LSA News

No. 59, November 2004

Dreaming at My Desk

(story continued)

A quick search on the web reveals that various universities and land-grant colleges provide some kind of access either to these advertisements or to the building plans themselves. North Dakota State University Extension Service has some plans available using pdf files. Very handy. And some of the pages I'm calling advertisements themselves have what look like very complete instructions and detailed drawings and might suffice for an experienced carpenter.

Aside from the amusement and day-dreaming value, and, in the case of some titles, the aid to my afternoon nap-time, I've learned a lot about our parents' and grandparents' past social and physical environment from cataloging these titles. For example, the various pamphlets concerning soil erosion with their amazing photos of huge gullies and cracks in what once was productive farmland were a real eye-opener! Never fear, the USDA had advice and help for farmers hoping to avoid this. (Would you have known that plowing patterns made a difference to soil erosion?) There are also pamphlets on mending clothing (does anyone do this anymore?), a group tomato-canning Extension project, and the best way to lay out your kitchen, garden, or dress pattern.

One pamphlet that particularly struck me with the difference between 1940 and 2004 was Questions and answers on the Cotton Mattress Program. That's because in our extremely affluent society full of cars, cell phones, TVs, and refrigerators, it often doesn't occur to us how much small, taken-for-granted things actually do make a difference in people's lives. When it does occur to us, our tendency is to supply the finished item to fill the want. What with today's updated safety codes, different materials and techniques, lack of practical manual arts training for many of us, and plentiful re-sale venues, when someone in need lacks a mattress or a bed, I'm guessing we would be most likely to give them a mattress—not to teach them to make one! But that's just what the Cotton Mattress Program begun in February 1940 did.

The pamphlet says the program is designed "to supply cotton materials for making mattresses to rural families whose economic condition prevents them from purchasing the mattresses needed in their homes". It also is part of a "move to expand the use of cotton and thus help reduce the cotton surplus". Lastly, "the mattress program provides demonstrations through which rural people learn how to make cotton mattresses and otherwise improve their homes". Mattresses were made in community work centers with the instruction and help of home demonstration experts and trained mattress-makers. Each family could receive materials for up to three double-bed-sized mattresses, depending on family size.

For the price of their time laboring on this project, men and women could gain skills they could use on other projects, while helping dispose of a surplus of cotton, and providing for a physical need (and also, one imagines, for a "moral" need—fewer people sharing a bed).

OK, everyone who's ever heard of this in their history books, raise your hands.

Right. Yet according to a letter from an Extension Service official over 10,000 mattresses were made within a five-month period! That didn't exactly have the kind of direct effect on the world as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but it's the background to the lives of ordinary people living through what we think of as "history". My imagination takes off here, wondering if maybe someone who got a better night's sleep as a kid because of this program went on to do wonderful things in the world….if maybe a marriage was saved because the kids could sleep in their own beds….if a man was able to keep farming day after day dust-filled day because he slept well at night….if a woman was able to gain skills that served her when she became widowed? It seems to me that these "little" things have an impact that ripples out imperceptibly through the generations.

I like to time-travel, and thanks to the Miscellaneous publications of the USDA I've visited rural 20th-century America this summer. Between Adequate diets for families with limited incomes, Pine-tree treasures, and Family expenditures for education, reading, recreation, and tobacco it's been quite the excursion.

Return to LSA Newsletter