ABSTRACT
As America's best-known plant scientist and as an innovative university administrator, Liberty Hyde Bailey left a large mark on his nation. In addition, for a critical twenty-five years of his life, Bailey focused his energies on building an Agrarianism fit for the twentieth century. From 1903 to 1928, he campaigned to craft a new rural civilization, one that could weather the economic and social storms that had shaken American agriculture during the prior thirty years. With a remarkably fertile mind and a prolific pen, Bailey created the Country Life movement. While many other well-known Americans—from Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Wallace—joined in this campaign, its leading historian concludes that Bailey "looms largest during the opening decades of the twentieth century". But ironically, Bailey would also guide this pattern of thought into paths that rejected the only forms of rural community and home reconstruction that proved able to meet the modernist challenge.
