Stewards of the Land: The American Farm School and Greece in the Twentieth Century (review)

The American encounter with the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean during the past century has taken many different forms. A variety of American agents—merchants, missionaries, diplomats, warriors, educators—have carried their particular ambitions, ideologies, and resources to countries that embody deeply rooted cultures and traditions but are often wracked by war and poverty. The results of American involvement have been mixed, as we are reminded by the collapse of President Woodrow Wilson's grand designs after World War I, the fate of the Christians of the Ottoman Empire, and the present-day conflicts in the Near East.

Some of the finest achievements were by American educators. Robert College in Istanbul, Anatolia College of Thessaloniki, the American University of Beirut, and the latter's counterpart in Cairo come to mind. In contrast to those famed institutions, located in their countries' leading metropolises, offering a wide range of liberal and professional education, and designed to shape national leadership, the American Farm School near Thessaloniki, Greece, since its founding in 1904 has concentrated on a single educational niche: training small farmers in modern agricultural techniques and leadership skills at the village level. What the Farm School does share with those illustrious educational centers, which also developed out of the American missionary thrust into the Near East during the nineteenth century, is an impact on the indigenous society far disproportionate to the institution's size and material resources.

In the case of the Farm School (officially the Thessaloniki Agricultural and Industrial Institute), this outsize impact stemmed mostly from the guiding principles of its founding couple, John Henry House and Susan Adeline House. Their dedicated successors judiciously adapted the school's creed to changing circumstances during the following decades.

Brenda L. Marder is exceptionally well qualified to relate this story. An inveterate philhellene, she first took up the project in the 1970s while residing at the Farm School and amassing its historical archive. The result was an antecedent work (Stewards of the Land, the American Farm School and Modern Greece, published in 1979 by Eastern European Quarterly), that told of the school's founding and its experience to mid-century. This new publication, timed for the school's centennial-year celebration, brings the account up to date. It includes the original work, unchanged in substance, as Book 1, followed by the new narrative as Book 2. The full work has also appeared in a Greek translation (Metechmio, 2004). The entire treatment benefits from the sure hand of an author whose acquaintance with her subject extends over four decades.

Book 1 (1904 to 1949) describes the Farm School's founding in Macedonia, then a province of the Ottoman Empire, for the purpose of schooling boys from that impoverished land in advanced farming methods while also imbuing them with Protestant ethics. Stressing practical instruction, it began with a demonstration farm on fifty acres of previously unproductive land eight miles from Thessaloniki. Its first years coincided with the struggle among rival powers for possession of Macedonia, which led to the Balkan Wars (1912 to 1913) and culminated in the irredentist Greek state wresting a large part of the province from the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. One of the notable accomplishments of the founders and their son and successor, Charles Lucius House (serving from 1929 to 1955), was to steer the school clear of political entanglements in that perennially insecure border region, while persuading the people of northern Greece and the government in Athens that its sole objective was the improvement of the Greek rural population.

Much of the Houses' success stemmed from their ability to infuse their Greek colleagues and students with a sense of mission that radiated outward to the larger society. The Farm School's fundamental rationale—applying Christian ideals of brotherhood and service to the training of rural youth in enlightened agricultural practices and community leadership...