The 4-H Harvest by Rosenberg Gabriel N.;

Author:Rosenberg, Gabriel N.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Noble’s protests against the USDA’s encroaching “burocracy and regimentation” suggested that expanding state power was the real threat to rural America, but his complaints fell on deaf ears. To the contrary, by the 1940s, 4-H was synonymous with the wholesomeness of country living, and the ability of the USDA to hide the National Committee’s unsavory commercialism only strengthened that connection. In contrast to the National Committee’s suggestions, the USDA used 4-H as evidence that federal power was conducive—perhaps even necessary—to a healthy, thriving countryside because of its potential to conserve rural youth and farm families. As if to prove the point, the Jane Withers film Young America, screened in country towns across America in 1942, delivered a perfectly distilled narrative of wholesome 4-H romance. Teen star Withers was among the highest box-office earners in 1937 and 1938, and Fox Films contracted her to appear as a “[v]ivacious Jane with her own car, a private aeroplane and her own bank account” who finds romantic fulfillment and personal transformation after an encounter with “the bees and the flowers and the trees.” Playing an urban girl forcibly shipped to the country for disciplinary reasons, Wither’s character joins a 4-H club. Club work teaches her the error of her spoiled ways and, more important, introduces her to a hunky 4-H boy, played by Robert Cornell. Fox advertised the film throughout the country as a romance and a tribute to 4-H. Like other 4-H material in the early 1940s, the film presented country living as synonymous with heterosexual romantic fulfillment and denigrated urban living as shallow, decadent, and fruitless.102

Even as the USDA continued to circulate the image of wholesome, heterosexual 4-H’ers, public health agencies increasingly trusted 4-H clubs to do the practical work of sex education. The American Social Hygiene Society, anxious about an alleged wartime surge in female sexual delinquency, emphasized that 4-H clubs should be used in rural communities to increase awareness about the threats of venereal diseases.103 The society’s local affiliates did just that. In Fulton County, New York, 4-H clubs screened With These Weapons, a 1939 film produced by the society, which warned viewers of the scourge of syphilis.104 The extension service in Puerto Rico arranged to have the blood of a hundred 4-H members examined for syphilis and gonorrhea. “It is a pity to have to say that because of scarcity of personnel and material, due to the war situation, it was impossible to examine the blood of all members belonging to the 4-H Club in Puerto Rico,” lamented health and hygiene specialist Elena Bonilla.105

These two images provide a powerful contrast. Young America represented the potential of 4-H to transform decadent urbanism into wholesome rural heterosexuality, a narrative that echoed interwar pronatalist celebrations of the ideal white farm family. At the same time, sex education programs in 4-H clubs recognized the probability that rural youth would be sexually active. Promiscuous rural youth, contrary to the wholesome romanticism of Young America, needed education, restraint, and observation by public health authorities and agents of the state.

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