GEORGE C. PARDEE, Executive Committee, 1910-11-12. 3. HENRY D. HARDTNER,
Vice-President, 1909-1912. 4. MRS. PHILIP N. MOORE, Executive Committee,
1909-12. 5. WALTER H. PAGE, Executive Committee, 1910-12. 6. D. AUSTIN
LATCHAW, Treasurer. 7. THOMAS R. SHIPP, Executive Secretary. 8. JAMES C.
GIPE, Recording Secretary. 9. A. B. FARQUHAR, Vital Resources, 1911-12.
10. L. H. BAILEY, Chairman Lands Committee, 1911-12. 11. W J MCGEE,
Chairman National Parks Committee, 1911-12.]
FARM ORGANIZATION.
The organization of the farmers has long been the end desired by those
who are seeking to promote the country’s welfare. By reason of all his
previous years of training when he has been acting on his own judgment,
and working alone, the farmer is not accustomed to organized effort, and
does not fully recognize its value; hence the influence of his wife in
this matter is of special help. The farmer knows if he leaves home for
any length of time that weeds spring up, fences fall down, cattle get
off their feed and cows fail in their milk. Hence he stays at home year
in and year out getting deeper and deeper in the rut unless educational
and social privileges are brought to him. This the women can and will do.
Through the united efforts of the women the farmer is going to think
less of his taxes and more of his schools; he is going to be one of an
army of country men united to secure conservation of the soil through
longer leases, conservation of the child through better educational
facilities; conservation of the wife through the relaxation of meeting
with those of her own sex, and shall I not add: conservation of the few
hard-earned dollars in the purse by parcels post? The farmer’s wife, in
order to conserve to the fullest extent the best interests of the farm,
must be filled with the conviction that farming is the most honorable
of any pursuit for a man and is a career worthy of his best endeavors
and not merely a makeshift until something better offers. Such a woman
will impress upon her children the thought that no calling or profession
is so worthy of their best efforts; she will see to it that the books
and papers that come into the family are those that treat farming and
the farmer with respect. No one thing probably has had a more invidious
influence in creating a desire among farm boys to leave the farm than the
funny papers and cartoons which make the farmer the butt of their jokes,
portraying him as the victim of the gold brick agent and picturing him
with the vacant look and gaping mouth of an imbecile.
Cato, the Censor, lived at a time when Rome was at its height as a
military power. He had held nearly all of the great offices under the
Roman republic, yet in his old age he left this record, that: “No
occupation was so worthy of the dignity of a man as that of farming,”
holding that: “Farming makes the bravest men, and thoughts.” The farmer’s
wife should use her influence to see that this kind of literature is kept
before her children in the farm home, in the curriculum of the school,
and in the school library.
In the time at my disposal I have been able to only hint at a few of
the very many and diverse problems, as well as opportunities which
belong to our women of the farm. I have tried to view them as a wife
and mother of the soil, where, indeed, my life is cast, and my energies
have been engrossed. I have endeavored to advance no fine spun theories,
but to suggest a solution which can be and is being worked out today
in many localities. That these and similar organizations are bound to
come in abundance and that they will work untold good to the cause of
conservation I fully believe. Once the farm wives of our country are
adequately organized there is no divining the power for good that they
may wield. There is an old saying: “Unless a man’s mother ordains him for
the ministry, he won’t make a good preacher.” When a boy’s mother ordains
him for the farm there will be no lack of good farmers. (Applause)
Chairman VESSEY—I now have the pleasure of introducing to you Mrs.
Matthew T. Scott, President General of the Daughters of the American
Revolution, who will talk to you in regard to the “Farmer’s Wife.”
(Applause)
Mrs. SCOTT—I have crossed the continent to be present today because of my
interest in the farm and the farmer’s wife—the class to which I am proud
to belong.
We have considered here every interest of conservation in
creation—vegetable, animal and mineral, and now come to conservation of
the farmer’s wife, the greatest issue before this Congress.
In the consideration of that problem which so far has baffled the
masculine intelligence, i. e., that of keeping the younger generation on
the farm, the key to the situation unquestionably is held by the farmer’s
wife.
The call of the country rings out from garden, from forest and stream,
from acres of golden grain, and tonics pure from Nature’s own laboratory.
Back of all of this is the farmer’s wife, who by making the farm home
attractive and interesting is the magnet which draws the boy and girl
back to the farm, from the allurements and disappointments of city life.
The farmer’s wife is no longer the isolated being of years ago—but with
her free rural delivery, and the country’s network of trolleys for her
convenience—good roads, and with the use of modern machinery, a large
degree of leisure to give to her social life, music and books, are now at
her command. If she succeeds in making life on the farm attractive, if
she is able to add the distinctively feminine touch of home charm to the
freedom and zest of country life, who can doubt that this great problem
of retaining the farmer boys on the farm will be solved?
It is the farmer’s wife also, and she chiefly, who can enforce the only
education that is worth while—that is real and true, that education which
builds character, which educates not the intellect alone, but at the same
time the conscience and the will; an education that means justice and
truth and purity in this selfish work-a-day world. Moreover, few farmers
succeed whose wives do not do their part to see to it that both ends
meet. It is the wife of the farmer who sees where the waste and loss are
eating into the profits of the farm. It is the housewife as a rule who
has ideas of thrift in farm management and who, if she has the chance,
will contribute more than is often realized to make the farm a business
success.
Upon the farmer’s wife largely rests this great responsibility, and in
this great work, with the help of the noble army of quiet, intelligent,
capable farmers’ wives, we hope to develop the most splendid crop known
on this fertile continent—the boys and girls, the youth of the land.
Largely is this work the prerogative of the farmer’s wife amid the stress
and strain which absorb the energies of modern masculine business life.
Another duty which devolves upon the farmer’s wife is to exert her
influence and teaching to train her boys so that they will see to it when
they are voters that in these days of political chicanery and corruption
that only honest men and true are sent to Legislatures, to Congress, and
the United States Government, to make the laws that are to govern this,
the greatest Nation on the face of the earth.
Sociologists and agricultural professors can aid the farmer’s wife in her
work, but, after all, it is upon her shoulders that the responsibility of
success or failure in this great task must ultimately rest.
Today the great difficulty is that the farmer’s wife is trying heroically
to fulfill the double functions—that of assistant economic producer and
of housewife, mother and the organizer and inspirer of the happier and
higher activities and diversions of country life.
To free the wife from the burden of money making and educate her in
the more difficult and equally important task of home-making and the
development of the finer and more humane and more enjoyable aspects of
country life, these are the problems we must help her solve and she will
do the rest.
An old Frenchman once said that farming was the only profession in
which a man works in a relationship of direct partnership with God. The
ministry might object to the words “only profession,” but the fact is
certainly patent that in more than any ordinary occupation of life, do we
coöperate day and night with the sun, and the wind and the rain, and all
the other forces of Nature and of Nature’s God, and I believe that for
women today there is no profession more alluring, healthful, or lucrative
than that of scientific agriculture. If I had my life to live over I
would enter as a student one of our great agricultural universities. I
would familiarize myself with the work of experiment stations, learn
to test soils, know the elements best suited to and most needed by the
different stratas of earth. I would master the secrets of fertilization,
which have for a thousand years made sections of the old world productive
without exhaustion. I would inform myself as to the value and methods of
rotation of crops, the value of dairy and cattle raising on the farm. I
would also inform myself of the comparative cost of nitrogen drawn from
the air in the form of leguminous crops, which imprison the nitrogen in
the soil, and the cost of commercial nitrogen, and their comparative
values.
I would learn the need of phosphate or potassium as applied to different
soils and the comparative value of tested fertilizers. We have already an
aristocracy of herds—cattle, horses and swine, but I would undertake the
breeding of an aristocracy of seed corn and oats and alfalfa.
Oh! they are great the possibilities of woman on the farm—if she would
only take advantage of them. (Applause)
Chairman WALLACE—We will now proceed with the call of the states, and
these organizations who wish to report.
Delegate C. J. DILLON of Manhattan, Kan.—Can’t we give five minutes more
to discussion by the ladies? We have a lady here I wish to propose, who
has been working in this same line for years, and I would like to have
you hear from her.
Chairman VESSEY—Send her up to the platform, please.
Mr. DILLON—I am glad to introduce to you Miss Frances Brown of Kansas,
who has been in active work along the lines of organization of farmers’
wives. (Applause)
A DELEGATE—Have her come down on the front platform.
President WALLACE—She has a pretty good voice, and I think if you will be
quiet you can hear her.
Miss BROWN—The first speaker on this subject this afternoon outlined
so ably and so well the needs of the farmer’s wife that it will be
my pleasure in just a very few minutes to tell you how we at the
Agricultural College in Kansas have tried to meet these needs of the
farmers’ wives. We have looked over the field as well as we could, and
we saw that in the very first instance the first thing for us to do was
to correct, as far as possible, the errors of those who had gone before
us. And so while it is only morning yet in Kansas, and the department as
organized is only two years old, we went out into the organization that
had already existed in Kansas and began to do work on these subjects that
pertained to the commonest things of life, the very household, taking up
for our very first work a sort of reformatory movement on the subject
of bread and bread making. Then we spread that same movement before the
Farmers’ Institutes, and by visiting every one of the institutes and
meetings that we could, we saw that the cause of dissatisfaction on the
farm lay largely in the fact that there are not the conveniences in
the farm home that we find in the town, and that was the cause of the
exodus from the farm to the town. So we have begun a campaign for the
country homes, and our women in the institutes are so anxious that they
ask us to help them effect an organization which we call an Auxiliary to
the Farmers’ Institutes. Of these during the last year we have twenty
organizations, with a membership of 500, whose women have been studying
the cost of putting in plants for heating and lighting and bringing water
into the homes, and taking care of the waste from the home. Now we are
getting letters every day from farm homes where they are actually making
use of some one of these various systems.
The next step was to take care of the younger members of the farm home,
and so we had to get something ready that could be used in the public
schools, as well as in the home itself. We have what you may be more or
less familiar with under the title of the Girls’ Home Economic Clubs,
by which we reach the girls through the printed page. These printed
papers are gotten up so that girls from ten to fifteen years of age can
master them perfectly. They are on the subjects that we need every
day, first, cooking, because you know that while man can live without
poetry, music and art, he cannot live without cooks, so we are going
to begin raising each one to be a cook for the future. We have these
courses in cooking out all over the state, not only being used by the
individual girls in the farm home, but being taken up by the public
schools where the towns or the communities are too poor to afford a
department in domestic science and art. During the past year 2,300 girls
took lessons either in cooking or sewing or both from this department
at the college, and already, as the new schools are opening, letters
are pouring in every day asking for more of that work in the various
sections of the state. Moreover, during the last year, due to these
efforts, seventy-five high schools put domestic science or art or both
into their systems where it had not existed before. Wishing to utilize or
bring together the organization that already existed instead of forming
new organizations, we have been getting together a course of domestic
lessons, or demonstrations, if you please to call them so, that can be
used by the women’s clubs that are already organized in the state. That
course is almost completed; and when we have that finished, we hope to
see every single organization of the women in the state adopting part or
all of it, not because they need it so much, because women that have time
for clubs, have more or less leisure through their added efficiency. But
it will mean that they are still thoughtful along these lines, and that
their efforts are going to be with us in spreading this gospel of good
housekeeping throughout the state.
Now, we have a big work yet before us. We are not going to stop. We are
going to work at every single channel that we have opened, and we are
going to open as many new ones as can be helped, until every roof in
Kansas covers a harmonious home where we will find every single thing
that will tend to the highest efficiency and the needs of every member of
the family in that home. I thank you. (Applause)
Chairman WALLACE—I know I voice the feeling of this audience when I say
we have already highly enjoyed these addresses from the ladies this
afternoon. The executive committee of this association has some business
that you must transact, and the report will now be read by Mr. J. B.
White, the chairman of the executive committee.
Mr. WHITE—The executive committee met this morning and adopted the
following resolutions:
In view of the very effective help which the national
organizations have given the Conservation Congress and the
conservation movement in general, the members of the executive
committee of the Third National Conservation Congress feel
that the national organizations should have more adequate
representation. Therefore, at a meeting of the executive
committee of the Congress today, it was decided unanimously to
recommend that the constitution be amended so as to provide
for an advisory board to be made up of representatives of
the national organizations which have appointed conservation
committees.
To this end the executive committee respectfully begs leave
to submit the following amendment to Article 5, Section 3, of
the Constitution of the Conservation Congress, by adding the
following:
“An advisory board, consisting of one person from each national
organization having a conservation committee, shall be created
to act for that Congress and during the interval before the
next succeeding Congress. The board shall report to and
coöperate with the executive committee.”
The executive committee is also of opinion that the scope of the work
of the permanent committees of the Congress should be extended so as to
cover a larger field. The present sub-committees are those on forests,
waters, land, mineral and vital resources.
The committee, therefore, recommends that the constitution of the
Conservation Congress be amended as follows:
Article 5, Section 5. The committee on vital resources shall
consist of members, each selected with the view to becoming
chairman of the sub-committee and that six sub-committees be
created subordinate to the committee on vital resources as
follows: Food, homes, child life, education, civics, general
(including wild life, domesticated animals and cultivated
plants). The chairman of each committee, with the approval of
the chairman of the executive committee, shall be authorized to
appoint as members of these sub-committees, such members as in
their judgment will best accomplish the object sought.
Delegate BRUCE DODSON of Kansas City—I move that the report of the
executive committee be received.
Delegate WM. H. DYE of Indianapolis—I second the motion.
Chairman VESSEY—All in favor of them will say aye. Contrary minded. The
amendments are adopted.
Mr. WHITE—Mr. President, we invite all those who are here and are
delegates of the different national associations that have conservation
committees to come on the platform, that they may choose their
representatives, if possible, and confer with the executive committee
immediately after adjournment.
President WALLACE—What now is the pleasure of the Congress? We have
filled up the program of today. I take pleasure in introducing Miss Mame
E. Weller of Nathan, Iowa, of the conservation committee of the Iowa
Federation of Women’s Clubs.
Miss WELLER—I bring greetings from the Federated Club women of Iowa, who
today stand ready to help in all lines of conservation.
We have been and are working for the conservation of child life, health
and happiness. We have done much toward procuring sanitation in schools,
and especially pure drinking water. We are trying to have our bird
laws enforced and shall petition our Legislature at its next session
to prohibit spring shooting of ducks and all shore birds, who are our
sanitary commissioners of lake, shore and stream borders.
We have caused many hundreds of trees to be planted in Iowa, and the
coming year we are to work for state control of the banks of our streams
and shores of our lakes.
We have done much to prevent the wanton mutilation of trees and
destruction of our wayside trees by telephone companies. Yet much
remains to be done. We have in Iowa a statute that exempts from taxation
almost entirely all woodlands, native or planted, when kept and used for
timber purposes only.
President WALLACE—We expected until today to have a paper or address by
Dr. Knapp of Washington, D. C., but I am very sorry to say that he cannot
come, but the Department of Agriculture has a gentleman that can take his
place, and I would suggest that Dr. W. J. Spillman come forward and tell
us about the wonderful demonstration work that is going on in the South.
Is Dr. Spillman in the audience? If not, we would be glad to hear from
Mr. F. A. Guthrie, a member of the Congress representing the city of St.
Paul, Minn. Five minutes, and then I promise you we will adjourn.
Mr. GUTHRIE—As indicated in the announcement, my work is on a line
somewhat different from almost anything that has been presented. In
connection with charitable and correctional institutions, we have found
that it is necessary to go to the country. This presentation this
afternoon relates to charitable and correctional work. The dreariness of
the country home is very important and has to do with most of that which
we have to treat. The national conferences on this matter have come to
the conclusion that it is necessary for leaders in the country to engage
some person specially qualified to advance social interests, to organize
country meetings of various kinds, or organize musical entertainments,
organize social entertainments, and organize educational work. We present
that to the national conference as something to which we will have to
come in order to bring about agreeable healthy country life, a life which
gives joy in living, as was presented by the President at the opening. I
thank you.
President WALLACE—We are ready to entertain a motion to adjourn. Ladies
and Gentlemen, remember that the meeting is at 8 o’clock sharp. We are to
have a great program tonight. Mrs. Moore, Dr. Wilson, and Dr. Wiley.
The Congress stands adjourned until 8 o’clock this evening.
_SIXTH SESSION._
President WALLACE—The house will come to order. The secretary has a
telegram to be read:
Returning from two weeks on the firing line of conservation
with Secretary Fisher. I send through you the accredited
representative of the American Civic Association hearty good
wishes for the great movement now being considered and promoted
by those who believe in a continuing and improving America.
J. HORACE MCFARLAND,
President American Civic Association.
President WALLACE—We are to be privileged this evening to have an address
on the Community Club, by Mrs. Phillip Moore, St. Louis, president of the
General Confederation of Women’s Clubs. (Applause)
Mrs. MOORE—Members of the Conservation Congress: I have already said
to the officers of the association that we very much prefer “Community
Center” to “Community Club.” It will cover the ground much better, as you
will see, from my viewpoint:
It may be a question in the minds of many present why this particular
subject has been assigned to a representative of the General Federation
of Women’s Clubs. I am glad to present the very best of reasons: because
we have studied it for years, and have worked on the findings of such
study.
At the Second Conservation Congress in St. Paul our honored ex-president
gave in some detail the history of the Country Life Commission in which
he had become much interested. Economic and social questions engaged
his attention; he had given thought to the economic strengthening and
social elevation of the Irish farmer, in connection with the policies of
conservation and country life in our own country.
The results of the Country Life Commission were of the widest import, but
were never made public, inasmuch as Congress did not appropriate money to
print the findings.
It was about this time that our interest was specially centered on the
life of the women of rural communities; one of the Eastern publications
supplemented the existing inquiries from the Government by sending out
letters to approximately 700,000 readers. There were answers from nearly
every state in the Union which would have required a large office force
to read and tabulate. The majority of these letters was given to our
general federation board members, representing through their own and
advisory states all the community interest which we wish to bring to you
today.
The result was extraordinary—answers from a thousand women, with facts,
feelings, hopes, ambitions, possibilities and probabilities. The bulk
of correspondence came from women, whose letters showed that they are
not having for one reason or another what Mr. Roosevelt called a “square
deal.”
The letters were distributed among the board members, were carefully
read, and they frequently gave an opening for further correspondence—with
most interesting, personal results. The letters were not illiterate; many
of the women have been school teachers and nearly all have had a good
education; many were eloquent in deeper modes of expression than rhetoric.
The volume of data which these letters presented is of high value
industrially, from a sociological point of view, and with reference to
sanitary conditions; the study of public schools and country churches
would gain largely from this material.
Our board members represented, and naturally for that reason understood,
the New England and Eastern states, the sandy shores, the Pennsylvania
settlements, the sunny South, the mountain regions, the near West, the
river states, the Northern plains, the prairie stretches, the Rockies and
the Pacific shores.