The church of the open country

Front matter

THE CHURCH

OF THE

OPEN COUNTRY

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface xiii

I Rural Decay and Repair I

Preface

There are not a few who ask the question, " What is the use of the Church in the open country?" Some of them have through a defective training learned to value their own souls dear and the Church very cheaply. Having secured a sort of fire insurance against the next world, they care nothing for an efficient Church in this world. But the religious history of the country community demonstrates that an efficient Church is necessary to the salvation of souls. Others there are who hold, as a matter of theory, that all rural institutions should be assembled at the population centers, presumably at the railway stations, and that ultimately the farmers will follow their stores, schools, and churches, and will live in congested villages; going out mornings to their fields, and returning in the evening to sleep. But the course of American history indicates no such future peopling of the land. It becomes the Church to serve the farmer where he lives.

An increasing number of American farmers are under economic pressure. They cannot secure land, and they have little ownership in productive tools. They, too, ask the question as to the utility of the Church in the country. They feel that they cannot afford anything but necessities. It is the purpose

XIV

Preface of these chapters to describe the Church which is a necessity to the poor. In the open country four farmers out of ten are renters. The future of the Church is with them. Yet they are to-day included in the membership of the churches in the smallest proportions of all men in the country. To give them the gospel is the acute problem of the Church in the open country.

I am indebted, for help in the preparing of this book, above all to Miss Anna B. Taft, without whose help it would have been impossible; and to my loyal associates in the day's work, every one of whom has given an essential part to a task completed in the midst of travel and teaching.

Warren H. Wilson. f New York, October 25, 191 1.

The well-read town dweller has more to learn about the social problems of the farm than the well-read farmer has to learn about the problems of the town. Each, however, ought to know the other's problems, for the problems of each are the problems of the other. They are all problems of the nation. As long as all men, however, derive their living from the soil, so long will the problems of the farmer be the fundamental problems of the nation. Until recently on account of the great development in industrial conditions, the problems of the town and the city have seemed most insistent; but now the more fundamental problems — the problems of the agriculturist — are making themselves heard. — The Outlook

We conclude, then, that the farm problem consists in maintaining upon our farms a class of people who have succeeded in procuring for themselves the highest possible class status, not only in the industrial, but in the political and the social order — a relative status, moreover, that is measured by the demands of American ideals. The farm problem thus connects itself with the whole question of democratic civilization. This is not mere platitude. For we cannot properly judge the significance and the relation of the different industrial activities of our farmers, and especially the value of the various social agencies for rural betterment, except by the standard of class status. It is here that we seem to find the only satisfactory philosophy of rural progress. — K. L. Butteriield

The patriotic American, who thinks of the life of the nation rather than of the individual, will, if he looks beneath the surface, discern in this God-prospered country symptoms of rural decadence fi aught with danger to national efficiency. — Horace Plunkett

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. — Horace Plunkett

I

Widespread Untoward Conditions. It is the common opinion of rural leaders that country life in America has fallen out of repair. The household, the church, the school, and the store in the country show the effect of change. They are not what they were twenty-five years ago. These changes are seen all over the United States, with slight local variation. They are uniform from Maine to Mississippi. Young people are leaving the country for the city, teachers of country schools move almost every year, and many ministers have despaired of the country Church.

National Commission. The Country Life Commission, in their report to President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1908, made this a national issue. Writers before that date had pictured it in terms of local degeneracy. The decay of families and the sinking of communities into degeneracy had shocked and alarmed. This earlier literature concerned New England alone, and found the causes to be social. The Commission, of which Liberty H. Bailey was Chairman, pressed the inquiry deeper into the economic welfare of the people. They found the causes in the living conditions of the people, and their summons has aroused all friends of the open country to work together for " better farming, better business, better living."

Writers and Proposed Remedies. This contrast between the early country life movement of New England and the present national country life movement is well expressed in ihe two books which may be called the best books on the subject. They are Anderson's The Country Town, published in 1906, two years before the Commission report was published, and Plunkett's The Rural Life Problem in the United States, published in 19 10, two years after that momentous report was published. Each book is national in its message, though Anderson frankly wrote from a New England study window, and Sir Horace Plunkett from an Irish gentleman's country house : and each writer has grasped the fundamental processes of American rural life. But the last chapter of The Country Town pleads for " The Church as a Social Center " ; while the message of The Rural Life Problem is that " There must be better farming, better business, and better living. These three are equally necessary, but better business must come first." Dr. Anderson, out of the New England experience, alarmed by rural decay, summons us to social service, but Sir Horace Plunkett, from the experience of the Old World, and the wider investigation of American conditions, recognizes that the causes of rural decay are economic, and demands an initial economic remedy.

Four Types and Periods. The decay of rural life in America is seen in four types : first individualism, second degenerate groups, third speculation, and fourth exploited lands. Each one of these is an enemy of the Church, and retards the growth of religion in the country. Each one of them arises, not out of the Church itself, but out of the social economy of the country. They are all results of causes which affect the farmer in the process of getting a living. Four periods of American country life are seen in these four kinds of decay: the pioneer, or solitary farmer; the land- farmer, or household farmer; the exploiter, or speculative farmer; and the husbandman, or organized farmer, who is righting the present exploitation of land. These four great American countrymen have followed one another across the stage of the open country. They have built their churches and their communities like unto themselves. The spirit of the future is one of organizing the farmers and federating the churches. These types of men and communities have been successive. They appear in the order named. They are cumulative, and the later communities contain all the earlier types. The troubles with the country Church are those of transition from household farming to organized farming.

Individualist Phase. Individualism in American country life has been marked. Farmer folk will not combine, and they recognize few ties outside of a man's duty to himself. In the older settlements the farmer is very independent. He is not used to obeying any one, and he refuses to respond to commands from whatever quarter they may come. He follows leaders, and not principles. He looks upon the world as made up of persons, and nothing else. This individualism has been the blessing of the few and the bane of the many in New England, for it has caused the creation of a few bright and brainy people, while it has neglected great numbers of ordinary people. The degeneracy of the rural stock of New England in many places has been due to the selection of the favored individuals for emigration to the West and to the cities; and the abandonment of all the weaker members in the communities. 1

Some of Its Effects. Individualism has been a factor in the dissolution of the rural household. The boy and girl have left home to seek a personal fortune. They have consulted personal pleasure rather than family advantage and have gone to the town or city to live, because there a better wage could be secured and more social pleasures enjoyed.

1 The sensational picture by the Rev. Rollin Lynde Harte, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Vol. LXXXIII, under the title " A New England Hill Town," and the article by President William DeWitt Hyde of Bowdoin College on the " Impending Paganism in New England," called public attention to the degenerate sections of New England. Dr. Josiah Strong pointed out in succeeding years the depletion of rural communities in States as far west as Illinois. Other writers depicted these processes, especially as they had roots in New England. An excellent summary of them is in the chapters on " The Extent of Rural Depletion " and " Local Degeneracy," in Dr. Wilbert L. Anderson's book, The Country Town.

The churches of the community have been multiplied by emphasis upon individual preference. Often one elderly church officer will insist upon the planting or the maintaining of a country church not needed in an overchurched community. Generally speaking, the problem of too many churches is due to the doctrine of personal salvation carried out to the extreme of personal selfishness. Yet the reason for the abuse is not in the doctrine, but in the circumstances under which they who believe that doctrine must needs work in getting a living. A Deep-seated Evil. American life is still affected by pioneer days. The pioneer was lonely in his way of life, and he was lonely in his thoughts. He had to work and fight for himself. So he prayed for himself. Self-protection was his battle all day long, and soul salvation was his thought at night. He thought and wrought and fought all the week that he might survive, and on Sunday he craved only to hear how he might survive death. Other men have the same thought, but the pioneer had it to the exclusion of nearly all social feelings. The individualist has this exclusive care of his own soul, his own children, his own property, and his own pleasure. So deep-seated is this evil in American rural life that it is a foe to the progress of people in the open country. Cooperation and combination are nowadays the principles on which business success, educational advance, or religious efficiency are based. None of these is possible among farmers who are individualized. That which in pioneer days was a means of survival has become, in our time, a sign of retrograde living, and a cause of rural decay.

A Separating Force. Here is the first clue to the mystery of overchurched communities. The independence of pioneer days, once a noble trait, has become a base form of decay. Generated in the solitary life of the woods, it has become a selfish philosophy in days long after the forests are gone. It makes country people suspicious of one another, and causes them to live in a sort of aggressive loneliness, the very opposite of a Christian state, and the active enemy of social service.

Household Group Phase. The second form of rural decay is group degeneracy. The second period of American rural life saw the perfecting of the household group. From 1800 to 1890 the life on the farm was represented in the household perfection of Whittier's " Snowbound." In those days the farmer was no longer living a lonely life. He had neighbors, but his household was a complete unit in itself. He had in his wife, children, and the grandparents, the maiden aunt of the family, and the hired man, a perfect little society. The whole earth might in those days have been depopulated: and if there had been left one farmer's household in Ohio or New York, they could have repeopled the earth, and could have restored the arts, the religion, and the learning of mankind. The household farmer farmed the first values of the land which lay upon the surface. He was not

PIONEER CABIN PIONEER FAMILY troubled with the depletion of the soil, the rotation of the crops, or the problem of nitrogen. He is the farmer of whom we think when we look back to the country life of the older days.

Weakened by Migration. This perfect group has suffered severely in the past twenty years. The church and the school, which are dependent upon it, have suffered with it. The picture at the World's Fair in Chicago entitled " Breaking Home Ties " depicted the crumbling of the family unit in the departure of the son from the farmhouse, never to return. The city has claimed a great share ; and the West has enticed many away with its opportunities. They have gone, not as in earlier days, in families, compacted by common hardships, but person by person; and the family group in the country has been weakened by their migration.

Discouraged Remnants. Throughout much of New England the weakening of family life is evident. The depleted households cling to small and unproductive farms, by a fraction of their former strength. I remember driving, in my early ministry, from a prosperous farming section into a weakened community, whose lands had a lowered value because they lay too far from the railroad. My path to a chapel service on Sunday afternoon lay past seven successive farmhouses in each of which lived one member of a family, clinging in solitary misery to a small acreage which had a few years earlier supported a household. In that same neighborhood was one group of descendants io The Church of the Open Country

of two brothers, which had in two generations produced sixteen suicides. " They could not stand trouble," the neighbors said. The lowered value of their land, with consequent burdens, humiliation, and strain, had crushed them. The very ability and distinction of the family in the earlier period had the effect, by contrast, to sink them lower down.

Persisting Primitive Types. There are families in the older States which have preserved the simplicity and independence of the pioneer days. They do not buy and sell, but the men make nearly everything needed for the household group. They live in the simplicity of earlier days and by simplifying their wants and multiplying their crafts they live very near to the soil and very far from the world market. You may call them degenerate. You may call them primitive. The effect is the same. They are not of the present. So far as the religious life of the community is concerned they are aliens. A primitive type which survives to a later day is essentially degenerate.

A Demoralizing Menace. A great deal of the political trouble in the country towns of the eastern States is due to the buying and selling of votes. Much of the difficulty in enforcing the laws against the saloon is due to this alien and degenerate stock. Dr. Wilbert L. Anderson has shown that the railroad and the city have generally sifted out these weaker members of the community. They have been carried into the city and sunk in the whirlpool of the slum. It remains, however, for every New Eng-

Rural Decay and Repair Ii

land church to plan for the ministry which it can render to degenerate households, for the moral tone of the whole community is lowered by their presence. They are vessels filled with a bitter and poisonous liquor. They put the cup of impurity to the lips of the children of the cleanest families. The punishment of one member or the removal of another member of such groups as this does not end their virulent power for evil. A group, especially a household, has power to perpetuate itself, and these families are the waste of the noblest period in American agricultural history.

Speculative Phase. The third form of rural decay is the process of farm speculation. Speculation is a valuing of things in cash. It is an effort to " make money " without labor. In the household period of farming, about the '80s and '90s of the nineteenth century, country people began to value their property no longer as homes but as assets. A price was put upon the acre. The farm home was offered finally for sale. Remaining still a farmer, the man has moved to the westward, or to the eastward, from the central States, as the rising values of land have tempted him. The vicious and artificial character of his social life is evidenced by the fact that he has been profiting through the rising price of land in a time when the actual value of land is falling. An Illinois farmer told the writer, " I used to raise ninety bushels of corn per acre on my farm. I can now with better machinery only raise forty-five bushels per acre. At the same time my land has increased in value from thirty-five dollars per acre, when it was producing ninety bushels, to one hundred and fifty dollars per acre when it is producing forty-five bushels. The only thing that saved me was the rising price of farm products." This is a vicious and artificial system. While it is not all evil, it has left a deposit of speculative influence in the country. Churches and schools in the district in which this system of the speculative farmer prevails are weakened, the most of them are standing still, and the number of those which fail is as great as the number of those which are succeeding. Effect of Abundant Cash. Rural decay through speculation shows itself in those regions in which the farmer sees before him a great profit through the sale of his properties and is transformed by this prospect into an idler. In southwestern Pennsylvania the farm lands are underlaid by beds of bituminous coal. The farmers of that section are of the household farming era. They have sold the coal under their land very generally and have received high prices for it. Sometimes the companies which now own the coal wait for years before mining it. Meantime, the farmers gradually have loosened and relaxed their methods of tilling the soil. After years of meager living they have come into possession of plenty of money. The older men maintain the industry of a lifetime, but imperceptibly the whole household, especially the younger members, show the corrupting influence of mere cash as opposed to an economic system. The ministers of that region and leading church people have come to recognize the impending destruction of their churches. They are praying and they are asking for light as to the methods to be used in the era just upon them.

Test of the Incoming Foreigners. As soon as the coal company begins to operate its properties it brings into the region great numbers of miners. These men are foreigners. The bosses are from the British Isles or from the older stock of immigrants. The miners themselves are from southeastern Europe, of those types of Europeans most alien to American customs and institutions. No severer strain can be put upon Christian institutions or upon public schools than such an invasion. Weakened already by the decay of the speculative process, these churches are ill prepared to minister to the needy foreigner. They are too feeble to teach the masterful industrial leaders their duty to the poor and to the kingdom of God.

Question of Remedies. The remedy for this decay is the exaltation of giving, when the farmers first become rich, and the organizing of benevolence through community enterprises. My purpose here is to describe the process. The remedy is seldom at hand. The trouble is that these changes through speculation are too swift or their slow processes are too subtle for religious men to understand them, and to deal with them. The whole countryside is often eaten with the social corrosion of the exploitation of land for coal, for iron, or other speculative commodities.

Exploitation Phase. The fourth form of decay is in the exploited lands and people. Farm life is like all other social life, subject to exploitation. Its values are seized by the masterful and by the selfish to increase their gains. The strong are made more powerful and the weak are ground into the earth. The country communities in all the eastern States show the effects of exploitation. They are almost hopelessly weakened through the depletion of the soil. In New England there are communities in which the land has been " ryed off." 1 Other towns have been exhausted by raising tobacco year after year without fertilization.

Example of Soil Exhaustion. Twenty years ago in Groton, Massachusetts, an old farmer, whose years and wisdom had earned him the title of " Uncle Rufus," took me to the top of a hill and pointing to the sandy stretches below us said, " Young man, you wouldn't believe that when I was your age I worked in fields of tobacco and of rye down there ! We raised big crops there till there was no more in the soil. We never fertilized. Now that land only raises the scrub oak and stunted pine you see down there. It will never again be what it was."

Example of Missouri Town. In some parts of Missouri the community has been blighted by the transformation of farm land into mining land, and

1 Land that has been robbed of its fertility by continuous crops of rye.

after the process is done there remains an impoverished stock, the leavings of a strong population, who themselves ousted the farmer for the sake of mineral wealth. Going on to other mining communities, they have left the weaker members of their own households to fester socially and to decay morally in a depleted and impoverished place. The following quotation from the letter of an investigator in Missouri is a picture of such a mining town. It shows the close relation between the impoverished soil and the exploited people. It is a luminous illustration of the close relation between economic, moral, and religious life. " It is a half -deserted mining town. The reason it isn't all deserted is because half the population were too lazy to move. They lie around in dilapidated, unpainted, filthy hovels from daylight to dark. There is a schoolhouse there : I mean there is a building there in which children go to school. It is 25 by 50 feet in size. It is frame; several square yards of weatherboarding have been torn from it; its door has been kicked in. Of its ten windows six have been completely knocked out. Many panes of the remaining four are broken. The blackboard is half demolished. Some of the seats are torn loose. Filth is on the floor. There is a road between Danforth and Connellsville on which I had to walk my horse every step. On the way I met another man on a horse. He looked at me suspiciously and remarked that no one ever traveled that road unless he was lost. There are 4,766 people in this township. Less than

300 go to church; and the churches! Heaven help them ! Offering denominationalism and theology to men who have practically no decent forms of social gathering or recreation ! The motion picture shows, held in buildings fit only for kindling purposes, have twice as many people in a night as the churches have all week. These and the pool-rooms and Sunday baseball games are the only places where men can meet out of working hours."

Four Phases Summarized. One might summarize this account of rural decay by saying that there have been four successive types of countrymen, of country community, and of country church in America. These four are the solitary farmer, the household farmer, the speculative farmer, and the organized farmer.

Work with Present Forces. The repair of country life can only be made in modern terms. One cannot rebuild the past. It is impossible to restore the pioneer, much as his virtues are to be admired, because he was made by the wild mountain and the lonely prairie, which are no more. The household organization of country life was created by a state of affairs in which the household made all that it consumed. It was complete in itself. This can never come again, because the market to-day is the world, and the farming class will not go back to manufacturing all their necessities on their own premises. We cannot restore the household type of farming, though its moral and spiritual values were very great.

EXTERIOR AND INTERIOR OF A COUNTRY SCHOOL NO FOUNDATION, SIDING BROKEN, DOOR CRACKED

Scientific Farming the Basis. Scientific farming is the clue to the repair of country life. Not merely for profit, but for the building up of an intelligent organized country population, scientific agriculture will be of use in the country. It must be a gospel of the mind and soul, and on this new basis churches, schools, and whole communities will be erected.

Introduces New Method of Life. The beginning of this process is already made. The government of life in the country by scientific standards is accomplishing much. Farmers who are obliged to be scientific in order to raise any crop out of depleted soil are fighting the battle with adversity, using scientific agriculture as a military necessity. But when the necessity is past, they will have learned a new method of life. Sanitary reform is coming also in the country, based upon exact scientific research. Throughout the Southern mountains the hope is entertained by teachers and social workers that the campaign against the hook-worm will be successful. Already its results there are astonishing, and the victory against this enemy of social progress among Southern people is in sight, though far off.

Country Struggle Changing the South. The fight in the South against the boll weevil is proving a wonderful social discipline. It is organizing the people of the whole South to a sense of the value of science in the reorganization of country life. This victory is coming in two forms. It is compelling the farmer to till the crop with energy and precision. He can win a good crop by forced culture and reap it before the boll weevil has matured sufficiently to destroy it. But a greater discipline is felt throughout the South. The long-needed diversifying of Southern crops will come by the destruction of the cotton crop in some sections.

Approaching Farmer Organization. Corresponding to science as a discipline for agriculture, the organization of country people is necessary. Precisely as the labor unions have organized wageearners, the farmers must organize. Not in the same terms nor with the same demands, but with equal thoroughness, and with the same subjection of the individual to the union of his fellows. These organizations which are now existing will have a variety of purposes. They are not merely for direct financial gain. So long as they go to the root of the farmer's prosperity, however, they will effect the same ethical and religious transformation. They will teach the farmer to cooperate and to obey. They prepare a way for the federation of the churches, and the unifying of every phase of country work.

A New Country Ideal. A new ideal of country life must arise out of the present struggle, and everywhere men are studying this ideal in the community. Its sources are in the experience of the older eastern States. New England was built under a community organization. The New England town is a self-governing community and the tradition of the Town Meeting has gone westward with a migrating population. Pennsylvania has in the Quakers and the Mennonites the community tradition in a more spiritual form. Disdaining the civil organization and caring nothing for politics, they formed themselves into communities by the genius of their religious system. They controlled the individual by methods of their own and cooperated in essential things for the common welfare.

Community in Action. The community is an old ideal, born out of the experiences of mankind in America and Europe, which expresses to-day the working principle of rural repair. The way to teach a population this ideal is not merely to preach it and to describe it, important as this is, but to practise it. People learn by what they do more than all that they hear. The first essential in teaching a community spirit is to organize a community act. Old Home Week in an eastern State will bring together a community meeting, and the effects of it will be illuminating to the minds of all. The celebration of the holidays of the year has power to awaken the community spirit, if this celebration is in common for all. It is not enough to have a Thanksgiving service in the church. Indeed, such a meeting may be a denial of community principles. But the celebration of Christmas, Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving should be so public and should be in such terms that the whole population will respond. The custom of so doing, even though it recurs but twice a year, will have amazing power in organizing a community sense.