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

Gabriel Rosenberg’s study of the origins and development of 4-H, the largest and best-known youth-serving organization in America, firmly embeds the federal government within the heart of modern agrarian life. While readers may already be familiar with the ways that the federal government insinuated itself into the American landscape through Progressive Era conservation and New Deal agricultural policies, this study explains how the 4-H youth program also provided the federal government a conduit to family farms, served to condition American youth to partner with government programs, and “functioned as a mode of governance implemented through the bodies of participating children” (3). Grounded in research from archives across the nation, this ambitious work is an institutional history of the organization, an examination of the cultural interpretations of the agrarian political economy, and an intimate look at the interconnection of the human and nonhuman biopolitical frameworks involved in modern state building.

Through six chronological chapters, Rosenberg’s book demonstrates how the federal government influenced American society, and eventually the world, through children and youth’s activities. As such, the 4-H program may be understood as a precursor to the sort of federal intervention that Marilyn Irvin Holt writes of in Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (2014). Rosenberg explains how the federal government, through the United States Department of Agriculture and the agricultural extension service, partnered with modern agrarian scientists, home economists, and social welfare reformers to modernize farms, combat perceived rural degeneracy, and strengthen the nation through healthy farm families. In so doing, the federal government gained acknowledgment as a cultural and scientific authority throughout rural America.

Beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, Rosenberg explains, children’s agricultural programs were used to reach out to farmers and their wives who were otherwise resistant to modernization. In supporting their children’s activities, parents were then exposed to scientifically proven best practices in animal husbandry, crop cultivation, and domestic homemaking. Agricultural clubs served to bridge the gap between home and school, providing vocational training that was meant to stem the tide of population drift toward cities by reinvigorating agrarian life with modern import. 4-H projects introduced boys to capital-intensive projects that often required debt financing. This helped to condition young farmers and their families to the notion of debt for the sake of progress while it also created and strengthened ties between farmers, bankers, and retailers under the guise of community building. The clubs also trained girls in the art of modern homemaking and ostensibly infused excitement into otherwise banal activities.

By the 1930s, children’s 4-H activities had become an unapologetic extension of the federal government as children were taught to assist parents in understanding the intricacies of New Deal agricultural policies, such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act. As well, Rosenberg explains, clubs became sites of heterosexual socialization in order to encourage positive eugenic efforts to curtail the crisis of reproduction that threatened to undermine rural America. Through club activities, prescriptive literature, and health contests that “scrutinized bodies and quantif[ied] copious ‘defects,’” (104) 4-H’ers learned to examine and document their health, physique, and emotional well-being just as they would score and record livestock, vegetation, or domestic projects. 4-H met the uncertainties of World War II with activities and literature that focused on rituals of belonging. Yet, it was through the organization’s patriotic literature, and at national 4-H conferences, Rosenberg writes, that the inconsistencies and contradictions of the organization’s racially discriminatory policies became starkly apparent. The club’s focus on producing young bodies suitable for labor and national sacrifice centered on contrasts between healthy, white, American bodies and those of “depleted foreign bodies” (171).

Rosenberg moves from the local to the global in the last chapter and epilogue. Like recent studies such as Daniel Immerwahr’s...