Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs

A Foundation for Sustainable Rural Community Development

1900-1920

• CLC home page
• Introduction
• Report

Summary

• Purpose
• Commissioners
• Survey & Hearings
• Prominent Deficiencies
• Underlying Problem
• Migration
• Agriculture Challenges
• Public Health
• Role of Farm Women
• Conservation & Land Use
• General Corrective Forces
• Commission Recommendations
• Legislative Recommendations
• Remedies
• The Call for Leadership

Legacy

• American Country Life Association
• Rural Sociology
• American Farm Bureau Federation
• Highways
• Agricultural Economics

Resources

• Bibliography
• Web Resources
• Timeline

The first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the beginning and end of federal commissions that addressed problems of agricultural and rural communities. For example, President Theodore Roosevelt – advocate for the Progressive Movement, conservation, and a Square Deal – established the Country Life Commission in the last year of his administration. The group assessed farming and country life and offered suggestions to Congress on ways to advance rural America. Roosevelt’s successors, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, discontinued many of Roosevelt’s groups, including the Country Life Commission, while instituting other reform efforts.

Although Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission lost political favor, agriculture and rural communities developed into fields of study for academics, including Liberty Hyde Bailey and Kenyon L. Butterfield. Their persistent leadership led to creation of a nongovernmental organization to build on the Country Life Commission’s work. In addition, the commission spurred numerous organizations to become more deeply involved with rural life issues on a wide variety of fronts. By 1920, the American Country Life Association (ACLA) had become a “medium of expression for ideas concerning the human aspects of the agriculture of America” (Wunderlich, 2003, p. 78-79)

During this time, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act in 1914 to set up cooperative extension and the Smith-Hughes Act (the Vocational Act of 1917) to advance farmer education. Numerous studies of rural communities by the burgeoning discipline of rural sociology led to deeper understandings of the meaning of community and its context in the larger social system of economics, politics, and culture. Agricultural economists studied farm operations and their relationships to local, regional, national, and global markets.

As the United States entered the First World War, farmers contributed to the war effort. They left the farm to fight in Europe, increased crop production to supply two continents, and became more engaged in national and international affairs. These events, coupled with the enduring legacy of the Country Life Commission, helped foster the ACLA and other rural economic and community development efforts in the evolution through the conservation and environmental movements, and later, the sustainability movement.

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