Week 7 - AEE Leaders

Introduction

Legislation is the result of the public's desire to see something important happen - to right a wrong, or to improve the human condition. This lesson introduces you to the individuals who helps to establish important legislation for extension and agricultural education.

Objectives

To develop a foundational understanding of the key players who developed important legislation for extension and agricultural education.

Before you begin this topic
Do some research on the following individuals. Who were they?

Hoke Smith

Asbury Lever

Dudley Hughes

Charles Prosser
Carroll S. Page 

Perhaps the best way to tell the story of Smith, Lever, Hughes, and Prosser is to walk you through the development of the Smith-Hughes Act and some of the acts that came before it. It all started in the 1860s. Well, not really. The idea of improving agriculture has been around for thousands of years, but the real legislative efforts to find some way to improve agriculture by improving education began in the 1860s. That was the time in American agriculture when we began to see a change from hand-powered agriculture to horsepower-driven agriculture. Agricultural exports had increased in the 1860s, and methods improved for transporting those products to market. Markets began to open beyond the borders of the country, and we began to see international trade flourish. Railroads began to expand across the nation, and with it, new lands were being settled and converted into farmland and ranches. By the end of the 1860s, the old plantation system of agriculture in the South would be nearly dead and replaced by a sharecropper system.

In 1862 the Homestead Act was passed, and it granted 160 acres of land to those Americans willing to carve out a niche for themselves in the West. The western territories developed rapidly under the agrarian interests of US farmers and cattlemen.

To prepare a new educational system for this new American system of exploration and industry, it was necessary to turn our attention to our institutions of higher learning. In the 1860s, universities were for wealthy students. The curriculum focused on liberal arts, such as Greek, Latin, and history, and there was no significant emphasis on the mechanical arts. There was no significant interest in teaching agriculture.

In the United States, the year 1862 was a busy one. The country was involved in a very uncivil civil war. In March of 1862 general of the Union Army George B McClellan loses his command, the Monitor and Merrimack warships fight at Hampton Roads Virginia, and the country sees major battles at Shiloh, Gaines Mill, Savage Station, Frazier's Farm, and Malvern Hill, all in a four-month period. By July 2nd, the Confederates had withdrawn from Northern Virginia and settled into a defense of Richmond. Meanwhile, the United States Congress continued its work. In that same period of time, Congress passed the Homestead Act and the Morrill Land-Grant Act, and Abraham Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation.

Let's turn our attention to Justin Morrill for a moment. Justin Morrill is often known as the sponsor of the Morrill Act of 1862, which established land-grant universities. Justin Morrill entered the United States House of Representatives in December of 1855 as a new congressman from Vermont. In the two months of his first term, Morrill distinguished himself as a proponent of legislation designed to help the American farmer and working-class Americans. The Morrill Act used the money from the sale of federal lands to create at least one university for agricultural and mechanical arts in each state.

Justin Morrill

Morrill worked on the land grant legislation through his first term in office, and on December 17, 1857, he introduced a bill granting lands for agricultural College. After a year of parliamentary wrangling, the bill passed the House by a vote of 105 to 100. The Senate passed its version of the bill in February of 1859, and it eventually found its way to President James Buchanan's desk. Buchanan promptly vetoed it.

President Buchanan was concerned that the Morrill Act, which provided federal funding in all states, influenced the development of educational systems in all states, including the Southern States, in some way. This influence, Buchanan believed, fanned the flames of secession and split the country. So he vetoed the legislation and Morrill went back to square one.

With the inauguration of President Lincoln that year, the Southern states began to secede from the union, starting with South Carolina and ending with North Carolina in May of 1861. With the southern states gone from the House and Senate chambers, conditions were favorable for the bill's return. On December 16th, 1861, Morrill introduced a revised land-grant bill for the House of Representatives to consider. For some additional editing by both houses, the bill finally passed Congress and went to the White House for President Lincoln's signature in July of 1862. On July 2nd, President Abraham Lincoln sat at his desk to sign the Morrill Act of 1862 into law. The stroke of his pen created colleges for the working classes and freed millions of people from the poverty of ignorance.

The land-grant mission is threefold. Land-grant universities are required to create new knowledge, and we call that research. Land-grant institutions are to transfer this new knowledge, and we call that teaching. And land-grant universities are to put that new knowledge to work in communities served by the university, and we call that extension.

All of this happened in the nick of time. the American South suffered greatly during the American Civil War; by the 1900s, it was still suffering. In the 1910s, 80% of Southerners lived in a rural setting, and half of all farms in the South were unimproved. Here's what this means. The average farm in the United States in 1910 was valued at $5,480. A similar farm in the South was valued at $2,051, or roughly half of the national average.

In 1913, Democrats controlled the Congress for the first time in 18 years. In this period, we saw the Smith-Lever Act passed in 1914. This Act created the Agricultural Extension Service. In 1917, the Smith-Hughes Act was passed, creating federal funding in schools across the United States to develop agricultural education, industrial education, and home economics.

I might be getting ahead of myself, but let me tell you what the Vocational Education Act of 1917 did. President Woodrow Wilson signed the Smith-Hughes Act into law on February 23, 1917. Its purpose was to provide federal funding to states for the development of vocational education in three areas. These areas were agricultural education, home economics, and industrial education. The Act further provided for the training of teachers in these areas. The Act also provided instructions for developing the methods of instruction to be used in teaching these vocational education subjects and also designated the equipment necessary and the qualifications for teachers. The ACT further provided for the creation of a federal board for vocational education.

Hoke Smith

The passage of the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 was no small endeavor. In fact, one of its sponsors was not in favor of it at first. Their number of key players in the drama are Senator Carroll Page, a US senator from Vermont, President Woodrow Wilson, and Senator Hoke Smith of Georgia. The other key players were Representative Dudley Hughes, a congressman from Georgia, and William H Wilson, a US representative from Pennsylvania. The germ of the idea of creating the Smith-Hughes Act came from a professional educator by the name of Charles Prosser. Prosser was an elementary school teacher and eventually became the state school superintendent of Indiana from 1900 to 1908. From 1909 to 1910, he was a superintendent of the Children's Aid Society New York and also became an assistant commissioner of vocational education in Massachusetts. While in Massachusetts, Prosser worked with two other men to develop vocational education. Those men were Charles Allen and Rufus Stimson. If you read the article on the quadrumvirate of vocational education, you'll learn a lot more about these men. Charles Prosser became the first executive secretary of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education.

Charles Prosser

The goal of this organization was to secure federal support for vocational education. Prosser later became the head director of the Dunwoody Institute in Minneapolis. Somewhere along the way, he became a close friend and ally of Senator Carroll Page. Senator Page was very much interested in vocational education and tried a number of times to have bills passed in the Senate and in the House of Representatives for the development of vocational education. Senator Page was passionate about vocational education, but he was a poor legislator. He couldn't get bills passed by the Senate, nor could he get Congress to adopt any of his measures related to vocational education. This is where Prosser comes in. Prosser was a good writer, and he was great at writing legislative bills. The only problem was that Senator Page was unable to get those bills passed. After 6 years, he had no luck at it. Prosser was adamant that something had to be done to advance the cause of vocational education. Quoting Charles Allen, he said that "the purpose of vocational education is to help a person secure a job, training so that he can hold it after he gets it, and a system and advancing to a better job." Prosser wrote the legislation that was to become Smith-Hughes. He also became the first executive director of the federal Board of Vocational Education, And he wrote much of the operating policies of the board. The federal board reported directly to Congress.

The Smith-Hughes did not pass unanimously. There were some opponents.  Representative JL Slayton of Texas said the law would teach the taxpayers more and more to rely upon federal appropriations. Others who were not in favor of segregated schools saw that black schools would get the same amount of money as white schools. Still, others pointed out that the 10th Amendment did not say anything at all about federal protection or responsibility for education. The Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution says the powers "not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Many people took that to mean that the federal government had no business providing funding for this type of legislation.

I mentioned earlier that one of the proponents and sponsors of the Smith-Hughes Act was initially not in favor of it. That would be none other than Georgia's favorite son, Hoke Smith. Senator Smith was not in favor of Smith-Hughes at first. He had a different plan in place. Hoke Smith, along with others, believed that legislation involving the creation or funding of extension was more important than agricultural education public schools at the time. Hoke Smith was a much better legislator than Senator Page, so he was able to use parliamentary delay tactics to hold off all of the Page bills until Smith-Lever was passed. Because of his skill in getting legislation through Congress, Proponents of vocational education, including Senator Page, agreed that it would be best if they could get Hoke Smith to sponsor the bill on the Senate side. Senator Smith turned to his friend in the US House of Representatives, Dudley Hughes, to enter the corresponding bill in the House. After deliberation, both houses passed some form of the Smith-Hughes bill, and the conference committee ironed out the differences. As we know, Smith-Hughes was passed in 1917.

Seaman A. Knapp

But vocational agriculture was not the only game in town. While efforts to build a sustainable educational program in schools were moving forward, the Extension movement was also gaining steam. One key proponent of the extension model was Seaman A. Knapp. Seaman Asahel Knapp (1833–1911) was an American agricultural pioneer and educator, best known for his significant contributions to the field of agricultural extension. Knapp was born on December 16, 1833, in Schroon Lake, New York. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1856. He began his career as a teacher and school principal before becoming involved in agricultural and community development. In the late 1800s, Knapp moved to Iowa, where he worked as a farmer and became interested in agricultural education and outreach. He was instrumental in establishing "Farmers' Institutes," which were educational programs designed to bring the latest agricultural knowledge directly to farmers. These institutes focused on practical, hands-on learning.

In 1902, Knapp was appointed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to address agricultural challenges in the southern United States. He implemented the "demonstration method," which involved sending trained agents to work directly with farmers, demonstrating improved agricultural techniques. Knapp's efforts laid the foundation for the cooperative extension system. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914, signed into law during President Woodrow Wilson's administration, formalized the cooperative extension system, establishing partnerships between the USDA, state land-grant universities, and local county offices. Knapp is often regarded as the "father of agricultural extension" for his pioneering work in bringing agricultural education and innovation directly to farmers. His emphasis on practical, hands-on learning and the cooperative extension model has had a lasting impact on agricultural development in the United States.

60-Minute Assignment

Take a moment to read the following article about Smith-Hughes by John Hillison. The PDF should be available to you. Or try to view it below. Hillison writes that the organizations put aside their differences to support the passage of vocational education legislation. What do you suppose the organizations had to gain, and what did they have to lose as a result of working together?

Record your answer on this Google Doc.