Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 233

The American Country Life Association was one of the organizations that defined rural America for the twentieth century. Born out of Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission, the ACLA was formally established in 1918 by representatives of a range of state institutions and non-state organizations who recognized the need for collective action to address the problems of rural life. In particular, it defined out-migration as the great problem facing rural America and identified the prosperity of farming as the key to retaining population – it elided rural problems with agricultural problems and pro-moted a vision of country life that was founded on the cornerstone of the family farm. As such, it has been argued that the ACLA, together with the Farm Bureau, framed the political construction of rural America as a policy object, positioning agrarianism at the heart of rural policy and legitimating state intervention to support rural life.

Yet from the beginning, the ACLA recognized that rural life was more than the economics of agriculture. Its second conference in 1919 was largely devoted to rural 234 the agricultural health and its membership was wide-ranging. Indeed, from the start the ACLA championed a partnership approach, bringing together farm unions, church groups and organizations involved with education, health, economic development and welfare. The bringing together of these groups was itself an important function of the ACLA which was bolstered by a strong educational agenda. The ACLA’s attempts to encourage school curriculums to reflect local communities are regarded as among its greatest successes.

Wunderlich’s book hints at the significance of the ACLA in the definition of rural America during the twentieth century, but does not develop this analysis in detail. American Country Life is less a critical academic tome and more a biography of the organization – and one that clearly reveals the endearment of the subject to the biographer. It is nonetheless an invaluable resource for anyone searching for detailed information on the ACLA or on rural America during the mid part of the last century. Based on painstaking research in the ACLA archives, the book is saturated with an impressive amount of detail about ACLA activities and leaders. These two dimensions form the structure for the book, first describing the ACLA’s organization and profiling some of its key leaders, and then moving on to a chronological account of its activities that is largely framed around discussion of its annual conferences. The importance of individuals in shaping the organization’s path stands out from the narrative, as do the recurrent problems of underfunding and understaffing.

Moreover, the book provides an insight into not only the ACLA but also the changing nature of rural America. As Wunderlich observes, ‘Rural life in America is projected through the lens of this extraordinary organization. ACLA is a metaphor of country life in much of the twentieth century’ (p.xii). The distinction made by Wunderlich between ‘generation one’ and ‘generation two’ of the ACLA membership neatly conveys a sense of how much rural America changed during the few decades of the mid-twentieth century and of how such changes threw up new leaders, new challenges and new policy contexts. The ability of the ACLA to evolve with rural America was not wholly successful. As Wunderlich’s chronology reaches its conclusion, the distance of the ACLA’s rural vision from that of modern corporate agriculture and the marginalization of the ACLA in ruralpolicy debates both become increasingly apparent. The demise of the organization in 1976 is treated with a tinge of sentimentality: ‘Its death was a lingering one, unattended’ (p.123).

The subtitle of the book is ‘a legacy’, and it is the legacy of the ACLA that occupies the final chapter. Wunderlich imagines a third ‘ghost’ or ‘spiritual’ history review generation of the ACLA that has carried forward the principles of the organization without the organization itself. He cites as evidence for this the continuing concern for issues of community, land and stewardship that were nurtured by the ACLA. Wunderlich also points to some of the broader lessons to be gained from the experience of the ACLA, suggesting in particular that the ACLA taught that not all rural life is farming, that rural life is multidimensional, that community extends beyond place or people and that space matters. Wunderlich may be accused of overstating his case in these ambitious claims, but in other respects the discussion of the legacy is curiously underdeveloped. The inter-organizational approach pioneered by the ACLA is newly fashionable again and there are several rural groups, particularly those with a more ‘progressive’ agenda, who are seeking to connect the different components of rural society and environment just as the ACLA did. Anyone interested in the future of rural America – and in how rural America got to where it is – could do worse than to look back at the ACLA. This book will not provide all the answers, but its rich mine of information forms a valuable resource.