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FARMERS, CAPITALISM, AND GOVERNMENT IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2016

Ariel Ron
Ariel Ron*
Affiliation:
Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions and Southern Methodist University
*
Ariel.ron@yale.edu
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Extract

In 1884, Congress created a new federal agency of unprecedented regulatory vision. Its officials soon acquired the capacity to summarily seize and destroy millions of dollars of property and thus to police the disposition of a stock of wealth worth more than the country's total capital invested in railroads. What was this federal colossus? It was the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), an agency that probably few historians know much about. Yet the hotly contested creation of the BAI—three years before the better-known Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)—amounts to an epochal expansion of federal powers. Housed within the already powerful Department of Agriculture (USDA), the BAI was charged with investigating and containing potentially devastating livestock epizootics such as bovine pleuropneumonia and, later, Texas fever. Its success at doing so was little short of astounding. By 1892 it had conceived and carried out the world's first area eradication program of an epidemic disease, in the process establishing a model for future global eradication efforts. More immediately, it bolstered an economy that, for all its industrialization, remained crucially identified with agriculture.

Type
Special Issue: The History of Capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 294 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, Arresting Contagion: Science, Policy, and Conflicts over Animal Disease Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), chaps. 3–4 (comparison to railroad capital on p. 9); Olmstead, Alan L. and Rhode, Paul W., “Not on My Farm! Resistance to Bovine Tuberculosis Eradication in the United States,” Journal of Economic History 67 (Sept. 2007): 768–809 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olmstead, Alan L. and Rhode, Paul W., “The ‘Tuberculous Cattle Trust’: Disease Contagion in an Era of Regulatory Uncertainty,” Journal of Economic History 64 (Dec. 2004): 929–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Gabriel N. Rosenberg, “Youth as Infrastructure: 4-H and the Intimate State in 1920s Rural America” in Boundaries of the State in US History, eds. James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 183–208; Gabriel N. Rosenberg, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). For budget, see Albert K. A. Acquaye, Julian M. Alston, and Philip G. Pardey, “Funds for Cooperative Extension, by Source: 1915–1999,” Table Da1260–1265, Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition Online. For the concept of an “associative state,” see Hawley, Ellis W., “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928,” Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 116–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Stevenson Whitcomb Fletcher, Pennsylvania Agriculture and Country Life, 1840–1940 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1955), 379.

4 Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). But see an earlier sketch of such an argument in Mary Summers, “Putting Populism Back in: Rethinking Agricultural Politics and Policy,” Agricultural History 70 (Apr. 1996): 395–414 Google Scholar.

5 L. H. Bailey, The State and the Farmer (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 67.

6 Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), ch. 1 (“agents of change”); Ariel Ron, “Developing the Country: ‘Scientific Agriculture’ and the Roots of the Republican Party” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012); Deborah Kay Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Jess Gilbert, “Agrarian Intellectuals in a Democratizing State: A Collective Biography of USDA Leaders in the Intended New Deal” in The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America, eds. Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 213–39; Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

7 Hal S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 10. Substantially the same quip appears in  Stock and Johnston, Countryside in the Age of the Modern State, 6. The reference is to Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

8 For “state of courts and parties,” see Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). The admittedly reductive synthesis in this paragraph draws on Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America's New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Elisabeth Stephanie Clemens, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); M. Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Adam D. Sheingate, The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State: Institutions and Interest Group Power in the United States, France, and Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

9 Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Novak, William J., “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 752–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar (for “infrastructural power,” p. 763). For the classic statement of the “party period,” see Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Critiques have appeared in many places but see especially two forums in the Journal of American History: “Political Engagement and Disengagement in Antebellum America: A Round Table,” Journal of American History 84 (Dec. 1997): 885–909 Google Scholar; and “Round Table: Alternatives to the Party System in the ‘Party Period,’ 1830–1890, Journal of American History, 86 (June 1999): 93–166 Google Scholar; and, more recently, John, Richard R., “Farewell to the ‘Party Period’: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Policy History 16 (Apr. 2004): 117–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For civic associations and public-private modes of governance, see Novak, William J., “The American Law of Association: The Legal-Political Construction of Civil Society,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (Oct. 2001): 163–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For questions about received chronologies, see, in addition to the works mentioned in the previous footnote, Edwards, Rebecca, “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8 (Oct. 2009): 461–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John, Richard R., “Who Were the Gilders? And Other Seldom-Asked Questions about Business, Technology, and Political Economy in the United States, 1877–1900,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8 (Oct. 2009): 474–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 George Edward Reed, ed., Pennsylvania Archives (Harrisburg, PA: State Printer, 1902), Fourth Series, v. 10, 226–69 (quotations on pp. 244, 268). On Pattison and his campaign, see National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: J. T. White and Co., 1898), v. 1, 278–79; Robert Sobel and John Raimo, eds., Biographical Directory of the Governors of the United States, 1789–1978 (Westport, CT: Meckler Books), vol. 3, 1313–14.

12 Agriculture of Pennsylvania, Containing Reports of the State Board of Agriculture, the State Agricultural Society, the State Dairy Men's Association, the State Horticultural Association, and the State College, for 1885 (Harrisburg, PA: State Printer, 1886), 46–48.

13 Memoirs of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, Containing Communications on Various Subjects in Husbandry & Rural Affairs, to Which Is Added, a Statistical Account of the Schuylkill Permanent Bridge, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Jane Aitken, 1808), xxi–xxx; Simon Baatz, “Venerate the Plough”: A History of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, 1785–1985 (Philadelphia: The Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, 1985), 1–20; Ellsworth, Lucius F., “The Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Agriculture and Agricultural Reform, 1785–1793,” Agricultural History 42 (June 1968): 189–200 Google Scholar. For the typical practices of such organizations, see Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 105; Marti, Donald B., “Early Agricultural Societies in New York: The Foundations of Improvement,” New York History 48 (Oct. 1967): 313–31Google Scholar; Marti, To Improve the Soil and the Mind: Agricultural Societies, Journals, and Schools in the Northeastern States, 1791–1865 (Ann Arbor, MI: Published for the Agricultural History Society and the Dept. of Communication Arts, New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University by University Microfilms International, 1979); Lawrence A. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 119–29.

14 Quoted in Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution, 183. On early American agricultural fairs, see Donald B. Marti, Historical Directory of American Agricultural Fairs (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); Mark Mastromarino, “Fair Visions: Elkanah Watson (1758–1842) and the Modern American Agricultural Fair” (PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 2002); Wayne Caldwell Neely, The Agricultural Fair (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935).

15 Baatz, Venerate the Plow, 42–46; Marti, “Early Agricultural Societies in New York”; John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), ch. 1.

16 Ariel Ron, “Summoning the State: Northern Farmers and the Transformation of American Politics in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of American History (forthcoming).

17 Transactions of the Pennsylvania State Agricultural Society 2 (1855): 9Google Scholar; Laws of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1849): 327; (1851): 557–58; (1853): 712–13; (1857): 196–97; (1861): 265–67; Transactions of the New York State Agricultural Society 16 (1856): 493–94Google Scholar; “An Act to facilitate the forming of agricultural and horticultural societies,” Laws of the State of New York (1853), ch. 339, pp. 716–18; “An Act to facilitate the forming of Agricultural and Horticultural Societies,” Laws of the State of New York (1855), ch. 425, pp. 777–80; “An Act to exempt lands held by Agricultural Societies from Taxation,” Laws of the State of New York (1856), chs. 183, 304.

18 Ron, “Summoning the State.”

19 Report of the Register of the Maryland Agricultural College, to the Board of Trustees; Act of Incorporation, with Amendments Thereto: List of Officers, and Names of Stockholders, with Number of Shares Held by Each (Baltimore: Samuel S. Mills, 1858), 15; Ron, “Developing the Country,” ch. 4; Alfred Charles True, A History of Agricultural Education in the United States, 1785–1925 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 66–67. For the decline of mixed enterprise in banking and transportation, see L. Ray Gunn, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948).

20 “The Pennsylvania Farm School,” Pennsylvania Farm Journal 5 (Mar. 1855): 94Google Scholar (emphasis in original); “Act of Incorporation of the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Farm Journal 5 (Mar 1855): 94Google Scholar; True, History of Agricultural Education in the United States, 69.

21 First Annual Report of the State Board of Agriculture for the Year 1877 (Harrisburg, PA: State Printer, 1878), 12.

22 Fletcher, Pennsylvania Agriculture, 1840–1940, 379–411.

23 On middle-class farmers, see Paula Baker, The Moral Frameworks of Public Life: Gender, Politics, and the State in Rural New York, 1870–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sally McMurry, Transforming Rural Life: Dairying Families and Agricultural Change, 1820–1885 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); McMurry, Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth-Century America: Vernacular Design and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

24 Clemens, The People's Lobby.

25 Hamilton, David E., “Building the Associative State: The Department of Agriculture and American State-Building,” Agricultural History 64 (Apr. 1990): 211Google Scholar; Bailey, The State and the Farmer, 55. See also Victoria Saker Woeste, The Farmer's Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jess Carr Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal, Yale Agrarian Studies Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Kathleen Mapes, Sweet Tyranny: Migrant Labor, Industrial Agriculture, and Imperial Politics (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Sheingate, Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State; Clemens, People's Lobby; Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy; Sarah T. Phillips, “The 1960s as Farm Policy Pivot,” (Policy History Annual Meeting, Columbus, July, 2014).

26 Ross, Earle D., “The United States Department of Agriculture during the Commissionership: A Study in Politics, Administration, and Technology, 1862–1889,” Agricultural History 20 (June 1946): 129–43Google Scholar.

27 On “biological innovation,” see Alan L. Olmstead and Paul Webb Rhode, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Daniel J. Kevles, “New Blood, New Fruits: Protections for Breeders and Originators, 1789–1930” in Making and Unkmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective, eds. Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) 253–67. On fertilizers and agricultural chemistry, see Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); Alan I. Marcus, Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy: Farmers, Agricultural Colleges, and Experiment Stations, 1870–1890 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1985); Margaret W. Rossiter, The Emergence of Agricultural Science: Justus Liebig and the Americans, 1840–1880 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975).

28 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Wealth” in The Conduct of Life (1860), http://www.rwe.org/complete-works/vi---conduct-of-life/iii-wealth.html; George Perkins Marsh, “The Study of Nature” in So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh, ed. Stephen C. Trombulak (Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press: University Press of New England, 2001), 75.

29 Mapes, Sweet Tyranny, esp. chs. 1, 5 (Wiley quotations, pp. 31–32). On “race,” see Fields, Barbara Jeanne, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review I:181 (June 1990): 95–118 Google Scholar; Fields, Barbara J., “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity,” International Labor and Working-Class History , no. 60 (2001): 48–56 Google Scholar. For an earlier example of the creation of racial categories predicated on ostensibly innate capacities for science and technological advancement, see Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

30 Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877 (New York: Perennial Library, 1990), 140.

31 “Horace Greeley on Agricultural Addresses, Choice of Speakers, Etc.,” Cincinnatus 3 (Oct. 1858): 465Google Scholar; Bailey, The State and the Farmer, 1, 47, 72, and passim.

32 This point especially stressed in Summers, “Putting Populism Back in.”

33 Monica Prasad, The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

34 Melillo, Edward D., “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930,” American Historical Review 117 (Oct. 2012): 1028–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Melillo, “From Bone Valley to ‘Far Places’: A Global Environmental History of the 1919 Phosphate Miners’ Strike in Mulberry, Florida” (Colloquium of the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies, New Haven, CT, 2015); Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).