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FLESHING OUT the land-grant mission states that established colleges under the Morrill Act. It was named for Missouri Democratic Congressman William Hatch, who was chair of T the House Agriculture Committee. Originally, the law provided each state with $15,000 to establish an experiment station, but funding afterward became annual. The history of the Hatch Act is described on a Web site maintained by University of Georgia professor John Schell: "During this time, many farmers were in great debt. It appears that the government saw our country's knowledge concerning agriculture as lacking and thus a direct cause of these failings in our agriculture industry. In response, the government implemented this provision of the law in order to provide funding to those states willing to conduct research in the area of agriculture. "Furthermore, the purpose of the Hatch Act is for the promotion of efficient produc- tion, distribution, marketing, and use of products and/or methods that promote a prosperous agriculture industry and thus national prosperity. "The Hatch Act provided much needed additional funds for the improvement of vocational education. Without the funds provided in this Act, it is quite possible that many of the colleges established under the Morrill Act may have floundered in their attempt to provide beneficial agricultural research." The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 The final pillar of public support for American agriculture is the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which created the Cooperative Extension Service. It will be a century old in two years. The law has a strong horticultural connection. A key figure was Liberty Hyde Bailey, the famous horticulturist who was appointed in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt to head a Commission on Country Life. After holding hearings throughout the country, his report was printed in 1911 and contained an important recommendation: Create a national extension service. he enactment of the Hatch Act of 1887 came 25 years after the Morrill Act was passed in 1862, but many consider it a logical extension of it. It celebrates its 125th birthday this year. The purpose of the act was to establish agricultural experiment stations in Bailey was the pioneer who, while at Michigan State University, worked to convert theoretical botany into practical horticulture, developing cross breeding and hybridizing and discovering that growth of greenhouse plants could be increased by raising the carbon dioxide content of the air. He was chairman of the Horticulture Department at MSU in the 1880s and moved to Cornell University in 1888. The act also represented a stepping up to the agricultural plate by southern congressional lead- ers, according to former North Carolina State University agricultural historian Philip Grant. He writes that, "The Agricultural Extension Bill had been introduced in September 1913 by Representative Frank Lever of South Carolina and Senator Hoke Smith of Georgia. The bill provided for a system of agricultural extension work based on coopera- tion between the Department of Agriculture and the numerous land-grant colleges. The program, calling for an annual expenditure of $4,580,000 and authorizing the appoint- ment of two farm demonstration agents in each of the nation's 2,850 rural counties, was to be financed equally by federal grants-in-aid and appropriations by the state legislatures." The new law helped farmers learn new agricultural techniques, and also home economics, from instructions and demonstrations in or near their homes. By the time of the introduction of the Agricultural Extension Bill, the South of the post- Civil War era had recovered much of its influence in both the House and Senate. The extension service bill nearly failed to pass the Senate, as midwesterners and westerners considered it too favorable to the South. Representative Lever and Senator Smith certainly ranked among the more activist members of Congress, Grant wrote. Representing two of the original Southern Confeder- ate states, Lever and Smith were keenly aware of the acute economic problems facing their heavily agrarian constituencies. —R. Lehnert rulers. Landowners were kings and the nobles they gave land to. Most of those who actually farmed land were peasants or sharecroppers, or even worse, serfs bound to the land and its aristocratic owner. Even the original 13 American colonies were created by grants of land from kings to nobles and gentrymen. The cause of the American yeoman farmer—the owner who worked his own land— was, if not an American inven- tion, greatly advanced by the Homestead Act. The Morrill Act These two laws did not pass "With a new president [Abraham Lincoln] and the departure of the Southern congressional delegations, Morrill was able during the first Civil War easily. Michigan State Univer- sity, for example, is called the pioneer land-grant university because it preceded the Morrill Act by seven years. It was founded in 1855 by the state of Michigan with its own state grants of land, so MSU provided a model for what the federal Morrill Act did in 1862. In an essay on the Morrill Land Grant Act, University of Congress to finally steer his bill to passage." —Daniel Hamilton Senate from Southerners objecting to the increased federal role in dictating the course of higher education within the states. Morrill's bill eventually passed the Senate in 1859 in the midst of an economic downturn. President James Buchanan, however, vetoed the bill for both constitutional and economic reasons." But during the Civil War, with states in the South having seceded from the Union, Congress had a dif- ferent composition, and the laws passed. The antebellum South had a very traditional and conservative con- cept, the aristocratic concept, of how land should be owned and farmed. "With a new president (Abraham Lincoln) and the departure of the Southern congressional delegations, Morrill (who was now a senator) was able during the first Civil War Congress to finally steer his bill to passage," Hamilton wrote. Under the new law, the federal gov- Illinois professor of law and history Dr. Daniel Hamilton wrote that Justin Morrill, a Whig who later turned Repub- lican and was elected to the U.S. House of Representa- tives from Vermont in 1855, "became one of the most outspoken advocates for the democratic ideal that a college education should be available, at low cost, to all who desired one. "Morrill's thinking was heavily influenced by Jonathan Turner of Illinois College, who had long argued for the establishment of state agricultural colleges through the use of federal land grants. Morrill proposed plans for land-grant colleges as early as 1857, and a plan of his passed the House in 1858. The bill faced opposition in the 10 JUNE 2012 GOOD FRUIT GROWER ernment distributed land proportionately to the states, which then sold their "land grants" to raise money. "Each state was given 30,000 acres of land for each senator and representative it had in the Congress," Hamilton wrote. Most of the land given to the states was not within their own confines but in the West, where the vast bulk of unsold federal land remained. Additionally, the most populous eastern states, such as New York and Pennsyl- vania, received a larger share of western land than the western states themselves. This provoked some opposi- tion from western delegations in the Congress, but the simultaneous passage of the Homestead Act secured the support of enough western Republicans to pass the act on July 2, 1862. Although first applied in the Union states, after the Civil War, the Morrill Act's provisions were extended to the former Confederate states. • www.goodfruit.com