GETTING TOGETHER
For two winters we had met together and amused ourselves together.
That was what counted--counted even more than the work we had done
together. Perhaps you wouldn’t think that this social intercourse and
the establishment of this common pioneer background was of any great
importance, but if you had been one of us you would surely have felt
its importance. It made us one big family as nothing else in the world
could have done. Church societies build up as many barriers as they
break down; so, too, do fraternal and political societies. But here we
went back to a meeting ground which kept us shoulder to shoulder with
one another and with our common past. Men and women can be entertained
together when nothing else is possible.
Then again, I don’t suppose city folks know what a New England winter
means to a New England farmer. Winter doesn’t mean much in the city
except a complication with coal bills. Routine work goes on in the
same routine way and the amusement of the beaches is shifted to the
amusement of the theaters. But in the country Nature shuts up shop and
there is a complete change of work and way of living. It’s a period of
exile for many and a period of loafing. Men and women are shut up with
themselves, or at best with their own. Six months of this isn’t good
for anyone. Every old spite and grudge and grouch fattens and grows
strong. Men get surly and women get cranky. Men eat too much and women
cook too much. If a man hasn’t any pet grievance of his own he has
plenty supplied him by the press and magazines. Farmers read too much
of murders and sudden death, of corruption in business and politics and
society. They have too much time to think over that stuff after they’ve
read it and they don’t exercise enough to work it off. City folk stand
it because they read and forget and don’t take it seriously. But I
tell you some magazine publishers have something to answer for in the
picture of city life they have drawn for country people whether true or
not. As I’ve heard Hadley say, “’Pears to me like everything’s rotten
to-day.” It makes men careless about being rotten themselves when they
think all the rest of the world is.
The value of our meetings didn’t end with the meetings themselves.
People who had been born and brought up together met in true neighborly
fashion for the first time through the Pioneer Club. This was because
we furnished them a common interest. This led to more every-day
intercourse that winter--to neighborhood calls and neighborhood
parties. Ruth helped this along wonderfully. She entertained a good
deal herself and helped others entertain, but I tell you she had her
own ideas how this should be done. She wouldn’t have any fuss and
feathers, such as we had experienced in the suburbs. People didn’t
have to dress up in their best bibs and tuckers to call on her, and
there was neither bridge nor cakes nor teas nor ices. People dropped in
just as they were and brought their sewing with them. For the younger
people she devised the Miles Standish play with such materials as she
had at hand. Then there were charades and old-fashioned games and what
not--everything simple, everything inexpensive, everybody friendly and
at ease. She kept the women, both young and old, astir all winter
long and gave them something else to think about besides the next
day’s cooking, washing or mending. She even helped them simplify these
necessary duties and taught them a more wholesome standard of living.
From morning till night she was a teacher, but no one except myself
realized this. She set everyone an example in her house and astonished
them with the ease with which she did her own work and cared for three
children without wearing herself out. They never found her too busy to
stop for a moment and never discovered her with either a headache or
a lame back. Over and over I’ve heard her say to them, “Housekeeping
is only a play game.” Then she would laugh until you couldn’t help
believing that it really was. And to her it was. God bless her--to her
it was. It was wonderful how far the influence of her laughter carried.
And all this while we had been strengthening the pioneer idea, too. We
found that older people responded to its spirit almost as eagerly as
boys do to the same thing in a simpler form as expressed in the Boy
Scout movement. There isn’t a boy with red blood in his veins, whether
raised in New York, London or a country village, who isn’t stirred by
the hardy principles that govern your true scout. It’s amazing to see
how much of that spirit is in their blood; how gladly they return to
more primitive conditions. Boys brought up in luxury taste their first
real meal when they munch a slice of bacon sizzled over the embers of a
wood fire or a potato cooked in the ashes. They learn the real meaning
of sleep when at the end of a hard day’s hike they roll up in a blanket
in the open. Boys are born pioneers the world over--even to-day. The
spirit is educated out of them in many cases, more’s the pity, but
after all it remains at the basis of every real man.
So when at our meetings, directly and indirectly, we harped upon
this idea and argued that the fun of living was within ourselves and
not outside ourselves; when we insisted that the more we depended
upon things outside ourselves for happiness, the less we responded;
when we argued for a simpler standard in our clothes, our food, our
surroundings, our amusements and a heartier dependence upon our work,
we saw its effect. Much has been said about the advantage to farmers of
the telephone, the rural mail which keeps them in daily touch with the
outside world and labor-saving devices which make their work easier,
but honestly I believe that if in the end this saves them from some
evils it brings evils of its own which they haven’t yet learned to
overcome. If these things save them from drudgery and monotony of one
type it isn’t long before they face drudgery and monotony of another
type, when they are allowed to dwell upon that feature of their work.
There isn’t in the world a bigger drudge leading a more monotonous life
than your city clerk who keeps agents scouring the world to furnish
him amusement for his idle hours and to make the routine of his work
lighter. And he’s just as apt to go crazy as your lonely farmer if he
doesn’t learn to seek the joy of living within himself and not in his
surroundings.
We tried particularly to get at the young man in our town and make him
feel it isn’t the wilderness and virgin land and homesteads that makes
your pioneer, but facing bravely whatever conditions may confront him,
relying upon his own efforts to win through them. It takes as much
of a pioneer to work three acres as one hundred and sixty; a man is
as much of a pioneer who forces worn-out land to yield, as one who
clears virgin land of rocks and stumps. It isn’t the nature of the work
but the attitude of the man towards his work which distinguishes the
plodder from the pioneer.
It is especially easy to appreciate this fact when dealing directly
with Nature. Every farm is a newly claimed homestead, if you choose to
look at it that way. And even if it has been worked a hundred years
there isn’t a season when there is not real pioneer work to be done.
As for the raising of live stock, it is done to-day much as it was two
hundred years ago, except for greater attention to details.
It may seem strange to some that just a fresh point of view on the same
old world makes so great a difference. It didn’t, however, surprise me,
because I had sensed the effect of this in my own life. If in the days
when things were going well with me as a clerk with the United Woolen
Company anyone had told me that I’d come down to digging in the subway
as a day laborer, I’d have felt disgraced. Such work seemed like sheer
animal-like drudgery. So it is, if you go at it that way. On the other
hand, when I saw it as the pioneer work it really is, I went at it
with better spirit than ever I did adding up another man’s figures for
him.
Two abstract things then we had accomplished besides the practical: the
establishment of both the social spirit and the pioneer spirit among
ourselves. We were together like one big family and we were working in
a movement that might fairly be called the Man Scout movement. That’s
just exactly what it was. It was alive with just the same wholesome
out-of-doors adventurous spirit that characterizes the boy scout
movement. I guess it’s a pretty safe bet that anything which appeals
universally to boys will appeal universally to men. It was so in our
town anyway.
The next step then--the coöperative step--came about naturally and
almost inevitably. No one planned it and no one so far as I remember
suggested it. It would have been a dangerous thing to suggest
directly. As a phrase it smacked of socialism and there were mighty
few socialists in our town. Our inheritance and our training was all
against it. There wasn’t a man so poor that even if he was willing
to make a martyr out of himself would let anyone else make a martyr
out of him. The worse off he was, the more independent he became. He
would rather play a lone hand at a losing game than win by joining
his troubles with those of someone else. Your bred-in-the-bone New
Englander is a solitary man who, when pressed to the wall, turns and
fights his own fight. He’ll unite against a common outside enemy but
not against his own. It’s this spirit that made our nation, but it’s
this spirit too which is to-day destroying the man himself. With a
closer knit civilization demanding coöperation he is as a rule so
jealous of his personal rights that he balks. And after all, that’s the
pioneer spirit too.
Coming into town as an outsider I was in a position to see certain
things that were not apparent to those born and brought up here. That
is always possible to anyone approaching a new business with his eyes
open. I had found it so when I began work as a ditch digger. Within
a year I detected flaws to which those who had given their lives
to construction work were blind. I was unburdened with bewildering
details and prejudices. So in this town my eyes were fresh and I
viewed the village not altogether from the unit of my own farm but
as a whole. I was a stockholder in a corporation owning a million and
more dollars’ worth of buildings and land, and employing hundreds of
hands. Consequently I was able to consider any new project not only
as it affected my own small interest but as it affected the whole
corporation. The question of raising our own meats then was not with me
merely a question of keeping a beef, some sheep, pigs and chickens for
myself but a matter of saving the corporation the thousands of dollars
which would result in the general undertaking. So it was natural
enough to me when the matter of buying full-blooded breeders came up
which were beyond the means of any one individual, to suggest that the
Pioneer Club, which represented the corporation, should do something
towards making this easy. I had no idea of any general coöperative plan
in doing this, but the idea was just the spark needed to kindle that
whole burning issue.
We wanted a good Dorset ram which would cost in the neighborhood of
a hundred dollars; we wanted a good bull which would cost in the
neighborhood of six hundred dollars. Unless a man went into either
business extensively such an investment wouldn’t pay. It seemed
natural enough then for us all to club together and buy shares. But
if we did this, why shouldn’t we do more? There was the whole problem
of marketing still confronting us. We had solved it in a crude way
last spring but that only served to show us what might be done with a
perfected organization. Out of this was born with scarcely any talk,
scarcely any planning and almost full grown, the scheme which finally
welded us into one compact business firm--the Pioneer Products Company.
The idea had been growing all this time and we didn’t know it. When
we did recognize it, it seemed so natural and obvious that everyone
marveled that we hadn’t thought of it from the beginning. It’s merely
another example of what a rut farming folk have fallen into.
There isn’t any business on the face of the earth that lends itself so
readily to coöperation as farming. Every country village consists of
a small compact body of men living side by side and almost to a man
engaged in buying the same products, manufacturing the same products
and selling the same products to the same market. And these products
are the universal necessities of life. It might be possible for men to
get along without coal, without oil, without steel, even without beef,
but they surely could not get along without wheat and corn, without
vegetables, without eggs and milk. And yet these communities instead of
holding the world by the throat are themselves the prey of the world
even with their own products. With common interests, common foes, with
a common plant and a common organization they still are the common
victims of a hundred diversified outside interests. This is solely
because the outside interests--like the banks--are allowed to treat
with them as small weak units instead of as one large strong unit. And
this after coöperation has been taught them by their government, by
every business in the land, by every labor organization. It is, as I
have said, this branch of the pioneer spirit which has been both their
salvation and their undoing. But that it is possible both to preserve
this and curb it we proved to our satisfaction with the Pioneer
Products Company.
Holt read up on the subject and he found that coöperative farming which
was so novel to us in the East had long been in successful operation
in the West and South. That’s just the point. So are a hundred other
good things. We in the East have urged our young farmers West until
we have drained the East of its best. We have sent them forth like
missionaries in such numbers that now we need some of them back as
missionaries to ourselves. It’s those same men in the West who have
been first to seize upon the new ideas in agriculture, while their
eastern brothers have gone along in the same old ruts. New England as a
whole has been treated like one vast deserted farm not worth anyone’s
trouble. The Government itself treats it as such. It’s eager enough to
spend millions on draining projects in Florida or irrigation projects
in the West while there are whole townships in the State of Maine in as
primeval a condition as they were at the landing of the Pilgrims. It’s
actually so. If Maine were located in Oregon it would be to-day the
richest State in the Union. But as sure as fate the old-world pioneers
will soon rediscover it if we don’t ourselves, for to them Maine is the
Far West.
I find I get switched back to that theme every time I trace a new
feature of our development.
As I said, Holt read up on the subject of coöperative farming as
he always read up on every new subject before tackling it. About
the first thing he ran into was the history of the Eastern Shore of
Virginia Produce Exchange--an enterprise which reads like romance.
Every farmer in New England ought to read it. Holt gave a talk on
it before the club and everyone listened in amazement. Here was a
good farming country settled by industrious well-meaning farmers who
raised good stuff, but who in 1899 found themselves on the verge of
bankruptcy. It was each man for himself and sometimes they sold their
crops for half what it cost to raise them. As individuals they couldn’t
reach their market without giving up their profits to commission men
and railroads. Then someone organized the exchange and so poor were
its members that a membership fee of only five dollars was charged
with the privilege of paying only twenty-five cents down and the rest
in installments. During the first year the organization shipped four
hundred thousand barrels of produce; ten years later it was shipping
one million four hundred thousand barrels. It now handles every year
one million barrels of Irish potatoes and eight hundred thousand
barrels of sweet potatoes. During the last three years it has done an
average business of two million five hundred thousand dollars a year.
It has lifted a stagnant community into a prosperous community within a
decade.
Another example was the Southern Texas Truck Growers’ Association
which was organized in 1905. At that time the farmers were producing
about five hundred car loads of onions a year and not making a living
from them. The following year they shipped nine hundred cars; the next
year one thousand cars; the next year two thousand cars, and in 1910
twenty-five hundred cars valued at one million five hundred thousand
dollars.
We had twenty more such examples for encouragement but we didn’t need
any of them. Our own needs suggested our own remedy and that spring the
Pioneer Products Company took out its charter.