Editing Liberty Hyde Bailey (section)

==Agrarian ideology==
Bailey represented an [[agrarianism]] that stood in the tradition of [[Thomas Jefferson]]. He had a vision of suffusing all higher education, including horticulture, with a spirit of public work and integrating "expert knowledge" into a broader context of democratic community action.<ref>Stephen L. Elkin, Karol Edward Sołtan: [https://books.google.com/books?id=-mq4m4MgJ7IC&pg=PA272 ''Citizen competence and democratic institutions''] p. 272. Penn State Press, 1999. {{ISBN|978-0-271-01816-4}}</ref> As a leader of the [[Country Life Movement]], he strove to preserve the American [[rural]] civilization, which he thought was a vital and wholesome alternative to the impersonal and corrupting city life. In contrast to other [[progressivism|progressive]] thinkers at the time, he endorsed the family, which, he recognized, played a unique role in socialization. Especially the [[family farm]] had a benign influence as a natural cooperative unit where everybody had real duties and responsibilities. The independence it fostered made farmers "a natural correction against organization men, habitual reformers, and extremists". It was necessary to uphold fertility in order to maintain the welfare of future generations.<ref name=Carlson>Allan C Carlson: [https://books.google.com/books?id=2ii4AnrkK8IC&pg=PA25 ''The New Agrarian Mind''] Chapter 1 "Toward a New Rural Civilization: Liberty Hyde Bailey"</ref>

According to Bailey, the American rural population, however, was backward, ignorant and saddled with inadequate institutions. The key to his reform program was guidance by an educated elite toward a new social order. The [[Cooperative extension service|Extension System]] was partly pioneered by Bailey. The grander design of a new rural social structure needed a philosophical vision that could inspire and motivate. Bailey proposed a Society of the Holy Earth in his book, ''The Holy Earth'' (1915). He envisioned farmers and others rising to the task of stewardship of the land, forests, oceans and all creation. ''The Holy Earth'' has been recognized as an early text of ecological theology.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Bailey |first=Liberty H. |title=The Holy Earth: The Birth of a New Land Ethic, edited by John Linstrom |publisher=Counterpoint |year=2015 |isbn=9781619025875 |location=Berkeley, California}}</ref>

Bailey's real legacy was, according to [[Allan C. Carlson]], the themes and direction that he gave the new agrarian movement, ideas very different from previous agrarian thought. He saw technological innovation as friendly to the family farm and inevitably resulting in decentralization. He was scornful of the actual forms of peasant life and wanted to transform it by cutting the farmers loose from "the slavery of old restraints". Parochial and communal social groups should be broken down and replaced by "inter–neighborhood" and "inter–community" groups, while new leaders would be called in "who will promote inclusive rather than exclusive sociability." Bailey and his followers held a quasi–religious faith in education by enlightened experts, which meant suppression of inherited ways and substitution by progressive ways. It was accompanied by a corresponding hostility to traditional religion.<ref name=Carlson />

Bailey's simultaneous embrace of the rural civilization and of technological progress had been based on a denial of the possibility of [[overproduction]] of farm products. When that became a reality in the 1920s, he turned to a "new economics" that would give farmers special treatment. Finally, after desperately toying with [[Communism]], he had to choose between fewer farmers and farm families and restraint on technology or production. He chose to preserve technology rather than the family farms. After this, he retreated from the Country Life movement into scientific study.<ref name=Carlson />

Bailey's influence on modern American Agrarianism remains determinative. The inherent contradictions of his ideas have been equally persistent: the tension between real farmers and rural people and the Country Life campaign; difficulties to understand the operative economic forces; the reliance on state schools to safeguard family farms; and hostility to traditional Christian faith.<ref name=Carlson />