The Land-Grant Colleges, Cooperative Extension, and the New Deal

Abstract

This chapter explores the history of cooperative agricultural extension, paying special attention to the crucial decade of the 1930s, when the relationship between the federal government and the land grants blossomed into its modern form. It states that the land-grant colleges, led by their extension departments, served as a predominant intermediary organization during the New Deal, paving the way for higher education's even greater support of the federal government during and after World War 2. The chapter argues that the land-grant colleges were crucial to the New Deal's achievement of national administrative capacity and to the education of rural Americans for life in a bureaucratic state. It shows how the Roosevelt administration used the land-grant colleges, and its vast agricultural extension network, to mediate relations with rural Americans at the grass roots level. The land-grant colleges helped the New Deal achieve administrative capacity in a political culture uncomfortable with a powerful national bureaucracy.