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THE EVOLUTION OF THE COUNTRY COMMUNITY
THE EVOLUTION OF
THE COUNTRY
COMMUNITY
A STUDY IN RELIGIOUS SOCIOLOGY
BY
WARREN H. WILSON
THE PILGRIM PRESS
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
_Copyright, 1912_,
BY LUTHER H. CARY
THE PILGRIM PRESS
BOSTON
TO
MISS ANNA B. TAFT
WHO FOUND THE WAY OF
RURAL LEADERSHIP
IN SERVICE ON THE NEGLECTED BORDERS OF
NEW ENGLAND TOWNS
PREFACE
The significance of the most significant things is rarely seized at the
moment of their appearance. Years or generations afterwards hindsight
discovers what foresight could not see.
It is possible, I fear it is even probable, that earnest and intelligent
leaders of organized religious activity, like thousands of the rank and
file in parish work, will not immediately see the bearings and realize
the full importance of the ideas and the purposes that are clearly set
forth in this new and original book by my friend and sometime student,
Dr. Warren H. Wilson. That fact will in no wise prevent or even delay
the work which these ideas and purposes are mapping out and pushing to
realization.
The Protestant churches have completed one full and rounded period of
their existence. The age of theology in which they played a conspicuous
part has passed away, never to return. The world has entered into the
full swing of the age of science and practical achievement. What the
work, the usefulness, and the destiny of the Protestant churches shall
henceforth be will depend entirely upon their own vision, their common
sense, and their adaptability to a new order of things. Embodying as
they do resources, organization, the devotion and the energy of earnest
minds, they are in a position to achieve results of wellnigh
incalculable value if they apply themselves diligently and wisely to the
task of holding communities and individuals up to the high standard of
that "Good Life" which the most gifted social philosopher of all ages
told us, more than two thousand years ago, is the object for which
social activities and institutions exist.
In one vast field of our social territory the problem of maintaining the
good life has become peculiar in its conditions and difficult in the
extreme. The rural community has suffered in nearly every imaginable way
from the rapid and rather crude development of our industrial
civilization. The emigration of strong, ambitious men to the towns, the
substitution of alien labor for the young and sturdy members of the
large American families of other days, the declining birth rate and the
disintegration of a hearty and cheerful neighborhood life, all have
worked together to create a problem of the rural neighborhood, the
country school and the country church unique in its difficulties,
sometimes in its discouragements.
To deal with this problem two things are undeniably necessary. There
must be a thorough examination of it, a complete analysis and mastery of
its factors and conditions. The social survey has become as imperative
for the country pastor as the geological survey is for the mining
engineer. And when the facts and conditions are known, the church must
resolutely set about the task of dealing with them in the practical
spirit of a practical age, without too much attention to the traditions
and the handicaps of an age that has gone by.
It would not be possible, I think, to present these two aspects of the
problem of the country parish with more of first hand knowledge, or with
more of the wisdom that is born of sympathy and reverence for all that
is good in both the past and the present than the reader will find in
Dr. Wilson's pages. I welcome and commend this book as a fine product of
studies and labors at once scientific and practical.
FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION IX
I THE PIONEER 1
II THE LAND FARMER 18
III THE EXPLOITER 32
IV THE HUSBANDMAN 48
V EXCEPTIONAL COMMUNITIES 62
VI GETTING A LIVING 79
VII THE COMMUNITY 91
VIII THE MARGIN OF THE COMMUNITY 108
IX NEWCOMERS IN THE COMMUNITY 123
X CO-OPERATION 142
XI COMMON SCHOOLS 158
XII RURAL MORALITY 171
XIII RECREATION 189
XIV COMMON WORSHIP 208
INTRODUCTION
The church and the school are the eyes of the country community. They
serve during the early development of the community as means of
intelligence and help to develop the social consciousness, as well as to
connect the life within the community with the world outside. They
express intelligence and feeling. But when the community has come to
middle life, even though it be normally developing, the eyes fail. They
are infallible registers of the coming of mature years. At this time
they need a special treatment.
Like the eyes, the country church and country school register the health
of the whole organism. Whatever affects the community affects the church
and the school. The changes which have come over the face of social life
in the country record themselves in the church and the school. These
institutions register the transformations in social life, they indicate
health and they give warning of decay. In a few instances the church or
school require the attention of the expert even in the infancy of the
community, just as the eyes of a child sometimes need the oculist, but
with normal growth the expert is called in for problems which have to
do with maturity.
In these chapters the center of attention will be the church, regarded
as an institution for building and organizing country life. It is not
the thought of the writer that the church be treated in ecclesiastical
terms. It is rather as a register of the well-being of the community
that the church is here studied. The condition of the church is regarded
as an index of the social and economic condition of the people. The
sources of religion are believed by the writer to be in the vital
experiences of the people themselves. In the process of religious
experience the church, the Bible, the ministry and other religious
methods and organizations are means of disciplining the forces of
religion, but they are not the sources of religion.
The church in the country above all other institutions should see what
concerns country people as a whole. If vision be not given to the
church, country people will suffer. The Christian churches are rich in
the experience of country people. The Bible is written about a "Holy
Land." The exhortations of Scripture, especially of the Old Testament,
are devoted to constructive sociology, the building and organizing of an
agricultural people in an Asiatic country. Many of the problems are
oriental, but some of them are precisely the same as are today agitating
the American farmer. Religion is the highest valuation set upon life,
and the country church should have a vision of the present meaning as
well as the future development of country life in America.
The country church ought to inspire. It is the business of other
agencies, and particularly of the schools and colleges, to impart
practical and economic aims. But these will not satisfy country people.
No section of modern life is so dependent upon idealism as are the
people who live in the country. Mere cash prosperity puts an end to
residence in most country communities. Commercial success leads toward
the city. The religious leaders alone have the duty of inspiring country
people with ideals higher than the commercial. It remains for the church
in particular to inspire with social idealism. Education seems
hopelessly individualistic. The schoolmaster can see only personalities
to be developed. It remains for the preacher to develop a kingdom and a
commonwealth. His ideals have been those of an organized society. The
tradition which he inherits from the past is saturated with family,
tribal and national remembrances. His exhortations for the future look
to organized social life in the world to come. He should know how to
construct ideals out of modern life, which are organic and social.
Beyond these two duties I am not sure that the churches in the country
have exceptional function. The writer is not a teacher, and what is said
in this book about the country school is said solely because of the
dependence of all else upon this institution. The patient, detailed and
extensively constructive work in the country must be done by the
educator. It is well for the church to recognize its limits, and to
magnify its own function within them. Vision and inspiration are the
duty of religious leaders. The application of these in a variety of ways
to the generations of young people in the country is an educational task
which the church can do only in part.
But the great necessity of arousing the church at the present time to
its duty as a builder of communities in the country is this. In all
parts of the United States country life is furnished with churches.
Perhaps not in sufficient degree in some localities, but in general the
task of religious organization is done. These religious societies hold
the key to the problem of country life. If they oppose modern socialized
ideals in the country, these ideals cannot penetrate the country. If the
church undertake constructive social service in the country, the task
will be done. The church can oppose effectively; it can support
efficiently. This situation lays a vast responsibility upon all
Christian churches, especially upon those that have an educated
ministry; for the future development of the country community as a good
place in which to live depends upon the country church.
This is not the place to discuss whether a population can be improved
and whether a community can be saved. The pages that are to follow will
discuss these questions. It is the writer's belief that a population can
be improved by social service, that the community is the unit in which
such service should be rendered in the country, and that by the vision
and inspiration of the church in the country, this service is
conditioned. He believes with those who are leading in the service among
the poor in the great cities that the time has come when we have
sufficient intelligence to understand the life of country people, in
order to deal with the causes of human action; we have sufficient
resources wherewith to endow the needed agencies for the reconstruction
of country life; and we have a sufficient devotion among men of
intelligence and of means to direct this constructive social service
toward the entire well-being of country people and of the whole
commonwealth.
The writer is indebted for help in the preparation of this book to Miss
Florence M. Lane, Miss Martha Wilson and to Miss Anna B. Taft, without
whose assistance and criticism the chapters could not have been prepared
and without whose encouragement they would not have been undertaken;
also to his teachers in Columbia University, especially Professors
Franklin H. Giddings and John Bates Clark whose teachings in the Social
Sciences furnish the beginning of a new method in investigating
religious experiences.
NEW YORK, July, 1912.
EVOLUTION OF THE COMMUNITY
I
THE PIONEER
The earliest settlers of the American wilderness had a struggle very
different from our own, who live in the twentieth century. Their
economic experience determined their character. They appear to us at
this distance to have common characteristics, habits and reactions upon
life; in which they differ from all who in easier times follow them.
They have more in common with one another than they have in common with
us. They differ less from one another than they differ from the modern
countryman. The pioneer life produced the pioneer type.
To this type all their ways of life correspond. They hunted, fought,
dressed, traded, worshipped in their own way. Their houses, churches,
stores and schools were built, not as they would prefer, but as the
necessities of their life required. Their communities were pioneer
communities: their religious habits were suitable to frontier
experience. Modern men would find much to condemn in their ways: and
they would find our typical reactions surprising, even wicked. But each
conforms to type, and obeys economic necessity.
There have been four economic types in American agriculture. These have
succeeded one another as the rural economy has gone through successive
transformations. They have been the pioneer, the land farmer, the
exploiter and the husbandman. Prof. J. B. Ross of Lafayette, Ind., has
clearly stated[1] the periods by which these types are separated from
one another. It remains for us to consider the communities and the
churches which have taken form in accordance with these successive
types.
Prof. Ross has spoken only of the Middle West. With a slight
modification, the same might be said of the Eastern States, because the
rural economy of the Middle West is inherited from the East. His
statement made of this succession of economic types should be quoted in
full:
"The agrarian occupation of the Middle West divides itself into three
periods. The first, which extends from the beginnings of immigration to
about the year 1835, is of significance chiefly because of the type of
immigrants who preempted the soil and the nature of their occupancy. The
second period, extending from 1835 to 1890, had as its chief objective
the enrichment of the group life. It was the period in which large
houses and commodious barns were erected, and in which the church and
the school were the centers of social activity. The third period, which
began about the year 1890, and which is not yet complete, is marked by a
transition from the era of resident proprietors of the land to that of
non-resident proprietors, and by the fact that the chief attention of
the land owners is paid to the improvement of the soil by fertilization
and drainage and to the increasing of facilities for communication and
for the marketing of farm products."
Each of these types created by the habits of the people in getting their
living, had its own kind of a community, so that we have had pioneer,
land farmer, exploiter and husbandman communities. Indeed all these
types are now found contemporaneous with one another. We have also had
successive churches built by the pioneer, by the land farmer, by the
exploiter and by the husbandman. The present state of the country church
and community is explained best by saying that it is an effect of
transition from the pioneer and the land farmer types of church and
community to the exploiter and husbandman types.
The pioneer lived alone. He placed his cabin without regard to social
experience. In the woods his axe alone was heard and on the prairie the
smoke from his sod house was sometimes answered by no other smoke in the
whole horizon. He worked and fought and pondered alone.
Self-preservation was the struggle of his life, and personal salvation
was his aspiration in prayer. His relations with his fellows were purely
democratic and highly independent. The individual man with his family
lived alone in the face of man and God. The following is a description
by an eye witness of such a community which preserves in a mountain
country the conditions of pioneer life[2].
"It is pitiful to see the lack of co-operation among them. It is most
evident in business but makes itself known in the children, too. I
regard it as one reason why they do not play; they have been so isolated
that they do not allow the social instinct of their natures to express
itself. This, of course, is all unconsciously done on their part.
However, one cannot live long among them without finding out that they
are characterized by an intense individualism. It applies to all that
they do, and to it may be attached the blame for all the things which
they lack or do wrongfully. If a man has been wronged, he must
personally right the wrong. If a man runs for office, people support him
as a man and no questions are asked as to his platform. If a man
conducts a store, people buy from him because he sells the goods, not
because the goods commend themselves to them. And so by common consent
and practise, the individual interests are first. Naturally this leads
to many cases of lawlessness. The game of some of our people is to
evade the law; of others, to ignore the law entirely."
The pioneer had in his religion but one essential doctrine,--the
salvation of the soul. His church had no other concern than to save
individuals from the wrath to come. It had just one method, an annual
revival of religion.
The loneliness of the pioneer's soul is an effect of his bodily
loneliness. The vast outdoors of nature forest or prairie or mountain,
made him silent and introspective even when in company. The variety of
impacts of nature upon his bodily life made him resourceful and
self-reliant; and upon his soul resulted in a reflective, melancholy
egotism. His religion must therefore begin and end in personal
salvation. It was a message, an emotion, a struggle, and a peace.
The second great characteristic of the pioneer was his emotional
tension. His impulses were strong and changeable. The emotional
instability of the pioneer grew out of his mixture of occupations. It
was necessary for him to practise all the trades. In the original
pioneer settlement this was literally true. In later periods of the
settlement of the land the pioneer still had many occupations and
representative sections of the country even until the present time
exhibit a mixture of occupations among country people most unlike the
ordered life of the Eastern States. Adam Smith in "Wealth of Nations"
makes clear that the practise of many occupations induces emotional
conditions. Between each two economic processes there is generated for
the worker at varied trades a languor, which burdens and confuses the
work of the man who practises many trades. This languor is the source of
the emotional instability of the pioneer.
The pioneer's method of bridging the gap between his many occupations
was simple. When he had been hunting he found it hard to go to plowing:
and if plowing, on the same day to turn to tanning or to mending a roof.
When the pioneer had spent an hour in bartering with a neighbor he found
it difficult to turn himself to the shoeing of a horse or the clearing
of land. For this new effort his expedient was alcohol. He took a drink
of rum as a means of forcing himself to the new occupation. The result
is that alcoholic liquors occupy a large place in the economy of every
such pioneer people.
In the mountain regions of the South, where the pioneer remains as an
arrested type, the rum jug occupies the same place in the economy of the
countryman as it occupied in the early settlements of the United States
generally. These "contemporary ancestors" of ours in the Appalachian
region have all the marks of the pioneer. Their simple life, their
varied occupations, and the relative independence of the community and
household, sufficient unto themselves, present a picture of the earlier
American conditions. It is obvious among them that the emotional
condition of the pioneer grew out of his economy and extended itself
into his church.
This emotional instability of the pioneer shows itself in his social
life. The well known feuds of the mountain people exhibit this
condition. Feeling is at once violent and impulsive. The very reserve of
these unsmiling and serious people is an emotional state, for the meager
diet and heavy continued strains of their economic life poorly supply
and easily exhaust vitality.
The frontier church exhibited emotional variability. It expressed itself
in the pioneer's one method; namely, an annual revival of religion. In
the pioneer churches there were few or no Sunday schools or other
societies. In those regions in which the pioneer has remained the type
of economic life Sunday schools do not thrive. Societies for young
people, for men, women and children do not there exist. The church is a
place only for preaching. Religion consists of a message whose use is to
excite emotion. Preaching is had as often as possible, but not
necessarily once a week. Essential, however, to the pioneer's
organization of his churches is a periodical if possible an annual,
revival of religion. The means used at this time are the announcement of
a gospel message and the arousing of emotion in response to this
message. There is little application of religious imperative to the
details of life. There is no recognition of social life, because the
pioneer economy is lonely and individual. The whole process of religion
consists in "coming through": in other words, the procuring of an
individual and highly personal experience of emotion.
"Beneath the surface of life in these people so conservative, and so
indifferent to change as it is, there runs a strain of intense
emotionalism. When storms disturb the calm exterior, the mad waves lash
and beat and roar. And in religion this is most apparent. With them
emotionalism and religion are almost interchangeable quantities,--if
they are not identical.[3]
"It is in the revival service that you see the heart of the stolid
mountain man unmasked. The local mountain preachers know this fact well
and use it with great effect. A word must be said about these men who
work all through the week alongside of their fellows and preach to them
on Sunday. In some places there is a custom of holding service on
Saturday and Sunday. These men have generally 'come through'--a term
used to describe the process beginning with 'mourning' and continuing
through repenting and being saved. And generally they are men of
personality. They have a certain power with men, anyway, and they are
keen to see the effect of things on their audiences. Some of them have
learned to read the Bible after they have been converted. It is not so
much what they say that counts. If people looked for that they would go
away unfilled. But they have another thing in mind. They want to feel
right. They go to church occasionally during revival drought, but always
during revival plenty. They go to get 'revived up.' The preacher who has
the best voice is the best preacher. He sways his audience. The more
ignorant he is, the better, for then the Spirit of God is not hindered
by the wisdom of man. The spirit comes upon him when he enters the
pulpit. He speaks through him to the waiting congregation. Of course
they do not know what he is saying for the man makes too much noise. But
they begin to feel that this is indeed the place where religion can be
found and where it is being distributed among the people.
"Generally revivals occur as they have always done, about three times a
year. At these services the method requires that exhorters should be
present and perform. Several do so at the same time. The confusion is
great but the people breathe an atmosphere that begins to infect them.
Sooner or later weeping women are in the arms of some others' husbands
begging them to come to the mourning bench. Young girls single out the
boys that they like best and affectionately implore them to begin the
Christian life. All the time the choir is singing a swinging revival
hymn; the preacher is standing over his audience shouting 'Get busy,
sinners,' and two or three boys are scurrying back and forth carrying
water to the thirsty ones, while little groups of the faithful are
hovering over a penitent, smothering sinner, trying to 'pull her
through.' During this kind of a meeting which I attended at one time a
woman 'got happy' and went around slapping everyone she could get her
hand on, and skipping like a schoolgirl."
The pioneer church has not fully passed away. Its one doctrine and its
one method have still a place in the more elaborate life of the modern
church. Like the rum jug which is preserved for medicinal purposes, the
revival has a use in the pathology of modern church life. The doctrine
of personal salvation which is of chief concern, in the ministry to the
adolescent population[4] of the modern church, is just as vital as ever;
though it is not the only doctrine of the church of the husbandman,
which has come in the country.
A relic of the pioneer days is the custom known as the "Group System."
By this a preacher comes to a church once a month, or twice, and
preaches a sermon, returning promptly to his distant place of residence.
The early settlers of this country who originated this system were
lonely and individualized. They believed that religion consisted in a
mere message of salvation, so that all they required was to hear from a
preacher once in a while.
But the districts in which the "Group System" is used have grown beyond
this religious satisfaction and the "Group System" no longer renders
adequate religious service. Religion has become a greater ministry than
can be rendered in the form of a message, however well preached.
Like all outworn customs, this one breeds abuses as it grows older. Its
value having passed away, it has forms of offensiveness. In sections of
Missouri where the farmers are rich they say with contempt, "None of the
ministers lives in the country." The "Group System," in a territory of
Missouri comprising forty-one churches, organizes its forces as follows:
these forty-one churches have nine ministers who live in five
communities and go out two miles, ten miles, sometimes thirty miles, in
various directions, for a fractional service to other communities than
those in which they live. Each of the two big towns has more than one
minister and none of the country churches has a pastor. Thus the value
of the family life of the preacher is cancelled. After all this
organization and division of the men into small fractions among the
churches, there are sixteen of these churches which have neither pastor
nor preacher.
This "Group System" can be improved, as is done in Tennessee, by the
shortening of the journeys which must be made by the minister from his
home to his preaching point. Nevertheless, it gives to the country
community only a fraction of a man's time. He can interpret religion in
only three ways; in the sermon, the funeral service and the wedding.
Unfortunately mankind has to do many other things besides getting
married, buried or preached at.
The country community needs a pastor. It is better for the minister who
preaches to the country to live in the country. There are some parts
which cannot support a pastor, but the minister to country churches
should know the daily round of country life. Religion can never be
embodied in a sermon; and when religion comes to be limited to a formal
act it is tinged with suspicion in the eyes of most men. Sermons and
funerals and weddings become to country people the windows by which
religion flies out of the community. Especially among farmers, religion
is a matter of every-day life. What religion the farmer has grows out of
his yearly struggle with the soil and with the elements. His belief in
God is a belief in Providence. His God is the creator of the sun and the
seasons, the wind and the rain. The man who does not with him share
these experiences cannot long interpret them for him in terms of
scripture or of church.
The policy of the newer territories of the church must be to translate
the "Group System" into pastorates. The long range group service should
be transformed into short and compact group ministry; the pastor should
live in the country community and the length of his journey should never
be longer than his horse can drive. A group of churches which are not
more than ten miles apart constitute a country parish. Some few active
ministers are able to make thirty to forty miles on horseback on a
Sunday, among a scattered people. This is well, but as soon as the
railroad becomes an essential factor in the monthly visit of ministers
to the country, religion passes out of that community.
The service of the country preacher, in other words, is essentially
confined to the country community, and the bounds of the country
community are determined by the length of the team haul or horseback
ride to which that population is accustomed. Within these bounds
religious life and expression are possible. Immersed in his own
community, the life of the minister and of his family attain immediate
religious value. The whole influence of the minister's home, the service
of his wife to the people, which is often greater than his own, and the
development of his children's life, these are all of religious use to
his people.
A recent speaker upon this matter said, "I doubt if even the Lord Jesus
Christ could have saved this world if he had come down to it only once
in two weeks on Saturday and gone back on Monday morning."
The pastor, then, is the type of community builder needed in the
country. The pastor works with a maximum of sincerity, while sincerity
may in preaching be reduced to the lowest terms. He is in constant,
intimate, personal contact. The preacher is dealing with theories and
ideals not always rooted in local experiences. The pastor lives the life
of the people. He is known to them and their lives are known to him. The
preacher may perform his oratorical ministry through knowledge of
populations long since dead and by description of foreign and alien
countries. It is possible to preach acceptably about kingdoms that have
not yet existed. But the work of a pastor is the development of ideals
out of situations. It is his business to inspire the daily life of his
people with high idealism and to construct those aspirations and
imaginations out of the daily work of mankind, which are proper to that
work and essential to that people.
An illustrious example of such ministry is that of John Frederick
Oberlin,[5] whose pastorate at Waldersbach in the Vosges consisted of a
service to his people in their every need, from the building of roads to
the organization and teaching of schools. It would have been impossible
for Oberlin to have served these people through preaching alone. Being a
mature community, indeed old in suffering and in poverty, they needed
the ministry of a pastor, and this service he rendered them in the
immersion of his life with theirs, and the bearing of their burdens,
even the most material and economic burden of the community, upon his
shoulders.
The passing away of pioneer days discredits the ministry of mere
preaching, through increasing variation of communities, families and
individuals. The preacher's message is not widely varied. It is the
interpreting of tradition, gospel and dogma. His sources can all be
neatly arranged on a book shelf. One suspects that the greater the
preacher, the fewer his books. On the contrary, the pastor's work is
necessitated by growing differences of his people. He must be all things
to many different kinds of men. In the country community this intimate
intercourse and varying sympathy take him through a wider range of human
experience than in a more classified community. He must plow with the
plowman, and hunt with the hunter, and converse with the seamstress, be
glad with the wedding company and bear the burden of sorrow in the day
of death. Moreover, nobody outside a country community knows how far a
family can go in the path to poverty and still live. No one knows how
eccentric and peculiar, how reserved and whimsical the life of a
household may be, in the country community, unless he has lived as
neighbor and friend to such a household. The preacher cannot know this.
Not all the experience of the world is written even in the Bible. The
spirit shall "teach us things to come." It is the pastor who learns
these things by his daily observation of the lives of men.
The communities themselves in the country differ widely, even in
conformity to given types, and when all is said by the general student,
the pastor has the knowledge of his own community. It belongs peculiarly
to him. No one else can ever know it and there are no two communities
alike. In the intense localism of a community, its religious history is
hidden away and its future is involved. The man who shall touch the
springs of the community's life must know these local conditions with
the intimate detail which only he commands who daily goes up and down
its paths. This man is the pastor. Except the country physician, no
other living man is such an observer as he.
The end of the pioneer days means, therefore, to religious people, the
establishment of the pastorate. The religious leader for the pioneer was
the preacher, but the community which clings to preaching as a
satisfactory and final religious ministry is retrograde. In this
retarding of religious progress is the secret of the decline of many
communities. The great work of ministering to them is in supplanting the
preacher, who renders but a fractional service to the people, by a
pastor whose preaching is an announcement of the varied ministry in
which he serves as the cure of souls.
The pioneer days are gone. Only in the Southern Appalachian region are
there arrested communities in which, in our time, the ways of our
American ancestors are seen. The community builder cannot change the
type of his people. He can only wait for the change, and enable his
people to conform to the new type. For this process new industries, new
ways of getting a living are necessary. The teacher or pastor can do
something to guide his people in the selection of constructive instead
of destructive industry.
In East Tennessee and in the mountain counties of North Carolina
lumbering industries are for the time being employing the people. The
result will be a deeper impoverishment; for the timber is the people's
greatest source of actual and potential wealth. The leaders of the
mountain people should teach reforestation with a view to maintaining
the people's future wealth.
In a mountain county of Kentucky a minister seeing that his people
needed a new economic life, before they could receive the religious life
of the new type, organized an annual county fair. To this he brought,
with the help of outside friends, a breed of hogs better than his
mountain people knew. He cultivated competition in local industries,
weaving and cooking; and started his people on the path of economic
success of a new type.
In conclusion, the pioneer was individualistic and emotional. These
traits were caused by his economic experience. While that experience
lasted, he could be made no other sort of man than this. To this type
his home and his business life and his church conformed. Within these
characteristics the efficiency of his social life was to be found.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: "The Agrarian Changes in the Middle West," by J. B. Ross,
in American Journal of Economics, December, 1910.]
[Footnote 2: Rev. Norman C. Schenck.]
[Footnote 3: Rev. Norman C. Schenck.]
[Footnote 4: "Youth," by G. Stanley Hall.]
[Footnote 5: Story of John Frederick Oberlin by Augustus Field Beard,
1909.]
II
THE LAND FARMER
I shall use the term land farmer to describe the man who tilled the soil
in all parts of the country after pioneer days. He is usually called
simply the farmer. This is the type with which we are most familiar in
our present day literature and in dramatic representations of the
country. The land farmer, or farmer, is the typical countryman who in
the Middle West about 1835 succeeded the pioneer, and about 1890 was
followed by the exploiter of the land.
In the Eastern States pioneer days ended before 1835. The land farmer
was the prevailing type throughout New England, New York, New Jersey and
Pennsylvania as early as 1800. In the South the contemporary of the land
farmer was the planter or slave holder. The modified type in the South
was due to an economic difference. The labor problem was solved in the
South by chattel slavery; in the North by the wage system. It is true
that throughout much of the South the small farmer held his own. These
men conformed to the type of the land farmer. But in the South they did
not dominate social and political life as the slave holder did. In the
Eastern States the whole social economy was, until a generation after
the Civil War, dominated by the land farmer.
The characteristics of the land farmer are: first, his cultivation of
the first values of the land. His order of life is characterized by
initial utility. He lived in a time of plenty. The abundance of nature,
which was to the pioneer a detriment, was to the land farmer a source of
wealth. He tilled the soil and he cut the timber, he explored the earth
for mines, seeking everywhere the first values of a virgin land. As
these first values were exhausted, he moved on to new territories. All
his ideas of social life were those of initial utility. The rich man was
the standard and the admired citizen. The policies of government were
dominated by the ideas of a land holding people. Individualism proceeded
on radiating lines from any given center. The development of personality
is the clue to the history of that period.
The second characteristic of the land farmer was his development of the
family group. He differed from the pioneer, whose life was lonely and
individual, in the perfection of group life in his period. He differs
from the exploiter who succeeds him in the country today in the fact
that exploitation has dissolved the family group. The experience of the
land farmer compacted and perfected the household group in the country.
The beginnings of this group life were in the pioneer period, but there
was not peace in which the family could develop nor were there
resources by which it could be endowed. The classic period of American
home life is that of the land farmer. The typical American home, as it
lives in sentiment, in literature and in idealism, is the home of the
land farmer.
Third, the land farmer owned his home. He built upon his farm a
homestead which in most cases represented his ideal of domestic and
family comfort. He built for permanence. So far as his means permitted
he provided for his children and for generations of descendants after
them. He consecrated the soil to his people and to his name by setting
apart a graveyard on his own land, and there he buried his dead.
Fourth, the land farmer had neighbors. His well-developed family group
would not have been possible without other groups in the same community
and the independence of the family group was relative, being perfected
by imitation and economic competition. The land-farmer type came to
maturity only when the whole of the land was possessed, when on every
side the family group was confronted with other family groups, and
neighborliness became universal. The family group is dependent through
intermarriage and relationship upon other groups in the community.
Family relationships thus came in the land-farmer communities to be very
general. Some rough and crude forms of economic co-operation also grew
up in this period, as modifications of the competition on which the
land-farmer type is based.
"The farmer type produced a definite social life," says Prof. Ross. "The
second period, extending from 1835 to 1890, had as its chief objective
the enrichment of the group life."
Fifth, the land farmer competed, by group conflict, with his neighbors.
Property was regarded by the land farmer as a family possession.
Competition was between group and group, between household and
household. The moral strength as well as the moral deficiencies of this
type of man flow from this competition. He considered himself
essentially bounden to the members of his own group by obligations and
free from moral obligations to others. The son received no wages from
his father for work on the farm and the daughter did not dream of pay or
of an allowance for her labor in the house. The land farmer conceived of
his estate as belonging to his family group and embodied in himself.
Therefore he had no wage obligations to son or daughter and he felt
himself obliged so to distribute his property as to care for all the
members of his household. This economic competition compacted the family
group and formed the basis for the social economy of the country
community. The land farmer had no ideal of community prosperity. His
thought for generations has been to make his own farm prosperous, to
raise some crop that others shall not raise, to have a harvest that
other men have not and to find a market which other men have not
discovered, by which he and his farm and his group may prosper. It is
hard to convince the land farmer, because of his immersion in this group
conflict, that the farmer's prosperity is dependent upon the prosperity
of other groups in the community.
The presence of the small group is the sign of normal social life. The
group is not complete in itself, but is a unit in human association. So
that the farmer economy had its social life and its own type of
communities. The economy of the farmer period represents the ideals born
in the pioneer nation. The community of the farmer is the destination of
the life of the pioneer. The farmer still practises a variety of
occupations. His tillage of the soil and his household economy are the
most conservative in all American population. He uses modern machinery
in the fields, but to a great degree his wife uses the old mechanisms in
the kitchen and in the household. The laborers employed on the farm are
received into the farmer's family under conditions of social equality.
The man who is this year a laborer may in a decade be a farmer. The
dignifying of personality with land ownership has been such a general
social experience in the country that every individual is thought of in
the farmer period as a potential landowner.
The institutions of the rural community of the land-farmer type are the
country store, the rural school, and the church. The country store deals
in general merchandise and is a natural outgrowth of the stores of the
pioneer period in which barter constituted the whole of the commerce of
the community. In the pioneer store but a few commodities were imported
from the outer world. The greater part of the merchandise was made in
the community and distributed in the store. But the farmer's rural
economy is the dawning of the world economy and the general store in the
farming community becomes an economic institution requiring great
ability and centering in itself the forces of general as well as local
economics.
The general storekeeper of this type in the country is at once a
business man, a money lender, an employer of labor and the manager of
the social center. He sells goods at a price so low as to maintain his
local trade against outside competition. He loans money on mortgages
throughout the community, and sells goods on credit. Judgment of men and
of properties is so essential to his business that if he can not
judiciously loan and give credit he cannot maintain a country store.
Around his warm stove in the winter and at his door in summer gather the
men of the community for discussion of politics, religion and social
affairs. In addition to all else, he has been usually the postmaster of
the community.
The one-room rural school which is the prevailing type throughout the
country is a product of the land-farmer period. Its prevalence shows
that we are still in land-farmer conditions: and the criticism to which
it is now subjected indicates that we are conscious of a new epoch in
rural life.
It fits well into the life of the land farmer because it gives obviously
a mere hint of learning. It has been the boast of its advocates that it
taught only the "three Rs." Its training for life is rudimentary only:
it gives but an alphabet. The land farmer expected to live in his group.
Secure in his own acres and believing himself "as good as anybody," he
relied for his son and daughter not upon trained skill, but upon native
abilities, sterling character, independence and industry. Of all these
the household, not the school, is the source. So that the one-room
country school was satisfactory to those who created it.
In another chapter the common schools are more fully discussed. Here it
may be said only that the creation of such a system was an honor to any
people. The farmers who out of a splendid idealism placed a schoolhouse
at every cross roads, on every hilltop and in every mountain valley,
exact a tribute of praise from their successors. The unit of measurement
of the school district, on which this system was based, was the day's
journey of a child six years of age. Two miles must be its longest
radius. The generation who spanned this continent with the measure of an
infant's pace, mapped the land into districts, erected houses at the
centers, and employed teachers as the masters of learning for these
little states, were men of statesmanlike power. The country school is a
nobler monument of the land farmer than anything else he has done.
The rural "academy" was the most influential school of the land farmer's
time. Situated at the center of leading communities, in New England,
Pennsylvania and the older Eastern States, it was often under the
control or the influence of the parish minister. It generally exerted a
great influence for the building of the church and the community. Its
teachers were men of scholarly ideals. Its students were from the
locality, being selected by ambition for learning, and by their ability
to pay the tuition.
The development of the high schools has generally resulted in the
abandonment of the academies. A few have survived and have adapted
themselves to new times. But it is to be doubted whether the common
schools have so far done as much for building and for organizing country
communities, for providing local leadership, for building churches, as
did the rural academies of New England, Pennsylvania and other Eastern
States.
The farmer's church is the classic American type of church at its best.
The farming economy succeeded to the pioneer economy without serious
break. The troubles of the country church have their beginnings in the
period of the exploiter which is to follow, but the farmer developed the
church of the pioneer with sympathy and consistency. The church of the
farmer still values personal salvation above all. The revival methods
and the simplicity of doctrine have remained, but the farmer has added
typical methods of his own.
The effect of this individualism is exhibited in the multiplication of
churches among farmers. So long as it is admitted that the church is for
personal salvation, it does not need to be a social institution. A small
group is as effective as a large one for securing salvation for
individuals. Two churches or three may as well serve a community as one,
if personal salvation be the service rendered. The gospel is for the
farmer good tidings,--not a call to social service. The result of the
farmer period has been, therefore, the multiplication of competitive
country churches. An instance of this competitive condition is: the
community in Kansas in which among four hundred people resident in a
field, there are seven churches, each of them attempting to maintain a
resident pastor. In Centre County, Pa., in a radius of four miles from a
given point, there are twenty-four country churches. In the same
territory within a radius of three miles are sixteen of these country
churches. This condition is satisfactory to the ideals of the farmer. If
the farmer type were permanent these churches might serve permanently
for the ministry of personal salvation. They are well attended by devout
and religious-minded people. Their condemnation is not in the farmer
economy but in the inevitable coming of the exploiter and the husbandman
with their different experience and different type of mind.