SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA 



the results of research into the hands of dirt farmers and convince them 

 that science was superior to inherited lore. The second problem was how 

 to convert the increased productivity brought on by science into eco- 

 nomic gains for the individual farmer. To the extent that the average 

 farmer could see science bettering his lot, research could substitute for 

 the Populist crusade. Carl Vrooman, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture 

 under Woodrow Wilson, addressed himself to these problems rather 

 thaa to the details of how to administer a research establishment. What 

 was the essential difference between industry and agriculture in this 

 period when an individual tried to introduce the results of science into 

 the stream of technological practice? (Carl Vrooman, "The Agricultural 

 Revolution," Century Magazine, XCIII [1916], 111-23.)] 



Agriculture, though one of the oldest of the arts, is the youngest 

 of the sciences. Less than two years ago, for the first time, the American 

 Academy for the Advancement of Science admitted agriculture into the 

 family circle by giving it a place on its program and in its organization. 

 Thus agriculture has become a sort of modern Cinderella. For thousands 

 of years the servant and drudge of civilization, at last she has found the 

 magic slipper and is making her debut as a veritable and acknowledged 

 princess, a royal dispenser of bounty and happiness. . . . 



It is indeed highly important that the farmer learn the agronomic 

 lesson of how to increase his yields and the economic and business lesson 

 of how to buy and sell to advantage, but in a larger sense these mat- 

 ters are important only as stepping-stones to a realization of the higher 

 possibilities of life. A scientific success has little importance to the farmer 

 unless it can be made the basis for a business success, and a business suc- 

 cess in turn has little real significance unless it can be translated into 

 terms of life. I know farmers who have broad fields, great herds, huge 

 barns, and large bank-accounts, but whose successes end right there; who 

 live narrow, dull, purposeless lives — lives devoid of aspiration, happiness, 

 or public spirit. The wealth of such men is like much of the fertility in 

 our soil: it is not available. These men need instruction in the art of 

 living as much as their less-prosperous neighbors need instruction in the 

 art of growing and marketing crops. For, after all, it is only the wealth 

 that we dominate and dedicate to some useful or noble purpose that we 

 can be said actually to possess. All other wealth that stands to our credit 

 is either inert or actively sinister, and in the latter event it often gains 

 the upper hand and finally comes actually to possess us. 



The agricultural possibilities that open out before the American 

 farmer in bewildering profusion are for the most part yet unrealized. 

 The lot of the up-to-date, scientific, and businesslike farmer has im- 

 proved greatly during the last few years, but the lot of the average 

 farmer still leaves much to be desired, still lacks much that has been 

 chronically lacking to the tiller of the soil for thousands of years. On a 

 western Iowa farm there was a young boy who plowed corn and did 

 diverse other things from dawn to dusk. When asked what he got for 

 all his hard work, a momentary fire of revolt flared up in his brain, and 

 he said: "Get? Get? Nothin' if I do, and hell if I don't." 



That boy summed up in one terse phrase the annals of husbandry 



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