Authors

Ariel RonFollow

Publication Date

7-2016

Abstract

The history of American capitalism in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century usually focuses on labor and industry to the relative neglect of important changes in agriculture. Landmark federal policies from the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) to the Smith-Lever Act (1914) indicate that these changes involved a tightening and self-reinforcing relationship between commercial farming and national governing power. To understand this trajectory, which contrasts markedly with the experience of business and labor, we have to consider a long-developing movement for “scientific agriculture” that allowed well-organized farmers to exert decisive influence on federal policy from about the 1850s. By elucidating the workings of this agricultural reform movement in relation to the party system, corporate law, bureaucratic governance, and prevailing ideologies, this article reveals a very different story of American political development than the one we usually tell.

Document Type

Article

Keywords

agricultural history, US history, political history, history of the state, american political development, APD

Disciplines

American Politics | United States History

DOI

doi.org/10.1017/S1537781416000165

Source

Jounral of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

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