The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunity

Railroads, Steam and Electric

It is hard for us to imagine a world without railroads! Yet before 1830 all long distance travel was by stage coach or by water. The world-view of most men was very tiny and their mental outlook correspondingly narrow. Farm life was seriously restricted by the fact that a distant market for most goods was impossible. It cost $10 per ton per hundred miles to haul merchandise to market, a tax which only high-grade goods could stand.

The triumph of the railroads in conquering the continent has been one of the national marvels. Suffice it to say, though the railroad has helped to concentrate population in the cities, it has also served in a wonderful way to develop the country communities, to open up whole sections for settlement, furnishing a market and a base of supplies, making extensive agriculture possible and distant commerce profitable; meanwhile serving as main arteries of communication, with a constant influx of fresh world thought and life.

The interurban trolleys are doing much that the steam roads cannot do, connecting vast rural sections which hitherto have been aside from the beaten paths of life. The relative cheapness of building these electric lines, and the less expense for power, equipment and maintenance make their further extension probable as well as necessary for years to come. Their frequent trips, the near approach to thousands of farm homes, their short stops and low rates make them particularly serviceable for country people. “No king one hundred years ago,” says Dr. Roads, “could have had a coach, warmed in winter, lighted up to read at night, running smoothly with scarcely a jolt, and more swiftly than his fastest horses. Through the loving providence of the heavenly Father, his poorest children have them now.”15 It is too early yet to estimate rightly the contribution the trolley has made to the new rural civilization. It has doubtless lessened in some respects the prestige of the village and especially of the village stores; and has brought in some evils, but it has interwoven, with its rapid shuttles, the city and the country, vastly enriching country life with broadened opportunity and making thousands more contented to live in country homes, because of lessened isolation as well as developing the suburban village, the most rapidly growing of all communities in America to-day.

The Rural Postal Service

The day of the moss-back who went for his mail once every week, the same day he got shaved and sold his butter, is gone forever, so far as most of our country is concerned. To-day about 20,000,000 of our rural neighbors receive their mail at their own farms, delivered by Uncle Sam’s messengers; and this great change has occurred in a decade and a half. In 1897 $40,000 was the appropriation by Congress for the experiment in rural free delivery. In 1909 the expense was about $36,000,000, and on June 1 of that year there were 40,637 rural routes, nearly all of them daily service. This rural army of the civil service is almost as large as the whole military force of the country and possibly quite as useful. It is rapidly driving from our rural homes the specters of ignorance, superstition, provincialism and prejudice, and the positive good accomplished cannot be estimated. Letter writing makes and keeps friends. Thousands of farmers’ families have joined The League of the Golden Pen in recent years. Their mail collected and distributed doubles in four or five years after the local R. F. D. is started.

Among the new civilizing factors is the metropolitan daily, bringing to millions of farmers the daily stimulus to thought and action which the continued story of the throbbing life of the struggling world unfailingly brings. On one rural route the number of daily papers delivered increased in three years from thirteen to 113. The great interests of humanity are now intelligently discussed by the farmer and his boys as they go about their work, and the broadening of interests is what prevents stagnation and enriches life.

We are not surprised to find a wonderful increase of magazines and other periodical literature in the country, especially the farm journals which have attained such influence and excellence. R. F. D. did it. Likewise the remarkable increase of shopping by mail is due to the same cause. Though many such purchases are doubtless foolishly made, it is undoubtedly true that even the great catalogs of mail-order houses with their description of many of the comforts of modern civilization have been of great educative value and have stimulated the ambition of countless country homes for an improved scale of living.

A recent rural survey of Ohio revealed the fact that pianos or organs were found in 25.9 % of the 300,000 rural homes of the state, though only 4.8 % had bath tubs! We venture to guess that many of these musical instruments were bought by mail, after the family had for many days studied the alluring catalogs of Chicago mail-order houses. Incidentally, it would be well for Chicago to sell more bath tubs! The new rural civilization is rapidly requiring them.

The Automobile, a Western Farm Necessity

Often merely a luxurious plaything in the city, a saucy bit of flaunting pride particularly irritating to envious neighbors, the automobile finds great usefulness in the country. The average village as yet cares little for it; but the western farmer in the open country is finding it almost a necessity. The proportion of autos to farms, in the prosperous corn and wheat belt, is very surprising. Low salaried tradesmen in the cities have mortgaged their homes to buy the coveted automobile; the thrifty farmer has also been known to do the same, but with vastly better reason. A certain bank in a Mississippi valley state tried to stop the withdrawal of funds for the purchase of machines, the vast sums being withdrawn from the state for this purpose had become so alarming; but it was like damming Niagara! In a prosperous little farm community in Iowa with only a few scattering families, there were nine automobiles last summer; and the situation is probably typical of prosperous western communities. A reliable authority vouches for the fact that 179 automobiles were sold in Cawker City, Kansas, in 1911. The population of the “city” in 1910 was 870. Obviously most of these machines must have been distributed among the farms in the outlying country. The village itself had last year but twenty-one automobiles.

Quite likely the per capita number of machines is greater in our great agricultural states than in the cities. It is needless to emphasize the social possibilities of this newest of our agencies for the newer rural civilization. As a means of communication it outstrips all but the telephone. It brings farm life right up to the minute for progressiveness, with a pardonable pride in being able to keep pace with the city. It annihilates distance and makes isolation a myth; and as the expense becomes less and less with every year, the time is soon coming when every farmer who can now afford the ordinary farm machinery will be able also to possess this newest symbol of rural prosperity.

II. The Emancipation from Drudgery

The Social Revolution Wrought by Machinery

Next to the great social transformation caused by these modern means of fighting isolation comes the emancipation from drudgery brought in by farm machinery. Labor saving machinery is just as much a feature of modern civilization in the country as it is in the city. Machinery, by developing the factory system, centralized industry and produced the great cities, attracting thousands from the farms to man the looms. But this is only half the story. Meanwhile the invention of agricultural machinery made it possible for the farm work of the country to be done by fewer men. Therefore the farm population of the United States decreased from 47.6 % in 1870 to 35.7 % in 1900, representing a change from agriculture to other employments by three and a half millions of people. Meanwhile, comparing the average value of farms, and the relative purchasing power of money, the average farmer was 42 % better off at the end of the century than fifty years before.16

The tendency of farm machinery to throw men out of employment and send many to the city is shown by these facts from the thirteenth annual report of the U. S. Commissioner of Labor. The sowing of small grains is accomplished nowadays by machine methods in from one-fifth to one-fourth the time formerly required for hand-sowing. One man with a modern harvester can now do the work of eight men using the old methods, while the modern threshing machine has displaced fourteen to twenty-nine farm laborers. Machinery displaces the labor or increases the crop, according to circumstances; but usually both. It has greatly increased the output of farm products, sometimes reduced prices, and vastly increased the efficiency of the workers. Of nine of the more important crops, the average increase in labor efficiency in the past two generations has been 500 %, while in the case of barley it was over 2,200 %, and nearly the same for wheat.17

The Evolution of Farm Machinery

The great incentive in America for our astonishing development of farm machinery has been our cheap lands and our relatively high wages. But the noble desire to rise above the slavery of drudgery has constantly had its influence. American ambition has combined with Yankee ingenuity to produce this wonderful story. The plow, that greatest of all implements, has passed through constant changes, from the crude simplicity of early days to the giant steam gang-plow of the present.

The first steel plow was made in 1837 from an old saw blade! The first mowing machine was patented in 1831. Imperfect reapers appeared two years later and were made practicable by 1840, one of the triumphs of modern industry. Meanwhile threshing machines began to come into use and separaters were combined with them by 1850. The first steam thresher appeared in 1860.

It was a dramatic moment in history when at the Paris Exhibition of ’55 a hopeless contest was waged between six sturdy workmen with the old hand flail, and threshing machines from four different countries. In the half-day test the six men threshed out by hand sixty liters of wheat; while a single American with his machine threshed 740 liters and easily beat all contestants.

By the time of the civil war great saving of labor had been effected by the invention of the corn planter and the two-horse cultivator. By 1865, about 250,000 reaping machines were in use and by 1880 our country had become the greatest exporter of wheat in the world. The invention of the twine-binder made this possible, making practicable the raising of greater crops of wheat; for as Professor T. N. Carver says: “The harvesting of the grain crop is the crucial point. The farmer has to ask himself, not, ‘How much grain can I grow?’ but, ‘How much can I harvest with such help as I can get?’” By the late seventies the steam thresher was fast supplanting horse-power and a great impetus was given wheat growing when the roller process for manufacturing flour was invented. By this process better flour was made from spring wheat than had ever been produced from the winter grain, and this made Minneapolis the Flour City, in place of Rochester.

In rapid succession the check-rower, permitting cross cultivation of corn, the lister, for deep plowing and planting, the weeder, the riding cultivator, the disk harrow and other kindred machines greatly helped the production of corn, our greatest crop. Cheese and butter factories and improvements in dairy methods helped to make Americans probably the largest consumers of butter in the world. The Babcock test for determining the butter fat, and the centrifugal separater for extracting the cream, were most important.

The Evolution of the Plow

In the last quarter century the improvement on these earlier farm machines has been remarkable and elaborate. One of the most wonderful continued stories of human ingenuity is the evolution of the plow, from the historic crooked stick that merely tickled the surface of the ground (and is still used in many countries) to the steam gang-plow which tears up the earth at an astonishing pace, and thoroughly prepares the soil meanwhile. When with a gang-plow and five horses, it became possible for a man to plow five acres a day, it was supposed the acme of progress was attained. But soon steam traction was introduced on the prairies and two men were able thus to plow a dozen furrows at once and cover thirty to forty acres in a day.

Now, however, a 110-horse power machine, a monster of titanic power and expert skill, plows a strip thirty feet wide, as fast as a man could comfortably walk, and also does the harrowing and sowing simultaneously. This completes the work of plowing and planting at the rate of 80 to 100 acres in a working day, or under favorable conditions even twelve acres an hour, thus doing the work of forty to fifty teams and men. Yet millions of people in the cities are not yet awake to the fact that we have a new rural civilization! When we think of the thousands of men who have patiently experimented and labored to perfect the plow, many of them now unknown, we must consider the modern planting machine not an individual but a race triumph. Among these innumerable experimenters was no less a man than Thomas Jefferson, gentleman farmer, who gave months and years of study in nature’s laboratory to the single problem of perfecting the moldboard of the plow, that it might do the most thorough work with the least unnecessary friction.

Likewise the harrow, so simple in our grandfathers’ days, has remarkably developed, and we have peg-tooth, spring-tooth, disk, spader and pulverizer harrows, drawn by horses or mules, which follow the plow with a four- to twenty-foot swath. But here again the city mechanic must tip his hat to the prairie farmer who uses twentieth century machinery, for we have now a harrowing machine 100 feet in reach which harrows thirty acres in an hour or a whole section of land in about two days! These astonishing facts are particularly staggering to the small farmer, but they need discourage only the incompetent. They have of course combined small farms into great enterprises, and have driven some slovenly farmers from poor soil. The pace is so fast. But specialized farming and intensive farming have their own successes to-day as well as extensive farming, and it all tends to elevate the whole scale of living and standard of efficiency upon the farms; in short producing a new rural civilization.18

Power Machinery on the Modern Farm

A most interesting chapter in the story of human industry is the evolution of power machinery. Gradually the drudgery of hand labor has been relieved by water power, horse power, steam power, wind power and the modern gasolene and electricity. The giant gang-plow with its 110-horsepower traction engine is a prairie triumph, but it has very little interest for the ordinary farmer on an average farm. Yet even the small farmer finds the gasolene portable engine wonderfully useful and a great labor-saver at slight expense.

Perhaps the surest way for a farmer to interest his discontented boy, who is crazy for the city, is to buy a gasolene engine. A machine shop on the farm is a great educator and a great resource for the boy as well as a money-saver for the farmer. But best of all is the portable engine, which not only relieves the boy of the most back-breaking labor but gives him the keen delight of controlling power, – a mighty fascination for every normal boy.

The most recent publication of a great farm machinery trust entitled “Three Hundred Years of Power Development,” dismisses electricity as impracticable for farm uses because of its expense; and says of wind power: “This power at best is unreliable and usually unavailable when most needed.” Yet the writer has discovered a 1,120-acre farm in North Dakota where electricity is generated by wind, and wind power is stored in electricity at a very slight cost, and it meets many of the mechanical needs of this prosperous farm. So far as known this is the first instance of a storage-battery electric plant upon a farm, the battery being charged by wind power! The ingenious older son, now a graduate of the State School of Science, experimented with this plan all through his boyhood and is now securing patent rights to protect his invention.19 He discovered from the U. S. Weather Bureau reports the mean wind velocity which could be depended upon at Mooreton, N. D., and built his windmill accordingly. An ingenious automatic regulator protects the battery from over-charging. The electricity provides 75 lights for house, barn and other farm buildings; power for wheat elevator, all laundry machinery, washing, ironing, centrifugal drying; cream separater and other dairy machinery; electric cook stove, et cetera, in the farm kitchen; electric fans for the summer and bed warmers in the winter; electric pumps for irrigating, and even an electric vulcanizer for repairing the auto tires! This is the way one farm boy succeeded in harnessing the fierce prairie winds and compelling them to do his drudgery.

The Social Effect of Lessened Drudgery

To the mechanic the story of agricultural machinery suggests the miracle of the conquest of nature by human ingenuity and perfected mechanical skill. To the economist it suggests fascinating new problems of production and consumption, and the new values of land, labor and capital. To the speculator it means a greatly enlarged field for manipulation and wilder dreams of profit. But to the country lover rejoicing in the new rural prosperity it first of all suggests that from thousands of progressive farms has the curse of drudgery been lifted.20

Hard, grinding, back-breaking labor, often with surprisingly meager returns, and in some seasons with total crop failure, has been in the past the bitter lot of the husbandman. Many a farm boy has thus had the courage crushed out of him in early teens and has ignominiously retreated to the city. Many a farmer’s wife has grown prematurely old and has slaved herself to death, leaving her children and her home to a younger successor. These conditions of course still continue even in the new age. Great numbers of farmers are still hopelessly poor, many of them needlessly so, through ignorance, slovenly management, laziness or willful unprogressiveness. But the rural moss-back is being laid upon the shelf with other fossils and soon will possess only historical interest. Great organized effort is being made to redeem him by the gospel of scientific farming before he dies, and the effort is by no means vain.

III. Increased Popular Intelligence

The new rural civilization, however, is by no means a mere matter of methods. The farmer himself has been growing more intelligent. County agricultural societies, first organized in 1810, set the farmers to thinking. Many farm journals have contributed widely to the farmers’ education. But in the past twenty years many agencies have united in what has been a great rural uplift. The government’s department of agriculture, the experiment stations established in each state, the better-farming trains with their highly educative exhibits, the countless farmers’ institutes for fruitful discussions, the extension work of state universities, the local and traveling libraries, and especially the agricultural colleges, through their short courses in the winter, their stimulating and instructive bulletins, their great variety of extension service through their territory, are among the many agencies for popular education in country districts which are becoming thoroughly appreciated and highly effective. In a great variety of ways a genuine rural culture is being developed, with its own special characteristics and enduring values. All this is helping to make country life vastly worth while.

This increased culture among country people is a great factor in the new rural civilization which must be given due consideration. It is this which is overcoming rural narrowness and provincialism. Herein is great hope for the future of the open country as a worthy home for people of the finest tastes and of genuine culture. This important topic will be considered in detail in Chapter VI, under Education for Country Life.

IV. The New Social Consciousness

In these days when the gospel of class consciousness is being preached by labor union leaders, as requisite to success, the farmers may well heed the lesson. Let them stop the luxury of self-pity and discover a genuine pride in their life calling. Thousands do not in the least need this exhortation. They rejoice in their privilege as scientific tillers of the soil. They are also discovering a real social spirit among themselves which speaks well for the future. As a class they are claiming their rights with a new insistence and a new dignity which is commanding a respectful hearing.

Legislatures and the national Congress are taking notice; likewise the railroads; but the middleman remains unterrified, secure in his speculative castle. He may look well to his profits however, for the days of organized agriculture are not far distant. The farmers are getting together for business and are comparing notes with the consumers. The producer finds he is often getting less than half what the consumer pays and the cooperative spirit grows apace. The efficiency of farmers’ organizations for mutual profit has varied greatly in different sections, but they serve a genuine need and have a great future, as class consciousness increases among farmers.

But the new social consciousness in the country is not merely a matter of group loyalty. It has to do with the interests of the whole community. The selfish days of the independent farmer are rapidly passing. The social spirit of mutual interdependence is certainly growing. One of the tests of modern civilization is the capacity for cooperation. Tardily, very tardily, the country has been following the city in this ability to cooperate for common ends and the community welfare, but improvement is very evident.

The problem of community socialization will be treated in Chapter V. We shall find that the need of cooperation runs through every phase of rural life and explains the common weakness of every rural institution. But leaders of country life, both East and West, have caught the social vision and are sharing it with their neighbors. “Together” is the watchword of the new day in the country, and the incentive of cooperative endeavor is the key to the new success in every rural interest and organization.

V. Effect of the New Order on Rural Institutions

For several decades we have been seriously troubled by the decay of rural institutions. The strain upon them resulting from rural depletion has been very serious. First of all the country schools began to deteriorate and thousands of them doubtless have been closed. With the decay of the village, the village store, that social center and fountain of all wisdom, has lost prestige and most of its trade. The trolley and the mail order houses have made it unnecessary. With the coming of the rural delivery route, even the village post-office has lost all social importance. With the advent of farm machinery and fewer farm hands, many of the jolly social functions of the past, such as husking bees, barn raisings, spelling bees and lyceums, have ceased to be; while the rural churches in all depleted sections have suffered sadly and in hundreds of cases have succumbed.

In some scattered communities, away from the beaten paths, this social decay has resulted in de-socializing the neighborhood. Feuds, grudges, gross immoralities have followed and the people have relapsed into practical heathenism. But in many places social readjustment has come, with a new efficiency in rural institutions. Centralized schools have brought a new largeness of vision in place of the little district knowledge shop. The great advantages of the rural free delivery have certainly outweighed the loss of the social prestige of the post-office, just as the trolley is more valuable than the village store. Many of the old time social functions were worth while, but new institutions like the Grange and the farmers’ clubs, institutes and cooperative organizations are better fitted to the modern age and are contributing largely to the new rural civilization, while the village church and the church in the open country are discovering new opportunities for service, broader community usefulness and a great social mission.