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 to take home a packet’s worth of fine seed corn. Through these careful arrangements, Otwell made a monument “to the industry and intelligence of 8,000 Illinois farmer boys,” one representative of the USDA remarked, on witnessing the exhibit.1
The exhibit, like the World’s Fair around it, exposed the agrarian futurist impulses underwriting America’s burgeoning empire. Framed around the hundred-year anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, the fair commemorated a century’s worth of agricultural expansion and visually linked the nation’s rise as an international power to the successful internal conquest of nature through settled agriculture. Near exotic ethnological exhibits of primitives drawn from far-flung colonial possessions and peripheries, individual states displayed bounties in the Palace of Agriculture grown on their most impressive, modern farms. For Illinois, the intricate corn structures, built from ears selected for their even rows and plump kernels, figuratively testified to the enduring virility of Illinois’s corn farmers. Through its hopeful invocation of youth, the exhibit envisioned a national future of abundance bred of technocratic expertise and rural fertility. Alongside that figurative assertion of virility, the accompanying seed samples intended a literal dissemination—a plan for the strong seed of the Illinois farmer boys to impregnate fertile soil from Grand Island to Canton.
Figure 1. The Illinois Boys’ Corn Exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.
At the turn of the twentieth century in America, such hopeful visions for the countryside mingled with disturbing reports of growing depravity, criminality, and venereal disease in decaying rural quarters previously toasted as holdfasts of national virtue and healthy reproduction. Witnessing rural “degeneration and demoralization” in 1893, Social Gospel activist Josiah Strong warned that if rural out-migration continued unabated, he could “see no reason why isolation, irreligion, ignorance, vice and degradation should not increase in the country until we have a rural peasantry, illiterate and immoral, possessing the rights of citizenship, but utterly incapable of performing or comprehending its duties.” In 1897, the poet Walter M. Rogers eulogized “the strong Green Mountain boy” in a poem called “Vermont’s Deserted Farms,” a demise marked on the landscape by “the shattered homes/ all crumbling to decay,/ like long-neglected catacombs/ of races passed away.” Reports of rural degeneracy were the nightmarish underbelly of agrarian futurism’s cheerful utopianism. Too many rural communities fell prey to out-migration and inbreeding, rural reformers complained. Rather than questioning agrarian futurism’s focus on the fertile possibilities of youthful rural bodies, tales of rural degeneracy assumed them—with a twist. If the reproductive possibilities of rural youth could be harnessed to produce a better future, what frightful perils attended their neglect? Where had the youthful virility of “the strong Green Mountain boy” gone? And would the Illinois farmer boy join him in this racial passing, littering the Corn Belt with the same “shattered homes”?2
In a moment when the future of agricultural landscapes was linked so intimately to healthy racial reproduction, Will Otwell’s efforts were poised to render all those questions moot. He directed the construction of the corn exhibit but had also pioneered the youth contests and clubs that had produced the corn—associations that were years in the making and that Otwell reported dramatically improved interest in the scientific cultivation of corn among boys as well as adult farmers. His approach was effective but was hardly unique. Across the Corn Belt and Deep South, a similar complex of clubs and contests blossomed throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. Educators, bureaucrats, bankers, and reformers alike identified youth clubs as an effective way to reach rural youth and, through them, farmers. Propelled by the success and notoriety of youth-oriented workers like Otwell, the U.S. Congress moved to formally subsidize agricultural extension and agricultural youth club work in 1914, with the passage of the Smith-Lever Act. Debate on Smith-Lever revealed that, more than simply a system to promote scientific agriculture, youth clubs were also intended to husband the nation’s future in a time of reproductive uncertainty. On the floor of Congress, advocates of the extension bill identified clubs as a powerful tool to stanch the dysgenic flow to the city and, with it, rural degeneracy. Through such strategies, early advocates of agricultural youth clubs aligned a vision of normal racial reproduction with the presence of diffuse federal power in the countryside.
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Federal interest in agricultural youth clubs initially emerged out of efforts to materially improve conditions in America’s rapidly expanding farmlands in the late nineteenth century, but it was tied as well to efforts to reconcile the nation’s seemingly urban destiny with its agrarian past. The increase of cultivated acreage and production across the United States during this period brought attendant concerns about pervasive rural poverty, moral and physical degeneracy, and inefficient farming techniques that complicated equally pervasive celebrations of the homesteading farmer as the source of national character. Middle-class reformers, both urban and rural, promoted “progressive” and “scientific” practices in the countryside, intending to improve rural living conditions, increase the nation’s agricultural bounty, and safeguard the countryside’s reproductive future. By the early twentieth century, agricultural progressives like Seaman Knapp were contending that existing means of rural reform—farmers’ institutes, pamphlets, and agricultural colleges—were insufficient, particularly in the impoverished South. Knapp argued that proponents of progressive country life needed to journey to the afflicted communities and farms to demonstrate their findings. He built an alliance among state experts, commercial interests, and farm families, using a method that became known as cooperative agricultural extension. Extension placed an agent of the state agricultural college in rural communities and among farmers, bringing the insights of scientific agriculture directly to farmers without intermediaries. No longer would farmers need to seek out the insights of the USDA and land-grant colleges. Agricultural extension would bring it to their doorsteps and into their homes.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, primarily through the USDA and the Department of the Interior, the federal government subsidized agricultural expansion in a number of ways. The USDA directly assisted farmers by distributing millions of seeds, free of cost. Federal monies helped to establish a network of universities partially dedicated to agricultural research and education through the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. After
