class are significantly different. And how great are these differences!
The wheat farmer of Washington state who receives for his year's crop
$106,000 has little understanding of the life outlook of the New
Englander who cultivates his small, rocky, hillside farm. The difference
is not merely that one does on a small scale what the other does in an
immense way. He who knows both men will hardly question that the
difference in quantity leads also to differences in quality, and in no
respect are the two men more certainly distinguishable than in their
mental characteristics.
It appears useless, therefore, to attempt to procure for dissection a
typical farmer's mind. In this country at present there is no mind that
can be fairly said to represent a group so lacking in substantial unity
as the farming class, and any attempt to construct such a mind is bound
to fail. This is less true when the class is separated into sections,
for the differences between farmers are in no small measure
geographical. Indeed, is it not a happy fact that the American farmer is
not merely a farmer? Although it complicates a rural problem such as
ours, it is fortunate that the individual farmer shares the larger
social mind to such a degree as to diminish the intellectual influences
born of his occupation.
The method of procedure that gives largest promise of substantial fact
is to attempt to uncover some of the fundamental influences that operate
upon the psychic life of the farmers of America and to notice, in so far
as opportunity permits, what social elements modify the complete working
of these influences.
One influence that shows itself in the thinking of farmers as of
fundamental character is, of course, the occupation of farming itself.
In primitive life we not only see the importance of agricultural work
for social life but we discover also some of the mental elements
involved that make this form of industry socially significant. From the
first it called for an investment of self-control, a patience, that
Nature might be coaxed to yield from her resources a reasonable harvest.
We find therefore in primitive agriculture a hazardous undertaking
which, nevertheless, lacked any large amount of dramatic appeal.
It is by no means otherwise today. The farmer has to be efficient in a
peculiar kind of self-control. He needs to invest labor and foresight in
an enterprise that affords to the usual person little of the opportunity
for quick returns, the sense of personal achievement, or the
satisfaction of the desire for competitive face-to-face association with
other men which is offered in the city. Men who cultivate on a very
large scale and men who enjoy unusual social insight as to the
significance of their occupation are exceptions to the general run of
farmers. In these days of accessible transportation we have a rapid and
highly successful selection which largely eliminates from the farming
class the type that does not naturally possess the power to be satisfied
with the slowly acquired property, impersonal success, and non-dramatic
activities of farming. This process which eliminates the more restless
and commercially ambitious from the country has, of course, been at
work for generations. It has tended, therefore, to a uniformity of
mental characteristics, but it has by no means succeeded in procuring a
homogeneous rural mind. The movement has been somewhat modified by the
return of people to the country from the city and by the influence on
the country mind of the more restless and adventurous rural people who,
for one reason or another, have not migrated. In the far West
especially, attention has been given to the rural hostility to, or at
least the misunderstanding of, city movements which attempt ambitious
social advances. It is safe to assume that this attitude of rural people
is widespread and is noticeable far west merely because of a greater
frankness. The easterner hides his attitude because he has become
conscious that it opens him to criticism. This attitude of rural
hostility is rooted in the fundamental differences between the thinking
of country and of city people, due largely to the process of social
selection. This mental difference gives constant opportunity for social
friction. If the individuals who live most happily in the city and in
the country are contrasted, there is reason to suppose that the mental
opposition expresses nervous differences. In one we have the more rapid,
more changeable, and more consuming thinker, while the thought of the
other is slower, more persistent, and less wasteful of nervous energy.
The work of the average farmer brings him into limited association with
his fellows as compared with the city worker. This fact also operates
upon him mentally. He has less sense of social variations and less
realization of the need of group solidarity. This results in his having
less social passion than his city brother, except when he is caught in a
periodic outburst of economic discontent expressed in radical agitation,
and also in his having a more feeble class-consciousness and a weaker
basis for cooperation. This last limitation is one from which the farmer
seriously suffers.
The farmer's lack of contact with antagonistic groups, because his work
keeps him away from the centers where social discontent boils with
passion and because it prevents his appreciating class differences,
makes him a conservative element in our national life, but one always
big with the danger of a blind servitude to traditions and archaic
social judgments. The thinking of the farmer may be either substantial
from his sense of personal sufficiency or backward from his lack of
contact. The decision regarding his attitude is made by the influences
that enter his life, in addition to those born of his occupation.
At this point, however, it would be serious to forget that some of the
larger farming enterprises are carried on so differently that the
manager and owner are more like the factory operator than the usual
farmer. To them the problem is labor-saving machinery, efficient
management, labor cost, marketing facilities, and competition. They are
not especially influenced by the fact that they happen to handle land
products rather than manufactured articles.
Much has been made of the farmer's hand-to-hand grapple with a
capricious and at times frustrating Nature. This emphasis is deserved,
for the farmer is out upon the frontier of human control of natural
forces. Even modern science, great as is its service, cannot protect him
from the unexpected and the disappointing. Insects and weather sport
with his purposes and give his efforts the atmosphere of chance. It is
not at all strange, therefore, that the farmer feels drawn to fatalistic
interpretations of experience which he carries over to lines of thought
other than those connected with his business.
A second important influence that has helped to make the mind of the
farmer has been isolation. In times past, without doubt, this has been
powerful in its effect upon the mind of the farmer. It is less so now
because, as everyone knows, the farmer is protected from isolation by
modern inventions. It is necessary to recall, however, that isolation is
in relation to one's needs and that we too often neglect the fact that
the very relief that has removed from country people the more apparent
isolation of physical distance has often intensified the craving for
closer and more frequent contact with persons than the country usually
permits. Whether isolation as a psychic experience has decreased for
many in the country is a matter of doubt. Certainly most minds need the
stimulus of human association for both happiness and healthiness, and
even yet the minds of farmers disclose the narrowness, suspiciousness,
and discontent of place that isolation brings. It makes a difference in
social attitude whether the telephone, automobile, and parcel post draw
the people nearer together in a common community life or whether they
bring the people under the magic of the city's quantitative life and in
this way cause rural discontent.
The isolation from the great business centers which has kept farmers
from having personally a wide experience with modern business explains
in part the suspicious attitude rural people often take into their
commercial relations. This has been expressed in a way one can hardly
forget by Tolstoi in his "Resurrection," when his hero, from moral
sympathy with land reform, undertakes to give his tenants land under
conditions more to their advantage and, much to his surprise, finds them
hostile to the plan. They had been too often tricked in the past and
felt too little acquainted with business methods to have any confidence
in the new plan which claimed benevolent motives. It is only fair to
admit that the farmer differs from others of his social rank only in
degree, and that his experiences in the past appear to him to justify
his skeptical attitude. He has at times suffered exploitation; what he
does not realize is that this has been made possible by his lack of
knowledge of the ways of modern business and by his failure to
organize. The farmer is beginning to appreciate the significance of
marketing. Unfortunately, he too often carries his suspiciousness, which
has resulted from business experiences, into many other lines of action
and thinking, and thus robs himself of enthusiasm and social confidence.
A third important element in the making of the farmer's mind may be
broadly designated as suggestion. The farmer is like other men in that
his mental outlook is largely colored by the suggestions that enter his
life.
It is this fact, perhaps, that explains why the farmer's mind does not
express more clearly vocational character, for no other source of
persistent suggestions has upon most men the influence of the newspaper,
and each day, almost everywhere, the daily paper comes to the farmer
with its appealing suggestions. Of course the paper represents the urban
point of view rather than the rural, but in the deepest sense it may be
said to look at life from the human outlook, the way the average man
sees things. The newspaper, therefore, feeds the farmer's mind with
suggestions and ideas that counteract the influences that specially
emphasize the rural environment. It keeps him in contact with thinking
and events that are world-wide, and unconsciously permeates his motives,
at times giving him urban cravings that keep him from utilizing to the
full his social resources in the country. Any attempt to understand
rural life that minimizes the common human fellowship which the
newspaper offers the farmer is certain to lead to unfortunate
misinterpretation. Mentally the farmer is far from being isolated in his
experiences, for he no longer is confined to the world of local ideas as
he once was. This constant daily stimulation from the world of business,
sports, and public affairs at times awakens his appetite for urban life
and makes him restless, or encourages his removal to the city, or makes
him demand as much as possible of the quantitative pleasures and
recreations of city life. In a greater degree, however, the paper
contents his mental need for contact with life in a more universal way
than his particular community allows. The automobile and other modern
inventions also serve the farmer, as does the newspaper, by providing
mental suggestions from an extended environment.
A very important source of suggestion, as abnormal psychology so clearly
demonstrates, at present, is the impressions of childhood. Rural life
tends on the whole to intensify the significant events of early life,
because of the limited amount of exciting experiences received as
compared with city life. Parental influence is more important because it
suffers less competition. This fact of the meaning of early suggestions
appears, without doubt, in various ways and forbids the scientist's
assuming that rural thinking is made uniform by universal and unvaried
suggestions.
The discontent of rural parents with reference to their environment or
occupation, due to their natural urban tendencies, or to their failure
to succeed, or to the hard conditions of their farm life, has some
influence in sending rural youth to the city. Accidental or incidental
suggestion often repeated is especially penetrating in childhood, and no
one who knows rural people can fail to notice parents who are prone to
such suggestions expressing rural discontent. In the same way,
suspiciousness or jealousy with reference to particular neighbors or
associates leads, when it is often expressed before children, to general
suspiciousness or trivial sensitiveness. The emotional obstacles to the
get-together spirit--obstacles which vex the rural worker--in no small
degree have their origin in suggestion given in childhood.
The country is concerned with another source of suggestion which has
more to do with the efficiency of the rural mind than its content, and
that is the matter of sex. Students of rural life apparently give this
element less attention than it deserves. As Professor Ross has pointed
out in "South of Panama," for example, the precocious development of sex
tends to enfeeble the intellect and to prevent the largest kind of
mental capacity. It is unsafe at present to generalize regarding the
differences between country and city life in matters of sex, but it is
certainly true, when rural life is empty of commanding interests and
when it is coarsened by low traditions and the presence of defective
persons, that there is a precocious emphasis of sex. This is expressed
both by early marrying and by loose sex relations. It is doubtful
whether the commercializing of sex attraction in the city has equal
mental significance, for certainly science clearly shows that it is the
precocious expression of sex that has largest psychic dangers. In so far
as the environment of a rural community tends to bring the sexual life
to early expression, we have every reason to suppose that at this point
at least the influence of the community is such as to tend toward a
comparative mental arrest or a limiting of mental ability, for which the
country later suffers socially. Each student of rural life must, from
experience and observation, evaluate for himself the significance of
this sex precociousness. When sex interests become epidemic and the
general tendency is toward precocious sex maturity, the country
community is producing for itself men and women of inferior resources as
compared with their natural possibilities. Even the supposed social
wholesomeness of earlier marrying in the country must be scrutinized
with the value of sex sublimation during the formative years clearly in
mind.
PSYCHIC CAUSES OF RURAL MIGRATION
IX
PSYCHIC CAUSES OF RURAL MIGRATION
In modern civilization the increasing attractiveness of the city is one
of the apparent social facts.[6] Social psychology may reasonably be
expected to throw light upon the causes of this movement of population
from rural to urban conditions of life. Striking illustrations of
individual preference for city life, even in opposition to the person's
economic interests, suggest that this problem of social behavior so
characteristic of our time contains important mental factors.
Since sensations give the mind its raw material,[7] the mind may be said
to crave stimulation. "In the most general way of viewing the matter,
beings that seem to us to possess minds show in their physical life
what we may call a great and discriminating sensitiveness to what goes
on at any present time in their environment."[8] This interest of the
mind in the receiving of stimulation for its own activity is an
essential element in any social problem. The individual reacts socially
"with a great and discriminating sensitiveness" to his environment, just
as he reacts physically to his stimuli to conserve pleasure and avoid
pain.
The fundamental sources of stimuli are, of course, common to all forms
of social grouping, but one difference between rural and urban life
expresses itself in the greater difficulty of obtaining under rural
conditions certain definite stimulations from the environment. This fact
is assumed both by those who hold the popular belief that most great men
are country-born and by those who accept the thesis of Ward that
"fecundity in eminent persons seems then to be intimately connected
with cities."[9] The city may be called an environment of greater
quantitative stimulations than the country. The city furnishes forceful,
varied, and artificial stimuli; the country affords an environment of
stimuli in comparison less strong and more uniform. Minds that crave
external, quantitative stimuli for pleasing experiences are naturally
attracted by the city and repelled by the monotony of the country. On
the other hand, those who find their supreme mental satisfactions in
their interpretation or appreciation of the significant expression of
the beauty and lawfulness of nature discover what may be called an
environment of qualitative stimulations. The city appeals, therefore, to
those who with passive attitude need quantitative, external experiences;
the country is a splendid opportunity for those who are fitted to create
their mental satisfactions from the active working over of stimuli that
appear commonplace to the uninterpreting mind. If Coney Island, with its
noise and manufactured stimulations, is representative of the city,
White's "Natural History of Selborne" is a characteristic product of the
wealth of the country to the mind gifted with penetrating skill.
Doubtless this difference between rural and urban is nothing new, and
from the beginning of civilization there have been the country-minded
and the city-minded. In our modern life, however, there is much that
increases the difference and much that stimulates the movement of the
city-minded from the country. Present-day life with its complexity and
its rapidity of change makes it difficult for one to get time to develop
the active mind that makes appreciation possible. Our children
precociously obtain adult experiences of quantitative character in an
age of the automobile and moving pictures, and an unnatural craving is
created for an environment of excitement, a life reveling in noise and
change. Business, eager for gain, exploits this demand for stimulation,
and social contagion spreads the restlessness of our population. The
urban possibilities for stimulation are advertised as never before in
the country by the press with its city point of view, by summer
visitors, and by the reports of the successes of the most fortunate of
those who have removed to the cities. In an age restless and mobile,
with family traditions less strong, and transportation exceedingly cheap
and inviting, it is hardly strange that so many of the young people are
eager to leave the country, which they pronounce dead--as it literally
is to them--for the lively town or city. It is by no means true that
this removal always means financial betterment or that such is its
motive. It is very significant to find so many farmers who have made
their wealth in the country, or who are living on their rents, moving to
town to enjoy life. May it not be that a new condition has come about in
our day by the possibility that there are more who exhaust their
environment in the country before habit with its conservative tendency
is able to hold them on the farm? One who knows the discontent of
urban-minded people who have continued to live in the country can hardly
doubt that habit has tended to conserve the rural population in a way
that it does not now. And one must not forget the pressure of the
discontent of these urban-minded country parents upon their children.
The faculty of any agricultural college is familiar with the farmer's
son who has been taught never to return to the farm after graduation
from college. That the city-minded preacher and teacher add their
contribution to rural restlessness is common thought.
In the city the sharp contrast between labor and recreation increases
without doubt the appeal of the city to many. The factory system not
only satisfies the gregarious instinct, it also gives an absolute break
between the working time and the period of freedom. In so far as labor
represents monotony, it emphasizes the value of the hours free from
toil. This contrast is often in the city the difference between very
great monotony and excessive excitement after working hours. It has been
pointed out often that city recreation shows the demand for great
contrast between it and the fatigue of monotonous labor. So great a
contrast between work and play--monotony and freedom--is not possible in
the country environment. In the midst of country recreations there are
likely to be suggestions of the preceding work or the work that is to
follow. It is as if the city recreations were held in factories. Country
places of play are usually in close contact with fields of labor. Often
indeed the country town provides the worker with very little opportunity
for recreation in any form. In rural places recreation cannot be had at
stated periods. Weather or market conditions must have precedence over
the holiday. Recreation, therefore, cannot be shared as a common
experience to such an extent by country workers as is possible in the
city. Since the rural population is very largely interested in the same
farming problems, even conversation after the work of the day is less
free from business concerns than is usually that of city people.
The difficulty of obtaining sharp contrast between work and play in the
country no doubt is one reason for the ever-present danger of recourse
to the sex instinct for stimulation. One source of excitement is always
present ready to give temporary relief to the barren life of young
people. Not only of the girl entering prostitution may it be said that
with her the sex instinct is less likely "to be reduced in comparative
urgency by the volume and abundance of other satisfactions."[10] The
barrenness of country life to the girl growing into womanhood, hungry
for amusement, is one large reason why the country furnishes so large a
proportion of prostitutes to the city. "This civilizational factor of
prostitution, the influence of luxury and excitement and refinement in
attracting the girl of the people, as the flame attracts the moth, is
indicated by the fact that it is the country dwellers who chiefly
succumb to the fascination. The girls whose adolescent explosive and
orgiastic impulses, sometimes increased by a slight congenital lack of
nervous balance, have been latent in the dull monotony of country life
and heightened by the spectacle of luxury acting on the unrelieved
drudgery of town life, find at last their complete gratification in the
career of a prostitute."[11]