The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America by Gabriel N. Rosenberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural Americaby Gabriel N. Rosenberg Andrew C. Baker The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America. By Gabriel N. Rosenberg. Politics and Culture in Modern America. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 290. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4753-4.) A freckled boy proudly raises a blue ribbon as he poses in front of his prizewinning hog. A beaming girl cradles her best-at-fair jar of pickles, satisfied that she has made the best better. Such scenes are a fixture of rural life. For those who grew up in the countryside, these 4-H competitions are simply a part of life, like high-school sports and church on Sunday mornings. Most metropolitan Americans, for their part, see 4-H as a quaint holdover from the rural past. These two perspectives, as Gabriel N. Rosenberg so deftly explains in The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America, have left this arm of the state free to establish “a mode of governance implemented through the bodies of participating children” (p. 3). Leaders of the 4-H movement, he argues, “produce[d] a countryside both fertile and modern and a state both powerful and hidden” (p. 19). [End Page 958] Rosenberg’s use of the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics provides new insights into the early-twentieth-century conflict between the agents of rural modernization (government, university, and business leaders) and recalcitrant farmers, resistant to “book farming” (p. 26). As these reformers saw it, breeding “quality” (white, heterosexual, middle-class) rural youth would be the nation’s salvation from rural decay, urban degeneracy, “race suicide,” and the collapse of the family farm. The 4-H program allowed access to rural youth, enabling business and extension leaders to preach the gospel of “agrarian futurism” directly to impressionable boys and girls (p. 12). These men acculturated rural boys into agricultural businessmen with the institutional connections and values (“financial intimacy”) to pursue modern farming (p. 55). Extension agents coaxed rural girls out of agricultural production and into middle-class domesticity and modern, scientific home-making. Embroiled in the eugenic science of the day, extension agents trained rural girls to literally score themselves according to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved standards of health and beauty to ensure they were fit for marriage and motherhood. With this groundwork laid during the 1910s and 1920s, the government called on these rural youths to become the hands and bodies of the state, its anchors in rural communities across the nation during the Depression and war. Through the last third of the book, Rosenberg follows his narrative of rural state building at home (World War II) and abroad (Cold War) in a way that inextricably ties seemingly insular rural communities to the modern nation. Rosenberg ends with the American military’s efforts to plant rural youth programs in Afghanistan and thereby shore up American empire abroad. This global turn is a well-executed twist that highlights the worldwide impact of this seemingly down-home organization, yet comes at a cost of losing much of the incisive gendered analysis that makes the earlier chapters so powerful. It is no exaggeration to say that Rosenberg has written one of the most important works in American rural and agricultural history of the last decade. The 4-H Harvestbuilds on the best of the field with insight, analytical depth, and an impressive amount of nuance and discretion, weaving together the histories of the nation-state, gender, and agricultural production in a way that demands attention. It tells the story of rural progressives, USDA agents, and businessmen embedding the state in the countryside. These actors indoctrinated youth into the nation-state and set them on the path toward modern agribusiness. They acculturated these boys and girls into USDA-approved gender roles and thereby solidified the future of the rural white middle class. The 4-H Harvestexplains 4-H’s meaning for the nation, for reformers, and for rural America. It, however, never really asks what 4-H meant to the millions of rural youths who poured themselves into their projects. It...