Learning to Live on the Land: Remaking American Catholics on a Subsistence Homestead

• In Event: New Deals in Learning: Depression-Era Education to Conserve and Transform Race, Gender, and Religion

Abstract

Objectives: This paper examines the philosophy, the teachers, and the curriculum of the Catholic high school connected to the New Deal’s Subsistence Homestead project at Granger, Iowa.

Perspectives: In a 1939 article in The Catholic School Journal, Emerson Hynes argued that “[i]f the virility and stability of both the Church and the Nation is dependent upon a thriving rural population, it is time to take steps to provide rural education with the philosophy, the teachers, and the curriculum that will prepare students to become intelligent farmers.”

Hynes continued by illuminating a potential model for Catholic rural education: Assumption High School of Granger, Iowa. Through a curriculum that combined ‘classical’ coursework, mechanics, arts and crafts, and ‘practical agriculture,’ Hynes believed that Assumption was a “pioneer in the movement to restore the right order of things in rural education.” Adding to its significance, the school’s founder, the Reverend Luigi Ligutti, also secured federal funds to build the Granger Subsistence Homestead on the edge of town. As a key figure in the Catholic Rural Life movement, Ligutti contended that the federal project and the Catholic school curriculum marked the beginning of a ‘Catholic New Deal’.

Methods and Evidence: This paper draws on a number of archival sources including: the Iowa State University’s Department of Extension archives and personal papers in Ames, IA; the Monsignor Luigi G. Ligutti Papers and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference Records at Marquette University; and the Records of the Subsistence Homesteads Division at the National Archives in College Park, MD.

Conclusions/Warrants: I argue that the Subsistence Homesteads Division (SHD) shared with dozens of other New Deal agencies a belief in the transformative power of relocation and re-education as necessary and complementary tools for building and conserving a liberal capitalist order.

SHD also shared with other New Deal agencies a desire to conserve the contradiction at the heart of previous attempts to transform and reconstruct American society: white supremacy on the one hand and visions of social and economic cooperation on the other. Thus, when Rev. Luigi submitted the application for the Granger Subsistence Homesteads, he noted that the “[p]resent plan calls for exclusion of other than Caucasian race– but if this plan is approved an attempt will be made to organize a colored community on similar basis– with due consideration for their abilities and failings.”

Significance: While there has been some treatment of SHD in the historiography, it has largely focused on the SHD’s initial project at Arthurdale, West Virginia and its Deweyan-inspired school. But Granger’s inspiration and pedagogical orientation was different. To Ligutti, the American Catholic leadership in the Midwest, and the Catholic press, Granger represented grand possibilities: American Catholic families returning to the countryside (and leaving their urban ethnic enclaves)– under the sanction and protection of the federal government– in order to develop a new, modern, pan-European (read: white) Catholic community rooted in traditional ideas of land ownership, folk education, cooperative labor, and papally-defined notions of justice.

Author

• Michael Bowman, Iowa State University