Speech or Document 9

THE FARMER; THE CORNER-STONE OF CIVILIZATION

RECENTLY an Indiana woman was peeling some potatoes, and in a hollow in one she found a note from the Southern farmer who had raised the potatoes running:

“I got 69 cents.  A bushel for these potatoes.  How much did you pay for them?"

She wrote back:
“I paid $4 per bushel."

The farmer sent her just one more letter.  It said:

“I got 69 cents.  for those potatoes.  It could not have cost more than 31 cents.  to carry them to you.  Who got the other $3? I am going to try to find out."

It is idle to say that when such an occurrence is typical — and it most certainly is to a large extent typical — there is no cause for uneasiness.  Something is wrong.  It may be wholly the fault of outsiders.  It may be at least partially the fault of the farmers and of those who eat the food the farmers raise.  The trouble may be so deep-rooted in our social system that extreme caution must be exercised in striving for betterment.  But one thing is certain.  The situation is not satisfactory and calls for a thoroughgoing investigation, with the determination to make whatever changes, including radical changes, are necessary in order once more to put on a healthy basis the oldest and most essential of all occupations, the occupation which is the foundation of all others, the occupation of the tiller of the soil, of the man who by his own labor raises the raw material of food and clothing, without which the whole fabric of the most gorgeous civilization will topple in a week.

We can not permanently shape our course right on any international issue unless we are sound on the domestic issues; and this farm movement is the fundamental social issue — the one issue which is even more basic than the relations of capitalist and workingman.  The farm industry can not stop; the world is never more than a year from starvation; this great war has immensely increased the cost of living without commensurately improving the condition of the men who produce the things on which we live.  Even in this country the situation has become grave.

The temporary causes of this' situation have produced such effect in our land only because they aggravated conditions due to fundamental causes which have long been at work.  These fundamental causes may all be included in one: the farmers' business in our country has remained almost unchanged during the century which has seen every other business change in profound and radical fashion.  He still works by methods belonging to the day of the stagecoach and the horse canal-boat, while every other brain or hand worker in the country has been obliged to shape his methods into more or less conformity to those required by an age of steam and electricity.

Our commercial, banking, manufacturing, and transportation systems have been built up with a rapidity never before approached.  We have accumulated wealth at an unheard of rate.  There has been grave injustice in the distribution of the wealth, our law-givers having erred both by unwisdom in leaving the matter alone, and at times by even greater unwisdom when they interfered with it.  But on the whole the growth and prosperity have been enormous; and yet we have allowed the basic industry of farming, the industry which underlies all economic life, to drift along haphazard, we have allowed the life of the dwellers in the open country to become more and more meager, and their methods of production and of marketing to remain so primitive that their soil was impoverished and their profits largely usurped by others.

In 1880, one farmer in four was a tenant; and at that time the tenant was still generally a young man to whom the position of tenant was merely an intermediate step between that of farm laborer and that of farm owner.  In 1910, over one farmer in three had become a tenant; and now-adays it becomes steadily more difficult to pass from the tenant to the owner stage.  If the process continues unchecked, half a century hence we shall have deliberately permitted ourselves to plunge into the situation which brought chaos in Ireland, and which in England resulted in the complete elimination of the old yeomanry, so that nearly nine-tenths of English farmers today are tenants and the consequent class division is most ominous for the future.  France and Germany are today distinctly better off than we are in this respect; and in New Zealand, where there is an excellent system of land distribution, only one-seventh of the farmers are tenants.

If the tendencies that have produced such a condition continue to work unchecked no prophetic power is needed to foretell disaster to the nation.  Therefore, the one hopeless attitude, in this as in recent international matters, is “watchful waiting," sitting still and doing nothing to prepare for or to avert disaster.  It is far better to try experiments, even when we are not certain how these experiments will turn out, or when we are certain that the proposed plan contains elements of folly as well as elements of wisdom.  Better “trial and error “than no trial at all.  And the service test, the test of actual experiment, is the only conclusive test.  It is only the attempt in actual practice to realize a realizable ideal that contains hope.  Mere writing and oratory and enunciation of theory, with no attempt to secure the service test, amount to nothing.

This applies to the tenancy problem.  It also applies to every other farming problem.  As regards each, let us test the plans for reform, so far as may be, by actual practice.

For many of these plans the several states offer themselves as natural laboratories, where experiments  n be tried when conditions and public opinion are right; and this although thepermanent remedies must ultimately, at least in major part, be national.  It is exceedingly interesting to watch such an experiment as that seemingly to be tried in North Dakota.  This is a farming State, where the farming is the predominant interest, and inasmuch as all reforms cost money, and as even advisable reforms become utterly disastrous if in spending money upon them we treat " the sky as the limit," and decline to consider the proportion between what the reform achieves and what it costs, it is well that the farmers themselves should pay a good proportion of the cost of reforms necessary to and peculiarly affecting themselves.  In North Dakota, in addition to matters like hail insurance, it is proposed that the State shall purchase and operate grain elevators, mills and terminals and other business instrumentalities of vital concern to farmers.  I most heartily commend the earnest effort the leaders in the movement have made actually to better conditions; and I say this although from the facts at my command I judge that most of the work which it is thus proposed to have done by the State could be done better by cooperative societies among the farmers themselves.  Present conditions should certainly be changed.  To keep them unchanged is to act in a spirit of mere Toryism.  From the North Dakota experiment, when put in actual practice, we can learn some things to follow and some things to avoid; and perhaps we can also learn to be wise in time, and, by sane determination to put in practice reforms that we are reasonably sure will have no bad effects, avoid the sad necessity of paying with our own skins for experiments which probably will have bad effects.

I greatly prefer to see the Government leave untouched whatever the corporations under Government supervision can do; and just as far as possible I want to see all the corporations made into cooperative associations.  But there are things so important that the Government must do them, if it is only through such exercise of collective power that they can be done.

Our object must be (1) to make the tenant farmer a landowner; (2) to eliminate as far as possible the conditions which produce the shifting, seasonal, tramp type of labor, and to give the farm laborer a permanent status, a career as a farmer, for which his school education shall fit him, and which shall open to him the chance of in the end earning the ownership in fee of his own farm; (3) to secure cooperation among the small landowners, so that their energies shall produce the best possible results; (4) by progressive taxation or in other fashion to break up and prevent the formation of great landed estates, especially in so far as they consist of unused agricultural land; (5) to make capital available for the farmers, and thereby put them more on an equality with other men engaged in business; (6) to care for the woman on the farm as much as for the man, and to eliminate the conditions which now so often tend to make her life one of gray and sterile drudgery; (7) to do this primarily through the farmer himself, but also, when necessary, by the use of the entire collective power of the people of the country; for the welfare of the farmer is the concern of all of us.