Re -parishing the countryside: Progressivism and religious interests in rural life reform, 1908-1934

Rural reform efforts in the early twentieth century often have been castigated for revamping the agricultural economy and community at the expense of traditional social and spiritual values. Likewise, religious reformers of this period have been accused of surrendering the church to the national enthusiasm for scientific secularism, of misplacing theology and faith in the scramble for membership and political clout. But the problem with such analysis is that it confuses unanticipated outcome with intent and fails to distinguish between changes in form and changes in substance. This dissertation examines anew the work of a tightly knit coterie of rural reformers in government, churches, and academia who were animated by strikingly similar visions of the social, economic, and religious future of the countryside. In the period following World War I, progressive reformers saw, not only postwar depression in the far economy, but also deterioration in institutions--schools, churches, social organizations of all kinds--that supported the farm community. By examining points of commonality between careers of several prominent rural reformers--among them, Kenyon Butterfield, Edmund Brunner, Warren Wilson, and Charles Galpin--the study seeks to determine how these reformers worked to develop a coherent vision for rural America, combining their religious sentiments, beliefs in the American system, and faith in scientific rationality. This project asserts that contradictions between religious values and bureaucratic goals may be more apparent in retrospect than they were at the time; that these reformers saw the tools of social science as appropriate to reinforce institutions they so valued. It will be argued that these reformers, far from losing their way in the modern wasteland, set out to solve contemporary problems in a manner fully consistent with the long tradition of American Protestant evangelical reform. It is a story of how reformers used yesterday's heresies to make those institutions more effective in society, how they manipulated traditional understandings of Christianity to meet the challenges of changing society, and ultimately, how they were unable to maintain those traditional understandings in the face of severe economic trials of the Great Depression.