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
Recommended Citation
Ron, Ariel. “Scientific Agriculture and the Agricultural State: Farmers, Capitalism, and Government in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 (July 2016): 294–309.
