The country town : a study of rural evolution

Front matter

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Preface

ScrENcE has the difficult task of correcting the illusions of the senses. The heavens and the atoms alike deceive the observer, and in history, also, things are not what they seem. The social fact thrusting itself upon impression has another character when placed under the laws of progress. One group of observations has peculiar need of interpretation—tradical changes in the rural population meet the eye everywhere, of which crass misjudgment passes from lip to lip and from page to page of print. There are hints of an alarming natural selection in depleted communities, but we search in vain for the chapter of biology that tells the tale of changing types of men in country towns. It is time to attempt a careful survey of this whole region, into which adventurers have pressed rashly, and from which explorers have brought disheartening reports.

If to tell the truth is better than to be an optimist, one may count himself fortunate who can be both truthful and optimistic. This book endeavors to set forth rural changes in their historical, scientific, and social aspects. Incidentally a wide consensus of opinion in disparagement of rural communities is chal-

4 PREFACE lenged, and the pessimist who haunts the country towns that he regards gloomily is confronted. The reader must judge the argument, which it has seemed worth while to make as thorough as possible at the critical points because the region it traverses affords many an ambush for the advocates of despair. It is hoped that a cheerful view of conditions and tendencies will be easier for those who follow this discussion, and yet the first responsibility is to the truth, which warrants nothing less urgent than a call to brave and patient work throughout the zone of peril. Even scientific diagnosis avails nothing unless remedies are applied, and certainly to refute the pessimist when the hour demands the rescue of a civilization would be no better than fiddling while Rome burned. If this book had the gift of prophecy and knew all mysteries and all knowledge, if it had all faith so as to remove mountains, and did not prompt the deeds of love, it would be nothing. The country town needs sympathy and calls for help.

My indebtedness to other writers is acknowledged wherever I have drawn directly from them. Among those who have assisted me with suggestion and encouragement I mention gratefully Mr. Edward T. Hartman, Secretary of the Massachusetts Civic League; Mr. Frederick H. Fowler, Clerk of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture; the Rev. Charles Allen Dinsmore, D. D., with whom almost every point of view has been discussed ; and my sister, Miss Mary P. Anderson, whose criticisms have corrected and enriched the entire book, but especially the chapter treating of nature

PREFACE 5 study: The United States Census Office and the United States Department of Agriculture generously supplied me with indispensable publications.

Finally, I am under the greatest obligation to the Rev. Josiah Strong, D.D., whose inspiring and thorough social studies opened to me this field of investigation.

WILBERT L. ANDERSON.

Exeter, New Hampshire.

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Book I The Changed World

I. Tue New Inpustriat OrDER , AD G | IJ. Tue Rurat ParTNerRsHIP WITH Cities. Pa III. Tue Exrent or Rurat Depietion : 0 57 IV. Tue Zone or Rurat GrowTH . . isi yg BOOK II THE QUESTION OF CHARACTER V. Locat DecENERAcy . ! * . Qs VI. THe Main Trenp : " : ° Skog , BOOK III THE INCIDENCE OF SELECTION VII. Tue Herrrace or Unrirness : ° bat VIII. Rurat SELEcTION : : . : Ae IX. Tue Pressure oF THE IMMIGRANT . : A Ae BOOK IV THE DIRECT ACTION OF ENVIRONMENT X. Recent INTERPRETATIONS OF EvoLutTion . Py a dy XI. Tue Inrtvence or Nature . ‘ : A 8 XII. Perrsonay Forces . : : . ° anh? XIII. New Facrors. : : ° ; . 208 BOOK V SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION XIV. Tue Feperat PRINCIPLE ‘ : ‘ eae XV. Tue Viratiry oF THE Town : ; ANA ye XVI. Tue PRESERVATION OF THE CHURCH é ahi So XVII. Tue Cuurcu as a Sociat CENTRE . : 278 INDEX : : ; 4 . : eg03 i

Introduction

THis is a much needed and valuable book. The author has faith in the future of the country town, and is able to render a reason for the faith that is in him. His confidence is based on the results of a close and scientific scrutiny of the complex influences which are at work upon the population of country communities.

Much has been said, and truly, of the removal of the upper stratum of country society to the city. When population is seriously depleted, roads deteriorate, communication becomes more difficult, the church and the school suffer, and it is those who place the highest valuation on religious and educational advantages for their children who seek those advantages in the city. Thus it is the cream that is skimmed off. If this were the whole truth, it would mean the inevitable degeneracy of the rural population. But while the author recognizes the loss of the old country aristocracy, he calls attention to the fact that the industrial revolution has also driven the lowest stratum of society from country to city,—a stratum which was not created, though it may have been augmented, by the influences of existing conditions, but is composed of the unfit who as descendants of the unfit have gravitated to the bottom, generation after generation.

Families run out both at the top and at the bottom of the social scale. It is the great middle class which

i il INTRODUCTION from the point of view of the evolutionist constitutes the hope of society ; and it is precisely this class which remains in the country.

The author, therefore, concludes, and very justly, “that there is no scientific reason for the popular notion that the rural population is under a fatality of evil. Its future depends almost wholly upon the power of environment,—upon education, upon commerce, upon evangelization, upon participation in the great movements of the age.”

The introduction of the rural mail delivery, the extension of the telephone system into the country, and easy communication with the city by means of the electric road, will all improve the country environment. It must not be inferred, however, that these agencies will materially affect the drift towards the city; that is determined almost wholly by economic causes. Some thousands of men work under ground, not because they prefer the darkness and danger, the smut and wet of a coal mine, to God’s blue sky and the green earth, but because there is a demand for coal. And the number of miners is determined by the magnitude of that demand, not by the measure of comfort or discomfort in mining. Pleasant or unpleasant conditions of work determine the class of people, but not the xumber of people, who will engage in it.

The improvement of the country environment, therefore, will have the double effect of elevating the country population and of attracting a better class to agriculture.

INTRODUCTION ill

The object of this volume, accordingly, is to excite interest in the problem of the necessary social reconstruction, the improved environment, of the country town.

The author gives us the inspiration of a rational hope that this problem can be and will be solved by “generous deeds, tireless diligence, and stedfast patience.” ,

JOSIAH STRONG.

BOOK I

THE CHANGED WORLD

“If we would study with profit the history of our ancestors, we must be constantly on our guard against that delusion which the wellknown names of families, places, and offices naturally produce, and must never forget that the country of which we read was a very different country from that in which we live.”

— Macaulay, « History of England,” Vol. I, Chap. ILI.

«¢ Now by far the most obvious and constant characteristic common to a vast number of social changes is that they are changes from a worse to a better state of things,—that they constitute phases of Progress. It is not asserted that human history has in all times and places been the history of progress; it is not denied that at various times and in many places it has been the history of retrogression: but attention is called to the fact—made trite by long familiarity, yet none the less habitually misconceived—that progress has been on the whole the most constant and prominent feature of a considerable and important portion of mankind.”

—fohn Fiske, “ Cosmic Philosophy,” Vol. Il, p. 192.

Chapter I The New Industrial Order

THE present stands in sharp contrast with the recent past in country towns. The memory of living men retains a vivid image of much to which visible conditions offer no parallel, and tradition further glorifies “the good old times.” The middle of the nineteenth century may be selected as the most eligible point from which to contemplate the contrasted civilizations. ‘If much that has come to pass could not have been foreseen then, the new form of society was clearly discernible, and the old order was not far out of sight. Happily the most competent man of his time for such a task took advantage of the centennial of a Connecticut county in 1851 to portray the life of the fathers as it lingered radiantly in memory, being himself deeply sensible that a new age had dawned. The hour was opportune for speech immortalizing a unique social order; it was the earliest moment permitting the en- _ chanter’s transformation, and a later time would have dulled the personal witness. From that crest of the nineteenth century the orator beheld the life of the fathers in the distance that obscures defect in idealizing lights, and his prophetic eye, penetrating the waiting years, saw that nothing would ever be again as in the old times.

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Never was Horace Bushnell happier in the choice of terms than when he called that vanished epoch “ The Age of Homespun.”! We see men clad in the wool clipped from their own flocks, women wearing the product of their looms ; and at once we know their industrial order, their manner of life, and their virtues. The thread from the home spindle is the clew to every passage in their civilization. With great zest the orator shows how in an age of homespun there are flocks of sheep in the pastures, flax growing in the fields, spinning-wheels buzzing and looms thwacking in the house; how food as well as clothing is produced on the farm, with the slight exception that the lads must go on horseback to mill; how trade is scant and money little used ; how families thrive in sturdy independence of the world but united in the closest domestic cooperation and affection; how character grows frugal, austere, honest; how common ideals and an approximate equality favor friendly intercourse ; how thrift is linked to intelligence and establishes the school; how these sturdy traits culminate in the earnest discharge of duty towards the Infinite Source of all good in solemn and heart-searching worship. There is such magic in this phrase that as an entire social order develops before the eye, one can scarcely tell whether he is the victim of | enchantment or is beholding soberly the course of actual history.

Born in 1802, Dr. Bushnell was able to draw from his own memory the “ Arcadian pictures” of his rural idyll. As late as 1810, the country people of the

1 Horace Bushnell, « Work and Play,” p. 374.

United States were generally clad inhomespun. This was no longer the case in 1851, but the memory of the orator easily reached backwards to the reality over which played the transfiguring light of his eloquence. He spoke to those who “recalled the fact that our Litchfield County people down to a period comparatively recent have been a people clothed in homespun fabrics—not wholly or in all cases, but so generally that the exceptions may be fairly disregarded.” Fortunately we are not dependent for the facts upon the uncertain recollection of alater time. In 1810, Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, presented to Congress his “ Report on American Manufactures,” in which the results of an investigation prosecuted in every state and in more than sixty different places were summarized. In that report he expresses the opinion “that about two thirds of the clothing, including hosiery, and of the house and table linen worn and used by the inhabitants of the United States who do not reside in cities is the product of family manufactures.”* The census of 1810 attempted to gather full statistics of manufactures, and the data collected were submitted to Tench Coxe for arrangement and comment. His report, published in 1814, thrills with the enthusiasm of a prophet who saw the impending changes in the mode of production, and it is at the same time the best witness concerning the earlier order? One has but to turn the pages and observe the 1« American State Papers,” Vol. 10, Finance 2, p. 427.

2A Statement of the Arts and Manufactures of the United States of America for the year 1810.

yards of cloth produced in families and in establishments in the several states to see the justice of the characterization of the time as an age of homespun. In Pennsylvania, for example, for which the statistics are the most carefully gathered, 611,481 yards of cotton and 997,346 yards of woollen cloth were produced in families and only 65,326 yards of cotton and 30,666 yards of woollen cloth were produced in establishments. The proportion is similar in all the states.

It should be remembered, also, that homespun had its greatest honor just before it was superseded. The embargo of 1807 cut off the importation of textiles. Indeed Gallatin’s investigation was prompted by the sudden development of manufactures when the customary sources of supply were no longer available, and his report speaks of “an extraordinary increase during the last two years.” A patriotic people caught the vision of complete industrial independence ; enthusiasm ran so high that an effort was made to pledge the members of Congress to wear American goods when engaged in the public service. These were not necessarily of the homespun sort, for the factory was beginning to place a scant product in the market. The embargo and the war that followed gave such protection to manufactures that by 1820 the modern form of production was well established, and the change in the dress of the people was noticeable. The stimulus fell first, however, upon household manufactures, especially in the South, where the people had depended upon ex- — changing agricultural products for English goods. Naturally Jefferson was an enthusiast for the incidental results of the embargo upon which he had stoutly insisted.!

It was, however, the personal experience of the profitableness of the new industries that appealed most powerfully to the thrifty mind of this very practical philosopher and statesman; the production of two thousand yards of cotton, linen, and woollen cloth on his own spinning-jennies and looms—a new feature on his estate—provoked an elation which is evident in several of his letters. One of the most notable of these is that to John Adams, written in 1812. It begins with thanks for specimens of homespun, which suggest a glowing paragraph. “Here we do little in a fine way,” he says, “ but in coarse and middling goods a great deal. Every family in the country is a manufactory within itself, and is very generally able to make within itself all the stouter and middling stuffs for its own clothing and household use. . . . For fine stuff we shall depend on your northern manufactories. Of these, that is to say of company establishments, we have none. We use little machinery. The spinningjenny and loom with the flying-shuttle can be managed in a family, but nothing more complicated. The economy and thriftiness resulting from our household manufactures are such that they will never again be laid aside; and nothing more salutary for us has ever happened than the British obstructions to our demands for their manufactures.’ What could be more naive than this pledge of perpetual fidelity to the household

1« The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,” Vol. VI, p. 36. See also pp. 69, 94. | crafts on a southern plantation at the very moment when they were about to disappear forever? If they awoke such ardor in a social order that had spurned them, what must have been the revived interest within the proper homespun area ? | |

Earlier witnesses confirm the view that the use of homespun was extraordinary in Gallatin’s time. <A report of the governor of Massachusetts to the Board of Trade about 1731 asserted that the country people then made but one-third of their own woollen clothing. Throughout the eighteenth century there were revivals of interest in these domestic manufactures. Thus in 1749, three hundred “ young female spinsters ” under the direction of the Boston Society for Promoting Industry and Frugality, spun on the common, where weavers also were engaged at their looms. A building seems to have been erected for the purposes of this “spinning craze,” which enlisted social enthusiasm and was fostered by anniversary sermons.’ The Stamp Act provoked this spirit into yet more striking displays; political feeling united with industrial necessity, so that the clothing that otherwise might have been deemed uncouth was marked with social and patriotic distinction. The century probably showed — an increase in the production and use of homespun from its beginning to its close.

This development suggests that at an earlier stage homespun was little used. The first period differs radically from subsequent times. The people were

1 William B. Weeden, « Economic and Social History of New England,” Vol. II, pp. 495, 679, 680.

too busy with lumbering and ship-building and fishing, with subduing the land and building homes, to find it possible or profitable to establish household industries. At that time, too, wool and flax were lacking, and it may be questioned whether appliances for spinning and weaving and skill in those crafts were available for the pioneers. When the frontier had been pushed much farther back, we find the settlers at the edge of the wilderness dependent upon the older communities for these supplies. The household crafts do not thrive until the first heavy labors are past, homes securely established, and the means gathered for industrial independence. The peculiarity of the seventeenth century in New England was the nearness of the frontier to the sea,—trade being as important as in the development of civilization along the deeply indented shores of Greece. In these conditions, a division of labor was fostered under which imports from England were distributed to the very edge of the wilderness. The conditions were not favorable for the homespun civilization until the line of the frontier was separated some scores of miles from the advanced line of commerce. Perhaps no spot was situated more typically in this regard than that upon which Dr. Bushnell pronounced the eulogy of the age of homespun. It was as far from the frontier and as remote from navigable water as any section of New England. Parts of New York and Pennsylvania supplied similar conditions, but the southern colonies, notably Virginia with its long stretches of tide-water, had no space for isolated communities. The settlement of the West fell within another era when changes in transportation caused the line of commerce to follow the frontier closely. The typical homespun civilization, therefore, is found only where settlements had reached maturity before the time of canals and railroads. Where the conditions deflected communities from the pure homespun type, an approximation to this social order was found. Only by observing the peculiar features of this society, can we understand the rural community of a former time or measure the extent of changes that have taken place within it.

By the second decade of the nineteenth century new instruments of textile manufacture were available. The marvellous series of inventions beginning with the fly-shuttle about 1750 included the carding machine, the spinning frame and spinning-mule, and the power loom, when in 1793 Eli Whitney added the cotton-gin. This intricate and ingenious machinery has been subject to constant improvement, so that to this day the discarding of machines before they are worn out is a heavy item of expenditure. The power loom waited for other inventions to make its use profitable,—carding, spinning, and weaving, by machinery, not taking place in one establishment until 1813; but in 1790 a cotton mill and in 1794 a woollen mill were in successful operation in the United States. Meanwhile the steam-engine had been introduced into the factory. When about 1810 the demand for American production became urgent, the pressure fell upon the new method, to the lasting relief of overburdened households. The effect of the new inventions upon the form of society was discerned almost from the first. Tench Coxe prefaced his statistical tables with an introduction that reads like an apocalypse. ‘“ The wonderful machines,’ he says, “working as if they were animated beings, endowed with all the talents of their inventors, laboring with organs that never tire, and subject to no expense of food, or bed, or raiment, or dwelling, may be justly considered as equivalent to an immense body of manufacturing recruits, suddenly enlisted in the service of the country.” !

The factory system, on the scale of a new social order, would not have been practicable without more efficient modes of transportation than were at hand in the age of homespun. The first decade of the last century brought internal improvements to public attention, but at the time little was accomplished except to plan an elaborate system of canals. The steamboat did not appear until 1807, and the railway with steam traction dates from about 1830. Before 1810 commerce and travel were limited to the natural waterways and slow and costly movement along the poor roads. There was a great enthusiasm in turnpiking at the beginning of the last century; at the close of its first decade one hundred and eighty turnpike corporations had been chartered in New England, and almost as many more had been launched in New York. This late interest in good roads, coming just as the canal and the railway were to provide new modes of trans-

1« Arts and Manufactures in the United States,” p. xxv. 2John Bach McMaster, «A History of the People of the United States,” Vol. III, p. 463.

portation, marks the growing discontent with the pitiful isolation of the age of homespun. Merchandise and produce that could not stand a freight charge of fifteen dollars per ton could not be carried overland to a consumer one hundred and fifty miles from the point of production; as roads were, a distance of fifty miles from market often made industrial independence expedient... Where the produce of the farms could not be sold, where wood and lumber were not marketable, the people had no resource but to raise their own wool and flax, and spin and weave and make their own clothing. Other crafts felt these influences, although the working of wood and metals and leather fell to skilled artisans in the villages rather than to the household. The local store had a small traffic in articles that could not be produced, and in luxuries. Salt fish was widely distributed; rum went everywhere; salt was a universal necessity ; tools and utensils and furniture were imported; a few articles of dress carried the style of the city to the hamlet. So insignificant was the traffic uniting the country town to the great world.

1« Taking the country through, it may be said that to transport goods, wares, or merchandise cost ten dollars per ton per hundred miles. Articles that could not stand these rates were shut from market, and among these were grain and flour, which could not bear transportation more than one hundred and fifty miles.” McMaster, Op. Cit., p. 464. Cf. Macaulay, “ History of England, Vol. I, Chap. III.

*Economic independence is illustrated in an old inventory which mentions nine hundred and one nails as part of the estate, the product, doubtless, of patient hammering by the fireside. Charles H. Bell, “‘ History of Exeter, N. H.,” p. 329.

The age of homespun was further characterized by the use of hand tools for nearly all the work of the farm. The first half of the nineteenth century bears the same relation to the invention of agricultural implements as the last half of the eighteenth century to the invention of textile machinery. In 1800 the hoe, the scythe, the sickle or the cradle, and the flail were as little displaced as the primitive cards, the spinning-wheel, the warping bars, and the hand loom fifty years earlier. The first decade of the century brought important improvements in the plow; the mowing-machine and the reaper came in the thirties ; the horse-rake and the threshing-machine operated by horse power were little used until after 1840. The middle. of the century was reached before the more important inventions had overcome popular prejudice. The still more recent rotary milk separator has removed the making of butter from the household in a manner analogous to the transfer of the textile crafts to the factory. A statement in a special report in the census of 1880 purports to gather up the opinions of competent observers concerning the efficiency of improved agricultural implements, and this estimate has been quoted by so many writers of authority that it may be accepted as a true account of conditions a quarter of a century ago: “It is, in fact, estimated by careful men, thoroughly conversant with the changes that have taken place, that in the improvement made in agricultural tools, the average farmer can, with sufficient horse power, do with three men the work of fifteen men forty years ago, and do it better.”! This declaration is sufficiently impressive without revising it to cover the changes of the last decade.

Rural evolution, as manifest in our time, consists essentially in the adjustment to new conditions as the transition from the age of homespun to the age of machinery is made. ‘The fact of critical importance, through its relation to the social structure and to the evolutionary forces, is the altered density of the rural population. In subsequent chapters an attempt will be made to measure the ebb and flow of population in country towns; here it is desirable to set this general movement, which is plain to every observer, in its relation to the change in the mechanical equipment of industry. In all towns not favored by the new development of manufacturing and trade, there are fewer people than once dwelt in them. The loss is accounted for, in part, by the removal of manufactures from families to establishments,—to use the terms employed by Tench Coxe. The village crafts have suffered a similar fate, and the displacement of skilled men is a most serious injury. The reduction of the force employed on the farms is considerable, although it cannot be so great as many discussions of the subject suggest. It is common to pass from the statement of the efficiency of labor equipped with modern agricultural implements to the loss of rural population, as if eleven of fifteen men had become superfluous. A diminution of workers in the ratio of

1Tenth Census, U. S., Vol. II, « Report on the Manufactures of Interchangeable Mechanism,” p. 76.

the increased efficiency of implements, if it were possible, would shatter society beyond recovery. It is evident that nothing so ominous has occurred, for Statistics supply the proof that only one or two of that Supposed band of eleven ever existed on the farms. There are many reasons why the shrinkage of the farm population is less than the efficiency of machinery Suggests. The number of men on the farm is determined largely by the demand for labor in operations that do not permit the use of machinery, as appears most decisively in dairying. The tendency, also, is to enlarge the amount of work done rather than to cut down the number of laborers. Not only are farms cultivated more thoroughly, but a vast production for the market has been added to the volume of agricultural industry. In fact the average farmer has changed and enlarged his business, so that he employs a great part of the labor force formerly required. The hours of work have been shortened notably ; the seasons of plowing and seeding, of haymaking and harvesting, have been contracted; the strain of toil has been reduced; the standard of living has been raised,—all this the machine has made possible. Nevertheless when all corrections of current exaggeration have been made, it will be found that the use of improved agricultural implements has seriously diminished the rural population.

The first effect of farm machinery is the hastening of the departure of the farmer’s boy from the home. In the age of homespun, sons remained with their fathers until marriage more frequently than in our day. This was partly because no other course was possible, and partly, also, because they were needed for the work now performed by the machine. The substitution of the machine for the lad delaying at home is a great economic and social benefit in spite of the loss through the early sundering of the family. Certainly the boy thrust out of his early home and the greater world which has received him cordially have suffered no injury, for this country boy has had a great career. His success has been due largely to the practical education of the farm; the many arts and crafts of the farm and the farmhouse, though fewer than formerly, still afford excellent manual training, —a more and more evident necessity in a working world. ‘The best schoolhouse in the world,” says a Yale professor, “is an eastern farm 7