FARMERS, CAPITALISM, AND GOVERNMENT IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

In 1884, Congress created a new federal agency of unprecedented regulatory vision. Its officials soon acquired the capacity to summarily seize and destroy millions of dollars of property and thus to police the disposition of a stock of wealth worth more than the country's total capital invested in railroads. What was this federal colossus? It was the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), an agency that probably few historians know much about. Yet the hotly contested creation of the BAI—three years before the better-known Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)—amounts to an epochal expansion of federal powers. Housed within the already powerful Department of Agriculture (USDA), the BAI was charged with investigating and containing potentially devastating livestock epizootics such as bovine pleuropneumonia and, later, Texas fever. Its success at doing so was little short of astounding. By 1892 it had conceived and carried out the world's first area eradication program of an epidemic disease, in the process establishing a model for future global eradication efforts. More immediately, it bolstered an economy that, for all its industrialization, remained crucially identified with agriculture.