Henry Wallace followed in his father’s footsteps in some ways, and tried to erase his father’s footsteps in other ways.
Henry Senior was a farmer who turned into a writer and researcher on agriculture, then turned into Harding’s sec of ag. Henry Junior started as a writer and researcher and businessman in ag, then turned into FDR’s sec of ag.
This correlation tells us that Harding had the same TRULY populist motives as FDR, but came along at the wrong time to resonate with public will.
We could speculate about family dynamics. Junior’s main political job was undoing the damage that happened before and during Senior’s political job. I’m being unfair to Senior, since the real damage was done by Wilson before he got into the job, and he couldn’t foresee the later consequences of Wilson’s policies.
Nevertheless, both Senior and Junior pushed hard for improved training. Senior started using radio as part of ag extension work.
From Radio News July 1922:
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To reach by radio the largest possible number of the 32,000,000 people in rural sections of the country with daily agricultural and general news, it is now proposed to organize farm boys and girls into radio clubs. This is the first organized attempt at a nation-wide radio news service. The United States Department of Agriculture is back of the movement. For more than a year the Department has been broadcasting agricultural news from stations of the Post Office Department in various sections of the country. A number of amateur operators receive the reports and pass them on to farmers in their locality. But there has been no organized method of reception and the number of farmers served is small as compared with the total number of farmers in the United States.
A number of farm radio clubs are already in existence, and it is hoped eventually to have at least one club in every county in the United States where radio reports can be received. Farm radio clubs will be plentiful and not only will they render a regular daily news service, but through them the practicability of radio on the farm will be demonstrated.
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Coolidge’s ag sec Jardine carried the idea to maturity, after radio was also more mature and widespread.
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One million farmers are going to school, by proxy, at the Department of Agriculture in Washington! Farms are to be transformed into scientific laboratories, and college certificates in agriculture are to be issued to farmers, without requiring them to leave the land which they till. The summer, during which farmers were formerly attracted to the extension courses of the state agricultural colleges, may soon find these same farmers remaining at home and pursuing courses of study in the “US Radio Farm School.” The most revolutionary departure in the use of radio as a medium for imparting information is the plan of the United States Department of Agriculture to carry its scientific knowledge, derived from research laboratories and experiment farms, directly to a million American farms. The farm will be considered the student’s laboratory, and assignments will be given, necessitating practical work.
The farmer who may be doing his fall plowing or wrestling with the problem of a litter of pigs, will apply the information from Washington to a proper adjustment of his farming practices. Thus, “for the land’s sake,” lecture courses from Uncle Sam’s national farming bureau will dovetail with the daily farm work; and each farm thereby becomes a practical laboratory. Radio instruction will be supplemented with a file of bulletins dealing with the subject matter of each broadcast.
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Radio Farm School’s printed bulletins, mini-textbooks, have been preserved at Google Books. This one is a short course on poultry management.
This training obviously didn’t make much difference. Junior’s training worked better, for three reasons. (1) Failure leads to learning. In the mid ’20s the farmers who were still on the land were reasonably successful, so didn’t feel the need to change their practices. (2) Learning also requires a sense of stability, a supportive environment so you can AFFORD the necessary failures. FDR’s farm subsidies provided the sense of support. (3) Some of the New Deal’s ag work was beyond the resources of independent farmers. Windbreaks required the organization and funding of CCC, and electrification also demanded infrastructure.
Polistra's Mill 