The farmer and the new day

Front matter

Class v> S% 1

Book JB ^

GopyrighfX? C^fc-S X.

Preface

For many years I have been meditating upon the matters that have been written about in this book. I have lectured about them to students and talked about them to farmers and other folks. Long ago I planned to write them out in a book or series of books, but I have found it nearly impossible to write satisfactorily in the midst of administrative duties. Good thinking and good writing on themes such as these require from most of us, time, fresh energy, and sufficient relaxation of mind to enable one to chew the cuds of reflection. Executives find it difficult to secure these requisites. I am finishing these pages under the pressure of a demand to join at once colleagues overseas in educational work among our soldiers.

All that I have attempted in this book, is to endeavor to state the larger problems which the farmer must face during reconstruction and to indicate the significance and character of the relations between him and the rest of society in this new era. There has been little attempt to furnish solutions of specific problems; rather to indicate a few of the fundamental principles and methods by which agricultural improvement and an adjustment to world affairs can be made.

My thanks are due to colleagues in the Division of Rural Social Science at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Dr. Alexander E. Cance and Professor John Phelan, for helpful comment and criticism; and par-

PREFACE

ticularly to Miss Lorian P. Jefferson, Assistant Professor in the Division, for close reading of both manuscript and proof. Indeed, T am obliged to leave for France before the proof is read.

Kenyon L. Butterfield.

Amherst, Massachusetts.

November, 191 8.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Is the Farmer Coming to His Own?

II The Challenge of the New Day .

Chapter I Is The Farmer Coming To His Own?

Many centuries ago a certain wise man said that he that holdeth the plow, and driveth oxen, as well as every artificer, all who put their trust in their hands, shall not be sought for in the council of wise men who have leisure in which to prophesy, and to enter into the subtleties of parables. What he meant to say was that the common people are fundamentally necessary to the world but do not govern the world.

A few months ago another wise man, perhaps the most far-sighted of his generation, bade us " search our hearts through and through and make them ready for the birth of a New Day — a day, we hope and believe, of greater opportunity . . . for the average mass of struggling men and women."

Which of these principles of human development and influence is to prevail in the years and centuries ahead of us? Which of these wise men is the true prophet for our time — he who condemned the common man to a position of minor influence in society, or he who sees a new day for the average man?

THE FARMER AS UNDERLING

It is certain that during the centuries that have passed since the wise man of Ecclesiasticus painted his picture

i of the peasant, in most times and in most places, the farmer has been an underling. Even the land that he tilled has not been his own. In great spaces of the earth the farmer was for ages an actual slave. In some regions even to-day he belongs to the land and, if the land is sold, he goes with it to the new owner. If any country is dark, with illiteracy, ignorance, and superstition, it will be found that the blackest areas are the rural districts. The soil tiller has at the worst been serf and clout, and at the best, with a few shining exceptions, rustic or peasant. Rarely indeed has he sat at the council-board of those who determined the destinies of peoples or even had a voice in the policies that governed his own work and life.

THE SHINING EXCEPTIONS

In republican Rome the farmer seems to have been held in respect and to have had a satisfactory place in the business of the time. Of the standing of Roman farmers in general, Cato says that when a Roman wished to commend an honest man he termed him a good husbandman, a good farmer. This was rated the superlative of praise. It was, he continues, from the tillers of the soil that sprang the best citizens, the stanchest soldiers, and theirs were the most enduring rewards. A survey of Roman literature reveals many a prominent name made famous chiefly through writings on agricultural subjects. Cato, farmer, soldier, lawyer, is known to us almost wholly through his De Re Rustica, which reveals his wide farm experience. Varro, " the most learned of the Romans," left to the world the best practical work on farm management which has come down to us from the ancients — Rcrum Rusticarum, a careful statement of actual experience and knowledge of a successful farmer. Virgil discoursed on the joys of country life. Cincinnatus left his plow for war on behalf of his country. Agriculture for centuries was the bed-rock of Rome's strength, and farmers were not kept out of the councils of the wise.

Again we find an exception to the dreary monotony of rural dependency in the English " yeoman." Of a population of perhaps two and one-half millions in England in the seventeenth century, it is estimated that not less than eleven-twelfths were engaged in agriculture. According to statistics for the year 1688, there were 180,000 families of yeomen, known as freeholders, and 150,000 families of farmers. These figures are significant in connection with a total of 1,360,000 families in England at the time. The freeholders were actual farm owners, living on the soil, and the farmers were those tenants who paid an annual rent for their holdings about equal to the annual value of the farm. The middle of the seventeenth century was the time when the English yeomen enjoyed the greatest freedom and prosperity. They owned their own land or rented it on favorable terms and for desirable periods; they were sturdy and independent, often daring to oppose, " in voting and in fighting," the neighboring squire. One writer of the period said, " The yeomanry is an estate of people almost peculiar to England; [he] wears russet clothes, but makes golden payments, having tin in his buttons but silver in his pockets. He seldom goes abroad, and his credit goes farther than his travel." Economically the farmers [tenants] were about equal to the freeholders, differing considerably, however, in social standing.

I

MODERN RAINBOWS OF PROMISE

During the past fifty years there has grown up in certain European countries a new treatment of the farmer and in some respects a new attitude toward him. He has acquired a new power in affairs. Perhaps the most conspicuous examples of this new situation are Germany, Denmark, and Ireland. Other countries, such as Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and even Italy, in many ways stand out in the light of a splendid progress and an intelligent statesmanship in rural affairs. But on the whole the three countries first named are the best illustrations of a rural development which has been planned in advance; each country has made a special contribution to rural improvement.

Germany had probably developed before the war the most far-reaching agricultural policy that we know — a policy grounded in national aspirations and designs. The principles underlying this policy were simple enough, especially as we view them now in the light of the world war. Germany encouraged agriculture for two great reasons: (i) That she might feed herself in time of war; (2) that she might breed soldiers. Her tariffs on food products; her encouragement of collective selling of farm products and of collective purchase of farm requirements; her remarkable machinery for furnishing the farmer with both short-time and long-time credit; her more than tolerance of great associations of farmers and the granting of semi-official standing to their leaders ; her widespread and very effective system of agricultural education — all these (added to the fact that German agriculture, and consequently the very structure of German society itself, rests upon the broad back of German farm women) made Germany all but self-sustaining at the time she chose war for her portion. Her encouragement of small farming and large families, her methods of " keeping boys on the farm," her care of public health, added to her system of military training, gave her the huge armies that she flung into Belgium and France, into Russia and the Balkans. Thus Germany, pursuing for two generations a consistent agricultural policy, was enabled, on a soil originally not especially rich and from an area smaller than that of the state of Texas, to provide perhaps nine-tenths of the food for her seventy millions of people. Her attitude toward agriculture, it may be said in passing, won for her militaristic policy the support of the agricultural classes. Thus, while we detest the spirit and method of the Germany that is responsible for the horrible carnage of the world war, we find in that country that the soil tiller came to a place of comparative influence and power.

Denmark, in 1866, found herself deprived of the richest part of her soil by the war with Germany. She had few manufactures and has not many to-day. She had little capital but grit, a vision of a complete agriculture and wonderful leadership. In half a century she developed probably the most fully organized and generally prosperous agriculture of any political area in the world. She chose a few products on which to specialize, those to which she was best adapted and for which a market could be found. Danish butter, Danish bacon, and Danish eggs made their way against all competitors and caused the Danish farmer to become a factor not only at home but in the national economy of other countries.

For decades and even centuries Ireland was the land of political protest and rebellion. Her sons and daughters left her by millions, her poverty both in city and in country grew apace. Absentee landlordism became a stench and a byword among the terribly poor tenantry. And then a prophet arose in that land and proclaimed a new gospel of reformation. Horace Plunkett had a simple message that went to the root of the situation; Ireland's farming must be rehabilitated; her land must be owned by those who till it; the day of the lone farmer has passed and the day of the rural cooperation has dawned; there must be a new rural civilization, adequate and satisfying economically and socially; self-sustaining local rural communities must be built up as the bulwark of a true democracy of work and life as well as of government. And so, by 19 14, half of Ireland's farm land had passed from big landlord to little farmer

— the " family size " farm was the unit of measure

— hundreds of cooperative societies were in active and successful operation, the spirit of cooperation had succeeded to the spirit of apartness. The flame of Irish enthusiasm and endeavor on behalf of rural interests has been carried to our own shores and has lighted many a torch of leadership in rural affairs.

SOME LESSONS FOR US

It is worth while to take note of the underlying methods and results of these great national enterprises in agricultural betterment, for they may have some valuable lessons for us in America. Germany, with its far-reaching agricultural policy; Denmark, with its very complete, almost perfect system of cooperative effort in production and sale of food; Ireland, with its ideals of social development and rural community building — these countries, together with the others already named, seem to have brought the farmer into a new and higher position in the business and life of the nations. What are the fundamental conditions under which this change was accomplished?

1. First was the spur of necessity. At bottom it was the competition from America, Argentina, and Australia, or some serious internal difficulty that forced the European farmer into the depths of despair and thus compelled statesmen to plan for his recuperation. " Something had to be done."

2. The great principles of improvement which were recognized and used at every turn were education and organization. Neither was more important than the other; both were indispensable and neither alone was efficient. Organization meant governmental approval, recognition, and even financial aid in all efforts at voluntary cooperation among farmers, especially in the business side of farming — selling products, buying supplies, and various forms of collective credit and insurance. Even in Germany, in spite of an opinion to the contrary, the main idea was for government to help farmers to help themselves. Education meant a widespread system of technical education in agriculture adapted to all degrees of intelligence, placed within reach of every youth and every adult living on the land. In some cases, the great cooperative societies carried on this educational work themselves, but always as a real part of a publicly supported and thoroughly organized system.

3. There was developed in each country a well planned and fairly definite agricultural program. This program was capable of being put upon paper. It had been hammered out in conferences of all the interests concerned. It was relatively stable. It was a plan of agricultural improvement recognized by farmers as meeting their needs and by statesmen as fitting into national welfare.

4. Finally, agriculture came to be recognized as a national factor, to be planned for and worked with for large national ends. It was no longer a neglected element. And so the leaders among the farmers were in a sense received at court; they did " sit with the wise men at the gate of the city."

Thus when the great war broke out in 19 14, it seemed as if in many parts of Europe the farmer had in a measure at last come to his own. It still remains to be seen whether, in the reestablishment of peaceful occupations, and particularly in the democratization of autocratic states, the farmer is to have a full share of responsibility and power.

THE AMERICAN FARMER

The final and the greatest exception to the general position of the farmer in society is the American farmer. In no age cf history and in no country has there been nor is there now his equal. American farm life has bred the most skillful farmers, the most intelligent rural citizens, the most engaging farm homes to be found anywhere in the world. This praise applies to the real American farmer, the owner and active manager of a family-size farm, who came of the best blood of pioneer America, whose intelligence is comparable with that of the leading groups of citizens of the Republic, many of whose sons and daughters have made their way into recognized leadership in business, industry, and the professions. It is difficult to speak with restraint of this man or his achievements. He conquered a huge continent of rich soil for civilization. He carried to the frontier an eager desire for education, the democratic impulse, and the fear of the Lord. He has helped fight his country's battles. He has been the bedrock of representative government. His independent spirit, his abundant energy, his high intelligence have made him without a peer among the tillers of the soil. His income is supposed to be two and one-half times that of the English farmer, three times that of the German farmer, and six times that of the Italian farmer.

A rather careful survey of the agricultural production of different nations indicates that the production of the American farmer, whether considered by himself or with all those dependent upon him, is several times that of the German, British, French, or Italian farmer. The exact relation may be shown in the following table, in which an arbitrary index figure is used to show relative values. If we call the index of productivity for each American engaged in agriculture 292; the index for the British farmer is 126; for each German farmer, 119; for the French farmer, 90; and for the Italian farmer, 45. That is to say, the volume of productivity of each American engaged in agriculture is about two and one-half times that of the English agriculturist, nearly three times that of the German farmer, and six times that of the Italian.

Fixing at 1,000 the productivity of each American dependent on agriculture, which includes all persons gainfully employed in agriculture as well as those dependent on them, the German index will be 685, or 68 per cent, as much; for the Briton, 425, or 42 per cent. ; for the Frenchman, 406, or 40 per cent. ; and for the Italian 230, or 23 per cent. Of course this table io THE FARMER AND THE NEW DAY

merely shows that for each person employed in agriculture in America, there are more unemployed dependents than there are in other countries.

Index of productivity per person:

For each American dependent upon agriculture. . . . 1004

For each German dependent upon agriculture 685

For each Briton dependent upon agriculture 425

For each Frenchman dependent upon agriculture . . 406 For each Italian dependent upon agriculture 230

Index of productivity per person:

For each American engaged in agriculture 292

For each Briton engaged in agriculture 126

For each German engaged in agriculture 1 19

For each Frenchman engaged in agriculture 90

For each Italian engaged in agriculture 45

RIFTS IN THE LUTE

But there has been another side to the story. The pioneer experiences were trying, often discouraging, not seldom heart-breaking. There have been poor farmers both on poor land and on good land, as well as good farmers on poor land, with resulting inefficiency. Farming regions have competed f6r the markets. Financial returns have often been meager, many total failures have ensued, mortgages have been foreclosed, women have gone insane from isolation and drudgery. These and other discouragements have from time to time resulted in organized protest; the great farmers' organizations of the country have all grown out of the spur of disadvantages to masses of farmers. The dissatisfaction of farmers was peculiarly acute during the period from about 1875 to 1895.

COMING TO HIS OWN? n

Since 1895 the rapidly decreasing percentage of new lands coming under cultivation, with a resulting decline in ratio between farm producers and urban consumers, the freer absorption of the food supply by both American and foreign markets, the gradual rise in price levels have given us an era of relative rural prosperity. Indeed some of the evidences of this prosperity in the form of the free purchase and use of automobiles, enormous statistical aggregates of value of animal and field production, the ability of many farmers to " retire " during middle life, have blinded us to sinister tendencies that have been creeping into our American agriculture as silently and as relentlessly as the inflowing tides of the sea. Without aiming to make a complete statement of these depressing facts, it will suffice to mention those that seem to be most significant in a bearing upon the question whether or not the American farmer will hold his own.

1. The great majority of American farmers are not to-day securing from their labor a reward which they regard as fair to themselves, nor one which students of social science consider satisfactory from the standpoint of minimum requirements for a decent living. The best figures obtainable indicate an average labor income for the American farmer of $400 per year. There are some states, indeed some whole regions, where farmers on the whole are very prosperous; but this fact merely adds force to the discouragingly meager income in those areas where the returns are at or below the average.

2. There is a widespread, almost a universal, belief among farmers that, as the phrase goes, " the farmer does not get his share of the consumer's dollar." Doubtless some statistics on this point are misleading;

unquestionably rural public opinion is narrow with respect to the real values created by middlemen; and probably distribution has been charged with failures that as a matter of fact are due to poor business management on the part of farmers, or to competition between rival areas of production, or merely to the influence of the season's weather. Nevertheless there is ample ground for the assertion that the farmers are quite right in the main contention. Our system of distributing food products works in general against the farmers' interests. Wonderfully complete and effective in many ways as a system of carrying food from and into all corners of an immense country and into foreign lands, it is a system costly to run and built up with scant regard to the farmer's share.

3. The growth in tenant farming has become notable, especially in quite recent years. To a degree this was inevitable. A vast number of American farmers came into possession of their farms either by direct gift of the nation or at prices that were merely nominal. Ownership was made easy. There was small excuse for tenant farming. As soon, however, as the demand for land outran the supply of virgin soil, the landless farmers were compelled to rent in order to " get a start." No doubt a fair proportion of present day tenant farming is due simply to the fact that the farmer has to use this method of arriving at ownership — he is on the way to possession. But there are features of this movement toward tenantry that are very disturbing. It is in the main a transient form of tenant farming. Figures gathered by the Census Bureau in 19 10 showed that out of six and one-third million farmers, 1,787,473 tenant farmers had been on the land they were tilling four years or less, and 1,123,722 but one year or less. These figures are for both share and cash tenants. Now the evils of such a situation need no explanation. Poor farming is inevitable; soil depletion is unescapable; futile, ineffective lives of farmers and their families are unavoidable; and worst of all, the deterioration of rural communities becomes hopelessly certain. We have reached a point in American agriculture where it is worth while to hold land for its speculative rather than for its true economic value. In some of our most prosperous farming states land is slowly but surely passing into the hands of absentee landlords — not merely farmers who can afford to retire to the village or county seat, but to an increasing extent men whose main business is banking, mercantiling, or the law, and whose investment in farm land is purely speculative.

4. Perhaps the most menacing tendency in American agriculture is one that curiously enough attracts little attention among the farmers themselves. It may be expressed by saying that in some ways many of our richest farming districts are becoming our poorest. The prosperous farmer in his pride says, " I can afford to retire." Retiring means moving away from the farm. He has pulled out by the roots his leadership in his community. His support of local enterprise is no longer felt. If his place be taken by his son or other young man educated, interested, public-spirited, the case is not so bad. But as a rule his place is taken by a man of lesser capacity whose interest in community affairs is transient. The sense of community responsibility, the feeling of local patriotism, the pull and push of loyalty to the common good of the neighborhood has dried up as the rootage of personal attachment to the farming community has been exposed.

As a, consequence it is probable that the great fundamental social institutions such as the rural school and the country church are not merely relatively but actually less efficient than formerly in many parts of our country, even in regions in which land owners are very prosperous in a business way. In some cases these changes for the worse are so marked that we find that entire neighborhoods in the course of perhaps two decades become populated by a class clearly less effective, less intelligent, and less ambitious than was formerly the case.

Now this way lies the extinction of the " American farmer." If farm " prosperity " spells actual rural decline, the yeoman type of soil tiller is doomed. The new peasant will take the place of the old plowman. One may still view the whole picture of American agriculture with pride, but only the blind optimist can fail to see the menace of these and other similar tendencies in our rural affairs.

WHAT THE WAR HAS REVEALED

And then came the war. How it intensified our thought about the future welfare of our country! Absorbed as we were in our effort to win the war, down underneath our activity we kept pondering the question, What is the war to bring us as its great abiding results? And so in agriculture we ask, What has the war revealed?

i. "Food will win the war" was an exaggerated statement of a great fact. Never before in all our history has our sheer dependence upon the soil and the men who till the soil revealed itself to the multitudes who have never had a curious question as to where food comes from, much less as to the welfare or the people who grow it. The war surely brought the farmer to his own in respect to a new consciousness on the part of the world's food users of their utter dependence upon him.

2. The war revealed to the farmer more clearly his duty as a member of society. He has seen as never before his obligation to strain his back to even severer toil for the sake of those so dependent upon him. Heretofore he has naturally been more concerned with his rights — with getting a fair and just return for his labor. He has not felt a keen personal sense of obligation to supply food for people who can't grow it for themselves. Now the deepest parts of a nature rich in feeling have been touched. The farmer has been asked to produce, not primarily for profit but for a great cause. And has the farmer responded? Indeed he has responded. If America's part in the war is ever adequately written, one of the great chapters will tell of the way in which the farmers who stayed on the land, working under the greatest difficulties, met the " call to the colors."

3. But the war also revealed a vacant chair at the nation's council table — the chair of the farmer. (And here let us recall the writer of Ecclesiasticus.) The United States Department of Agriculture, with its great machinery and its staff of trained and able men; its auxiliaries, the agricultural colleges and schools; and particularly the new but effective system of county farm bureaus — verily raised up for the great hour — all have done an effective and indispensable service in the crisis. Groups of farmers have from time to time and to an increasing extent been in consultation with responsible officials of government and their counsel been made effective. Nevertheless the working farmers of America as a class have not been represented in any authoritative or adequate way in the groups that have outlined policies nor in the councils that have determined destinies, either with respect to agriculture itself, nor in those fields of effort in which the farmers as a great class of citizens have a special interest. This is not a new situation. The war has merely revealed it in an accentuated form. The farmer has never been taken into council about the big affairs of the nation in political, business or welfare enterprises. "How will it affect the farmer?" is a question seldom asked in a serious, intelligent way in those conferences in which great movements for human wcllbcing are started and maintained.

4. Our entrance into the world war also revealed the absence of a national agricultural policy, clear, definite, accepted by the farmers. The war made clear once for all that the problem of food supply is one problem, and that a program of activities for the farmers must fit into a program not only for producing but also for distributing and using the food produced. We did not have at the opening of the war, and we do not yet have, a food supply policy on a national scale, unified in its program and fully cooperative in its methods, with all agencies working as one instrumentality in an effort to carry on one big task. Part by part we developed an agricultural policy for the war, but slowly, hesitatingly, partially. Our agricultural preparedness for the war was but little further advanced than was our military preparedness.

5. It is quite clear that both lack of agricultural representation in national affairs and absence of a distinct agricultural policy are in a very real way the farmer's own fault. The secret of the matter is the unorganized character of agriculture. " Farmers' organizations " there are, of considerable recognized power. Associated efforts there are by the thousand for various purposes. We have a huge and on the whole an effective scheme of publicly supported agricultural education. We have an alert agricultural press. But there is no national figure nor central group of men to voice authoritatively any message to or from the farmers. There is no one of the farmers to speak for the farmers. American agriculture, unlike other prime industries, is not organized. It is a great unwieldy, complex mass of individuals and relatively small groups, without effective unity of thought to direct or tongue to express.