Many of the older churches had land, ten or twenty or forty acres, which
the minister was expected to till, and from it to secure a part of his
living. A church at Cranberry, N. J., had a farm of one hundred acres
until the close of the nineteenth century. But with the coming of the
exploiter and the husbandman the minister ceases to be an agriculturist.
Like unto the tillage of the soil by the minister was the "donation" to
the minister, of vegetables, corn, honey and other farm products. At one
time this filled a large place in the supply of the minister's living.
In various communities the custom has remained with fine tenacity in the
presentation to the minister of portions of farm produce throughout the
year. But the portions so given are fewer, as years pass, and the total
quantity small. The donation of vegetables and farm produce has survived
in but a few places. The modes of life which succeeded to the farmer
economy are dependent on cash for the distribution of values, and the
"donation," if it remain at all, is a gift of money. Frequently the
"donation" has survived as a social gathering, being perpetuated in one
of its functions only, its earlier purposes and its essential form being
forgotten.
The church of the land farmer corresponded by logical social causation
to the social economy of this type. It was seated with family pews
generally rented by the family group and sometimes owned in fee. In the
South the slave-holding churches, which have all passed away, had
galleries for the slaves, who worshipped thus under the same roof with
their masters. The preaching of this period was directed to the
development of group life. Its ethical standards were those of the
household group, in which private property in land, domestic morality,
filial and domestic experiences furnished the stimuli.
The land-farmer's church had some organizations to correspond to the
differences in social life. The presence of the children in the family
group is represented in the Sunday schools and parochial schools built
during this period. The schools are in many cases highly organized, with
separate recognition of infancy, adolescence and middle life. In
Protestant churches the particular concerns of women and the religious
service rendered by them take form in women's societies in the churches,
mostly charitable and missionary.
Finally, at the close of the land-farmer period, about 1890, there
sprang up the young people's societies, which in the ten closing years
of the land-farmer period reached a membership of hundreds of thousands
among the Protestant churches. These societies of young people
were organized in the churches to correspond to the growing
self-consciousness among adolescent members of the land-farmer's
household. The young men and women in the maturing of the family group
came to have a life of their own. As frequently happens, the family
group reached its highest development and perfection just before it was
to pass away.
The church of the land-farmer is the typical Protestant church of the
United States. So influential has the farmer been in national life that
organized religion has idealized his type of church. It has been
transported to villages and towns. It has become the type of church most
frequent in the cities.
Nearly all the Protestant churches in New York City are land-farmer
churches; "and that," says a noted city pastor, "is what ails them."[6]
This church centers its activities in preaching, rents or assigns its
pews to families, and organizes societies for the various factors of the
family group. It has Sunday schools, women's, men's and young people's
societies, with only one minister to supervise them all.
The transformation of this type of church, so deeply rooted in the
idealism of the whole people, into a church better suited to city,
factory, town and mining settlement, has been the problem for Protestant
bodies to solve in the past twenty years. The beginning of this
transformation, it is striking to observe, came at the end of the
land-farmer period, about 1890.
The land-farmer, then, whose period according to Prof. Ross, extended
from 1835 to 1890 in the Middle West, is the best known agricultural
type. He is the typical countryman as the countryman is imagined in the
cities and recorded in our literature. It has been the American hope
that he should be the land-owner of the days to come. In East Tennessee
the farmer is still the type of landowner in country communities. In
some portions of Michigan and Minnesota the farmer type gives character
to the whole population, but generally throughout the country the
processes described by Prof. Ross have undermined the integrity of the
farmer type and broken his hold upon leadership of the country
population. Within the last two decades, since 1890, the farmer has been
gradually discouraged and has realized that his economy is not suited to
survive. The most representative farming communities today are those of
Scotch or Scotch-Irish people, whose instinctive tenacity, their
"clannishness," has perpetuated longer than in other instances the rural
economy and the country community.
In using the term land-farmer I am aware of its close resemblance to the
term exploiter. The word itself points to exploitation of land. The land
farmer has used the raw materials of the country. He has tilled the soil
until its fertility was exhausted and then moved on to the newer regions
of the West, again to farm and to exploit the virgin riches of a
plenteous land. The planter in the South, possessing frequently more
than a thousand acres, was accustomed to till a portion of one hundred,
two hundred or four hundred acres, until its fertility had been
exhausted. Then he moved his slaves to another section, cleared the land
and cultivated it until its power to produce had also been exhausted.
The difference between land-farming and exploitation is the absence of
speculation in land in the former period.
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote 6: Rev. Charles Stelzle.]
III
THE EXPLOITER
The third type in American agriculture is the exploiter. Between the
farmer and the husbandman there is an economic revolution. In fact the
exploiter himself is a transition type between the farmer and the
husbandman. "The fundamental problem in American economics always has
been that of the distribution of land," says Prof. Ross. The exploiter
is, I presume, a temporary economic type, created in the period of
re-distribution of land. The characteristic of the exploiter is his
commercial valuation of all things. He is the man who sees only the
value of money.
It was natural that with the maturing of an American population, the
exploitation of the natural resources should come. We have exploited the
forest, removing the timber from the hills and making out of its vast
resources a few fortunes. We wasted in the process nine-tenths for every
one-tenth of wealth accumulated by the exploiter. We have exploited the
coal and iron and other minerals. The exploitation of the oil deposits
and natural gas reservoirs has been a national experience and a national
scandal. The tendency to exploit every opportunity for private wealth
has characterized the past two decades.[7]
There are those who exploit the child vitality of the families of
working people, and the States have put legal checks in the way of child
labor. The exploitation of the labor of women has gone so far as to
threaten the vitality of the generation to be born, and laws have been
passed which forbid the employment of women except within limits. The
ethical discussion of the past decade is largely a keen analysis of the
methods of exploitation of resources, of men and of communities, and an
attempt to fix the bounds of the exploitation of values for private
wealth.
There are those who exploit the farm. "Farms which from the original
entry until 1890 had been owned by the same family, or which had changed
owners but once or twice, and whose owners were proud to assert that
their broad acres had never been encumbered with mortgages, since 1890
have been sold, in some instances as often as ten times, in more
numerous instances four or five times, and a large part of the purchase
price is secured by encumbering the estates!"[8]
Agriculture, especially of the Middle West, is affected in all its parts
by the exploitation of land. To a traveller from the Eastern States, the
selling and re-selling of farm land, without fertilization or
improvement by any of the successive owners, is a source of amazement.
"The new lands opened under the Homestead act of half a century ago were
often exploited for temporary profit by soil robbers who were experts of
their kind. Owing to such farm management, the yield of the acre in the
United States gradually decreased. Very little intensive farming was
done."[9]
The commercial exploitation of land dissolves every permanent factor in
the farm economy. The country community of the land-farmer type is being
undermined and is crumbling away under the influence of exploitation.
The pioneers were a Westward emigration, pushing Westward the boundaries
of the country at the rate of fifty miles in a decade; but since 1890
emigration has been eastward, and it is made up of farmers who move to
ever cheaper and cheaper lands to the East, the tide of higher prices
coming from the West. Already in central Illinois the values of land
seem to have reached the high water mark. About Galesburg "the Swedes
have got hold of the land and they will not sell." Among the last
recorded sales in this district were some at prices between two hundred
and two hundred fifty dollars per acre.
It is not generally understood that this exploitation of farm lands has
extended over nearly the whole country. Its spread is increasingly
rapid in the last two years. In the Gulf States and the Carolinas and in
Tennessee and Kentucky prices of farm land have increased in the last
five years from twenty-five to one hundred per cent. Even in the most
conservative counties in Pennsylvania the prices of farm land have
increased twenty to twenty-five per cent.
The sign of this exploitation is a rapid increase in the market values
of farm land, due to frequent sale and purchase. This increase is
independent of any increase in essential value to the farmer. The net
income of the farmer may have been increased only five per cent, as in
the State of Indiana, whereas the values of farm land have increased in
the same period more than one hundred per cent. That is, the speculative
increases have been twenty times as much as the agricultural increase.
Along with this change in farm values goes the increase or decrease in
the number of tenant farmers and the shifting of the ownership of land
to farm landlords. In some parts of the country this exploitation has
taken a purely speculative form. In all parts it is speculative in
character, but in some sections of the country the exploiters are
themselves farmers and the process is imposed upon the farmers
themselves by economic causes. This is true of the Illinois and Indiana
lands, which are under the influence of a system of drainage, but there
are other portions of the country in which the process is chiefly
speculative. In some Western States the exploitation of farm land is in
the hands of speculators themselves, doing real estate business purely
as a matter of trade. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute a
process so general as this one to the power exerted by a class of real
estate agents. Its causes are deeper than the commercial process. They
go into the very roots of modern life. This should be clearly
understood, because when frankly realized it compels the adjustment of
social, educational and religious work to the period of exploitation.
The effect of this process is upon all the life of country people. It
has created its own class of men. There was no intention in the mind of
earlier Americans that we should ever have a tenant class in America.
The assumption on which all our ideals are built has been that we would
be a land-owning people, but we are confronted with a tenantry problem
as difficult as any in the world. The process of exploiting land has
added to the social and economic life of the country the farm landlord,
whose influence upon the immediate future of the American country
community, church and school, in all sections will be great, and in many
communities will be dominating.
The exploitation of land has produced the retired farmer. He is a pure
example of the weakness of the exploiter economy. Originally he was a
homesteader, or perhaps a purchaser of cheap land in the early days. He
expected not to remain a farmer, but hoped for removal to the East or
to a college town. The motives which animated him were varied, but among
them none was so prominent as a desire for better education than was
provided for his children in the country community of the farmer type.
So that at forty or fifty years of age he seized an opportunity to sell
his land, as the prices were rising, and retired to the town with a cash
fortune for investment.
Immediately the economic forces to which he had submitted himself made
of him a new type, for the retired farmer in the Middle West is a
characteristic type of the leading towns and cities. Some whole streets
in large centers are peopled with retired farmers. The civic policies of
scores of small municipalities are controlled in a measure by them, so
that journalists, religious leaders, reformers and politicians have very
clear-cut opinions as to the value of the retired farmer.
The analysis of this situation is as follows. While the land which he
sold continued to increase in value, his small fortune began to diminish
in value. The interest on his money has been less every ten years;
whereas he formerly could loan at first for six and sometimes seven per
cent, he cannot loan safely now for more than five or six per cent.
Meantime the prices of all things he has to buy are expressed in
cash,--no longer in kind as on the farm; and these cash prices are
growing. In the past decade they have almost doubled. This means that
he is a poorer man. His money has a diminished purchasing power and he
has a smaller yearly income.
In addition to this, his wants, and the wants of the members of the
family are increased two or three times. They cannot live as they lived
on the farm. They cannot dress as they dressed in the country. The
pressure of these increasing economic wants, demanding to be satisfied
out of a diminished income, with higher prices for the things to be
purchased, keeps the retired farmer a poor man. The result is that the
retired farmer is opposed to every step of progress in the growing town
in which he lives. He opposes every increase of taxation and fights
every assessment. He dreads a subscription list and hates to hear of
contributions. Although an intelligent and pious man, he has come to be
an obstacle to the building of libraries, churches and schools and
opposed to all humane and missionary activities. He is suffering from a
great economic mistake.
Before leaving the exploiter it is to be said he also has his church.
The exploiter has built no community. He has contributed the retired
farmer to the large towns and small cities of the Middle West. It is
natural, therefore, that few exploiter churches are found in the
country. But in the larger centers there are churches whose doctrine and
methods are those of the exploiter. Indeed, at the present time the
exploiter's doctrine in ethics and religion is highly popular. It is
the doctrine of the consecration of wealth.
There are in the larger cities churches whose business is to give;
Sunday after Sunday they hear pleas and consider the cases of college
presidents, superintendents of charities, secretaries of mission boards
and other official solicitors. These churches have systematized the
discipline of giving. Their boards of officers control the appeals that
shall be made to their people. Such churches are highly individualist in
character, and the preacher who ministers in such a church has a
doctrine of individual culture and responsibility.
The exploiter's doctrine of systematic giving has gone into all of the
communities in which prosperous people live. It has become a moral code
for millionaires, and the response to it is annually measured in the
great gifts of men of large means to institutions which exist for the
use of all mankind.
But not all the farm exploiters retired from the farm. The stronger and
more successful have become absentee landlords. These men have invested
their cash in farm lands. Distrusting the investments of the city
market, and fearing Wall Street, they have purchased increased acreage
in the country, and when the local market was exhausted, they have
invested in the Southwest and the far West, buying ever more and more
land. They have proven that "It is possible to maintain a vicious
economic method on a rising market."[10]
These landlords have leased their land in accordance with mere
expediency. No plans have been made in the American rural economy for a
tenantry. The lease, therefore, throughout the United States generally
is for only one year. This gives to the landlord the greatest freedom,
and to the tenant the least responsibility. Neither is willing to enter
into a contract by which the land itself can be benefitted. The landlord
is looking for the increase of the values of land, and is ever mindful
of a possible buyer. Moreover, he is watchful of the market for the crop
and of the size of the crop, so that he desires to be free at the end of
the year to make other arrangements.
The tenant on his part is somewhat eager to do as he pleases for a year.
He expects to be himself an owner, and he does not expect to remain
permanently as a tenant on that farm. He reckons that he can get a good
deal out of the land in the year, and is unwilling to bind himself for a
long period. "The American system of farm tenantry is the worst of which
I have knowledge in any country."[11]
It is true that in some parts of the country leases of three and five
years are granted to tenants by the landlords. At Penn Yan, New York, a
reliable class of Danes secure such leases from the owners. I am aware,
also, that in Delaware, in an old section dependent upon fertilization
for its crops, where the land is in the hands of a few representatives
of the old farmer type who have held it for generations, that the
tillage of the soil shows specialization. The landlord and the tenant
co-operate. The leases, while they are for but a year, specify how the
land shall be tilled, how fertilized. They require the rotation of crops
and the keeping of a certain number of cattle by the tenants. The
landlord personally oversees the tillage of several farms. This seems
the beginning of husbandry, instead of exploitation of the land.
Another instance of the landlord who is more than a mere exploiter is
that of David Rankin, recently deceased. In the last years of his life
Mr. Rankin owned about thirty thousand acres of land in Missouri. It was
said in 1910 that he had seventeen thousand acres of corn. He had a
genius for estimating the values of land, the expensiveness of drainage,
and the possibilities of the market. He was an expert buyer of cattle,
and a master of the problems entering into progressive farming on a
large scale.
From his vast acreage Mr. Rankin sold not one bushel of corn. All his
crops "went off on four legs." "He drove his corn to market," as they
say in the Middle West. He bought cattle from the ranches, for none were
bred on his own land. He fattened them for the market, translating corn
into beef and he was well aware of the values of pork in the economy of
such a farm. Nothing went to waste. According to the formula in
Nebraska, "For every cow keep a sow, that's the how." Mr. Rankin made
large profits from his cattle and hogs.
It is true that he cared nothing for the community or its institutions.
On his wide acres family life was replaced by boarding-houses. Schools
and churches were closed, and many farmhouses built by the homesteaders
rotted down to their foundations. But David Rankin was a husbandman, if
not a humanist. His tillage of the soil was successful in that it
maintained the fertility of the soil, that it produced large quantities
of food for the consumer, and that it was profitable.
The following is a description of community life under the influence of
such great landlords, by a Western observer:--
"The city of Casselton, North Dakota, was originally started about the
year 1879. Thirty years ago the first settlers came to this great
prairie region from the New England and Central States. It was shortly
before this or about this time that the Northern Pacific Railroad was
built across this western prairie. The government gave to the road every
other section of land on each side of the railroad for thirty miles as a
bonus. That land was sold in the early days by the railroad to
purchasers for fifty cents an acre. It was some of the finest farming
land in the wide world. Out of those sales grew some of the immense
farms that have been so famous over the country and while they are great
business concerns managed with fine business ability, yet they are not
much of a help in the settling of the country. Here within one mile of
Casselton is the famous Dalrymple farm of twenty-eight thousand acres.
This farm employs during the busy season what men it needs from the
drifting classes and puts no families on its broad acres. These men are
here a short season in the summer, then are gone. They are rushed with
work for that season, Sundays as well as other days from early morning
to late at night, making it almost impossible to touch their religious
life or even to count them a part of the community life.
"Another farm is the Chaffee farm of thirty-five thousand acres. Mr.
Chaffee is a thorough business man but is a fine Christian and places a
good family on each section of land. He allows no Sunday work. Has a
little city kept up in beautiful condition in the center of his land
where he lives with his clerks and immediate helpers. Here they have a
neat little Congregational church and support their own minister. His
fine influence is felt all over the country. The partners in this farm
also have a land and loan corporation and also a large flour mill in
Casselton which employs about twenty-eight men, running day and night
during the busy season.
"There are many farms smaller, from one thousand acres and up. Many also
of a quarter section. Casselton was built simply as a center for this
beautiful and rich farming region. It is in the center of a strip six
miles long and twenty-five miles wide which is said to be one of the
finest sections in the land. There are other towns sprung up in the same
section also. Through the past thirty years farmers have retired, well
to do, and moved into the city. Here are now maintained excellent
schools."
In conclusion: the exploitation of farm lands is a process with which
the church in the country cannot deal by persuasion. It is an economic
condition. They who are engaged in this process or are concerned in its
effects are in so far immune to the preacher who ignores or who does not
understand these economic conditions. Their action is conditioned by
their status. They will infallibly act with relation to the church in
accordance with the motives which arise out of their condition. That is,
they will act as tenant farmers, as retired farmers or as absentee
landlords. They must be treated on these terms. Their whole relation to
organized religion will be that of the condition in which they live and
by which they get their daily bread. This is a matter independent of
personal goodness. The church is dependent not on personal good
influences, but upon the response which a man makes in accordance with
his economic and social character.