The State and the Farmer

Outline

• Foreword

  
  
  

• Explanation

  
  
  

• The Argument

        Governmental interference
  
  
  

• The Agricultural Shift

        The Geographical Shift in Rural Occupations
              The apparent reaction
  
        The Shift in Agricultural Method
  
        The Shift in Rural Institutions
  
        The "Abandoned Farm" as an Illustration of the Agricultural Shift
              The illusion of old buildings
              Old fields
              The significance of the general situation
              The situation with individual farms
              Lack of adaptation
              Point of view as to remedies
              The outlook for the hills and remote lands
  
  
  

• Society and the Farmer

        The Problem
              Saving our resources
              The social questions
              The countryman
              Rural needs
  
        The Nature of the Social Remedies
              The importance of the personal and local initiative
              Agencies of local communication
              Reconstructive movements
              The kinds of help

Foreword

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Liberty Hyde Bailey was the leading public spokesman for rural renewal in the first decades of the 20th century. As chair of Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission, he was also a major architect of the Cooperative Extension System. These roles alone warrant introducing him again to modern audiences.

Even more to the point, Bailey’s ideas are of great importance once again in our time for their practical guidance and for their larger public meanings. Indeed, it is not too much to say that retrieving Liberty Bailey’s legacy could help the cooperative extension system take a substantial leadership role in addressing the overarching challenge of our age: the crisis in democracy itself.

Liberty Bailey was a world renowned horticulturist and Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell. He was also a remarkable theorist of practical democracy. He had many creative ideas about cooperation between citizens and government, cooperative action within communities, and cooperation between rural and urban areas. Bailey was fully aware of the importance of science and technology. But he saw specialized scientific and technical knowledge as always a means to an end, not an end in itself. Bailey believed that expertise should be "on tap, not on top." Education at every level, including particularly education promoted by cooperative extension, should have as its primary aim preparing people for "public work," developing their capacities to work together on common tasks of importance.

The State and the Farmer is one of Bailey’s most important books. It directly takes up the topic of capacity-building for public work. The book addresses especially the practical problems that college-educated rural workers faced. It also raises large questions that again have relevance in our time. What is wealth? What are the nature and purposes of work? What is education? What is the role of government? What is the meaning of democracy itself?

In Bailey’s view, extension agents could play pivotal roles if they helped communities develop their own capacities for cooperative work. "Real leadership lies in taking hold of the first and commonest problems that present themselves and working them out. I like to say to my students that they should attack the first problem that presents itself when they alight from the train on their return from college. It may be a problem of roads; of a poor school; of tuberculosis; of ugly signs along the highways..." The point was not simply or even mainly the specific problem. Rather, it was the fact that the public work created opportunities to develop community capacity for self-action. "Our present greatest need is the development of what may be called the community sense," Bailey says.

The book is written with a specific focus on rural revitalization. Yet the Center for Democracy and Citizenship has found it relatively easy to translate his practical insights and his larger ideas to urban areas as well, and to the challenges experienced by widely different cultural groups in our time.

Taken as a whole, Liberty Hyde Bailey’s works can be considered a buried treasure whose rediscovery is long overdue. Liberty Bailey believed ardently in a democracy that rested upon the self-confidence, public spirit, and civic skills of ordinary people and in a government that worked in partnership with the people to produce things of public value. Bailey continued Abraham Lincoln’s vision of a "new birth of freedom," founded in popular self-governance. This again is the task of our age.

Harry C. Boyte, Co-Director
Center for Democracy and Citizenship
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota

I am pleased that the Minnesota Extension Service can play a part in bringing The State and The Farmer back into circulation and hopefully prominence, not only for the Cooperative Extension System, but also for other public agencies and civic groups on the journey of re-examining their purposes and rediscovering their roots.

Despite my over two decades with the Cooperative Extension Service, it was only recently that I heard the name Liberty Hyde Bailey and came to understand the instrumental role he played in the founding philosophy of this system, thanks to Harry Boyte and his colleagues at the Center for Democracy and Citizenship with the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs here at the University of Minnesota. I soon discovered, when I asked Cooperative Extension colleagues from across the country if they’d heard of Liberty Hyde Bailey, that I was hardly alone.

Now is an opportune time for us to be reintroduced to this remarkable man and his writings. As we re-examine the role of the Cooperative Extension Service, and more broadly the role of government, and envision for the future a deeper, more meaningful partnership with the public, The State and The Farmer provides an intriguing and important perspective. Through it you will discover that, far from charting new territory and diverging from our roots, we are rediscovering them and the ideas that gave birth to the Cooperative Extension Service.

Gail Skinner-West
Associate Director
Minnesota Extension Service
University of Minnesota

To maintain the integrity and flavor of the original work, obsolete spellings have been retained wherever feasible in this reprinting.

Liberty Hyde Bailey Photo from the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Explanation

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T he immediate basis of this book is a paper on "The State and the Farmer," originating as a presidential address before the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations at Lansing, Michigan, May 28, 1907. Five hundred copies of this address were printed by order of the Association. The demand continuing, I decided to expand the principles there expressed, and to apply them to a somewhat wider range; in doing this I have, of course, much increased the size of the original paper, but the general motive is not different. That paper, in turn, was the result of previous papers and addresses, some parts of which were incorporated in it; therefore, some of the arguments and points of view in this book are likely not to appear to be new to those readers who have followed this class of discussions. It is needless to say that the book is in no sense a treatise, but only a judge of opinions; and I am well aware how likely it is for opinions to be colored by the particular set of conditions under which one works.

L. H. Bailey
Ithaca, N. Y.
May, 1908

Originally published in July, 1908
by the MacMillan Company
Reprinted by the Minnesota Extension Service
University of Minnesota, St. Paul
1996

Cover Design: Tammy Blair
Book Design: Mavis Wheeler
Editor: Phyllis Jenks

Produced by Communication and Educational Technology Services, University of Minnesota Extension.

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