Seaman A. Knapp: Schoolmaster of American Agriculture 9780231890281

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Seaman A. Knapp COLUMBIA IN

UNIVERSITY

THE

AMERICAN

HISTORY

STUDIES OF

AGRICULTURE

Number 10

SEAMAN

ASAHEL

KNAPP

1 8 3 3 - 1 9 1 1 FOUNDER OF FARM DEMONSTRATION WORK He organized the system of c o u n t y f a r m and home d e m o n stration agents a n d boys and girls d u b s f r o m which developed the Cooperative Extension Service of the United States. ( F r o m the Resolution of Congress authorizing a K n a p p Memorial Tablet and Arch in W a s h i n g t o n , 1933.)

Seaman A. Knapp SCHOOLMASTER AMERICAN

OF

AGRICULTURE

By Joseph Cannon Bailey

COLUMBIA U N I V E R S I T Y NEW

YORK

PRESS

COPYRIGHT 1945 BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK

First Second

printing

1945

printing

194S

P u b l i s h e d in G r e a t B r i t a i n a n d India by Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University London

and

Press

Bombay

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To W.W. B.

C O L U M B I A

U N I V E R S I T Y

H I S T O R Y

O F

A M E R I C A N

EDITED HARRY

S T U D I E S

J.

CARMAN,

I N

T H E

A G R I C U L T U R E

BY

Dean,

Columbia

College

AND REXFORD

G.

T U G W E L L . Professor oj Political in (he University of Chicago

ADVISORY

BOARD

EVARTS B. GREENE, De

Witt

of American

AVERY O .

Professor

History

in Columbia

EVERETT E . EDWARDS Umited States Department of Agriculture Managing Editor of AGRICULTURAL HISTORY LEWIS C .

Emeritus University

HAROLD A .

Professor of History in the University of Chicago

GRAY

Ecconomist, Division of Land Umited States Department of

Chairman

Clinton

CRAVEN

Science

Professor

in the University

Economy

oj

Toronto

Louis B. SCHMIDT Professor of History in the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts WALTER

Economics Agriculture

INNIS

of Political

P.

WEBB

Professor of History in the University of Texas

EDITORS' FOREWORD CULTIVATORS of the earth are the most valuable of citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds. . . . Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.

T H U S spoke Thomas Jefferson more than a century ago. Instead of developing great urban communities he would keep America agrarian. Countless men of affairs have repeated this idea. Even today we find many of our most thoughtful and influential citizens voicing the opinion that farming is, or ought to be, the nation's backbone. Every aspirant to high political office points to his rural background, or at least insists on his love for farmers and farm life. And when we think of "typical Americans" we think not of people in New York or San Francisco or St. Louis, but of people on farms in Iowa or Vermont or Wisconsin.

The high regard in which the American farmer has been held is not hard to understand. For a long time America was primarily rural. And the notion prevailed that American characteristics—both virtues and weaknesses—were the characteristics of those who tilled the soil. The promise of American life was embodied in pioneer farmers—the selfreliant men and women who struck out in a rich land and by dint of hard work, simple living, and minding their own business got ahead in the world. The independent farmer, idealized perhaps, but nevertheless having a good deal of reality, was the prototype of the successful American, the main character in the American dream. He was regarded as the mainstay of individualism, the guardian of liberty and democracy, the inheritor of America's future. The farm owned outright by those who occupied it and operated so as to provide them with a secure and comfortable living was regarded as the foundation of the American social order. Seaman A. Knapp believed in this ideal but he knew that it could not be attained as long as the slipshod agricultural practices which

X

EDITORS'

FOREWORD

he saw all about him prevailed. The American farmer to be prosperous and contented had to learn new methods. Knapp believed that those methods could best be taught by demonstration. His accomplishments in this direction marked the beginning of what, to date, is undoubtedly the most expansive and important experiment ever undertaken in the field of adult education. In the pages which follow, Doctor Bailey, in masterly fashion, tells the story of this great American who labored so intelligently to the end that America's rural population might be prosperous, contented, and a bulwark to our national perpetuity. Seaman A. Knapp passed to the Great Beyond almost a quarter of a century ago. In this book he lives again. Doctor Bailey's work is definitive and he has made an outstanding contribution to the literature of American agricultural history. HARRY J . CARMAN REXFORD G. TUGWELL

Editors February 22,

1945

PREFACE MANY

ABLE DIAGNOSTICIANS

believe that American agriculture has

been metamorphosed so profoundly by technology and capitalism that its end as a mode of life is at hand. Charles A. Beard declares: "Within less than one hundred years after Jefferson's death . . . the early dream of a nation chiefly sustained by free, independent, home-loving farmers of North European stock had been exploded." The implications of these beliefs increasingly concern us all. While the most productive industrial nation on the globe has grown up in our cities, the proportion of our rural population has been dropping every decade and the trend is downward still. Philosophers of history have generally agreed that the mainstay of a democratic society is the free land-owning farmer. Our best statesmen long have been aware that the equilibrium of a wholesome social order needs a substantial share of its population as rural people. How this can be managed no one knows for certain, but those devoted to the democratic vision hope to keep enough of the citizenry on the soil to leaven our urban civilization. Should it prove possible to maintain the essence of the Jeffersonian dream through a reduced, but still substantial, farming population, then Seaman Knapp has played, and goes on playing, an important role in the social history of America. Most social change today originates in the scientific laboratory, and it is the long lag between the discoveries of the scientists and the conversion of their dynamic findings to the people's use that creates the most pressing problems of our time. Seaman K n a p p worked out an educational instrument that is the swiftest and most effective method yet contrived of getting badly needed technological and sociological knowledge from the colleges and laboratories to the groups farthest from the sources. His social invention, called the County Demonstration Agent System, bridges the gap between our rural communities and some fifty agricultural colleges and sixty experiment stations with their new-found information in the arts and

xii

PREFACE

sciences of husbandry. As much as anything this instruction helps keep farmers on their land. How does a man beget an educational device that breaks with all tradition, and has such democratic potentialities? Seaman Knapp stood at the farthest pole from the popular conception of the genius who works by inspiration and fine frenzy. Steady-going as an Erie barge boat, it is doubtful if he ever had a temperamental moment in his life. He was one of the breed molded by the demands of pioneering who, as his son writes, "had no time for foolishness." The root of Knapp's idea seems to trace back to his boyhood and to have germinated through a lifetime of hard work at many seemingly unassociated occupations, maturing finally when Seaman was a man of seventy. Teacher, preacher, editor, banker, stockbreeder and plant explorer, his contribution to education, to the farmer, and to American social life came as the offshoot of his living. This book has sought to follow the slow ripening of the demonstration concept through the life of Seaman Knapp into the social invention upon which the Extension Service was erected. The bulk of the material upon which this record of Knapp's work rests was consulted in various offices and in the library of the United States Department of Agriculture. The author is deeply appreciative of the courtesy and interest shown by its staff, several of whom are mentioned in the bibliographical note. Others whose assistance and comments are valued were Mrs. Eva Snyder, Miss Claribel Barnett, Director of Extension Work M. L. Wilson and the late Dr. B. T. Galloway. Of the remaining data, part was secured through the helpful cooperation of the New York Public Library; Columbia University Library; the Library of Congress; the Louisiana State University Library; the Iowa Agricultural College Library; the Howard Memorial Library, New Orleans; the Iowa Masonic Library, Cedar Rapids; the John Crerar Library, Chicago; and the Fort Edward Free Library, Fort Edward, New York. Many individuals have been generous with aid in several forms. To Dr. Ramsey Spillman of New York City, the author owes much for the loan of a valuable manuscript biography of his father, Pro-

fessor W. J. Spillman, and for a critical reading of the latter half of this volume. Mr. Russell Lord, editor of The Land, loaned his manuscript of The Agrarian Revival, read this manuscript and supported a correspondence over several years that provided much encouragement. Dr. J. A. Evans, author of a number of acute and accurate brief accounts of the early days of the demonstration work and one of Dr. Knapp's first lieutenants, supplied an elaborate commentary on the manuscript of this work which helped eliminate many imperfections. Major S. Arthur Knapp of Lake Charles, Louisiana, has been an unfailing source of information about his father and his family to the extent of a folder full of cheerfully gathered detail. He also read and commented on this manuscript. Others to whom the author is indebted include the late Honorable A. Frank Lever, the late Dr. Bradford Knapp, Dr. Albert Shaw, the Honorable David F. Houston, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Dr. J. P. Bogue of Poultney, Vermont, and Mr. Jackson Davis of the General Education Board and Dr. C. B. Smith of the Department of Agriculture. At Columbia University Professors O. S. Morgan and R. M. MacIver suggested phases for inclusion in this work and gave a helpful reading to the manuscript. Professors Allan Nevins, Merle Curti, and Edmund deS. Brunner also read the manuscript and went out of their way to supply both information and discriminating criticism. Grateful thanks are due Miss Matilda L. Berg of Columbia University Press for the patience and the enviable skill with which she managed her editorial assignment. The author's obligations to Professor Harry J. Carman run over so many years and touch so many subjects, in connection with this book and otherwise, that there is scarcely any way to render the appreciation felt except to say the book would never have seen print but for his aid and interest. JOSEPH C . BAILEY

New York January, 1945

CONTENTS EDITORS' FOREWORD

ix

PREFACE

xi

PART

The Making

1

of a Teacher

and

an

Agriculturist I. II.

A

HOMESPUN

CHILDHOOD

1

A C L A S S I C A L E D U C A T I O N AND T H E C L A S S I C A L EDUCATOR

20

III.

THE

REEDUCATION

44

IV.

THE

NEW

V.

A

VENTURE

OF A PEDAGOGUE

EDUCATION IN

LAND

VI.

109

2

oj the County Agent

VII.

79

SETTLEMENT

PART

The Founding

AND F A R M E R

FOR A G R I C U L T U R E

Agricultural

System

A PROGRAM TO P R O M O T E A G R I C U L T U R E IN T H E S O U T H THE

DISCOVERY

OF

THE

AGRICULTURAL

TION T E C H N I Q U E VIII.

THE

BOLL WEEVIL

IX.

THE

ORGANIZATION

X.

THE

149 EMERGENCY OF

THE

169

FARMERS'

COOPERATIVE

DEMONSTRATION WORK

XI.

133

DEMONSTRA-

187

G R O W T H OF T H E F A R M E R S ' COOPERATIVE

DEMON-

STRATION W O R K

200

E X T E N S I O N OF T H E C O U N T Y F A R M A G E N T S Y S T E M

215

PART

3

The Institutionalization

of an

Individual XII.

THE

PASSAGE OF T H E

SMITH-LEVER

ACT

244

BIBLIOGRAPHY

281

INDEX

291

PART 1 The Making of a Teacher and an Agriculturist I: A H O M E S P U N

CHILDHOOD

O N E SUMMER MORNING in 1 8 3 3 , in t h e k n o l l y f a r m l a n d of s o u t h e r n

Ohio, one of America's numerous tool-shed inventors was trying out his contraption—a horse-drawn machine to reap grain, audaciously designed to increase tenfold the bread-flour output of individual harvesters of wheat. Clattering and racketing, the unwieldy machine lurched into the field at the heels of a half-frantic team. A farmside audience gawked in unfriendly distrust. The reaper bumped forward a few rods and stopped; some piece of its homemade apparatus broken. In its path the yellow grain, though bent and trampled, was not severed from the stalks. T h e crowd jeered. They told each other they had known it wouldn't work. Such harebrained contrivances had been tried before by fellows who wouldn't believe that man was meant to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow. One burly reaper in the crowd snatched up his cradle, and swung it through the grain, crying exultantly, "Here's the machine to cut the wheat!" Tiring finally of their waggeries and satisfied that they had witnessed another crank's failure, the crowd gradually wandered away. Needed for more useful work, the team was unhitched and driven off. T h e inventor, deserted by curiosity-seekers, was left to tinker with his folly. At last he ferreted out and repaired the defective part, and with the aid of some near-by laborers hauled the machine to the crest of a hill within the field. Taking up the shafts, the inventor himself drew the reaper down the hill. It worked. Behind him stretched a swathe with every stalk of grain cut clean. 1 i L. L. Follett Greeno, ed., Obed Husscy, Who, of All Inventors, Cheap . . . (Rochester, N.Y., 1912), pp. 115-116.

Made

Bread

2

A HOMESPUN

CHILDHOOD

Obed Hussey, the sailor who preferred inventing to whaling, had demonstrated on this summer day the practicality of his homemade reaper. When the twentieth century opened, the reaper as developed by McCormick, its co-inventor and manufacturing genius, would be harvesting a greater volume of food grains than any man alive in 1833 could have dreamed possible. Hussey's machine was not only an epochal invention that would replace men and women reaping and gleaning among the sheaves; it was an omen and a herald of a new age in agriculture. Before a century passed, science and the new machinery would change rural life more profoundly than it had changed since the Work and Days of Hesiod in Boetia. Historically, the change was from an economy of production for use at home by the farmer's family to a production of food and fibers for cash sale off the farm. The new science and the new machines would wholly change immemorial techniques of sowing, tilling, and reaping; would dictate the crops the farmer cultivated, the animals he chose to milk, to shear, or to fatten for the packer; and would change farming from a rule-of-thumb enterprise into a business, with returns dependent upon the employment of scientific methods, systematic accounting, and rational planning. Before the revolution in agriculture could be more than a promise, the farmer had to be transformed from a countryman governed by signs, omens, and ancient custom to a man whose business was agriculture, and who succeeded or failed according to the scientific techniques and strict business practice he applied to his operations. This metamorphosis required new machinery and new labor-saving, yieldincreasing knowledge to supplant mindless brawn and proverbial nature lore. As the mowers, drills, and seeders, the reapers, and the balers were turned out by the factories, they were pressed upon the masters of every farmstead by brisk, untiring salesmen, spurred on by fat commissions. But agronomy, entomology, and soil physics had no corps of hustling salesmen. The new discoveries of the scientists were dammed up at their sources, in research laboratories and experiment stations. The facts about the chemical appetites of plants and

A HOMESPUN

CHILDHOOD

3

the needs of the soil; how to manipulate the superior germ plasm in plants and animals in order to multiply several fold the production of meat, milk, butterfat, eggs, and the yield per acre of all important field crops; the economies to be obtained through practicing the principles of farm management, production and marketing procedures— these cost-lowering, money-making facts published in books of science, journals of research, technical bulletins and monographs were as inaccessible to the nonspecialized farmer as though printed in Arabic. Vet until the new machines could be guided by the new knowledge in the farmer's mind, the vast productiveness of the modern scientific agriculture was not attainable, and the farmer was still a peasant drudge. In December, 1833, the month Hussey's reaper was patented, the man was born who worked out the Demonstration System. This device, which transmitted the findings of the laboratory to the farmer, put science in the fields along with the new machines and hastened a new era in rural life. Seaman Asahel Knapp was born December 16, 1833, at Schroon Lake, New York, a tiny hamlet isolated in the heavy forests of the Adirondacks some twenty miles west of Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain. He was the ninth and last child of parents whose forebears were pioneers in upper "York State." Rhoda Seaman, his mother, had been brought to the lakeside clearing called Schroon Lake in 1803 when she was nine. The Seamans came from Killingly, Connecticut, a long-established farming community near the Rhode Island line. 2 The new home, in a settlement of log cabins hewn from virgin woods that stretched to the water's edge, stood in strange contrast to the sedate and settled comfort "back East." At one step, Asahel Seaman, Rhoda's father, moved his family not merely westward in space but also backward in time to conditions of life approximating those which faced the colonists at Plymouth. Essex County, New York, when the nine-year-old girl first saw it, was still the domain of the hunter. Lakes and streams 2

S. Arthur Knapp, M e m o r a n d u m 42A.

4

A HOMESPUN

CHILDHOOD

swarmed with fish. Deer, bear, fox, mink, otter, beaver, and the wolf —once the quarry of the Iroquois—multiplied in the wilderness. As late as 1814 when Rhoda Seaman married Bradford Knapp, furs and peltries remained the chief product of the northern counties, and skins were still measured in tons when Seaman, their last child, was born.s On the paternal side, Seaman Knapp's ancestors had been following the frontier for two centuries before his birth. Nicholas, progenitor of this hardy and prolific line in America, came ashore with Sir Richard Saltonstall at Massachusetts Bay in 1630 and settled in outlying Watertown. Eighteen years later, with nine children and a second wife, he relocated at Stamford, Connecticut. Nicholas's great-great-grandson Justus, fifth in line of descent in the new world, moved over into the Hudson Valley and began the trek northward, borne on the current of settlement that was thrusting up the Hudson-Champlain trough. In 1775, he cleared a farm for his family of twelve children—nine of them boys—near Saratoga Lake. He served, with five of his sons, in the Revolutionary armies. Justus's sixth son, Obadiah, moved farther north, settling at Chester in Warren County in 1793 when that district was an almost wholly undeveloped wilderness. Here he cleared his farm, worked at the trade of blacksmith, and reared a family of nine children. Obadiah's eldest son, Bradford, born on September 2, 1791, became the father of Seaman.4 It is a genealogy typical of thousands of old-stock Americans descended from the Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: farmers, pioneers with large families, moving every generation or oftener, usually westward to clear new land, and leaving scant records of themselves; crabbed notations in a family Bible, entries of the s

Thomas F. Gordon, Gazetteer of the State of New York . . . (Philadelphia, 1836), pp. 449-455. 4 J. Joslin, B. Frisbie, and F. Ruggles, A History of the Town of Poultney, Vermont, from Its Settlement to the Year 1875, with Family and Biographical Sketches and Incidents (Poultney, 1875), pp. 294-297. S. Arthur Knapp, Memorandum 42A; also, material from a family record prepared by Mary S. (Knapp) Macomber, sister of Seaman A. Knapp. See also Memorandum 33.

A HOMESPUN

CHILDHOOD

5

births of numerous progeny christened piously in Scriptural tradition —Joshua, Josiah, Jonathan, Daniel, Obadiah, Hannah, Sarah, Ruth. Such knowledge as we have of them usually ends with the date of death written in by a filial hand. Sometimes, along with uncertain shreds and scraps of oral tradition a crinkled page from a long-forgotten will turns up, a cherished handmade chair or table, a soldier's musket, or a tintype taken on a marriage day. About Bradford Knapp, Seaman's father, we possess only fragments of knowledge. He is referred to as a "doctor of the old school." 5 The phrase as it was used in that day and age tells us that he learned his art through apprenticeship, that he depended for his family's food supply mainly upon farming, and that he must have been a man of uncommon physical and spiritual endurance to carry on for a lifetime the dual job of farming and pioneer doctoring. In Bradford Knapp's day, no medical school worthy of the name existed nearer than Boston or Philadelphia. The son of a plain backwoods farmer-blacksmith had little choice but to follow the custom of the time and learn his profession by entering the office of an older practitioner. During two or three years' apprenticeship, he turned his hand to whatever odd job needed doing, assisted in preparing pills and potions, read the few medical volumes available, and accompanied the doctor on his rounds to witness his methods of treatment. Once his preparation was held to be adequate, the young man cast about for a district lacking a doctor's services and "commenced on his own hook." 6 The country doctor, a century ago, entered a calling offering little in the way of monetary gain. Like ministers and lawyers, doctors found their surest remuneration in a cord of firewood, a side of bacon, 6

Mr. and Mrs. A. M . Mayo, Dr. Seaman A. Knapp. Mrs. A. M . Mayo, "Biography of Seaman A. K n a p p , " Silver Anniversary, pp. 44-47. • H. P. Smith, History of Essex County, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Syracuse, N.Y., 188S), p. 311. Percy Wells Bidwell, "Rural Economy in New England at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century," Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Transactions, X X (April, 1916), 254, 256.

6

A HOMESPUN

CHILDHOOD

or a brace of squawking pullets. The man willing to ride on horseback, day and night, through the severe winters of the Adirondacks, to visit patients scattered along forest streams and trails, had to be deeply imbued with a sense of service to his community. In this Bradford and his son were much alike. Bradford K n a p p probably hung out his shingle and began "doctoring" about the time he married Rhoda Seaman in 1814. He established a home near Chester, later moving his wife and children to Warrensburg, then to Schroon Lake where his ninth child Seaman was born, and finally settling about 1836 in Crown Point. T h e Champlain Valley lumber boom was rising to its peak when the Knapps settled in their new home. The traffic in logs began in earnest after the war of 1812. Giant Norway pine for masts and white oak for ship timbers were rafted northward along Lake Champlain and the River Richelieu, across the St. Lawrence to Quebec, for sale to agents of the British Navy. The opening of the Champlain Canal in 1820, connecting the Lake with the Hudson River and the seaboard, opened larger lumber markets southward. Business redoubled, sawmills sprang up along every stream. Settlers flocked in, villages grew, schools multiplied, new roads were opened. Essex County entered an era of activity and prosperity.' By mid-century the best timber had been culled and the growth of population was slowing to a halt. Rhoda's children rarely glimpsed the leather-clad hunters and trappers so familiar to her own childhood. Following their game, they withdrew northwestward as the forest cover shrank before the axe of the advancing lumbermen. Gradually fields and farmsteads appeared among the stumps of the loggers, and as the years passed the countryside came to remind Seaman's mother more and more of her old home in the East. As a boy in those far-off days of large families, Seaman imbibed a more sustaining sense of his ancestry than the best authenticated ' S m i t h , op. at.,

p. 184. Flavius J . Cook, Home

Sketches

of Essex

(Keeseville, N.Y., 18S8), p. 41. W . C. Watson, A General View and Survey

of the County

of Essex

County

Agricultural

. . . [Albany, N.Y., 1853], pp. 713, 808.

A HOMESPUN

CHILDHOOD

7

records provide. Unlike the children of today, he grew to know scores of his immediate relatives in flesh and blood reality. His arrival was welcomed by at least three grandparents and a dozen great aunts and uncles. He grew to boyhood in a household of two brothers and five sisters who looked eagerly to visits with the aunts and uncles and their offspring, numbering at one time nearly half a hundred cousins. His grandfather, Obadiah, lived to be eighty-four, well into his grandson's seventeenth year. With his endless yarns of Revolutionary vintage, centering about the five great uncles and their father, Justus, he carried the child's feeling for the past back to the stirring days of Bunker Hill and Saratoga, to the Indian skirmishes and massacres in the Mohawk Valley, to the words and deeds of Benjamin Franklin, the Adamses, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain boys. When the sturdy old blacksmith was nearly eighty, he turned up one day in Crown Point, having walked that day more than twenty miles of his journey from Chester, and took his ten-year-old grandson fishing. From patriarchs of such stock, the boy inherited his rugged constitution and the longevity which enabled him to accomplish his most important work after he had turned seventy. Seaman Knapp grew up in an age of rural self-containment when family needs were supplied at home—or gone without. The Knapps, like all their friends and neighbors, produced the necessities of life on the homestead farm in Essex County. From the barnyard came butter and milk, eggs, cheese, and poultry. Bread for the family table was baked from home-grown grain, ground at a neighboring grist mill. Animals were bred, pastured, and butchered at home. Meat was smoked and salted. Hides were preserved at a tannery, later to be turned into shoes for the family during the stay of an itinerant cobbler. Fats were tried out and put away as lard, or dipped onto strings to make candles for winter evenings. In a great out-of-door cauldron, fat combined with lye was manufactured into soft soap. Fuel was cut, sawed, split, and sledded home from the forest or wood lot. Wool was sheared from the flocks, and was then cleaned, washed, scoured, combed and spun. The yarn was dyed and woven. Flax was put through an equally

8

A HOMESPUN

CHILDHOOD

tedious and complicated process. All the clothing for the family was made at home, the garments serviceable beyond belief, and so easily recognized anywhere by their stiff rusticity as to have earned for the epoch its telling title, "the Age of Homespun." 8 Down to the eve of the Civil War, field operations were equally elementary. Small grain was seeded broadcast by hand, cut with a cradle, threshed with a flail, or trodden out by cattle and winnowed with a sieve. Hay was scythed down, raked, and pitched by hand. Cultivation was a toilsome chore accomplished with a heavy hoe. Except for plowing, harrowing, and hauling, virtually all agricultural labor was performed by human muscles.' Although Obed Hussey obtained a patent on his machine during the month Seaman was born, it was not until 1855 when Seaman had reached voting age that the first reaper was put to the grain in his locality. Threshing machines had been introduced several years earlier, but they could still be counted on the fingers of two hands because most farmers felt it cheaper to employ the days of the long winter pounding out their grain with flails, as their fathers had done before them.10 Lacking markets in the preindustrial epoch, farmers could not sell their surplus produce. Unable to sell, they had no money to buy. It was a simple economy of production for use at home, not for sale in a distant market. But the change was on the way. Less than two years before Seaman was born, a quaint-looking, wood-burning locomotive, appropriately named after the dwarf "Tom Thumb," completed in triumph a thirteen-mile trial trip over the 8

Bid well, loc. cit., pp. 361-364, 380. Cook, op. tit., p. 32. Rev. Horace Bushnell, The Age of Homespun. A Discourse delivered at Litchfield, Connecticut, on the occasion of the Centennial Celebration, 1851. Two men later famous in the world of agriculture were born—one in New York in 1833 and the other a little latfr in Pennsylvania—and reared in the same Age of Homespun that molded Seaman Knapp. They have left vivid personal recollections of their childhood experiences: Wilmer Atkinson, An Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1920). Isaac Phillips Roberts, Autobiography of a Farm Boy (Albany, N.Y., 1916). 10 • Bidwell, loc. cit., pp. 331, 333. Cook, op. cit., pp. 61-62.

A HOMESPUN

CHILDHOOD

9

newly laid Baltimore and Ohio tracks. Nearer home, the "DeWitt Clinton" confounded skeptics and set off pious forebodings about "flying in the face of Providence," by chuffing its way, amid showers of sparks, over seventeen miles of rail between Albany and Schenectady. Turnpikes, canals, and river steamboats were coming into widespread operation not much more than a decade earlier. Bit by bit the tentacles of transportation began to reach outward from busy little manufacturing towns springing up under the touch of the Industrial Revolution. For the first time, farmers had access to large and growing markets. They could sell their products for cash. They began to specialize on crops in which they held a competitive advantage. They tried to increase their output with labor-saving machinery, better seed, better stock, and better techniques of production and management. Throughout the two decades of Seaman's youth, these changes were in constant and accumulating process. Yet, until he was a man, married and settled in his profession of teaching, they were mainly portents—a promise or a threat to those who had grown up in the "good old days." During the 1830s and '40s, an overwhelming majority of the American people still lived a rural life in which almost every necessity was produced at home by skill of hand or strength of arm. " T o be a farmer was to be a blacksmith, lumberman, carpenter, hunter, tanner, shoemaker, fisher—a jack of all trades,"

11

and the

boy growing up in that state of society learned the rudiments of a score of arts and handicrafts. On the Essex County farm, Seaman learned to handle hoe, scythe, sheep shears, adze, jack plane, and other tools of the all-round pioneer farmer. He developed habits of steady work, self-reliance, and a levelheaded common sense that grew from early participation in the discussions and decisions about the farm and its work. Is the weather safe to shear the sheep? Dare we work the badly needed horse with the sore shoulder? Will we waste labor if we try for a second stand 11

Knapp, Rice Journal

and Gulf Coast Farmer,

VI, No. 2, P a r t 2 ( J a n . 1,

1903), 27. He continues, "the wooden mouldboard flow, the flintlock, the mud chimney, the faint light of a string in a vessel of grease, wooden dishes, wooden knives, wooden spoons, etc., etc., have passed away."

10

A HOMESPUN

CHILDHOOD

of oats? Such were the practical, urgent problems that the farmer and the farmer's family met with day by day. Everything young Knapp learned for sixteen years, save only the three R's of the little one-room schoolhouse, he learned by doing. The boy, who later became one of the educational innovators of his age, received his initial lessons by the same direct and simple methods that his father had learned his "doctoring" and his mother her wide lore of domestic economy. He learned, as did his sisters and brothers, his friends and neighbors, through observation, imitation, repetition, through "doing" for himself. Only in the nineteenth century with its multiplication of cheap print did the idea gain currency that learning-by-reading could take the place of learning-by-doing. Progressive education is essentially a return to the simple naturalistic methods of learning in which Knapp grew up. Years later he was to revive these age-old methods and use them to bring to rural folk everywhere the accumulated stock of valuable scientific knowledge about agriculture. Seaman's formal education—his "schooling"—began at a oneroom schoolhouse near the crossroads of Crown Point Center. His fellow pupils ranged from timid youngsters of six and seven called unkindly by their older brother and sisters "trucklebed trash," to fully grown, marriageable girls and strapping farm lads, often the terror of the teacher. Here Seaman applied himself to the simple rudiments of learning, studiously ciphering out his sums, "spelling down" inattentive opponents, practicing longhand penmanship with goose quills, or reciting in singsong manner selections memorized from favorite poems. At its worst, the old-time one-room school was a prison ruled by an embittered martinet or an incompetent, periodic inebriate. T h e pupils escaping such schoolmasters emerged barely literate and harboring an unchangeable disrelish for teachers, books, and study. At its best— too frequently the fond image preserved for later generations—the little red schoolhouse provided exceptional mental training. Knapp

A HOMESPUN

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11

himself in after years labeled it "simply a kindergarten school adapted to an elementary condition of society.12 Autobiographies of Victorian Americans often contain moving tributes to the narrow but beneficial discipline, to the overkeen but stimulating competitions, and to the ardent yet enduring enthusiasm for learning which came their way in a country school. At the Crown Point Center school, young Seaman had the good fortune to find stimulus and encouragement from a Yankee schoolmaster now known only by his last name, Bingham. 1 ' Some time during the ten years that Knapp attended Mr. Bingham's classes, he discovered the existence of the world of books, of scholars, and of learned professions. Suddenly, beyond the stores and fields and fences of the rustic community he perceived a larger sphere for ambition and accomplishment, stretching away to the unseen horizons of the imagination. The experience seems to have been akin to a religious revelation. Sixty years later when he assured an assemblage of teachers that "The greatest event in human life is the awakening of the infant intellect," 14 he was thinking of the moment when illumination descended on him. Seaman wanted to go to college. Perhaps he could become a lawyer, summing up a defense of the Union, like Daniel Webster, already legendary in New England, or a minister as famous at winning souls for Methodism as the evangelist Francis Asbury, or a college president, like the renowned Timothy Dwight whom Mr. Bingham admired. Which of these callings appealed to him most? At first he was not sure. Could a backwoods boy from the Crown Point Center school become a leader too? In the do-or-die tradition of ambition in America, he could try. Tales were heard about how Daniel Webster got his silver tongue by haranguing cornstalks from a stump. Seaman at ten read industriously in Addison, Macaulay, and Irving to master style in English and enlarge his vocabulary. At home, with his patient mother and his sister Mary as audience, he declaimed selected passages from 12 13 14

Knapp, "Agricultural Education for the Rural Districts." Mr. and Mrs. A. M. Mayo, Dr. Seaman A. Knapp, p. 1. S. A. Knapp, Address at Chick Springs (1907).

12

A

his reading.

15

H O M E S P U N

C H I L D H O O D

As he grew older, dreaming of college, of the literary

lyceum where he could make use of his Addisonian diction, of t h e graduation d a y on which a boy from Essex C o u n t y might be the valedictorian, he h u n t e d out every extra chore in the neighborhood t h a t might bring a dime or quarter to add to the f u n d he hoarded for school. In the 1840s food was plentiful but cash was scarce. In the back districts, it was still largely an economy of barter. N o matter how hungry a boy was for education, unaided he could never hope to get together enough money to carry him through this college prelude to the Hall of F a m e beyond. T h e family had to help. T h e cash outlay to send Seaman through preparatory school and college would require more money than Bradford and R h o d a K n a p p had spent to bring their other seven children to the age of marriage. How could it be managed? Alonzo, Seaman's older brother, opposed the idea. Five or six years' schooling, with each year costing as much in hard cash as many a family in Crown Point lived on, and what could it teach a boy t h a t was useful? Snatches of Latin and Greek, literary fol-de-rol—that's what he'd learn. High falutin' notions! Enough to ruin anyone for an honest clay's sweat in the field or shop. Alonzo's opinion counted. H e was twice Seaman's age, married, the father of several children, and long established as a cabinetmaker. T h e year following Seaman's graduation from t h e Crown Point Center school, Alonzo was seriously ill. In the emergency, Seaman took over. Often he rose at four in the morning during that long winter and began working by candlelight in order to finish on time a promised piece of furniture. T h e lumber on which he laid his pattern out he was obliged to draw from underneath the heavy drifts of Adirondack snow. 16 He was a good 15

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a p p r e n t i c e , a n d Alonzo did not w a n t to lose h i m . Yet on t h e b r o a d e r g r o u n d s of S e a m a n ' s own good, m a n y a d u l t s in C r o w n P o i n t p r o b a b l y s h a r e d Alonzo s p o i n t of view. I n s t i t u t i o n s of h i g h e r learning a h u n d r e d y e a r s ago were still devoted m a i n l y to t h e drill a n d indoctrination of y o u n g m e n d e d i c a t e d to the m i n i s t r y . B o a r d s of t r u s t e e s a n d f a c u l t i e s were largely c o m posed of c l e r g y m e n . C u r r i c u l u m s revolved a r o u n d L a t i n , Greek, a n d H e b r e w , because in t h e m were w r i t t e n the original d o c u m e n t s of C h u r c h a n d S c r i p t u r e . Secondary courses were disquisitions on, a n d i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s of, s e c t a r i a n doctrine. M a t h e m a t i c s , theologically neutral, was a n i n d e p e n d e n t b u t h o n o r a b l e b r a n c h of s t u d y , a n d w a s accompanicd by a few harmless p r e - D a r w i n i a n courses in zoology, physiology, a n d b o t a n y . T o m a n y Americans of t h e d a y , such collegiate a b r a c a d a b r a seemed a self-indulgent w a s t e of time a n d m o n e y , a r e f u g e for triflers a n d t h e physically frail. T h e r o b u s t w o u l d do b e t ter to claim a f a r m f r o m a c o n t i n e n t of a l m o s t f r e e land a n d set a b o u t m a k i n g a h o m e for a f a m i l y . M r . B i n g h a m , S e a m a n ' s mother, a n d his sister M a r y looked b e y o n d this parochial view. Something e a r n e s t a n d u n t i r i n g in t h e y o u n g s t e r m a d e t h e m feel t h a t it would be wrong if he did not h a v e his c h a n c e to go to college. M r . B i n g h a m first pointed out to S e a m a n t h e world of work t h a t lay b e y o n d the f a r m s a n d forests of the C h a m p l a i n Valley. S e a m a n ' s m o t h e r never ceased to encourage her y o u n g e s t . T e a c h i n g was a t r a d i t i o n a l calling in the Q u a k e r family to which s h e belonged. H e r only b r o t h e r was t h e first g r a d u a t e of the N e w York S t a t e N o r m a l School at Albany. 1 7 H e r own education h a d n o t g o n e b e y o n d t h e elem e n t a r y g r a d e s ; for S e a m a n , she w a n t e d s o m e t h i n g more. M a r y , who was t h e n t h i r t y a n d t h e oldest d a u g h t e r living a t h o m e , defended college against the objections of Alonzo. I t w a s s h e w h o settled things at last b y d r a w i n g o n her savings as a s c h o o l t e a c h e r — her hope-chest f u n d — a n d loaned her y o u n g b r o t h e r e n o u g h to set him on the road to college

1° The Committee, acknowledging that each college "must determine for itself those types of work most important for its own state" recommended nevertheless, "that large emphasis be placed at once upon those forms of work that represent systematic instruction, or formal teaching. In our judgment this is to be the great permanent work of the extension department, and it should be organized as rapidly as possible and developed on a thoroughly scientific and pedagogically sound basis." 31 The forms of work which the Committee had classified under the heading of formal instruction were: 1) the lecture course, 2) the reading course, 3) the correspondence course, 4) the movable school, S) the permanent demonstration, or model, farm, 6) study clubs. By 1912 the Committee had somewhat shifted its view of the lecture course, the reading course, the correspondence course, and so on, as "the great permanent work of the extension department." The continually mounting demand from the public at large was uneasily referred to. Agricultural educators are appalled at the nature and extent of the work which the extension service is expected to perform. . . . The demand for assistance from a variety of sources constitute one of the greatest problems with which administrative officers and boards of trustees have to deal. Even the man who considers the subject of extension teaching from a conservative point of view is bound to admit that there is justification on the part of the public in seeking to have the information obtained by the colleges and experiment stations distributed in an effective manner and as widely throughout the state as possible.'2 How was this to be done? Evidently the forty varieties of extension in use, and even the six types emphasized by the educators them80 32

Ibid., 1910, p. 83. Ibid., 1912, p. 63.

81

Ibid., p. 84.

S M I T H - L E V E R

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selves were not entirely meeting the public's need or demands. T h e next section of the Committee's report takes up a form of extension which had not been included under the heading of formal teaching or as part of " t h e great permanent work of the extension departm e n t " — T h e Demonstration Proposition. It should not be concluded that the committee is in any sense opposed to demonstration work. . . . It favors this character of extension teaching within certain well-defined limitations. It is easily possible, however, to create a wrong impression with regard to the efficiency of demonstration work, and to lead the farmers and others interested in his welfare to the conclusion that demonstrations will solve all the ills which . . . affect his interests. M a n y misconceptions about the "county or field agent" were pointed out. Without expert assistance and advice, he couldn't meet all the demands made upon him. He needed constant supervision. T h i s required enlargement of the college resident staff. Much money was necessary. Above all, the right type of man had to be found. H e would need great common sense, good farm experience, and must be a man who is an all-round capable fellow. . . . It is equally certain that if the field or county agent is to perform the best service for a community, he must be an expert agriculturalist. The time has long since passed when the man who is a semi-political agent or a so-called practical farmer can fill such a position acceptably. The rural population of the United States has become entirely too discriminating and too well posted to accept any but a well-trained college man. 33 Up to this date, mid-November 1912, eighteen months before the final passage of the Smith-Lever Act, the reports, definitions, recommendations, and discussions of the appointed organs of the Association of American Agricultural Colleges had not hitherto dealt straightforwardly with the one kind of demonstration work which was the only form of extension considered worthwhile by the General Education Board, all Southern Congressmen, most Southern states and »»Ibid., p. 64.

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counties, an increasing number of national organizations, corporations and individuals, and Roosevelt, T a f t , and Woodrow Wilson. Members of the Association were not wholly uninformed on the matter. As early as 1907 President Roosevelt had drawn their attention to Knapp's brand of demonstration work. The following year two of their principal figures served on the Country Life Commission which recommended an extension service for the whole nation patterned in large measure on the Department of Agriculture's Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work. In 1910 two of the prominent members of the Association advised the membership that public demand for the learn-by-doing type of extension technique practiced by Knapp could not be deflected. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture W. M. Hays, Knapp's pupil at Iowa in the 1880s, said, "People are going to have this kind of education . . . it is upon you, and is up to you to guide it . . . It has taken the people out of feeling that book farming was no good, and made them your followers." Professor ('. F. Curtiss, a n o t h e r g r a d u a t e under K n a p p at

Iowa,

and now Dean of the Iowa Agricultural College, warned the Association not to jeopardize the prospects for its McLaughlin bill by a show of hostility or indifference toward other versions of extension work in agriculture. "We ought as a body to have a sympathetic attitude towards the movement" and, show a willingness to accept changes. 34 In 1911 Dr. B. T . Galloway sent in a most explicit paper on the Farm Demonstration and Farm Management work of his Bureau, which was read to the general session of the Association." The Section on Extension Work heard that same year two full reports on the Boys' and Girls' Club Work in the Southern states by two of Knapp's own men, who were most particular about the methods they used and the results which were obtained. They were preceded by a speaker whose description of a system of agricultural education in operation in Canada had greatly interested the audience. Mr. O. H . Benson of the United States Department of Agriculture, one of the two K n a p p «Ibid.,

1910, pp. 100-103 .

35

Ibid., 1911, pp. 97-98,

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259

men, tried to capitalize on their enthusiasm by saying that he had "been impressed with the interest shown in the Canadian . . . system of agricultural education; and I felt that perhaps some of you might not be familiar with the fact that in many of the Southern states a county system of agricultural supervision is a realized fact." He might have strengthened the impression considerably had he been able to tell them that the Canadian system they so eagerly inquired after had been drawn directly from K n a p p and his work in the South a few years earlier. 37 By 1912 demand for a national system of extension work in agriculture was becoming insistent. Sixteen bills providing Federal aid for such work were pending in the House. A newly formed and exceedingly powerful pressure group, the National Soil Fertility League, sent H. H. Gross, its President, to explain to the Association of Agricultural Colleges that the League believed that the state colleges should direct extension work in their own states. But the League was emphatic and uncompromising about what kind of extension work it was willing to place in the hands of the colleges. We believe that at least 75 percent of the money should be used for actual farm demonstrations. . . . You have spent vast sums of public money and thus accumulated a vast body of knowledge of priceless value if generally used, of little or no value unless used; and we want you to put it to work. The methods heretofore used for disseminating this knowledge have not been successful.

Bulletins, the lecture platform, the farmers' institute, the running of exhibition trains—in short, most of the forms endorsed two years earlier by the Association's Committee were decried by the League, because "measured by the net result they do not amount to much." It is clear to us as business men that something more is needed. . . . Experience . . . demonstrates that the best way to get this knowledge into practice is to bring about a contact, right in the field where the problem lies, between the man who wants to know and the man who knows. It is the best, most effective, quickest way, and, really, the cheapest and only way; hence, as business men, we believe this the plan to adopt; hence 38

Ibid., p. 217.

37

True, Agricultural

Extension,

p. 86.

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the Lever bill and the reasons why we have given it such earnest and continued support. 38 In the domain of agricultural education, incomparably the most powerful organization was the Association of Agricultural Colleges. Composed of delegates from each of the Morrill land-grant colleges and Hatch experiment stations in every state and territory, the Association felt free to put its own construction on the passages in President Roosevelt's address that praised Knapp's work in the South. It could also minimize warnings uttered by one or two of its own membership, and the expositions or persuasions made before it by Knapp's chief or Knapp's lieutenants, when these voices advocated a method of extension toward which members of the Association were skeptical or hostile. Quick to welcome the recommendation for a national system of Agricultural extension when made by the Country Life Commission on which two of the Association's most prominent leaders served, its uncontested authority .promised to secure from Congress whatever statutory provisions its membership endorsed. T h e experience was all the more disconcerting then, to discover the existence of a rival organization created to work exclusively for the Knapp form of demonstration. Officials from tax-dependent land-grant colleges had need of a hardihood bordering on recklessness to oppose openly the coalition of interests that had been drawn by a common purpose into the National Soil Fertility League. The membership of the League marshaled an impressive array of public figures whose connection and concern with the farmer was quite the equal of the college men. The roster included politicians and railroad presidents in abundance, bankers, agricultural journalists, farm-implement manufacturers, mail-order-house magnates, and many leaders in the vigorous conservation movement stimulated by Theodore Roosevelt. President T a f t was a member of the major committee of the League. So were James J. Hill of the Great Northern, W. C. Brown, president of the New York Central, and F. A. Delano, presi38

S t a t e m e n t b y H . H . Gross, President of t h e N a t i o n a l Soil F e r t i l i t y League,

q u o t e d in A.A.A.C. a n d E.S., Proceedings,

1912, p p . 102-103. Also, " T h e

d r a f t of the Lever bill was m a d e in o u r office."

first

SMITH-LEV E R A C T

261

dent of the Wabash railroad. Others included Champ Clark, William Jennings Bryan, Samuel Gompers, J. M. Studebaker, Henry Wallace (the elder), A. H. Sanders of the Breeder's Gazette, D r . E. J. James, president of the University of Illinois, plus an equal number strategically as well placed to assist a bill through Congress. 35 The League had announced itself as "an organization to put forth a sustained effort to induce the Federal Government and the several States to cooperate in supplying the funds necessary so that the State Agricultural Colleges may carry extension work into every county and assist the farmers themselves to solve this great problem of increasing soil fertility." T h e reason for the organization of the League was to push " a country-wide campaign for better agriculture by local demonstration," as in the method devised " b y Dr. Knapp, who originated the movement" in the South, where it was financed and fostered by the General Education Board and by the Department of Agriculture under the authority of James Wilson. " T h e success of their work is a revelation. It proves that the plan is right."

40

President T a f t , at a great meeting held by the League in conjunction with the Third National Conservation Congress that assembled in Kansas City in the fall of 1911 with an appropriate fanfare of publicity, committed himself to the League's program of a demonstration agent for every county in the nation. " I do not think we could have a more practical method than this. . . .

It is a subject

so all-compelling, in which all the people are so much interested . . . and the expenditure of money to a good purpose so free from difficulties that we may properly welcome the plan and try it."

41

The point at issue was becoming clear at last to everyone. All groups with an interest in the outcome favored Federal assistance in establishing a national system of agricultural extension. Agreement was general too, that within the confines of each state such work should be under the direction of the Morrill Agricultural and Mechanical College. But there agreement ended. The colleges, exhibit39

40 National Soil Fertility League (Chicago, 1911), p. 1. I b i d . , p. 2. Third National Conservation Congress, Addresses and Proceedings (Kansas City, Mo., 1911), p. 61. 41

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ing through their Association their collective apprehension at losing face and favor with their home-state farmers if forced to import an outsider's mode of extension—and to share credit for its benefits with the national Department of Agriculture—hung back and sought reassurance for their fears where they could find it. The emergence of the National Soil Fertility League merely brought matters to a head, for it only underscored and dramatized the unwelcome fact that all the Southern states, their representatives in Congress, the General Education Board, two presidents of the United States (soon to be joined by the third), and now a host of powerful businessmen and politicians insisted that Knapp's demonstration work was the only variety of agricultural extension work worth supporting through the Federal Treasury. It was becoming plain to the Association that some accommodation of their views to those held by many others was unavoidable. The day that preceded the appearance of President H. H. Gross before the Association with his firm, but not unfriendly, message from the League about supporting the Lever bill had witnessed a worried joint session of the Association held with the Department of Agriculture "for the purpose of discussing cooperation in extension service." Dean Mumford of Missouri pointed out that hitherto cooperation between the Department and the colleges had been confined to investigational work, but now the Department proposed cooperation with the colleges in teaching—specifically, through "a county agent or farm adviser, under the joint direction of the Department and the college. The duties of the county agent as indicated by Dr. B. T. Galloway . . . are to be similar to those of the special agents employed in the cooperative demonstration work conducted in the southern states." Dean Mumford felt no hesitancy in approving the familiar investigational sort of cooperation then being carried on through all the North and West in the form of farm management investigations pursued jointly with the Office of Farm Management under Professor W. J. Spillman. But—Dean Mumford objected—it was hard to see

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where cooperation with Rnapp's rfien came in. Primarily they were teachers who carried "to the farmer on his own farm the results of the investigations made at the college." Under such a division of labor it was evident that a lion's share of the farmer's gratitude would go to the man who made the contact out in the field. Speaking for his colleagues, Dr. Mumford wondered why the teachers at the college, if left to their own devices, couldn't serve the farmer equally well. " I see no essential difference in principle between teaching farmers in a college or teaching farmers a mile away from the institution."

42

Professor Spillman came forward to answer for the Department. He was well chosen for a difficult task because his men and their work were known and not feared by the colleges in the Northern and Western states. He had been closely associated with the earliest effort to develop effective methods of demonstration in the South. It had been Spillman who had explained in detail the differences between most varieties of extension work and the county agricultural demonstration agent work as it had developed in the South before the great meeting that President Taft addressed at the Conservation Congress in Kansas City. On that occasion he had added, in concluding, "The Secretary of Agriculture has asked me to develop a similar line of work in the Northern States and we are now laying plans for its development."

43

No one was in a bfctter position than

Spillman to act, in 1912, as interpreter and go-between, on this touchy subject, for the Department. President Kenyon L. Butterfield launched the cross-examination. 44 What is the theory of the department in regard to the type of dissemination work which it should do? . . . What should be the relationship of this work to the various agricultural colleges and their extension service? I n the mind of the department, what is the justification for its taking up the county agent work as a phase of its dissemination service? Just why should 42

A.A.A.C. and E.S., Proceedings, 1912, p. 137. Third National Conservation Congress, Addresses and Proceedings (Kansas City, Mo., 1911), p. 152. 44 Due to his position of leadership, both official and unofficial, within the Association on all matters touching on extension work in agriculture. 43

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the county agent scheme be forwarded chiefly by the Federal Department?" 41 S p i l l m a n struggled v a l i a n t l y to a n s w e r t h e s e queries. Some h e was a b l e t o h a n d l e w i t h finality. Such w e r e t h e inquiries which q u e s t i o n e d t h e s u p e r i o r i t y of t h e d e m o n s t r a t i o n m e t h o d over o t h e r f o r m s of extension w o r k . I did not appreciate [Spillman confessed] in my early days as an investigator, the fact that when a farmer tried to put in application the recommendations I was making to him, he had a much bigger problem on his hands than I had in finding out what he ought to do. Why do we advocate the county agent system? The answer is a simple and definite one. We have spent much time and money trying to devise some means of helping the farmer solve his problems. . . . We have tried many schemes to this end. We first tried what we called at the time the demonstration farm. We started thirty-five of these farms the first year the project was under way; and thirty-four of them were dismal failures. They were unsuccessful simply because the farmer would not follow instructions; but the one success has served to revolutionize agriculture. 4 9 W i t h queries, w h i c h focused on t h e p r o b l e m of c o o p e r a t i o n r a t h e r t h a n on the t e c h n i q u e of extension t e a c h i n g , Spillman h a d little success, because t h e y d e a l t w i t h f e a r s instead of facts. T h e root f e a r was indeed a basic one. D e a n M u m f o r d p u t it c l e a r l y e n o u g h . If cooperation between the colleges of agriculture should result in minimizing the local influence of the most unfortunate. Many of these institutions have discouragements. Their progress has been directly growth of favorable public sentiment.

and the department colleges, it would be labored under great proportional to the

The avenue through which favorable public sentiment has been secured in these institutions has been the extension service. I t is safe to say that those institutions which have the best organized and most efficient extension departments, have grown most rapidly in all departments, including men and equipment for college instruction and facilities for original research. If cooperation should result in confusing the minds of the people as to sources of aid it will certainly result in difficulties for the state institution. 45

A.A.A.C. and E.S., Proceedings, 1912, p. 144.

48

Ibid., p. 146.

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These institutions are supported by direct taxation and the extent to which they are able to direct public thought and render large public service, will determine their ultimate success. 4 7

T h e following year, six months before the Smith-Lever Act was passed which did require demonstration work to be the principal form of extension teaching and did require cooperation between the Federal Department and each state college of agriculture, the Association threshed over these same issues again. In this second joust the champions were Dr. B. T. Galloway, newly appointed Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, for the Department, and Dean Eugene Davenport of the University of Illinois, for the agricultural colleges. Dr. Galloway made an able exposition of the responsibility laid by Congress on the Department to see that the people received their money's worth for appropriations made to aid them. He advanced not only principles for cooperation, but proposals for working them out at once in practice. Dean Davenport sailed into the subterfuge and encroachments which he alleged were glossed over with the fair word cooperation. In hammer-and-tongs fashion he made it apparent that the colleges felt that the existence of not merely their extension departments were at stake, but also their college and experiment station work as well. He demanded the retirement of the Department to very limited confines of work and a return of the Lever bill to its original provisions, by which the states determined the nature of the extension work they wished to do, and in which the word and the concept of Federal-state cooperation was to be dropped. 4 8 Hostility to cooperation with the Federal Department, resentment at the popularity of the unacademic county demonstration agent system, deep-seated fear of the formidable popular backing and political aggressiveness of the champions of Knapp's farm demonstration techniques seemed on the point of driving the agricultural educators Association, during 1912-1913, into an untenable position of hopeless intransigeance. From this possibility, deliverance was effected through 47

Ibid., p. 137.

*» Ibid., 1913, pp. 117-133.

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an unexpected chain of circumstances that reached back to Colonel Green, the Porter farm, and the meeting arranged between Dr. Buttrick and "Texas's other university"—Dr. Knapp. Woodrow Wilson in March, 1913, took office as President of the United States. Some six weeks earlier, as Governor of New Jersey, he had devoted a portion of his last message to the Legislature in explaining and recommending the establishment of a state system of county farm demonstration agents. He informed the state's legislators that, "the farmer has not been served as he might and should be." Our agricultural schools and their many mechanisms of dissemination have been of help, "but a more effective way still has been found by which the farmer can be served." The thing that tells is demonstration work. The knowledge of the schools should be carried out to the farms themselves. Dr. Seaman A. Knapp found the way when he was sent into the South to fight the boll weevil. . . . It does not require a great deal of money to train men and send them out for this work; and once it is begun it goes on of itself. Private persons, voluntary independent associations, county authorities, take it up. It is a thing that gives life as it goes. It awakens countrysides and rouses them to take charge of themselves. . . . We should give ourselves the pleasure, the pride and satisfaction, of putting New Jersey forward to set an example in this truly great and intelligent work.49 Wilson had been given his interest in, and had received his information about, Knapp and the Demonstration Work from his old friend, Walter Hines Page—trustee of the General Education Board. Page, well aware that some form of Federal aid to agricultural extension soon would be enacted, requested Knapp's son and successor Bradford Knapp, and one of his earliest assistants, J . A. Evans, to prepare a history of the work and a report of its results down to the date of the presidential elections in the fall of 1912. "When it was completed Dr. Buttrick, accompanied by Walter Page, member of the Board, who was later Ambassador to England, came down to go over it with 19

Woodrow Wilson, Second Annual Message to the Legislature of New (Trenton, N.J., 1913), pp. 8-9.

Jersey

SMITH-LEVER

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267

us. We were told afterwards that the report, bound in vellum, was sent by special messenger to Wilson while he was vacationing at Bermuda."

10

Page seems to have been Wilson's principal adviser on agricultural matters. He recommended for Secretary of the Department the man Wilson selected (and whom he later made Secretary of the Treasury) —David F. Houston. Page seems to have been the first to present his name to the Presidentelect. Page had called upon Wilson soon after the election to plead the cause of agriculture and the development of country life. In his mind the problems of the soil offered opportunities second to none for the new administration and he was anxious to have Wilson meet them. At Wilson's invitation, he sent to Bermuda while the Governor was resting there a memorandum regarding men w h o might be fitted to head the D e p a r t m e n t of Agriculture. Houston, he thought, was the best man for the place. 5 1

Thus it came about that Houston, the first agricultural college president who had observed Knapp's work—its educational effectiveness, rural popularity, and political momentum—and with him had first worked out the procedures necessary for Federal Departmentstate college cooperation in agricultural extension projects, 52 and had served as the intermediary between Knapp and Dr. Buttrick, now was assisted by Walter Page to the most influential position in the field of agriculture at the most critical moment in the whole movement to nationalize the country farm demonstration agent extension service. Houston accomplished two things. He dispelled the fears of the agricultural educators and their Association and obtained their whole-hearted participation. He was firm in upholding popular and Congressional insistence on demonstration work as the principal form of extension work and in gaining incorporation of legislative and administrative provisions designed to hold the colleges to the use of Knapp's methods and to the pursuit of his aim to render practical help to the plain men and women, boys and girls, on the farm. 50

J. A. Evans, Recollections

01

R. S. Baker, Life and Letters of Woodrow

III, 448-449.

of Extension

History 52

(Raleigh, N.C., 1938), p. 25.

Wilson (8 vols., New York, 1931), See p. 195, above.

268

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Secretary Houston, a few weeks after assuming office, invited the Executive Committee of the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations to confer with him on the multitudinous problems which had arisen out of the efforts to draft a Federal statute extending aid to extension work in agriculture that would meet the wishes of agricultural educators as well as those of the farming population, and of the business groups interested in rural prosperity. Views were exchanged with great frankness. A memorandum presenting the proposals of the Department on the moot point of cooperation was delivered to the Committee. I n turn they presented counterproposals. Out of this came agreement on the administrative principles and plans which the Department desired and which the Association accepted. And to prevent future misunderstandings and to create conditions for harmonious mutual operations a joint committee on relations drawn from the Department and the Association was proposed. The Executive Committee returned home vastly reassured and enlightened." T h e Convention of the Association, meeting in Washington in November, 1913, was opened with an address by Secretary Houston, which was both frank and disarming. T h e Secretary reminded the delegates that he had been one among them eight years earlier, knew their problems, and meant to bring the Department to their assistance. He went at once to the sore point which was still the principal source of delay and confusion. There seems to me no lack of boldness in approaching the Federal Government for funds, no fear of interference with state rights and state functions there; and it seems to me that these timid gentlemen ought to let their courage bait them just at that point; for I am convinced that if it is proper for the Federal Government to secure and disseminate information and to set aside funds for that purpose, it is a matter of mere duty to the people who contribute the funds through the federal agcncy to see that the federal agency shall guarantee to them that the funds are efficiently expended for the purpose for which they were appropriated. Now " A . A . A C. and E.S., Proceedings,

1913, pp. 133-143.

S M I T H - L E V E R A C T

269

gentlemen, I cannot see any more efficient way of doing this than through cooperation with you.54 The fears of the Association had been exorcised. T h e members were given—following the gladiatorial melee between Dr. Galloway and Dean Davenport— an opportunity to deliver their systems of the poisonous matter that may be therein. . . . It is no offense to say to this assembly that for many years there has been a feeling of unrest, if not distrust and uncertainty, as to just where we were going. . . . Now, it is an open secret among members of the committee that, subsequent to last May's conference with the Secretary of Agriculture, we were charmed and delighted with what we believed to be a vision of new progress, a beginning of a new era in our work."5 Dr. Butterfield approved. Secretary Houston's address was the most statesmanlike expression from a responsible federal official concerning our national agricultural program that I have ever heard. . . . My hearty appreciation of Dr. Galloway's . . . constructive administrative principles and plans which the Department proposes to try to carry out . . . the memorandum of the Executive Committee is to be commended. The establishment of a permanent committee on the general relations of the Department and the colleges, will prove absolutely epoch making. . . . A word in regard to the Lever bill. I do not quite share Dean Davenport's fears. . . . While these dangers might exist, the spirit of the present administration of the Department is such that, particularly if the proposed joint committee is established, there would early be laid down such principles and such practice in actual operation as would establish the proper relationships for all time to come.56 The Convention designated the Executive Committee of the Association to be the committee on relations in conjunction with a similar group from the Department. H . H . Gross, president of the National Soil Fertility League, expressed his relief that after two and a half years, at last "everything looks clear and the bill will undoubtedly pass."

57

Director C. D. Woods of Maine reported

" / « < / . , p. 21. »« Ibid., pp. 134-13S.

"Ibid., pp. 140-141. « Ibid., p. 141.

270

S M I T H - L E V E R

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a reminiscent mood; I remember the doubts and misgivings we experienced at the time when the Hatch act was introduced, particularly as to the legislation establishing the Office of Experiment Stations; how this Association feared that the Government would interfere with the newly created experiment stations. How groundless were our fears has been shown by the history of twenty-five years. I believe that we as scientists, as educators, as administrative officers, will be enabled out of this proposed action to develop that which we shall look upon as a matter of history with the same satisfaction with which we now look upon that action taken twenty-five years ago which resulted in the establishment of the Office of Experiment Stations. 58 In March, 1908, the chairman of the Committee on Agriculture informed the H o u s e that appropriations for the Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work were no longer to be requested as an emergency, but rather as a regular item of expenditure, because the results obtained had been "almost phenomenal." I may say in passing [Chairman Scott continued], that the success with which this demonstration and cooperative work has met . . . has suggested to members of your Committee the idea that it might be profitably extended to other sections of the country. . . . T h e work in the South . . . has demonstrated that the knowledge of science can be carried in a most efficient way to very large numbers of individual farmers at a minimum of expense. Comparatively few men are able practically to apply the information which may come to them in a bulletin, but no man is so dull as not to understand the results that are obtained on his own land from the work of his own hand. Your Committee is very much disposed, therefore, to encourage the Department in this line of its effort to carry to the people the information that is acquired in its laboratories and on its experimental grounds." Approval and encouragement voiced thus early b y the key man in Congress has several points of interest. H i s remarks revealed the existence of a bloc of Congressmen personally enthusiastic about Knapp's work, and as devoted to the expansion and wider use of the farm demonstration plan as were Knapp's own agents. These legislative adherents, in the second place, were experts on, as well as ex"Ibid., p. 138. 88 Congressional Record, 60th Cong., 1st Sess., March 24, 1908, p. 3813.

SMITH-LEVER

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271

ponents of, the Demonstration technique. In contrast to the agricultural educators who, by and large, remained not only uninformed, but seemingly uninterested in either the nature or the meaning of " T h e Demonstration Proposition" until it was prescribed for them by the Smith-Lever Law, Congressmen from the South had provided many brilliant analyses, graphic descriptions and striking definitions of the work. Repeatedly, for their legislative colleagues, the Demonstration Work was extolled for its benefits to the rural population and supposedly similar work was dissected skillfully to show wherein it differed from, and was therefore inferior to, the only type of extension which produced results. So far as the records show, every Representative from the South supported the F.C.D.W. repeatedly and eagerly. None, in any case, ever spoke against it. The attitude of Joseph Ransdell, from Knapp's home state, is typical of the attitude and interest of this group. "Louisiana is very proud of her adopted son, and Southerners generally regard Dr. Knapp as one of the most progressive, enlightened and practical men the nation has ever produced." Accurately and triumphantly, he narrated to the House the inception and development of the boys' corn clubs in the South. "I wish that this great work could be carried on everywhere in the Union—not only in the South, but everywhere." Cunningly he concluded, " I see my friend from New York (Mr. Driscoll) over there, listening intently."

60

Well before the McLaughlin bill had been introduced Dr. Knapp was asked, "What changes would be necessary in this bill to authorize you to go into Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and the other great com states?" DR. KNAPP: Nothing but a change in that little wording of the bill, and money enough to do it. REPRESENTATIVE

RI/EKER:

Would

it

not

be

advisable

. . .

?

DR. KNAPP: There is no question but that it would be helpful, for they are suffering from the same causes as in the South. 6 1 60

Congressional Record, 61st Cong.. 3d Sess., Feb. 2, 1911, pp. 1857-1858. House Committee on Agriculture, Hearings, 61st Cong., 3d Sess., Dec. 8, 1910, p. 118. 61

272

SMITH-LEVER

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Political understanding and support was sufficiently engaged by 1908 to secure a rather generalized endorsement of extension work in agriculture in the National Democratic party platform of that year. Four years later this was repeated in more explicit form. 62 T h e Republicans, notwithstanding Roosevelt's leadership on this question and the recommendations made by his Country Life Commission, ignored the issue in their party platforms. The "Old Guard," who were adverse to increases in social expenditures and who had declined to authorize printing the report of the Commission, were opposed to the idea as much on principle as they were to Roosevelt's sponsorship. Speaker Cannon, in 1908, failed to reappoint Representative C. R. Davis of Minnesota to the Committee on Agriculture, because—it was charged by Southern Congressmen—Davis had introduced in 1907 the first bill "looking to a larger diffusion of agricultural education among the masses . . . and had made his campaign upon a platform in which this bill was the chief plank, and because he has advocated in correspondence with members of Congress the importance of such a measure."

83

T h e Democrats in 1910 gained control of the House; in 1912; of the Senate as well. T h e party's President-elect gave the Demonstration Work unqualified backing in January, 1913, and appointed one of its first and firmest friends his Secretary of Agriculture. The Chief of Knapp's Bureau, Dr. B. T . Galloway, who had aided Knapp to pioneer a successful method of demonstration during

1902-1904

and had backed its development consistently since, became Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. A. F. Lever of South Carolina came to the chairmanship of the House Committee on Agriculture, while Hoke Smith of Georgia assumed parallel powers in the Senate. T h e out-going Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson, in unmistakable terms had endorsed one, and only one, type of extension work as worthy of Congressional enactment. 82 Edward Stanwood, A History of the Presidency (2 vols., New York, 1928), II, 193, 265. 83 Congressional Record, 60th Cong., 1st Sess., March 25, 1908, pp. 3908-3909.

SMITH-LEVER

ACT

273

It would seem to me to be much wiser to follow along the lines that have succeeded so well in the Southern States. . . . I would have most hope of good coming from extension work and demonstrations made on the farms of the country under intelligent direction and practical instruction in the field given to the boys of the farm and practical instruction in the homes given to the girls of the farm. 04 Everywhere, save in the Conventions of the Association of Agricultural Colleges, there was virtual unanimity on the form and method of a national agricultural extension system. I was a member of the Agricultural Committee when Dr. Knapp began his work. I followed it from its very inception and became thoroughly imbued—saturated, as it were—with the Knapp doctrine of teaching things by doing them, and so profoundly impressed was I with this new theory of agricultural teaching that the Agricultural Extension Bill . . . put through Congress . . . simply perpetuated in permanent fashion the original idea underlying demonstration teaching. . . . Senator Hoke Smith and I had in mind . . . to make permanent the ideals of Dr. Knapp. 65 At hearings on bills to provide extension work in agriculture the same singleness of purpose was made repeatedly apparent. Mr. Harris, banker and owner of many thousands of corn-belt acres, who followed several agricultural college presidents at a hearing in 1912, was almost rudely blunt. "Now this talk is not for the McKinley bill or any particular bill. We want field demonstrations. . . . It isn't a theory. It has been a demonstrated fact for seven years in the South. . . . Now, what we want is not extension work, so-called, but demonstrations, pure and simple . . . and we want it all over the nation."

86

Representative Lever, explaining to the House an early version of his bill, called attention to the provision which required that not less than 75 percent of all funds appropriated should go for field demonstrations and added, "We were careful to protect the bill and not have the money wasted in talk. . . . That provision was put into the 64

True, Agricultural Extension, p. 108. A. F. Lever, "Back to First Principles," Epsilon Sigma Phi Yearbook (Washington, D.C., 1933), pp. 27-28. 66 House Committee on Agriculture, Hearings, 62d Cong., 2d Sess., March 1, 1912, pp. 120-121. 95

274

SMITH-LEVER

ACT

bill for the very purpose of seeing to it that the money provided by this bill should not be used for lectures, the running of agricultural trains, and the like of that, but . . .

for practical demonstrations."

On this point, Congress had the explicit backing of Dean Davenport, who seems to have been a nonconformist generally, when he expressed a preference for the demonstration idea "because the term agricultural extension in the present state of evolution means principally talk, attendance upon farmers' institutes, conduct of special trains, etc."

68

Such was the popular and the political verdict upon the

forms of extension which the agricultural educators Association had designated not long before this "to be the great permanent work of the extension department." Senator Smith, after hearing Senators Smoot of Utah, Burton of Ohio, Simmons of of North Carolina and others recount personal experiences with delegations of boys' corn-club and girls' tomato-club winners, and recite their remarkable records, agreed that such work was the kind his bill was meant to forward. He confided that, " T h e truth about it is that the real object this bill had in view was to prevent the diversion of the money to the college . . . and away from" demonstration work of the kind his fellow Senators had just declared their great approval of." 0 Such was the distrust felt in Congress toward the agricultural educators and their lack of receptivity to the Demonstration Proposition. It was this feeling which dictated many of the provisions in the Smith-Lever Act. Section 5 prohibits the application of any Federal funds "to the purchase, erection, preservation, or repair of any building or buildings, or the purchase or rental of land, or in college-course teaching, lectures in colleges, promoting agricultural trains . . . and not more than 5 percent . . . to the printing and distribution of publications." Section 2, after declaring "that cooperative agricultural extension work shall consist of the giving of instruction and practical demonstrations in agriculture and home economics to persons not attending or 97 89

68 Ibid., AUK- 13, 1912, pp. 10857, 10860. ¡bid., p. 10857. Congressional Record, 63d Cong., 2d Sess., Jan. 17, 1914, pp. 1822-1828, 18.i4.

S M I T H - L E V E R

ACT

275

resident in said colleges in the several communities, and imparting to such persons information on said subjects through field demonstrations, publications, and otherwise": required that the work "should be carried on in such a m a n n e r as may be mutually agreed upon by the Secretary of Agriculture and the State agricultural college or colleges receiving the benefits of this a c t . " Section 3 orders f u n d s to the colleges held back each fiscal year until " p l a n s for the work to be carried on under this act shall be submitted by the proper officials of each college and approved by the Secretary of Agriculture."

7,1

It was a euphemism to label "cooperative" a s t a t u t e which lodged such broad powers of supervision and control in the hands of the Secretary of Agriculture, Butterfield pointed out to his uneasy, but relatively impotent, fellow delegates in the Association. 7 1 T h a t the point was well taken quickly was confirmed. At a Congressional hearing in t h e fall of 1913 concern was expressed that omission of the specific requirement that 7.5 percent of Federal f u n d s should be spent on actual field demonstrations would allow the colleges to use money for one of their favorite activities—farmers' institutes.

Assistant

Secretary Galloway replied that although this was not specifically prohibited the new bill conferred on the D e p a r t m e n t power to check such use of the funds. 7 J Secretary Houston, writing in praise of the new law the following spring, made no bones of his pleasure that it not only explicitly required that its appropriations " m u s t be expended in direct instruction in the field," but rejoiced equally t h a t " t h e act is very specific in prohibiting its use for teaching or erecting buildings at institutions and in limiting the proportion that can be expended in printing bulletins." He, too. used a phrase which barely qualified as an euphemism: " I t guarantees

a coordination . . . between the States and the Federal

Government." 7-' 70

T r u e , Agricultural

71

A.A.A.C. and E.S., Proceedings,

" - T r u e . Agricultural 7:1

Extension, Extension,

D e p t . of Agric., Report,

pp. 195-197. p. 135. p

111.

1Q14, p p

J5-36.

276

SMITH-LEVER

ACT

Dr. Galloway, for the Department, in 1914 further elaborated restrictions in a statement sent to the executive committee of the Association. Prohibitions included ''college-course teaching, lectures in colleges, promoting agricultural trains . . . Farmers' institutes . . . and maintenance of permanent 'model' or demonstration farms." At least 75 percent of the Smith-Lever fund was expected to be allotted annually "for field demonstrations."

74

Ten years, almost to the month, from the date when Knapp had opened headquarters in Houston to demonstrate to the panic stricken Cotton Kingdom sounder practices in agriculture, his methods of instruction—in principle and in detail—were extended to aid rural people in every county in the country by authority of the carefully considered provisions of the Smith-Lever Act. How completely that Act, the legal foundation of the Extension Service of the United States, of all the forty-eight States, Alaska, Porto Rico, and Hawaii, is Knapp's nearly single-handed achievement, has been realized by almost no one. By many of his early associates and backers, he has been celebrated as the gifted educator that he was. By more recent students and supporters of his institution, his work has been hailed for its social significance and cultural promise. There even have been a tardy scattering of appreciative comments, and forecasts as to the yet little-realized potentialities of the seemingly intricate, but eminently workable, three-level integration of Federal, state and county governmental machinery involved in county agent operations, with its beneficial check on excessive centralization counterbalanced by its vigorous stimulation of neighborhood self-help." Almost in no instance, however, has there been a limited recognition of him as a consummate politician—statesman, if preferred— with a genius for public relations and the mobilization of public opinion, which he used to out-maneuver individual opponents and to 74

True, Agricultural Extension, p. 117. Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York, 1933), pp. 12931294. J. M. Gaus, et al., Public Administration and the United Stales Department of Agriculture (Chicago, 1940), p. 39. Gladys Baker, The County Agent (Chicago, 1939). 75

SMITH-LEVER

ACT

277

overcome concerted opposition. Lacking his educational fertility, his inspirational leadership and his administrative competence, his political skill and generalship would have been of small avail in the field of agricultural extension. However, had he lacked the latter— so needful to gain perpetuation for the demonstration work through the Smith-Lever measure—it is a serious question whether traditional educators could not have written their own legislation, and remained at liberty to apply funds for agricultural extension to whatever academic fancy they pleased to give the proper label. Knapp's performance in this role was unsurpassed; so much so that its effortlessness may be the reason why it has been overlooked in the existing brief accounts of his life. It appeared the day he opened his campaign in Texas, and quickly rallied for him vigorous support which he shrewdly attached permanently to his movement. He sought out and secured the backing of state-wide railroad and industrial interests, of local businessmen, bankers, lawyers, landlords, ministers, newspaper men and teachers at the same time he was working with the farmers. To this throng the state legislators responded promptly; so also did the voters' representatives in Congress. The General Education Board was quite as much impressed with the popular support Knapp had generated as with the pedagogical technique responsible for it. It properly confirmed their judgment as to the practicality of the work itself, and as to the reasonableness of the hope that the work would in time beget its own support and enable the Board to withdraw. The alliance they made with him was to the great gain of each. Knapp at once used the funds and freedom of action provided to obtain still wider mass support—from the Negroes, from farm boys, farm girls, and farm mothers. As such well-nigh universal backing accumulated cooperation with the demonstration work came to seem more and more desirable to agricultural educators, state by state, throughout the South. Cooperation with the colleges once gained, Knapp placed it immediately on the unshifting rock of mutual self-interest through the instrument of a series of written agreements freely negotiated. The

278

SMITH-LEVER

ACT

first of these was contracted with Dr. David F. Houston, in July, 1905, while president of Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College.7" This was followed by similar arrangements with Tuskegee, then Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and so o n , " until by the close of 1913 not only were such written undertakings in force with practically all Southern agricultural colleges, but in most instances they provided for collaboration with the Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work on all the demonstration work done within their jurisdictions. 79 The Memorandum of Agreement between the United States Department of Agriculture and the General Education Board signed in April, 1906, was the prototype of those which followed. The contents of all were simple and similar. They provided for a use of joint funds, for an allotment of credit for results obtained to the joint efforts of both parties, for selection by the college, with approval by Knapp (or the Department) of the agents employed and of the projects planned. The nature of demonstration work was closely defined, and other lines of college work were specifically excluded. In 1913 this is precisely the mode of cooperation that Houston, first party to such an arrangement eight years earlier, proposed to the agricultural educators of the North and West and to which he gained their adherence. These were the definitions and restrictions written into the Smith-Lever law; these were also its cooperative obligations. Subsequently these provisions were amplified by a supplementary Memorandum of Agreement, signed within a year of the passage of the bill by all but two of the Morrill land-grant beneficiaries of the law. This has since been the basis on which the colleges and the Department have conducted their extension work. 79 And—it should be added—was what the basis had been from the year Knapp showed the way to cooperation as he had done to demonstration. No great Congressional statute comes readily to mind for which 7r

' Knapp to Galloway, July 7, 1905. See p. 195, above.

77

See pp. 227-232, above.

7K

Evans, Recollections

79

True, Agricultural

of Extension Extension,

History,

pp. 118-119.

pp. 15, 25. 27.

S M I T H - L E V E R

ACT

279

one man was more wholly responsible than K n a p p was for the SmithLever act. He was originator of the idea, organizer of the details of s t r u c t u r e and operation, and principal engineer of the forces of opinion and political energy which secured its passage. All this is explicitly affirmed in the reports M r . Lever made for the Committee on Agriculture to the full membership of the House as the measure, to which his n a m e was given, was formally presented for consideration in 1912 a n d again in 1914. T h e late Dr. Seaman A. Knapp's . . . s y s t e m of bringing h o m e to the actual farmer upon his actual farm the best m e t h o d s of agriculture. . . . The

proposed

legislation

intends to do this same kind of

bigger, broader and better scale . . .

work o n

a

to do for the whole country, in a

larger measure, what has been accomplished for the South in a smaller w a y under the Farmers' Cooperative D e m o n s t r a t i o n Work.* 0

Seaman K n a p p died April 1, 1911, three years before the SmithLever bill became a law, but it was largely the work he had done that assured its passage through the Congress. Coming from a family of octogenarians, Seaman K n a p p should have lived to witness Woodrow Wilson sign the measure. But near the end of spring in 1910, his wife, Maria Hotchkiss died. For more than sixty years, ever since they were both sixteen, Maria had been the mainstay of Seaman's life, the comforter and upholder of his active spirit. Her death, to t h e seventy-seven-year-old man, was a deprivation seen by others in his declining health. T h e r e were other men, now, who could carry on his work and so, ten months later, he was buried by Maria's side in t h e College cemetery at Ames. Iowa was a fitting choice for the location of their graves. It was there the crippled Seaman won his stubborn fight for health, there he first made a name in agricultural education, and there he and M a r i a reared their family. T h e y lie, in Iowa, near the center of one of the 80

A. F. Lever, submitting House

Report

A~o. 546 (on the ''Establishment of

Agricultural Extension D e p a r t m e n t s " ) , 62d Cong., 2d Sess., 1912, p. 5. House Report

No. 110 ("Cooperative Agricultural Extension W o r k " ) , 63d Cong., 2d

Sess., 1914, p. 4, rewords and reemphasizes the same points.

280

SMITH-LEVER

ACT

•finest blocks of farmland on the globe. All around them, the land's fertility is enhanced and guarded by agricultural agents, whose work continues a pattern Knapp established, and for whose presence in all the states his own life was so much responsible. In Washington, Dr. Knapp's services to agriculture are officially attested by a bronze plate affixed to one of the archways that connect the two principal buildings of the Department of Agriculture. From that plaque the passerby may read that he stands under the Knapp Memorial Arch—so designated by Resolution of Congress to preserve and honor the memory of the Founder of Farm Demonstration Work. Nearby stands a second archway similarly inscribed to the memory of Secretary James Wilson, Knapp's old neighbor back in Iowa. In a city where monuments overflow from all the parks and plazas these two half-hidden tablets dedicate the only structures in our national c a p i t a l t h a t c o m m e m o r a t e t h e work of a g r i c u l t u r i s t s .

Seaman Knapp is not a famous man today. Few visitors to Washington ever ask to see the plaque or Arch that bears his name. No songs or legends lionize his deeds. But the work the Yankee-bred schoolmaster of American agriculture labored so earnestly to start goes on. It goes on day after day, in all the seasons and in farmers' fields throughout the nation—a vivid illustration of Emerson's famous dictum that "Every institution is but the lengthened shadow of a man."

SELECTED

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

NOTE

THE MAJOR reliance for this record of the last decade and a half of D r . K n a p p ' s life has been his c o r r e s p o n d e n c e ; the records of the organization he directed until his d e a t h — t h e

Farmers'

Cooperative

Demonstration

W o r k ; and his own writings, addresses and Congressional testimony during this period. I m m e d i a t e l y next in i m p o r t a n c e are all g o v e r n m e n t publications touching him or his work, such as the Yearbooks m e n t of Agriculture, the Annual Reports,

Bulletins,

Reports

Inventories,

D e p a r t m e n t ; and the Debates,

and Circulars Documents,

of the U.S. D e p a r t -

of the Secretary of Agriculture, of various bureaus of the

Reports

and Hearings

of b o t h

Houses of Congress concerning K n a p p , the D e m o n s t r a t i o n W o r k , the establishment of a national agricultural extension system, etc. A n u m b e r of autobiographies, recollections and memoirs, biographies and f r a g m e n t a r y historical sketches f r o m the persons involved in this m o v e m e n t constitute the third class of material f r o m which light has been obtained. T h e views held and policies a d v o c a t e d in person, by a n o t h e r group of participants, has been secured f r o m the Proceedings, Transactions

Addresses

and

of certain interested Association^. All other types of

Annual

Meetings,

data

are classified under t h e heading of secondary material. Letters and other m a n u s c r i p t material originating with K n a p p were located f r o m April t h r o u g h N o v e m b e r , 1938, in Washington, D.C., in the following places: 1. All correspondence between K n a p p and J a m e s Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, was t a k e n f r o m files in charge of

M r . L. E.

Donaldson,

R o o m 346, Administration Building, U.S. D e p a r t m e n t of Agriculture. Mail and Files Section of the Office of the Secretary- Examination began with Book Number

34 Secretary

James

Wilson

Letter

Number

65, 7 M a y 1898,

and was continued t h r o u g h to t h e last volume in this series. Book ber 157 Secretary

James

Wilson,

Num-

M a r c h , 1913.

2. Nearly all correspondence covering K n a p p ' s work for the

Depart-

m e n t as Agricultural Explorer, 1897 into 1902, is tiled in the keeping of D r . B. Y. Morrison, Principal Horticulturist-in-charge, Division of Plant Exploration and I n t r o d u c t i o n , Bureau of P l a n t I n d u s t r y , R o o m 6074 South Building, U.S. D e p a r t m e n t of A g r i c u l ' - ' e . Officials with w h o m K n a p p dealt

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

282

in this Section include: D . G. Fairchild, A. J. Pieters, J. G. Smith, Ernest Beasey and O. F. Cook. 3. Records and correspondence dealing with the projects under Knapp's management as Special Agent to Promote Agriculture in the South, 1902 through 1904, but including material reaching into 1905 and 1906, were under the authority of Mr. H. B. Allanson, Business Manager of the Bureau of Plant Industry, Room 202 W.. Administration Building, U.S. Department of Agriculture. This material was disposed through several filing cases then stored in the attic of the South Building and accessible only through the courtesy and unerring sense of location of Mr. Fred Frost, for more than a generation File Clerk of the Bureau of Plant Industry. 4. Records, newspaper clippings, reports of agents, monthly and yearly compilations of expenditures, appointments and projects in progress, bundles of agreement forms and report forms filled out and signed by hundreds of early "cooperating" farmer-demonstrators and cooperators, plus many volumes of old fashioned letter-press tissue sheet impressions of Knapp's correspondence with his agents, his demonstrating farmers, business men and railroad industrial agents, with President David F. Houston, Dr. W. J. Spillman, Dr. B. T. Galloway, Booker T. Washington, Dr. Wm. Buttrick. et al. fill a large closet in the office of Mr. C. L. Chambers, Principal Agriculturist in the Office of the Director of the Extension Service, Division of Cooperative Extension, Room 5438. South Building, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Four additional cases full of generally similar material covering this same period were found in the keeping of Mr. W. H. Conway, assistant in the same Division, Room 5921, South Building. U.S. Department of Agriculture. KNAPP'S

PUBLISHED

WRITINGS

AND

SPEECHES

Address to the State Teachers Association of South Carolina. Chick Springs, 5.C., July, 1907. Excerpts reprinted by the Dept. of Agric. Extension Service. Washington, D.C., n.d. "Agricultural Education for the Rural Districts," National Education Association. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting, Denver. Colo. (1909V "Agricultural Resources and Capabilities of Porto Rico." House Document No. 171, 56th Cong., 2d. Sess., 1900. Announcement of Plans, Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work, Houston, Texas, Jan. 30, 1904. "Causes of Southern Rural Conditions and the Small Farm as an Important Remedy," Dept. of Agric., Yearbook

1908, pp. 311-320.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

283

"Farmer's Co-operative Demonstration Work and Its Results," in Proceedings of the 9th Conference for Education in the South, May, 1906. Richmond, Va., 1906. Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work in Its Relation to Rural Improvement. Dept. of Agric., Bureau of Plant Industry, Circular No. 21. Washington, D.C., 1908. "How to Make Farming Profitable," College Arms [Florida State Normal and Industrial School, Tallahassee], Vol. XI (1908). Improved Conditions for the Southern Farmer. Address at the 10th Conference for Education in the South, Pinehurst, N.C., 1907. "The Limits of Education, under the Law, at Our Agricultural Colleges." Dept. of Agric., Miscellaneous Special Report No. 9. Washington, D.C., 188S. The most comprehensive exposition of Dr. Knapp's views on education in general, and agricultural education in particular, that has been found. The Mission of Cooperative Demonstration Work in the South. Dept. of Agric., Office of the Secretary, Circular No. 33. Washington, D.C., 1910. The Present State of Rice Culture in the United States. Dept. of Agric., Division of Botany, Bulletin No. 22. Washington, D.C., 1899. The Production of Cotton under Boll Weevil Conditions. Washington, D.C., Dept. of Agric., Bureau of Plant Industry, 1910. Recent Foreign Explorations, as Bearing on the Agricultural Development of the Southern States. Dept. of Agric., Bureau of Plant Industry, Bulletin No. 35. Washington, D.C., 1903. "Rice," American Economic Association Publications, 3d ser., V (Feb., 1904), 102-109. "Shall Agriculture Be Taught in the Secondary Schools of the United States?" Address to the Southern Education Association, Chattanooga, Tenn., Dec., 1910. Reprinted by the Southern Educational Review, n.d. Work of the Community Demonstration Farm at Terrell, Texas. Dept of Agric., Bureau of Plant Industry, Bulletin No. 51: Part II. Washington, D.C., 1905. OTHER PRIMARY

SOURCES

CONGRESS

Congressional Record, 58th Cong., beginning July 1, 1903, through the 63d Cong., ending June 30, 1915. House Committee on Agriculture, Hearings. 59th Cong., 1st Sess., Jan. 24, 1906, 2d Sess., Jan. 11, 17, 22, 1907. 60th Cong., 1st Sess., Jan. 16, 17,

284

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

21, 22, 1908, 2d Sess., Dec. 16, 1908. 61st Cong., 3d Sess., Dec. 8, 1910. 62d Cong., 2d Sess., March 1, 1912. House Documents. No. 421 (61st Cong., 2d Sess., 1912), No. 463 (63d Cong., 2d Sess., 1914). House Reports. No. 546 (62d Cong., 2d Sess., 1912), No. 110 (63d Cong., 2d Sess., 1914). Senate Documents. No. 70S (60th Cong., 2d Sess., 1909), No. 453 (60th Cong., 2d Sess., 1909), No. 537 (63d Cong., 2d Sess., 1914). DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

Commissioner of Agriculture, Reports. Department Bulletin No. 1356 (1925), No. 1127 (1923). Experiment Station Record, X V I I I (Oct., 1906), 101-103. Farmer's Bulletin No. 110 (1900), No. 212 (1905), No. 310 (1907). Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the General Education Board for Cooperation in Extending the Farmers' Cooperative Cotton Demonstration Work. Washington, D.C., April 20, 1906. Miscellaneous Special Report No. 2. "Proceedings of a Convention of Agriculturists Held at the Department of Agriculture, January, 1883." Washington, D.C., 1883. Miscellaneous Special Report No. 9. "Proceedings of a Convention of Delegates from Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations Held at the Department of Agriculture, July, 1885." Washington, D.C., 1885. Official Record, Feb. 7 and 28, 1929. Report of the Secretary, from 1889. Yearbook, from 1894. Bureau of Plant Industry. Bulletin No. 259 (1912). Cotton (a series, 1904- ). Leaflets (a series, 1902- ). Division of Agrostology. Bulletin No. 22 (1900). Division of Botany. Bulletin No. 8 (1889). Inventory No. 7 (1899), No. 8 (1900). Division of Entomology, Circulars. No. 6 (2d ser., 1895), No. 14 (1896), No. 18 (2d ser., 1897). Fourth Report of the United States Entomological Commission (1885). Office of Experiment Stations. Bulletin No. 153 (1905). Office of the Secretary. Circular No. 8 (1900), No. 24 (1907), No. 32 (1910), No. 33 (1910).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

285

PROCEEDINGS, TRANSACTIONS, AND REPORTS

American Association of Farmers' Institute Workers. Proceedings, 18961914. Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations. Proceedings, 1904 through 1915. Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work. Proceedings of the Silver Anniversary, Held at Houston, Texas, by the Extension Service of the Agricultural and Mechanical College, Texas, Feb. 5, 6, 7, 1929. Contains autobiographical reminiscences of the early days of the work by such participants as J. C. Bamett, W. D. Bentley, E. C. Brooks, C. H. Brough, Jackson Davis, L. N. Duncan, Lonnie Landrum, W. A. Lloyd, W. B. Mercier, R. R. Moton, G. W. Orms, L. E. Perrin, and R. S. Watson. I.F.S.B.A. and I.S.I.S.B.A. See Iowa State Improved Stock Breeders' Association. Iowa. Legislative Documents submitted to the 10th through the 20th GenT era] Assembly, Des Moines, 1864-84. These volumes contain the reports of the Iowa College for the Blind, the Iowa State Agricultural College and Farm, and the General Assembly's own Joint Visiting Committees. Each of the reports was issued separately, but they are sometimes hard to locate. Iowa College for the Blind. 9th through the 12th Biennial Report. Des Moines, 1869-75. Iowa State Agricultural Society. Annual reports, 1854-99. Des Moines, Iowa. Iowa State Agricultural College and Farm. 8th through the 12th Biennial Report of the Trustees. Des Moines, 1879-87. Iowa State Improved Stock Breeders' Association (I.S.I.S.B.A.). Proceedings, 1879-82. Des Moines. This was originally the Iowa Fine Stock Breeders' Association (I.F.S.B.A.) ; reports of its first five meetings were published only in newspapers, most fully in the Farmers' Journal and its successors. Michigan. Twenty-second Annual Report of the Secretary of the State Board of Agriculture. National Soil Fertility League. Chicago, 1911. Silver Anniversary. See Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work (in this section of the Bibliography). Southern Commercial Congress. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Convention at Nashville, Tenn., April 9, 1912. A memorial to Dr. Knapp, containing sketches and tributes by colleagues and observers. Reprinted as Senate Document No. 537, 63d Cong., 2d Sess., 1914.

286

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Third National Conservation Congress, Kansis City, Mo. Addresses and Proceedings, Sept. 25-27, 1911. GENERAL WORKS

Baker, R. S., Life and Letters of Woodrow Wilson. 8 vols. New York, 1931. Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens of Essex and Clinton Counties, New York. Boston, 1896. Cline, Rodney, The Life and Work of Seaman A. Knapp. George Peabody College for Teachers, Contribution to Education No. 183. Nashville, Tenn., 1936. Country Life Commission, Report. Senate Document No. 70S (60th Cong., 2d Sess., 1909). Washington, D.C., 1909. Evans, J. A., Recollections of Extension History. North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service Circular No. 224. North Carolina State College, Raleigh, N.C., 1938. "A Tribute to Dr. S. A. Knapp," Epsilon Sigma Phi Yearbook 1933. Washington, D.C., 1933. Reprinted in Agricultural Leaders Digest, Vol. XV, No. 1 (1934). Chicago, IU. Fairchild, David G., The World Was My Garden. New York, 1938. Farmers' Journal (F.J.) and Farmers' Stock Journal (F.S.J.). See Western Stock Journal and Farmer. Ferguson, Stewart Alfred, "The History of Lake Charles, Louisiana." An unpublished thesis, Louisiana State University. Baton Rouge, La., 1931. General Education Board: an Account of Its Activities, 1902-1914. New York, 1915. Knapp, Maria (Minnie), see Mayo, Mrs. A. M. Knapp, S. Arthur, Memorandum. In answer to a series of questions from the author, Major S. A. Knapp of Lake Charles, La., supplied much personal data concerning his father and his family. This material, compiled and numbered, is cited in the footnotes as Memorandum 1, 2, 3, and so on. Lever, A. Frank, "Back to First Principles," Epsilon Sigma Phi Yearbook 1933. Washington, DC., 1933. Lord, Russell, First manuscript version of The Agrarian Revival (New York, 1939), containing a good deal of material omitted from the work as published. Much of this deleted material appears in The Land, I (Washington, D.C., 1941), 252-260, 330-339. Marks, Tom, "Early Days of Extension Work." Unpublished manuscript, Dept. of Agriculture. Washington, D.C., c.1927. Martin, 0. B., The Demonstration Work: Dr. Seaman A. Knapp's Contribution to Civilization. Boston, 1921.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

287

Mayo, Mrs. A. M. (Maria or Minnie Knapp), "Biography of Seaman A. Knapp," Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work, Silver Anniversary. Mayo, Mr. and Mrs. (A. M.), Dr. Seaman A. Knapp. A memoir prepared for the Board of Directors of the Public Schools, Calcasieu Parish, La. [1912?]. Mitchell, Samuel C., "The South's Good Earth," Richmond [Va.] Times Dispatch, May IS, 1939. Nesbit, D. M., Tide Marshes of the United States. Dept. of Agric., Miscellaneous Special Report No. 7. Washington, D.C., 1885. Rice Journal and Gulf Coast Farmer. Crowley, La. Beginning with Vol. VIII No. 6 (May, 1905), this was renamed Rice Journal and Southern Farmer. Roosevelt, Theodore, An Autobiography. New York, 1919. Ross, Earle D., "The 'Father' of the Land-Grant College," Agricultural History, XII (1938), 151-186. Washington, D.C., Agricultural Historical Society. Spillman, Ramsey, "Prof." An unpublished biography of W. J. Spillman by his son. Copy in Dept. of Agric. Student's Farm Journal, Vols. I - I I I (1884-87). Ed., Agricultural and Horticultural Asociation, Iowa Agricultural College. Ames, Iowa. Van Santvoord, C., Memoirs of Dr. Nott. Kingston, N.Y., 1875. Waldron, C. N., "College Record of Seaman A. Knapp." The information so designated was supplied to the author in 1939 by the Secretary of the Graduate Council of Union College. Western Stock Journal and Farmer (WS.J. and F.). Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1876—, Launched in May, 1872, as the Farmers' Journal, this was called the Farmers' Stock Journal from January to October, 1876. It is listed by Buck (The Granger Movement, p. 324) as one of the principal agricultural papers published during the period, but since it is not cited in his footnotes it would appear to be one of those sources of information that Dr. Buck hoped would be located and preserved through the publication of his list {op. cit., p. 321). The files of the journal were located in the keeping of the Iowa Masonic Library, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and for the courtesy of permission to inspect them the writer is much indebted to Mr. C. C. Hunt, Librarian. Wilson, Woodrow, Second Annual Message to the Legislature of New Jersey. Trenton, N.J., Jan., 1913.

288

BIBLIOGRAPHY SECONDARY

SOURCES

Bailey, Liberty Hyde, The Country Life Movement in the United States. New York, 1911. Baker, Gladys, The County Agent. Chicago, 1939. Baker, 0 . E., "Agricultural Regions of North America, Part II : The South," Economic Geography, I I I (1927), 50-86. Brunner, Edmund de S., in "International Institute of Teachers College," 1938 Educational Yearbook (New York, 1938), pp. 379ff. Brunner, Edmund de S., and I. Lorge, Rural Trends in Depression Years. New York, 1937. Buttrick, Wallace, The Farm Demonstration Work of Seaman A. Knapp. Bureau of Educ., Bulletin No. 30. Washington, D.C., 1913. "Seaman A. Knapp's Work," American Review oj Reviews, X L I I I (1911), 683-685. Carriere, C. A., "Romances of Industry: Rice," American Industries, X X V (1925), 15-17. Conover, Milton, The Office of Experiment Stations. The Johns Hopkins Institute for Government Research, Service Monographs of the U.9. Government No. 32. Baltimore, Md., 1924. Copeland, Edwin B., Rice. London and New York, 1924. Curti, Merle, The Social Ideas of American Educators. New York, 1935. Dabney, Charles W., Universal Education in the South. 2 vols. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1936. Davis, Jackson, "Seaman A. Knapp, Pioneer in Southern Agriculture," in H. W. Odum, ed., Southern Pioneers in Social Interpretation. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1925. Gaus, John M., Leon O. Wolcott, and Verne B. Lewis, Public Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture. Chicago, 1940. Hendricks, Burton J., Life and Letters of Walter H. Page. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y., 1922. Hill, James J., Highways of Progress. New York, 1910. Hough, B. F., Historical Sketch of Union College. Washington, D.C., Bureau of Education. Houston, David F., Eight Years with Wilson's Cabinet. 2 vols. New York, 1926. Klein, A. J., et al., Survey of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities. Dept. of the Interior, Bulletin No. 9. 2 vols. Washington, D.C., 1930. Kolb, J . H., and E. de S. Brunner, A Study of Rural Society: Its Organization and Changes. New York, 1935.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

289

Landis, Benson Y., and John D. Willard, Rural Adult Education. New York, 1935. Landis, Paul H., Rural Life in Process. New York, 1940. Lanier, R. S., "The Revolution in Rice Farming," American Review of Reviews, X X X I I I (1906), 716-719. Lord, Russell, Men of Earth. New York, 1931. Monroe, Paul, ed., A Cyclopedia of Education (New York, 1913), IV, 508. "Eliphalet Nott." Nevins, Allan, John D. Rockefeller: the Heroic Age of American Enterprise. 2 vols. New York, 1940. Perrin, William Henry, Southwest Louisiana, Biographical and Historical. New Orleans, 1891. Plunkett, Sir Horace, The Problem of Rural Life in the United States. Dublin, Ireland, 1906. Confidential. The Rural Life Problem of the United States. New York, 1910. Poole, T. W., Some Late Words about Louisiana. New Orleans, 1891. Pyle, Joseph G., Life of James J. Hill. 2 vols. New York, 1917. Recent Social Trends in the United States. Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends. New York, 1933. "Rice," The World Today, XVI (April, 1909), 437. "Rice Culture in the United States," Harper's Weekly, XLVI (1902), 1742. Roberts, Isaac P., Autobiography of a Farm Boy. Albany, N.Y., 1916. Roosevelt, Theodore, The Man Who Works with His Hands, Dept. of Agric., Office of the Secretary, Circular No. 24. Washington, D.C., 1907. Shepardson, Whitney H., Agricultural Education in the United States. New York, 1929. Sherwood, Sidney, The University of the State of New York: History of Higher Education in the State of New York. Bureau of Educ., Circular of Information No. 3. Washington, D.C., 1900. Smith, C. B., "The Origin of Farm Economics Extension," Journal of Farm Economics, Vol. XIV, No. 1 (Jan., 1932). Stanwood, Edward, A History of the Presidency. New ed., revised by C. K. Bolton. 2 vols. New York, 1928. Stubbs, William C., A Handbook of Louisiana. New Orleans, 1895. Thompson, E. H., "The Origin and Development of the Office of Farm Management in the United States Department of Agriculture," Journal of Farm Economics, Vol. XIV, No. 1 (Jan., 1932). True, Alfred Charles, A History of Agricultural Education in the United States, 1785-1925. Dept. of Agric., Miscellaneous Publication No. 36. Washington, D.C., 1929,

290

BIBLIOGRAPHY

True, Alfred Charles, A History of Agricultural Experimentation and Research in the United States, 1607-192 S, Including a History of the United States Department of Agriculture. Dept. of Agric., Miscellaneous Publication No. 251. Washington, D.C., 1937. A History of Agricultural Extension Work in the United States, 1785-1928. Dept. of Agric., Miscellaneous Publication No. 15. Washington, D.C., 1928. Wiest, Edward, Agricultural Organization in the United States. Lexington, Ky., 1923. Wilcox, Earley Vemon, and F. H. Wilson, Tama Jim. Boston, 1930.

INDEX Africa, demonstration idea carried into, 229 Agents, see County agents; County agricultural agent system Agrarian distress and uprisings, 55 Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 204 Agricultural agents, see County agents; County agricultural agent system Agricultural colleges, proposal to establish experiment stations at, 74, 97; leading object: conflict over educational emphasis, 80; practical or narrow gauge school, 81, 83; move to unite agricultural experiment stations with, 99; Knapp charged with preparation of a plan for organization of, 100; periods of depression and prosperity, 101; relationship between work conducted by, and that of agents of Dept. of Agriculture, 190; rarely made effort to help farmer, 192; place F a r m Institute workers at Knapp's disposal, 193; failed to keep faith with public and rural population, 223 ; first comprehensive arrangement with, 225; commitments re boys' club work, 232; felt that they should share in county agent work, 232 ; application of findings to problems of farm family, 236; funds for agricultural extension, 253, 254; opposed National Soil Fertility League iq.v.), 260; extension work to be under direction of, 261; cooperation with Dept. of Agriculture placed on rock of mutual self-interest, 277; collaboration of Southern, with Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration work, 278; Smith-Lever law supplementary Memorandum of Agreement signed by, 278 Agricultural educators feared Knapp and popular support he generated, 223 Agricultural experimentation at Ames, 91 ff.

Agricultural experiment clubs for boys and girls, 230 Agricultural experiment stations, campaign for establishment of, 73 ; should be departments of state colleges, 97 ; movement to establish in all states, 97 ff. ; organized separately under state laws, 98; move to unite with land grant colleges, 99; cooperation with Spillman Diversification Farms, 164; first systematic scheme of cooperation with Dept. of Agriculture, 192; conferences with directors in Southern states re demonstration work, 195 ; all experimentation in a state should be done through local station, 195 f.; failed to provide a code of agricultural salvation, 223 Agricultural extension bill to create a rational system of, 253 (see also McLaughlin bill), 253 Agricultural extension service, cooperation of local community, 201 ; county demonstration agents, 204; inauguration of demonstration work as, 21 I n ; movement to nationalize, 244-80; discussions preliminary to creation of U.S. Cooperative Agricultural Extension Service, 253 Agricultural extension system, 242; nation-wide recommended, 247 ff. Agricultural extension work, Mrs. Welch's adaptation of principle, 102 ; fundamental function of extension education, 243; contest over educational purposes and practices involved, 250; Federal grants-in-aid to land-grant colleges for off-thecampus instruction, 253, 254; types of, enumerated, 254, 255; demand for a national system becoming insistent, 259; Federal assistance favored, 261 ; Knapp's demonstration work the only va'riety worth Federal support, 262 ; endorsed by Democrats, ignored by Republicans, 272 Agricultural legislation, see Hatch Act;

292

INDEX

Agricultural Legislation (Continued) Morrill Land Grant College Act; Smith-Lever Act; Swamp Land Acts AgriciflVural research, lack of farreaching, 94; Knapp's plea for appropriation for, 95; effort to secure Federal assistance, 98 ff. Agricultural research stations, application of findings to problems of farmer and family, 236 Agricultural research workers, feared Knapp and popular support he gained, 223 Agriculture, revolution in, required new machinery and new knowledge, 2; commercial, 55; new education for, 79-108; post-war depression, 101; Program to Promote Agriculture in the South, 133-48, 161 Agronomy, dammed at its source, 2 Adams, Henry, 25, 29 Age of Homespun, 1-19 Alabama aided by General Education Board, 218 Agricultural College: forces lined up, 229; agreement with Knapp for cooperation on boys' club work, 231 Experiment Station: agreement with Knapp for cooperation on boys' club work, 231 Allan, C. J., 113 Allanson, H. B., 282 American, The, 117 American Agriculturalist (Judd), 55 American Poland China Record Book, 58, 61 Animal husbandry in America, 62 Animal locomotion photographed, 73 Apple tree, search in Russia for, suited to Iowa winters, 102 Asbury African Church, New York, 23 Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, 100, 250; never adopted a definition of extension work, 253; did not deal straightforwardly with Knapp's form of demonstration work, 257; power of organisation: composition, 260; joint session of Dept. of Agriculture with, to discuss cooperation in extension service, 262 ; Hostile attitude toward Federal-state cooperation, county agent system, and Knapp's demonstration technique,

265; Convention, Washington, 1913, 268 ff.; fear of Government interference, 270 Committee on Extension Work, 252, 254; formulation of definitions and nomenclature, 255; forms of work classified under formal instruction, 256; attitude toward demonstration work and county agents, 257 Executive Committee: invited to confer with Secretary of Agriculture re Federal aid to extension work, 268

Section on Extension Work, 252, 258; McLaughlin bill (q.v.) drafted and introduced in House, 252 Auction sales, 60 Bailey, Liberty Hyde, 251 Baker, O. E., 144 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 9 Barnett, J. A., quoted, 204 f. Barrett, C. S., 249 Beard, William R., 249 Beasey, Ernest, 282 Benson, O. H., 258 Bentley, W. D., quoted, 207, 210 Benton County, I6wa, 46; soil: price of land, 47 Benton County Agricultural Society, 58 Benton County Fine Stock Association, 64 Berkshires, see Pigs Bessey, Charles E., 98, 101, 105n Big Grove Township, Knapp's farm in, 47 "Bill for Increase of Appropriations to Agricultural Colleges for Extension Work, A," see McLaughlin bill Bingham, 13 Blind, Iowa Institute for the Education of the, 49 ff.; home for, recommended: prohibition against marriages between, 50; personality rehabilitation: gross neglect, 51 Boll weevil, impervious to all common methods of attack, 169; legislation in fight against, 193; appropriations to combat, 196; a blessing in disguise, 244 Boll Weevil Commission, 170, 188, 189, 191

INDEX Boll weevil emergency, 1S8, 167, 16986; appropriation to combat, 140; application of Knapp's technique to battle against, 141; work at Calvert and Shreveport redirected against, 147; opened way for diffusion of Terrell f a r m technique, 161; Wilson's ten-point program to eradicate, 170, 172, 188; agencies delegated to carry out projects, 170; cultural remedy, 171 if.; enlarged to include diversification and management, 174; bankers and merchants cause much of damage, 182; cultural remedy p r o duced larger crops than before infestation, 196 Boll worm controlled, 222 "Book Farmer," 66 Boys, bow to keep college boys on farm, 106; demonstration program extended to bring in, 230 ff. Boys' clubs, agricultural experiment clubs, 230; Knapp's agreement with Alabama Agricultural College a n d Experiment Station re, 231; state colleges make commitments in connection with work of, 232; other rural, that developed f r o m corn clubs, 234; see also Corn clubs; 4 - H clubs Brand, H. R., 110 Breeder's and Farmer's Convention, West Liberty, 68 Brien, Maurice, invention, 121 Brown, W. C., 260 Brownsville, Tex., boD weevil infestation, 169 Bryan, William Jennings, 127, 261 Bryson, quoted, 242 Budd, J . L., 87, 102 Burleson, Representative, 198 Business men supported demonstration work, 208 Butterfield, Kenyon L., 275; a t variance with views of Knapp, 250; address on "The Social Phases of Agricultural Education," 252; crossexamination of Spillman, 263 fi.; quoted, 269 Buttrick, Wallace, 226, 247, 248, 266; sent to Texas to investigate Knapp's methods, 216; conferences with Knapp, Wilson, and Gates, 217; signed agreement between General

293

Education Board and Dept. of Agriculture, 218 'Cajuns, 111: reservoirs, 112, 120, 128 Calcasieu Bank of Lake Charles, 126 Calf clubs, 234 Calf peddlers, 63 California rice industry, 143 Calvert, Tex., farm demonstration program, 146; work redirected against boll weevil menace, 147; model f a r m discontinued, 160 Cameron Parish, La., 114 Canada, demonstration idea carried into, through Hampton Institute, 229; system of agricultural education, 258; drawn directly from Knapp's work in South, 259 Canals, irrigation, 128 Cannery in Vinton, 75 Canning clubs, girls', 213, 235, 274 Cannon, Joseph G., 272 Card playing, 16 Carleton, M a r k , 134 Carpenter, C. C., Carpenter bill, 97, 98 Carpenter-Holmes bills, 99 Caterpillar tractor tread, 73 Cattle, Shorthorn, 60 Cattle ranges, experiments to improve fodder capacity, 139; demonstration in range-improvement practices, 145 Chambers, C. L., 282 Champlain Valley, lumber boom, 6 Chicago, University of, 215 Chick Springs, Ga., 225 Cincinnati dubbed Porkopolis, 61 Clark, Champ, 261 Clarkson, "Father," 65 Clemson College agreed to carry on extension work jointly with demonstration work, 225 Cleveland, Grover, 97, 127 Clipper, Traer, 65 Cochran, 61 Coeducation, 17, 35 Coleman, Commissioner, 97 College boys, how to keep on farm, 106 College of Physicians and Surgeons, 23 Colonization scheme in Louisiana, 10932; see also Louisiana Columbia College, title to land occupied by Hosack Botanical Gardens, 23

294

INDEX

Committee on the Order of Business and Resolutions for the Convention of 1885, 100 Community Demonstration Farm, Terrell, see Terrell Community opinion, see Public opinion Conference for Education in the South, 209, 224 "Confessions of a Rice Farmer" (Knapp), excerpt, 130 Congressman, bloc of, adherents of Knapp's work, 270 Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, 74 Conscription Act of 1863, 37 Conway, W. H., 262 Cook, O. F., 282 Cooperation, basic patterns established, 236 Cooperative agricultural extension system, see Agricultural extension system Cooperative Demonstration Work, see Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work Corn, 93 Corn clubs, boys, 213, 230, 271, 274; "daddy" of the, 20S; sold idea of demonstration work to colleges, 232, 233; made an enterprise of deep educational significance, 233; prizes offered, 234; attracted visitors and imitation from all over world, 234 Corn contests for boys and girls, 230 Cotton Belt, loss through boll weevil, 169 Cotton boll weevil, see Boll weevil Cotton Boll-Weevil Investigations, 172 Cotton culture, disastrous season of 1903, 158, 167, 169-86; extinction of threatened, 161 (see also Boll weevil; Boll weevil emergency); diversification to lessen risks involved in one-crop growing, 162; efforts to improve, 168; campaign to grow cotton despite boll weevil, 171, 177; cultural remedy, 171 ff.; cotton farms operated under contract between Bureau of Entomology and farm owner, 173; efforts to locate cotton demonstration farm near every market town, 179

Cotton growers, skepticism and resistance to campaign against boll weevil, 174; efforts to allay panic among, 175; opposition to county agents' work, 207 County agents, representatives of ideas of Nott and Knapp, 30; two branches of demonstration work started, 167; qualifications of pioneer, 202 ff.; how chosen, 202; sense of missionary character of work, 202, 207, 209; methods of "selling idea of work" evolved, 205; salaries, 206, 207; lecture train work, 207; annual meetings, 210; voluntary contributions by communities to obtain services of, 220; state colleges felt they should share in work of, 232; number employed in 1933, 241 Negro: results of work: aided in interracial cooperation, 228 County agricultural agent system, 30, 133-243; Knapp's training for building up, 103; extension of, 21543; matching funds, 226; collegiate opposition to, 233; offered leadership and vision of range and power, 240; Bailey's misgivings re proposals to nationalize, 251 Country Life Commission, Roosevelt's interest in, 229; appointed: report on deficiencies of rural life: remedies recommended, 246; members, 246, 247, 249; extension service recommended by, 258, 260 Country Life Movement, The (Bailey), 251 "Course of Science Related to Agriculture, The," 87 Croier, 61 Cromer, Miss, 235 Cropping system, 164 Crowley, La., 131; rice milling center of nation, 132; Rice Experiment Sub-station, 142 Crown Point Center school, 10 ff. Crown Prince, 61 Cullen, Congressman, Cullen bill, 97, 100

Cultural remedy to combat boll weevil, 171 ff., see also Boll weevil Curtis, Professor G. W , 200 Curtiss. Professor C. F.. 258

INDEX Dakota, importation of blooded bulls and boars, 184 Dancing, 16 Davenport, Eugene, gladiatorial melee between Galloway and, 265, 269 Davis, C. R., 272 Davis, Jackson, 211» Deering Twine Binder, adjustments, 121 Delano, F. A., 260 Democratic party, endorsement of extension work, 272 Demonstration agents, see County agents Demonstration Farms in the South, 140, 141, 264; diversification program, 144 ff.; Knapp's summary of situation, 157; tidal wave of, 159; number conducted in 1903, 201; cooperation of local community: how financed, 201; see also Terrell Community Demonstration Farm Demonstration technique, learning-bydoing, 5, 10, 258; Knapp's discovery of, 141, 148, 149-68; system and its agents installed in all states and territories, 161; nation-wide conflicts re value and use of, 187 ff.; generally doubled crop, 220; see also Terrell Community Demonstration Farm Demonstration work, see Farmers Cooperative Demonstration Work De Quincy, La., farm demonstration program, 146, 147; model farm discontinued, 160 Dewey, John, 234 Dietetics, study of, 236 Dingley tariff, 129 "Direct Work on the Cotton Boll Weevil," 170 District agents, 219 Diversification work, Galloway's effort to get knowledge of, to farmers, 145; to fight boll weevil, 170; see also Spillman diversification farms Donaldson, L. E., 281 Drainage of marshlands, 114; pumping equipment inadequate, 123 Driscoll, 271 Durum wheats, 134 Dysart, Joseph, 65 Dysart, Samuel, 65

295

Earning capacity, disparity between, of urban and farm worker, 237 ff. Education, progressive, 10; in "Age of Homespun," 13 ; Dr. Nott's aim to democratize, 27; beginnings of free public, 28; control over higher, lodged with state legislatures, 84; schools should follow greater earning capacity, 216; promotes exodus from country, 238; of the masses, 240; influence of common schools, 240; Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work (q.v.) The largest adult educational enterprise in world, 241 ; need of a redirected, 246; rural schools, 247; see also Agricultural colleges; Agricultural extension Educational institutions opposed county agricultural agent system, 233; see also Agricultural colleges Educational state-rights, reason for insistence on, 254 Education in the South, Rockefeller's gifts to promote, 214, 215 (see also General Education Board) ; Ogden Movement, 215, 223 ; people unable to support an adequate system, 216; demonstration work as feature of rural education, 217 ff.; individuals and local tax units provided greater sum than Rockefeller agency, 221; Page's crusade in behalf of: unable to support a better system, 248 Education of Henry Adams (Adams), 29 Educators, agricultural: lacked interest or information about Knapps' work, 252 Elements in Criticism (Kames), 25 Ellis, James, 123 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 241 "English Company," 123 English interest in American land investment, 110, 123 Ennis, Tex., 158 Entomologists, see U.S., Agriculture, Department of: Bureau of Entomology Entomology, dammed at source, 2 Evans, J. A., quoted, 181 ; see also Knapp, Bradford, and J. A. Evans Experiment stations, see Agricultural experiment stations; Association of

296

INDEX

Experiment stations (Continued) American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations Extracurricular activities, college life devoid of, 42 Fairchild, D. G., 282 Fairchild, David, 133, 142, 181 Farm Bureau movement, county agents often termed, 167 Farm Credit Administration, 204 Farmers, results of access to growing markets, 9; victims of sharpers, goldbrick artists, and swindlers, 62; effort to convert to more progressive practices, 66; more facts for, 73; would not practice diversification, 165; bard to change habits of, 166, 179; response to cooperative demonstration work, 176; held in grip of credit-advance system, 182; invincibly individualistic, 184; prejudice against book farming, 207; hostility toward the government, 207, 208; as county agents (q.v.), 208; problem of overcoming opposition to demonstration work, 208; average earnings in South and in Iowa, 216; search for a means of increasing income as a prelude to improving education, 216; earning capacity, 237 ff.; could always be doubled, 238; true goal of aid to, 239; see also Cotton growers Negro: carrying demonstration work to, 213; better farm implements for, 228; brought into organized acquaintance with Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work (q.v.), 228, 229 Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work, 167, 174, 177, 179, 187-99; psychological key which unlocked door to cooperation, 151, 155; response to, 176; organizing public opinion, 180; organization of work, 187.-99; drive for funds, 198; growth, 200-214; participation of General Education Board, 207; problem of building up sentiment among farmers, in favor of, 208; Federal legislation designed to nationalize and perpetuate, 211», 225 f.

(see also Smith-Lever Act); in noninfested regions, 217; as feature of rural education: cooperation of General Education Board with Dept. of Agriculture, 217 ff.; voluntary contributions by communities, 220; first recipient of General Education Board's millions: reactions, 223; Knapp's desire to extend to all back roads of South, 226; Negroes brought into organized acquaintance with, 228; boys brought in through corn clubs (.q.v.), 230; rounded out to include total environment of rural family, 235 ff., 241; higher mission, 239; largest adult educational enterprise in world, 241; Roosevelt's desire to extend, 244; an extension service patterned on, recommended, 258; appropriations for: results almost phenomena], 270; legislative support, 271; Knapp's, the only variety of agricultural extension work worth Federal support, 262; collaboration of Southern agricultural colleges with, 278 Farmers' institutes, 275, 276; Iowa one of first land-grant colleges to initiate, 102; plan to hold institute on each diversification farm, 165; work in campaign against boll weevil, 177; workers placed at Knapp's disposal, 193 Farmer's Journal, The, 57 ff., 70 ff. Farmer's Loan and Trust Company of Vinton, 7S Farmer's Stock Journal, 70 Farm experimentation at Ames, 91 ff. Farm family, Knapp's efforts to lift load of drudgery off wife and children of, 76; application of findings of agricultural colleges to, 236 Farm implements, traveling exhibit for Negro farmers, 228 Farming, era of commercial, opened by railroads, 46; live-at-home aspect of, 55; improved equipment, 62; campaign for better, 65; book farming, 66; winter farming, 67; Southerners knew nothing about rotation of crops or general farming, 146; Hill's efforts to grade up level of wheat farming, 184 "Farm Investments" (Wilson), 65

INDEX Farm machinery substituted for prim' itive methods of rice growers, 121 Farm management, research investigation into methods of, 165 Farms, of New England and New York, 46; railroads and steamships forcing up price of land, 66; mortgage interest rates, 75; how to keep college boys on, 106; rice experiment farm, 136 (see also Rice) ; diversification program in South, 144 ff. (see also Demonstration Farms in South; Terrell Community Demonstration Farm) ; effort to work out crop system of plants for semi-arid conditions, 146; psychological worthlessness of "government farms," 148; five model, in Texas discontinued, 160; Spillman diversification farms, 164 ff.; discontinued, 166; cotton farms operated under contract between Bureau of Entomology and farm owner, 173; abandoned during boll weevil emergency, 191; effort to locate cotton demonstration farm near every market town, 179 (see also under Cotton); why graduates in agriculture were not returning to, 237 ; exodus of best elements from, 238 Farm Security Administration, 204 Farm women, demonstrations in home economics for, 213; aid to, 235, 236; source of dissatisfaction, 237 Farm workers, disparity of earnings of urban and, 237 ff. Federal Crop Insurance Corporation, 204 Federal grants-in-aid for extension work, 253, 254 Federal-state cooperation, 145, 229, 261, 265; Knapp helped create scheme of, 102; see also Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations; General Education Board; U.S. Agriculture, Dept. of Fellenberg manual labor theory, 83 Field agents, 219 "Forgotten Man, The," Page's address in behalf- of education in South, 248 Fort Edward Collegiate Institute,

297

Knapp and wife on faculty, 31; curriculum, 35 Fort Worth, Tex., 178 4-H clubs, 234; number of farm boys enrolled, 242 Frissell, H. B., 245 Frost, Fred, 282 Galloway, Beverly T., 148, 160, 188, 195, 197, 221, 262, 275; efforts to introduce better farming methods in South, 136 ff. passim, 145, 146; collaboration with Knapp, Spillman, and Pieters, 139, 141 ff., 164; truck growers appeal to, 150; desire for a tea and drug farm, 151; quoted, 159; object of collaboration with Spillman and Knapp realized, 161 ; allotted share of boll weevil appropriation to diversification farms, 164; paper on farm demonstration and farm management work of his Bureau, 258; gladiatorial melee between Davenport and, 265, 269; became Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, 272 Garfield, James Rudolph, 246 Gates, Frederick T., 216, 248; quoted, 215; conferences with Knapp, Wilson, and Buttrick, 217 Geddes, J. L., 87 General Education Board, 167; participation in Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work, 207, 250; amount of gifts, 215, 218; purpose, 216; a silent partner with Dept. of Agriculture in move to make demonstration work a feature of rural education, 217 ff.; collaboration with Southern Education Board, 224; cooperation with Tuskegee Institute, 228; incorporated, 245; trustees, 247, 248; alliance with Knapp, 277; Memorandum of Agreement between Dept. of Agriculture and, 278 General Propaganda, to fight boU weevil, 170 George, Henry, 94 Georgia aided by General Education Board, 218 Georgia State Agricultural College, 225 Georgia State Teacher's Association, invitation to Knapp, 225

298

INDEX

Girls, canning dubs, 213, 235, 274; corn contests and agricultural experiment clubs for, 230 Gold-brick artists, 62 Gompers, Samuel, 261 Granges, 55; Plow Handle Grange organized, 58 Gras, Professor, 62 Grass and Forage Plants Investigations, 165 Grass and forage work, 139; demonstration in range-improvement practices; collaboration with agricultural experiment stations, 145 Great Northern Railroad, 184 Green, E. H. R., 266; president of Texas Midland Railroad, 149 ff.; invited Knapp to visit Terrell, 150, 152; demonstration farm, 158, 190; bequeathed farm to U.S. Department of Agriculture, 159 Green, Hetty, 149 Greenville, Tex., demonstration farm, 151 ff. Grinnan, Major, 158 Grinnell, J. B., 65 Gross, H. H., 259, 262, 269 Gulf Coast rice region, see Louisiana; Rice; Texas Gundtvig, Bishop, 242 Gymnastics, 41 Hamilton College, 23 Hampton Institute, 228; new barn at school farm, 215, 216; instrumental in drawing attention of Rockefellers to South, 227; demonstration idea carried into Canada through influence of, 229 Harris, 273 Hatch, William H., 97 Hatch Act. 96, 189, 195, 230, 270 Hawaii, confidential mission to, 135, 245 Hays, Willet M., 105n, 216, 245, 258 Hayseed, The, 90 Hayseed Society, 90 Hill, James J., 77, 184, 260 History of Agricultural Extension (True), 183 Hoard, Governor, 118 Hoard's Dairyman, 118 "Hollow Farm," 46 Holmes. A. I.. Holme« hill. 97. 99

Holmes County, Miss., corn clubs, 230 Home, "The greatest of universities," 237; influence, 240 "Home Company," 124 Home demonstration agent, 235; probable origin of idea, 102 Home demonstration work the capstone of Knapp's edifice, 236 Home economics, demonstrations in, for farm wives, 213; Federal grantsin-aid to land-grant colleges for off-campus instruction in, 254 Homespun, Age of, 1-19 Hopper, Emma, 42 Horse, photographed while racing, 73 Hotchkiss, Maria Elizabeth, 17; engagement to Knapp: graduation, 18; marriage, 29; see further under Knapp, Maria Elizabeth Hotchkiss Household management, study of, 236 Houston, David F., 194, 211n, 248, 275, 278; quoted, 166, 214, 268ff.; made Secretary of Agriculture, 267 Howard, L. O., 171, 212; final authority on boll weevil, 176 Hudson, C. R., quoted, 241 Hunt County, Tex., farmers organized for individual demonstration work, 159 Hunter, W. D., agency under, listed as "Direct Work on the Cotton Boll Weevil," 171; quoted, 172, 176 Hussey, Obed, 2; reaper, 1, 8 Institutionalization of an individual, 244-80 Interracial cooperation aided by Negro agents, 228 Iowa, Knapp family moved to, 44; the Hawkeye State in '66, 45; high annual loss of stock, 48; root of agrarian distress and uprisings, 55; Knapp and his wife buried in, 279 Iowa Farm Journal, 115 Iowa Fine Stock Breeders Association, influence: multiplication of local units fostered, 64 Iowa Fine Stock Gazette, The, 70 Iowa Institute for the Education of the Blind, Vinton, 49 ff. Iowa State Agricultural College, Knapp appointed to chair of Practical and Experimental Agriculture, 79: manual labor svstem. 83, 91;

INDEX evasion of labor: scarcity of books a n d material for teaching agriculture, 84; turbulence and instability, 85; management of boarding department, 86; academic program, 87; new degree of Bachelor of Scientific Agriculture, 88; Hayseed Boys, 90; improvements on college f a r m , 91; lack of far-reaching research, 94; plea for appropriations for research and experimentation, 95 ff.; Knapp as president, 98; his influence, 102; farmers' institutes initiated under Welch, 102; disastrous meddling of Board of Trustees, 103; decline in enrollment, 104 Iowa State Agricultural Society, 58 Iowa State Improved Breeders Association, 58, 64, 97, 222 Iowa State Register, 75 Iowa Slock Journal, 130 Irrigation, "Providence Style," 112, 120, 128; canals replace 'Cajun reservoirs, 128 Jackson, Andrew, 44 James, E. J., 261 J a p a n , official Plant Explorers visit, 133; introduced Kudzu plants, 142; surplus rice from California exported to, 143 Jeanes Teachers carried demonstration idea into Canada, 229 Jennings, La., 131 Johnson, S. W., 74 Jones, Thomas Jesse, 21 In Judd, Orange, 55 Kalisthenics, 41 Kames, Lord, 25 Kansas University offered presidency to Knapp, 79 Kaufman county, Tex., farmers request service of expert to help with potato problems, 149 King, Joseph E., 32 ff. passim Klein, A. J., et al., quoted, 243 Knapp, Alonzo (brother), 12 Knapp, Arthur (son), 86, 117 Knapp, Bradford (father), 5; married Rhoda Seaman, 4, 6 Knapp, Bradford (son), 86, 117 and J . A. Evans, asked to pre-

299

pare a history of Knapp's work and report of its results, 266 Knapp, George (son), 37» Knapp, Helen (daughter), 86, 117 Knapp, Herman (son), 37«, 86, 1Í7 Knapp, Justus (great-grandfather), 4, 7 Knapp, Maria (daughter), 37», S4, 86, 116, 117 Knapp, Maria Elizabeth Hotchkiss (wife), 17, 18, 29; on faculty of Fort Edward Collegiate Institute, 31; children, 37; wedding present from her father, 46; matron of Institute for the Blind, 52; boarding employees of Iowa State Agricultural College, 86; death, 279 Knapp, Martha (sister), 16 Knapp, Mary (sister), 11, 13 Knapp, Nicholas (progenitor), 4 Knapp, Obadiah (grandfather), 4, 7 Knapp, Rhoda Seaman (mother), 3, 4, 6, 13 Knapp, Seaman Asahel, homespun childhood, 1-19; birth, 3, 6; learned to be jack of all trades, 9; meeting with Maria Hotchkiss, 17; engagement, 18; marriage, 29; children, 37, 86, 117; quoted, 69, 89, 90, 93, 119, 180 £f. passim, 198, 209, 213, 216, 222, 229, 236 ff. passim; death, 279; Memorial Arch, 280 making of a teacher and an agriculturist, 1-132: education, 10 ff.; Crown Point Center school, 10 ff.; Troy Conference Academy, 14 ff.; graduation, 18, 19; Union College, 20ff.; A.B. degree, 24, 28; Phi Beta Kappa key, 28; Nott's influence, 29; degree of A.M.: right to use Reverend, 33 as an educator: efforts to remodel curricular, 29; grew into a truly great teacher, 30; on faculty of Fort Edward Collegiate Institute, 3 I f f . ; desire to own a school, 36; return to Troy Academy as coproprietor, 37; exempt from military service, 37 ; Troy Academy renamed Ripley Female College: Knapp's partners, 38; lamed by fall, 42; choice between amputation of leg or reversion to farm life, 43; Superintendent of Iowa

300

INDEX

Knapp, Seaman Asahel ( C o n t i n u e d ) Institute for the Education of the Blind, Vinton, 49 ff. ; use of leg restored, 53 ; continued in post after return to farming, SS ; resignation, 60; chair in Iowa State Agricultural College, 79; salary, 86; manager of college boarding department, 86; appointed Superintendent of Buildings, 87 ; m a n agement of college farm, 91 ff. ; bulletins reporting farm experiments, 93 ; efforts to furuther experimentation and research, 94 ff.; bill started by, became basis for Hatch Experiment Station Act, 96 ff. ; president of Iowa Agricultural College, 98; connection with agricultural education ceased, 101 ; college furnished training for his final work, 103; leave of absence, 104; resignation, 10S; educational philosophy, 10S ff.; believed he was leaving schoolteaching forever, 116 as farmer: reeducation, 44-78; move to Iowa, 44 ; experiment with sheep, 46 (see also Sheep) ; purchase farm, 47, SS; loss of livestock, 48 ; rode plow with crutc.ies by his side; move to Vinton, 48; return to agriculture after eight years, 54 ; pig business, S4 ff. ; activities in better-pig campaign, 55 ; role as schoolmaster to farmers of Iowa, 67 land settlement venture: move to Louisiana, 109; prairie development for Watkins Syndicate, 114 ff.; description of Louisiana Land Reclamation Company's tract, 116 (see also Louisiana) ; program for farming population of upper Mississippi Valley, 117; connections with Watkins Syndicate severed, 124 (see also Marshlands; Prairie development; Rice cultivation) ; president of "Home Company," 124; president of bank of Lake Charles, 126; work for protective legislation for rice, 127 builder of county agricultural system, 133-243 Special Agent for Promotion of Agriculture in the South: program,

133-48, 187; salary, 138; trips to Orient in search for rice suited to reeds in Louisiana, 133, 134 (see also Rice) ; investigation into agricultural resources and capabilities of Porto Rico, 134; in Philippines and Hawaii, 13 S; cooperation with Department of Agriculture in rice experiment farm, 136; collaboration with Galloway, Spillman, and Pieters, 139, 141 ff., 164; auspices and arrangements under which he worked, 141; discovery of demonstration technique, 141, 148, 14968; first visit to Terrell, 150; declined to conduct meetings on local farm problems, 150, 1S1; summary of situation re demonstration farms, 1S7; stumbled onto way to improve outmoded practices, 160; object of collaboration with Galloway and Spillman realized, 161 how he met boll weevil menace, 161, 169-86; undertaking labeled General Propaganda, 170; called propagandist, 181«; success in combination of salesmanship and public relations, 185 Farmers' Cooperative Demonstration Work (q.v.) 167, 174, 176, 177, 179, 180, 187-214; nationwide conflicts re value and use of demonstration technique, 187 ff.; contest with Texas State College of Agriculture, 192; popular and powerful support in Texas, 194; success in recruiting men of high caliber as agents, 202 county agricultural agent system (q.v.), 215-43; conferences with Wilson, Gates, and Buttrick, 217; first recipient of General E d u cation Board's millions: reactions, 223; reply to Editor of The Manufacturers' Record, 223 ; desire to extend demonstration work to all back roads of South, 226; bold and unabashed lobbying, 226; encouraged interracial cooperation, 228 institutionalization of an individual: passage of the Smith-Lever Act, 244-80; friendship with W. H . Page, 248; Roosevelt's praise of

INDEX

301

his work, 251; Southerners' admiration and respect for, 271; Act nearly singlehanded achievement of, 276, 279 ; social significance and cultural promise of work, 276; placed cooperation with colleges on rock of mutual self-interest, 277 character, personality: resourcefulness, 77; spirit of the social pioneer, 109; liked by Southerners, 125, 271; qualities of leadership and inspiration, 210, 211, 240; ability to teach in homely, vivid phases, 212; ability to idealize material things and to spiritualize the commonplace, 212; intense loyalty he aroused, 226; could speak his mind with great plainness, 233; influence, 240, 241; "making greatness common" the ultimate goal of, 240, 241, 242; political skill and generalship, 277 as preacher, 33, 48; pastor of Methodist Episcopal Church, Vinton, 49; years on crutches, 49; at Lake Charles, 124 as writer, 58 if., 69; range of subjects, 65; in editor's chair, 70 ff.; on what practices make good farming, 129 as public speaker, 58, 60, 125; before Washington Convention, 105 Knapp movement, see Farmers Cooperative Demonstration Work Kudzu, 142

Lever, A. Frank, 198, 272; interest in demonstration movement, 225 (see also Smith-Lever Act) ; quoted, 226, 273, 279 Lever bill, 254, 262, 265; see also Smith-Lever Act Limestone County, Tex., boll weevil infestation, 169; farms abandoned, stores closed, 191 Lincoln, Abraham, 80 Live-at-home aspect of farming, 55 Livestock, campaign for better, 65 Livingstone, Tex., 181 Local agents, see County agents Locomotives, first, 8 London Daily Standard, 72 Loring, George B., 98 Louisiana, colonization scheme, 10932; Watkins reclamation project, 109 ff.; rice cultivation, 112, 120; swamp Land Acts of 1849 and 1850, 113; drainage channels, 114; prairie development, 114ff.; boom in prairie lands, 119, 123; reclamation of swamp lands abandoned, 123; spread of rice growing, 143; enthusiasm for demonstration farms, 158 Louisiana and Southern States Real Estate and Mortgage Co., Ltd., of Leicester, England, 123 Louisiana Land Reclamation Company, 113; description of tract owned by, 116 Lumber boom, 6 Luse, Z. C., 65

Lake Calcasieu, La., 114 Lake Charles, La., 118, 124, 131 Lake Charles Rice Milling Company, 126 Land-grant colleges, see Agricultural colleges; Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations Land prices in Iowa, 47 Land settlement, 109-32; see also Louisiana; Mississippi Valley Language, English: study, 106 Learning, Nott's aim of bringing, to aid of life, 25 Learning-by-doing, see Demonstration technique

McAdams, Eddy, 153 McAdams, Y. O., 153 Machinery, see Farm machinery McCormick, Cyrus Hall, 2 McKinley, William, 127; tariff of 1890, 132 McLaughlin, J. C., 252 McLaughlin bill, 250, 253 ff., 258, 271 ; left matter and manner of agricultural extension to each state, 253 Madisonian, The, 65 "Making greatness common," 240, 241, 242 Manchester, La., 142 Manual labor system, 41, 83; K n a p p recommended abolishing, 91

302

INDEX

Manufacturers' Record, The, hostile attitude toward demon*tration work, 223; Knapp's reply, 224 Markets, lack of, in preindustrial epoch, 8; results of access to growing, 9; railroads and steamships opening wider, 66 Marks, Tom, quoted, 205 Marshlands, as tempting schemes of conquest, l l l f f . (see also Rice cultivation) ; almost valueless: reclamation project abandoned, 123 Martin, O. B„ 224, 225; quoted, 212, 213 Matching funds, 226, 229 Meat export, 62; Scots' inquiry into American, trade, 72 Mercier, W. B., quoted, 210 Mexican boll weevil, see Boll weevil Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science, 81 Mid West, corn contests and agricultural experiment clubs for boys and girls, 230 Minnesota, importation of blooded bulls and boars, 184 Minnesota State Board of Agriculture, 68 Mississippi, aided by General Education Board, 218; part payment of county agents' salaries, 227 ; agricultural college forces lined up, 229; corn clubs, 230 Mississippi Valley, flood of grain and meat from, 46; program directed at farming population of the upper, 117 Mitchell, Samuel Chiles, quoted, 215, 216 Moniger, D. M., 60 Morrill agricultural and mechanical colleges, see Agricultural colleges Morrill Land Grant College Act, 28, 37, 84, 88, 101 Morrison, B. Y., 281 Morton, R. R„ quoted, 228 Movie camera foreshadowed, 73 M u m f o r d , Dean, quoted, 262 " M y Farm of 160 Acres" (Knapp) National Boll Weevil Commission, 170, 188, 189, 191 National Conservation Congress, Third, 261, 263

National Democratic party platform endorsed extension work, 272 National Live Stock Journal, 71 National Soil Fertility League, 259, 269; opposed by land-grant colleges: membership, 260; reason for organization, 261 Negroes, Ogden Movement to improve education for, 215, 223; see also county agents, Negro; Farmers, Negro; H a m p t o n Institute; Tuskegee Institute Newell, F. H., 123 Newman, John, 38 ff. passim New Orleans, shift of rice-milling industry away from, 126 North, vitality of the, 44; Spillman's work, 162, 167; foundations on which Extension Service developed, 184 North American Land and Timber Company, 110 North Carolina aided by General Education Board, 218 North Galveston, Tex., farm demonstration program, 142, 147; model farm discontinued, 160 N o t t , Eliphalet, 20 ff., 41, 212; quoted, 22, 24, 27; influence on legislation, 23; opposed on campus, 23; innovations at Union College, 24; course in Practical Living, 24 ff.; influence on Knapp, 29 Nutrition, study of, 235 Ogden Movement, 215, 223 Orange Land Company, 110 Orient, Knapp's trips to, on behalf of rice and agriculture, 134 Page, Senator, quoted, 203 Page, Arthur, quoted, 210 Page, Walter Hines, 210, 214, 250, 266; recommended a nation-wide agricultural extension system, 247; friendship with Knapp: address on "The Forgotten M a n " : crusade in behalf of Southern education, 248 Palestine, Tex., 178 Paris, Tex., 158 Perrin, L. E., quoted, 206 Personality rehabilitation for the blind, 51

INDEX P h e l p s - S t o k e s F u n d carried d e m o n s t r a t i o n idea i n t o Africa, 229 Philippines, r e p o r t on f o r a g e s which could be g r o w n , 135 Pieters, A. J . , 142, 188, 282; collaboration with Knapp, Galloway, and S p i l l m a n , 139, 141 Pig business, 54 ff.; a science a n d an art, 5 6 ; b e t t e r - p i g c a m p a i g n , 58 Pig clubs, 234 Pigs, P o l a n d Chinas, 57 £f.; B e r k shires, 60, 61 P i n c h o t , Gifford, 246, 249 P l a n t testing, 138, 142 P l o w H a n d l e Grange, 58 P l u n k e t t , Sir H o r a c e , 228, 249; i n t e r est in rural i m p r o v e m e n t , 245 Poe, Clarence, q u o t e d , 211 P o l a n d Chinas, see Pigs P o l l a r d , R e p r e s e n t a t i v e , 226 Populists, 55 P o r t e r , W a l t e r C., 151, 153, 175; f a r m , see Terrell C o m m u n i t y D e m onstration Farm P o r t o Rico, investigation i n t o agricult u r a l resources a n d capabilities, 134 P o t a t o clubs, 234 P o u l t n e y N o r m a l I n s t i t u t e , 39 P o y n e e r , A. N., 65 Practical Living, D r . N o t t ' s course in, 24 ff. Prairie development, 114 ff.; l a n d b o o m , 119, 123 P r o c t o r , W . F., q u o t e d , 210 P r o g r a m t o P r o m o t e Agriculture in t h e S o u t h , 133-48; o u t c o m e , 148; halted, 161; see also F a r m s : Gallow a y ; Rice; S o u t h ; Spillman Progressive education, 10 Progressive Farmer, The, 70 P r o p a g a n d a , organizing public opinion, 180 ff. Public opinion, organizing, 180 ff.; economic factors involved, 182; K n a p p tireless in e d u c a t i n g , 200 P u r d u e University offered presidency to K n a p p , 79

Quakers, English: interest in N o r t h American L a n d a n d T i m b e r C o m p a n y , 110 Quarterly Journal, The: Devoted to Female Education, 38, 41

303

R a c i n g horse p h o t o g r a p h e d , 73 Railroads, 8 ; opening wider m a r k e t s , 66; w o r k of i n d u s t r i a l agents in c a m p a i g n against boll weevil, 177 Range-improvement practices, 139 ; d e m o n s t r a t i o n in, 145 Ransdell, J o s e p h , 198, 271 Reaper, Hussey's, 1, 8 R e f r i g e r a t i o n , 62 Republican p a r t y , 26; ignored issue of extension w o r k in p a r t y p l a t f o r m s : a d v e r s e to increases in social exp e n d i t u r e , 272 Research, see Agricultural research Reservoir, inexhaustible u n d e r g r o u n d , t a p p e d , 128, 149 Rice, cultivation in the S o u t h , 111; in Louisiana, 112, 120 ff.; size of f a r m s c o m p a r e d with those in Orient, 120; prairie lands as rice lands, 1 2 0 f f . ; revolution in g r o w i n g , 121; first mill west of Mississippi, 126; effect of tariff rates u p o n p r o d u c t i o n , 127, 129; C r o w l e y the center of milling, 132; loss f r o m b r e a k a g e : search in Orient for b e t t e r varieties, 133 ; K i u s h u best suited t o needs in Louisiana, 134; testing u n f a m i l i a r varieties, 135; experiment f a r m , 136; second i m p o r t a t i o n of new varieties, 138 ; experiment sub-station at Crowley, 142 ; v a l u a b l e varieties, 143; s p r e a d in S o u t h : i n d u s t r y in California, 143 Rice Association of America, 127 Rice Journal and Gulf Coast Farmer, 129, 131, 132 Ripley, William Y., 38, 40 Ripley F e m a l e College, 3 8 ; p r o p r i e tors, 3 8 ; as a s u m m e r resort, 3 9 ; c u r r i c u l u m , 4 0 ; r e v o l u t i o n a r y concept re y o u n g ladies, 41 R o b e r t s , Isaac, 103 R o b e r t s o n C o u n t y , Tex., boll weevil i n f e s t a t i o n , 169; f a r m s a b a n d o n e d , stores closed, 191 Rockefeller, J o h n D., 223, 248 ; gifts t o p r o m o t e educational interests in S o u t h , 214, 215, 218; see also General E d u c a t i o n B o a r d Rockefeller Center, 23 Roosevelt, T h e o d o r e , 135, 171, 223, 250, 258; created C o u n t r y L i f e Commission, 229; desire t o e x t e n d

304

INDEX

Roosevelt, Theodore ( C o n t i n u e d ) Knapp's demonstration work, 244; interest in farmer, 245; conservation movement stimulated by, 260 Root, Elihu, 135 Rueker, Representative, 271 Rural education, see Education; Education in the S o u t h ; Schools Rural Electrification Administration, 204 Rural life, efforts to avert desertion of, 66 Rural New Yorker, 74 Rural population, demonstration work rounded out to include total environment, 235 ff., 241; necessity of providing with greater earning capacity, 239; see also Boys; Farmers; Farm w o m e n ; Girls Rural self-containment, 7 Russell, Representative, 198 Saltonstall, Sir Richard, 4 San Antonio, farm demonstration program near, 146, 147; model farm discontinued, 160; committee to aid in work against boll weevil, 178 Sanders, A. H., 261 Sanitation, study of, 236 Schools, one-room, 10; should follow greater earning capacity, 21; influence of elementary, 240; rural, 247; see also Education Science, friend of workers, 106 Scotsman, The, 71 Scott, chairman, Committee on Agriculture, quoted, 270 Scott, John, 65 Seaman, Asahel (grandfather), 3 Seaman, Rhoda (mother), 3, 13; married Bradford Knapp, 4, 6 Sears, Roebuck and Company, 221 Seed, for free Congressional distribution, 138, 140, 142; testing and raising, 138, 142; free distribution discontinued, 178 Seward, William H., 26 Sharpers, 62 Shaw, Albert, 245, 247; trustee of General Education Board, 21 On, 245, 247 Sheep, Knapp's purchase of Merino thoroughbreds, 46; killed in blizzard, 48; high annual loss, 48

Sheffield Scientific School, Yale, 74, 80 Shepard and Alexander, 57 Short-Horn Cattle Breeder's Convention, 67 Shreveport, La., farm demonstration program, 146; work redirected against boll weesil menace, 147; model farm discontinued, 160 Simmons, Senator, 274 Simpson, Sockless Jerry, 95 Smith, Hoke, 272, 273, 274 Smith, J . G., 282 Smith, W. H., 230 Smith-Lever Act, 162, 193, 230, 231; authorized inauguration of demonstration work as extension service, 21 I n ; one of greatest statutes of agricultural education, 243 ; passage, 244-80; provisions, 265, 274; allotted 75 percent of Federal funds for field demonstrations, 273, 275, 276; prohibitions, 276; extended Knapp's methods to every county in the country: legal foundation of Extension Service, 276; Knapp's nearly single-handed achievement, 276, 279; cooperative obligations, 277; provisions amplified by a supplementary Memorandum of Agreement, 278 Smith-Lever bill, 218 Smoot, Senator, 274 Snowbound (Whittier), 46 "Social Phase of Agricultural Education, T h e " (Butterfield), 252 Social Security Act, 193 Society for the Advancement of Agricultural Science, 98 Soil Conservation Service, 204 Soil physics dammed at source, 2 South, ruined by war, 44 ; homeseekers, 118, 122; program to promote agriculture, 133-48, 161 ; experimental farms, 137; importation of varieties of rice, fruit trees, and plants, 138; Demonstration Farms (q.v.), 140ff.; people knew nothing about rotation of crops or general farming, 146; community demonstration farms 149-68 (see also Terrell Community Demonstration Farm) ; answer to search for means to improve agriculture in, 160; efforts to improve cotton culture and to break grip on one crop credit system, 168; Rocke-

INDEX feller's gifts to promote education, 214, 215 (see also General Education B o a r d ) ; reed to recover fertility of soil, 215; Ogden Movement, 215, 223; economy of, agricultural, 216; increasing taxable wealth to provide base for better educational system, 218; individuals and local tax units provide greater sum than Rockefeller agency, 221; all reforms waited on agricultural reform, 248; see also Boll weevil; C o t t o n ; Louisiana; Rice; Texas South Carolina aided by General Education Board, 218; officials refuse to introduce Knapp's method: coastal rice plantation crippled by development of Louisiana prairie rice belt, 224; first girls' club to grow and can own tomatoes, 235 Southern Education Board, 224, 248 Southern Education Conference, 248 Southern Pacific Railroad, 119, 132 Southern Real Estate Loan and Guaranty Company. 124 Special agents, see County agents Spillman, W. J., 140, 148, 160, 174, 176, 222, 262; collaboration with Knapp, Galloway, and Pieters, 139, 141 ff., 164; efforts to introduce better methods of farming in South, 141, 145, 146; object of collaboration with Galloway and K n a p p realized, 161; in charge of Office of Farm Management, 161 ff.; work in North and West, 162, 167, 184; belief re key to study of farm management, 163; work as Agrostologist, 163, 165; Diversification Work delegated to help carry out Wilson's ten-point program, 170; interpreter and go-between, Dept. of Agriculture and Association of American Agricultural Colleges, 263 Spillman diversification farms, method of organizing: cooperation with Experiment Stations, 164; failures, 165; discontinued, 166 Sports, college life devoid of, 41 f. Stamford, Leland, 73 State agents, 219 Steam plow, application of caterpillar tractor tread to, 73

30S

Steamships opening ever wider markets, 66 Studebaker, J . M., 261 Student activities, college life devoid of, 42 Students' Farm Journal, The, 104, 105» Sulphur Springs, Tex., 158 Swamp lands, see Marshlands Swamp Land Acts of 1849 and 1850, 113 Swindlers, 62 T a f t , William H., 135, 258, 260 "Talk on Pigs" ( K n a p p ) , 58 Taylor Township, Knapp's f a r m in, 47 Tea and drug farm, 150 "Teachers of Agriculture, The," 98 Teachers rccognized as close kin to preachers, 34 Ten Commandments of Agriculture, 221

Terre Bonne reclamation project, 113 Terrell, Tex., use of local businessmen in campaign against boll weevil, 178 Terrell, Tex., Community Demonstration Farm, discovery of the agricultural demonstration technique, 141, 148, 149-68; basis of national system of county farm and home demonstration agents, 151; pledge of indemnification against loss, 154; focused social spotlight on participants, 156, 157; community guarantee f u n d dropped, 157, 179; f a r reaching results of farm, 158; citizens provide leadership and assume financial risks, 160; way opened for a diffusion of the technique, 161; modification of plan, 179 Texas, spread of rice growing, 143 (see also Rice); enthusiasm for demonstration farms, 158 (see also Terrell Community Demonstration F a r m ) ; extinction of cotton culture threatened, 161 (see also Boll weevil; Cotton culture) boll weevil emergency, 169-86; commotion extreme, 191; Knapp's methods gained popular and powerful support in, 194 Texas, Agricultural and Mechanical College of, 193; agreement with, re demonstration work, 278

306

INDEX

Texas Midland Railroad, 149, 152 Texas State College of Agriculture, work in campaign against boll weevil, 177; challenged move to place State farms under Dept. of Agriculture, 191; staff aided demonstration work, 193 ; how K n a p p regularized relations with, 194, 195 Thompson, Mrs. A., 87 Thomson, Alexander, 114, 115 Threshing machines, 8 Tilford Academy, Vinton, 76 Tomato-club, girls', 235, 274 Tracy, S. M., 74 Troy Conference Academy, 14 ff., 32 ; graduation, 18; curriculum, 35; made into school for girls only, 37; renamed Ripley Female College (