The Evolution of the Country Community
by Warren H. Wilson · English · Gutenberg #30563 · 340,150 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Evolution of the Country Community
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Evolution of the Country Community
Author: Warren H. Wilson
Release date: November 29, 2009 [eBook #30563]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30563
Credits: Produced by Tom Roch, Carla Foust, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images produced by Core Historical
Literature in Agriculture (CHLA), Cornell University)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EVOLUTION OF THE COUNTRY COMMUNITY ***
Produced by Tom Roch, Carla Foust, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images produced by Core Historical
Literature in Agriculture (CHLA), Cornell University)
Transcriber's note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer
errors have been changed and are listed at the end. All other
inconsistencies are as in the original.
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 curé 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.
In this period the minister frequently is himself a tiller of the soil.
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.
For instance, in Wisconsin a church worker found that thousands of acres
in a certain section were owned by a Milwaukee capitalist. He found
that the tenant farmers on these acres were poor and struggling for a
better living, and he could not, among them, finance an adequate church.
He promptly went to Milwaukee and secured five minutes of the time and
attention of the absentee landlord. When he had stated the case and the
reasons why this large owner should give to the country church on his
acres, the man promptly said, "You have stated what I never before
realized and I will give you a contribution of one hundred dollars per
year for that church until you hear from me to the contrary."
In contrast to this there is in Central Illinois a large estate of five
thousand acres. The owner lives in a distant city and his son tills the
land. It is known among the neighbors that the son has orders to oppose
all improvements of churches and of schools, "because there is no money
for us in the church or the school."
It is useless to complain of the position in which a man is. The
minister's duty is to utilize him in his own status and to enable him to
practise the virtues which are open to him. The retired farmer can
become an active and devoted evangelist, preacher or organizer. He
should be made a leader in the intellectual development of the farmer's
problem of the region. He has leisure and intelligence and is often a
devout man. It is the business of the minister to transform this into
religious and social efficiency. The temperance movement in the Middle
West has had generous and devoted support from the retired farmers
living in the towns. The families of these one time farmers are seeking
after culture. The literary and aesthetic aspects of the community can
well be committed to members of these families. Their value for the
community is probably in these directions. Above all it is the business
of the minister to sympathize with the life they are living and to
enable them to live it to the highest advantage.
The energies of the church should be devoted to the tenant farmer. Of
this more will be said in another place. He also must be treated in
sympathy with his social and economic experience and the religious
service rendered to him must be the complete betterment of his life as
he is trying to live it. He is not a sinner because he is a tenant and
what he does as a tenant is therefore not a misdemeanor, but a normal
reaction upon life. The church can help him in purging his life from the
iniquities peculiar to a tenant and a dependent. The noblest motives
must be brought out and the life he is to live should be given its own
ideals.
Above all the period of exploitation must be understood by the teacher
and the preacher to be a preparation, a transition through which country
people are coming to organized and scientific agriculture. Gradually the
influence of science and the leadership of the departments and colleges
of agriculture are being extended in the country. Little by little,
whether through landlord or tenant, farming is becoming a profession
requiring brains, science and trained intelligence. The country church
should promote this process because only through its maturity can the
country church in the average community find its own establishment. The
reconstruction of the churches now going on corresponds to the
exploitation of the land. The duty of the church in the process of
exploitation is to build the community and to make itself the center of
the growing scientific industry on which the country community in the
future will be founded.
The religion of the exploiter moves in the giving of money. Consecration
of his wealth is consecration of his world and of himself. The church
that would save him must teach him to give. His sins are those of greed,
his virtues are those of benevolence. His own type, not the least worthy
among men, should be honored in his religion. No man's conversion ever
makes him depart from his type, but be true to his type. Therefore the
religion for the exploiter of land is a religion of giving, to the poor
at his door, to the ignorant in this land, and to the needy of all
lands.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States,
by Van Hise.]
[Footnote 8: J. B. Ross--"Agrarian Changes in the Middle West."]
[Footnote 9: Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson at the United States
Land and Irrigation Exposition, Chicago, Nov. 19, 1910.]
[Footnote 10: The Rural Life Problem in the United States, by Sir Horace
Plunkett.]
[Footnote 11: Dean Chas. F. Curtiss, State College of Iowa.]
IV
THE HUSBANDMAN
The scientific farmer is dependent upon the world economy. He is the
local representative of agriculture, whose organization is national and
even international. He raises cotton in Georgia, but he "makes milk" in
Orange County, New York, because the market and the soil and the climate
and other conditions require of him this crop.
He is dependent upon the college of agriculture for the methods by which
he can survive as a farmer. Tradition, which dominated the agriculture
of a former period, is a disappearing factor in husbandry of the soil.
The changes in market conditions are such as to impoverish the farmer
who learns only from the past. Tradition could teach the farmer how to
raise the raw materials, under the old economy, in which the farmhouse
and community were sufficient unto themselves. But in a time when the
wool of the sheep in Australia goes halfway round the world in its
passage from the back of a sheep to the back of a man, the sheep farmer
becomes dependent upon the scientist. He cannot afford to raise sheep
unless the scientific man assures him that in the production of wool
his land has its highest utility. "The American farm land is passing
into the hands of those who will use it to the highest advantage."[12]
The dependence of the scientific farmer or husbandman upon the world
market and upon the scientists who are studying agriculture enlarges the
circle of his life from the rural household to the rural community. In
the rural community agriculture can be taught; in the household it
cannot. The only teaching of the household is tradition; the teaching of
the community is in terms of science. The country school and the country
church take a greater place as community institutions just so soon as
the farmer passes out of the period of exploitation into that of
scientific husbandry.
The husbandman is the economist in agriculture. He is to the farm what
the husband was to the household in old times. One is tempted to say
also that the husbandman is he who marries the land. American farm land
has suffered dishonor and degradation, but it has known all too little
the affection which could be figuratively expressed in marriage. The
Bible speaks of "marrying the land."--"Thy land shall be called Beulah
for thy land shall be married." Side by side in this country we have the
lands which have been dishonored, degraded, abandoned, dissolute, and
the lands husbanded, fertilized, enriched and made beautiful.
The husbandman or rural economist cares more for qualities than for
quantity. He works not merely for intensive cultivation of the soil, but
also for the preservation of the soil and use of it in its own terms, at
its highest values.
The principle at work is not the increase in the farmer's material gains
or possessions. The husbandry of the soil is not a mere increase in
market values. It is a deeper and more ethical welfare than that which
can be put in the bank. "Agriculture is a religious occupation." When it
sustains a permanent population and extends from generation to
generation the same experiences, agriculture is productive in the
highest degree of moral and religious values. In the words of Director
L. H. Bailey, of Cornell, "The land is holy."
This is especially true at the present time, when the land is limited in
amount. Already the whole nation is dependent upon the farmer in the
degree intimated by the statement of Dean Bailey. "The census of 1900
showed approximately one-third of our people on farms or closely
connected with farms, as against something like nine-tenths, a hundred
years previous. It is doubtful whether we have struck bottom, although
the rural exodus may have gone too far in some regions, and we may not
permanently strike bottom for sometime to come."[13]
The service of the few to the many, therefore, is the present status of
the husbandman. The very fact that one-third of the people must feed
all the people imposes religious and ethical conditions upon the farmer.
The dependence of the greater number for their welfare upon those who
are to till the soil brings that obligation, which the farmer is well
constituted to bear and to which his serious spirit gives response.
This means that with the growing consciousness of the need of scientific
agriculture there will arise, indeed is now arising, a new ethical and
religious feeling among country people. The church which is made up of
scientific farmers is a new type of church.
A notable testimony to the influence of the church in developing
husbandry is by Sir Horace Plunkett,[14] who testifies to the religious
influence that led to the agrarian revolution in Denmark.
"My friends and I have been deeply impressed by the educational
experience of Denmark, where the people, who are as much dependent on
agriculture as are the Irish, have brought it by means of organization
to a more genuine success than it has attained anywhere else in Europe.
Yet an inquirer will at once discover that it is to the 'High School'
founded by Bishop Grundtvig, and not to the agricultural schools, which
are also excellent, that the extraordinary national progress is mainly
due. A friend of mine who was studying the Danish system of state aid to
agriculture, found this to be the opinion of the Danes of all classes,
and was astounded at the achievements of the associations of farmers not
only in the manufacture of butter, but in a far more difficult
undertaking, the manufacture of bacon in large factories equipped with
all the most modern machinery and appliances which science had devised
for the production of the finished article. He at first concluded that
this success in a highly technical industry by bodies of farmers
indicated a very perfect system of technical education. But he soon
found another cause. As one of the leading educators and agriculturists
of the country put it to him: 'It's not technical instruction, it's the
humanities.' I would like to add that it is also, if I may coin a term,
the 'nationalities,' for nothing is more evident to the student of
Danish education or, I might add, of the excellent system of the
Christian Brothers in Ireland, than that one of the secrets of their
success is to be found in their national basis and their foundation upon
the history and literature of the country."
Every observer of these Danish Folk High Schools testifies to their
religious enthusiasm, their patriotism and above all to the songs with
which their lecture hours are begun and ended. A graduate of these
schools living for years in America, the mother of children then
entering college, said, "Those songs helped me over the hardest period
of my life. I can always sing myself happy with them." The spirit which
pervades the schools was influential in Danish agriculture, as
expressed in the title of Grundtvig's best known hymn, "The Country
Church Bells." Under such an influence as this has the agricultural life
of Denmark taken the lead over its urban and manufacturing life.
The modifying influence of husbandry upon the church and its teaching is
illustrated in the following incident. A farmer in Missouri had a good
stand of corn which promised all through the summer to produce an
excellent crop. Abundance of sun and rain favored the farmer's hope that
his returns would be large, but in the fall the crop proved a failure.
The farmer at once cast about for the cause of this disappointment. He
had his soil analyzed by a scientist and discovered that it was
deficient in nitrogen. The next year he devoted to supplying this lack
in the soil and in the year following had an abundant return in corn.
"Now that experience turned me away," said he, "from the country church,
because the teaching of the country church as I had been accustomed to
it was out of harmony with the study of the situation and the conquest
over nature. I had been taught in the country church to surrender under
such conditions to the will of Providence." The country church of the
husbandman must therefore be a church in harmony with the tillage of the
soil by science. Like the farm households about it, the church will
possess a large wealth of tradition, but the church of the scientific
farmer must be open to the teachings of science and must be responsive,
intelligent and alert in the intellectual leadership of the people.
A church of this sort is at West Nottingham, Maryland. The minister Rev.
Samuel Polk, had been discouraged by the inattention of his people to
his message. He had come to feel that this is an unbelieving age and had
surrendered himself to the steadfast performance of his duties, the
preaching of the truth faithfully and the ministry to his people so far
as they would receive it. In addition he had the task of tilling forty
acres of land which belongs to the church. This he was doing faithfully,
but without much intelligent interest.
An address on the country church in an agricultural college sent him
home with new ideas. He saw that his life as a farmer and as a preacher
had to be made one. He determined to preach to farmers and to till his
land as an example of Christian husbandry. He began as a scholar by
studying the scientific use of his land. He found at once that the
farmers about him were forced to study the tillage of their soil,
because it had been exhausted of fertility by methods of farming no
longer profitable. In the first year the preacher raised, by means of a
dust mulch through a dry summer, a crop of one hundred and seventy-five
bushels of potatoes. Meantime his preaching had been enlivened with new
illustrations and he was enabled to enforce, to the amazement of his
hearers, new impressions with old truths. The Scripture teaching which
had become dull and scholastic became live and modern, as he preached
the Old Testament to a people who were recognizing the sacredness of
land. His audiences began to increase. His influence on his people very
shortly passed bounds and reserves. When at the end of the season his
potato crop came in, the farmers gave sign of recognizing his leadership
as a farmer and as a preacher. Within a year this man had taken a place
as a first citizen, which no one else in the community could hold.
Because he was a preacher he could become the leading authority upon
farming and because he must needs be a farmer he found it possible to
preach with greater acceptance.
This pastor gave up the methods of bookish preparation for preaching. He
preached as the Old Testament men did, to the occasion and to the event.
He spoke to the community as being a man himself immersed in the same
life as theirs. On a recent occasion when a woman was very sick in one
of the farm houses and had suffered from the neglect of her neighbors,
his sermon consisted of an appeal to visit the sick. That afternoon the
invalid was called on by thirty-eight people and sent a message before
night, begging the minister to hold the people back.
There are a few ministers throughout the country who are successful
farmers. Many ministers are speculators in farm land. They belong in the
exploiter class. One more instance should be given of the preacher who
promotes agriculture. In a recent discussion the writer was asked, "Do
you then believe that the minister should attend the agricultural
college," and he replied, "No. The agricultural college should be
brought to the country church."
At Bellona, New York, the ministers of two churches, Methodist and
Presbyterian, united with their officers in a farmers' club, to which
others were admitted. This club under the leadership of Rev. T. Maxwell
Morrison, makes the nucleus of its work the study of the agriculture of
the neighborhood and the improvement of it. Lecturers from Cornell
University are brought throughout the year into the country community to
take up in succession the various aspects of farming which may be
improved. The market is studied, by chemical analysis the nature of the
soil is determined, and the possibilities of the community are raised to
their highest value by careful investigation.
This farmers' club has social features as well. Other topics besides
farming are occasionally studied but the business of the club is
economic promotion of the well-being of the community. Incidentally, it
has furnished a social center for the countryside. The churches which
have had to do with it have been enlarged, their membership extended and
even their gifts to foreign missions have been increased in the period
of growth of the farmers' club.
The elements of permanent cultivation of the soil are found in greater
numbers among the Mormons, Scotch Irish Presbyterians, Pennsylvania
Germans, who are the best American agriculturists, than among the more
unstable populations of farmers. Those elements, however, are, simply
speaking, the following.
A certain austerity of life always accompanies successful and permanent
agriculture. By this is meant a fixed relation between production and
consumption.[15] Successful tillers of the soil labor to produce an
abundant harvest. They live at the same time in a meager and sparing
manner. Production is with them raised to its highest power and
consumption is reduced to its lowest. This means austere living. Such
communities are found among the Scotch Irish farmers. Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania, is peopled with them and their tillage of the soil has
continued through two centuries.
A notable illustration is in Illinois. The permanence of the conditions
of country life in this community is indicated by the long pastorate of
the minister who has just retired. Coming to the church at forty-eight
years of age, after other men have ceased from zealous service, he
ministered forty-two years to this parish of farmers, and has recently
retired at the age of ninety, leaving the church in ideal condition.
"The Middle Creek Church is distinctly a country charge, located in the
Southwest corner of Winnebago Township, of the County of Winnebago.
"The church was organized in June, 1855, in a stone schoolhouse. The
present house of worship was erected and dedicated in 1861. Five
ministers served the church as supplies until 1865, when the Rev. J. S.
Braddock, D. D., became the pastor and carried on a splendid work for
forty-two years, when he laid down his pastorate in 1907, at the age of
ninety."
"This community was settled by homesteaders and pioneers in the early
days of the West. Many of them came from Pennsylvania and some of them
were of Scotch descent. The history of the community has been but the
history of the development of a fertile Western Prairie country. It was
settled by strong Presbyterian men, and their descendants are now the
backbone of the community. There has been little change, but steady
growth."
The second element in the community of husbandmen is mutual support.
Professor Gillin of the University of Iowa has described to me the
community of Dunkers whom he has studied,[16] being deeply impressed
with their communal solidarity. Whenever a farm is for sale these
farmers at the meeting-house confer and decide at once upon a buyer
within their own religious fellowship. In the week following the
minister or a church member writes back to Pennsylvania and the
correspondence is pressed, until a family comes out from the older
settlements in the Keystone State to purchase this farm in Iowa and to
extend the colony of his fellow Dunkers. Reference is made elsewhere to
the communal support given to their own members who suffer economic
hardship. The serious tillage of the soil necessarily involves mutual
support and the husbandman's life is in his community.
The third factor in communal husbandry is progress. Everyone testifies
to the leadership of the "best families" in the transformation of the
older modes of the tillage of the soil to the newer. It is impossible
for the scientific agriculturist to make much improvement upon a country
community until the more progressive spirits and the more open minds
have been enlisted. Thereafter the better farming problem is solved.
There can be no modern agriculture in a community in which all are
equal. The communities of husbandmen will be as sharply differenced from
one another, so far as I can see, as men are in the great cities.
Leadership is the essential of progress. Gabriel Tardé has clearly
demonstrated that only those who are at the top of the social scale can
initiate social and economic enterprises. The cultivation of the soil
for generations to come must be highly progressive. To recover what we
have lost and to restore what has been wasted will exhaust the resources
of science and will tax the intelligence of the leaders among
husbandmen.
For this reason the ministers, teachers, and social workers in the
country should be not discouraged, but hopeful, when confronted with
rural landlords and capitalists. The business of the community leader is
to enlist in the common task those persons whose privileges are superior
and inspire them with a progressive spirit. Without their leadership the
community cannot progress. Without their privileges, wealth and superior
education, no progress is possible in the country.
If these pages tell the truth, then agriculture is a mode of life
fertile in religious and ethical values. But it must be husbandry, not
exploitation. Religious farming is a lifelong agriculture, indeed it
involves generations, and its serious, devoted spirit waits for the
reward, which was planted by the diligent father or grandfather, to be
reaped by the son or grandson. Men will not so consecrate themselves to
their children's good without the steadying influence of religion. So
that agriculture and religion are each the cause, and each the effect,
of the other.
If this is true, then the country church should promote the husbandry
of the soil. The agricultural college should be brought into the country
parish, for the church's sake. Indeed the minister would do well if his
scholarship be the learning of the husbandman. No other science has such
religious values. No other books have such immediate relation to the
well-being of the people. The minister is not ashamed to teach Greek,
or Latin,--dead languages. Why should he think it beneath him "to teach
the farmer how to farm," provided he can teach the farmer anything? If
he be a true scholar, the farmer, who is a practical man, needs his
learned co-operation in the most religious of occupations, that the land
may be holy.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: Rural Economics, by Prof. Thos. Nixon Carver.]
[Footnote 13: "The Country-Life Movement," by L. H. Bailey.]
[Footnote 14: "Ireland in the New Century," by Sir Horace Plunkett.]
[Footnote 15: Professor Thomas Nixon Carver.]
[Footnote 16: See Chapter V.]
V
EXCEPTIONAL COMMUNITIES
Most of this volume is devoted to the average conditions which prevail
throughout the United States. The attempt is made to deal with those
causes which are generally operative. It is the writer's opinion that
the causes dealt with in other chapters are the prevailing causes of
religious and social experience in the most of the United States. As
soon as the community, after its early settlement, becomes mature, these
causes show the effects here described. But there are exceptions which
should be noted and the cause of their different life made clear. These
exceptions are represented in the Mormons, the Scottish Presbyterians
and the Pennsylvania Germans.
"The best farmers in the country are the Mormons, the Scotch
Presbyterians and Pennsylvania Germans." This sentence expresses a
general observation of Prof. Carver of Harvard, speaking as an
economist. The churches among these three classes of exceptionally
prosperous farmers show great tenacity and are free from the weakness
which otherwise prevails in the country church. There is a group of
causes underlying this exceptional character of the three classes of
farmers.
These exceptional farmers are organized in the interest of agriculture.
The Mormons represent this organization in the highest degree. Perhaps
no other so large or so powerful a body of united farmers is found in
the whole country. They have approached the economic questions of
farming with determination to till the soil. They distrust city life and
condemn it. They teach their children and they discipline themselves to
love the country, to appreciate its advantages and to recognize that
their own welfare is bound up in their success as farmers, and in the
continuance of their farming communities. This agricultural organization
centers about their country churches. They have turned the force of
religion into a community making power, and from the highest to the
lowest of their church officers the Mormon people are devoted to
agriculture as a mode of living.
This principle of organizing the community consciously for agriculture
results in the second condition of the life of these three exceptional
peoples.
They build agricultural communities. The Mormons are organized by an
idea and by the power of leadership. They have recruited their
population through preachers and missionaries. This new population is
woven at once into the fabric of the community. They are not merely
employed in the community: they are married to the community. The
organization on which the Mormon community is based becomes embodied at
once in a society, with its own modes of religious, family, and moral
feeling and thought.
These two principles are discovered in the Pennsylvania Germans. For
more than two centuries they have continued their settlements in
Pennsylvania. They are today a chain of societies loosely related to one
another through religious sympathy and a common tradition, but united
only in the possession of certain characteristics. They also are an
organization for agricultural life, though not so consciously organized
as the Mormons. Their societies are older and they have replaced with
instinctive processes that which is among the Mormons a matter of logic
and shrewd application of principles.
The life of the Pennsylvania Germans is expressed in the community. They
have as much aversion to other people as they have fondness for their
own. Their religion consists of a set of customs in which to them the
character of the Christian is embodied. These customs can be expressed
and embodied only in the life of common people working on the land. They
make plainness, industry, and patience, austerity of life and other
agricultural virtues constitute sanctity. It is impossible to believe
sincerely in their mode of life and not be a farmer. It is easy to
believe the Pennsylvania Germans' code, if one is a farmer, and it is
profitable as well.
The Scotch and the Scotch Irish Presbyterians represent a third
principle of agricultural success. Their churches are tenacious and
their country communities outlive those of the average type. In them is
represented in the highest degree the principle of austerity. By this I
mean, as defined by an economist, the custom of living so as to produce
much and consume little. These people look upon life with severity. They
have little sympathy with the expansive and exuberant life of the young.
The men of the community, who are the producers, occupy a relatively
greater position than the women, who are the consumers. They exemplify
to a slight degree the conscious organization for agriculture, and in a
high degree the resultant social life which we have noted among the
Mormons and the Pennsylvania Germans; but to the highest degree the
Scottish Presbyterians represent this self-denial and rigidity of
life--which appears in the others also--and they embody it in their
creed. This austerity gives to them a forbidding character, and robs
them of some of the esthetic interest attaching to the other two, but it
is possible that they are more nearly the ideal type of American farmer
because of certain other traits possessed by them.
The Scotch farmer has not in the United States settled in communities or
colonies, as he has in Canada, but the typical farming community of this
stock is Scotch Irish. As Prof. R. E. Thompson has shown,[17] the
emigrants from the North of Ireland, who are themselves of Scotch
extraction, have colonized extensively. That is, they have settled
their populations so as to cover a territory and possess it for
themselves. But the Scotch, from whom they derive many characteristics,
have settled no colony in the world except in the North of Ireland.[18]
The peculiarity of these Scotch Irish farming settlements, as shown
especially in Pennsylvania, is their capacity to produce leaders in
sympathy with the whole of American life. The Mormons produce leaders,
but their influence is compromised by religious prejudices. The
Pennsylvania Germans have produced no leaders whom they can call their
own, and very few writers or educators. The Scotch Irish, on the other
hand, considered as farmers, have contributed an extraordinary
proportion of the leadership of the United States. They have been able
to maintain their own communities in the country and to find for these
communities a sufficient leadership, and they have sent forth into the
general population a multitude of men for leadership in the army, in the
legislatures, in the colleges and universities, and above all, in the
pulpit.
In these three types of successful farmers religion is an essential
factor. No history can be written of the Mormons, of the "Pennsylvania
Dutch" or of the Scotch Presbyterian without recording their religious
devotion, their obedience to leaders, to customs and to creed. One
cannot live among them without feeling the peculiar religious
atmosphere which belongs to each of them. They are admirable or
obnoxious, according as one likes or dislikes this religious character
of theirs, but it pervades the whole life of the community. If it be
true that there is no type of farmer--except the scientific farmer of
the past few years--who has succeeded as these three types have
succeeded, and there is no country community so tenacious as their
communities are, and if it be true that these farmers more uniformly
than other farmers are religiously organized, then it follows that there
is an essential relation so far as American agriculture goes, between
successful and permanent agriculture and a religious life. The country
church becomes the expression of a permanent and abiding rural
prosperity. Agriculture is shown by its very nature to require a
religious motive. An element of piety appears to be necessary in the
makeup of the successful farmer.
In these three types of successful farmer there appears another
principle which is common to them all. They are not only organized for
farming, but they are organized as a mutual prosperity association,
based on their consciousness of kind. Prof. Gillin has called attention
to the habit of the Dunkers in Iowa, who are of the Pennsylvania German
sects, by which they extend their farming communities.
"The thing that is needed is to make the church the center of the social
life of the community. That is easier where there is but one church than
where there are several, but federation is not essential. Thought must
be taken by the leaders to make the church central in every interest of
life. I know of a community where that has been done. It is the
community located south of Waterloo, Ia., in Orange Township. It is
composed of an up-to-date community of Pennsylvania Dutch Dunkers. From
the very first they have made the church central. When these great
changes of which I have spoken began to occur, the leaders of that
community began to take measures to checkmate the attractions of the
towns for their young people. For example, Fourth of July was made a day
of celebration at the church. When the people of other communities were
flocking to town by hundreds, the youth of that community were
gathering, in response to plans well thought out beforehand, to the
church grounds where patriotic songs were sung, games were played, a
picnic dinner was served, and a general good time was provided for the
young. They have also arranged that their young people have a place to
come to on Sunday nights where they can meet their friends. The elders
look to it that provisions are made for the gatherings of the young
people on Sunday so that they shall 'have a good time,' with due
arrangements for the boys and girls to get together under proper
conditions for their love-making. Even their church 'love feasts' held
twice a year, are also neighborhood gatherings for the young people. The
church is the center of everything. Is a farmers' institute to be held
in the community, or a teachers' institute? The church until very
recently was open to it. Is a farm to rent or for sale? At once the
leaders get busy with the mail, and soon a family from the East is on
their way to take it. This country church has not remained strong and
dominant in the country just by accident or even by federation. It has
survived because it had wise leaders who have met the changes with new
devices to attract the interest of the community and make the church
serve the community in all its affairs, but especially on the social
side. Such thought takes account of the 'marginal man' too. The hired
man and the hired girl, the foreigner and the tramp are welcome there.
No difference is made. There is pure democracy. With the growth of the
class spirit I do not know how that can survive. These hirelings are not
talked down to; they are considered one with the rest. They will some
day get enough to buy a farm and become leaders in the community,
perhaps. The church is theirs as much as anyone's else. It looks after
their interest, not only for the hereafter, but here and now. Under its
fostering care they form their life attachments, it provides for their
social pleasures, it is the center to which they come to discuss their
farming affairs or whatever interests them. And in spite of the fact
that the preaching has little contact with life and its interests, so
strong is the social spirit that the preaching can be left out of
account. What could be accomplished were the preaching as consciously
directed to forwarding the social interests of the community one can
only speculate."[19]
Thus they work for the propagation and extension of their own community.
The Scotch Presbyterians in like manner favor their own kindred and
their kindred in the faith, though, I think, in a lesser degree. The
Mormons are consolidated both by formal organization and by instinctive
preference for their own in a multitude of co-operating habits, through
which they build up their communities and contend with one another
against their economic and religious opponents. It is not enough to say
that this is clannishness; it is a mingling of kinship and religious
preferences. It constitutes the strongest form of agricultural
co-operation to be found in the United States.
A Quaker community represents ideal community life. There is none poor.
The margin of the community is well cared for by the conscious and
deliberate service of the central and leading spirits in the community.
At Quaker Hill, New York, there has been for almost two centuries a
community of Friends. The Meeting has now been "laid down" but the
customs and manners by which these peculiar people maintain their
community life have been wrought into the social texture of the present
population of Quaker Hill. During two centuries this community has
cared for its own members in need. It was not beneath the dignity of the
Meeting to raise money and purchase a cow, early in the eighteenth
century, to "loan to the widow Irish," and at the close of the
nineteenth century, the few Quakers and the many Irish and other
"world's people" took part more than once in subscriptions by which the
burden was borne, which had fallen upon some workingman or poorer
neighbor through the death of horse or cow, or even to bear the expense
incidental to the death of his child.
These Quakers co-operated in their business life. They made themselves
responsible that no member of their Meeting should be long in debt. From
1740 for 100 years and more, the records of the Meeting show that
marriage was made impossible and other vital experiences were forbidden
by the Meeting, unless the individual Quaker paid his debts and
maintained his business on a level dictated by the common opinion of the
Quaker body.[20]
In 1767, Oblong Meeting of Quaker Hill, New York, began the legislative
opposition of the Society of Friends to the institution of slavery. This
great economic movement expressed the degree to which the Quaker
discipline merged the religious life in the economic life. This
consolidation of religious and economic life was essential in the
community building of the Quakers.
It is surprising to many to discover that the "Pennsylvania Dutch" were
part of the same movement of population which brought the Quakers into
Pennsylvania. William Penn spoke German as well as English. His mother
was a German. When he inherited his father's claim against the British
Crown, and received from Charles the Second the grant of that extensive
territory in America on which he launched his Holy Experiment, he began
to advertise and to seek for settlers on the Continent as well as in
England.
William Penn was a Quaker, and on the Continent he found immediate
response in the greatest number of cases among the various branches of
Mennonites, Anabaptist, and other sects, who shared a common group of
beliefs and experienced at this time a common persecution. William Penn,
therefore, reaped a harvest of responses in the territory between the
mouth of the Rhine and the Alps. His proposal made its own selection,
and brought to America a population calculated like the Quaker
population for the building of communities. The largest single
contribution was made by the Palatinates, who were at that period
undergoing extreme persecution.
The communities founded within the first century after the opening of
Pennsylvania have remained to the present day, and the earliest
establishments of Mennonites and Quaker communities in Pennsylvania have
been duplicated in the westward stream of immigration, especially in
Ohio and in Iowa. These people are roughly called the "Pennsylvania
Dutch." Even when one meets them in Michigan, Iowa or Minnesota, this
name clings to them, and the form of social organization which they
elaborated in Eastern Pennsylvania still persists.
This social organization has varying characteristics. It is somewhat
difficult to analyze the intricate windings and entanglements of
doctrinal and practical belief in custom among the Mennonites, Amish and
Dunkers. Old school and new school have been formed in almost every one
of these sects. Eccentric and peculiar principles of belief in
organization have formed the lesser and the least permanent groups; but
there is a common principle in them all. Their ability to form
communities in the midst of hostile populations and adverse conditions
has been due to the co-operation between their religious and their
economic habits.
The "Pennsylvania Dutch" have simple doctrinal characteristics. They
have never worked out in detail the logic of their beliefs. They put the
weight of their organization upon practical customs, as the Quakers did.
In some cases, this applied to clothing; in some or all of these sects
to the manner of speech; to family customs; but, the one peculiar
principle in it all, which has been vital to the success, to the
persistence, to the wide extension of these sectarian groups has been
that the religious life has penetrated the economic life. They have not
permitted members of their community to be poor. They have turned the
attention of their religious sympathies to the economic margin of the
community. They have enforced the payment of debts, and they have
governed and controlled marriage conditions. By subtle enforcement of
custom having the power of laws, they have governed the community in its
vital relations, and perfected the system by which the poorest man shall
make his living and by which the richest man shall make his fortune.
Recently, I was in Lancaster, Penn., and passing through a market I was
told by a resident that all the truck farming of the market for that
city had come into the hands of the Amish, and my friend added, "If you
go at an early hour to buy, and ask the price of certain vegetables, you
will probably be told, 'We do not know the price yet; we will have to
wait until all the farmers come in.'" That is, after two hundred and
more years of living as farmers in this section of Pennsylvania, these
sectarians maintain their community life, co-operate in the monopolizing
of an industry, and in fixing the price of the monopolized product in
the markets of a Pennsylvania city.
This survey of community-building peoples in America may throw light
upon the recommendations of Sir Horace Plunkett for the organization of
country life upon an economic basis. The present writer heartily agrees
with him that the center of the community must be economic. He says that
"Better business must come first" in constructive policies for American
country life, but "by failing to combine, American and British farmers
persistently disobey an accepted law."
Social division is the impending danger which threatens the future of
the American community in the country. For if the analysis of
agricultural success in this chapter is correct, then the farmer is
exceedingly dependent upon his neighbor, and the permanence of rural
populations depends upon the social unity of the farmers in the
community. The highest expression of this social unity is in the
farmer's religion. Worship thus becomes a symbol of agricultural
prosperity. The writers and the orators have then truly spoken who
symbolized the beauty of rural life in the church steeple. The farmer
himself seems to recognize, in the church spire rising above the roofs
of the hamlet, the symbol of prosperous and satisfactory life in the
country.
As the tillers of the soil come to the necessity of co-operation in the
new order of life in the country, as the old isolation passes away and
the modern farmer comes to recognize his necessary dependence upon other
farmers in the community, a common place of worship will become
necessary to the community. One church will of necessity express the
life of the community and the periodic meeting of all the people in one
house of worship will be the highest and most essential symbol of the
feeling and the thought and the aspirations of that community after
true prosperity and permanence.
The purpose of this chapter has been to present the general
characteristics of the most exceptional communities in the country.
These are Mormon, Scotch Presbyterian and Pennsylvania German. By their
very names they indicate religious organization of the community and
"birthright membership" associations. They are grouped under the one
principle, that in them the religious organization is an expression of
their social economy. Their social and economic life is under the
domination of their religion.
These farmers are organized in the interest of agriculture. The
resultant social life constitutes a most intense organization in which
voluntary and conscious combination matures in instinctive union
embodied in blood relationship, neighborliness and economic union. These
populations show the correspondence between economic and religious
austerity. Thrift takes the form of dogmatic repression and finally
their organization and their relationship express themselves in
organized efforts for the well-being of the community. They deliberately
as well as instinctively co-operate.
It is the writer's belief that these exceptional communities exhibit the
principles on which American life must be organized, if the farmer is to
be a success, if his schools are to progress, his churches to be
maintained, and if the country community is to be a good place to live
in. None of these populations can be imitated. It would be impossible
for a community to take over their modes any more than it could imbibe
their motives. The study of them throws light upon the problem of
country life in America. Above all things it illustrates the especial
union of the country church with the social economy of the farmer and
his household. It shows that the life of country people is co-operative,
that it is undermined by division and disunion and that in the open
country where man is least seen his society is most evident. The
dependence of each man upon his neighbor is increased in modern times by
the thinning out of the rural population and the increased economic
burden laid upon the farmer.
Finally, the exceptional populations present an exceptional victory over
economic and natural forces. They abolish poverty within their own
bounds. Every one of the communities just described turns the power of
its common organization upon the problem of maintaining the lower margin
of the community. They who are in danger of falling behind are sustained
and carried on. None in these communities is permitted to fall into
pauperism. The workingman without capital, whether he be in their
meetings or only employed on their farms, is kept from want. The widow
with her little house and one cow is insured against the loss of any
feature of her small property. This seems to me to be the greatest
triumph of these communities. It is the test, I am convinced, of their
organizations and of their success. In this they demonstrate one of the
greatest possibilities of country life. They show that in the open
country it is possible for men to live without the suffering and
degradation of poverty.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 17: History of American Presbyterianism, by R. E. Thompson.]
[Footnote 18: An exception to this statement must be noted, in the
Scotch settlements in Canada and Nova Scotia.]
[Footnote 19: Professor John L. Gillin, in American Journal of
Sociology, March, 1911.]
[Footnote 20: Quaker Hill, by Warren H. Wilson.]
VI
GETTING A LIVING
The core of a community must be economic. The main business of life is
to get a living.[21] The reason for existence of any community is found
in the living which it supplies its residents. Men are attracted to a
community by the increases in their living furnished by that community.
The first element in the getting of a living is the securing of daily
bread, shelter, clothing and the satisfaction of physical needs. It is a
mistake to think of the community as beginning in religious
institutions--narrowly understood--or in social gatherings or in
educational service. The initial human experience is the finding of
food.
But the getting of a living is a long process. A living is more than
bread, and a roof and a coat. In quest of a living men go from the
country to the town and from the town to the city. They migrate from the
small city to the large. In each of these moves they secure a further
element in their living. Each of these communities is characterized by
the increase which it contributes to the living of its citizens, but in
every community the initial experience is the securing of daily bread,
shelter, clothing and material economic gains. Whatever is done,
therefore, for the community in a service to all the people must have
initial concern with the purely economic welfare of the people.
Sir Horace Plunkett's book, "The Rural Life Problem of the United
States," develops this principle very clearly. He shows that in the
Country Life Movement in Ireland it was necessary to go into the very
heart of the people's aspirations, and organize their economic needs.
It is necessary to understand the word "economic" if one would read
these pages aright. Economic matters are not those of mere money. The
word has a greater meaning than has the word finance. It connotes
poverty as truly as wealth, and is greater than both. The economic
motive animates men in the quest of those vital satisfactions which the
individual craves, and the social group requires. Professor John Bates
Clark has somewhere described this motive as the desire to preserve the
present status, with slight improvement, for oneself and one's children
after him; the desire to live on the same economic standard in one's own
generation; and to be reasonably assured of the same security for one's
children. This is not the desire to get rich, though in individual cases
it is changed into a desire for wealth. But it is a far more general,
indeed a universal aspiration, which inspires most of the work of the
world. Industry is based on it. Civilization is propelled by it. It is
the desire to get a living and the quest of a living.
I believe that this economic motive is religious. It is the quest of
what a man has not, but feels to be his. It engages his utmost efforts.
It is labor for his wife and children and for all his group fellows, and
therefore is involved in his holiest, most self-forgetting feelings. It
takes him back to his parents and reminds him constantly of his
ancestors. He forms his ideas of justice in his economic experiences.
His ultimate conviction as to the goodness or the badness of the world
are the outgrowth of his experience in getting a living. Therefore his
economic life is his wrestle with nature and with society. It generates
in him all the religion he has.
I suppose it was for this reason that Jesus said "I am come that they
may have life, and that they may have it abundantly." Probably his
meaning was economic, in part, in the saying, "Man shall not live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."
The quest of a living is a satisfaction of successive economic wants, of
which bread is but the first. Every truth that mankind knows involves
men in an economic want. Education is one of the most general wants. It
comes in the series somewhat later than bread. The love of music is an
economic want, which comes generally later than education. But both are
a part of a living. I believe that the quest of education and the love
of music are religious, just as much as the desire for daily bread. One
might enumerate the whole series of economic wants, to satisfy which is
to live, but religion is the total of the reflections, and the complex
of customs which result from the lifelong quest for a living among
common folk. At its highest it is expressed by St. Augustine, "O God,
thou hast made us for thyself, and our souls are not at rest until we
find ourselves in thee." Bread is the first economic want, and God is
the greatest and the last.
Economic wants among common folk are usually the source of religious
feeling. Few people desire to be rich; a lesser number strive to get
wealth; and very few attain a fortune. The most of men seek and get a
living. The best of men, and the most religious, are those whose
economic experience brings them a series of satisfactions, beginning
with bread, clothing, shelter, education in the essentials, music and a
little aesthetic culture, and gradually extending into higher forms of
human enjoyment. The simplest religious craving is for economic
assurance of supply. "The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want," is on
the most thumbed page of the Bible. The play of these economic
aspirations among poor people results in all the simpler and most
general religious feelings. With the rise of the aspirations of the
individual, and the ideals of the group, toward higher satisfactions,
the religious experiences should become nobler, more refined. The
penniless college student who prays for an education should be a nobler
worshipper than the fisherman who asks his mud-divinity for a good
catch. The group of Oberammergau players who present the Passion Play, a
highly complex satisfaction of wants, should be nobler believers and
worshippers than herdsmen who out on the hills pray for the increase of
their flocks and for a better price for wool.
Communities differ from one another according to the living which they
supply, or the wants which they satisfy. Modern men will not live in a
community that does not satisfy a pretty long series of wants. For
instance, a graduate of the American common schools will desire bread,
clothing, shelter--all of comfortable quality--and education for his
children better than his own, musical enjoyment, aesthetic culture, the
possession of some books, access to many magazines and the reading of a
daily paper; and varied opportunities for the exercise of the play
spirit. The country community satisfies, in most of the United States,
only the first of these. It is a place for securing food, clothing and
shelter of a comfortable sort. Country people have in the past ten years
secured also a better supply of reading matter. Almost all the rest of
the series is lacking. The reason for the rural exodus is in the most of
cases the quest of education and of music, the craving for aesthetic
culture, and the desire for recreation. Country towns and small cities
therefore have come to be centers of education, of amusement and of
"culture." They are the first step upward on the series of economic
satisfaction. Men who have made some money on the farm "move into town,"
for the satisfaction of the later wants in the series.
None of these wants is itself sinful, for all of them make up life. They
are the steps on the way from bread to God. The business of the teacher
and preacher of religion is to know the wants of his people: study those
which are satisfied in his community, and so to build the community that
for most of its people and for the most desirable people, all the vital
necessities of life shall be satisfied, in the community in which the
desire for bread is satisfied. The problem of amusement exhibits these
principles clearly. Farming is austere, and few farming communities have
recreation adequate to the demand of the young people and the working
people who live on the farms. Agriculture is becoming more systematic
and more exacting in its demands: and systematic work creates a demand
for organized play. As this demand is not satisfied in the
country--indeed it is less generally satisfied now than in former
times--the youth and workingman from farming communities go to the towns
and larger villages for amusement. These centers of population have a
disproportionate burden therefore of cheap vaudeville shows, saloons,
professional baseball games, and moving-pictures.
These amusements are, to a degree, abnormal in character because those
who enjoy them are away from their home community, and are suffering a
reaction from pent-up desires. Just as the lumberman or cowboy or sailor
when he comes to town "tears loose and paints the town red," so, in a
milder degree, the farmer's son or hired man, because he has at home no
recreations supplied by his church or school, patronizes in the town or
small city a cheaper and nastier theatre than one would expect to find
either in that town, or in his home community. The remedy is to make the
country community adequate to the wants of those who live there. The
church should promote recreation. The public school should supply
entertainment of a high standard, both to satisfy the play instinct and
to elevate the youth's ideals of amusement. The community which works
should be dependent on no other community for play.
Common-school education is a function which country communities have
surrendered to the centers of population. The one-room country school
has long been inadequate; but the farmer has not improved it, preferring
to rely upon the town schools to which he will remove his family after
he has made enough money on the farm. I am told that about Crete,
Nebraska, a recent census revealed that half the normal child population
is missing from the country districts; and double the normal child
population is found in Crete. The quest of adequate schooling explains
the condition, which speaks ill for the country community of Nebraska.
In all these cases religious service consists in completing the
community. The supply of wants, which are widely and keenly felt, is a
religious act. This has been the reason for the success of the Du Page
Presbyterian Church in Illinois.[22] The minister, Mr. McNutt, in a
religious spirit so well supplied the recreative life needed in the
community, that the community has been made whole. Just as Jesus made
sick or maimed men whole, as a religious act, so the community builder
who supplies to working farmers something besides labor on the land, is
making the community whole.
The perfecting of the common school system in McNabb, by Mr. John Swaney
and other Friends, and in Rock Creek by Mr. R. E. Bone and other
Presbyterians, was a religious act for their communities in Illinois.
The farmers who have money can move to the town, but to complete the
country community is to satisfy the economic wants of the poor. The
wants of the poor are always of religious value.
Moreover, the satisfaction of all wants in the community itself is a
moral gain. If individuals live this life in the bounds to which their
group and family associations are confined, the steadying influence of
society is at its greatest. Jacob Riis[23] noted among immigrants the
working of a lower sense of obligation due to absence from accustomed
home associations. Communities are compacted of the strongest moral
bonds. If churches would make men righteous they cannot do better than
to complete the community, especially in the country, as a place to live
in: making it a place for education as well as profit: of play as well
as work, of worship as well as of material comfort.
Unfortunately churches in the country are too often recruiting stations
for the cities and colleges. The ministers are respectable pullers-in
for the city show. Nothing rejoices them so much as to help their young
men and women find a position in the city; unless it be to have a bright
lad or girl go off to college. When a country minister was reminded that
all these departures weakened the country community, and that very few
of them benefitted the lad or girl who goes to the city, he replied "you
cannot blame them; there is nothing here to keep them."
"The rural exodus" has had its Moses in the rural college student, its
Aaron in the country minister, and its Miriam in the country school
teacher. These three have led a generation out of the country to perish
in the wilderness. For only a pitiful few of those who leave the country
come to prominence in the city. The most gain but a poor living there,
and very many go to ruin. The church should be the savior of the
community, as her Master is of the soul.
It seems to me that this is done in a church in Ottumwa, Iowa, of which
Dr. W. H. Hormell is minister. It is in a stock-yards district, and the
daily occupation of many of the members is unclean, of some revolting.
But the church is a dynamo of spiritual forces. It supplies the
experiences most opposite to those of the slaughter-house. A half-dozen
chapels in surrounding neighborhoods, most of them in the country, are
outposts of the church, for each of which a superintendent is
responsible: and thus a man who is an underling at the slaughter-house
is a leader in the quest of eternal life. The whole company of workers
with the pastor, constitute a spiritual cabinet of the district. It is
not surprising that this church fascinates men. The minister cannot be
persuaded away, and a like devotion pervades his group of workers. The
intensity of the industrial labor is matched by the intensity of Bible
study, prayer and evangelism. The degradation and repulsion of the
leading industry of the place are equalled by the unworldly nobility and
optimism of the leading church. This church does not attempt to mend the
community--which might be found impossible--but only to serve the
community by supplying the satisfaction for spiritual wants.
According to the law of diminishing returns, the first satisfactions of
any want have infinite value. What does this mean but that they have
religious value? The first drink of water to a famished man calls forth
a fervent "Thank, God." The first book printed is a Bible. The first
landing on American soil was a solemn religious occasion--and still is
for the immigrant. So the first gains of money are of religious value to
the poor. The first hundred dollars to a mechanic's family is invested
in a dozen benefits. The first thousand dollars which a working farmer
saves go into a home, a piano or books, or an education for a child. It
is all moral and spiritual good. Later thousands have diminishing moral
and spiritual values. Most of the churches and homes in America were
paid for out of the tithes of men and women who owned at the time a
margin of less than a thousand dollars.
This is the reason for the religious character of economic life. The
most of people spend their lives with less than a thousand dollars. They
are poor, and money does them good, not harm. They need to know how to
use it. But the getting of their living is a process prolific in
religious feeling, because economic matters have to them the infinite
value of first satisfactions of all the simplest wants of life.
The salvation of the community will be accomplished in satisfying the
higher wants of those whose lower wants are satisfied. For those who
"have made money" supply schools; for those who work supply recreation;
for the sick hospitals; for the invalid build sanitariums; and for all
men supply social life, the greatest need of human life on earth. For
those who are thus united to the community, and to one another in the
intricate network of associations, the opportunity of worship together,
and of sharing common spiritual interests becomes the highest economic
want.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 21: "I come that they may have life, and may have it
abundantly."--Jesus, in John 10:10.]
[Footnote 22: "Modern Methods in the Country Church," by Matthew Brown
McNutt.]
[Footnote 23: "The Making of an American," by Jacob Riis.]
VII
THE COMMUNITY
The country community is defined by the team haul. People in the country
think of the community as that territory, with its people, which lies
within the team haul of a given center. Very often at this center is a
church, a school and a store, though not always, but always the country
community has a character of its own.[24] Social customs do not proceed
farther than the team haul. Imitation, which is an accepted mode of
social organization, does not go any farther in the country than the
customary drive with a horse and wagon. The influence of leading rural
personalities does not extend indefinitely in the country, but
disappears at the boundary of the next community. Intimate knowledge of
personalities is confined to the community and does not pass beyond the
team haul radius. Within this radius all the affairs or any individual
are known in minute detail; nobody hopes to live a life apart from the
knowledge of his neighbors; but beyond the community, so defined, this
knowledge quickly disappears.
Men's lives are housed and their reputations are encircled by the
boundary of the team haul.
The reason for this is economic and social. The life of the countryman
is lived within the round of barter and of marketing his products. The
team haul which defines the community is the radius within which men buy
and sell. It is also the radius within which a young man becomes
acquainted with the woman he is to marry. It is the radius of social
intercourse. Within this radius of the team haul families are accustomed
to visit with ten times the frequency with which they pass outside this
radius. Indeed, for most of them, one might say that social intercourse
is a hundred times as frequent within the team haul as without it.
The average man would define the community as "the place where we live."
This definition contains every essential element, locality, personal and
social relations, and vital experiences. The community is that complex
of economic and social processes in which individuals find the
satisfactions not supplied in their homes. The community is the larger
social whole outside the household; a population complete in itself for
the needs of its residents from birth to death. It is a man's home town.
This conception of the community as a vital common possession explains
the relation of religious, educational, ethical, economic institutions
to one another. The community is the clearing-house of all these
influences. It is the medium by which they exchange with one another,
in the interest of human life. The perfection of this exchange and the
abundance of communal influences makes the community good and desirable,
or poor and undesirable.
Sometimes one says that the community is "a good place to live in." When
it is ample for the needs of individual lives men move into it, and the
average man finds there a contented and satisfied life. The decay of the
community is indicated by the departure of individuals and of families
in quest of a better centre for the supply of vital human needs. Some go
to make more money elsewhere, some depart for educational advantages and
some move away because social life is lacking or religious privileges
are not suitable. But these four vital essentials, economic, ethical,
educational and religious, make up the elements in the community's
service to the individual.
The community is sometimes corrupted by vicious principles in its
construction; and then its members are in proportion defective. It
produces in excessive degree idiots, blind, deformed, neurotic, insane
or criminal individuals.
The community, thus defined, is normally furnished with certain
institutions essential to the life of the people. In earlier days the
community was sufficient unto itself. Very little was imported.
Everything for use in the community was raised therein and manufactured
in the households. A system of exchange gradually was effected through
the country store. The country store of 1770 in Duchess County, New
York, had an amazing relation to a wide population. The radius of the
life dependent upon it was the same as the radius around the Quaker
Meeting, beside which this store was placed, and all the goods used in
the community with few exceptions were produced and manufactured in this
radius of the team haul of ten miles.[25]
Nowadays the country community has normally a store, a blacksmith shop,
a church and a school. In the recent past certain classes of peddlers
regularly visited the country community, though their place in the rural
economy is diminishing. The country store in many communities is already
closed and its maintenance is surrounded with increasing difficulty. So
long, however, as the horse drawn vehicle is the type of transportation
in the country, the elements of the country community must remain
substantially the same.[26]
The economic life of the community is necessarily a part of the general
economic life of the population as a whole. The world economy has in the
past hundred years, with the perfection of the means of transportation,
taken the place of the communal economy. In 1810 every country community
was obliged to manufacture its own raw products so far as possible
within its own limits. In 1910 it was no longer profitable for even a
country community to do so. The result is that the economic life of the
community is usually expressed in a specified industry to which the
whole community is primarily devoted. If it be a rural community this
organization takes the form of a "money crop." In the corn belt there
are other products raised from the soil besides corn, but the world
economy assigns to that fertile section the producing of corn as the
most profitable and the simplest task. In the coal region it tends to
the highest efficiency for the labor of the region to be concentrated
upon the supply of this fuel, although in addition the surface of the
soil may be cultivated and in the larger population centers other
industries are coming in to exploit the superfluous labor. None of these
competes with the primacy of the coal industry, which the world economy
assigns to that community.
It is essential that in every community there should be one or more
industries by which men may live. It tends to the highest well-being of
the community, that is, to its possession of a maximum of vital
attraction for individuals, that this industry should supply a variety
of sources of income; that is, wages, profits and interest. If the
community can retain in its own bounds the owners of its industries, at
least in some numbers, and the capitalists whose wealth is invested in
these industries, it is of great service. If it can make life
attractive for wage-earners in these industries, the completeness of
that community has its testimonial in this variety and wealth of
attraction. The weakness of many American communities is shown in their
inability to retain within their bounds the owners of the businesses and
the employers of labor. The ideal character of some communities in
Massachusetts is due to the fact that in the same streets there daily
meet capitalists, superintendents, foremen and wage-earners who are
alike interested in the local industries.
This power of the community to attract and hold individual lives,
supplying them with the vital necessities for which the individual
craves, is dependent in America upon educational institutions more than
upon any other factor. The French philosopher Desmoulin has said that
the Anglo-Saxon supremacy is due to the Anglo-Saxon love of the land and
of education. The American represents these two passions, and of the two
the love of education is at present, the stronger. The community which
is weak in its schools will not hold its people. The generation who at
present are the largest owners of American wealth are eager for
educational advantage: and the incoming stream of immigration promises
that in the days to come this craving for education will not diminish,
but will increase.
The country community has been peculiarly weak in its educational
facilities, by a strange dullness and inertia due to the economic
prostration of the farming industry. For the two decades following 1880
the country schools have failed to keep pace with the city schools.
Prof. Foght says, "While the public attention has been centered on work
and plans for the improvement of the city schools a great factor for or
against the public weal has been sadly neglected. This is the rural
school. One-half of our entire school population attend the rural
schools, which are still in the formative stage. The country youth is
entitled to just as thorough a preparation for thoughtful and
intelligent membership in the body politic as is the city youth. The
State, if it is wise, will not discriminate in favor of the one as
against the other, but will adjust its bounties in a manner equitable to
the needs of both. Heretofore the rural schools have received very
little attention from organized educational authority."[27]
The effect of this neglect of the country school in the face of the
constructive statesmanship which has led in perfecting the city school
is seen in the exodus from the country community of very large numbers
of the most successful farmers. Evidences are abundant that this exodus
from the country community is primarily a quest of educational
advantage. Not in every case would the departing family confess that
they were seeking better schools: but it is probable that the majority
of them while giving a variety of primary reasons for moving would
assign the desire for education as the uniform secondary reason for
departing from the country community.
It is impossible for the country church to retain its best ministers.
Many reasons enter into this, but always at the top of the list is the
desire for better educational opportunities for the ministers' children.
The advice has become proverbial in theological seminaries, "Go to the
country for five years." It is said that in New England there are three
classes of country ministers and the first of them is the bright young
man who will not long be in the country.
The ethical, sometimes called the social factor in the community's life,
is no less essential. Organized work requires organized recreation.
Every community which has a systematic economy by which its residents
get their living is found to have a systematic though usually informal
and unrecognized provision for recreation. Somewhere in the bounds of
every working town in America is a playground. It is not the result of
"the playground movement," but of the play necessity in human nature.
The open lots where the town is not built up, the railroad yard, the
yard of a factory or the town common are used by common consent by the
young people and the working-people of the town as a playground.
The departure of many persons from country communities is due to the
lack of social life: and the fascination of the city for bright and
energetic young men and women is due to the variety of recreation and
interest which it provides to those who expect to work and are willing
to work. Regular work means regular play. This fact cannot be too well
learned by those who study the religious and moral life of modern men.
The need of play is as real as the need of food or of sleep.
This recreational life is highly ethical. The craving of the young and
of working-people for common places of recreation is a normal craving
due to the development of conscience as well as to weariness of body.
The exactions of modern labor create a craving for free and voluntary
movement. Those who are hired to work, and those who if they are
employers are bound to the routine of the desk or of the bench, seek to
breathe deeply the air of happy and self-expressive action. The result
is that play, especially team work, is highly moral. It is not only
personal and self-expressive, but it involves co-operation,
self-surrender, obedience and the correlation of one's own life with
other lives in a glorious complex of experiences, unexampled elsewhere
in modern life for their ethical value in developing adolescent minds in
the common humanities and moralities. The playground is an essential
field in the preparation of good citizens and it is not to be wondered
at that in country communities, where all provision of recreation is
difficult, and no public provision of playgrounds is thought of by those
in authority, that young people and working people, indeed all classes
of the population, tend to move away.
The religious attraction of the community has just as real a value for
the satisfaction of individual life as the economic or ethical or the
educational. "Mankind is incurably religious," and the life from birth
to death cannot be complete in average cases without religious
experience. Indeed the conscious testimony of men to the community's
religious value for them is greater than any of the others. Religious
experience is indeed a form of community conscience. To many men the
church and the community are one. We cannot within our definition grant
this; but the testimony to the religious character of the country
community is a classic in American thought. The early days of every
community are hopeful and optimistic. The tendency has been therefore
for each religious communion to establish its own church. These early
Protestant churches were expressions of the community sense on behalf of
these people. The average American can best think of the community in
terms of a church and a school. For building up the community,
therefore, the maintenance of religious institutions is essential.
We are concerned in these chapters most of all with the American
community in the country. Not because it is more important, but because
it is easier to understand and affords a better model for interpreting
other communities more complex and highly organized. In it one may see
the processes which affect the town and city communities; shifting of
population, economic changes, educational improvement or retrogression
and the processes of social life which express themselves in moral
conditions. The community is the field in which may be observed the
prosperity of the people as a whole. It is the local exhibit in which
the average man shows what has come to pass throughout the commonwealth
as a whole.
American rural communities have been under the influence of swift and
sudden changes during the years of railroad development. This is
exhibited in the country community very clearly. There almost all the
causes which are at work in the city are seen and their operation is
easier to observe and to measure than in a city community. It is the
general impression that the country community has suffered greatly
though the loss of population. This is probably due to the diminishing
agricultural activity of the country. Thirty-four counties in Ohio are
producing less than the same counties were producing before the Civil
War. It is natural that the population of these counties should be on
the whole smaller than at that time. But it is more probable that the
social, educational and moral life of the people of these counties who
stayed in the country is slacker and less vigorous than in 1860.
Sometimes the population of a community remains stationary but the
economic weakness expresses itself in a retarded social, ethical and
religious life.
There is high authority for the statement that the sifting of the
country community in recent years has on the whole improved it. Wilbert
L. Anderson says, "If this emigration of the best were the whole story,
it would be impossible to refute the charge of degeneracy. There is,
however, another aspect of the matter. The industrial revolution has put
a pressure upon rural life that is more important even than the
attraction of cities. That pressure has aggravated the severity of the
struggle for existence, and this grinding of the mill of evolution has
crushed the weaker strata of the population. Among those who have gone
are laborers and their families, the owners and occupants of the poorest
lands--the famous abandoned farms, and the weaklings and dependents.
Many of these have swollen the crowds of the factory towns; others have
supplied unskilled labor to the cities; in not a few cases they have
gone to their destruction in the slums, where residues of decadent folk
finally disappear. The human material that was most susceptible to
alcohol has gone into the mills of the gods. When all is summed up, the
clearance at the bottom is not less significant than the loss at the top
of the social scale. Natural selection works as effectually in toning up
the species by weeding out the worst as 'natural selection reversed'
works for degeneracy through the removal of the best. This purgation
has been overlooked; whether it offsets the injury in the highest
stratum is a fair question, but obviously no man is wise enough to
answer it. The opinion may be hazarded that when the two influences are
compounded, it will be found that the average child has moved but a
little way up or down the scale. This is a local question to which there
are as many answers as communities. The net result of these changes is a
gain in homogeneousness; in the country town the dream of equality is
nearer realization to-day than ever before."[28]
It is the writer's belief that, allowing for local variation, this
statement is the best generalization of the condition throughout the
country. The rural population has been specialized. The country
community is finding its own kind of people. It has not yet, through
suitable institutions, learned to cultivate its problems and to train
its own leaders. That is precisely what will be accomplished through the
building up of the country community with which we are here concerned.
But already the country population is homogeneous and is selected with a
view to fitness for the environment of the rural community. As the city
is breeding its own stock, who are possessed with the problem of city
life and devoted to the interests of the city, so the country in the
shifting of modern populations is coming to have its own kind of people;
among whom the problems of the country community are beginning to be
discussed and the interests of the country community are being provided
for by suitable organizations.
The building of communities, therefore, will provide the positive
agencies requisite for the needs of the present population in the
country. The purpose of those who serve the country population shall be
the construction of suitable institutions by which country life shall be
made worth while. These institutions must be economic, for the securing
of prosperity to country people, social institutions which shall build
up their moral character and life, educational institutions whereby the
problems of country life shall be understood in the light of all human
life, and religious institutions which shall crown the life of country
people with hope and animate the individual with the spirit of
self-sacrifice on behalf of all the people of the community and of the
world.
The church should be a community center. There may be other centers of
the community where other functions are assembled, but the church should
lift up her eyes to the horizon in which she lives and comprehend all
the people in her service and affection. This does not mean that they
shall all be members of that church. The community spirit is itself
growing. Frequently the country community has attained a unity which the
churches ignore. For the church to become a community center means that
it represents in itself the united life of the people. Whatever be
their common interest that interest dwells in the church.
In Hernando, Mississippi, the people are united. The interest of one is
the concern of all. Under the leadership of the families of old
land-owners the whole community responds to common impulses and is
organized under common ideals. No poor child of either a white or a
negro household is neglected or is overlooked. Yet in this community
churches have no federation and ministers have no regular means of
working together. A charity organization was recently formed in this
community as an organ by which the community should care for its poorer
members. This society was formed outside of the churches, no one of
which had the right to be a center for the community. It is true that
ministers and members of these churches were leaders in this community
enterprise, but the churches as organizations were not a part of it,
although its purposes are purely Christian.
Prof. Alva Agee insists that "The country church does not serve the
community's needs as the community sees those needs." His meaning is
that when a community enterprise is to be launched the promoter of it
finds it necessary in the country to avoid the churches, lest his
enterprise be entangled in their differences. He is embarrassed also by
their lack of a community spirit. Frequently the same persons who to the
church contribute no community spirit are in the community itself
leaders of common enterprises.
In contrast to these conditions the instance of Du Page Church at
Plainfield, Illinois, of which Rev. Matthew B. McNutt was recently the
minister, exhibits the power of a country church to make itself the
center of a whole community. This church, which in a year became famous
throughout the land, has earned its repute by ten years of devoted
service of its minister and the growing affection and union of its
people. The church serves so well the social needs of the community that
a social hall once popular has been closed and three granges in
succession have attempted to organize in the community and have failed.
Yet Du Page Church is passionately devotional and intensely missionary.
Its social life is but a legitimate expression of its community sense.
The minister and his people have had the power to see and to inspire a
common life among the people in the countryside.
This chapter has been intended as a definition of the country community.
Its radius is the team haul, because the horse has been the means of
transportation in the country. The community is the round of life in
which the individual in the country passes his days: it is his larger
home. The definition of this greater household of the country must be
flexible, but however it be defined, it is the characteristic unit of
social organization among country people. The map of the United States
outside the great cities is made up of little societies bordering
sharply upon one another, differing from one another socially and
religiously. These little societies are the proper fields in which the
life of the church and the school is lived. Of these small societies the
church and the school are the expressions. In church and school the
country community has its highest life.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 24: The author expresses his indebtedness for this definition
to Dr. Willet M. Hays of the Department of Agriculture at Washington.]
[Footnote 25: Quaker Hill, by Warren H. Wilson.]
[Footnote 26: Professor C. J. Galpin of University of Wisconsin has done
precise work of great value, in defining the country community, as it
centers in the village. See his pamphlet, "A Method of Making a Social
Survey of the Rural Community," a bulletin of the Agricultural
Experiment Station of the University of Wisconsin.]
[Footnote 27: "The American Rural School," by Harold W. Foght.]
[Footnote 28: "The Country Town," by Wilbert L. Anderson, D.D.]
VIII
THE MARGIN OF THE COMMUNITY
The change of ethical consciousness among church people in recent years
takes the form of a transference of interest from the individual to the
community. The literature of religious and ethical thought is full of
appeal to "serve the community." The working out of any religious or
ethical force in modern society is guided by the closely compacted and
highly organic character of present-day social life.
In the old times in America, which have so recently gone, men were of
one class; the community was homogeneous; universal acquaintance
prevailed.
The unit of value in American life until recent years was the successful
man, because we faced a continent unexplored. Unpossessed commercial
resources were before the people. The standard of the time of Horace
Greeley was the standard of individual success, of initial utility. The
town boasted of the man it had "turned out." The church measured its
value by the rich and benevolent farmer or merchant, and by the
individuals whose piety or literary success seemed to express the life
of the church. There was an opportunity for all, because crude
resources, numberless openings offered themselves to every one who had
character, industry and brains.
Within a decade the American people have become conscious that their
resources are numbered. The free lands of the West are assigned. The
tons of coal under the ground are estimated. The amount of timber, of
copper and of iron still unexploited is known, and public discussion is
centered upon the limits to the growth of the American population, and
the possibilities of more economical organization of life. We can no
longer waste as once we could. The problem is now a problem of economy.
Instead of the standards of a time of plenty we are confronted with
problems of bare subsistence.
In times of plenty, when resources are not yet exhausted, men's lives
diverge and the individual is the unit of thought and feeling. The
natural result of a time of plenty is the development and the endowment
of personality. But in times when a bare subsistence is the condition
with which many are confronted, men are drawn together and the community
becomes the unit of thought and feeling. Industry as it matures brings
men together. It becomes evident that they depend upon one another.
Men who in a time of plenty would seek an independent fortune, under
conditions of bare subsistence are contented to secure employment and to
become dependent upon others. The problems of subsistence open
opportunities for exploitation and the stronger become related to great
numbers of weaker members of the community. Thus men's lives are
intensified, and the conditions out of which thought and feeling arise
are social conditions rather than individual.
The country community under these circumstances rises into new
significance. In the early pioneer days the country community for a
similar reason was much in thought and feeling, because then men were
seeking a bare subsistence in the contest with nature. This
consciousness was lost as soon as the pioneer days were past and the
abundance of nature began to enrich mankind instead of antagonizing him.
Now, again, the country community has come into prominence because men
are confronted with a struggle to maintain an acceptable standard of
living.
In dealing with a social whole, to accomplish certain purposes one must
deal with it in social terms. Social service is not quantitative, but
qualitative. Ministry to a community is not uniformly applied to all the
members. In social service there is no such thing as equality of all the
population. The differing values of men in a social population are
determined, as other values are measured, by the working of the law of
diminishing returns.
Roughly stated, this law is that successive additions of any valued
thing bring ever diminished returns. The first quantity of anything is
of infinite value. For later increments the value is measurable, and
ever less with the increase. The application of this law in economics is
stated as follows by Professor John Bates Clark:
"Labor, as thus applied to land, is subject to a law of diminishing
returns. Put one man on a quarter section of land, containing prairie
and forest, and he will get a rich return. Two laborers on the same
ground will get less per man; three will get still less; and, if you
enlarge the force to ten, it may be that the last man will get wages
only."
"Modern studies of value, show that doses of consumer's goods, given in
a series to the same person have less and less utility per dose. The
final utility theory of value rests on the same principle as does the
theory of diminishing returns from agriculture; and this principle has a
far wider range of new applications."
"We have undertaken to generalize the law that is at the basis of the
theory of value. In reality, it is all-comprehensive. The first
generalization to be made consists in applying the law, not to single
articles, but to consumers' wealth in all its forms. The richer man
becomes, the less can his wealth do for him. Not only a series of goods
that are all alike, but a succession of units of wealth itself, with no
such limitation, on its forms, becomes less and less useful per unit.
Give to a man not coats, but 'dollars,' one after another, and the
utility of the last will still be less than that of any other. The
early dollars feed, clothe and shelter the man, but the last one finds
it hard to do anything for him."[29]
By this law successive deposits of immigrants and successive gains in
the American population are reducing the valuation of men for religious,
moral and educational use. The first man in any historic experience is
of infinite value. The first American, Columbus, will be famous forever,
but not because of any talents or enterprises of his. As a matter of
fact he blundered in discovering America and died ignorant of the feat
he had actually accomplished. But because he was the first white man on
a new continent he had infinite historical value. When the early
Europeans were increased to ten or to one thousand each of them entered
into fame, though men like John Smith were commonplace enough in their
performances. Their fame is measurable, but still great. When the number
of Americans was increased to eight millions everyone thought himself a
great citizen, the founder of a family and a potential millionaire.
Those were still the days of exceptional personality. The type of man in
those times was the landowner, the pioneer and the statesman. But now
there are ninety million Americans, all the valuable lands are assigned,
all the best positions are filled, every job is taken, and ten million
of the population are concerned about the problem of daily bread. These
ten million people are the marginal Americans. They are breadwinners,
and the breadwinner is the unit of value on whom the standard of
American social and religious life is measured. So far as there can be
an American type on whom policies in public life are measured, that type
is today the breadwinner. In the city the breadwinner is a working man
or an immigrant. In the country the marginal man is the tenant farmer;
or a working farmer, though he be the owner. The marginal man represents
the value of all men in the community.
The law of diminishing returns works in the factory for fixing the wages
in any scale which prevails throughout a level of pay. It is equally
efficient in leveling men in the community. The employer does not pay
the working man on any level of wages in accordance with the value of
the few brilliant, trusty or inventive men in that group, but he pays
each man just that wage which he must offer to the last man he hires.
The marginal man standardizes the wage. The religious values of men are
standardized not upon the brilliant or saintly or accomplished, not upon
the well-to-do members of the community, but upon the poor who are just
able to stand and maintain themselves in the life of that community.
The working of this law is not a matter of persuasion. It is the
inflexible condition with which religious and ethical institutions are
confronted. Churches should therefore estimate their policies by the
responses of the marginal people of the community. Religious standards
of value should be measured by final utility, not initial utility. The
complaint against the church today is reducible to this: that she
standardizes her ideals and her policies in accordance with the
prosperous and well-to-do. The eloquence and the character of her
ministers, the kind of music with which God is worshipped, the
comfortable pews, the carpets on the floor, are all of them unlike the
public hall which is supported by the dues of the poor. The taste
expressed in church matters is rather literary and aesthetic than
popular. The church which would appeal to the whole community must
standardize her work upon the poor man, and make her appeal to him.
This principle is not only scientifically correct, but it works out in
practise. A minister who came into a well organized country community,
where there were a few land-holders, many tenants and numbers of farm
lands, found that the only appeal by which the whole community could be
reached was an appeal directed to the marginal people in the community.
When he sought the tenant farmer, he secured with him the land-holder,
and when he went after the hired man on the farm, he secured the farmer
who employed him. When he gained the adherence of the boys and girls he
secured the support of their parents, and when he rendered service to
little children, he could safely rely upon the gratitude and loyalty of
their mothers and fathers.
This was the kind of work which Jesus did. He frankly made a selection
of the people to whom he should minister.[30] He knew no phrases about
all men being equal, and he made no profession of impartiality such as
today causes many ministers to loiter among the well-to-do, who care not
for them. Jesus said he had no time to spend with well people, because
he was sent to the sick. But the philosophy of his action was seen in
the fact that when he ministered to the sick he himself helped the well.
He "preached the gospel to the poor," but not because he had any
prejudice against the rich. By ministering to the poor he applied his
gospel to the margin of the community. That gospel has been of equal
value to the rich man, because the spiritual experiences of the poor are
the experience also of the rich. The modern minister who goes after rich
men specifically, or who goes after them with the same vigor with which
he seeks the poor, will receive but a grudging welcome. But if he
awakens the gratitude and support of the poor, he will find himself
sought by the rich, and sustained by their abundant gifts.
Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton, the English critic, has somewhere finely said
that the Master in his words to Simon Peter, "Thou art Peter, and upon
this rock I will build my church," clearly recognized that Peter was a
shuffler and a weakling and a coward and it was upon just such common
material that the church was founded. It was not to be an aristocratic
organization. Its foundations were not laid upon skill and genius in
human character, but upon the weaker and commonplace traits, which
universal mankind possesses.
So definite was the appeal of Jesus to the marginal people of his time,
that he has been twice criticized unjustly; once in his own time by the
Pharisees, and again in our time by the Socialists. The latter have
claimed that Jesus was "class conscious," that he was a partisan of the
poor, a proletarian radical. The unscientific character of Socialism is
displayed in this comment upon Jesus. His appeal was to the whole
community, as through Christian history his message has come uniformly
to men of all degrees, rich and poor, ignorant and learned, bad and
good. The religious genius of Jesus is shown in the fact that he
recognized what the Socialist does not, that to appeal to the whole
community a prophet must address his plea to the people on the margin of
the community. His measure of value must be final utility.
One may go at large into this tempting field in illustrations. The
artistic experience of mankind is abundant in illustration of it. There
is no beauty of the ocean save in its shores--the margin of the
boundless expanse. Literary descriptions of the experiences of human
love are made up of descriptions of the margins of love. Married life is
depicted in courtship, and the sentiments of affection are described in
scenes of parting and meeting, which are the margins of companionship.
This principle should be fundamental in all policies of reconstruction
of religious and ethical institutions. In the training of men for
religious service and for ethical leadership they should be accustomed
to think in terms of communal wholes, and this thinking will use as its
units of measure the characteristics of the marginal life. It is for
this reason that temperance reform in America has been so influential
within the past two decades. It is a communal form of ethics. It demands
that the community should act together in safeguarding the weaker
members of the community, the young men, and the working people. The old
temperance propaganda was individualistist. It recorded its results in
the number of persons who signed the pledge. Its results were almost as
gratifying if the pledges were signed by well-doing and orderly people
as if they were signed by drunkards. The modern temperance movement
draws its influence from its proposed effect upon the agricultural
laborer.
The theological seminary of the past has been a literary institution.
During the period of its development the typical Christian was the
bright and aspiring young man in a community of boundless resources. To
such a man books are the interpreters of life. But in the modern period
with the congested population and close social organization, human
fellowship is an experience of greater value to most men than books.
Since the time of the invention of printing successive quantities of
literature have been given to the world, and under the law of
diminishing returns literature has come to have for many very small
returns. At the time of the Protestant Reformation the value of books in
the hands of the common people was infinite. For several generations
along with the extension of universal education this infinite value of
books continued for the people on the margin of the educated world. But
nowadays everybody in American progressive communities can read and
write: and in a universally educated population we arrive at the final
utility of books in human use. Great masses of poor people and also many
people of means use books within narrow limits only. They do not buy
them, they do not read them, they do not think in literary terms. Yet
they have access to books and they turn from them with a clear sense of
intelligent preference for other human values. Books are to them but an
alphabet and social life is the story.
My own impression is that the life of the marginal man is social rather
than literary. His religion will be a social religion rather than a
biblical religion. The weakness of Protestantism is that it stubbornly
insists upon literary interpretation of God and upon a biblical
ministry, while the population around these Protestant churches
exemplifies the diminished value of literature for spiritual uses.
The religious and ethical service of the days to come must interpret
the social life of the people. The great mass of the people care as
little for wealth as they do for books. The same argument as to the
diminished returns of literature may be repeated to describe the
diminished returns of private property. The economic revolution since
feudal days has exhausted the values of private property in satisfying
human need. The time was when property had an infinite value for
expressing personality. In days to come private property will still have
this value for many individuals. But among common folks generally
private property does not seem to have boundless value for human
satisfaction. Working men as I have known them do not take pains to get
rich. They know the way to wealth by economy and accumulation, but they
do not take it. They have a vast preference for the social intercourse,
friendly interchanges and mutual dependence by which their life is
refreshed, strengthened and sustained. Ethical policies of the future
while using literature and private property as efficient implements must
interpret social life itself as a flowing spring of religion and
morality.
The training of religious and ethical leaders should be undertaken in
the theological seminary and in the university in such manner as to
standardize the influence of these institutions, by the life not of the
exceptional man, but of the common man. The influence of educated men
must be used to reconstruct churches and societies upon the standards
not of the wealthy, the learned, the genius and the well-to-do, but by
the experiences of the poor, the workingman and the immigrant. The
standard in all religious and ethical institutions which profess to
represent the community is today graded up to the professional and
exceptional. The reconstruction necessary is to grade down so that the
appeal shall be to the poor and struggling man whose condition is in
jeopardy, and whose status in the community is as yet undetermined.
Institutions which appeal to the community as a whole must standardize
their policy to the level of the margin of the community.
The reconstruction of the theological seminaries is necessary, if they
are to fit men for service in communities. They render now a service
which is so valuable that one cannot pass over them lightly. They train
the candidate for the ministry by a process which develops and engages
his piety. Other university courses either ignore his religious feeling,
or if they develop it, do not harness it to the task of social
improvement. The theological seminary lays the yoke of service upon the
neck of prayer. This alone justifies its existence as a servant of the
church in the community. However, the instruction in the seminary is
rigidly grouped around courses in dead languages; which are jealous of
instruction in a living tongue. The history of discarded doctrines and
of discredited teachers is minutely taught through months, to the
exclusion of courses upon modern, living people, whose religious
experience is rich and striking. The purpose of seminary instruction is
personal culture instead of efficiency. It is the theory of the teachers
wherein they disagree with all other professional teachers, that "We do
not make preachers: the Lord makes them." They try therefore to impart
culture and personal distinction.
The seminaries need first of all flexibility of courses. The whole
traditional schedule should be made elective. The demands of the time
would then have free course in the seminary, and would rearrange the
instruction according to actual present need. The cultivation of
practical piety should receive more attention. The social life of the
students, in close association with their professors and under religious
stimuli, should be made a more powerful force than it usually is, in
creating a common ideal of service to which the seminary should commit
itself. Above all, the seminary of theology should teach sociology and
economics, as a religious interpretation. Students should after a year's
class-room work be made to investigate and report upon actual
conditions, should be delegated to study social movements, report upon
them, and to lead in discussing them. They should be trained in the use
of statistics, in graphic display of conditions, and in the use of
public reports. In the senior year they should be employed definitely in
practical work for populations, under instructors. After graduation the
young minister should, more generally than now, be employed as an
assistant to an older minister, in a large organization.
The influence of such social training would itself reform seminary
instruction. Thrust into a present-day curriculum, social science is a
foreign and alien intruder; but its value would soon be demonstrated and
other courses would be made over in new harmony with it. If some courses
be dropped, even if whole chairs be abandoned, it is better than that
the whole theological seminary be abandoned by students--which is the
apparent fate hanging over certain seminaries! What has here been said
is true of the schools of theology in all denominations, and applies
alike to both the conservative and the liberal.
In conclusion, the writer believes that the church's future is with the
self-respecting poor. Jesus and nearly every leader of a great religious
movement was of the poor and labored with the poor. The sources of
religion are those named in the Beatitudes: poverty, meekness, sorrow,
hunger, ostracism; and those are all social experiences. The service of
the church should be to these; and in serving the marginal people, whose
life is composed of the Beatitudes, the church will serve all men.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 29: "The Distribution of Wealth," by John Bates Clark.]
[Footnote 30: Luke, 6:20 ff; 15:1 ff.]
IX
NEWCOMERS IN THE COMMUNITY
One general cause is bringing new people into the average country
community. The exploitation of land expresses the transition from the
period of the land farmer to that of the scientific farmer or
husbandman. The signs of this exploitation are the retirement of farmers
from the land, the incoming of new owners in some numbers and of tenant
farmers in a large degree, into the country community. The influence of
the absentee landlord begins to be felt in communities in which the
landowner was until 1890 the only type. In most of the older states
immigration from foreign lands has not greatly affected the country
community. In Wisconsin, Minnesota and other states of the Northwest
substantial sections of the community are invaded by people of sturdy
Germanic and Norse extraction. In New England the Poles, French,
Portuguese and some Jews are settling in the country. But throughout the
states of the Union as a whole the population, both the newcomers and
older stock, are American.
The dates of this exploitation of land are, generally, from 1890 onward.
Reference is made elsewhere to the description of this process in the
Middle West.[31]
Independent of these causes the same process has appeared in the South,
in Georgia, Mississippi and in West Tennessee, as well as other states.
In sections in which the values of land have not been doubled, as in
Illinois and in Indiana they have, the same exodus from the farm and
invasion of the country community by new people has taken place.
One cause of this exploitation of land is the shrinkage in size of the
older families. Everywhere the exploitation of land is the greatest
where the soil is the richest and the farmers the most prosperous. Even
in the exceptional populations such as the Scotch Presbyterians and
Pennsylvania Germans, this effect of agricultural prosperity is slowly
at work.
In Chester County, Pennsylvania, and in Washington County, where the
most substantial farmers in the country are found, the families in the
present generation are small. Many of the older stock have no children.
Families which have retained the title of their land for eight
generations are losing their hold upon the soil, by the fact that they
have none to inherit after them.
Another cause of this exploitation of land is the increasing number of
small farms in certain regions. This means that in certain sections the
farming population has a new element, for the holders of these small
farms are many of them new to the community.
The process, which is made clear by the census of 1910, is this. The
earlier retirement from the farms was by sale, the farmer taking money
instead of land. The second stage of retirement from the farm was
through absentee landlordism and the placing of tenants on the farm.
This process has come to an end in many sections of the Middle West,
with the return of the sons of the landlord to the family acres in the
country, so that there is a sort of rhythm in the flow of population
from the country into the town and backward to the land. In this process
there is no invasion by new people, except the temporary residence of
the tenant farmer in the country, and some of these have in the process
gained a footing by ownership of land. But this ebb and flow of
population out of the country community and back again has weakened and
strained the country church and school and has not yet begun to
strengthen them. There is every evidence that with a pleasant and
agreeable country life the country community can retain the best
elements of this population, which comes and goes. The country church
and school ought to take measures to retain the best of the country
population through these changes.
Through all these causes the presence of a large proportion of aliens in
the community who are American born, but locally unattached by birth or
ownership, has effected great changes in the country church, and other
community institutions. The State of Illinois, which has a tenant farmer
population of more than 50 per cent in its richest sections, has
suffered severely through the loss of many country churches. There is no
precise measure of this loss, but a sociological survey recently made in
Illinois indicates that in the past twenty years more than fifteen
hundred country churches have been abandoned in the State. This
statement must be accepted as approximate, but the number is likely to
be greater rather than less. This abandonment of country churches has
come in the same period in which the proportion of tenant farmers has
greatly increased. Reference is made elsewhere to a similar condition in
the State of Delaware, in which the churches of the old land-owners have
been abandoned and replaced at heavy expense with poorer churches built
by the incoming tenant farmers.
Everywhere in the United States this process has in some measure
affected the country. It does not much matter whether the proportion of
tenants is increasing or decreasing, the present effect is one of
instability. In New England where in the past ten years tenantry has
been diminished ten per cent, the country churches are weakened as
elsewhere. The churches have not yet had time to recover while the
population is in a state of change.
The old order in the country is crumbling. The church is an expression
of stability. The people on whom the church always depends for its
audiences, its enthusiasm and its largest accessions, are marginal
people, working men, adolescent youths and those who are coming to a
position in the community. The exodus of these from the country
community, or the incoming of persons in these classes into the country
community, has been unfavorable to the country church at the present
time.
It may be said at this point that a state of transition is for the time
being unfavorable to ethical and moral growth. Moral conditions are
sustained by custom, and where customs are in change, moral standards
must themselves be in transition. The country community is moral so far
as adhering to the standards of the past is concerned. But the
population themselves who have to do with the country are undergoing
extraordinary moral change, with incidental loss, and many of the
problems of the United States as a whole are made more acute by the
waste of the country community. Among these should be cited the
amusement question in the small town, the decadence of the theatre in
the cheaper vaudeville, the white slave traffic and the social disorders
peculiar to unskilled laborers, many of whom come from country
communities of the United States and Europe.
It must be remembered, too, that the rural free delivery and the
telephone have entered the country community in the past twenty years
and their effect has not yet been recorded. It has probably been in the
direction of chilling instead of warming the social life of the
country. The old acquaintance and the intimate social relations of the
country community have not been helped by the telephone: and along with
the presence of aliens in the community, one-fourth or one-half or
three-fourths of the population, the telephone has had the effect of
lowering the standards of intimacy and separating the households in the
country one from another. The rural free delivery has put country people
into the general world economy and for the time being has loosened the
bonds of community life.
In those states in which the trolley system has been extended into the
country, for instance Ohio and Indiana, the process of weakening the
country population has been hastened. Sunday becomes for country people
a day of visiting the town and in great numbers they gather at the
inter-urban stations. The city and town on Sunday is filled with
careless, hurrying groups of visitors, sight-seers and callers, who have
no such fixed interest as that to be expressed in church-going or in
substantial social processes. For the time being inter-urban trolley
lines have dissipated the life of the country communities.
The duty of the church in the country under these conditions can be
accomplished only under a widened horizon. The minister and the leaders
of the church must lift up their eyes. They need not be discouraged if
for the time being they accomplish little, for the period of
exploitation must come to an end normally with the exhaustion of its
forces, before the better day can come. But this period is one of
enlargement. The units of social life will be spaced farther apart. The
country community will advance as soldiers say, "in open order." This is
true for the family life, in which the father, the mother and the
children have greater freedom from one another; as well as in the
community, in which neighbors become less intimately dependent on one
another. The church must therefore preach the world idea. At this time
of transition the country church should undertake its foreign missionary
service. The great causes of the Kingdom which are world-wide should be
presented to country people when they are lifting up their eyes from
local confines to look at the world and the city and the nation. As the
daily paper comes into the farmer's household the farmer's church should
interpret the history of the time in missionary terms. The literature of
the great missionary agencies should be distributed in the farm
household. Wherever the catalogue of the big store in Chicago or New
York is found on the center table, beside it should be placed a modern
book expressive of missionary evangelism. As the mind of the countryman
develops to comprehend the world in his daily thought under the impetus
of a daily newspaper, his conscience and his religious experience should
be expanded correspondingly.
In a time of exploitation of land the country church should regenerate
its financial system. The system of barter passes away in the day of
speculation in farm land; and the country church which can find means to
endure the period of exploitation must put its financial system on a new
basis. The tenant farmer is crudely striving through problems of
scientific agriculture. He may, indeed, be a soil robber, but by his
waste of economic values he and other men are learning to conserve. The
financial system of the church should be placed at this time on a basis
of weekly contribution, for with the tenant farmer comes system, cash
payments, regular commercial processes. The business administration of
the church must be made to correspond.
The country minister and schoolteacher must therefore become prophets of
the intellect and of the spirit, in the new order. If they cannot
minister to the new intelligence of the farmer and his children, their
institutions will necessarily decay. The farmer who succeeds in the new
social economy of the country will not endure old sermons which were
appropriate in his father's time. The emphasis must not be placed on
tradition, but upon inductive study. The preacher must not feed the
people on special instances, but upon representative cases. The
intelligence of the new type of farmer will not be satisfied with
sensations and with the unusual; but he demands to be trained in
standards of the new day, when science, system, organization and world
economy are making their demands on him and his very soul is concerned
in his response to those demands.
The task of dealing with newcomers in the country community is
educational, financial and recreative. One should add that it is also
evangelistic, but I have in mind the possibility that these newcomers
may be Catholics with whom Protestant evangelism will not be successful.
It is possible also that they will be of another Protestant sect from
that of the reader of this chapter, so that to evangelize them would
mean proselyting. The writer believes very heartily in rural evangelism.
It is an essential process in building the country church. These
chapters are devoted primarily to the building of the country community
and in that process the securing of members for the country church is
preliminary only. Leaving, therefore, the question of rural evangelism
for treatment in another place, let us take up the educational treatment
of the newcomer in the country community.
The proper machinery for this education is the common school and the
Sunday school. As the common school is treated elsewhere, the use of the
Sunday school in organizing the rural population belongs here. Few
churches realize the power and value of Sunday-school training. I am
insisting that the life of country people is religious. The use of the
Sunday school is to train the young of the community in religion. All
country people accept the Bible as a holy book. They all believe in the
education of their children and in much greater numbers than they will
respond for a church service their children will respond to the work of
religious culture on Sunday at the church. The Sunday-school
organization is interdenominational. Its lessons and its methods are a
common heritage of the churches at the present time. The machinery is
perfect, but the Sunday-school leaders lack vision and they lack the
progressive spirit. If only the teachers and ministers realized the
value of the Sunday school and its acceptance with the people, there
would be needed no other machinery for building the country community.
The Sunday-school should be a close parallel to the day school. If the
day school in the community has any progressive features, the Sunday
school should use these and improve them. Between the two there should
exist the closest sympathy, not formal or definitely organized, but
actual and expressed in parallel lines of work. Where the day school is
graded, the Sunday school should accept the same grading, strongly
organizing all its classes. The pupils in the Sunday school should pass
by successive promotions from teacher to teacher and from grade to
grade.
If the day school in the country is unprogressive and is taught by a
succession of indifferent persons, the Sunday school should practise
under the guidance of religious leaders those principles of modern
pedagogy which should be used in the common schools. Graded lessons,
the organization of material and progressive development of religious
truth from the simpler to the more complex, should find their place in
every Sunday school. The opportunity for service to the whole community
thus offered through the Sunday school is excelled by none in the
country community.
The upper classes of the Sunday school should be organized. Young men
and women especially, who are in danger of finding the Sunday school
irksome because their intelligence has passed beyond its control, should
be organized in classes which on week days have a club or society
character. The Sunday school should use as an ally their tendency to
organization and should satisfy their social needs by giving them
regular and approved opportunities for meeting and for pleasure.
Another principle which the Sunday school can practise for the benefit
of the community is the centralization of religious teaching. Even if
the common schools are not centralized, the children for the Sunday
school should be brought to the church from outlying regions in hired
wagons every week. It is better that a large Sunday school be maintained
under efficient leadership than that a number of small schools with
indifferent teachers should be maintained in various school districts.
The larger body can have better leadership. It is more closely under the
supervision of the minister, who is generally the superior in education
of the laymen, and the social value of the meetings of the Sunday
school will be greater in the larger body. All the arguments which make
for the centralization of the day school have force for the
consolidation of Sunday schools in one large school.
The Sunday school offers a basis for church federation. In the community
it is frequently possible for Sunday schools to be united and for the
advantages of this common teaching to be made even greater because all
the children of the various churches are in one body. The best
leadership and the best teachers are thus secured and the community
spirit is cultivated through the young people and more loosely attached
members of the community.
The older classes of the Sunday school on a basis of study of the Bible
should be organized for practical ends. The adult Bible class can be
made to have all the influence of the grange in the country community.
The fathers and mothers of the community may meet throughout the week
socially. They may undertake together the study of the economic life of
the community. Lecturers from the agricultural college, representatives
of the Play Ground Movement, of the county work of the Y. M. C. A., of
historical societies interested in the community's past and other
representatives of national movements, may be welcomed and heard by this
organized class, the basis of which is religious education.
What I am urging may be accomplished by any church in some measure,
however divided the community may be. It is the business of the
individual church which has a vision of the community as a whole to act
as if it were a federation of churches. Frequently ministers are in
favor of church federation, as if that process were an end in itself.
The writer believes that the individual church can accomplish the ends
of federation if the union of churches can do so. The best means for
effecting federation of churches is to practise the program of
federation until it shall come about.
The community made up in a degree of new families and the community in
which the newcomers are young men and women, children of the residents,
are bound to educate these invaders of the community, whether they come
from without or whether they come by "birthright membership," in the
spirit of benevolence. The giving of money to public uses is one of the
cherished social forces of our time. The country community is just
entering into the day of cash. The period of barter is over. The farmer
therefore needs in his ethical and his religious training, to have
definite culture as a philanthropist. The future of the farm-hand in
America is still very hopeful. The tenant farmer expects to be an owner.
The farmer's son believes himself to have a future. These hopes from
earliest years should be disciplined by the practise of giving. For this
end the church is a rarely well fitted means. The financial system of
the church must be made democratic
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/30563