Part 13 (1/2)

_The Weakness in Rural Inst.i.tutions_

This unsocial streak of distrust and poor social cooperation runs through every sort of inst.i.tution in rural life. Schools are usually run on the old school-district plan with over-thrifty supervisors, no continuous policy, and with each pupil buying his own text books; roads are repaired by towns.h.i.+p districts, with individuals ”working out their taxes;”

churches are maintained on the retail plan, the minister being hired by the year or even by the week; the churches themselves are numerous and small, because of the selfish insistence upon individual views; even cooperative agreements in business have been repudiated by farmers under stress of temptation to personal gain; while rural distrust of banks and organized business is proverbial.

All of these unsocial tendencies are probably less due to selfishness than to lack of practice in cooperation. City people however have had constant practice in cooperation; hence they work together readily and successfully. They are organized for every conceivable purpose good or bad. In fact they are so intoxicated with the joy of social effort, they are apt to carry all sorts of social life to an extreme. The social fabric is as complex and confusing in the city as it is simple and bare in the country. The problem for the country is to develop a wholesome social life and an efficient inst.i.tutional life which shall avoid the extremes of the city and yet shall get country people to working together harmoniously and happily. Only thus can life in the open country maintain itself in a social age for successful business, church, home, school or social life.

Only thus can country character develop its capacity for those social satisfactions which are the crowning joys of a complete and harmonious civilization. But those who have faith in the fundamental vitality and adaptability of rural life believe that even this serious weakness in cooperation can be gradually overcome and country life be made as effective for its own purposes as life in the city. This faith is justified by large success already thus attained in progressive rural sections with the modern spirit.

_The Difficulty of Organizing Farmers_

Five reasons are mentioned by President b.u.t.terfield to account for this difficulty: Ingrained habits of individual initiative; Financial considerations; Economic and political delusions which have wrecked previous organizations of farmers; Lack of leaders.h.i.+p; and Lack of unity.

Under lack of leaders.h.i.+p, he says: ”The farm has been prolific of reformers, fruitful in developing organizers, but scanty in its supply of administrators. It has had a leaders.h.i.+p that could agitate a reform, project a remedial scheme, but not much of that leaders.h.i.+p that could hold together diverse elements, administer large enterprises, steer to great ends petty ambitions.”[24] Yet country-bred leaders have been wonderfully successful in the city under different social conditions.

Failures in leaders.h.i.+p are often due to failure to get support for the project in hand. This in turn is due to lack of common purposes and ideals. A successful leader personifies the ideals of his following.

Unless there is unity in ideals the following disintegrates. Here again the rural unsocial streak shows plainly. Individual notions, ideas and remedies for social ills have been so various, it has taken the stress of some great common cause, the impulse of some powerful sentiment, or the heat of some mighty moral conflict to fuse together the independent fragments. This was done when Lincoln sounded the appeal to patriotism in '61; when Bryan's stirring eloquence aroused particularly the debtor farmer cla.s.s in '96; and when the projectors of the Farmers' Alliance, the Grange and the Populist Party succeeded in their appeals to cla.s.s consciousness and convinced the farmers of their need of union. Rural movements however have usually been short-lived.

II. Failures in Rural Cooperation.

_Lack of Political Effectiveness_

Farmers usually do their duty serving on juries and in minor civil offices. They are usually fairly well represented in state legislatures.

But few farmers go to Congress or gain real leaders.h.i.+p in politics. In proportion to their numbers, the rural people have marvelously little influence in the affairs of government. We have in this country no Agrarian party. The farmers are divided among the different political camps and seldom do they exert any great influence as a cla.s.s in the making of the laws. There are about seventy times as many agriculturists as lawyers in the United States,--yet the lawyers exert vastly greater civic influence and greatly outnumber farmers in most law-making bodies.

Yet there are about fifty million rural people in the country, largely in farm households. The average farmer in 1910 paid taxes on 138 acres besides other property. Why should he not have more political influence?

Why has he not demanded and secured a dominating influence in the state?

There is probably no reason except lack of cooperation, and adequate leaders.h.i.+p to accomplish it.

_Lack of Cooperation in Business_

Successful farming is essentially cooperative. The most successful cla.s.ses of farmers in the country, according to Professor Carver, are the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Mormons and the Quakers. All of these cooperate in their farming operations to a high degree, as well as in their social and church life. They occupy their farms permanently as family homes. Their land is not for sale, in spite of the rising values. To a large extent they buy and sell, and work their farms together, to their great mutual advantage.

The old-fas.h.i.+oned farm management however, which still generally persists, is compet.i.tive, and therefore wasteful and unsocial. With rapid transportation and the lengthening distance between producer and consumer, the function of the middleman has grown and his power vastly increased.

Consequently on many products the rise in selling price is due to the series of middlemen through whose hands the article has pa.s.sed on the way to market. Investigations at Decatur, Ill., revealed the fact that head-lettuce sold there was raised within five miles of Chicago, s.h.i.+pped into the city, repacked and s.h.i.+pped by freight to Decatur, a five-hour trip; then stored in the latter city over night; and finally displayed, wilted in the sun, in a store window, and sold to a housewife who buys it for fresh goods! If raised in a suburb of Decatur, it might have been sold at half the price, and been really fresh enough to eat. The same story of flagrant waste through poor management might be told of b.u.t.ter, cream, and practically all farm products which are not sold in a public market near the producer's home.

Not only are both the farmer and his ultimate customer suffering a considerable loss from this compet.i.tive system of marketing, the process itself is bad socially, for this reason. It cuts off the farmer from his normal market, the nearest village, and isolates him and his family so that they have virtually no interests there. If the farmer should sell his product in the village stores or through a public market, or a cooperative commission house, he would have more at stake in that town. He would probably trade and go to church there, his wife would do her buying there, they would be persons of importance to the townspeople and would form friends.h.i.+ps and social relations.h.i.+ps there. As it is, a wall of mutual suspicion and disregard separates this family from the people of the town.

It is doubtful whether farming can be sufficiently profitable to-day, or the life of the open country be really satisfying, without some degree of cooperation in business. More and more men are realizing this; are overcoming their natural weakness for independence and are discovering numerous modern ways to cooperate with other farmers; to their great mutual advantage both financially and socially, as will be indicated later.

_Lack of Religious Cooperation_

The old self-sufficing and compet.i.tive methods of farming have been closely paralleled by the selfish ideals in religion; the great aim being to save one's own soul and enjoy the religious privileges of one's favorite type of church, whatever happened meanwhile to the community. In most country places religion is still strongly individualistic. Rural folk have seen little of the social vision or felt the power of the social gospel of Jesus, which aims not only to convert the individual, but to redeem his environment and reorganize the community life by Christian standards. Consequently rural churches are depending too exclusively on preaching and periodic revivals rather than on organized brotherliness, systematic religious education and broad unselfish service. All of these are essential.

This lack of cooperation is very widely in evidence in the division of country communities into petty little churches, so small and ineffective as to be objects of pity instead of respect and enthusiastic loyalty. In the older sections of the country, rural communities often have twice as many churches as are needed; but in the middle West and the still newer sections further westward the problem of divided Christian forces is even more serious. Many a small towns.h.i.+p has five churches where one or two would be quite sufficient, and all are struggling for existence. The problem is less serious in the South, where denominations are fewer and where union services are exceedingly common.

In a spa.r.s.ely settled section in Center County, Pennsylvania, there are 24 churches within a radius of four miles. This fact was vouched for in 1911 by the Presbyterian Department of the Church and Country Life. The same authority suggests the following: