Western Illinois University

A Foundation for Sustainable Rural Community Development

Country Life Commission Timeline Introduction

By Stephen R. Hicks and Timothy Collins

The timeline chronicles significant events affecting twentieth-century country living, agriculture, and rural communities. It concentrates mainly on the Country Life Commission (CLC) as an element of President Theodore Roosevelt’s (1901-1909) Square Deal for all citizens and his emphasis on conservation of natural resources. Although succeeding presidents paid little heed to the CLC, academics – including CLC members Liberty Hyde Bailey and Kenyon L. Butterfield – and others carried on the commission’s legacy with their studies of rural life and communities and the creation of the American Country Life Association (ACLA) after World War I. ACLA flourished into a successful organization during its first two decades, providing beneficial information for the agrarian community for better farming and better living, while becoming an assembly of numerous farm organizations.

The timeline also addresses national and international events that contributed to ACLA’s demise, which began when America entered World War II. Like the rest of the country, the association concentrated on contributing to the war effort, sacrificing its own agenda. After the war, ACLA’s leaders sought to re-establish the organization to adapt to the changing social, economic, and political world that rapidly altered agriculture and other facets of rural life.

As mid century approached, a new generation of leaders continued to find direction and purpose for ACLA. While ACLA sought congressional approval to create a second Commission on Country Life, the federal government moved to address poverty in rural and urban areas in other ways that bolstered rural community development. Declining membership, lack of funds, and competition with other agricultural and rural development agencies sapped the ACLA.

The practice of community development evolved side by side with ACLA, especially in land grant universities where rural sociologists, agricultural economists, and others studied farmers and rural communities with an eye toward practical applications of knowledge in rural settings. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal experimented with different community programs to fend off the Great Depression of the 1930s. After World War II, leaders from government, academia, foundations, church groups, and the nonprofit sector set up organizations founded on newly emerging ideas of community and economic development. For example, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) built local networks and national partnerships of residents, local organizations such as churches, and other community leaders to overcome segregation at the local, state, and national levels. Much like their cousins in organized labor who used strikes to secure better pay and workplace conditions, civil rights activists organized communities to obtain justice through boycotts of community economic institutions and peaceful protests to gain attention for their cause. In the case of both unions and African Americans, these seemingly radical expressions by well-organized groups challenged establishment practices that thwarted social justice and democracy. Sit-down strikes and economic boycotts were intended to be nonviolent, but often met with violent responses from company managers and community leaders.

Presidents John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) and Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969) developed a wide-ranging federal response to clamors for justice and democracy. Johnson’s War on Poverty built massive programs to develop rural and urban areas of the country based on “maximum feasible participation” to promote community action. As a result, community and economic development practice has become incredibly diverse. Academic institutions, government agencies, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the United States Department of Agriculture and its land-grant university extension educators, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and a host of local, regional, and national organizations now address concerns highlighted by Theodore Roosevelt’s CLC. Today’s community developers have inherited the progressive agenda, emphasizing building capacities of individuals and organizations to fight unemployment, deal with migration, and promote the general welfare in rural and metropolitan communities.

Johnson’s Great Society and his War on Poverty clearly reflected the core progressive ideology of Theodore Roosevelt’s CLC. His National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty examined contemporary economic issues and opportunities in rural America. Although Johnson’s domestic anti-poverty efforts were overshadowed by international affairs such as the Vietnam War, his social programs allowed community development to advance into a wider branch of study and professional practice with the creation of organizations such as the Community Development Society, which held its first conference in 1969, and the National Community Education Association.

Johnson’s successor, President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) continued to pursue rural and urban community development, but gave states more control over rural development activities. He set up a task force on rural development in 1971. He signed the Rural Development Act of 1972 and the Housing and Community Act of 1974. As rural and urban communities garnered the attention of federal, state, and local governments and other community organizations, ACLA held its last conference in 1976. Despite constant efforts to adapt, it had failed to adjust to changing times.

While the timeline stops in the mid 1970s, it is important to note that the impacts of the Country Life Commission continue to be felt today. A hundred years later, many rural communities continue to lag behind much of the rest of the country, facing many of the same issues they faced a century ago:

  • Challenges of outmigration remain an important issue.
  • Many rural schools face declining enrollment and budgetary restraints that limit their ability to educate children for today’s social and technological demands.
  • The number of farms continues to decline because of changing technology, fluid world markets spurred by increasing population, rapid growth of nations such as China and India, and the growing importance of biofuels.
  • Rural communities have seen manufacturing and service jobs disappear because of competition from foreign countries.
  • Many rural communities have aging populations, high poverty, relatively high rates of domestic violence, and depression, often accompanied by drug and alcohol abuse.
  • Housing and water and sewer systems are deteriorating.

The continuing challenges and opportunities in rural America – coupled with the tendency of government and many larger-scale institutions to minimize their involvement with rural areas over the past several decades – mean that rural community development is all the more important. In fact, many communities already are working hard to build their own capacity with cooperatives, local entrepreneurship, job creation strategies, local food systems, schools that educate students for the community, and a host of other strategies that promote economic democracy. The emergence of state-level rural development policy and the proliferation of national, state, and local community development organizations are signs that Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive tradition is alive and well a century later. The activities of these organizations help to empower people who might otherwise be marginalized from building rural communities around a common vision.