions to supplement its own educational activities with fund-raising, lobbying, and leader training. These institutions—most notably, the National Committee on Boys and Girls Club Work (National Committee)—fused the publicly financed technocratic expertise of the USDA with the commercial capital of bankers, railroads, mail-order retailers, and agricultural technology firms. Through this alliance of state expertise, local voluntary labor, and private commercial capital, the 4-H clover sprouted in communities around the nation, enrolling more than 800,000 youth by the end of the decade and visibly “demonstrating” the USDA’s preferred brand of capital-intensive, debt-financed agriculture in every rural county.
Far from an incidental detail, the famous moniker’s genesis explained much about how 4-H functioned in the decade after the passage of Smith-Lever. Despite 4-H’s avowed educational and public-spirited purposes, profit motives and commercial transactions were integral components of 4-H’s identity. 4-H was a marketing device designed by state experts to help farm kids sell agricultural products to the rural public. Experts at the USDA also used 4-H to “sell” capital-intensive, debt-financed agriculture and technocratic expertise to rural Americans. And bankers and businessmen gave cheap loans and prizes to 4-H in the belief that it would prime the sale of financial products to the next generation of farmers. Among the various actors enticed by the 4-H movement, the clover planted visions—and seeds—of multiplying transactions from which future rural prosperity would grow. All these “sales” depended upon and reproduced a range of intimate registers—trust, loyalty, friendship, and affection—that were typically re-coded through the ubiquitous buzzword “cooperation.” By offering rural youth an arena for cooperation, club work cultivated spaces where the rising generation would be brought into proximity and contact with community members, bankers, merchants, and agricultural experts. Crucially, the cumulative effect of this combined economic and cultural project provided what I call “financial intimacy” or, in other words, intimacy—in the form of knowledge and social bonds—with and through capital. Financial intimacy entailed
