The Evolution of the Country Community Part 2

The development of the high schools has generally resulted in the abandonment of the academies. A few have survived and have adapted themselves to new times. But it is to be doubted whether the common schools have so far done as much for building and for organizing country communities, for providing local leadership, for building churches, as did the rural academies of New England, Pennsylvania and other Eastern States.

The farmer's church is the cla.s.sic American type of church at its best.

The farming economy succeeded to the pioneer economy without serious break. The troubles of the country church have their beginnings in the period of the exploiter which is to follow, but the farmer developed the church of the pioneer with sympathy and consistency. The church of the farmer still values personal salvation above all. The revival methods and the simplicity of doctrine have remained, but the farmer has added typical methods of his own.

The effect of this individualism is exhibited in the multiplication of churches among farmers. So long as it is admitted that the church is for personal salvation, it does not need to be a social inst.i.tution. A small group is as effective as a large one for securing salvation for individuals. Two churches or three may as well serve a community as one, if personal salvation be the service rendered. The gospel is for the farmer good tidings,--not a call to social service. The result of the farmer period has been, therefore, the multiplication of compet.i.tive country churches. An instance of this compet.i.tive condition is: the community in Kansas in which among four hundred people resident in a field, there are seven churches, each of them attempting to maintain a resident pastor. In Centre County, Pa., in a radius of four miles from a given point, there are twenty-four country churches. In the same territory within a radius of three miles are sixteen of these country churches. This condition is satisfactory to the ideals of the farmer. If the farmer type were permanent these churches might serve permanently for the ministry of personal salvation. They are well attended by devout and religious-minded people. Their condemnation is not in the farmer economy but in the inevitable coming of the exploiter and the husbandman with their different experience and different type of mind.

In this period the minister frequently is himself a tiller of the soil.

Many of the older churches had land, ten or twenty or forty acres, which the minister was expected to till, and from it to secure a part of his living. A church at Cranberry, N. J., had a farm of one hundred acres until the close of the nineteenth century. But with the coming of the exploiter and the husbandman the minister ceases to be an agriculturist.

Like unto the tillage of the soil by the minister was the "donation" to the minister, of vegetables, corn, honey and other farm products. At one time this filled a large place in the supply of the minister's living.

In various communities the custom has remained with fine tenacity in the presentation to the minister of portions of farm produce throughout the year. But the portions so given are fewer, as years pa.s.s, and the total quant.i.ty small. The donation of vegetables and farm produce has survived in but a few places. The modes of life which succeeded to the farmer economy are dependent on cash for the distribution of values, and the "donation," if it remain at all, is a gift of money. Frequently the "donation" has survived as a social gathering, being perpetuated in one of its functions only, its earlier purposes and its essential form being forgotten.

The church of the land farmer corresponded by logical social causation to the social economy of this type. It was seated with family pews generally rented by the family group and sometimes owned in fee. In the South the slave-holding churches, which have all pa.s.sed away, had galleries for the slaves, who worshipped thus under the same roof with their masters. The preaching of this period was directed to the development of group life. Its ethical standards were those of the household group, in which private property in land, domestic morality, filial and domestic experiences furnished the stimuli.

The land-farmer's church had some organizations to correspond to the differences in social life. The presence of the children in the family group is represented in the Sunday schools and parochial schools built during this period. The schools are in many cases highly organized, with separate recognition of infancy, adolescence and middle life. In Protestant churches the particular concerns of women and the religious service rendered by them take form in women's societies in the churches, mostly charitable and missionary.

Finally, at the close of the land-farmer period, about 1890, there sprang up the young people's societies, which in the ten closing years of the land-farmer period reached a membership of hundreds of thousands among the Protestant churches. These societies of young people were organized in the churches to correspond to the growing self-consciousness among adolescent members of the land-farmer's household. The young men and women in the maturing of the family group came to have a life of their own. As frequently happens, the family group reached its highest development and perfection just before it was to pa.s.s away.

The church of the land-farmer is the typical Protestant church of the United States. So influential has the farmer been in national life that organized religion has idealized his type of church. It has been transported to villages and towns. It has become the type of church most frequent in the cities.

Nearly all the Protestant churches in New York City are land-farmer churches; "and that," says a noted city pastor, "is what ails them."[6]

This church centers its activities in preaching, rents or a.s.signs its pews to families, and organizes societies for the various factors of the family group. It has Sunday schools, women's, men's and young people's societies, with only one minister to supervise them all.

The transformation of this type of church, so deeply rooted in the idealism of the whole people, into a church better suited to city, factory, town and mining settlement, has been the problem for Protestant bodies to solve in the past twenty years. The beginning of this transformation, it is striking to observe, came at the end of the land-farmer period, about 1890.

The land-farmer, then, whose period according to Prof. Ross, extended from 1835 to 1890 in the Middle West, is the best known agricultural type. He is the typical countryman as the countryman is imagined in the cities and recorded in our literature. It has been the American hope that he should be the land-owner of the days to come. In East Tennessee the farmer is still the type of landowner in country communities. In some portions of Michigan and Minnesota the farmer type gives character to the whole population, but generally throughout the country the processes described by Prof. Ross have undermined the integrity of the farmer type and broken his hold upon leadership of the country population. Within the last two decades, since 1890, the farmer has been gradually discouraged and has realized that his economy is not suited to survive. The most representative farming communities today are those of Scotch or Scotch-Irish people, whose instinctive tenacity, their "clannishness," has perpetuated longer than in other instances the rural economy and the country community.

In using the term land-farmer I am aware of its close resemblance to the term exploiter. The word itself points to exploitation of land. The land farmer has used the raw materials of the country. He has tilled the soil until its fertility was exhausted and then moved on to the newer regions of the West, again to farm and to exploit the virgin riches of a plenteous land. The planter in the South, possessing frequently more than a thousand acres, was accustomed to till a portion of one hundred, two hundred or four hundred acres, until its fertility had been exhausted. Then he moved his slaves to another section, cleared the land and cultivated it until its power to produce had also been exhausted.

The difference between land-farming and exploitation is the absence of speculation in land in the former period.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote 6: Rev. Charles Stelzle.]

III

THE EXPLOITER

The third type in American agriculture is the exploiter. Between the farmer and the husbandman there is an economic revolution. In fact the exploiter himself is a transition type between the farmer and the husbandman. "The fundamental problem in American economics always has been that of the distribution of land," says Prof. Ross. The exploiter is, I presume, a temporary economic type, created in the period of re-distribution of land. The characteristic of the exploiter is his commercial valuation of all things. He is the man who sees only the value of money.

It was natural that with the maturing of an American population, the exploitation of the natural resources should come. We have exploited the forest, removing the timber from the hills and making out of its vast resources a few fortunes. We wasted in the process nine-tenths for every one-tenth of wealth acc.u.mulated by the exploiter. We have exploited the coal and iron and other minerals. The exploitation of the oil deposits and natural gas reservoirs has been a national experience and a national scandal. The tendency to exploit every opportunity for private wealth has characterized the past two decades.[7]

There are those who exploit the child vitality of the families of working people, and the States have put legal checks in the way of child labor. The exploitation of the labor of women has gone so far as to threaten the vitality of the generation to be born, and laws have been pa.s.sed which forbid the employment of women except within limits. The ethical discussion of the past decade is largely a keen a.n.a.lysis of the methods of exploitation of resources, of men and of communities, and an attempt to fix the bounds of the exploitation of values for private wealth.

There are those who exploit the farm. "Farms which from the original entry until 1890 had been owned by the same family, or which had changed owners but once or twice, and whose owners were proud to a.s.sert that their broad acres had never been enc.u.mbered with mortgages, since 1890 have been sold, in some instances as often as ten times, in more numerous instances four or five times, and a large part of the purchase price is secured by enc.u.mbering the estates!"[8]

Agriculture, especially of the Middle West, is affected in all its parts by the exploitation of land. To a traveller from the Eastern States, the selling and re-selling of farm land, without fertilization or improvement by any of the successive owners, is a source of amazement.

"The new lands opened under the Homestead act of half a century ago were often exploited for temporary profit by soil robbers who were experts of their kind. Owing to such farm management, the yield of the acre in the United States gradually decreased. Very little intensive farming was done."[9]

The commercial exploitation of land dissolves every permanent factor in the farm economy. The country community of the land-farmer type is being undermined and is crumbling away under the influence of exploitation.

The pioneers were a Westward emigration, pushing Westward the boundaries of the country at the rate of fifty miles in a decade; but since 1890 emigration has been eastward, and it is made up of farmers who move to ever cheaper and cheaper lands to the East, the tide of higher prices coming from the West. Already in central Illinois the values of land seem to have reached the high water mark. About Galesburg "the Swedes have got hold of the land and they will not sell." Among the last recorded sales in this district were some at prices between two hundred and two hundred fifty dollars per acre.

It is not generally understood that this exploitation of farm lands has extended over nearly the whole country. Its spread is increasingly rapid in the last two years. In the Gulf States and the Carolinas and in Tennessee and Kentucky prices of farm land have increased in the last five years from twenty-five to one hundred per cent. Even in the most conservative counties in Pennsylvania the prices of farm land have increased twenty to twenty-five per cent.

The sign of this exploitation is a rapid increase in the market values of farm land, due to frequent sale and purchase. This increase is independent of any increase in essential value to the farmer. The net income of the farmer may have been increased only five per cent, as in the State of Indiana, whereas the values of farm land have increased in the same period more than one hundred per cent. That is, the speculative increases have been twenty times as much as the agricultural increase.

Along with this change in farm values goes the increase or decrease in the number of tenant farmers and the shifting of the ownership of land to farm landlords. In some parts of the country this exploitation has taken a purely speculative form. In all parts it is speculative in character, but in some sections of the country the exploiters are themselves farmers and the process is imposed upon the farmers themselves by economic causes. This is true of the Illinois and Indiana lands, which are under the influence of a system of drainage, but there are other portions of the country in which the process is chiefly speculative. In some Western States the exploitation of farm land is in the hands of speculators themselves, doing real estate business purely as a matter of trade. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute a process so general as this one to the power exerted by a cla.s.s of real estate agents. Its causes are deeper than the commercial process. They go into the very roots of modern life. This should be clearly understood, because when frankly realized it compels the adjustment of social, educational and religious work to the period of exploitation.

The effect of this process is upon all the life of country people. It has created its own cla.s.s of men. There was no intention in the mind of earlier Americans that we should ever have a tenant cla.s.s in America.

The a.s.sumption on which all our ideals are built has been that we would be a land-owning people, but we are confronted with a tenantry problem as difficult as any in the world. The process of exploiting land has added to the social and economic life of the country the farm landlord, whose influence upon the immediate future of the American country community, church and school, in all sections will be great, and in many communities will be dominating.

The exploitation of land has produced the retired farmer. He is a pure example of the weakness of the exploiter economy. Originally he was a homesteader, or perhaps a purchaser of cheap land in the early days. He expected not to remain a farmer, but hoped for removal to the East or to a college town. The motives which animated him were varied, but among them none was so prominent as a desire for better education than was provided for his children in the country community of the farmer type.

So that at forty or fifty years of age he seized an opportunity to sell his land, as the prices were rising, and retired to the town with a cash fortune for investment.

Immediately the economic forces to which he had submitted himself made of him a new type, for the retired farmer in the Middle West is a characteristic type of the leading towns and cities. Some whole streets in large centers are peopled with retired farmers. The civic policies of scores of small munic.i.p.alities are controlled in a measure by them, so that journalists, religious leaders, reformers and politicians have very clear-cut opinions as to the value of the retired farmer.

The a.n.a.lysis of this situation is as follows. While the land which he sold continued to increase in value, his small fortune began to diminish in value. The interest on his money has been less every ten years; whereas he formerly could loan at first for six and sometimes seven per cent, he cannot loan safely now for more than five or six per cent.

Meantime the prices of all things he has to buy are expressed in cash,--no longer in kind as on the farm; and these cash prices are growing. In the past decade they have almost doubled. This means that he is a poorer man. His money has a diminished purchasing power and he has a smaller yearly income.

In addition to this, his wants, and the wants of the members of the family are increased two or three times. They cannot live as they lived on the farm. They cannot dress as they dressed in the country. The pressure of these increasing economic wants, demanding to be satisfied out of a diminished income, with higher prices for the things to be purchased, keeps the retired farmer a poor man. The result is that the retired farmer is opposed to every step of progress in the growing town in which he lives. He opposes every increase of taxation and fights every a.s.sessment. He dreads a subscription list and hates to hear of contributions. Although an intelligent and pious man, he has come to be an obstacle to the building of libraries, churches and schools and opposed to all humane and missionary activities. He is suffering from a great economic mistake.

Before leaving the exploiter it is to be said he also has his church.

The exploiter has built no community. He has contributed the retired farmer to the large towns and small cities of the Middle West. It is natural, therefore, that few exploiter churches are found in the country. But in the larger centers there are churches whose doctrine and methods are those of the exploiter. Indeed, at the present time the exploiter's doctrine in ethics and religion is highly popular. It is the doctrine of the consecration of wealth.

There are in the larger cities churches whose business is to give; Sunday after Sunday they hear pleas and consider the cases of college presidents, superintendents of charities, secretaries of mission boards and other official solicitors. These churches have systematized the discipline of giving. Their boards of officers control the appeals that shall be made to their people. Such churches are highly individualist in character, and the preacher who ministers in such a church has a doctrine of individual culture and responsibility.

The exploiter's doctrine of systematic giving has gone into all of the communities in which prosperous people live. It has become a moral code for millionaires, and the response to it is annually measured in the great gifts of men of large means to inst.i.tutions which exist for the use of all mankind.

But not all the farm exploiters retired from the farm. The stronger and more successful have become absentee landlords. These men have invested their cash in farm lands. Distrusting the investments of the city market, and fearing Wall Street, they have purchased increased acreage in the country, and when the local market was exhausted, they have invested in the Southwest and the far West, buying ever more and more land. They have proven that "It is possible to maintain a vicious economic method on a rising market."[10]

These landlords have leased their land in accordance with mere expediency. No plans have been made in the American rural economy for a tenantry. The lease, therefore, throughout the United States generally is for only one year. This gives to the landlord the greatest freedom, and to the tenant the least responsibility. Neither is willing to enter into a contract by which the land itself can be benefitted. The landlord is looking for the increase of the values of land, and is ever mindful of a possible buyer. Moreover, he is watchful of the market for the crop and of the size of the crop, so that he desires to be free at the end of the year to make other arrangements.

The tenant on his part is somewhat eager to do as he pleases for a year.

He expects to be himself an owner, and he does not expect to remain permanently as a tenant on that farm. He reckons that he can get a good deal out of the land in the year, and is unwilling to bind himself for a long period. "The American system of farm tenantry is the worst of which I have knowledge in any country."[11]

It is true that in some parts of the country leases of three and five years are granted to tenants by the landlords. At Penn Yan, New York, a reliable cla.s.s of Danes secure such leases from the owners. I am aware, also, that in Delaware, in an old section dependent upon fertilization for its crops, where the land is in the hands of a few representatives of the old farmer type who have held it for generations, that the tillage of the soil shows specialization. The landlord and the tenant co-operate. The leases, while they are for but a year, specify how the land shall be tilled, how fertilized. They require the rotation of crops and the keeping of a certain number of cattle by the tenants. The landlord personally oversees the tillage of several farms. This seems the beginning of husbandry, instead of exploitation of the land.

Another instance of the landlord who is more than a mere exploiter is that of David Rankin, recently deceased. In the last years of his life Mr. Rankin owned about thirty thousand acres of land in Missouri. It was said in 1910 that he had seventeen thousand acres of corn. He had a genius for estimating the values of land, the expensiveness of drainage, and the possibilities of the market. He was an expert buyer of cattle, and a master of the problems entering into progressive farming on a large scale.

From his vast acreage Mr. Rankin sold not one bushel of corn. All his crops "went off on four legs." "He drove his corn to market," as they say in the Middle West. He bought cattle from the ranches, for none were bred on his own land. He fattened them for the market, translating corn into beef and he was well aware of the values of pork in the economy of such a farm. Nothing went to waste. According to the formula in Nebraska, "For every cow keep a sow, that's the how." Mr. Rankin made large profits from his cattle and hogs.

It is true that he cared nothing for the community or its inst.i.tutions.