Causes of Agricultural Unrest

THE A TLANTIC MONTHLY:

A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and politics.

A TRAVELER following the path of La Salle across the plains of the Illinois to-day would be struck, even on the most superficial survey, by the signs of agricultural prosperity. Broad farms, substantial buildings, bursting cribs, fields drained with tile, and every evidence of good farming are visible. The original settlers, moreover, have won their fortunes, and retired to the neighboring towns to spend their years of rest. It is common to find men who have amassed, from farming, fortunes counted by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Iowa, also, is certainly to-day a successful farming community. And wherever a man of executive ability and training in farming has taken up agriculture upon a good soil, there comfort and prosperity are pretty sure to be found. But there is another side to the picture. A fire lies somewhere below all this Populistic smoke which has risen from the granger agitation and rolled ominously over the skies from Chicago and St. Louis during the past summer.

Behind the political evolutions of the parties which have marshaled themselves under the leadership of Mr. Bryan there have been some forces at work which it may be interesting to record. The fact that so many delusions could result in a kind of political unity, and could produce common political action, itself demands explanation. In truth, the earnestness of great groups of fanatical men in the Chicago convention has even a touch of pathos about it, the more that they are evidently sincere and honest. They represent, however, certain strata in our economic and social organization. Throughout the newer States we find a widely spread class of undereducated, brawny, earnest, but narrow minds. There is little pliability in their mental processes. Once the single-ideaed brain has been occupied by a theory, or craze, the gate to all other ideas is thereby closed. In a brain incapable of economic and judicial reasoning, the one idea now in possession engenders prejudice, and even, in an emotional nature, frenzy. This class of minds may not always have the same craze, but, in its undereducated way, it is sure to have one of some sort. The subject of the fanaticism may change in time, but with the fanaticism we must always reckon so long as the undereducated class exists and wields a large political power.

The honest but narrow mind is ever the prey of knaves. The cheat plies his trade among the untrained so long as the eternal-gullible maintains its seat in the human heart. The thriftless incapable purposely frames a scheme to make something out of nothing, which often appeals to the naïve honest as the cloud of fire by night guiding them out of the desert. Thus two general classes, both hoping to acquire riches by legerdemain, by tricks of legislation, come to work together for a common aim. The honesty of the one is the mask for the dishonesty of the other ; and they are stimulated, in the attempt to rub the lamp of fortune for the sake of obtaining sudden riches without the sweat of the brow, by the picture, familiar to us in the rapid development of a young country rich in varied resources, of men of their own undereducated kind who have stumbled upon great wealth. The man who for years has been eating his bacon over a deposit of petroleum, coal, copper, or gold, awakes some day to great wealth, puts on the fine linen of civilization, and stands as the possibility of what may at any moment come to every other one of his kind. Cupidity nudges the elbow of fanaticism. While this human quality is not confined to any particular part of our country, yet in the newer States there is an energetic restlessness in urging a peculiar nostrum to which the older part of the country is a stranger.

The narrow mind — like a popgun in which the last wad shoots out the first — honestly holds to its one idea, but this idea is driven out by any new agitation strong enough to force in another idea which may displace the old. The basis of the old greenback delusion, following the commercial crisis of 1873, was this same mental quality. The optimism of the Western spirit has created cities like Chicago, and it even built the palaces of the White City, but in feeble intellects this optimism is the spring to many harmful kinds of activity. In its expansive way it sees results before they have gone through the formality of taking place. The mere possibility of borrowing is itself almost the realization of brilliant dreams. The possession of a loan is a ladder to the pinnacle of life. The return of the loan to the lender and the way down the ladder again find no place in the imagination of the borrower.

Such is the background of my picture. We can see the characteristics out of which a certain kind of results will surely come. The greenback craze was the outcome of a depression following a long period of extraordinary inflation and speculation after the Civil War. When the bubble burst in 1873, business disasters were not confined to the farming class. Expansion of trade, inflated prices, airy ventures of all kinds collapsed, and brought down men of affairs in every occupation with pitiless impartiality. The farmer, having entered into engagements for large sums when all the world was booming with speculative schemes of development, suddenly found himself prone on the ground, with his flying-machine lying splintered and ruined beside him. But in this fate he found himself in company with men engaged in all branches of manufacture and trade. It is in such a soil, composed of the débris of speculation and overtrading, that a crop of weedy delusions grows. It is commonly known that the years succeeding a panic are the ones in which quack remedies for industrial distress find many gullible victims. Untrained in economic reasoning, inexperienced in industrial history, untaught in penetrating into the causes of commercial phenomena, the undereducated man is the prey to the first nostrum that happens to be offered him. His distress pinches. How easy to believe the dogmatic assertion that the cause of his distress is the “ scarcity of money ” ! Why not ? He knows precious little about the principles of money. Why should it not be that, as well as something else of which he knows equally little? It is all mysterious, anyway. He must believe the statements of the man who first gets his confidence. Therefore, in times of industrial depression we have always had an epidemic of crazes. We know that in many former depressions the remedies proposed have had nothing whatever to do with silver, which to-day appears as the sovereign cure. In 1874 it was a greenback wad in the popgun ; since then the silver wad has driven out the greenback wad. In both cases it was clear that industrial disaster was due to trading beyond all reason and judgment, and that the quantity of money did not determine the quantity of goods and property in existence.

Of course, the farmer who has overtraded, or expanded his operations beyond his means, in a time of commercial depression is affected just as any one else is in like conditions. After 1873 he probably found himself in goodly company, but the present difficulties seem to be limited to farming. It is quite certain that in the last few years special conditions have surrounded the farmer and placed him in a peculiar position, — conditions which have not been common to men in other industries. If a period of over-development, confined almost entirely to agricultural interests, has been followed by the inevitable reaction, we may expect to see all the evidences of distress in rural communities which follow in the wake of a general commercial crisis ; and we may expect to find also that nostrum-mongers have come to the fore, charming and deluding the honestly distressed farmer with the magic of their patent remedies. It boots nothing that the diagnosis is wrong or that the medicine is unfit; the mind of one idea, by its nature, is hospitable to the first-comer, and prejudice closes the door to the advice of the trained physician who arrives later.

In the genuine Populistic programme silver plays but an unimportant vôle. For political purposes, it is skillfully made the common basis of action, in this campaign, by different groups of persons. Yet it is less hungrily demanded than inconvertible paper, or the sub-treasury scheme, or the income tax, or greater freedom from the militia, by the mind of the true Populist. In short, the conditions of agriculture have permitted the growth of numerous crazes, of which silver is not even the tallest weed in the soil. Behind silver lies a whole thistle crop of ideas, with which we must eventually deal. We shall have to face various schemes of redistribution of property, even after the silver question has gone to its long home with the greenback. A craze is the inevitable manifestation of an idea strongly held by undereducated men. If it is not the greenback craze or the silver craze, it will be some other.

While understanding that vagaries are prolific in a season of financial distress, the essence of our inquiry is to discover the causes which have brought about this situation of hardship. To one who has watched the larger industrial movements of recent decades it is clear that very powerful currents have been set in motion, the force and direction of which may be unknown to the very persons who are unconsciously carried along on their surface. In this study, it may be possible, so to speak, to cast some sealed bottles into the currents, and thereby record their trend and force.

We are now witnessing in practical operation in the United States a difficult adjustment of the farming industry under an economic principle as old as Ricardo. If only for geographical reasons, the new-comers to an unsettled country originally plant themselves upon the soil most conveniently situated to harbors and rivers, irrespective of the fact that soil much richer and more fertile lies in the interior. The poorer soil accessible to transportation is, in fact, the richer soil to the settler, who is saved the sacrifices of location distant from the market. So long as water furnished the arteries of transportation and trade, settlements were placed upon seacoasts and rivers. Rich farming communities spread over the outlying districts adjacent to these settlements. The thin soil of New England once masqueraded in the guise of a prosperous farming district, but that is now a thing of the past. And when Mr. Whittier, in the pages of this magazine, mourned the decay of the farm and of rural life, and the departure of the ambitious boy to the town or city, he touched with song the hard facts of an economic revolution.

The same pitiless wave which has swept over Great Britain in recent decades, spreading confusion and disaster in English farming, reducing prices of farm products, shriveling English rentrolls, changing the character of agriculture in many districts, has spread its influence also over New England and the rest of the Eastern States, — a wave set in motion by the progress of the age, by the railway and the improved steamship. Its immediate effect was to bring the products of new, distant, and vastly richer farming-land into the same markets where the products of the old and poorer soil had been sold. In economic phrase, it was the insertion, into existing grades of cultivated land, of new grades of higher fertility. Consequently, if the required supply of food can now be produced more cheaply by the new and better soils, the old grades must go out of cultivation. It mattered not. in the inevitable onward sweep of this evolution of the fittest instrument of production, — bringing cheaper food to hungry legions, — that the owner of the old farm had attachments of heart and association to the old lanes, the old blue hills, and the old trees. The progress of the age was under it all, like a ploughshare upturning the nest of his youth.

The railway and the steamship have not yet ceased their iconoclastic operations. A few years ago, the varied expanses of middle New York and the broad valleys of the Susquehanna made up the flower of our farms and gave solid incomes to their owners. This state of things is now of the past. Farming is no longer profitable in these districts, because more fertile though distant lands have been brought within reach of markets. The richer wheat-land in the middle West, and of the prairies of Minnesota and Dakota, lay untouched until the railway opened up a cheaper transportation to the lakes and seaboard. The cause of the enforced agricultural readjustment in the United States was the progress of the age, represented mainly by the modern railway. The fall of railway rates to less than one cent per ton per mile, and the generally dubious condition of railway securities as investments, are glaring evidences of the pressure to secure cheap transportation in the exploitation of the West.

It is a strange development — indeed, a curious travesty on justice — that the railway, which by reason of its low cost of transportation has practically destroyed the farming interests of the East, should be regarded by the farmer of the West as the vampire sucking out the blood of his agricultural profits; and yet the Western lands could have been opened to seaboard markets only by means of it and its low rates. The Eastern farmer must justly regard the railway, and the resultant competition of the richer farm-land in the West, as the cause of his ruin and the force which has driven him to new employments ; the Western farmer would not now be in existence if it were not for the railway. The proof that it has served the Western farmer well is to he found in the sad ruins of Eastern agriculture. But by such revolutions is the progress of invention marked. Every great improvement which has cheapened the cost of reproducing existing forms of capital has necessarily lowered the value of that previously made, to the level at which it can be reproduced. Ocean steamships which cost $500,000 each five years ago — and which could now be built for $400,000 — must have fallen in their capitalized value by one fifth, or twenty per cent, irrespective of depreciation by wear and tear. In a similar way, the general introduction of steamships has lowered the selling price of sailing vessels. Every owner of capital in its various forms must always take the risk that invention may devise something cheaper in operation than his existing machinery.

By the nature of his occupation, a farmer is subject to this principle quite as much as any owner of capital. His land may for the moment be the best in cultivation for wheat; but any conceivable discovery, or any improvement of existing devices, by which, directly or indirectly, new soils in any part of the world may be brought into competition with his own, must lower the price of his farm products. The wheat - growing farmer is, therefore, at the mercy of world-causes, and not merely of the domestic events within the boundaries of his own country. The reason is that wheat is a commodity whose price is not determined by home, but by foreign markets. We ourselves do not consume nearly the whole product of our wheat or cotton land. We export largely beyond our own consumption. We exported in 1892 — a good year —157,280,351 bushels of wheat, and 15,196,769 barrels of wheat flour, when our total yield of wheat was 515,949,000 bushels. It will at once appear to the reader how surely the price of wheat must respond to influences quite out of the ken of the ordinary farmer, and yet that the continuance of farming depends upon his keeping careful watch of all the forces affecting his business, wherever and however they may he acting throughout the world.

The simple facts that we produce more wheat than we consume, and that, consequently, the price of the whole crop is determined, not by the markets within this country, but by the world-markets, are sufficient to put wheat, as regards its price, in a different class from those articles whose markets are local. It differs very radically, for example, from corn: while we export 36.88 per cent of our wheat crop, we export only 3.72 per cent of our corn crop (which in 1892 was 1,628,464.000 bushels). Whether he knows it or not, whether he likes it or not, every man who chooses as his occupation in life the growing of wheat must be affected by everything which influences the production and price of that article throughout the entire world. And it need not be said that many wheat-growing farmers make little or no allowance for events beyond their limited range of local information. A good crop in Europe means a lessened demand for American wheat; a large European crop, accompanied by a very large harvest at home, is sure to depress the price abnormally ; and if, in addition to these two uniting causes, competing countries in Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia send large quantities of the same grain to Europe, the price may fall still further. A given demand may be more than met by an exceptional supply. It must then be remembered, too, that .as regards an article of food like wheat, after a person has taken his usual quantity, his demand does not rise with a falling price, but after a saturation point of desire is reached, it practically ceases altogether. This accounts for the extreme fall in price produced by a supply only slightly in excess of the ordinary demand. Does the farmer of our Western States study to adapt his supply to the known demand, as the manufacturer does ? Probably not: he plants because he has wheat-land, and leaves the rest to the mysterious play of forces outside his ken. Yet it is certain, nevertheless, that the price of his grain is determined by events in Australia, Argentina, Egypt, India, Hungary, and Russia, or by excessive rains in England, France, or Germany. To know the economic nature of the farmer’s occupation is necessary to an understanding of his existing situation, and one can clearly see how varied are the world-influences which may affect his efforts in growing wheat.

The revolution by which invention and progress have forced a readjustment of industries, with a better relation to our natural resources, has wrenched the country and twisted it into new shapes. It has taken away the farming industry from the older States, and given it to the newer territory where soils are richer. The problem left to the farmers of the Middle States is the difficult problem correctly to learn the causes of the agricultural readjustment; to master the qualities of the old soil for other crops ; scientifically to adapt the land to the new conditions brought by the opening up of new areas of superior soil. It is a problem requiring a high order of intelligence and scientific training in farming.

But a problem which under the most favorable conditions would be a complex and diffioult one, is made far more serious by a movement which has taken away from farming the most enterprising spirits and the most vigorous brains. The movement of the better minds away from the farms to the towns, where a wider career is opened, is so well known to Americans that I do not need to describe it. Enterprising spirits have left New England mainly to the small farming of the Irish ; and the Middle States have likewise enlarged their quotas in the towns. It is one of the most marked events in our economic history. The brightest youths speed to the cities as a matter of course.

But even if, with Mr. Whittier, we sing dolorously of the abandoned farm, we cannot fail to see above the horizon the expanding roofs of the manufacturing town and the glittering attractions of the greater cities. We must see also a larger power to purchase food and other necessaries in the wages of the daily laborer, graded schools instead of the “ district ” schools, better drainage, better lighting, a larger nervous excitement, more stimulus to the plodding mind, a response to the offer of more intellectual tonics, a wider reading, and a more intelligent acquaintance with the lives and manners of cultivated persons. If the moral tone of the city and town be low, in all probability children there are safer than on the farm, from vulgar vice, and from that inward moral starvation which follows upon a lack of mental nourishment. In short, when in some farming districts one notes the bad roads, the social privation, the lonely isolation of farm life, one wonders that there are any farmers. The movement to the towns is really in answer to a craving for something besides mere material existence : it arises from a delight in the society of others and in access to books and information; from æsthetic satisfaction and a general striving for the better thing.

The effect of these revolutions upon farming was that in those years when a great industrial readjustment was taking place which required the best efforts of the best intelligences, at the very time when the hardest problem was presented for solution, social forces were at work to take away the men best capable of solving the problem. Just as the situation became more serious, the least efficient were left to meet it. It is not necessary for me to say, by way of qualification, that there are efficient farmers; of course there are. Wherever one finds executive ability and training in farming, there one is likely to see success, as in any other occupation of life. But I wish to emphasize my general point, that from the nature of his occupation the farmer is subjected to world-wide operations requiring careful foresight; that the age is bringing him new adjustments and new problems ; and yet that the concomitant part of the situation has been a marked reduction, due to the attractions of our cities, in the quality of farming skill and capacity.

But the farmers on the richer soils of the trans - Mississippi States, although holding the coigne of vantage relatively to other farmers in this country, especially as regards wheat-growing, have been themselves affected by special influences of an unfavorable kind. In the years of prosperity after recovery from the panic of 1873, the Western farming districts witnessed a curious epidemic of loans, an unexampled prevalence of borrowing-made-easy. Eastern money-lenders sent unlimited sums, with reckless confidence, to be loaned on Western farm mortgages. So little discrimination was exercised in this expansive era that the droughty lands of Kansas and Nebraska were estimated to be as good security as the more trustworthy soil of Iowa and Minnesota. Methods of lending were careless ; and the unwary met sad treatment at the hands of rogues, or fell victims to poor land-titles. The abundance of loanable capital was a premium on borrowing, and few farmers in need of improving their farms escaped the temptation. They were led into plans for expenditure without fully realizing the risks of farming, the operation of world-causes upon agricultural prices, or the difficulties of repaying loans after they were spent.

Following the recovery from the panic of 1873, the development of western Minnesota and Dakota reached a stage of speculative expansion quite as dashing and bold as any ventures of Wall Street brokers. Over-confidence was sublime. No other part of the country was comparable for sound investment to this wheat Eldorado ; the East was a doubtful place for solid prosperity in comparison with this brilliant addition to our resources. Fortunes were to be made only in farming. Fathers bought shares in the ventures undertaken by their sons who had moved to the new West. Old residents of Ohio, Illinois, or Wisconsin sold their lands to join the great hegira. In its way it was as picturesque and exciting as any like event in our history ; and it would not be easy to exaggerate the intensity of this period of the early eighties, soon after the resumption of specie payments.

This over-development was to the farmers what overtrading is to the commercial world. The expansion having gone beyond legitimate bounds, the reaction was certain to come. The drought, hot winds, and consequent failure of crops, in Kansas and Nebraska, startled Eastern lenders into the discovery that the lands were in many cases valueless as security. The time for repayment of loans came around, and brought with it a test of the good judgment of the borrowers in the use of their loans. Bad judgment and lack of skill meant inability to repay. “ Settling day ” is in any market a solemn occasion, but in the case of farm loans it is sure to reveal all the weak spots. A vast deal of capital, of course, was properly lent, and wisely expended in improvements ; but this was far from being commonly true. In justification of this statement I need do no more than refer to the recent failures of Western mortgage companies, and to the present generally suspicious attitude in regard to their investments. I do not imply, by any means, that there are not good Western farm mortgages, but only that the era of speculation has been followed by the inevitable reaction.

Under the influences of this period farmers had borrowed, and pledged themselves to the payment of fixed units of money. While agriculture was booming, the ability to change wheat into these units for repayment seemed easy ; and if this situation had remained unchanged all might have gone well. But there soon came a heaving of the calm sea, showing that storms were going on in other parts of the wide waters. As I have pointed out, world-causes must be taken into account. Just when the reaction in American farming began to set in, the distant countries of the world, which had begun to send wheat to the same competitive markets, rapidly increased their exports. The sudden enlargement of the supply without any corresponding increase of demand produced that alarming fall in the price of wheat which has been made the farmer’s excuse for thinking that silver is the magic panacea for all his ills. At the very time when the American farmer was under pressure to increase his production in every possible way, he was disastrously affected by a similar increase in other countries. In short, the agencies which opened up the superior wheat-fields of the Dakotas have not been confined to the United States. The progress of the age in the form of cheapened railway transportation revolutionized the agriculture of our country ; but likewise the progress of the age in the form of cheapened steamship transportation opened up to European consumers the superior wheat-fields of Argentina, Australia, Egypt, and India. Yet the Western farmer ploughed and sowed blindly, as if his were the only sources of wheat supply in the world.

Here is the pith of the whole trouble of the farmer of the farther West. A boom and wild expansion consequent upon the settlement of the Dakotas brought about the inevitable reaction. The one serious difficulty to the sufferer was that there were special conditions, in a great measure influencing agriculture alone, which produced the same results that a violent commercial crisis produces in a wide range of industries. To be sure, a disaster in farming conveys the impact of damage to other allied interests ; but here were conditions, the results of seismic convulsions throughout the world, practically uncomprehended by those most deeply affected, and yet not directly touching other great industries. Developments special to agriculture, although radiating all over the world, narrowed in upon our Western farmers, quite unconscious of the currents that were bearing them up and dashing them on the rocks. If we understand, then, that the agriculture of the middle West has been suffering bitterly from readjustment; and more than this, that even the favored farmers of the richest land in the remoter West (whose success had ruined the Eastern farmers) have been suffering from a disaster not entirely of their own making, we may be better able to judge of their present unrest. They are in a measure responsible for the wild expansion of the early eighties, but they are to be judged leniently for their ignorance of those waves of damage which came from abroad,

Feeling the coils of some mysterious power about them, the farmers, in all honesty, have attributed their misfortunes to the “ constriction ” in prices, caused, as they think, not by an increased production of wheat throughout the world, but by the “ scarcity of gold.” This seems hardly an adequate explanation, just at the time when the gold product is doubling itself. If scarcity of gold has been pushing prices down, why does not an abundance of gold push prices up? This explanation of low prices as caused by insufficient gold is so farfetched that its general use seems inexplicable. The existence of such a theory in explanation of the low price of wheat is so unnatural that it leads one to suspect the presence of a guiding power. Therein is to be found one of the most interesting parts of the present situation. The undereducated man, capable of holding but one idea at a time, and holding that idea fanatically, crushed by the coils of an industrial readjustment, with a system depressed by a speculative debauch, finds supposed helpers in the wiliest managers who have ever entered American politics. This is, in a nutshell, the true philosophy of the movement in favor of free coinage of silver.

Given a large community with innate prejudices against the East, intensified by the dislike born of the relation of debtor to creditor, prostrated by the collapse of the greatest agricultural speculation of modern times, suffering from foreign competition in the world-markets, the opportunity of the tempter is nearly perfect. And the skill of the tempter is Satanic. I doubt if ever in our political history we have had more adroit manipulation and strategy than have been displayed by the managers of the silver party. In Congress they have been more than a match in plans and ingenuity for the leaders of the two great parties. Supplied with abundant means by the silver-mining interests, they have “ buncoed ” one party or coquetted with another, as suited their interests. While extending their propaganda for years in the ranks of the Democratic party throughout the West and South, they have bargained with the leaders of the Republican party in Congress for legislation favorable to silver in return for votes for special and private interests. It was in this way that the so-called Sherman Act of 1890 was passed. When they were given an inch they took an ell, until the country stood aghast at finding these silver managers holding the national legislature by the throat, and demanding silver legislation or a stoppage of all old “ deals.” It was a political brigandage that put the little by-play of Greek bandits to shame. A game of burglary like this in the Capitol at Washington is as audacious as is the seizure of money-tills at high noon on a crowded street.

This, however, was but one part of the great silver conspiracy, the equal of which has never been recorded, and which is too considerable for me to do more than refer to it here. It embraced in its plans years of systematic agitation of the silver doctrines, both by speaking and by writing, among those dissatisfied classes which I have described. The situation of farmers in the West, depressed after a collapse of a speculation in wheatlands, and of cotton-growers in the South, the price of whose product also had been disturbed by world-causes, was a rich soil for the silver propaganda. It was begun stealthily and secretly, and carried on later with noise and open activity. Newspapers were hired to exploit and advertise silver literature in a way to enlarge their list of subscribers. A literary bureau controlled a systematic distribution of “ catchy ” and “ taking” illustrated reading-matter. The prejudices and antagonisms of classes were appealed to most skillfully. The wheat-farmer and the cotton-grower wrere for years practically permitted to hear nothing else but the wrongs of silver, the evil effects of gold, and the grinding oppression of the money-lender. As a piece of successful political intrigue and agitation, this propaganda was probably the most effective since the repeal of the Corn Laws. One can have nothing but admiration for the consummate political skill displayed by the managers of the silver party.

How adroitly a situation of agricultural depression, due to an industrial revolution, has been made to serve the dealers in silver, the present presidential campaign gives convincing evidence. At this time, silver is jangling in the ears of those who, a few years hence, will permit only the music of a new craze to be heard. If the conditions which allow of delusions among the farmers were of passing duration, if in a few years we might see Western farming recover from its depression as easily as we see manufacturing and trade readjust themselves after a commercial crisis, the remedy would not be far to seek. But the opening up of new wheat areas to European markets is not a thing that, rising like a wave, like a wave disappears; it is a permanent uplift of the sea-level. It has come to stay, and probably to rise still higher. Farming will go on, and go on profitably; but it will never realize all the bright dreams of the ballooning years in the early eighties. How natural that the seeds of dissatisfaction should grow up in the various forms of protest against existing legislative and social arrangements ! It is precisely the expansive, optimistic, speculating Americanborn in whose minds these erratic developments have taken deepest root. Our less mercurial Germans and shrewder Scandinavians are safer than our Americans, in this day of crazes.

J. Laurence Lang him.