I grew up with many vestiges of classic Americana. I was a Boy Scout for many years and even worked for two years as a counselor at Camp Glen Grey, a Boy Scout camp in Oakland, New Jersey). I played for two years in my high school marching band. When I was in junior high school, I even entered a Rotary Club speech contest. (I finished third and got a trophy.)

But I never was a member of a 4-H club.

That’s not surprising because when I was growing up, 4-H clubs were associated with farming and I don’t think there were many (if any) farmers in suburban Summit, New Jersey or the nearby communities.

But I’ve always known about 4-H. I’d read about it. I think we’d see 4-H displays when we went to county fairs, like the one in Sussex County where parents had a lake cottage. (That fair is where my father and I once saw a travelling knife salesman give an entire pitch that involved a complicated story involving a Chinese family called the “Dum Goys.”)

As a result, I’ve always thought of 4-H as a quintessentially American entity. That image is confirmed by the bucolic image on today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp, issued on January 15, 1952. Designed by Charles Chickering, a longtime federal employee who designed 77 stamps from the late 1940s until the early 1960s, it shows a (very) white teenage boy and girl as well as the 4-H logo with a bucolic farm scene in the background

The stamp officially honors the 50th anniversary of the founding of what supposedly was the first 4-H club, in Springfield, Ohio by A.B. Graham, the superintendent of schools in Clark County. Like similar entities sprang up in other midwestern rural communities in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Graham’s club – which was called either “The Tomato Club” or “The Corn Growing Club”- focused on activities (often developed in conjunction with state agricultural schools) that would teach better farming and homemaking practices and, in doing so, spur the adoption of new ideas that might otherwise be ignored by the club members’ parents.

The national 4-H organization was formed in 1914, when the US Congress created the Cooperative Extension Service (CES), which was supposed to help ensure that farmers know about and used new research findings. To help further this message, the law called on the CES to work with the growing number of boys’ and girls’ clubs involved with agriculture, home economics and related subjects. By the early 1920s, the various clubs had been organized as 4-H clubs, all using the clover logo.

The 4 H’s refer to head, heart, hands, and health and the 4-H pledge is that

“I pledge my head to clearer thinking,
my heart to greater loyalty,
my hands to larger service,
and my health to better living,
for my club, my community, my country, and my world.”

(“My world” was added in 1973)

The stamp itself was part of a subtle (or perhaps not very subtle) post-World War II change in topics on stamps. Before the war, the Red Cross appears to have been the only service, youth, or professional organization that had been portrayed on a stamp, which generally portrayed famous men, notable events, and national landmarks. For reasons I haven’t unearthed, that changed in 1948 when the Post Office issued stamps honoring, among other things, Volunteer Firemen, the Centennial of American Poultry Industry, Girl Scouts founder Juliette Low; Red Cross founder Clara Barton, and Moina Mitchell, who started the movement of wearing red poppies to honor veterans.

1949 brought a stamp – issued over the Post Office’s objections at the insistence of a persistent member of Congress – honoring the 100th anniversary of the “American Turners Society,” a German-American group that promoted gymnastics and fitness. And that appeared to confirm that lobbying and Congressional pressure could secure the apparently desirable honor of appearing on a postage stamp. So 1950 brought a stamp honoring the Boy Scouts and another honoring railroad engineers, which led a few years later to one honoring truckers who were angry about the railroad stamp.

The 4-H stamp, apparently, was issued in response to a campaign launched by leaders and supporters of 4-H clubs in Clark County, who claimed (with little evidence) to have been the nation’s first 4-H club. Their cause was taken up by Congressman Clarence J. Brown, a conservative Republican whose district included the county.

Brown, who died in 1965, apparently was no slouch. In the 1950s and 1960s he was the ranking Republican on the Rules Committee; and he supposedly was friends with Sam Rayburn, the powerful speaker of the House.

Oddly, while the 4-H stamp strikes me as an almost iconic-representation of mid-century whiteness (perhaps, what some people might argue was the time when America was “great”), Brown turns out to have been an early and important advocate of civil rights. In 1940, for example, he spoke in favor of a federal anti-lynching bill, an often proposed measure that was regularly defeated by southern Democrats.

In words that are still powerful today, he said: “We hear much of the struggle throughout the world to maintain democracy. From the lips of those who oppose this measure comes…at other times…the loudest protestations of belief in democracy. Let me say, here and now, that if democracy is to continue to live throughout the world, and here in our beloved America, those of us who have the ability and power to do so must see to it that the full rights of the weak and defenseless are safeguarded against the violence and the intolerance of the strong and the mighty.”

And in the 1960s, near the end of his life, Brown checked out of the hospital to help force votes on landmark civil rights legislation that had been bottled up in the Rules Committee by its chairman, Howard W. Smith of Virginia.

That’s a long way from the rabbits, cows, and canned goods that I associate with 4-H clubs, which apparently now focus more on citizenship, healthy living, science, engineering, and technology programs, and have the motto “to make the best better” as well as the slogan is “learn by doing” (sometimes written as “learn to do by doing”).

Still, there wasn’t any 4-H club (that I know of) in suburban Lexington, MA where I now live. So it continues to be a piece of Americana that I’ve always known about but never really encountered.

Be well, stay safe, pledge your head to clearer thinking and your hands to larger service, fight for justice, and work for peace.