Abstract
This dissertation explores the political conflict over the origins of a land-grant college—the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts (NHCAMA, or the NH agricultural college, now the University of New Hampshire)—from 1866 to 1895. Examining the ongoing dispute between college founders and one of the most prominent farmers' organizations in the state (and the country), the Grange, I argue that the forces that shaped the land-grant college as we know it today stemmed from different positions on how to instrumentalize higher education for capitalism. On one side were elite college leaders, who aimed to create colleges of science and industry for the management of a commercial economy, and on the other side was the New Hampshire State Grange, which challenged the existing college to better serve farmers and establish an independent institution to incentivize youth to stay on the farm. Both sides aimed to bureaucratize their ideology within an institution of higher education to meet the demands of modernity and industrial capitalism.
This research contributes to the sociology of higher education, drawing on and extending existing scholarship on land-grant colleges. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 marked a major shift toward modern public higher education, establishing public colleges and universities all over the country, and expanding access to greater numbers of students; historiographic narratives of the land-grant colleges have thus characterized them as an experiment in democracy. Scholarship has complicated this narrative, showing that the colleges were for the purposes of managing capitalist industry; they have shown that our ideas about the land-grant colleges as democratic experiments are likely due in no small part to the efforts of farmers’ movements, who challenged the colleges to better serve farmers and industrial classes.
I intervene in this scholarship by way of conjunctural analysis, contextualizing the emergence of the Grange within the political economy of rural New England in the midst of the transition to industrial capitalism and modernity. I analyze the rural politics of the Grange in relation to these shifts and in relation to the historical emergence of agrarian reform more broadly. The Grange was a significant national farmers’ movement with state and county organizations all over the country. It emerged in the postbellum years to develop farmers socially and intellectually, and played a prominent role in shaping America’s higher education institutions, helping to expand access to college for farmers across the country. The Grange was also a contradictory organization, at times representing more prosperous farmers, and their priorities in developing farmers as educated citizens and landowners were sometimes at odds with the more militant political approaches of their contemporaries, such as the Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor in other regions. They were nevertheless an important movement for farmers’ democracy, and they were instrumental in challenging a form of elitism conceptualized by the founders of land-grant colleges.
On the other end of the dispute were college leaders. These elite founders of the agricultural college were, like their counterparts in other northeastern states, scientific reformers of industrial modernity who sought to spread the gospel of industrial education in newly founded postbellum land grant colleges. Often from humble farming origins themselves, they attended European scientific schools and theorized land grant colleges as fundamental to the shaping of progress in science and industry.
I show how the Grange and college leaders were different but both still committed to capitalist social mobility. College leaders and the Grange both emerged from the same fabric of agricultural reform in the antebellum period. Agricultural reformers included some of the first professors of northeastern land grant colleges who attended European Universities and returned to the U.S. to spread the doctrine of industrial education at land-grant colleges—The New Hampshire agricultural college’s first professor was one of these figures. The National Grange emerged out of federal government bureaucracy—it was founded by employees within the newly established U.S. Department of Agriculture, with the goal of uniting farmers through notions of abstract equality and, despite a commitment to rural democracy and its challenges to monopoly, no real opposition to capitalism. Its agenda found a comfortable home in New Hampshire, where it became an articulating organization for the agenda to stay on the farm and cultivate meaningful work. However, in the dispute over the meaning and purpose of New Hampshire’s agricultural college, while the Grange argued that the college should incentivize youth to stay in their own communities rather than move elsewhere as professionals, in arguments for the benefit of higher education they embraced similar frameworks of professionalism, upward mobility, and the attainment of wealth. By tracing the origins of both land-grant college leaders and the Grange, I analyze the conflicting and overlapping power relations between both sects in their attempts to bureaucratize their ideologies across the land-grant college. Seen in this light, I show how both sects represented different attempts to deal with forces of modern capitalism, with no real opposition to the idea of higher education as a class-sorting mechanism.