PRESENT CONDITIONS
Up to the Civil War and for some years after, our people were almost
wholly agricultural. National activity contented itself with
settling and developing the vast areas of the public lands, whose
virgin richness cried aloud in the wilderness for men.
The policy of the government, framed to stimulate rapid occupation
of the public lands, had attracted hordes of settlers over the
mountains from the older states, and immigration flowed in a steady
stream into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi.
A system had grown up in the South almost patriarchal, based upon
cultivation by slave labor of enormous areas devoted exclusively to
cotton. In the North, New England had developed some few centers of
industry, drawing their support from the manufacture of the great
Southern staple. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were growing as
outlets for foreign commerce, but as yet manufacturing flourished
but feebly and in few localities.
Such manufacturing and commercial enterprises as existed had been
laboriously built up by long years of honest working. The free lands
of the government, by giving laborers an alternative, kept up wages,
forcing employers to bid against each other for labor; and monopoly
thus being checked, individual equality was possible.
The mineral resources of Pennsylvania and Ohio were all but
unsuspected, and the calm of a people devoted to the peaceful
pursuits of agriculture rested over the country.
Railroads were few and inefficient: telegraph lines but in their
infancy. Intercourse among the people, outside of a narrow fringe on
the Atlantic coast, was cumbersome, and impeded by many obstacles.
Primitive conditions everywhere prevailed, and communities brooded
in silence, growing stragglingly in sluggish indifference, content
with coarse food and coarser living.
Such, in general, were the conditions up to 1861. Then came the
storm of shot and shell, the rain of blood, the elemental rage of
passion called the Civil War. There was a total upset of business.
Such periods of hard times as had occurred prior to that time had
been caused by the tinkering of untrained minds with the money
system or by land speculation, and not by lack of access to the
riches of nature. After four years our people awoke, as from a
nightmare, to find the old life swept away forever. In the South,
the Confederates, bitter and sullen, groping amid the ruins of their
institutions, sought to find some substitute for the agricultural
despotism exercised for generations by their slaveholding families.
In the East, the first families of the Revolution, secure in their
preeminence, assumed again the manufacturing-banking-social
prestige. The far West was still almost unknown, and remained in
possession of the buffalo and the Indian. Settlers poured, in
increasing numbers on to the unappropriated lands still left in the
states of the central West, and the center of political power
shifted rapidly to this fertile region.
Already men of keen insight foresaw a time when oil, timber, coal,
and iron must become the stay of a vastly expanding industrial
system, and bent their energies to secure the chief sources of
supply. From the nature of their work the men who built railways
first became aware of the riches of nature, and aided by an enormous
public sympathy with their efforts, monopolized all the natural
opportunities of value. Coupled with industrial development was the
gradual appropriation of the land. The time soon arrived when the
late comers either stayed in the manufacturing centers at the
railways terminals or were pushed farther and farther away from the
centers. As the landowning families multiplied, the young men were
confined to the same choice. Forced off the land, the tendency has
been to crowd the brainiest blood of America into the cities. In
addition, the competition of the new Western lands, brought into use
by railway development, has exiled the youth of New England, who
found in their rocky acres no incentive to toil. They, too, joined
the ever-increasing flow to the cities, and entered into the savage
competition of our great towns.
In our time the pendulum has swung to its extreme. At every
depression of business, armies of the unemployed perish in sight of
the land they abandoned in the hope of a brighter future. Their
children have forgotten the traditions of the soil, and the energies
of our people must now be concentrated to reverse the aimless tide
of human sufferers, which under stress continues to flow city-ward,
and to send it to repeople the silent places whence it came. The
fight will not be easily won. Changes in the national land policy
are imperative. To give one generation privileges which enslave all
who succeed it, is intolerable and will not be permanently endured.
It is easy to determine upon a policy in the quiet of the study;
different is the problem of applying a comprehensive scheme to
repeople the idle land. In the first place, where is the idle land?
In all parts of our country it exists in abundance. Almost every
state in the Union has lands which either have never been alienated,
or which have reverted to the state through nonpayment of taxes. In
the East, particularly, the competition of Western lands, aided by
discriminating freight rates, now so notorious, has resulted in the
abandonment to the mortgagee of vast areas in New York, Connecticut,
New Hampshire, Maine, and to some extent in New Jersey. These are
now largely resold.
Declining fertility and exorbitant and oppressive transportation
charges have helped to keep these lands out of use, and some still
lie idle and neglected, to excite the wonder of the social and
economic student. To use the abandoned lands of the East, equal
rates on agricultural products is a basic necessity.
The first step, now well under way, is railroad control by the
Government. Equal access to transportation is as essential as equal
access to land, for transportation is indeed an attribute of land.
Extending the inquiry westward, the coal and oil areas of
Pennsylvania and Ohio are all controlled by a few hands. The
original fertility of the farming areas of these states, together
with the fact that they have been producing for only about a
century, has enabled them to hold their own until recently, but now
only the best located tracts are in maximum production, and this can
be maintained only by the most advanced agricultural science. In
spite of greater advantages, the crowded cities and deserted country
districts are beginning to repeat in the fertile alluvial valleys of
the interior, the tragic story of the East.
In the Mississippi valley, conditions seem better. Values of farming
lands are increasing rapidly; the farms are rich and growing richer;
food products are cheap and abundant; certain staples are produced
in enormous quantities and sent to feed the cities of the East and
the industrial population of Europe. The railroads transport these
products nearly one thousand miles for the same prices as they
charge in the East for transporting them one hundred miles. Wealth,
activity, and political power concentrate at the inlet and outlet of
the railway funnel, leaving vast areas of unused and unusable land
between the terminals. Access to markets determines value. That is
why the favored lands of Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, and
Wisconsin, one to two thousand miles from market, have risen in
value to as high as three hundred dollars per acre, and the lands of
New England, New York, and New Jersey go begging at twenty to sixty
dollars per acre, unless they lie within the artificial prosperity
of the cities.
Farther west in the irrigated regions of Colorado and Utah,
restricted areas are held for special fruit crops, at prices ranging
from three hundred to two thousand dollars and up, per acre. But
here, again, monopoly, now a monopoly of natural opportunity, is a
factor in creating prices; on this, however, the vast irrigation
projects of the government, bringing into use larger and larger
areas of these favored lands, were expected to exercise a check. Up
to 1918 little has been sold. Their reclamation cost too much.
The willingness of the Southern planters to sell their lands, and so
to release them for intensive cultivation, has partly turned the
tide of immigration from the Eastern ports to the South, and the
market garden system is reaching increasing areas. The development
of factories to make cotton fabrics and to utilize the formerly
wasted cotton seed by turning it into meal for cattle and other
animals, as well as into the various food products, such as
cotton-seed oil, cottolene, etc., has stimulated the use of the
waste land around these budding factory centers, thus tending to
encourage intensive use of small, well-located tracts.
With a climate much milder and more equable than that of the
Northern states, with a potential fertility of soil, equally great
under proper management, the South is making greater strides than
any other part of the country.
The foregoing shows that in every section opportunities of getting
the people to the land exist. Where a man should go is determined by
a variety of things. If he be a newly arrived immigrant used to land
work in Southern Europe, he would find his best chance in the South;
if a German or Russian, or from any of the Northern European
countries, he would find the beet-sugar sections of Michigan
Colorado, or California more to his liking; if American born,
without much knowledge of out-door work, and feeling the need of
social life, the cheap farms of New York, New Jersey, and New
England would probably be most attractive.
Many persons write me that I say it is necessary to get good land
near population or with cheap and assured transportation
facilities--and that it must not cost more than it is worth for
gardening. "I find," they say, "that such acres are held as 'lots'
at wildly speculative prices" and they ask "Where can I find such
land?" But this is a book on agricultural use of land. Why land
costs too much and where the remedy lies are other questions, dealt
with in my "Things as They Are."
However, probably the best chances now for intensive cultivation are
in New Jersey, in the backwoods of the Middle states now made
accessible by cheap autos--and in the South.
What can be undertaken with good prospects of success will be
outlined in the following chapters.