CHAPTER IV

THE INNER LIFE OF THE AMERICAN FARMER

I recently asked a German economist if he could tell me the best books to read upon the problem of rural life in Germany. His reply was: "There are no books, because there is no problem." It is generally true, no doubt, that the Rural Life problem, in so far as it consists in the subordination of the country to the town, is peculiar to the English-speaking countries, where it seems to be mainly attributable to three causes. The chief of these was no doubt the Industrial Revolution in England, of which enough has already been said. Secondly, in the United States and in some portions of the British Empire, the opening up of vast tracts of virgin soil led not unnaturally to the postponement of social development until the pioneer farmers had settled down to the new life. The third cause was immunity from the danger of foreign invasion, which eliminated the military reasons for maintaining a numerous, virile, and progressive rural population.

There are many in England who regret that it should have been forgotten how the English owed their commercial supremacy to the fighting qualities of the old yeoman class. In the United States it should be remembered that nowadays peace strength is quite as important as war strength, and it may be questioned whether there can be any sustained industrial efficiency where the great body of workers who conduct the chief--the only absolutely necessary--industry are wasting the resources at their command by bad husbandry. We may, however, concede that the neglect of rural life is much easier to explain and excuse in the United States than in the older English-speaking countries. Quite apart from the abundance of agricultural resources which the American farmers enjoy, it might well be thought that the rural communities are keeping pace with the progress of urban civilisation. The citizens who now occupy the farm lands of the United States have been largely drawn from the pick of the European peasantries. In the days of their coming, it took courage and enterprise to face the now almost forgotten terrors of the Atlantic Ocean. These immigrants, and the migrants from the Eastern States, have profited enormously by their change of residence. Their material well-being has already been admitted, and, with rare exceptions, they have displayed no overt symptoms of agrarian discontent.

It must not, however, be imagined that the apparent apathy of American farmers is due to contentment. Like others of their calling, they keep a full stock of grievances in their mental stores. They have very definite opinions as to what is wrong, but to these opinions no formal expression is given. They vaguely feel that they would like to remould "the sorry scheme of things entire," but they lack the public spirit which is required before concerted action can be taken successfully. The Country Life Commission held a series of conferences throughout the United States, which brought them into the closest touch with every type of American farm life. They received written replies from some 125,000 rural folk to whom they had sent a circular with a dozen questions covering the essential heads of inquiry. The Commissioners say in their report: "We have found by the testimony, not only of the farmers themselves, but of all persons in touch with farm life, more or less serious unrest in every part of the United States, even in the most prosperous regions."

The truth is that, while judged by the standard of living of European peasantries, the farmers of the United States are prosperous, in comparison with the other citizens of the most progressive country in the world they are not well-off. Their accumulation of material wealth is unnaturally and unnecessarily restricted; their social life is barren; their political influence is relatively small. American farmers have been used by politicians, but have still to learn how to use them. This may be due to the fact that my countrymen elected to devote their genius for organisation to the problems of city government. And in the sphere of private action they are, as will be seen when I discuss the need for a reorganisation of their business, even less effective than in public affairs.

It will be conceded that any hopeful plan to put things right will have to rely upon the organised efforts of those immediately concerned. Both in the sphere of governmental action, and in the vastly more important field of voluntary effort, the moving force will have to be public opinion. But the thought of the farming communities has long ago joined the rural exodus; and before the country life idea can find expression in an effective country life movement, those who are thinking out the problem will have to commend their arguments to the thought of the towns. Therefore I address these pages, not to farmers only, but to the general reader--who, I may observe, does not generally read if he happens to live in the open country.

In the course of my own studies of American rural life I have found it convenient to divide the United States into four sections, each of them more or less homogeneous. As this method of treatment may help my readers, I will give them a look at my map of American rural life. The four sections may be called the North Eastern, the Middle Western, the Southern, and the Far Western. The division has no pretensions to be scientific; the boundaries can be adjusted to fit in with the experience of each reader.

In my North Eastern section I include the New England States, New York, New Jersey, and most of Pennsylvania. This is a section where manufacturing communities have long been established, where migration from country to town has been most marked, and where the competition of the newly settled Western farm lands has been followed by effects upon agricultural society very similar to those produced by the same causes in many a rural community on the Continent of Europe. Second comes the Middle Western section, consisting mainly of the Mississippi Valley, with its vast area of high average fertility, the greatest food-producing tract on the continent. Third, I place the Southern section, where the governing factors in rural economy are the climate, the numerical strength of the colored population, the two staple industrial crops--cotton and tobacco--the comparatively recent abolition of slavery, and the long-drawn-out effects of the Civil War. My fourth division, the Far Western section, includes the ranching lands of the arid belt with their irrigation oases, and the fruit-growing and farming lands of the Pacific Coast.

As we are discussing the problem chiefly in its human aspect, which affects alike communities wealthy and impoverished, large and small, old-settled and newly established, it will not matter essentially where we first direct our attention for the purpose of illustration. But if, as I hold, nothing less than a reconstruction of rural civilisation is called for, our inquiries will be more profitably directed to those sections where agricultural society is permanently established, or where the rural population might abandon the migratory habit if the conditions were more favorable to an advanced civilisation. At the present stage I feel that the whole subject can be most profitably discussed in its application to the Middle Western and the Southern sections. Here the intimate relationship of the Conservation and the Country Life ideas is best illustrated. Here, too, we get into touch with the problem at its two extremes of prosperity and poverty, each in its own way retarding the progress of rural civilisation. In both sections the conditions are typical, and distinctively American.

Let us then consider first the general course of rural civilisation in the great food-producing tract of the Middle West. I have in my mind the portion I know best, the last-settled part of the corn belt. Thirty years ago I saw something of the newcomers who settled in this section, where there was still much raw land. These settlers, knowing that the land must rise rapidly in value, almost invariably purchased much larger farms than they could handle. They often sank their available working capital in making the first payments for their land, and went heavily into debt for the balance. They became "land poor," and, in order to meet the instalments of purchase and the high interest on their mortgages, they invented a system of farming unprecedented in its wastefulness. The farm was treated as a mine, or, to use Mr. James J. Hill's metaphor, as a bank where the depositors are always taking out more than they put in. A corn crop, year after year, without rotation or fertilisers, satisfied the new conception of husbandry--the easiest and least costly extraction of the wealth in the soil. Land, labour, capital, and ability I had been taught to regard as the essentials of production; but here capital was reduced to the minimum, and ability left to nature. Many of the young men who took Horace Greeley's advice and went West knew nothing about farming. I remember writing home that I was in a country where the rolling stone gathered most moss. Possibly the method adopted was the quickest way to get rich; living on capital is all right provided somebody will replace the squandered resources. While there were ample unoccupied lands, Uncle Sam looked kindly upon these enterprising pioneers. It was only in the second Roosevelt Administration that it dawned upon the national conscience that the nation had some claim to be considered as well as the individual. Of course all this is changed now; although I am not sure that western Canada is not being educated in soil exhaustion by some of these extemporised husbandmen whose habits and temperament lead them to seek "fresh fields and pastures new." "We are not out here for our health," was the reply I got when I showed that my old-fashioned economic sense was shocked by this substitution of land speculation for farming.

I am aware that this very uneconomic procedure is capable of some plausible explanations. The opening up of the vast new territory by the provision of local traffic for transcontinental lines was an object of national urgency and importance. Nevertheless, I think it must now be regretted that a little more thought was not given to the general problem of rural economy, of which transit is but one factor. This may be that irritating kind of wisdom which comes after the event, but I cannot help regarding the policy of rewarding railroad enterprises with unconditional grants of vast areas of agricultural land as one of the many evidences of the urban domination over rural affairs.

Of the earlier settled portions of this section I cannot speak from personal knowledge. But a recent magazine article,[3] "The Agrarian Revolution in the Middle West," follows closely the line of my own thoughts. In this article Mr. Joseph B. Ross, of Lafayette, Indiana, who is making a special study of the evolution of American rural life, considers it in three periods: from 1800 to 1835, from 1835 to 1890, and from 1890 to the present time. In the middle period he shows how the most progressive families raised their standard of living steadily with the growing prosperity of the country. They built themselves stately homes with substantial barns. The farmer was developing into a citizen with the solid virtues, the virile independence, the strong political opinions, religious interest, and social instincts which characterised the English yeoman of the preceding century. The social life which these communities built up, as soon as their economic position was assured, was a reflection of the best English traditions--it centred round the churches and the Sunday-school. There was a growing distribution of literature as well as organisation for intellectual, educational and social purposes. Mr. Ross notes the winter excursions to Florida and California, the adornment of the homes, and many other evidences of a social progress developing a character of its own. During this period there was a migration from the country homes to the cities; but it was only the natural outflow of the surplus members of the rural families into the professional and business life of the growing centres of commerce and industry.

In the period through which we are now passing a transformation is taking place. The rural exodus is no longer that of individuals, but of whole families. The farms thus vacated are let to tenants, generally on a three years' lease, at a competition rent. The Country Life Commission says that this tendency to move to the cities "is not peculiar to any region. In difficult farming regions, and where the competition with other farming sections is most severe, the young people may go to town to better their condition. In the best regions the older people retire to town because it is socially more attractive, and they see a prospect of living in comparative ease and comfort on the rental of their lands. Nearly everywhere there is a townward movement for the purpose of securing school advantages for the children. All this tends to sterilize the open country and to lower its social status." The Commission points out that the new addition of what is likely to be a stationary element, whose economic interests lie elsewhere, to the citizenship of the town, may create there a new social problem, while the tenant in the country will not have that interest in building up rural society which might be expected in the owners of land. Mr. Ross's studies lead him very definitely to the same conclusion. Churches and educational institutions, he tells us, are being starved, and rural society is fast reverting to the type which was prevalent from thirty to fifty years ago. But there is one great difference between then and now. Then, rural civilisation was passing through a stage of marked social advancement which was common throughout the country; now, there are distinct indications of social degeneration, which Mr. Ross regards as the inevitable consequence of the new landlord and tenant system. Many members of these communities must have left the Old World to escape from the selfsame conditions which they are reproducing in the New.

Rural society in the Middle West, as it presents itself to the observer whose authority I have cited, is obviously in a transitional stage. The lack of farm labourers, which is the common subject of complaint by farmers in all parts of the United States, cannot fail to be aggravated by the change in the conditions of tenancy just noted. The man whose chief concern is to get the most out of the land, at the least expense, in two or three years, will not treat his labourers so well--nor the land so well--as will the man who means to spend his life on the farm; and therefore the labourers will not stay. This scarcity of labour may be met to some extent by an increased use of machinery; but it is more likely to lead to poorer cultivation, which means the depopulation of agricultural districts. England and Ireland furnish too many examples of the rural decay immortalised in Goldsmith's "Deserted Village." It would be strange and sad if the experience were to be repeated on the richest soil of America.

In the Southern section we find a wastefulness similar to that in the corn belt, but due to wholly different causes. The communities are old-settled, but in many instances they are still abnormally depressed by the terrible effects of the great war, followed by a period of social and economic stagnation. Here there was little but agriculture for the people to rely upon, and their methods have, until recent years, been very backward. The growing of the same crops year after year upon the same fields, the neglect of precaution against the washing away of the soil surface, and the failure to use fertilisers, have made the profits of tillage disappointingly small. Billions of dollars have been lost by these communities through persistent soil exhaustion and erosion. In the last few years the Federal Department of Agriculture has maintained a most efficient staff of agricultural experts under the direction of Dr. Knapp, one of the ablest organisers of farm improvement I have ever met. The General Education Board, who administer large sums provided by Mr. Rockefeller, recognising the educational value of Dr. Knapp's operations, are contributing about one hundred thousand dollars a year to his work. Dr. Knapp and his field agents have no difficulty at all in demonstrating that the yield may be doubled, and the cost of production greatly reduced, merely by the application of the most elementary science to agriculture. I heard him tell of a farmer whom he had induced to allow his boy--still attending school--to cultivate one acre under his instructions. In the result the boy quadrupled the number of bushels of corn to the acre that his father, following the traditional methods, was able to raise. It would be easy to multiply such instances of thriftlessness and neglected opportunity, of poverty within easy reach of abundance, which have brought it about that the future of the nation is actually endangered by the failure of the food supply to keep pace with the increase of its still relatively sparse population.

The Southern section furnishes two illustrations of long-standing neglect, both well worthy of consideration for their pregnant suggestiveness. The Federal Department of Agriculture recently scored a notable success in dealing with an insect pest which was threatening the cotton-growing industry with economic ruin. The boll-weevil, like the legal and medical professions, thrives upon the follies of humanity. It attacks the cotton plants which have been weakened by bad husbandry. The scientists did not succeed in finding in the commonwealth of bugs the natural enemy of the pest they were after, but Dr. Knapp, with the wisdom which prefers prevention to cure, seized the opportunity of teaching cotton-growers to diversify their cultivation. The consequence was that the cotton crop itself is gradually responding to the treatment. Many other crops are adding their quota to the produce of the Southern farms, and an all-round improvement, moral as well as material, is accompanying the educational discipline through which this reformer is putting the communities with whom and for whom he is working.

There is another pest in the South which does not attack the farm crops, but goes straight for the farmer. If the Country Life Commission had done nothing more, they would have justified their appointment by the attention they called to the ravages of the hookworm, which have, no one knows how long, scourged the poor white communities in the Southern States. The effect of the disease set up by the hookworm, which infests the intestines, is a complete sapping of all energy, mental and physical. Mr. Rockefeller has provided a million dollars for the necessary research work and for such subsequent organisation of sanitary effort as may be required to extirpate this unquestionably preventable evil. I wonder how long such a state of affairs would have been permitted to interfere with the health and to paralyse the industry of urban communities. Had the hookworm, instead of lurking in country lanes, walked the streets, how would it have fared?

These two pests furnish a fine illustration of the length to which the neglect of rural life has been allowed to go in the Southern States.

Neither the Eastern nor the Far Western section presents aspects of special interest to the foreign student of the Rural problem in the United States, but in both the constructive statesman and the social worker will find a rich field for their efforts. In the New England States--more especially in the manufacturing districts--the competition between town and country for labour is as marked as in Industrial England. In this section, however, the lure of the city has a rival in the call of the West, which still makes its appeal to the farmer's boy. Secretary Wilson has recently given it as his opinion that land-seekers who pass by the farms now offered for sale in the western portions of New York State often go further and fare worse. In these relatively low-priced lands, it ought not to be difficult for agricultural communities to establish permanently a rural society worthy of American ideas of progress. But to do this is to solve the problem we are discussing. We have some other aspects of that problem to consider before we can agree upon the essentials of a philosophic and comprehensive scheme for the rehabilitation of rural life--before we can lay down the lines of a movement to give effect to our plan.

The Far Western section has hardly yet emerged from the frontier-pioneer stage, and its rural problem is still below the horizon. I may, however, note in passing a few evidences that the people of this section have already shown a very real concern for rural progress. The fruit-growers of the Pacific Coast have, in the cooperative marketing of their produce, made an excellent beginning in a matter of first importance in any scheme of rural development. On irrigation farm lands there has been developed, in connection with the upkeep and control of the water systems, a community spirit which will surely lead to many forms of organisation for mutual economic and social advantage. In the city of Spokane, Washington, the Chamber of Commerce has aroused a public interest in the work of the Country Life Commission which, so far as my information goes, has not been equalled elsewhere in the United States. The Chamber is republishing the Report of the Commission, for which no Federal appropriation appears to have been made. It would seem to be a not wild speculation that the statesmen and social workers who will first solve the rural problem of the English-speaking peoples may be found in the Far West of the New World as well as of the Old.

I must now conclude the diagnosis of rural decadence by a consideration of what in my judgment is the chief cause of the malady, and so get to a point where we can determine the nature of the remedy. It will then remain only to sketch the outlines of the movement which is to give practical effect to the agreed principles in the life of rural communities.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] _North American Review_, September, 1909.