The Evolution of the Country Community Part 4

"The church was organized in June, 1855, in a stone schoolhouse. The present house of worship was erected and dedicated in 1861. Five ministers served the church as supplies until 1865, when the Rev. J. S.

Braddock, D. D., became the pastor and carried on a splendid work for forty-two years, when he laid down his pastorate in 1907, at the age of ninety."

"This community was settled by homesteaders and pioneers in the early days of the West. Many of them came from Pennsylvania and some of them were of Scotch descent. The history of the community has been but the history of the development of a fertile Western Prairie country. It was settled by strong Presbyterian men, and their descendants are now the backbone of the community. There has been little change, but steady growth."

The second element in the community of husbandmen is mutual support.

Professor Gillin of the University of Iowa has described to me the community of Dunkers whom he has studied,[16] being deeply impressed with their communal solidarity. Whenever a farm is for sale these farmers at the meeting-house confer and decide at once upon a buyer within their own religious fellowship. In the week following the minister or a church member writes back to Pennsylvania and the correspondence is pressed, until a family comes out from the older settlements in the Keystone State to purchase this farm in Iowa and to extend the colony of his fellow Dunkers. Reference is made elsewhere to the communal support given to their own members who suffer economic hardship. The serious tillage of the soil necessarily involves mutual support and the husbandman's life is in his community.

The third factor in communal husbandry is progress. Everyone testifies to the leadership of the "best families" in the transformation of the older modes of the tillage of the soil to the newer. It is impossible for the scientific agriculturist to make much improvement upon a country community until the more progressive spirits and the more open minds have been enlisted. Thereafter the better farming problem is solved.

There can be no modern agriculture in a community in which all are equal. The communities of husbandmen will be as sharply differenced from one another, so far as I can see, as men are in the great cities.

Leadership is the essential of progress. Gabriel Tarde has clearly demonstrated that only those who are at the top of the social scale can initiate social and economic enterprises. The cultivation of the soil for generations to come must be highly progressive. To recover what we have lost and to restore what has been wasted will exhaust the resources of science and will tax the intelligence of the leaders among husbandmen.

For this reason the ministers, teachers, and social workers in the country should be not discouraged, but hopeful, when confronted with rural landlords and capitalists. The business of the community leader is to enlist in the common task those persons whose privileges are superior and inspire them with a progressive spirit. Without their leadership the community cannot progress. Without their privileges, wealth and superior education, no progress is possible in the country.

If these pages tell the truth, then agriculture is a mode of life fertile in religious and ethical values. But it must be husbandry, not exploitation. Religious farming is a lifelong agriculture, indeed it involves generations, and its serious, devoted spirit waits for the reward, which was planted by the diligent father or grandfather, to be reaped by the son or grandson. Men will not so consecrate themselves to their children's good without the steadying influence of religion. So that agriculture and religion are each the cause, and each the effect, of the other.

If this is true, then the country church should promote the husbandry of the soil. The agricultural college should be brought into the country parish, for the church's sake. Indeed the minister would do well if his scholarship be the learning of the husbandman. No other science has such religious values. No other books have such immediate relation to the well-being of the people. The minister is not ashamed to teach Greek, or Latin,--dead languages. Why should he think it beneath him "to teach the farmer how to farm," provided he can teach the farmer anything? If he be a true scholar, the farmer, who is a practical man, needs his learned co-operation in the most religious of occupations, that the land may be holy.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Rural Economics, by Prof. Thos. Nixon Carver.]

[Footnote 13: "The Country-Life Movement," by L. H. Bailey.]

[Footnote 14: "Ireland in the New Century," by Sir Horace Plunkett.]

[Footnote 15: Professor Thomas Nixon Carver.]

[Footnote 16: See Chapter V.]

V

EXCEPTIONAL COMMUNITIES

Most of this volume is devoted to the average conditions which prevail throughout the United States. The attempt is made to deal with those causes which are generally operative. It is the writer's opinion that the causes dealt with in other chapters are the prevailing causes of religious and social experience in the most of the United States. As soon as the community, after its early settlement, becomes mature, these causes show the effects here described. But there are exceptions which should be noted and the cause of their different life made clear. These exceptions are represented in the Mormons, the Scottish Presbyterians and the Pennsylvania Germans.

"The best farmers in the country are the Mormons, the Scotch Presbyterians and Pennsylvania Germans." This sentence expresses a general observation of Prof. Carver of Harvard, speaking as an economist. The churches among these three cla.s.ses of exceptionally prosperous farmers show great tenacity and are free from the weakness which otherwise prevails in the country church. There is a group of causes underlying this exceptional character of the three cla.s.ses of farmers.

These exceptional farmers are organized in the interest of agriculture.

The Mormons represent this organization in the highest degree. Perhaps no other so large or so powerful a body of united farmers is found in the whole country. They have approached the economic questions of farming with determination to till the soil. They distrust city life and condemn it. They teach their children and they discipline themselves to love the country, to appreciate its advantages and to recognize that their own welfare is bound up in their success as farmers, and in the continuance of their farming communities. This agricultural organization centers about their country churches. They have turned the force of religion into a community making power, and from the highest to the lowest of their church officers the Mormon people are devoted to agriculture as a mode of living.

This principle of organizing the community consciously for agriculture results in the second condition of the life of these three exceptional peoples.

They build agricultural communities. The Mormons are organized by an idea and by the power of leadership. They have recruited their population through preachers and missionaries. This new population is woven at once into the fabric of the community. They are not merely employed in the community: they are married to the community. The organization on which the Mormon community is based becomes embodied at once in a society, with its own modes of religious, family, and moral feeling and thought.

These two principles are discovered in the Pennsylvania Germans. For more than two centuries they have continued their settlements in Pennsylvania. They are today a chain of societies loosely related to one another through religious sympathy and a common tradition, but united only in the possession of certain characteristics. They also are an organization for agricultural life, though not so consciously organized as the Mormons. Their societies are older and they have replaced with instinctive processes that which is among the Mormons a matter of logic and shrewd application of principles.

The life of the Pennsylvania Germans is expressed in the community. They have as much aversion to other people as they have fondness for their own. Their religion consists of a set of customs in which to them the character of the Christian is embodied. These customs can be expressed and embodied only in the life of common people working on the land. They make plainness, industry, and patience, austerity of life and other agricultural virtues const.i.tute sanct.i.ty. It is impossible to believe sincerely in their mode of life and not be a farmer. It is easy to believe the Pennsylvania Germans' code, if one is a farmer, and it is profitable as well.

The Scotch and the Scotch Irish Presbyterians represent a third principle of agricultural success. Their churches are tenacious and their country communities outlive those of the average type. In them is represented in the highest degree the principle of austerity. By this I mean, as defined by an economist, the custom of living so as to produce much and consume little. These people look upon life with severity. They have little sympathy with the expansive and exuberant life of the young.

The men of the community, who are the producers, occupy a relatively greater position than the women, who are the consumers. They exemplify to a slight degree the conscious organization for agriculture, and in a high degree the resultant social life which we have noted among the Mormons and the Pennsylvania Germans; but to the highest degree the Scottish Presbyterians represent this self-denial and rigidity of life--which appears in the others also--and they embody it in their creed. This austerity gives to them a forbidding character, and robs them of some of the esthetic interest attaching to the other two, but it is possible that they are more nearly the ideal type of American farmer because of certain other traits possessed by them.

The Scotch farmer has not in the United States settled in communities or colonies, as he has in Canada, but the typical farming community of this stock is Scotch Irish. As Prof. R. E. Thompson has shown,[17] the emigrants from the North of Ireland, who are themselves of Scotch extraction, have colonized extensively. That is, they have settled their populations so as to cover a territory and possess it for themselves. But the Scotch, from whom they derive many characteristics, have settled no colony in the world except in the North of Ireland.[18]

The peculiarity of these Scotch Irish farming settlements, as shown especially in Pennsylvania, is their capacity to produce leaders in sympathy with the whole of American life. The Mormons produce leaders, but their influence is compromised by religious prejudices. The Pennsylvania Germans have produced no leaders whom they can call their own, and very few writers or educators. The Scotch Irish, on the other hand, considered as farmers, have contributed an extraordinary proportion of the leadership of the United States. They have been able to maintain their own communities in the country and to find for these communities a sufficient leadership, and they have sent forth into the general population a mult.i.tude of men for leadership in the army, in the legislatures, in the colleges and universities, and above all, in the pulpit.

In these three types of successful farmers religion is an essential factor. No history can be written of the Mormons, of the "Pennsylvania Dutch" or of the Scotch Presbyterian without recording their religious devotion, their obedience to leaders, to customs and to creed. One cannot live among them without feeling the peculiar religious atmosphere which belongs to each of them. They are admirable or obnoxious, according as one likes or dislikes this religious character of theirs, but it pervades the whole life of the community. If it be true that there is no type of farmer--except the scientific farmer of the past few years--who has succeeded as these three types have succeeded, and there is no country community so tenacious as their communities are, and if it be true that these farmers more uniformly than other farmers are religiously organized, then it follows that there is an essential relation so far as American agriculture goes, between successful and permanent agriculture and a religious life. The country church becomes the expression of a permanent and abiding rural prosperity. Agriculture is shown by its very nature to require a religious motive. An element of piety appears to be necessary in the makeup of the successful farmer.

In these three types of successful farmer there appears another principle which is common to them all. They are not only organized for farming, but they are organized as a mutual prosperity a.s.sociation, based on their consciousness of kind. Prof. Gillin has called attention to the habit of the Dunkers in Iowa, who are of the Pennsylvania German sects, by which they extend their farming communities.

"The thing that is needed is to make the church the center of the social life of the community. That is easier where there is but one church than where there are several, but federation is not essential. Thought must be taken by the leaders to make the church central in every interest of life. I know of a community where that has been done. It is the community located south of Waterloo, Ia., in Orange Township. It is composed of an up-to-date community of Pennsylvania Dutch Dunkers. From the very first they have made the church central. When these great changes of which I have spoken began to occur, the leaders of that community began to take measures to checkmate the attractions of the towns for their young people. For example, Fourth of July was made a day of celebration at the church. When the people of other communities were flocking to town by hundreds, the youth of that community were gathering, in response to plans well thought out beforehand, to the church grounds where patriotic songs were sung, games were played, a picnic dinner was served, and a general good time was provided for the young. They have also arranged that their young people have a place to come to on Sunday nights where they can meet their friends. The elders look to it that provisions are made for the gatherings of the young people on Sunday so that they shall 'have a good time,' with due arrangements for the boys and girls to get together under proper conditions for their love-making. Even their church 'love feasts' held twice a year, are also neighborhood gatherings for the young people. The church is the center of everything. Is a farmers' inst.i.tute to be held in the community, or a teachers' inst.i.tute? The church until very recently was open to it. Is a farm to rent or for sale? At once the leaders get busy with the mail, and soon a family from the East is on their way to take it. This country church has not remained strong and dominant in the country just by accident or even by federation. It has survived because it had wise leaders who have met the changes with new devices to attract the interest of the community and make the church serve the community in all its affairs, but especially on the social side. Such thought takes account of the 'marginal man' too. The hired man and the hired girl, the foreigner and the tramp are welcome there.

No difference is made. There is pure democracy. With the growth of the cla.s.s spirit I do not know how that can survive. These hirelings are not talked down to; they are considered one with the rest. They will some day get enough to buy a farm and become leaders in the community, perhaps. The church is theirs as much as anyone's else. It looks after their interest, not only for the hereafter, but here and now. Under its fostering care they form their life attachments, it provides for their social pleasures, it is the center to which they come to discuss their farming affairs or whatever interests them. And in spite of the fact that the preaching has little contact with life and its interests, so strong is the social spirit that the preaching can be left out of account. What could be accomplished were the preaching as consciously directed to forwarding the social interests of the community one can only speculate."[19]

Thus they work for the propagation and extension of their own community.

The Scotch Presbyterians in like manner favor their own kindred and their kindred in the faith, though, I think, in a lesser degree. The Mormons are consolidated both by formal organization and by instinctive preference for their own in a mult.i.tude of co-operating habits, through which they build up their communities and contend with one another against their economic and religious opponents. It is not enough to say that this is clannishness; it is a mingling of kinship and religious preferences. It const.i.tutes the strongest form of agricultural co-operation to be found in the United States.

A Quaker community represents ideal community life. There is none poor.

The margin of the community is well cared for by the conscious and deliberate service of the central and leading spirits in the community.

At Quaker Hill, New York, there has been for almost two centuries a community of Friends. The Meeting has now been "laid down" but the customs and manners by which these peculiar people maintain their community life have been wrought into the social texture of the present population of Quaker Hill. During two centuries this community has cared for its own members in need. It was not beneath the dignity of the Meeting to raise money and purchase a cow, early in the eighteenth century, to "loan to the widow Irish," and at the close of the nineteenth century, the few Quakers and the many Irish and other "world's people" took part more than once in subscriptions by which the burden was borne, which had fallen upon some workingman or poorer neighbor through the death of horse or cow, or even to bear the expense incidental to the death of his child.

These Quakers co-operated in their business life. They made themselves responsible that no member of their Meeting should be long in debt. From 1740 for 100 years and more, the records of the Meeting show that marriage was made impossible and other vital experiences were forbidden by the Meeting, unless the individual Quaker paid his debts and maintained his business on a level dictated by the common opinion of the Quaker body.[20]

In 1767, Oblong Meeting of Quaker Hill, New York, began the legislative opposition of the Society of Friends to the inst.i.tution of slavery. This great economic movement expressed the degree to which the Quaker discipline merged the religious life in the economic life. This consolidation of religious and economic life was essential in the community building of the Quakers.

It is surprising to many to discover that the "Pennsylvania Dutch" were part of the same movement of population which brought the Quakers into Pennsylvania. William Penn spoke German as well as English. His mother was a German. When he inherited his father's claim against the British Crown, and received from Charles the Second the grant of that extensive territory in America on which he launched his Holy Experiment, he began to advertise and to seek for settlers on the Continent as well as in England.

William Penn was a Quaker, and on the Continent he found immediate response in the greatest number of cases among the various branches of Mennonites, Anabaptist, and other sects, who shared a common group of beliefs and experienced at this time a common persecution. William Penn, therefore, reaped a harvest of responses in the territory between the mouth of the Rhine and the Alps. His proposal made its own selection, and brought to America a population calculated like the Quaker population for the building of communities. The largest single contribution was made by the Palatinates, who were at that period undergoing extreme persecution.

The communities founded within the first century after the opening of Pennsylvania have remained to the present day, and the earliest establishments of Mennonites and Quaker communities in Pennsylvania have been duplicated in the westward stream of immigration, especially in Ohio and in Iowa. These people are roughly called the "Pennsylvania Dutch." Even when one meets them in Michigan, Iowa or Minnesota, this name clings to them, and the form of social organization which they elaborated in Eastern Pennsylvania still persists.

This social organization has varying characteristics. It is somewhat difficult to a.n.a.lyze the intricate windings and entanglements of doctrinal and practical belief in custom among the Mennonites, Amish and Dunkers. Old school and new school have been formed in almost every one of these sects. Eccentric and peculiar principles of belief in organization have formed the lesser and the least permanent groups; but there is a common principle in them all. Their ability to form communities in the midst of hostile populations and adverse conditions has been due to the co-operation between their religious and their economic habits.

The "Pennsylvania Dutch" have simple doctrinal characteristics. They have never worked out in detail the logic of their beliefs. They put the weight of their organization upon practical customs, as the Quakers did.

In some cases, this applied to clothing; in some or all of these sects to the manner of speech; to family customs; but, the one peculiar principle in it all, which has been vital to the success, to the persistence, to the wide extension of these sectarian groups has been that the religious life has penetrated the economic life. They have not permitted members of their community to be poor. They have turned the attention of their religious sympathies to the economic margin of the community. They have enforced the payment of debts, and they have governed and controlled marriage conditions. By subtle enforcement of custom having the power of laws, they have governed the community in its vital relations, and perfected the system by which the poorest man shall make his living and by which the richest man shall make his fortune.

Recently, I was in Lancaster, Penn., and pa.s.sing through a market I was told by a resident that all the truck farming of the market for that city had come into the hands of the Amish, and my friend added, "If you go at an early hour to buy, and ask the price of certain vegetables, you will probably be told, 'We do not know the price yet; we will have to wait until all the farmers come in.'" That is, after two hundred and more years of living as farmers in this section of Pennsylvania, these sectarians maintain their community life, co-operate in the monopolizing of an industry, and in fixing the price of the monopolized product in the markets of a Pennsylvania city.

This survey of community-building peoples in America may throw light upon the recommendations of Sir Horace Plunkett for the organization of country life upon an economic basis. The present writer heartily agrees with him that the center of the community must be economic. He says that "Better business must come first" in constructive policies for American country life, but "by failing to combine, American and British farmers persistently disobey an accepted law."

Social division is the impending danger which threatens the future of the American community in the country. For if the a.n.a.lysis of agricultural success in this chapter is correct, then the farmer is exceedingly dependent upon his neighbor, and the permanence of rural populations depends upon the social unity of the farmers in the community. The highest expression of this social unity is in the farmer's religion. Worship thus becomes a symbol of agricultural prosperity. The writers and the orators have then truly spoken who symbolized the beauty of rural life in the church steeple. The farmer himself seems to recognize, in the church spire rising above the roofs of the hamlet, the symbol of prosperous and satisfactory life in the country.

As the tillers of the soil come to the necessity of co-operation in the new order of life in the country, as the old isolation pa.s.ses away and the modern farmer comes to recognize his necessary dependence upon other farmers in the community, a common place of worship will become necessary to the community. One church will of necessity express the life of the community and the periodic meeting of all the people in one house of worship will be the highest and most essential symbol of the feeling and the thought and the aspirations of that community after true prosperity and permanence.

The purpose of this chapter has been to present the general characteristics of the most exceptional communities in the country.

These are Mormon, Scotch Presbyterian and Pennsylvania German. By their very names they indicate religious organization of the community and "birthright membership" a.s.sociations. They are grouped under the one principle, that in them the religious organization is an expression of their social economy. Their social and economic life is under the domination of their religion.