THE FARMER AND HIS COMMUNITY

BY

DWIGHT SANDERSON

PROFESSOR OF RURAL SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
CORNELL UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.

EDITOR'S PREFACE

In the "good old days" of early New England the people acted in communities. The original New England "towns" were true communities; that is, relatively small local groups of people, each group having its own institutions, like the church and the school, and largely managing its own affairs. Down through the years the town meeting has persisted, and even to-day the New England town is to a very large degree a small democracy. It does not, however, manage all its affairs in quite the same fashion that it did two hundred years ago.

When the Western tide of settlement set in, people frequently went West in groups and occasionally whole communities moved, but the general rule was settlement by families on "family size" farms. The unit of our rural civilization, therefore, became the farm family. There were, of course, neighborhoods, and much neighborhood life. The local schools were really neighborhood schools. Churches multiplied in number even beyond the need for them. When farmers began to associate themselves together as in the Grange, they recognized the need of a strong local group larger than the neighborhood. A subordinate Grange for example is a community organization. Experience gradually demonstrated that if farmers wished to coöperate they must coöperate in local groups. Strong nation-wide organizations are clearly of great importance, but they can have little strength unless they are made up of active local bodies. Gradually, the community idea has spread over the country, in some cases springing up almost spontaneously, until to-day there is a very widespread belief among the farmers, as well as among the special students of rural affairs, that the organization and development of the local rural communities is the main task in conserving our American agriculture and country life. It is interesting to note that what is true in America is proving also to be true in other countries. In fact, the farm village life in Europe and even in such countries as China is taking on new activities, and it is being recognized that the improvement of these small units of society is one of the great needs of the age.

Professor Sanderson, in this book, has attempted to indicate just what the community movement means to the farmers of America. He has brought to this task rather unusual preparation. In turn, a graduate of an agricultural college, a scientist of reputation, Director of an agricultural experiment station, Dean of a college of agriculture, he has had a wide, varied and successful experience in various states. He finally arrived at the conviction, however, that the most important field of work for him lay in dealing with the larger phases of country life, and he gave up administrative work for further preparation in the new field. In his position as Professor of Rural Organization in the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, he has been unusually successful, both as investigator and as teacher. He speaks as one who knows the farmers and not as an outsider, and also as a thorough student.

This book therefore is sent out with a good deal of confidence. It deals with one of the most important of the rural topics that can be discussed these days. It points out fundamental principles and indicates practical steps in applying principles.

Kenyon L. Butterfield.

FOREWORD

In recent years we have heard a great deal about the rural community and rural community organization. All sorts of organizations dealing with rural life discuss these topics at their meetings, the agricultural press and the popular magazines encourage community development, and a number of books have recently appeared dealing with various phases of rural community life. The community idea is fairly well established as an essential of rural social organization.

One might gain the impression that the community is a new discovery or social invention were he to read only the current discussions. It is, however, a form of social organization as old as agriculture itself, but which was very largely neglected in the settlement of the larger part of the United States. This new emphasis on the community is, therefore, but the revival in a new form of a very ancient mode of human association. The community becomes essential because the conditions of rural life have changed and rural people are again being forced to act together in locality groups to meet the needs of their common life.

The author has attempted to define the rural community and to describe the new conditions which are determining its structure and shaping its functions, in the belief that an understanding of the nature of the rural community should aid those who are seeking to secure a better social adjustment of the countryside. It attempts to relate "The Farmer and His Community." The problems and methods of community organization have been discussed but incidentally, and the book is not designed as a handbook for community development. Its chief aim is to establish a point of view with regard to the rural community as an essential unit for rural social organization through a sociological analysis of the past history and present tendencies of the various forms of associations which seem necessary for a satisfying rural society. It is hoped that such an analysis presented in an untechnical manner may be of service to rural leaders who are working for the development of country life by giving them a better understanding of the nature of the community and therefore a firmer faith in its future and greater enthusiasm and loyalty in its service.

The present volume is a brief summary of a more extended study of the rural community, not only in this country but in other lands and in other times, which is now in preparation for publication.

Dwight Sanderson.

Cornell University.
May, 1922.

CONTENTS

THE FARMER AND HIS COMMUNITY

The core of the community idea, then—as applied to rural life—is that we must make the community, as a unit, an entity, a thing, the point of departure of all our thinking about the rural problem, and, in its local application, the direct aim of all organized efforts for improvement or redirection. The building of real, local farm communities is perhaps the main task in erecting an adequate rural civilization. Here is the real goal of all rural effort, the inner kernel of a sane country-life movement, the moving slogan of the new campaign for rural progress that must be waged by the present generation."—Kenyon L. Butterfield, in "The Farmer and the New Day."

CHAPTER I

THE RURAL COMMUNITY

No phase of the social progress of the Twentieth Century is more significant or promises a more far-reaching influence than the rediscovery of the community as a fundamental social unit, and the beginnings of community consciousness throughout the United States. I say the "rediscovery" of the community, for ever since men forsook hunting and grazing as the chief means of subsistence and settled down to a permanent agriculture they have lived in communities.

In ancient and medieval Europe, in China and India, and among primitive agricultural peoples throughout the world, the village community is recognized as the primary local unit of society. In medieval France the rural "communaute" was the local unit of government and social administration. Its people met from time to time at the village church in regular assemblies at which they elected their local officers, approved their accounts, arranged for the support of the church, the school, and local improvements. In most of France and throughout much of Europe the farm homes are still clustered in villages, from which the farm lands radiate. There the village is primarily a place of residence, and with the lands belonging to it forms the community.

New England was settled in much the same manner, being divided into towns which still form the local units of government, and which for the most part are single communities, though here and there more than one center has sprung up within a town and secondary communities have developed. The New England town meeting has ever been lauded as the birthplace of representative democratic government in America, and in its original form it was a true community meeting, dealing not only with the political government, but considering all religious, educational, and social matters affecting the common life of the town.

Although the New England tradition determined the form of local government in the areas settled by its people in the central and western states, the township was but an artificial town resulting from methods of the land surveys. The homesteader "took up" his land with but little thought of community relations. He traded at the nearest town; church was first held in the school-house and later churches were erected in the open country at convenient points; his children went to the district school; and his social life was chiefly in the neighboring homes. His life centered in the immediate neighborhood. As railroads covered the country, villages and town sprang up at frequent intervals, and gradually became the real centers of community life, but usually there was but little realization on the part of either village or farm people of their community interests. The farmer's attention was on the farm, the townsman's chief interest was his business, and not infrequently their interests were in conflict and they gave little thought to their real dependence on each other.

In the South the plantation system of the landed aristocracy, which as long as it existed was quite self-sufficient, gave little encouragement to community development. The county was the most important unit of local government and the "carpet-baggers'" efforts at establishing local townships were repudiated with the ending of their régime. Only in recent years have conditions throughout the South, largely the result of increased immigration and the breaking up of large plantations, favored the development of local communities.

In general, the American farmer has voted and taken his share in local politics and government, has attended his own church, has traded where most convenient or advantageous, has joined the nearest grange or lodge, and with his family has visited nearby friends and relatives and joined with them in social festivities; he has loyally supported these various interests, but until very recently, he has had little conception of the interrelations of these institutions in the life of the community or of the possible advantages of community development as such. But new wants and new problems have arisen which may only be met by the united action of all elements of both village and countryside. The automobile demands better roads and both farmer and businessman are interested to have them built so that the natural community centers may be most easily reached. Better schools, libraries, facilities for recreation and social life, organization for the improvement of agriculture and for the better marketing of farm products, are all community problems and force attention upon the community area to be served by these institutions. A consolidated school or a library cannot be maintained at every crossroads. Only by the support of all the people within a reasonable distance of a common center are better rural institutions possible.

The trend of events was thus bringing about a recognition of the place of the community in the life of rural people, when the Great War hastened this process by many years. Liberty Loan, Red Cross, and other war "drives" were organized by communities which vied with each other in raising their quotas. A new sense of the unity of the community was brought about by the common loyalty to its boys in the nation's service. Having created state and county councils of defense, national leaders came to appreciate that the primary unit for effective organization for war purposes must be the community, and President Wilson wrote to the State Councils of Defense urging the organization of community councils. Thousands of these had been organized when the Armistice was declared, and although most of them were not continued, the importance of the local community was given national recognition and attention was directed to the need of the better organization of local forces for community progress.

What, then, is the rural community? Is it a real entity or is it merely an idea or an ideal? Where is it and how can we recognize it?

We are indebted to Professor C. J. Galpin, now in charge of the Farm Life Studies of the United States Department of Agriculture, for first developing a method for the location of the rural community. Professor Galpin[1] holds that the trading area tributary to any village is usually the chief factor in determining the community area. He determines the community area by starting from a business center and marking on a map those farm homes which trade mostly at that center. By drawing a line connecting those farm homes farthest from the center on all the roads radiating from it, the boundary of the trade area is described. In the same way the areas tributary to the church, the school, the bank, the milk station, the grange, etc., may be determined and mapped. The boundaries of these areas will be found to be by no means coincident, but it will usually be found that most of them center in one village or hamlet, and that the trade area is the most significant in determining the area tributary to this center. When the areas served by the chief institutions of adjacent centers are mapped, it is usually found that a composite line of the different boundary lines separating these centers will approximate the boundaries of the communities. A line which divides adjacent community areas so that most of the families either side of this line go most frequently to, or their chief interests are at, the center within that boundary, will be the boundary between the adjacent communities. Thus, from the standpoint of location, a community is the local area tributary to the center of the common interests of its people.[2]

As indicated above the business center may usually be taken as the base point or community center, from which to determine the boundaries of the community. However, in the older parts of the country or in hilly or mountainous regions, the trade or business center is not always the same as the center of the chief social activities of the people, and may not be the chief factor in determining the community center. Not infrequently a church, school and grange hall located close together may form the nucleus of a community which does its business at a railroad station village some distance away, possibly over a range of hills. The chief trading points cannot, therefore, be arbitrarily assumed as the base points for determining community areas, but those points at which the more important of the common interests of the people find expression should be considered as community centers. It is not simply a question of where the people go most often, but of where their chief interests focus.

With this concept of a community it is obvious that the "center" of a community must be the base point for determining its area. It would seem that the community center is essential to the individuality of any community: The community "center" need not necessarily be at the geographical center of the community; indeed in many cases it is at or close to one of its boundaries, though in an open level country it will tend to approximate the center.

The term "community center" is here used in a literal sense of being the center of the activities of the community. It should be distinguished from the "community-center idea" which refers to a building, whether it be a community house, school, church, or grange hall, as a "community center." Such a building in which the activities of the community are largely centered may be a community center in a very real sense, but in most cases these activities will be divided between church, school, grange hall, etc. No one of them can then be a center for the whole community, but taken together they constitute the center in which the chief interests of the community focus. Every community must necessarily have a more or less well defined community center; it may or may not have some one building in which the chief activities of the community have their headquarters. Such buildings, of whatever nature, may well be called community houses or social centers.

Although attention has been directed to the area of the community, the community consists not of land or houses but of the people of this area. Its boundary merely gives a community identity, as does the roll of a company or the charter of a city. The community consists of the people within a local area; the land they occupy is but the physical basis of the community. The nature of the community will depend very largely upon whether its people live close together or at a distance. In the Rocky Mountain States many communities are but sparsely settled and may have a radius of forty or fifty miles and yet be true communities, while on the Atlantic seaboard a definite community with as many people may have a radius of not over a mile or two.

Nor is the community a mere aggregation or association of the people of a given area. It is rather a corporate state of mind of those living in a local area, giving rise to their collective behavior. There cannot be a true community unless the people think and act together.

The term "neighborhood" is very frequently used as synonymous with "community," and should be definitely distinguished. In the sense in which these terms are now coming to be technically employed, the neighborhood consists of but a group of houses fairly near each other. Frequently a neighborhood grew up around some one center, as a school, store, church, mill, or blacksmith shop, which in the course of time may have been abandoned, but the homes remained clustered together. Or the neighborhood may be merely six to a dozen homes near together on the same road or near a corner. The school district of the one-room country school is commonly a neighborhood, but as there are no other interests which bind the people together it cannot be considered a community. Likewise people associate in churches, granges, etc., but church parishes overlap, and the constituency of any one of these associations is not necessarily a community. Only when several of the chief human interests find satisfaction in the organizations and institutions which serve a fairly definite common local area tributary to them, do we have a true community. In many cases the neighborhood, particularly the school district, forms a desirable unit for certain purposes of social organization, and, indeed, in many cases it may be necessary to develop the neighborhood as a social unit before its people will actively associate themselves in community activities, but the neighborhood cannot function in the same way as the larger community which brings people together in several of their chief interests. The community can support institutions impossible in the neighborhood, such as a grange, lodge, library, various stores, etc. The community is more or less self-sufficing. A community may include a variable number of neighborhoods. The community is the smallest geographical unit of organized association of the chief human activities.

Bringing together these various considerations concerning the nature of the rural community we may say that a rural community consists of the people in a local area tributary to the center of their common interests.

Obviously the community thus defined has nothing to do with political areas or boundaries, for very commonly a community may lie in two or three townships or counties. That rural areas are actually divided into such communities and that the community is the primary unit of their social organization may best be tested by taking any given county or township and attempting to map its area into communities on the basis above described. In most of the northern and western states and throughout much of the South, most of the territory may be quite readily divided into communities. This has been demonstrated by the rural surveys of the Interchurch World Movement[3] and by the community maps made by County Farm Bureaus.

A very large part of the South, however, has no natural community centers and in such sections it will be found very difficult if not impossible to define community areas. The store may be at the railroad station, the church in the open country, and the district or consolidated school at still another point. Some people go to one store or church and others to another. Under such conditions, no real community exists. Usually, any form of social organization is more or less difficult under such conditions, for the people are divided into different groups for different purposes and there is nothing which makes united activities possible. It seems probable that only to the extent that certain centers of social and economic life come to be recognized by the people, and community life is developed around them, will the most effective and satisfying social organization be possible.

Recognition of the community as the primary unit for purposes of rural organization has now become quite general. Several mid-western states have passed legislation permitting school districts to combine into community districts for the support of consolidated schools or high schools, irrespective of township or county boundaries. The present tendency in the centralization of rural schools seems to be in the direction of locating them at the natural community centers. Rural churches are coming into a new sense of responsibility to the community and the community church is increasingly advocated. The American Red Cross in planning its peace-time program is recognizing the importance of the rural community as the local unit for its work. The County Farm Bureaus, working in coöperation with the state colleges of agriculture and the United States Department of Agriculture, very soon discovered the value of the community as the local unit of their organization, and carry on their work through community committees or community clubs. Possibly no other one movement has done so much to bring about the definite location of rural communities and their appreciation by rural people. A conference of national organizations engaged in social work in rural communities held in 1919 summed up the experience of a group of representative rural leaders in the statement: "In rural organization it is recognized that the local community constitutes the functional unit and the county or district the supervisory unit." In other words, it is the rural community which really "carries on," whatever the executive organization of the county or district may be.

The strength of the rural community as a social group lies in two facts. First, it is not so large but that most of its people know each other. The size of the community in this regard does not depend so much upon the actual number of square miles involved as upon the number of its population. People may all be acquainted in a sparsely settled community covering a ten-mile radius, and there may be less acquaintance in a small community with a dense population. Secondly, the great majority of the people in the average rural community are dependent upon agriculture for their income, either directly or once-removed. These two facts make possible common interests and a social control through public opinion which is not possible in larger social units such as the county or city. Sir Horace Plunkett appreciates this when he says:

"Our ancient Irish records show little clans with a common ownership of land hardly larger than a parish, but with all the patriotic feeling of larger nations held with an intensity rare in modern states. The history of these clans and of very small nations like the ancient Greek states shows that the social feeling assumes its most binding and powerful character where the community is large enough to allow free play to the various interests of human life, but is not so large that it becomes an abstraction to the imagination."[4]

This inherent social strength of the rural community, the fact that the community is relatively permanent, and the appreciation that only through community effort may rural people realize their natural desire to enjoy some of the advantages of cities, force the conviction that the community must be the primary unit for the organization of rural progress. It is from this point of view that we shall discuss the community aspects of the various human interests of the farmer and the consequent relations of "The Farmer and His Community."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Galpin, C. J., "The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community." Research Bulletin 54, Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Wisconsin, May, 1915; and also in his "Rural Life," Century Co., New York, 1920.

[2] The following four pages are revised from the author's bulletin, "Locating the Rural Community," Cornell Reading Course for the Farm, Lesson 158.

[3] See Reports of the Town and Country Department, Committee on Social and Religious Surveys, 111 Fifth Ave., New York, or Geo. H. Doran, New York.

[4] "Rural Life Problem in the United States," p. 129. Italics mine.

CHAPTER II

THE FARM HOME AND THE COMMUNITY

The American farmer thinks first of his own home; only recently has he commenced to appreciate that his and other homes form a community. In the "age of homespun" the pioneer subdued his new lands and built his home; the farm and the home were his and for them he lived. He bought but little and had but little to sell. Farms were largely self-supporting. Neighbors helped each other in numerous ways and as the country became more thickly settled neighborhood life grew apace. But there was little sense of relation to the larger community. Roads were bad and people were too widely scattered to come together except on special occasions. The family was the fundamental social unit and social life revolved around the family, or in the immediate neighborhood.

But "times have changed." The farm is no longer largely self-supporting. It is now but a primary unit in a world-wide economic system, conducted with money as the basis of exchange and dominated by the interests of capital. Farm products are sold for cash and their value is determined by distant or world markets with which the farmer has no personal contact and of which he often has but little knowledge. Most of the goods consumed on the farm must be purchased. The marketing of his products and the purchasing of goods have given the farmer increasing contacts with the village and town centers and a broader knowledge of the world at large.

During the past century modern ideas of transportation and the development of industries due to inventions and scientific discoveries have resulted in an enormous growth of city populations. The social life of the cities is increasingly dominated by the interests of the individual rather than those of the family, until the breaking down of urban family life has become a world-wide problem. The family is no longer the social unit of the city as it is in the country.

Now farm people are by no means as isolated from town and city as is often imagined. Their brothers and sisters, sons and daughters have gone to make up the increasing urban populations. Through correspondence and visiting back and forth, through frequent trips to town, through the daily city newspapers, and through the general reading of magazines, farm people are in more or less close contact with the life and manners of the cities. Inasmuch as slightly over half of our people now live in towns or cities and only one-third live on farms, it is not surprising that urban ideals and values and the urban point of view tend more and more to dominate those of the countryside. There has been a natural tendency, therefore, for the association of country people to center in the country town and village, in the community center.

Better transportation and the inability to maintain satisfactory institutions in the open country have made this process inevitable and it will do much to abolish the evils of rural isolation. The increasing difficulty of maintaining successful churches in the open country and the growth of the village church, the dissatisfaction with the one-room district school and the desire for consolidated schools and community high schools, are evidences of this tendency.

The smaller size of the farm family has made it less self-sufficient socially than formerly, and the fact that fewer near relations live nearby and farms change hands more often has resulted in fewer neighborhood gatherings. The different members of the family tend to get together more with groups of their own age and sex coming from all parts of the community, and definite effort is made for the organization of such groups according to their various interests.

Attention is directed to these tendencies because in our present emphasis on the relation of the farmer to his community and on community values, we must not lose sight of the fact that the family must ever be recognized as the primary social institution of rural life. Indeed, it may not be too much to claim that the largest value in the agricultural industry is in the possibility of the most satisfactory type of home life. The millionaire farmer is so rare as to be negligible, and although farmers as a class doubtless have as wholesome and satisfactory a living as they would in other pursuits, yet no one engages in farming as a means of easily acquiring large wealth. The highest rural values cannot be bought or sold.

The mere fact that farming is practically the only remaining industry conducted on a family basis—which seems likely to continue—and that all members of the family have more or less of a share in the conduct and success of the farm, creates a family bond which does not ordinarily exist where the business or employment of the father and of other members of the family is dissociated from the home. Although the burden of the farm business on the home is often decried and there is obvious need of lightening the mother's work for the farm as much as possible, yet under the best of conditions there is on the farm a constant and intimate contact between the father and mother and children which is rarely found under other conditions.

Primitive woman discovered the art of agriculture. At first, the men assisted the women in what time they could spare from hunting; but as game became scarce and the food supply grown from the soil was found to be more certain, agriculture became man's vocation. Permanent home life commenced with the development of agriculture. As he became a farmer, primitive man stayed at home with his wife and shared with her the nurture of the children. Before then the family had been hers, now it was theirs. The mere fact that the home and the business are both on the farm, that father is in the house several times a day and that the whole family are acquainted with his farm operations, will always give the farm home a superior solidarity, so long as the family lives on the farm. Though but few farm homes are ideal and some of them have but little that is attractive, yet nowhere are conditions so favorable for the enjoyment of all that is most precious in family life as in the better American farm homes.

If this be true, that the chief value in agriculture is in the possibility of the most satisfactory home life, then community development should be considered primarily from the standpoint of its effect on the farm home, for the social strength of the country will be more largely determined by its homes than by its other social institutions. We should endeavor, therefore, to build up that type of community life which makes for better homes and stronger families. While seeking to afford superior advantages to individuals, all effort toward community improvement should recognize that the strength of the community is in its home life.

The need of this point of view with regard to rural community organization has been very forcibly indicated by Mr. John R. Boardman, one of our keenest observers and interpreters of country life in his "Community Leadership." He says:

"At the heart of the rural situation is the rural family. The social problems involved in home life in the rural village and on the farm are of two kinds,—developmental and protective. The social unit in the city is the individual. Urban conditions have rapidly disintegrated the family as a social unit. Grave dangers have resulted from this interference with the unity of domestic life. The rural family is in danger of meeting the same fate. It is now the social unit in the rural social structure. Every effort must be put forth to make this situation permanent. The major problem is one of home conservation. Protection of the rural family against social exploitation will demand increasing attention. The development of social organization along lines which interfere with the unity and solidarity of rural family life must be approached with extreme caution and tolerated only as they may be absolutely necessary. So far as possible social organization must be built around the rural family and give it every possible opportunity to act as a family in the scheme of organization and activity. The home as a social center must receive increased attention. There is great danger, in the new interest which is being aroused in rural social life, that the matter of social organization be greatly overdone. The rural family will be the one to suffer first and most severely as a result of this craze for social organization."

In support of this point of view it is interesting to note that the strongest rural institutions, the church, the grange, and the recently organized Farm Bureaus, are all organizations which have an interest for the whole family or for most of its members. With an increasing sense of social needs and responsibilities on the part of rural people, new organizations will be formed and various community activities must be undertaken, but if country people will remain true to their traditions and, with clear view of changing conditions, will seek to organize their community life as an association of farm and village families, they will create the most satisfying and enduring type of society. The community buildings now becoming so popular in rural communities are a good example of a family institution organized to furnish better recreation and social facilities for the whole family.

Inasmuch as the home is its primary social institution, the rural community must give its first consideration to its relations to the home and how the home life may be strengthened, if the rural family is to withstand the influence of the disintegrating home life of the city. For the farm home is in a process of readjustment to modern conditions and the recognition of ideals and objectives of home-life by the community will be a powerful factor in their maintenance.

The mother has ever occupied the central position in the home. Under modern conditions, as a result of her education and broader knowledge of life, through her more frequent contacts with town and city and through her wider reading, many a farm mother is coming to feel that her position is an anomalous one. In some cases she may be able to solve her own problems, but only a general change in public opinion concerning their position will bring a more acceptable status to farm women as a class.

Some of the farm woman's problems arise from the increasing division of labor between her husband and herself and from the marketing of the farm products; these are the problems of her economic status. The peasant woman of medieval Europe or the wife of the American pioneer never worried that she did not receive a monthly allowance or a certain share of the farm income. She worked with her husband and family in raising the farm products and she shared in their consumption, for but relatively little was sold off the place. To-day, the wife of the farm owner does little work on the farm; its products are sold and much of the food and practically all of the clothing is purchased. She and her children contribute a considerable amount of the labor of the farm enterprise, and do all of the housework; but the husband does the selling and most of the buying, she often has but little share in the management of the family's finances, and rarely knows what she may count on for household expenses. She comes to feel that she is no longer a real partner, but a sort of housekeeper, though without salary or assured income. In over nine thousand farm homes studied in the northern and western states,[5] one-fourth of the women helped with the livestock, and one-fourth worked in the field an equivalent of 6.7 weeks a year, over half of them cared for the home gardens, and one-third of them kept the farm accounts. Over a third of them helped to milk, two-thirds washed the separators, and 88 percent washed the milk pails, 60 percent made the butter and one-third sold the butter, but only 11 percent had the spending of the money from its sale. Likewise 81 percent cared for the poultry, but only 22 percent had the poultry money for their own use and but 16 percent had the egg money. These figures do not give us a complete analysis of the household finances in relation to the amount contributed by farm women, but they are indicative of the general situation.

It is because of these facts that farm women feel that a larger portion of the farm income should be spent in giving them better household conveniences, somewhat commensurate with the amount that is spent for improved farm machinery and barn conveniences. Only one-third of these farm homes had running water; and but one-fifth had a bath-tub with water and sewer connections; 85 percent had outdoor toilets. Improvement is in evidence, however, for two-thirds had water in the kitchen, 60 percent had sink and drain, 57 percent had washing machines, and 95 percent had sewing machines. It is not that she is merely seeking less work so that she may attend her club or go to the movies, that the farm mother desires better conveniences and shorter hours—her average working day is now 11.3 hours—but because she has new ideals of the nurture which she wishes to give her family and of what she might do for them had she the time and physical strength.

As a result of the coöperative survey of 10,000 representative farm homes in 241 counties in the 33 northern and western states made by home demonstration agents and farm women, Miss Ward[6] gives some interesting "side-lights," which are as illuminating as the statistics:

"Women realize that no amount of scientific arrangement or labor-saving appliances will of themselves make a home. It is the woman's personal presence, influence, and care that make the home. Housekeeping is a business as practical as farming and with no romance in it; home making is a sacred trust. A woman wants time salvaged from housekeeping to create the right home atmosphere for her children and to so enrich their home surroundings that they may gain their ideals of beauty and their tastes for books and music not from the shop windows, the movies, the billboards, or the jazz band, but from the home environment.

"The farm woman knows that there is no one who can take her place as teacher and companion of her children during their early impressionable years and she craves more time for their care. She feels the need of making the farm home an inviting place for the young people of the family and their friends and of promoting the recreational and educational advantages of the neighborhood in order to cope with the various forms of city allurements. She realizes that modern conditions call for an even deeper realization and closer contact between mother and child. The familiar term, 'God could not be everywhere so He made mothers' has its modern scientific application, as no amount of education and care given to children in school or elsewhere outside the home can take the place of mothering in the home. 'The home exists for the child, hence the child's development should have first consideration.'

"Farm women want to broaden their outlook and keep with the advancement of their children 'not by courses of study but by bringing progressive ideas, methods, and facilities into the every day work and recreation of the home environment.'"

"True enough," you say, "but these are problems of the individual home. What have they to do with the community?" Just this: The status of the farm woman is a matter determined more by custom than by individual achievement. It is difficult for any one woman, no matter how able or strong-minded, to maintain a status much in advance of that of her neighbors; but let the women of a community get together and discuss their problems and ideals and the group spirit strengthens each of them in the pursuit of the common ideals. It is such a desire for mutual support—even though they are not conscious of it—which has drawn farm women together into clubs and which has given such an impetus to the Home Bureaus, or women's departments of the county Farm Bureaus. Not only in women's organizations, but finally in community organizations of men and women, such as the Grange and the church, the social standards of the community receive the sanction of public opinion, than which there is no more powerful means of influencing family usages. The community as such, must give recognition to a new and better status of its farm women.

If the rural home remains the primary social institution, it will be due to its intelligent effort at self-defense, and not to any inherent right which it has to such a position. Originally the family was but a biological group. Until modern times the agricultural family was chiefly an economic unit. Only with the isolation of the American farm, did the individual family assume the primary social position known to our fathers and grandfathers. Physical isolation and large families made the farm home the only possible social center. Isolation is largely passing, families are smaller, and organizations of all sorts and commercial amusements compete with the family. It is the use of leisure time which reveals the true loyalty of the family group. If there be nothing to attract them to the fireside, they will inevitably go elsewhere whenever possible. Hence, if it would have its foundations strong, the community must encourage the enrichment of home life, particularly, in the hours of leisure when life is most real. The family games after supper, the group around the piano singing old and modern songs, the reading aloud by one member of the circle, the cracking of nuts and the popping of corn, the picnic supper on the lawn, the tennis court or croquet ground, the home parties, the guests ever-welcome at meals, these are but items in a possible scorecard of the sociability of the home. We are giving much thought to all sorts of group activities, but how much attention have we given to systematically encouraging the social unit which has the largest possibilities, the family? Last summer my friend, Professor E. C. Lindeman, of the North Carolina College for Women, spent several weeks in becoming acquainted with rural Denmark under peculiarly favorable conditions. A statement in a letter from him regarding Danish home life is apropos in this connection:

"I observed that the country people find a great deal of social expression within their own homes. The home life is organized on a much higher plane than is common in America. In addition, there is a larger content of cultural and educational material within the family circle."

In the same way the economic position, health, education, and all other phases of life of the family are the most potent influences both in the life of its members and of the community.

The question arises, therefore, what is the community doing to strengthen the home? In recent years the new discipline of Home Economics has vigorously attacked the problems of diet, clothing, and household management, and has accomplished much. It is now concerning itself with health, child welfare, and even with child psychology and the family as an institution. Yet the home economics point of view is necessarily restricted to that of the institution which it serves, i.e., the home; it has the same limitations, when pursued solely from the home standpoint, that farm management has as an interpretation of farming if not related to agricultural and general economics. We need a consideration of the problems of the home from the standpoint of other social institutions and with regard to its function in social organization. We need a clearer concept of the relation of the home to the community and to community associations and activities.

The community institutions, the school, the church, and various organizations, have had too much of a tendency to compete with the home rather than to support and strengthen it. Thus the tendency of the school has been to demand a larger and larger portion of the child's time and to assume that because certain phases of education can be more economically given in the school, that, therefore, it should take over as much of the educational function of the home as is possible; a conclusion which is by no means valid. In the home project a new educational principle has been discovered, which has far-reaching significance: for in it the school and the home coöperate, the school outlining, standardizing, and interpreting, while the home furnishes supervision, advice, and encouragement. Thus, the home is stimulated to perform those educational functions in which it is superior, through a definite effort upon the part of the school to strengthen them. The same principle is being applied to education in hygiene. Why should not the church and Sunday school adopt similar methods and undertake a definite system of encouraging the home to give moral and religious education in an adequate fashion, rather than attempt to give homeopathic doses to children en masse? Why should not the church, or the school, or both, give parents instruction and inspiration as to how to educate their children in matters of sex, about which they are in the best position to gain their confidence? Should not our clubs and social organizations, for men and women, boys and girls, face the question, as to whether their aggregate activities are unduly competing with the home, and should they not give definite thought as to how they may assist and strengthen the basic institution of our social organization? If the home is the essential primary social institution, then its well-being should command the consideration of every institution of the community; for the function and objectives of the home cannot be determined solely by either its own ideals and purposes, or by the values established by the various special interest groups. The home and the community institutions are constantly in a process of adapting themselves to each other, and to the extent that each recognizes the function of the other and is willing to coöperate rather than to compete, is the highest success of each made possible.

This problem of the relation of the home to the community is a relatively new one, and is largely the result of better means of communication which have enlarged the horizon of every farm home. When the life of the child was almost wholly within the home and the neighborhood, the parents gave themselves little concern about the influence or conditions of the larger community. But when her children go to a consolidated school and their school associates are unknown to her, when they attend the movies in the village, and when they read the local weekly or the city daily newspaper and the monthly magazines, so that they know what is going on throughout the world, then, if she be wise, a mother commences to realize that the community is having a growing influence in shaping their character and that however ideal the home may be, it is but a part of their lives. She commences to appreciate that she must have an understanding of the life and forces of the community so that she may use her influence toward making their social environment what it should be and so that she may be able to make the home so attractive that it will hold their primary interest and loyalty. Thus community problems of health, of education, of recreation and social life, and of religion become inter-related with those of the home. The successful homemaker can no longer concern herself solely with home-management, but must assume her share of responsibility in community-management, or "community housekeeping."

With the new responsibilities of suffrage rural women are following the example of their city sisters in taking a larger interest in civic affairs and social legislation, and with a most wholesome influence on community life. There is, however, some danger that while the men are engaged with their business problems, these social problems will be too largely left to the women;[7] for without the sympathetic understanding and hearty coöperation of their husbands, rural women will find that their new social ideals will materialize but slowly. Here again, such family organizations as the Grange, the Church, and Farm and Home Bureau, in which community activities engage both men and women are peculiarly serviceable.

An interesting example of how the family may function in community life is found in a small town in southern Michigan (Centerville) where the people have established a coöperative motion picture theater, to which the families buy season tickets, and where one may find whole families together enjoying the best pictures to the accompaniment of a community orchestra. This is also being accomplished in many community buildings.

On the other hand the home need not abdicate all of its old-time functions as a social center. A few years ago in attending a rural community conference at the University of Illinois I was interested to hear a farm woman, a graduate of that university, tell how she and her neighbors had held amateur dramatic entertainments on their front verandas during the summer. The young people took the parts and the audience sat on the lawn, and thus many families were brought under the influence of the better homes who would not have thought of visiting them. When winter came on, these entertainments were continued in a slightly different manner, so that neighboring families were brought into contact without any tendency toward undue intimacy between families which would not associate otherwise. Family parties for young and old, should by no means be abandoned in favor of community parties, however satisfactory and attractive the latter may be.

The social responsibility of the rural home must receive new recognition, for the day when we can live to ourselves in the enjoyment of a select group of personal friends is rapidly passing, if we are to have satisfactory social conditions. It is one of the bad effects of the increasing amount of tenancy in our best farming sections, and of the frequent changing of farm ownership, that the shifting of residence makes it difficult for the family to secure a satisfactory social position in the community life.

In the last analysis, however, the largest contribution of the home to the community and the best means of solving the problem of its relation to community life, is in the development of the best social attitudes among its members toward each other and toward the life of the community; for all sound social organization is but an application of the relations of the family to the affairs of larger social groups, and unless attitudes of mutual aid, common responsibility, and voluntary loyalty, are maintained in the home, so that its relations form a norm for all other human groups, rural society will have lost the chief dynamic of social progress.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] From "The Farm Woman's Problems," Florence E. Ward. U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, Circular 148 (1920).

[6] Ibid., pp. 14, 15.

[7] Benjamin Kidd claims that this superior interest of women in race welfare is due to woman's cultural inheritance and that from the very nature of the division of labor between man and woman, man is less capable than woman of devoting himself to human welfare. "But the fact of the age which goes deeper than any other is that the male mind of the race as the result of the conditions out of which it has come, is by itself incapable of rendering this service to civilization. It is in the mind of woman that the winning peoples of the world will find the psychic center of Power in the future."—"The Science of Power," p. 241.

CHAPTER III

THE COMMUNITY'S PEOPLE AND HISTORY

The community is composed of people in a certain area, but the community may be dead or it may be alive. The life of the community is determined by the degree to which its people are able to act together for the best promotion of their common welfare. This ability to act together will obviously depend upon the extent to which the people have common aims and purposes. If the people of a community form distinct groups with diverse ideals and purposes, it will be much more difficult to secure that sympathy, tolerance, and understanding which are necessary for united action, than if they are more alike. Yet it is just such diversity of interests of different elements in the community which gives rise to community problems and which brings about an appreciation of the need of developing community life.

It is necessary, therefore, to have some appreciation of how the characteristics of its population influence community life.

In the first place, a community of people of different nationalities or races, or sometimes even of people from different states, find it much more difficult to secure a common loyalty than if they were of one stock. It is, of course, quite true that many an old community of a single stock is divided by family, religious or political feuds; yet usually there is more solidarity between people of common traditions and culture. The largest problem in the so-called "Americanization" of foreigners in rural communities is to get the natives to understand and appreciate the newcomers and to realize that the future of the community depends upon mutual respect and good will. Had we a little more of an historical perspective, we would remember that all of our ancestors were "foreigners" but a few generations back. In almost every part of the United States are communities in which alien groups form one of the chief obstacles to a better community life. Throughout the South, the most fundamental problem is that of a better understanding between the two races, and until some means of amicable adjustment is attempted, there is little prospect for the development of community life. In some of our best agricultural sections there have been successive waves of immigration of different nationalities. Thus in Dane County, Wisconsin, of which Madison—the state capital—is the county seat, Dr. J. H. Kolb[8] describes communities in which Germans, Norwegians, and Swiss have largely supplanted the original settlers from New England. In an interesting study of Americanization in a community in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, John Daniels[9] has described how the French Canadians and Irish and then the Poles have taken up the land, and how good feeling between them and the native Yankees was gradually established. On the other hand, a nearby community in southern New York comes to mind, in which there is a colony of Bohemians, and another of Finns, which have been fairly successful in building up hill farms deserted by the descendants of the original settlers, and yet the community as a whole has done little toward making these people feel that they are a part of its life, although their industry is one of its largest economic assets. "America is the home of the free" and most of our people do desire a real democracy, but we seem to have assumed that it will develop spontaneously, and we have not appreciated that good will and common understanding require some means of acquaintance and exchange of ideas, and that the interests and desires of all the people in a community, young and old, must receive recognition. Unless we can establish democracy in our own local community, how can we expect it in the state or nation?

A second factor in community life is the age of its people. How often do you find a community composed chiefly of elderly people which is progressive? In the more progressive communities are not the middle-aged and young married people in control? The younger people desire better advantages for themselves and particularly for their children, and so they stand for better schools, better churches, and better facilities for all phases of community life. It is largely for this reason, it seems to me, that older communities seem to have cycles of relative decline and progress, according to the proportion of older and younger people. It is to be hoped that in future generations the ability to "keep young" may become more common; indeed, this is one of the chief objectives of modern education.

The density of population is also a determining factor with regard to many phases of community life, for it is obviously much easier to carry on many community activities where the people live fairly close together and not very far from the community center, than where the country is but sparsely settled. Even with automobiles and telephones, the distance between homes will have a large influence in determining the nature of community activities. One of the most difficult of our rural problems is how to bring to the people in sparsely settled regions the advantages which they rightly crave. It will be physically and economically impossible for them to have as good opportunities as sections which are more densely settled, but ways must be found whereby a larger degree of equality of opportunity is available to more thinly inhabited communities.

Changes in population immediately affect community needs. Where immigration is increasing rapidly, institutions such as schools, churches, and stores are often inadequate, and there is every incentive toward the development of community spirit and united effort to meet the common needs. On the other hand, in the older sections decreasing populations make it impossible to maintain as many institutions as formerly. Many an eastern community has inherited two or three churches, which were once well filled, but which now merely serve to divide the community as none of them are able to operate successfully, though it is obvious that unless the people are more loyal to their common needs than to their differences that the community will be unable to survive.

In relatively new communities, and often for several generations, the influence of the original settlement of the community may have a strong effect on its life. Thus where a new section is settled by acquaintances from an older community, by relatives, or those of one church, there is a bond between them from the beginning, but where land is settled by homesteaders from different sections, the process of establishing common ideals and purposes is a gradual one. Many a community in the middle west still bears the stamp of its original settlers. About in the center of West Virginia is the little community of French Creek which was settled by a few New England families a little over a hundred years ago. A recent study[10] of this community shows that it has had a powerful influence in the educational life of the whole state, and that its progressive spirit is largely traceable to "an ancestry of energetic people with high ideals which have been passed on by each generation." On the other hand, in many cases this influence is soon lost, due to some radical change in local conditions and the influx of new elements.

Its history plays an exceedingly large rôle in advancing or retarding community development. History and tradition are the memory of the community; they bring to mind its past experiences. Common ancestors and common participation in important events in the past give a sense of identity and heighten community consciousness. Pride in the history of the community is like pride in a good family, and is a strong factor in maintaining the standards of its people. Of course the past may be one of which no one is proud and which they may prefer to forget, but this is a spur to new endeavor as it is to a family to attain a new status.

Community life is likely to be at a low ebb where there is but little knowledge of, or interest in, the history of its past. I was recently impressed with this in visiting a small inland community, which was not without many events of interest in its earlier development. I failed, however, to find any connected records of the community's past or any of its people who know much of its history. So far as I could learn there had been few celebrations or community activities for many years and there was a general feeling that the community had been on the down grade and needed redirection. It seemed to me that one of the things which might arouse community loyalty in this instance would be for its people to clean up some of the old neighborhood cemeteries where many of the early pioneers lie buried, and which are now grown up and unkept.

Then I think of another community where every few years on important anniversary events the history of an organization or of the community as a whole is related and often published in the local press. Its past has no more striking events than that of the locality last mentioned, but these people have pride in their community and their loyalty is renewed on these anniversary occasions.

Miss Emily F. Hoag[11] has recently given a good picture of how the history of their community has been made to live in the hearts of the people of Belleville, New York, through their loyalty to the old Union Academy, and she has given a fine example of how a community may be brought to a realization of the contribution which it has made to the life of the state and nation.

Only by a knowledge of the community's history can the nature and origin of the attitudes of its people be understood. A generation or two ago, perchance, there was a quarrel between two families which was carried into the school meeting, and to this day two factions have persisted. The attitudes of the people in many a progressive town may be directly traced to the influence of some outstanding leaders—a teacher, minister, or doctor, perhaps—long since gone to their reward. A village fire, the coming of a railroad or its deflection to a nearby town, a bank failure, a prohibition crusade, the establishment of a library are but a few examples of events which form crises in the life of every community and which have a far-reaching and subtle effect in moulding its character.

The cultivation of a knowledge of its own history is, therefore, one of the first duties of a community which seeks to understand itself so that it may better direct its life. Every community should maintain a record of its history, and have some means of preserving important historical material. The New York legislature has recently passed an act authorizing any township or village board to appoint a local historian, without salary, and to furnish safe storage for historical records. One of the most progressive rural communities in the country is the Quaker settlement at Sandy Spring, Maryland,[12] whose first historian was appointed in 1863 and whose historian reads the record of the year at each annual meeting. These "Annals" form a most intimate account of the community's progress. The custom of some rural newspapers of publishing local history of the past year on New Year's Day serves much the same purpose.

One of the best means of encouraging historical appreciation, and one which is very generally neglected, is the teaching of local history in the schools. Educators have learned that it is more pedagogical to commence instruction in geography with the local environment of the child, which it can know and understand, than to begin—as formerly—with the nebular hypothesis; but they are only commencing to appreciate that the same principle applies to the teaching of history. Is it not true that most children can glibly recite dates and events in the history of their own and foreign countries, of whose significance they have only a vague appreciation, but who never secure any real historical point of view or an appreciation of the importance of history because it has not been made concrete and intimate, as must be the case in considering local events? If national history is taught to develop patriotism, why should not local history be taught to inspire civic loyalty? Such a study of the efforts and sacrifices of former citizens would bring a new sense of obligation to be worthy of the heritage they have bequeathed, and would gradually establish an attitude of loyalty to the community which would be considered as essential to respectability as devotion to one's country. Indeed, how can one be truly loyal to a great country which is mostly unknown to him if he is not loyal to the people with whom he lives day by day in his home community?

One of the best means of reviving interest in the community's past is through the production of an historical pageant, which is discussed on page 161; for as the people act together the events of the past, they gain a new realization of what they owe to the life of the community in bygone days, and come to appreciate that men come and men go but the community continues and perpetuates their influence for better or for worse.

Socrates' injunction to "know thyself" is the epitome of wisdom for the community as it is for the individual. The first step in this process of self-acquaintance is to secure an accurate knowledge of the kinds of people which compose the community, and how its past is influencing its present.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] "Rural Primary Groups," a study of agricultural neighborhoods. Research Bulletin 51, Agr. Exp. Station of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1921.

[9] "America via the Neighborhood," p. 419, D. Appleton & Co., 1920.

[10] A. J. Dadisman, "French Creek as a Rural Community," Bulletin 176, Agricultural Experiment Station, West Virginia University, June, 1921.

[11] "The National Influence of a Single Farm Community," Bulletin 984, United States Department of Agriculture, Dec., 1921.

[12] See "A Rural Survey of Maryland," Dept. of Church and Country Life, Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., 1912; reprinted in part in N. L. Sims' "The Rural Community," p. 227, New York, Scribners, 1920.

CHAPTER IV

COMMUNICATION THE MEANS OF
COMMUNITY LIFE

We have seen that the real life of the community depends on common interests and the ability of its people to act together. This having things in common is the basis of all community and is achieved only through the exchange of ideas by various means of communication. Without communication there would be no community and no civilization. It is man's ability to communicate through spoken and written language that has made him human. Man is more than animal because he can exchange ideas with his fellows, and can profit by the experience of the race. This power of communication creates a new world for him in which he lives on a different plane from all other living things. The very words community and communication, both derived from communis—common, indicate their relation to each other; community—the having in common, communication—the making common.[13]

Until modern times practically all communication between the masses of the people was by word of mouth. The people of the old world lived together in villages which were largely self-dependent, and only the higher classes were educated to read and write. There was little opportunity for contact with the outside world, and the people felt little need of better means of communication. It has been frequently asserted that isolation has been the chief rural problem in America. The reason for the dissatisfaction with life on isolated farms is better appreciated when we remember that during all previous history men have lived together in close association and their whole mode of thought, customs, attitudes, and desires have been formed in the intimate life of compact groups. It is but natural, therefore, that life on the isolated farm with but few contacts with others than immediate neighbors should become irksome and that town and city have had a peculiar attraction for farm people.

We cannot here examine the causes and history of the development of our modern means of communication, but we must recognize that it is due to them that rural community life as we are coming to know it in the United States is made possible. Without these newer facilities for more frequent association and exchange of ideas, rural life would still be confined to the small local neighborhood.

At the same time, the railroad and trolley have abolished the isolation of the rural community and have made possible the diversion of local interests and loyalties to larger centers. Thus while communication aids the integration of the community it affords equal facilities for its disruption. Doubtless some of the smaller community centers will be unable to compete with the attraction of nearby larger centers, but there seems no good reason to believe that better communication will injure the best life of communities which are of sufficient size to support the institutions which will command local loyalty. This dual influence of means of communication on the internal and external relations of rural communities creates some of the chief problems of rural social organization, for the increase of means of communication in the past two or three generations has been more momentous and has had a more far-reaching effect on human relations than in all the previous centuries since the invention of writing.

A brief survey of the more important of these new agencies will indicate how they affect the relations of the farmer to his community and to other communities. These may be considered under the two general heads of means of transportation, and means for the exchange of ideas.

As long as transportation was by wagon and by boat, commerce was slow and expensive; each community was compelled to be largely self-dependent, and life was isolated to an extent that it is difficult for us to conceive. Anderson has well stated the situation when he says:

"Merchandise and produce that could not stand a freight of fifteen dollars per ton could not be carried overland to a consumer one hundred and fifty miles from the point of production; as roads were, a distance of fifty miles from the market often made industrial independence expedient."[14]

It was the steam railroad which made larger markets available, made possible the growth of our large cities and the opening up of new lands distant from markets. The railroad and manufacturing by power machinery put an end to the "age of homespun," and made it more profitable for the farmer to sell his products and to purchase his manufactured goods in exchange. The railroad, and the markets which it made available, changed the village center from a place of local barter to a shipping point and so tended to center the economic life of larger areas in the villages with railroad stations. Better local roads were necessary and business tended to become centralized in the village. The numerous wayside taverns along the main highways disappeared, as did the neighborhood mill and blacksmith shop. The railroad, more than any other one factor, has determined the location of our rural community centers.

The electric railroad made the village centers more available to farm people and gave transportation facilities to many villages without railroads, but it also made it possible for the people of smaller communities to go to the larger centers for trading and other advantages. Trolleys have made it possible for many farm children to get to high school who could not otherwise have attended and have enabled those living near them to more easily get back and forth from the village centers for all phases of community life. On the whole, however, they have probably carried more traffic between communities, and it seems strange that they have not more generally been able to find a profit in hauling produce from the farms to the nearest markets or shipping stations.

Of more importance to community life has been the development of good roads, a movement which did not get under way until the present century and which was chiefly due to the rural free mail delivery and the automobile. The change in rural life due to automotive vehicles can hardly be exaggerated. In our best agricultural states practically every farmer has his automobile. He can get to the community center as quickly as the business man or laborer gets to his work in the average city, and can go to the county seat or neighboring city as quickly as one can drive to the business section from the more distant parts of New York or Chicago. Auto-bus lines radiate from most of our small cities, and auto trucks not only bring freight from nearby wholesale centers, but are rapidly supplanting horses for hauling farm produce to the shipping station or market.

As good roads have been due chiefly to state and county, and more recently to national aid, it is but natural that they should have been constructed where the traffic is heaviest connecting the main centers. What is now most needed to build up the local communities is a systematic development of the principal local roads radiating from the community centers.

Good roads and automobiles have made possible a new sort of a local community, which could never have existed without them. Consider the present possibility of consolidated schools with auto-busses to haul the children; the numbers of automobiles which come in from the farms to every village center where there is a band concert or movie show; the ability to get in the "flivver" after supper and ride to a relative's or friend's on the other side of the town and be back for early bedtime; and one can perceive how the people in a community area are bound together and develop common interests in new advantages made possible by their ability to get together easily and quickly. How could the county agricultural agent or the visiting nurse cover a county as effectively as they now do without the automobile? The rural community can now enjoy the services of expert paid executives in many fields of work as diverse as a county commercial club secretary, a Boy Scout leader, a Sunday school executive, or county health officer, because the county has become a unit which can be covered as easily as a city and is large enough to support such a division of labor as no one community could enjoy. We shall have occasion to refer to many county organizations and agencies which not only build up the county and the county seat, but which strengthen the life of every community which they serve, and whose work is very largely possible because of good roads and automobiles. Where bad roads still exist many of these services must wait and less community life is possible.

Nor does the home lose with the community advancement due to better transportation. Surely it is better to have the children living at home than boarding in the village while they attend high school; the doctor is secured more quickly and the visiting nurse is available; and the family can come and go as a family because less time is required and there is no waiting for the horses to feed, or to get rested.

It is true of course that the automobile makes it possible for people to go to the larger towns and other village centers, and to visit their particular friends and relatives in neighboring communities, and thus seems to furnish means for breaking down and stratifying community life. These tendencies exist, but they will not seriously injure the community which has anything worth while for its people. Better transportation simply makes possible a more highly organized community life, and any complex organization is the more easily deranged; a complex machine or a high-bred animal is more susceptible to injury than a simple tool or scrub. Many ministers have railed against the automobile, while others have used it to fill their pews. We cannot get away from that oldest of paradoxes, first learned by Father Adam, that every new good has possibilities of evil. A certain type of mind has always enjoyed condemning every new invention as "of the Devil," and yet the world wags on and no one who knows them would go back to "the good old days."

The automobile has brought new ideas both to the community and to the farm and home. Farmers and their wives are traveling by auto much more than they ever did by train, and it is impossible not to pick up new ideas. One of the most effective educational devices is the farm tour in which a group of Farm Bureau members travel from one farm to another studying the methods of farming, and the women have adopted the idea for an inspection of farm homes.

To discuss all the effects of automotive vehicles—cycle, car, truck, bus, and tractor—on farm life would fill a book in itself: space forbids except for incidental mention in the following chapters.

Turning to the mechanisms for the transmission of ideas, we appreciate the even more wonderful inventions which have brought the whole world to the farmer's door.

A generation ago farmers went several miles to the nearest postoffice for their mail, and usually got it but two or three times a week. To-day over the greater part of the country it is delivered to them daily, and they can ship small packages by parcels post from their doors. This daily delivery has greatly widened the circulation of the daily newspapers and magazines of all sorts, and has given farm people a new knowledge and a livelier interest in city and world-wide affairs. The parcel post has made the mail-order business, but it is even more beneficial to the local merchant who can fill a telephone order and mail it to a customer for less expense than delivery costs in the city. Correspondence and advertising by farm people have greatly increased. It is true that the abolition of many rural postoffices has destroyed an old-time rendezvous, but farmers probably go to the community center more frequently than formerly. A more unfortunate feature of the rural delivery service is that it often gives the farmer a mail address at a postoffice of a community where he rarely goes, and fails to indicate the community in which he is located to one unacquainted with the local geography (see page 232).

Even more important as an aid to community activities is the telephone. Visiting is now done more over the phone than in person, but conversation can be had with any one in the community at any time, and isolation is banished. The telephone has brought a larger protection to the farm home in calling the doctor, police, or fire assistance. The economic value of the phone soon became apparent for the distribution of market reports and weather forecasts or for ordering goods or repairs from town, and the marvelous wireless telephone will greatly extend these services. The Extension Service of the Kansas Agricultural College is installing a wireless outfit which will receive market and weather reports and will transmit them to the farm bureau offices at the county seats, where they may be relayed through the local telephones to every farmer. Thus world-wide conditions may be flashed to the farmer's fireside. Within the community the telephone has made possible a degree of organization hitherto impossible. Meetings are called, committees are assembled, or their business is done over the phone, so that both social and economic life are greatly stimulated.

The farmer is sometimes chided for not having organized rural life more effectively. The simple reason is that he has not had the mechanisms whereby he could do so. With only mud roads and horses people could get together but infrequently, and arrangements had to be made when they were together. City life was better organized because people could get together more easily. To-day both time and space have been so largely overcome that communication in the country is almost as rapid as in the city and more effective organization is possible.

Better transportation, mail, and telephone service have made available agencies for the communication of ideas, previously accessible only to the few or patronized so infrequently by those further away as to furnish too small a constituency for their successful maintenance. The free public library is a powerful educational agency, but many a community has been too small for its support. Now county library systems are being organized—thanks to automobiles—which give branch stations to every community (see p. 102). Lyceum courses of lectures and entertainments, chautauqua courses, public forums for the discussion of current problems, and last, but not least, the moving picture shows with their pictures of important events from all parts of the world and showing life from Central Africa to the Antipodes, all of these are agencies for bringing new ideas to the rural community, and are becoming increasingly common as better transportation makes it possible for the people to utilize them. The fact that these agencies must be located where they can serve the largest number of people, determines their location at the community centers and they are thus a large factor in unifying the community.

Modern transportation has abolished the isolation of the farm and new means of communication have freed the spirit of the farmer and brought the world to his doors. Together they make possible so many satisfactions heretofore only available to the cities, as to quite revolutionize the whole aspect of rural life. They give a new position to the rural community and to the farmer's status in it.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] Community is derived from the Old English word commonty which came to mean "the body of the common people, commons." Communication is from the Latin communicare, also derived from communis—common, and ic (the formative of factitive verbs)—to make, or to make common.

[14] "The Country Town," p. 20.

CHAPTER V

THE FARM AND THE VILLAGE

We have seen that an active community must focus its life at some center, and that this center is usually a village which has been established primarily for business purposes. The relation of the American village to the surrounding farms is historically unique and is largely due to the rapidity and ease with which large areas of the United States were settled after the advent of railroads. In the colonial period and the early days of the New West, every settlement was so isolated that it was obliged to be largely self-sufficient. Transportation was slow and uncertain and prohibitive for other than the necessities which could not be locally produced. Under these conditions the farmer and village business man were so inter-dependent that they were forced to consider each other's interests. But when settlement became safer and transportation easier the homesteaders took up their claims without relation to village connections; they traded where it was most convenient, and their social life centered largely in the immediate neighborhood and in the district school and country church. On the other hand the village was settled by men who came primarily for business. The spirit of the age was that of competition and they came primarily for profits. Their business came from the farms, but they felt little sense of obligation to them. Every village was a potential city in their eyes and its growth and the rise of real estate values was of more concern to them than the development of the community's basic industry of agriculture. The village craftsman and business man gets most of his living from the farms and it should be to his interest to give them the best of service, but more and more he has become primarily a business man or craftsman, coming to the village to "make money" and moving on when he sees better opportunities elsewhere. His business and craft affiliations link him to the centers of commercial and industrial life in the cities, and he is strongly inclined to take the city's point of view. Particularly has this been the case with the country banker who has so largely controlled the economic life of the village and countryside. Too often he has inevitably been more largely influenced by the interests of eastern capital and the mortgage owners than by the real needs of his local constituency.

The result has been an increasing friction between the villages and the farms, and we have come to think of them as two separate groups or interests rather than as essential and inter-dependent parts of a social area—the community. The literature of country life and of rural sociology has very rightly recognized the existing situation, but many writers seem to accept the division between village and farm as inevitable, and even question whether there can be a rural community of the type herein described, rather than to recognize that this is but a necessary stage in the beginning of community life, due to the mode of settlement and temporary conditions.

This friction between farmer and villager has been most acute in the Middle West and has found its extreme expression in the Non-partisan League Movement, which has engendered a degree of bitterness between the two factions which cannot be permanently maintained without serious injury to their common interests. This, however, is only an attempt of the farmers to secure redress through political control, and is but the political form of expression of a protest which is being more effectively made as an economic movement through coöperative buying and selling agencies, particularly strong in Kansas and Nebraska, but rapidly spreading throughout the country.

Some rural leaders would have us believe that the interests of the village and the farm are fundamentally antagonistic and irreconcilable. They advocate that the consolidated school or high school be placed in the open country where it will be uncontaminated by the urban-mindedness of the village; that the grange is the farmers' organization and is sufficient for him and has no need of affiliating itself with the affairs of the village; that the farmers should develop their own coöperative stores and selling agencies so that they can be economically independent of the "parasitic" trader of the village. Such a naïve point of view has a certain logical simplicity which is based on the presupposition that conflict is inevitable and that justice and equity can be secured only through dominance. The same line of reasoning finds no solution of the problem of capital and labor, or of the interests of producer as over against consumer, except in strong organization and eternal economic conflict. It is apparent that there is much justification for this view and that it seems in many cases to be a necessary stage in the adjustment of interests, but that it is either inevitable or a permanent necessity is controverted both by experience and by a more thorough analysis of the relationships involved.

There is no gainsaying the fact that conflict has been one of the chief agencies of human progress in the past; but neither can it be disputed that coöperation, or mutual aid, has been of equal importance. Neither attitude can be conceived as primary or dominant; they have interacted throughout the history of mankind. Fundamentally, the problem of the relationship of these two phases of life is much the same as that of the nature and function of good and evil. The one cannot exist without the other, and both are relative terms. Our present thought on these problems has been too largely dominated by a wrong interpretation of the theory of the survival of the fittest as the primary force in human evolution. We have assumed, and the German militarists carried the doctrine to a logical conclusion, that this hypothesis gave the sanction of a biological law to a competitive struggle between men. But such an inference was explicitly denied by Charles Darwin,[15] and has no biological foundation. The struggle he described is between species and not between members of the same species. On the other hand, we find throughout nature that those species have been most successful which have developed the most effective means of mutual aid.[16] Thus our economic and political thought has been dominated for the past two or three generations with a blind worship of the dogma of unrestrained competition, which has no basis of proof either in biological or social science.

When we examine what has gone on in the older sections of our country and project the present tendencies into the future, we get a different point of view, and come to see that only by an adjustment of the relations of the village and the farm to each other can the best life of both be secured. We shall have occasion in subsequent chapters to consider the social and political problems involved, but let us here discuss merely the economic relations, which have been the chief source of discord.

In the first place if we examine the situation in the older parts of the country we find a much more cordial relation between village and country than farther west, and a greater sense of belonging to a community. The reasons for this cannot be discussed in detail, but a large factor is the increasing tendency to centralize institutions; school, church, grange, lodge, stores, etc.; in the village as the country becomes older, roads are better, and higher standards develop. Furthermore, the relative status of the farmer changes the situation. In the older parts of the country most of the capital needed to supply credit to farmers and their business organizations comes from within the locality, whereas in the newer sections they are dependent upon outside capital. In the older sections where land has become more valuable and wealth has accumulated, the farmer as well as the villager is a bank director, and the amount of capital which the farmer has invested in his business is often much greater than that of the village business man. When the farmer comes into town in his first-class automobile as frequently as he desires, he has a very different status from former days. The "banker-farmer" movement, which started as an effort of the banker to assist the farmer in better methods of production and marketing, has now become a "farmer-banker" movement in which the country banker has been forced to give new thought to the credit facilities of his patrons, and is already challenging the justice of the country's credit facilities being dominated by the large city banks which are chiefly interested in financing industry and commerce.

There is no question that in many a rural town there are too many stores, as there are in the cities, that in many cases their service is very inefficient, and occasionally their prices are exorbitant, but several forces are already tending to remedy these evils where they occur, and improvement may be hastened by intelligent and constructive discussion. Thus exorbitant prices or poor service has made possible the large sales of the mail-order houses, but the total volume of their business in most localities is relatively small and their competition has probably been beneficial to the wide-awake merchant. For first-class merchants have been able to show that they can meet the mail-order prices if the customer is willing to pay cash, and the advertising of the mail-order houses has undoubtedly increased the wants of the average farm household. In a recent address Dr. C. J. Galpin has pointed out that one of the shortcomings of the average country merchant is that he has not studied the needs of his patrons and brought to their attention new inventions and the better grades of goods. He holds that the higher standard of living of city people is largely due to the fact that attractive goods and better equipment are constantly brought to their attention in the shop windows and by salesmen.

The coöperative buying of farm supplies and machinery, which is now assuming such large proportions, is due not merely to an effort to secure lower prices, but to secure better goods. It is a notorious fact that for many years the farmer has had to buy inferior fertilizers and feeds from local dealers because they were all he could get. Both mixed feeds and fertilizers have been sold under certain brands on much the same principle as patent medicines, until the farmer has organized his own agencies to secure their manufacture in accordance with the best scientific formulas. This has been primarily due to a short-sighted policy on the part of manufacturers, but it has done greater injury to the retailer who, in general, has made little effort to learn the real needs of his trade and supply it with the best goods. The same has been true of seeds and agricultural machinery. As a result of this one of the chief claims of such a coöperative agency as the New York Grange-League-Federation Exchange is that it is able not only to sell at a lower price but to furnish the best quality. The wide-awake country merchant has been keen to appreciate these facts and wherever he has studied his trade and devoted himself to its interests he has built up a successful business. The "Country Gentleman" has done a real service in recently publishing a series of articles by A. B. MacDonald which have described the successes of a few of the outstanding "Big Country Merchants."

The "chain store" has not as yet invaded the village, but it is rapidly gaining a foothold in the smaller cities and village merchants may as well prepare for its competition, for there seems no good reason why its greater buying power and superior organization should not enable it to undersell the local merchant if the customer is willing to pay cash. As yet all chain stores are on a cash basis and this would seem to prevent their gaining much of the business of the farmer who has depended on long time credit. But the coöperative stores, which do business only for cash, have solved the credit problem by establishing credit facilities whereby short-time loans may be made and a credit established against which purchases are charged. There is no question that both farmer and merchant would be better off if credit were carried by a financial institution. The farmer is being rapidly educated in business practices, and it will be surprising if some enterprising corporation does not establish a chain of village stores which will do a cash business, but which will arrange for separate credit on a strictly business basis. If one looks at the trend of business in the cities and towns during recent years, he cannot but come to the conviction that either country merchants will have to get together so as to pool their purchasing power and get the advantages of expert assistance in advertising, accounting, store arrangement, and other technical services which the chain store enjoys, or they will be forced to content themselves with the poorer and less profitable class of trade. I have seen no studies of the matter, but it would be interesting to know how large an amount of farmer trade is now enjoyed by the chain groceries in our larger towns. My own impression is that they are a much more serious competitor of the small country merchant than is the mail-order house. These are but a few of the forces which will bring better service from the village merchant.

There are also ways in which farmers may secure better service without attempting to operate a coöperative store of their own or deserting the local merchants. Farm Bureau associations have in numerous cases made arrangements with a local dealer whereby he would handle their seeds, fertilizers, or spraying materials at a specified rate of profit, upon condition that they give him all their trade in these articles and place their orders in advance. This principle of collective buying through an established merchant at an agreed rate of profit has much to commend it, and is being utilized by the Grange-League-Federation Exchange in New York state to take care of its local business as far as possible. The fact is that the profits of a strictly coöperative store, after paying the salary of a competent manager and other costs of operation, which would make a very attractive income for a single merchant, do not make a dividend to each of its many patrons much more than a good rate of interest on the total cost of purchases. It may as well be recognized that unless there be a strong loyalty to the coöperative principle by a considerable group of patrons and unless there be peculiar need of a coöperative store that it is not a mechanism which will automatically secure much lower prices or superior service, for the success of the enterprise depends primarily on the manager and if he be competent, he must be paid sufficient to command not only his services but his loyalty and initiative. The coöperative store will find it good business to have a profit-sharing arrangement with its manager and employees, if it expects to secure the same service from them that may be secured from the better merchants. On the other hand, if by pooling their buying power a group of farmers can throw their business to one merchant in consideration of his selling at a specified profit, even if only for a particular line of goods, they get the advantage of their collective purchasing power and have none of the responsibility for maintaining the business. Although it is my belief that the coöperative principle is essentially sound and must ultimately dominate our business life, yet it will need to find means of giving larger incentive to its managers if it is to compete with the best individual business men. After all, what is wanted is to get business on a functional basis, and if this can be accomplished by means of collective buying through an established business which furnishes its own capital and management, the farmer is the gainer. The essential thing is that business be put on the basis of public service rather than private profit. When that principle is recognized as being the only sound basis of our economic system, then the methods of business organization will be determined by what experience shows to be most advantageous to the community, and it may well be that true "coöperative competition" between individual merchants and coöperative stores may exist side by side with advantage to all concerned.

Another factor in rural community life is the increase of industrial establishments in villages and small towns. There can be no question that the centralization of industry in our large cities, which has proceeded so rapidly since the development of steam power, has now passed its maximum and that there will be a considerable decentralization of certain industries which can be operated profitably in small units. The metropolitan city has passed its maximum of economic efficiency for many phases of manufacturing, if economic efficiency is judged by its power to produce "well-being," rather than mere wealth. We have been obsessed with the glamour of the bigness of the modern city and we are but beginning to seriously question its real efficiency. The possibility of superior living conditions in a small town are now being recognized both by employer and laborer, and better transportation and the development of electric power lines make possible the organization of certain of our large industries in small units. As this process proceeds the business of the village and small town will no longer be chiefly dependent on agriculture and there will be a further need for accommodation of the different interests of the community. Here again, some see only loss to rural life; but if one examines the situation more thoroughly, mutual advantages are equally apparent. If the farmers are organized for coöperative selling, they will be benefited by the better local markets, which are the backbone of the agricultural economy of so prosperous a country as France. Certain local industries, whose production is of a seasonal nature, might so arrange their operation that some of their labor might be available to work on the neighboring farms during the rush season. Even more important would be the increased purchasing power of the community, making possible better stores and business and professional services of all sorts, and the increase of wealth which would make possible the support of better schools, churches, and social advantages of all sorts. It is, of course, true that the introduction of industry in not a few cases seems to have lowered the standards of community life, but this is by no means universal or inevitable.

One of the unfortunate phases of the efforts of small communities to secure industrial plants is that they often secure establishments which are not adapted to local conditions or whose financial status is insecure, and the enterprise inevitably results in failure, with discouragement to all concerned. There is great need for county chambers of commerce or commercial clubs with skilled commercial executives as secretaries who can give the same expert service to the business life of the small rural communities that the cities now have. The business life of the community might profit as much from such a service as the farms have from the expert assistance afforded through the Farm Bureaus.[17]

We have been considering the economic relations of the farm and the village as affecting community life, for they are at present the chief factor in creating community interest, as well as the leading cause of group friction. The rural community of to-day is primarily an economic unit, but in the future it seems probable that business will occupy a relatively less important place than the social activities of the community center. Not that there will necessarily be less business, although the widening of markets constantly tends to take business from the local centers, but that business will be more efficient and less competitive; business will not occupy so large a share of attention, but will take its rightful place as a means to an end, while the community will take more interest in those institutions which actively promote all phases of its higher life, of health, education, art, sociability, and religion.

These social institutions will increase in relative importance and they must be located at the community center if they are to have a sufficient constituency to be efficient in their work and command the loyalty of rural people. Inasmuch as both farmer and villager are necessary for the adequate support of church, lodge, school, and other community organizations, they cannot be expected to work together in these activities if one is antagonistic to the other, or if the one is helping to put the other out of business. The farmer has had many grievances against the townsman, but the fault has not been entirely on one side, and only by mutual support and the recognition of their dependent interests can a satisfactory community life be maintained. The root of the whole trouble lies in the imaginary division of the community into town and country. With the realization that their common interests are essential and that their differences are due to lack of proper adjustment, many of these difficulties will be alleviated. It is my experience that in the most successful communities, the farmers speak of "our" town, they are proud of "our" bank, and "our" stores, school, and churches are the best in the region. Such loyalty is the best of evidence that the business men of the town have devoted themselves to supplying the farmers' needs, and that there is mutual understanding between them. Only by a common loyalty to mutual service can the true community exist.

Farmers need the village and it should be to them "our town," of whose successes and improvements they are proud. As the villagers cannot exist without the farmers they should be interested in supporting every movement for the farmers' weal. As they have more frequent contacts with other centers and with cities, they will be the first to bring many new ideas and suggestions to the community, but they must realize that only as all elements of the community are agreed will any new movement be permanently successful. There must be loyalty to farm leaders as well as to those of the village. Indeed, the most successful rural communities are those in which all are one big community family whose institutional interests center in the village.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] See George Nasmyth, "Social Progress and the Darwinian Theory."

[16] See P. Kropotkin, "Mutual Aid."

[17] See L. H. Bailey, "The Place of the Village in the Country-Life Movement," York State Rural Problems, II, 148. Albany, N. Y., 1915.

CHAPTER VI

COMMUNITY ASPECTS OF THE FARM BUSINESS

In the days of the pioneer the farm business was hardly affected by community conditions. A general store where necessities could be purchased, a mill where grain could be ground, and a blacksmith shop were about the only necessary business agencies. The farm was largely self-sufficient and there was but little real community life. Nor was there much change in the next generation or two among the farmers who built substantial homes, supported their neighborhood churches and schools, and with the free labor of a good-sized family made a comfortable living. Their interests were chiefly in their families and neighbors, and questions of local government were about the only community bond. When new sections of the country were opened up by railroads and with the growth of cities farm lands increased rapidly in value, there was an era of speculative farming, which Dr. Warren H. Wilson has called the era of the "exploiter."[18] A farm was bought with an idea of its improvement and resale at a good profit, and many farmers moved from one section to another in search of new land which was both fertile and cheap.[19] The era of land speculation has by no means passed, as has been learned to their sorrow by many who bought farms at inflated prices during the World War, and whenever there is a sudden rise in land values, speculation will doubtless recur. On the other hand, as cheap lands become scarce, as the better lands become more valuable and the amount of capital required to equip and operate a farm in the better agricultural sections increases, there will be less tendency to be on the lookout for a profitable sale and the farm business will become more permanent because of the large effort and capital expended in the enterprise and the consequent attachment of the owner. A man with a considerable investment does not care to move frequently. Thus higher land values—inevitable with an increasing population—will favor a more permanent type of farming, conducted on scientific and business principles, of what Dr. Wilson calls the "husbandman" type. This type of farmer not only desires but requires better institutions of all sorts, which can only be maintained at a community center. Thus permanency of ownership of farm operators conduces to community development.

Unfortunately, however, the rise of values of the best land seems to encourage tenancy rather than ownership, for tenancy is greatest and increases most on the best farm lands. The general economic aspects and the ultimate solution of the tenancy problem are national rather than local problems. The effect of tenancy as it now exists, with a frequent shifting from one community to another, is, however, a very serious community problem, for all observers agree that the maintenance of a satisfactory standard of community life is much more difficult where tenancy predominates.

One important economic aspect of tenancy is that tenants, who are frequently moving, will less readily and effectively affiliate in coöperative enterprises, and we shall see that coöperative organizations have a large influence in promoting the solidarity of the rural community. This has been well brought out by one of our best students of the tenancy problem, Dr. C. L. Stewart, who says:

"Farming efficiency in the future, however, will probably consist to a greater extent in the ability to increase net profits through coöperative dealing with the market. The efficiency test must, therefore, rule more strongly against operators of the tenures, whose characteristics are opposed to successful coöperative effort on their part.

"That tenants," he continues, "changing from farm to farm at more or less short intervals, should generally be more active and successful than owners in building up coöperative organizations is hardly in the line of reason.... If in the future, coöperation assumes forms requiring greater permanency of membership in the societies, greater intimacy of acquaintance among the members, or greater investment per member, the tenants will doubtless find themselves handicapped in their relation thereto."[20]

The effect of a large percentage of tenants is even more serious upon the social side of community life. Those who have studied the problem are agreed that both schools and churches tend to be inferior in tenant communities. There is little "chance of development of deep friendships and associations which give vitality to church life" where a large proportion of the tenants are frequently moving, nor can they give as good financial support to the church as landowners. The frequent shifting of the tenant population creates a difficult problem for all the social life of the community, for it is impossible for a community to assimilate a considerable percentage of its population every year and to develop those strong ties of loyalty which are essential to real community life.

Thus a reasonable permanency of residence of its population is essential to successful community life and this is largely determined by the economic situation of the farm business. And the importance of the effect of tenancy, or any other economic aspect of agriculture on the life of its people must be recognized as a fundamental consideration in determining rural policies. Well being on the land and not wealth from the land is the final goal of agriculture.

Community life is also affected by the type of farming which is prevalent among its people. Modern agriculture is becoming specialized, and the crops grown are determined both by soil and climate and by the markets available. Fruit sections are due primarily to the former, while the regions producing market milk are determined chiefly by the latter factor. Now various types of farming make distinctly different demands upon the time of the farmer and so to a considerable extent they condition his social life. Dairying is probably the most confining sort of farming, and on the one-man farm there is little opportunity for getting away. "Haven't missed milking morning or night for six years," one dairyman replied to me when asked if he ever had a vacation. The fruit grower, on the other hand, during the winter can take a few weeks to go South or visit relatives without injury to his business. In the South after the crops are "laid by" in midsummer is the season for camp-meetings, picnics, and "frolicking" in general. Not only does the fruit grower have more leisure than the dairyman, but population is denser in a fruit-growing or trucking community and hence the communities are smaller and more compact. Just what characteristics of community life may be attributed to these differences in vocation it would be difficult to say, for so far as I am aware no exact studies have compared several communities of each type, but that they exercise a large influence on community customs and the social attitudes of the people is patent to even a casual observer who passes from a dairy section to a fruit region, or from the northwestern grain belt to a region of general farming.[21]

Specialization in agricultural production also affects community life in that its economic interests are unified both as regards production and marketing and as the income of most of its people comes from one or two products, their attention is focused upon them and a greater degree of solidarity results than where farming is more diversified and farmers are not so dependent on the sale of one or two crops. Specialization is chiefly due to advantages which it ensures in marketing, as will be indicated in the next chapter, and it is because there is less economic pressure to compel general farmers to market together and that they lack the solidarity developed by specialization, that coöperative selling associations have not generally succeeded in a general farming region when they have attempted to handle various farm products.

Specialization in agriculture encourages further division of labor because there is a sufficient volume of work to pay for expert services. Thus dairy communities have developed cow-test associations, which employ one man to test the percent of butter-fat for each cow, to interpret their milk production records, and sometimes to advise them with regard to feeding. In fruit regions a considerable business is done in contract spraying. Threshing crews and threshing-rings have long been common. Custom plowing by tractor, and hauling of farm produce by motor truck are becoming common. It seems probable that such division of labor will increase as much as is practicable, but it finds very definite limitations in the agricultural industry, due to the very short season in which many operations can be performed and which thus gives short employment for any of the seasonal operations.

Division of labor also involves increasing the manufacture or "processing" of agricultural products which is an asset to the community if performed locally as far as possible. Butter is no longer made in the home but at the creamery, and milk is prepared for the city market at the shipping station, or is sold to a local condensary, all of which employ more or less skilled labor. With crops which are perishable or bulky, "processing" must be performed locally. Thus canneries are located where the vegetables or fruits are grown. Although the selling of equipment for coöperative canning plants has been almost as much of a swindle as promoting coöperative creameries, yet large numbers of coöperative creameries exist where conditions for them are suitable, and there seems no inherent reason why coöperative canneries cannot be made successful when farmers have learned how to organize and to employ expert help.[22] In his delightful vision of the possibilities of a new Ireland, entitled "The National Being," George William Russell ("A. E."), holds out the hope that the increase of such local coöperative manufacture of agricultural products may be the means of furnishing an opportunity for the rural laborer to better his status.

"But what I hope for most," he says, "is first that the natural evolution of the rural community, and the concentration of individual manufacture, purchase, and sale into communal enterprises, will lead to a very large coöperative ownership of expensive machinery, which will necessitate the communal employment of labor. If this takes place, as I hope it will, the rural laborer, instead of being a manual worker using primitive implements, will have the status of a skilled mechanic employed permanently by a coöperative community. He should be a member of the society which employs him, and in the division of the profits receive in proportion to his wage, as the farmers in proportion to their trade."[23]

To the extent that "processing" farm products is taken from the farm and performed at the community center, or that there is a division of labor, the local community is thereby strengthened, for its life is more highly organized; it is more inter-dependent.

An interesting phase of the relation of the community to the farm business is in the protection of crops and animals from insect pests and diseases. If one man plants his wheat late enough to escape the Hessian fly his crop is benefited, but if all in a community do so the subsequent infection is greatly reduced with consequent advantage to all. The chief obstacle preventing the successful combating of the cotton boll weevil in the South has been the difficulty of securing united action in the necessary cultural measures for its control. Most striking results have been secured in the eradication of the Texas Fever Tick from large areas of the South, although this has been carried on using the county as a unit; for many purposes in the South the county is practically a community. Some of the best community work in this field has been in the West in poisoning ground squirrels and other injurious rodents and in rabbit drives. Although the poisoning campaigns are conducted over whole counties or several counties, they are organized by communities and their success is possible only because every one in the community does his part. Whenever the farmers of a community become convinced that they are unable to fight a pest or disease individually, but can do so if they act collectively so that a sufficiently large area is treated as to prevent immediate re-infection, a new community bond has been established. Whether these activities are carried on by communities of the exact nature previously defined (page 10) is immaterial. The significant fact is that their people are learning how to act together in the common defense, for it was the common defense which first compelled mankind to live in communities, and it is defense for one purpose or another which is ever compelling the people of a locality to act together.

Farm management experts point out the practical value to the farmer of community experience with regard to methods of farm practice peculiarly adapted to local climate, soils, and markets. If one is going into dairying he can learn little from his neighbors if he locates in a fruit section, but in a dairy section he may constantly learn from the common experience. Dr. G. F. Warren says:

"There is so much to learn about farming in any community that one man cannot hope to learn it alone. The experience of the community is of the utmost value to every farmer. Different men try out new varieties of crops, new machines, different breeds of animals, different methods of raising crops, different methods of building construction, different ways of saving labor. Each man gets the experiences of all; if a man is following a type of farming different from his neighbors, he cannot hope to try all these things. He is not likely to progress very rapidly."[24]

These advantages occur if there be a true community; i.e., if through communication one may learn the experience of others, but in some cases the experience is of little value because it is not available.

Finally farmers are coming to find it profitable to establish the reputation of a community for advertising purposes. So at the railroad station we are faced with the sign, "Kalamazoo, the home of celery." We know of "Kalamazoo, direct to you" stoves, but we had forgotten that it is one of the oldest and best celery-growing communities in the country. Thus increased specialization gives very real advertising values to a community which builds up a reputation for its products. But such a reputation is simply the recognition by the outside world of the character of the community. Thus ability to advertise itself is a very real index of its solidarity, and the desire to be able to gain advantage from advertising may become a real motive for activities of a community, as it does with many an individual. The ability to advertise but shows the economic value of the creation of a real community.

Common interests in the farm business form the primary bond for the establishment of true rural communities, and the strongest of these common interests are those involved in the problems of marketing.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] See "The Evolution of the Country Community."

[19] See Hamlin Garland, "A Son of the Middle Border."

[20] Land Tenure in the United States with special reference to Illinois, University of Illinois, "Studies in the Social Sciences," Vol. V, No. 3, Sept., 1916, p. 124.

[21] See John M. Gillette, "Constructive Rural Sociology" (1st Ed.), Chapter III.

[22] For an excellent discussion of "Processing Farm Products," see Theodore Macklin, "Efficient Marketing for Agriculture," Macmillan, New York, 1921, Chap. VI.

[23] "The National Being, Some Thoughts on Irish Polity," p. 57, Maunsel & Co., Dublin and London, 1916.

[24] "Farm Management," p. 98, Macmillan & Co., New York, 1913.

CHAPTER VII

HOW MARKETS AFFECT RURAL COMMUNITIES

We have already observed the influence of transportation and the growth of markets in revolutionizing the self-sufficient farming of the pioneer and the industrial self-dependency of the isolated community, but we must give further consideration to the influence of markets on rural community life, for the world is now facing problems of the readjustment of its whole economic system which necessitate a better understanding by the farmer of his dependence on markets and by urban populations of their dependence upon the raw materials produced by the farm, if the mechanism of our complex modern civilization is to be maintained. These relations involve the largest questions of the interdependence of industries and of national and international policy in relation thereto, and we can but call attention to some of the more fundamental principles involved. An understanding of some of the elementary principles of agricultural economy in relation to national and international economy by the masses of our farmers, but particularly by their local leaders, is essential to any permanent progress not only of agriculture, but of industry and commerce.

Before the time of railroads when rural communities were isolated from the few cities situated on the seaboard and along the larger waterways, there was little incentive for the inland farmer to raise more than he needed for the use of his own family. As a result there was inefficient farming and a low standard of living.[25] Railroad transportation made it possible for the farmer to send his products to the existing markets and so made it an object for him to produce a surplus, but, more important, it also made possible the rapid growth of numerous industrial and commercial centers and so was directly responsible for the creation of new and growing markets. Steam power, the use of coal, and the economies of the factory system made it possible to manufacture in large city factories many articles previously produced in the farmer's home or in the village centers. Thus a division of labor was effected which was profitable to all parties; the growth of industrial populations gave the farmer a market for his produce, and in turn he was able to purchase from the city many goods previously unknown to the farm—fertilizers, agricultural machinery, factory-made clothing, furniture, and other factory products too numerous to mention. Furthermore, transportation and reasonably stable government made possible the growth of international commerce so that the markets of many staple farm products became practically world-wide and a division of labor arose between certain nations. England and Germany are dependent on other countries for a considerable part of their food supplies and raw materials, while certain agricultural countries depend on them for manufactured goods.

The point which must ever be borne in mind in considering the relation of rural and urban communities is their interdependence; that the development both of modern industrial centers and of modern agriculture and the higher standards of living on American farms, have been due to an exchange of commodities and services which was mutually advantageous. Without the growth of markets our farms would still be self-sufficing, but they would lack the many comforts and cultural advantages which they now enjoy, and this rise in the farmer's standard of living has stimulated further growth of industry and so made better markets.

These considerations are particularly pertinent at the present time of agricultural and business depression. The present position of American agriculture, and its lack of buying power in our markets, has been largely due to the fact that Europe has heretofore furnished an open market for our surplus agricultural products. To-day Europe is unable to purchase this surplus. The cause seems to be chiefly an economic paralysis resulting from the political interference by the tariff walls of newly-created states with the established economic relations of agricultural areas and manufacturing centers, and an unwillingness of the farmer to do business with a currency so debased that its value is highly problematical. So we see the great city of Vienna,[26] once one of the gayest and most brilliant capitals of Europe, now reduced to destitution, and the cities not only of Russia but of Germany being forced to revert to the ancient system of barter in order to secure adequate food.

The ultimate dependence of all cities upon the farms and mines is to-day exemplified in Europe with such appalling tragedy, that even the smug isolation of the American farmer and the American business man is broken down, not only by human sympathy but by the necessity of a better adjustment of their own economic system to the world crisis from which they are unable to escape.

This shift of control from the city to the country has been powerfully portrayed by Norman Angell:

"Moreover, the problem (of feeding Great Britain) is affected by what is perhaps the most important economic change in the world since the industrial revolution, namely the alteration in the ratio of the exchange value of manufacture and food—the shift over of advantage in exchange from the side of the industrialist and manufacturer to the side of the producer of food."[27]

"Before the War the towns of Europe were the luxurious and opulent centers; the rural districts were comparatively poor. To-day it is the cities of the continent that are half-starved or famine-stricken, while the farms are well-fed and relatively opulent. In Russia, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Austria; the cities perish but the peasants for the most part have a sufficiency. The cities are finding that with the breakdown of the old stability—of the transport and credit systems particularly—they cannot obtain food from the farmers. This process which we now see at work on the continent is in fact the reverse of our historical development."[28]

But although the farmer may have sufficient food for the time—though in Russia millions are starving, due in considerable measure to the economic and political chaos of the nation—yet if this reverse process should go on, rural civilization would be reduced to that of former generations, and its advance would be possible only when the industries which furnish its material basis were revived and confidence in the medium of exchange were again established. The city owes its existence to the farm, but without the city the farm would go back to the hoe and the sickle and the "age of homespun."

I am not seeking to justify the modern city, for its economic and social weaknesses are ever increasingly apparent, but it is important that we fully realize the fact that rural progress has been chiefly due to the goods and services received in exchange from urban markets. We have already noted the tendency toward specialization in agriculture and its effect on the rural community, and that specialization has been chiefly due to markets. One of the chief factors in encouraging specialization in the growth of certain products by whole communities and sections is the fact that a larger volume of a given product ensures better marketing facilities and a better price to the producer as long as the supply is not in excess of the demand. Where there is a considerable volume of a certain product, buyers can meet their demands more easily and are attracted to it, whereas a small lot of howsoever good a product must seek a buyer. Freight rates are reduced, damage in transit is reduced, and better transportation is secured in carload and trainload than in small shipments. The middleman's charges are less if he is assured a considerable volume of business. Thus specialization makes possible a more effective system of marketing than is possible with indiscriminate production.

Not only must there be sufficient volume of a given product, but it must be so standardized with regard to varieties, grade and quantities or packages that the reputation of the goods may be established in the market. In order to secure uniformity it has been found necessary to standardize varieties and to grow a few well-known varieties of a given product which are best adapted to local conditions and to the market, rather than a number of varieties, as might be feasible if they were all sold directly on the local market.

Uniformity of grading and packing is also essential to establish a reputation on the market. A concern like the California Fruit Growers' Exchange cannot afford to spend half a million dollars a year in advertising unless it knows that its product will be as advertised, for advertising an unreliable product may secure temporary sales, but will hardly be a profitable investment, for the value of advertising an honest product is cumulative. To secure necessary uniformity of grading and packing it has been found necessary with almost all agricultural products to have the grading and packing done at a central establishment rather than on the farm. For even assuming the honesty and good intent of the farmer, the standards and skill of different farmers will vary to such an extent that uniformity is impossible. Uniformity of grade and package must be secured at some stage of the process of marketing before the goods are bought by the retailer. Until recently much of this service has been performed by the commission men at the central markets, who have taken what was shipped to them or what their agents purchased and graded it to meet the demands of the trade, and who, of course, had to charge for their services. It has been found more profitable with most products to have the grading and packing done as near to the farm as is possible to secure a sufficient volume of business for the enterprise. Thus we have local packing houses for fruits, potatoes, poultry products, grain elevators, etc., usually located at the point of primary shipment. These local plants, as well as local creameries, canneries, and other agricultural factories and storage plants, become community institutions as they meet the needs of the farmers within the areas tributary to the centers where they are located. It is true, of course, that many of these plants are located in the open country or at mere railroad stations, and that many of them draw their patronage from several communities; yet more commonly than otherwise they are located at village centers and serve the areas tributary to them. With the advent of good roads and motor trucks, the areas served by such establishments will tend to become larger, but there are many local circumstances which will tend to limit the process of centralization. Whether these plants are operated by private individuals, by stock companies, or by coöperative associations of the producers, they are essential to an effective marketing system and may greatly strengthen community life. If, however, there be two or three elevators in a little village, each operated for profit by a private owner, where all the business could be more economically handled by one concern and where the competition creates friction and suspicion, then like the rivalry between an excessive number of churches, they tend to divide the community.

Students of marketing problems seem agreed that better marketing systems will benefit the farmer through greater efficiency which will reduce the costs of the process rather than through greater profits from higher prices, and that in many lines the largest improvement is possible in the grading, packing, and shipping from the local station. This being the case, it seems obvious that the solution of the marketing problem will increasingly depend upon community action.

Better transportation and storage facilities tend to stabilize prices over large areas and to give the larger markets increasing advantage in bargaining for the farmer's products. Not that there is any concerted action upon the part of the buyers to take an undue advantage of the farmer, for there is usually keen competition between them, but inevitably the "centralization" of the buying power of the larger markets makes it possible for them to very largely determine the price, just as the large employers of labor can to a considerable extent determine the wages they will pay if labor is unorganized; for whenever there is a surplus the individual farmer must sell, while the buyer can, within limits, purchase where or from whom he chooses. Thus for the same reason that labor is forced to organize trade unions to maintain its wages and working conditions, farmers are forced to organize to market their products together and to bargain collectively for their price. This is the outstanding agricultural movement of the past decade and at the present time is so successfully challenging the established system of marketing as to command national attention. The success of such a movement depends primarily upon the solidarity and efficiency of the local units, so that collective bargaining requires the organization of the agricultural community into selling associations for its various products. The whole process encourages the economic organization of the rural community and heightens community consciousness through the effort of its members to defend their common economic interests.

The method of collective selling may vary, but in practice the coöperative selling association has proven the most satisfactory and will be discussed in the following chapter.

When the most successful farmers on the best land in Illinois lose twenty-five cents on every bushel of corn they raised, as was the case in 1921, and when it is easier for isolated farmers in Kansas to burn corn than to buy coal at the prices current, while at the same time millions of innocent women and children are starving in Europe, it seems evident that the complex system of marketing upon which modern industry and civilization has depended, is pretty well out of gear and that national and international questions must be wisely solved before it can again function. Yet in last analysis the solution of the complex problems of marketing rests not alone with international treaties, but with the farmers' selling associations of the rural communities. If we are to have a marketing system which is truly functional, which is built on the principle of the greatest service at the lowest cost, rather than on the principle now implicit in business of sufficient service to secure the maximum of profit which the traffic will bear, then it must be a coöperative system, the primary unit of which is the local coöperative association, whose success depends upon the loyalty of its members to the coöperative principle. So coöperation is a community problem.

Nor can we expect marked progress in other phases of rural life as long as the economic question is acute. It is not true that economic prosperity in agriculture will of itself ensure the higher culture of the countryside; but it is true that so long as the farmer is compelled to devote all of his strength and time to making a competence for his family, that his attention must necessarily be fixed on economic ends and that he will have neither the means nor the time for those satisfactions of life which are possible to one with some leisure. Says "A.E.": "I believe the fading hold the heavens have over the world is due to the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual life. What profound spiritual life can there be when the social order almost forces men to battle with each other for the means of existence?"[29] For weal or woe the material existence of both farmer and townman throughout the civilized world is inextricably inter-dependent. If a better economic system is to arise it must come through the general understanding of these relations by the education of all parties and by a willingness to find satisfaction in the well-being of all rather than in the largest individual profit. Unless these attitudes can be established in the local community, how can we expect to secure harmony of interests among larger groups? Loyalty to the common good must first be developed in the local community among neighbors.

In subsequent chapters we shall have occasion to consider various forces and methods for creating this spirit of community, and we shall see that whereas the higher culture of rural life awaits a better economic system, this spirit of loyalty which is essential for coöperative organizations may be developed through various forms of community activity.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] See Percy Wells Bidwell, "Rural Economy in New England at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century." Trans. Comm. Acad. Arts and Sci., Vol. 20, p. 253, 1916; and E. G. Nourse, "Agricultural Economics," p. 65.

[26] See the account of Mr. A. G. Gardiner, Manchester Guardian, Weekly Edition, Feb. 6, 1920, quoted by Norman Angell in "The Fruits of Victory," p. 27: "Suddenly all this elaborate structure of economic life was swept away. Vienna, instead of being the vital center of fifty millions of people, finds itself a derelict city, with a province of six millions. It is cut off from its coal supplies, from its food supplies, from its factories, from everything that means existence. It is enveloped by tariff walls."

[27] "The Fruits of Victory," p. 12, New York, 1921.

[28] Ibid., p. 14.

[29] (George William Russell), "The National Being," p. 167.

CHAPTER VIII

HOW COÖPERATION STRENGTHENS THE COMMUNITY

The greatest improvements in marketing are being effected through coöperation. We have indicated that willingness to work together for the common good and loyalty to this principle are essential for successful coöperative enterprises. As these same attitudes are the basis of community life, it seems obvious that to the extent that membership in coöperative associations becomes general throughout a community, the stronger will be the community life. Indeed, the very etymology of the two words, coöperate—to work together, and community—having in common, indicate that community activities are essentially a form of coöperation—of working together. Inasmuch as coöperative enterprises are rapidly increasing and that they must, therefore, exercise a powerful influence upon community life, it is necessary to gain a clear idea of just what is involved in the principle of coöperation and to what types of organization the term is applicable.

In a general way there has always been a certain amount of coöperation between neighboring farmers in the exchange of work in barn-raisings, threshing, silo-filling, slaughtering, etc. Out of this have grown such coöperative organizations as threshing rings, and groups for the common ownership and use of all sorts of more expensive machinery, the coöperative ownership of sires, cow-test associations, and many other forms of organization for mutual aid in farm operations. All of these are coöperative associations in the common usage of the word coöperation, but in recent years the term has come to have a more technical meaning to denote a form of organization in contrast to the corporation or stock company, which has been the most prevalent type of business organization in recent years.

The coöperative association differs from the corporation or stock company in three essentials. First, it is democratic in its control; all true coöperative organizations employ the principle of "one man, one vote," the influence of each member of the association being equal as far as the legal control of its administration is concerned. The individual members and not the amount of stock owned controls the policy of the association. Coöperation is democracy applied to business. Second, the coöperative association is organized to secure more efficient service rather than to exact profits. This is a point upon which there is much misunderstanding upon the part of those starting coöperative enterprises and which requires further explanation. Third, the earnings or savings of the association (commonly thought of as "profits") are distributed among the members or patrons of the association pro rata according to the volume of the business which they have transacted with the association, so that although its control is democratic its benefits accrue according to the amount of financial interest involved. There are certain other principles of business procedure which have been found essential to the successful operation of different kinds of coöperative associations, but these three—individual voting, service rather than profits, and pro-rating the earnings—are fundamental to all truly coöperative associations, and it is to this combination of business methods to which the term coöperation has now come to be applied in a technical sense.

Exclusive of associations formed for coöperation in the general sense of the term, i.e., for various purposes of farm operation as mentioned above, farmers' coöperative associations may be divided into three general groups: for buying, for selling, and for finance.

Coöperative buying has been most successfully developed by industrial workers in towns and cities and is commonly known as "consumers' coöperation." Starting with a few poverty-stricken workers who pooled their meager savings so that they could buy at wholesale and share in the profits of the retailer, the Rochdale system has grown until the wholesale coöperative societies of England and Scotland are probably the largest general merchandising corporations in the world, doing a business of approximately a billion dollars a year.

Coöperative buying of farm supplies, fertilizers, machinery, spraying materials, feeds, binder twine, etc., is one of the first forms of coöperative effort ordinarily undertaken by farmers' associations, and is carried on by numerous methods. In most cases the services rendered in the business management of such buying is at first largely on a voluntary basis or is but poorly paid. Only in a few sections of the country has the coöperative buying of agricultural supplies assumed a permanent or stable form of organization, and in those cases it is very frequently a department of a coöperative selling association, such as a fruit exchange. From an educational standpoint there is much to be said for commencing coöperation through organization for buying agricultural supplies, for through it farmers are trained in the principles of coöperation with the greatest possibility of advantage and the least risk of loss. There is little probability of loss in judicious coöperative purchases of carload lots with orders in hand, while in coöperative selling, unless marketing facilities are so bad as to force him to take the risk, the chance of loss is a serious consideration to the farmer. This point has been well stated by Edwin A. Pratt, a leader of agricultural organization in England, who says:

"Inquiry into the conditions under which organization of agriculture has been successfully carried out in other countries showed that a beginning had invariably been made with the simplest form of combination for the joint purchase of agricultural necessaries. In this way the advantages of coöperation could be brought home to cultivators, who were gradually educated in the theory and practice of combination without having their suspicions aroused and their mutual distrust stimulated by proposals that they should at once alter their old conditions of trading in accordance with that system of combination for transport or sale which really constitutes not the beginning of agricultural organization, but one of the most difficult and most complicated of all its many phases."[30]

One of the allurements of coöperative buying has been to at once establish a coöperative store for a general merchandising business. The history of such stores started by granges in the 70's and 80's is instructive in this connection. A few of them survive, but most of them were failures. Only after years of experience and education in coöperative purchasing and other coöperative enterprises have the aims and methods of operating coöperative stores been sufficiently appreciated by most rural communities to ensure their successful establishment. We have already considered (page 48) some of the considerations which should govern the attempt to compete with local merchants. Generally the successful operation of a coöperative store is more difficult for an average group of farmers to manage than the simpler forms of coöperative purchasing, or coöperative credit or selling associations.[31] Moreover, a coöperative store will seriously affect the solidarity of a small community unless a goodly majority, both from farm and village, are convinced of the necessity of competing with local retailers and will give the store their patronage. Except in the buying of agricultural supplies, which may be considered rather as the raw materials and equipment of the farm as a manufacturing business and which are therefore entitled to wholesale prices, consumers' coöperation as usually conducted through coöperative stores is not a distinctively agricultural problem, but is the same for the farmer as for the villager or industrial worker, and its desirability and limitations are determined by similar considerations.

With the change to a commercial type of farming and with the higher price of land, the American farmer has had to make larger use of borrowed capital and his business has been seriously hampered by a lack of credit facilities to meet his needs. Probably in no field of coöperative effort have the benefits been more apparent than in that of the rural credit banks which are found throughout Europe and which have thoroughly demonstrated their usefulness. Attention has been called to the fact that our best farm lands are more and more operated by tenants, and that this is inimical to strong community life. One of the reasons for this tendency has been the inability to secure long-term loans on farm real estate by the man who has little capital of his own. As lands rose in value this became increasingly difficult. To meet this situation a commission representative of all sections of the United States visited various countries in Europe in the spring of 1913, and as a result of their report, in 1916 Congress finally enacted the Federal Farm Loan Act establishing a system of farm land banks. Under this system one-half of the value of a farm and buildings up to $10,000 may be borrowed and paid off under the amortization plan in from five to forty years at a low rate of interest. The details of the system do not concern our present discussion, but the essential feature of the system is the local land bank through which the loans are made and collected. The local land bank is strictly a coöperative society organized to secure long-term credit facilities for its members under the terms of the federal act through the regional land banks of which each local bank is a member. Like other coöperative associations, the area in which the local bank does business is not necessarily that of a community, it may be a whole county where there are but few members, or there may be more than one bank in a single community, but more commonly it is located at a village center and tends to become a community institution.

Equally important for financing the current expenses of farming operations and to make possible the orderly marketing of crops, is the farmer's need for short-time credit. Our banking system has been developed to meet the needs of the business world, and the period for which loans can be made is too short to meet the needs of the farmer, who often requires credit for six months to a year. In some ten states legislation has been passed authorizing the formation of local credit associations, which are really local coöperative banks, but the number of credit associations established in rural communities has been insignificant, thirty-three out of a total of thirty-six being in North Carolina.[32] The tremendous losses suffered by American farmers during 1921 and their inability to secure sufficient credit from their local banks has shown the necessity for better short-time credit facilities, and bills are now before Congress which will enable the local land banks to also handle short-time loans in coöperation with the Federal Reserve Banks. If this is done, the amount of business done by these local banks will be greatly increased and the coöperative principle in banking will be greatly strengthened.

Coöperative selling associations have had a rapid growth in the United States during the past decade. In 1919 the federal Bureau of Markets estimated that agricultural products worth one and a half billions out of a total of nearly nineteen billion dollars sold from farms were marketed through coöperative associations, and the total has greatly increased since then. The California Fruit Growers' Exchange, probably the largest coöperative selling association, does a business of over $50,000,000 annually and has one of the most efficient distributing systems in the country.

At the present time some very ambitious programs of national organizations for coöperative marketing are being started, such as the United States Grain Growers, Inc., which is modeled after the successful Canadian Grain Growers, Inc. One of the chief obstacles to all such plans of effectively organizing the marketing of various agricultural products is the fact that a strong central organization can be developed only by the federation of local associations whose members understand the purposes of the organization and are loyal to them. The history of all coöperative movements shows that those which have been permanently successful have arisen through the federation of strong local associations, and numerous failures of well-intentioned efforts at large-scale coöperative marketing have been due to the fact that numerous local associations cannot be organized by the parent association with any assurance that they will function effectively.

The late G. Harold Powell, for many years the successful manager of the California Fruit Growers' Exchange, in his discussion of the fundamentals of coöperation emphasizes that coöperative associations must be born of a real need:

"Among farmers, who under existing conditions are already prosperous, the need of business organization is not usually felt, even though the costs of marketing and extravagant profits of the middlemen or the railroads might be greatly reduced. They must feel the pressure of need before they can launch a successful business association. When the farmers buy their supplies at reasonable prices, and sell their products readily at a good profit, they do not feel the necessity of organization. It has been the experience of the past that they must feel the need of getting together to meet a crisis in their affairs, and the realization of the need must spring from within and not be forced upon them from without by the enthusiasm of some opportunist who seeks to unite the farmers on the principle that organization is a good thing.... In short, if an organization is to be successful, the investment of the farmer must be threatened by existing social and economic conditions before he can overcome his individualism sufficiently and can develop a fraternal spirit strong enough to pull with his neighbors in coöperative team work."[33]

The tremendous losses suffered by American agriculture in 1921 furnish exactly such a crisis as Mr. Powell suggests, and have given the strongest impetus to the coöperative movement. But even when the necessity exists and is recognized it takes time to build up a strong coöperative association.

The successful operation of a local coöperative association is a matter of slow growth, because it requires the education of the membership in the principles both of coöperation and of marketing, and what is equally essential, the development of a willingness to sometimes forego the advantage of larger profits by individual members in order to ensure the permanent success of the association. The local association has to learn how to conduct its business just as does the individual business man, and it has to compete with individuals and firms who are in business for profit and who have the advantage of experience in the existing marketing system and the financial backing of its business connections. In the attempt to create local selling associations rapidly so as to secure a sufficient volume of business to ensure the success of large marketing enterprises, there is always a tendency to encourage the local members to believe that they will secure a considerably larger share of the consumer's dollar, and when prices are not materially better than under the old system they readily become dissatisfied and withdraw. The best authorities and advocates of coöperative marketing insist that it will be successful only to the degree that it can become more efficient than the existing system and so effect savings and make legitimate earnings, but that there is little prospect for large "profits"; indeed, that the legitimate objective of coöperation is not profits, but savings. Professor Macklin summarizes the matter as follows:

"The true coöperative organization seeks to establish and maintain a distributing system to provide adequately and dependably at minimum cost the essential marketing services of which the industry and its individual members have constant and vital need. Its justification lies in rendering these services at a lower cost and in bringing to farmers a higher proportion of the consumer's dollar."[34]

With the factors involved in successful coöperative selling associations we are not here concerned, except to insist upon the point that as the weakest link measures the strength of a chain, so the strength of the local association determines the strength or weakness of the central selling association. A joint stock company may afford more efficient management than a coöperative association, and unless the local membership is convinced of the superior equity and ultimate advantages of a strong coöperative system, there is little hope for the coöperative to compete with the stock company. Coöperation means working together, and its emphasis is more on duties and obligations than on rights and personal advantage. In coöperative enterprises the individual must be convinced that his best interest in the long run is bound up with the best interest of the whole membership, and unless he is sometimes willing to forego immediate personal advantage and unless he can learn how to work with others, sometimes without compensation or with less than he could secure otherwise, there is little chance for developing a strong organization. For coöperation is but democracy applied to certain phases of business, and, like democracy in politics or any other sphere of life, its highest sanction lies in belief and satisfaction in the collective well-being.

It seems obvious, therefore, that those attitudes which are essential for coöperation are the same which encourage community life, and that where the coöperative spirit dominates, community activities will be strengthened. Whereas, on the contrary, in those localities where family, political, or personal feuds, jealousies and suspicions are rife, coöperative enterprises will be difficult and the community will be weak.

That coöperation does develop those qualities which make for better communities is attested by all who have observed its effects. As a result of his long experience Sir Horace Plunkett says:

"It is here, in furnishing opportunity for the exercise of education secured from the agricultural colleges, that the educational value of coöperative societies comes in; they act as agencies through which scientific teaching may become actual practice, not in the uncertain future, but in the living present. A coöperative association has a quality which should commend it to the social reformer—the power of evoking character; it brings to the front a new type of local leader, not the best talker, but the man whose knowledge enables him to make some solid contribution to the welfare of the community."[35]

So, likewise, a keen observer of Danish coöperation describes its influence in creating scientific and social attitudes:

"Among the indirect, but equally tangible results of coöperation, I should be inclined to put the development of mind and character among those by whom it is practised. The peasant or little farmer, who is a member of one or more of these societies, who helps to build up their success and enjoy their benefits, acquires a new outlook. The jealousies and suspicions which are in most countries so common among those who live by the land fall from him. Feeling that he has a voice in great affairs he acquires an added value and a healthy importance in his own eyes. He knows also that in his degree and according to his output he is on an equal footing with the largest producer and proportionately is doing as well. There is no longer any fear that because he is a little man he will be browbeaten or forced to accept a worse price for what he has to sell than does his rich and powerful neighbor. The skilled minds which direct his business work as zealously for him as for that important neighbor."[36]

It is interesting to note that the three highest authorities on the coöperative movement in Ireland all lay great stress on its importance as a means of community organization and value its social effects as highly as its economic benefits. Thus Sir Horace Plunkett says:

"Gradually the (coöperative) Society becomes the most important institution in the district, the most important in a social as well as an economic sense. The members feel a pride in its material expansion. They accumulate large profits, which in time become a sort of communal fund. In some cases this is used for the erection of village halls where social entertainments, concerts and dances are held, lectures delivered and libraries stored. Finally, the association assumes the character of a rural commune, where, instead of the old basis of the commune, the joint ownership of land, a new basis for union is found in the voluntary communism of effort."[37]

In the same vein Smith-Gordon and Staples in their account of the coöperative movement in Ireland, see it as the most important force for socialization because it makes the most immediate and practical appeal to men of all parties and sects and establishes a business system which develops the community attitude:

"The present individualist system which takes care of the business interests of the farmer is a dividing and disintegrating force. It tends to destroy the natural associative character and to set each man against his neighbor.... But as a member of a society with interests in common with others, the individual consciously and unconsciously develops the social virtues.... The society is in miniature a community, and the community is but a part of the larger social group."[38]

George William Russell ("A.E."), the poet-prophet of Irish agriculture, bases his whole conception of a desirable polity for the Irish State upon coöperative communities, and considers coöperative societies as a prerequisite to rural organization. After describing the marked economic and social changes which have taken place in a typical Irish community as the result of coöperation, he says:

"I have tried to indicate the difference between a rural population and a rural community, between a people loosely knit together by the vague ties of a common latitude and longitude, and people who are closely knit together in an association and who form a true social organism, a true rural community, where the general will can find expression and society is malleable to the general will. I will assert that there never can be any progress in rural districts or any real prosperity without such farmers' organizations or guilds. Wherever rural prosperity is reported in any country inquire into it, and it will be found that it depends on rural organization. Wherever there is rural decay, if it is inquired into, it will be found that there was a rural population but no rural community, no organization, no guild to promote common interests and unite the countrymen in defence of them."[39]

The same observations might be made upon the effect of coöperative enterprises in solidifying rural communities in the United States. It seems doubtful whether coöperative associations in the United States will develop a general social program as they have done in Ireland, Belgium, and Russia. On account of a different social inheritance and account of our facility in forming and belonging to numerous organizations, it seems probable that we will limit our coöperative societies to strictly economic functions, and will use the increased income secured through them in other organizations for social purposes.

Commercial farming is breaking down the old individualism of the farmer, for the exigencies of the economic situation are forcing him to market collectively through coöperative selling associations, and as he learns that his own best interests are bound up with those of the whole community, he becomes increasingly concerned for the common welfare; he commences to think in terms of "us" and "ours," instead of only "me" and "mine." The community becomes a reality to him.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] "Agricultural Organization," p. 99. London, P. S. King & Son, 1912.

[31] See Clarence Poe, "How Farmers Coöperate," Chap. III, p. 37. "Coöperative buying is good; coöperative merchandising may or may not be." New York, Orange Judd Co., 1915.

[32] V. N. Valgren and E. E. Engelbert, "The Credit Association as an Agency for Rural Short-time Credit." Department Circular 197, U. S. Dept. Agr., 1921.

[33] "Coöperation in Agriculture," pp. 22, 23. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1913.

[34] Theodore Macklin, "Efficient Marketing for Agriculture," p. 260. New York, Macmillan Co., 1921.

[35] "The Country Life Problem in the United States," p. 123.

[36] Harvey, "Denmark and the Danes," p. 146, quoted by F. C. Howe, "Denmark a Coöperative Commonwealth," p. 61.

[37] Ibid., p. 128.

[38] "Rural Reconstruction in Ireland; a Record of Coöperative Organizations." New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1919.

[39] "The National Being," p. 39.

CHAPTER IX

THE COMMUNITY'S EDUCATION

THE SCHOOL

At its beginning the United States Government gave support to education by the allotment of public lands to the states as an endowment for public schools, and although the federal government has done but little since then for primary education, the support of education has become one of the chief concerns of state and local governments. In colonial times public schools were largely confined to New England. With the settlement of the Middle West district schools were established with the aid of the government land grants. But in the South conditions were not favorable for public schools until long after the Civil War, and only in the last generation or two has public education become firmly established.

The district school, the famous "little red school-house" of the nineteenth century, was frequently the neighborhood center and the school district commonly formed a neighborhood area, particularly in hilly sections where its lines were adjusted by topography. A recent study of neighborhood areas in Otsego County, New York, shows that about half of them are identical with the school districts, chiefly on account of topography, while in Dane County, Wisconsin, more neighborhood areas are determined primarily by the school district than by any one factor.[40] Formerly the district school-house was quite frequently used for Sunday school or preaching services; spelling-bees and other entertainments were held from time to time; and political meetings and elections were commonly held there.

Although the district school is still a neighborhood social center in many sections, its decadence commenced at the close of the nineteenth century, the change depending upon the general progress or isolation of the community, particularly as affected by transportation. Several factors have combined to make the district school unsatisfactory to the rural community of to-day. In the older parts of the country the population has so decreased that in many districts the maintenance of a school has become exceedingly expensive, it is difficult to secure competent teachers, and there are too few pupils to make the school attractive. The better educational advantages of town and city schools have caused much dissatisfaction upon the part of the better class of farmers who wish their children to have the best possible start in life, and many of those who can afford to do so have "moved to town" to educate their children, thus making a bad matter worse for the district school. As long as roads were poor the district school was the only one possible, but with better roads, automobiles and trolleys, the consolidation of schools has proceeded rapidly in the past decade, particularly in the prairie states.

A modern school cannot be maintained at every other crossroads. Improved roads naturally radiate from the village center and hence it is the logical point for a consolidated school or high school. There are localities in isolated regions where it might be desirable to establish consolidated schools in the open country, but in most cases where there is a natural village center, the school should be located there and the school laws should make possible the organization of the consolidated school district regardless of township or county lines. Indeed legislation has already been enacted to this end in several states and forms one of the most important movements for strengthening the rural community. Here and there are to be found consolidated schools which have been placed in the open country at the center of a township because it was the point most easily agreed upon by all the patrons, particularly where the township is an administrative unit of the school system. In some cases somewhat successful efforts are being made to have such consolidated schools serve as social centers, but it is believed that in the long run community life will flow to its natural centers and that the seeming success of such social centers in the open country, unless the neighborhood be an isolated one, will tend to weaken the communities concerned. Usually a consolidated district of this sort will contain parts of two or three community areas and the location of the school at a point between them weakens the support of the community centers to that extent. Here we encounter one of the many ways in which our artificial unit of rural government—the township—interferes with community progress.[41]

Formerly only the children of the upper classes who were preparing for college received a secondary education, but during the past generation there has been a rapid growth of public high schools which serve as the "people's colleges." At first these were found only in the cities and larger towns, but rural communities have demanded equal advantages and state and national legislation has aided them in the cost of maintenance. Federal aid for secondary education in vocational subjects, now available through the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, has encouraged the establishment of rural high schools and has greatly increased the number giving instruction in agriculture and home economics. Hundreds of rural high schools are now giving agricultural courses better than the agricultural colleges gave twenty-five years ago.