with improving the impoverished spaces of America’s sprawling agrarian empire, USDA experts turned to these generational logics for animals, plants, and humans alike. These technocrats placed the improvement of seemingly marginal locales and bodies at the core of the nation’s reproductive future. Although these technocrats diverged in fundamental ways from the agrarian modernists of the populist rebellion, they shared populism’s confidence that the nation’s future hinged on the transformation and budding prosperity of nonmetropolitan spaces. This inverted the typical narrative of urban modernity in which movement into the future coincided always with movement to the city.
To map 4-H as a biopolitical apparatus makes this book a work of queer political history, a declaration that may seem initially counterintuitive, given that it makes no direct comment on the histories of sexual minorities.25 The history of 4-H challenges depictions of nonmetropolitan family life as more authentic or normal than its metropolitan counterparts. Instead, I embed the material production of youthful bodies and the reproduction of rural society squarely within the historical development of state power and capitalist agriculture in rural America. The nucleated family farm was the cultural effect of the managed industrialization of the American countryside. This site of healthy social and biological reproduction in the countryside was ever fragile, faltering, and in need of federal assistance. Such an explanation makes normalized relationships between rural people and the American state rural heterosexuality’s prerequisite.
Just as the body of the 4-H’er allows us to historicize heteronormativity in rural America, it also illustrates the assembly of the American state. In other words, as the American state produces heterosexuality in rural America, heterosexuality also produces the American state.26 In rural America, we find the state assembled out of unexpected materials. 4-H was an infrastructure composed of prized calves, symmetrical ears of corn, hand-sewn dresses, cans of tomatoes, bags of seed, precise record books, and, most important, the gendered bodies of rural youth—these all testified to rural people on the state’s behalf. They endowed it with credibility and insinuated its physical presence into barns, fields, and parlors. In those locations, through the bodies of 4-H’ers, the state became an object of desire and affection and operationalized that desire and affection in its governing technologies. This infrastructure, along with its affective products, became an indispensable part of the American state’s functioning and capacity, rendering vital service at moments of historical necessity such as the New Deal and World War II. Burdened with the agricultural and military demands of the wartime state of emergency, 4-H’s infrastructure clarified the biopolitical stakes of agricultural production. 4-H offered healthy, vigorous bodies—individual and collective—ready to live and die for the American state.
In identifying this infrastructure, I am referencing the historical sociologist Michael Mann’s concept of “infrastructural power,” originally defined by Mann as “[t]he capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm.”27 His concept shifts attention from the sovereign rights of the state to the technologies that actively and materially constitute governing networks; he pushes historians of the state to move from problems of law to problems of logistics and thus makes possible an empirical approach that historian William Novak calls a “bottom-up” history of governing and statecraft. 4-H’ers entered into alliance with the state, but their value to that alliance depended on their simultaneous ability to embody an innocent future; 4-H’s political efficacy hinged on its political innocence. 4-H’s state/civil status was always fluid, contingent, and contextual.28 At some moments, 4-H’ers embodied the state; at other moments, they embodied its antithesis, civil society. This ambiguity was not a problem to be overcome. It was, to the contrary, a strategic asset and the very root of 4-H’s political power.
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This book is organized into six chapters that proceed chronologically and thematically. Just as the chapters move in a generally chronological fashion, each chapter also maps a particular biopolitical unit. The book moves in an arc from a broad regulative field of discourse (rural degeneracy and agrarian futurism in Chapter 1) to particular localized embodiments of gender (rural boys in Chapter 2 and rural girls in Chapter 3) to the idealized reproductive units assembled from those local bodies (farm families in Chapter 4) to the aggregated bodies that harnessed and redirected the labor of those reproductive units (nations and global communities at war, hot and cold, in Chapters 5 and 6).
Chapter 1 begins by tracing the development of the 4-H movement from its origins in early twentieth-century rural reform movements to its central role in the creation of the USDA’s CES in 1914. Progressive Era reformers believed that the countryside—and, with it, the nation—had entered a stark and dangerous decline. Many rural communities and households, they argued, corroded body and soul, driving the fittest to cities and leaving the countryside teeming with the infirm, foolish, and deviant. For a nation rooted in agrarian virtues and a “native” population demographically dependent on the fecundity of rural families, these facts boded ill for rural populations, imagined racial futures, and national bodies alike. Faced with intractable stubbornness of ignorant, lazy farm patriarchs, reformers turned increasingly to children as instruments of transformation. Youth clubs departed dramatically from previous methods of agricultural reform because they gave government agents direct access to rural homes, educated the next generation of farmers and homemakers, and allowed rural youth to carry the banner of rural modernization. Buoyed by reports of healthy, radiant youth canning tomatoes and growing corn, Congress created the CES with the passage of the Smith-Lever Act in 1914. The legislative debate around that act crystallized the assumption that rural youth, when allied with the technocratic expertise of a federal bureaucracy, could bypass faltering rural fathers, transform rural households, and restore vigor to the national body.
Chapter 2 explores the intertwined growth of 4-H, capital-intensive agriculture, and technocratic expertise 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, symbols, and institutions—most notably, the National Committee on Boys and Girls Club Work (National Committee), a private, not-for-profit organization that handled 4-H’s national fundraising and lobbying. Through an alliance of state expertise, local voluntary labor, and private capital, the 4-H clover sprouted in communities around the nation, enrolling more than 800,000 youth by the end of the decade. By providing rural youth with an arena for cooperation, club organizers enticed participation and habituated club members to accepting the USDA as a reliable source of knowledge and advice. By enlisting a diverse array of private local actors as the face of the 4-H program and by tightly coordinating with county farm bureaus, the USDA packaged 4-H’ers as authentic representatives of rural communities and the apotheosis of a cooperative spirit. Crucially, this cooperative spirit critiqued extant rural masculinity: the stubborn rural patriarchs who, lacking the masculine self-discipline to run their farms like businesses, begged like dependents for public relief. 4-H’s allies and advocates contended that through the clubs, rural boys could develop into farmer-businessmen: men characterized by both their homespun folksiness and economic self-possession; men as comfortable at barn raisings as at financial conferences; men for whom capitalist competition was a gate to rural cooperation rather than a barrier.
The gendered reform of rural households also had significant implications for the hundreds of thousands of rural girls engaged in club work. As Chapter 3 explains, 4-H programming encouraged rural girls in the 1920s to
