"Every farmer should be awakened": Liberty Hyde Bailey's vision of agricultural extension work

Agricultural History

Volumn 80, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 190-219

  Peters, Scott J ^a  

^a Cornell University ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION; AGRICULTURAL HISTORY; AGRICULTURAL PRACTICE; AGRICULTURAL WORKER;

EID: 33746841788     PISSN: 00021482     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ah.2006.80.2.190     Document Type: Article

References (144)

1. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Newer Ideas in Agricultural Education" Educational Review 20 (Nov. 1900):379.
2. Gould P. Colman, Education & Agriculture: A History of the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1963), 153
3. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Extension Work in Horticulture" Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 110 (Jan. 1896): 125-26
4. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "The Experiment Station Extension, or Nixon, Bill," Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 69 (Aug. 1894): 242.
5. The area covered by the Nixon Bill included sixteen counties in the western part of New York State, bounded on the east by Cayuga, Seneca, Yates, and Steuben Counties. Unlike most other states New York had two independently established and financed experiment stations. As a result of a compromise over a contentious battle about state funding for agricultural experiment station work in New York, the original Nixon Bill also provided eight thousand dollars to the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva for extension work in horticulture in western New York. For details on the feud, see, Colman, Education & Agriculture, 121-22.
6. For a history of the state station, see, P.J. Chapman and E.H. Glass The First 100 Years of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva, NY (Geneva: New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, 1999).
7. Colman, Education & Agriculture, 122-28, 157.
8. Roy Vernon Scott, The Reluctant Farmer: The Rise of Agricultural Extension to 1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Preas, 1970), 148. Although an extension department had been organized at Rutgers in 1892, Scott noted, its work was not continuous. Therefore, he wrote, "Cornell must be considered the leader in agricultural extension with its pioneer office established in 1894" (166).
9. For a similar judgment of the significance of Cornell's pioneering agricultural extension work, see, Alfred Charles True, A History of Agricultural Extension Work in the United States: 1785-1923 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1928),45. A detailed description and statistical account of the state funded extension work Cornell conducted between 1894-1902 was published in a series of six Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station bulletins (Bulletins 110, 122, 137, 146, 159, and 206), and in the Annual Report of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station (see the seventh through the fifteenth annual reports).
10. The only comprehensive history of the cooperative extension system that has been published to date is Wayne D. Rasmussen, Taking the University to the People: Seventy-five Years of Cooperative Extension (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989). Rasmussen makes only a passing mention of Bailey's work during the 1890s.
11. Liberty Hyde Bailey, ed, The Principles of Agriculture: A Text-Book for Social and Rural Societies (New York: Macmillan Company, 1898), vii.
12. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Farmers' Reading Courses," USDA Office of Experiment Stations, Bulletin 72 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1899): 5
13. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "The Agricultural Status," 1897, Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21-2-3342, Division of Rare Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, p. 14
14. Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Principles of Fruit Growing (London: Macmillan Company, 1897), 26.
15. Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 19-31.
16. On federal land policies and their effects on eastern farmers, see, Edward T. Peters, "Evils of Our Public Land Policy," Century Magazine 25 (Feb 1883)
17. Murray R. Benedict, Farm Policies of the United States, 1790-1950: A Study of their Origins and Development (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1953)
18. Benjamin Horace Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965)
19. and Paul Wallace Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, DC: GPO, 1968).
20. On the conditions of agriculture and rural life during the second half of the nineteenth century, see especially, Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860-1897 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1945)
21. Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmer's Frontier: 1865-1900 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966)
22. Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984)
23. Alan I. Marcus, Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy: Farmers, Agricultural Colleges, and Experiment Stations, 1870-1890 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1985)
24. and David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
25. Paul W. Gates, "Agricultural Change in New York State, 1850-1890," New York Hitory 20 (Apr. 1969): 117.
26. Gates considered five of New York's agricultural papers to be among the best in the nation: The Genesee Farmer, American Agriculturalist, Albany Cultivator, Moore's Rural New Yorker, and Country Gentleman. On the role of fairs, the agricultural press and agricultural societies and farmers' organizations in agricultural education and reform, see especially, William E. Ogilvie, Pioneer Agricultural Journalists: Brief Biographical Sketches of Some of the Early Editors in the Field of Agricultural Journalism (Chicago: A. G. Leonard, 1927)
27. Wayne C. Neely, The Agricultural Fair (New York: Columbia University Press 1935)
28. Albert L. Demaree, The American Agricultural Pres, 1819-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941)
29. Carl C. Taylor, The Farmers' Movement, 1620-1920 (New York: American Book Company, 1953)
30. and Scott, The Reluctant Farmer. On the changing conditions of agriculture and rural life in New York state and other northeastern states during the nineteenth century
31. see, Ulysses P. Hedrick, A History of Agriculture in the State of New York (New York: Hill and Wang, 1933)
32. Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1976)
33. Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century, New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
34. Paula C. Baker, The Moral Frameworks of Public Life: Gender, Politics and the State in Rural New York, 1870-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
35. Sally McMurry, Transforming Rural Life: Dairying Families and Agricultural Change, 1820-1835 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
36. and Hal S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
37. Bailey, "Extension Work in Horticulture," 129.
38. Liberty Hyde Bailey, Agricultural Education and Its Place in the University Curriculum (Ithaca: Andrus & Church, 1893), 3, 8.
39. Ibid., 8, 9.
40. Ibid., 10, 11.
41. Ibid., 11, 12.
42. Ibid., 12.
43. Ibid., 15, 17.
44. While the Morrill Act of 1862 called for states to provide funds for the construction and maintenance of buildings for the land-grant colleges, up to and including the time that Bailey delivered his lecture in Jan. 1893, the state of New York had failed to provide any such funding for Cornell. Cornell's third president, Jacob Gould Schurman, spent most of his inaugural address, delivered on Nov. 11, 1892, making a case for state funding. See, Proceedings and Addresses at the Inauguration of Jacob Gould Schurman, LL.D., to the Presidency of Cornell University (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1892), 29-81.
45. New York State Governor Roswell P. Flower was sympathetic to Schurman's plea for funding. He argued in favor of it himself in his annual message delivered to the legislature on Jan. 3, 1893. See, Public Papers of Roswell P. Flower, Governor (Albany, NY: The Argus Company, 1894), 26-30.
46. John H. Vincent, The Chautauqua Movement (Boston: Chautauqua Press, 1886), 2
47. Richard Kenneth Bonnell, "The Chautauqua University: Pioneer University Without Walls, 1883-1898" (PhD diss., Kent State University, 1988), 1, 2, 58, 164.
48. For accounts of the Chautauqua movement and institution, also see, Hugh A. Orchard, Fifty Years of Chautauqua: Its Beginnings, Its Development, Its Message, and Its Life (Cedar Rapids, Ia.: Torch Press, 1923)
49. Joseph E. Gould, The Chautauqua Movement: An Episode in the Continuing American Revolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1961)
50. Theodore Morrison, Chautauqua: A Center for Education, Religion, and the Arts in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974)
51. John C. Scott, "The Chautauqua Movement: Revolution in Popular Education," The Journal of Higher Education 70 (July-Aug. 1999): 389-412
52. and Andrew C. Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
53. James Creese, The Extension of University Teaching (New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1941), 39
54. Alfred Lawrence Hall-Quest, The University Afield (New York: Macmillan Company, 1926), 14
55. Theodore J. Shannon and Clarence A. Schoenfeld, University Extension (New York: The Center for Applied Research in Education, Inc., 1965), 13.
56. Cornell was not a recipient of any of the funds the legislature appropriated in 1891 for university extension in New York, see, Colman, Education & Agriculture, 120.
57. On the broader extension movement, also see, Creese, The Extension of University Teaching
58. George M. Woytanowitz, University Extension: The Early Years in the United States, 1885-1915 (Iowa City, Ia.: ACT Publications, 1974)
59. and Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750-1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
60. On the early history of extension in the land-grant system, see, Thomas L. Riley, "The Development of Extension in the Land-Grant Universities, 1862-1914" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1965).
61. Bailey, Agricultural Education and Its Place in the University Curriculum, 3, 8.
62. Three works that are especially helpful in tracing the influences of Bailey's educational ideas are Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961)
63. Richard R. Olmsted, "The Nature-Study Movement in American Education" (EdD diss., Indiana University, 1967)
64. and Tyree G. Minton, "The History of the Nature-Study Movement and its Role in the Development of Environmental Education" (EdD diss., University of Massachusetts, 1980).
65. Also see, Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Education by Means of Agriculture," in Cyclopedia of American Agriculture, Vol. 4: Farm and Community, ed. Liberty Hyde Bailey (New York: Macmillan Company, 1909), 355-477.
66. W. C. Gifford, "Master's Address," Journal of Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Session of the New York State Grange (Elmira, NY: Husbandman Print, 1890), 11-12.
67. George P. Cushman, Master's Address, Journal of Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Session of the New York State Grange (Rochester, NY: Artistic Printing and Engraving, 1894), 29-30.
68. On the educational views and work of the Grange in New York and beyond, see especially, Solon J. Buck, The Granger Movement: A Study of Agricultural Organization and its Political, Economic and Social Manifestations, 1870-1880 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1913)
69. Leonard L. Allen, History of New York State Grange (Watertown, NY: Hungerford-Holbrook, 1934)
70. Charles M. Gardner, The Grange: Friend of the Farmer (Washington, DC: National Grange, 1949)
71. Dennis S. Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867-1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1974)
72. and Donald B. Marti, Women of the Grange: Mutuality and Sisterhood in Rural America, 1866-1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).
73. Colman, Education & Agriculture, 120-23
74. Bailey, "Extension Work in Horticulture," 125-26.
75. Descriptions and statistical records of horticulture in western New York can be found in the published annual proceedings of the Western New York Horticultural Society. For this paper, I reviewed the proceedings for the 1890-1902 period. Western New York Horticultural Society, Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting (Rochester, NY: Post-Express Printing Company, 1894), 5, 105.
76. On the panic of 1893, see, Harold U. Faulkner, Politics, Reform and Expansion, 1890-1900 (New York: Harper, 1959)
77. Douglas Steeples and David O. Whitten, Democracy in Desperation: The Depression of 1893 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998)
78. and Charles Hoffmann, The Depression of the Nineties: An Economic History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970).
79. The Western New York Horticultural Society, Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting, 9, 8.
80. "Report of L. H. Bailey," Second Annual Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1894 (Albany, NY: James B. Lyon, 1895), 482
81. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "The Experiment Station Extension, or Nixon, Bill," in "The Grafting of Grapes," E. G. Lodeman, Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 77 (Nov. 1894): 458.
82. It is important to note that while Bailey's comments show a respect for farmers as experimenters, they also reveal his view of the importance of the role scientists were to play in studying and publicizing them as "trained and disinterested" observers. For an account of the views of other land-grant scientists on farmers' and scientists' respective roles in agricultural experimentation, see, Marcus, Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy;
83. Bailey, "Extension Work in Horticulture," 130-31.
84. It should be noted that while Bailey was respectful of farmers' experiences, in many of the bulletins he authored during this period he was sharply critical of their practices. See especially, Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletins 74, 84, and 109.
85. Bailey, "Extension Work in Horticulture," 131.
86. Ibid., 131-33.
87. Ibid., 133-34.
88. Ibid., 133, 135, 144, 150-51, 154, 156.
89. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Horticulture at Cornell," Scence 2 (Dec. 20, 1895): 836, 837.
90. Ibid., 837.
91. Bailey, "Extension Work in Horticulture," 133.
92. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Second Report Upon Extension Work in Horticulture" Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 122 (Dec. 1896): 502, 485.
93. Ibid., 484-85.
94. Ibid., 485-86.
95. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "What is Nature-Study?" in Appendix III of Tenth Annual Report of the Agricultural Experiment Station (Albany: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., 1898), 49.
96. Bailey later wrote a book on nature study, see, Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Nature Study Idea (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1903).
97. Bailey, "What is Nature Study?" 50.
98. Ibid., 50, 51.
99. I. P. Roberts, "Report of the Director," Tenth Annual Report of the Agricultural Experiment Station, xii.
100. Gray and Agassiz quoted in Minton, "The History of the Nature-Study Movement," 55, 57, 58.
101. The practice of conducting "object lesson," was central to the pedagogy of the new science education that developed during the late nineteenth century. See, George E. DeBoer, A History of Ideas in Science Education: Implications for Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991).
102. Bailey's personal familiarity with object lessons came through William J. Beal, a professor of botany who served as Bailey's main mentor during his undergraduate years at the Michigan Agricultural College. See, Rodgers Liberty Hyde Bailey, 19-51.
103. Bailey, "Farmers' Reading Courses," 18
104. Bailey, "Second Report Upon Extension Work in Horticulture," 492, 493.
105. Colman, Education & Agriculture, 124
106. Bailey, "Farmers' Reading Courses," 17-18.
107. Bailey, "Farmers' Reading Courses," 18
108. John Craig, "Sixth Report of Extension Work," Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 206 (1902): 130.
109. Bailey, "Farmers' Reading Course," 17, 22.
110. For more on Cornell's farmers' reading course, see, John Craig, "Teaching Farmers At Home," The World's Work 2 (June 1901): 810-12.
111. Bailey, "Farmers' Reading Courses," 17
112. Craig, "Sixth Report of Extension Work," 129, 132, 136.
113. Women also participated in the farmers' reading course. On the origins and development of Martha Van Rensselaer's work at Cornell, see, Ruby Green Bell Smith, The People's Colleges: A History of the New York State Extension Service in Cornell University and the State, 1876-1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1949)
114. Flora Rose, "A Page of Modern Education, 1900-1940: Forty Years of Home Economics at Cornell University," in A Growing College: Home Economics at Cornell University (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1969)
115. and Kathleen Rebecca Babbitt, "Producers and Consumers: Women of the Countryside and Cooperative Extension Service Home Economists, New York State, 1870-1935" (PhD diss, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1995).
116. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Second Report Upon Extension Work in Horticulture," 471-72.
117. Ibid., 472.
118. There isa large literature on the populist movement. See, especially John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931)
119. Carl C. Taylor, The Farmers' Movement, 1620-1920 (New York: American Book Company, 1953)
120. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)
121. and Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992).
122. Bailey, "The Agricultural Status," 1.
123. Ibid., 2, 3.
124. Ibid., 10, 12.
125. Ibid., 13, 14.
126. John Dewey, "My Pedagogic Creed," The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898, Vol. 5: 1895-1898 (1915; repr., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 93.
127. John Dewey, The School and Society (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 6, 15.
128. Bailey, The Principles of Fruit Growing, 26.
129. Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 19-31.
130. Bailey, The Principles of Fruit Growing, 28.
131. Bailey, The Principles of Fruit Growing, 30.
132. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Preface by the Editor," in The Fertility of the Land, ed. I. P. Roberts (New York Macmillan Company, 1897), vi.
133. Liberty Hyde Bailey, "Some Facts and Fancies, Old or New, in Horticulture," Thirty-Third Annual Report of the Secretary of the Connecticut Board of Agriculture, 1899 (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company, 1900), 54. The question of how farmers understood and received Bailey's vision of agricultural extension work is important, but it is beyond the scope of this paper. Based on a review of the proceedings from their annual meetings between the years 1894-1902, it does appear that the leadership of the Grange in New York State did understand and appreciate Bailey's larger vision. The proceedings are filled with many positive mentions of Bailey, as well as many endorsements of Cornell's extension work.
134. Scott, The Reluctant Farmer, x. Scott's portrayal of the rise of agricultural extension work is consistent with the portrayals provided by others in the academic literature.
135. See, for example, True, A History of Agricultural Extension Work in the United States; Rasmussen, Taking the University to the People
136. Rasmussen, Taking the University to the People
137. Earle D. Ross, Democracy's College: The Land-Grant Movement in the Formative Stage (Ames: Iowa State College Press, 1942)
138. Edward Danforth Eddy, College for Our Land and Time: The Land-Grant Idea in American Education (New York: Harper, 1957)
139. Frederick Rudolph and John R. Thelin, The American College and University: A History (1962; repr., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990)
140. Marcus, Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy;
141. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties;
142. Willard W. Cochurane, The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979)
143. R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994)
144. and Danbom, Born in the Country.