Land Ho!
I
A FOLK movement back to the land is now taking place on a scale comparable to that of pioneer days, and with equal meaning to America. For better or worse, between one and two million Americans have quit cities and villages during the last three years, leaving the shadow of the bread line for the seeming plenty of our farms, as the Bureau of Census defines ‘farms.’ As many more have moved from industrial centres, not to farms, but to small semi-rural holdings on the outskirts of cities, in the hope of establishing a two-way grip on life by growing part of their food while continuing to work for wages as they can find work.
These folk have left the cities and towns quietly, usually on their own resources, but in many instances with the encouragement and even the help of employers, communities, states, and of the Federal Government itself. Their initiative and daring have received little recognition, yet this migration, insistently increasing while the counter-movement from the farm to the city has slackened, has brought the once-declining farm population to 32,242,000 as of January 1, 1933. This is the peak for farm population in our history, the previous high being 32,076,960 in 1910. The latest estimate of the Department of Agriculture, on April 20, 1933, indicates that the farm population gained more than a million in 1932 alone, but part of this gain is represented by surplus of farm births over deaths. With this item eliminated, the net farm gain from migrations to and from town was 533,000 for the year.
Both the nation and the farmers accepted this shift casually at first. As late as the autumn of 1932, candidates for office discussed agriculture and unemployment in hundreds of speeches without mention of this, the one movement where agriculture and unemployment meet head-on. Politicians are insatiable optimists in promising industrial recovery. Nevertheless, this wholesale retreat to the land registers the common man’s humble yet eloquent opinion that recovery will, at best, be slow, so slow that it behooves him to be on his way looking for food and shelter, either on an abandoned farm or on a bit of land within reach of a city or an industry, where he can raise some food and still not be entirely out of touch with pay rolls, where he and his family can exist without public relief.
These migrants search along main and back roads for shelter and cheap, tillable soil. They form a procession seldom noted by those who keep their eyes on the stock ticker. Even farmers gave the movement little heed until the real-estate market for farms began to improve, and homeless, destitute families began to enter rural dooryards asking for assistance. In many rural communities women have organized to assist the more helpless wayfarers. The farmers are still puzzled over the situation, but no more so than the legislators. The Bankhead bill, appropriating $400,000,000 to encourage and supervise the land rush, is the first Congressional reaction to this great social movement.
Farms, even those from which experienced farmers could not wring a living in days when farm-commodity prices were better than at present, are in high demand, thanks to this migration. Practically all the habitable farms among the 200,000 abandoned during the five years between 1925 and 1930 have been or are being reoccupied, in many cases by experienced farmers returning from city life. Insurance companies agree that there is a rapid increase in the sale of foreclosed farms. Federal Land Banks, which write an eighth of all our farm mortgages, note a rising demand for their foreclosed properties, although foreclosure itself would seem to indicate trouble ahead for the new buyers.
Small plots within automobile reach of industries reflect still larger demand. In March — soon after the fourth of March — motorists and others, in the quest for such plots, struck out into the open country looking for likely locations. Along the Boston Post Road, for example, garage and real-estate men reported inquiries without end for such plots.
Along main traffic routes, along river bottoms, on marginal Appalachian and swamp tracts, in dry farming areas, along railroads, and near other industries glad to lend a hand by granting leaseholds to furloughed employees and perhaps to others, one finds these folk raising or repairing shelters. More log cabins are being built in the United States than at any time since Abraham Lincoln was a rail-splitter. Also, more tar-paper shacks! And more homes, as distinguished from shelters and shacks, including many quite respectable bungalows. Almost the only private building operations now in progress are those going forward on country roads.
Even Montana, showing the highest percentage of population loss in the period from 1920 to 1930, has begun to perk up. A correspondent from that sector submits data on rainfall cycles to prove that the double decade from 1930 to 1950 will be made up of nice wet years, excellent for dry farming on the high plains. Population, in retreat from that region for some years, is again advancing toward the Rockies. The humblest of once-abandoned shacks are being reoccupied, and new settlers are reproducing the sod huts of the original pioneers.
II
The 1910 census revealed the farming population of the United States at an all-time high. Then followed the ‘drift to the city,’ resulting in a farm population roughly two millions less in 1930 than in 1910. Now, in three years, that twenty-year drift has been reversed. There are again 32,000,000 persons on American farms. Within a year there will be 33,000,000, since the net gain to farms and non-city areas, where marginal farms are in the making, is not far from 100,000 a month. Consider some of the personal aspects of the changing rural scene.
Here, for example, are Negroes on their way from Northern cities to their Southern homelands. Returning colored folk have filled nearly all the habitable cabins in the lowland South from which they departed when needed most and now return when needed least. They’re going ‘home’! Such wanderers repopulated one typical Virginia plantation.
‘Miss Elizabeth’ came North from Virginia forty years ago to teach science in a college for women. Pensioned and retired at the age of sixty-five, she was still too full of energy and wisdom to fold her hands and wait for the ultimate. Instead, she went back to the plantation of her birth and undertook to run it. Hiring two colored men of the old school, Miss Elizabeth bossed their operations. Soon after the depression set in, the population of her plantation began to increase. Sons and daughters of her two retainers came back with their broods and moved into the tumble-down slave cabins, patching those shelters against the weather. Other Negroes, introducing themselves as children and grandchildren of her father’s slaves, appeared to claim asylum. Her cabins are now ‘full up’ with a Negro population of twenty-eight.
In effect, those Negroes walked or hitch-hiked, of their own free will, back into something like slavery. Miss Elizabeth could not pay wages, and none of her volunteer help expected wages; what they wanted was shelter, protection, food, security. She bosses them to the end that they may earn at least their keep. She takes charge of their produce and rations her ‘ family ’ through the winter. Occasionally ‘Old Miss’ parts with a few dollars for their clothes. Every Sunday morning she marshals all hands for divine service in the ‘old plantation’ way, for the good of their souls. The situation differs from slavery only in that her Negroes are legally free to leave. Practically they are tied to her soil, because they have nowhere else to go. Disciplined by adversity, they need less discipline than their ancestors needed under slavery. They had been taken up into a high place and shown a promised land which proved itself full of thorns and trouble for those who set out to travel it. They are now content to be managed and sustained by Miss Elizabeth’s feudal authority.
III
Another chip on this ground swell back to the land is a writer, a shrewd Yankee, still with money in his purse and a desire to keep it there. With his markets perishing, he dug in on eight acres in northern New Hampshire, there to put his boys in school buy a cow, fill his cellar with food, catch up on his reading, and play the flute ‘far from this busted Babylon of New York.’ He vows he will never return to town except for an occasional visit.
An advertising man has gone in for space in a big way — ten acres in Connecticut! He started a roadhouse, but no customers came; tried chicken farming and discovered for himself how ill-disposed are Leghorn hens. Now, with his savings gently subsiding, he contemplates, of all things, a beer garden, in the woods hard by the stream of traffic! Meanwhile, he is taking lessons in agriculture from an old friend, over the line in New York State, and may eventually be able to earn an honest living.
A New York neighbor tells me joyfully that ‘Hank’s back.’ Hank went to town ten years ago; Mr. Berry never found his equal. Of late years there has been no ‘hired man’ whatever on the Berry place, because of the difficulty of finding wages. Now Hank is working for his board and room and doing his own washing while waiting trustfully for a little cash, if and when the boss can afford to give it to him. He is happy to be out of the bread line and back on the land. But Hank’s contentment is nothing compared to the change which his coming has wrought in his employer. The place had become ‘all run down,’ because so many repair jobs are beyond the strength and cunning of one man. Together the two men have been repairing roofs and fences. Hank’s boss has someone to talk to, and, although Hank mostly listens, their communion seems to be mutually satisfactory.
Before Hank returned, Mr. Berry had only his wife to talk to. But women do not comprehend the intricacies of either spavins or politics, to mention only two of the subjects which Hank and his boss discuss in infinite detail. A farm can be a lonesome place, so lonesome that a man gets to talking to himself about the animals, and to the animals about taxes. That farm will be completely restored as a social picture when one of its old ‘ hired girls ’ comes back to keep the boss’s wife company. They have heard from Nellie, a former favorite, and expect her along soon. Nellie left the farm to work in a laundry, and when she insists on showing her skill on Hank’s raiment one cloud on the horizon will be removed.
Another New York State farm is now owned by a young woman of twenty-one, born on a Vermont farm, who saved the money for it out of her pay as a domestic servant. For $1500 she bought one hundred acres near Saratoga with a house and barns and eight cows, moved her parents thither in 1931, found herself a husband, and carried him off to the land in 1932. She keeps her ‘man’ out after wages when he can find employment, and does the farm work with her father’s help. So far the milk checks have met the easy payments on the purchase contract.
There is a pleasant, watery valley in our neighborhood where half-a-dozen farms were vacant several years ago. To-day each of them is occupied. Few of these newcomers are equipped for production on a commercial scale. They are short of horses and implements, but they raised gardens and chickens last summer and stored food for winter. Also they worked for their neighbors, sometimes taking produce in lieu of money wages and also pledges of meat when the winter butchering should begin. Their lands, of course, are of marginal productivity with insufficient drainage; if they remain on them, it is likely that they will hire themselves out rather than take the gamble of cropping on their own account. So far only one of the six has concluded that he is on the land for keeps; the others look upon their move as only temporary, tiding over a bad time.
The exception used to drive a truck in Schenectady. He was reared on a farm in Canada, where, during the last three years, the Canadian Government has carefully selected and placed on the land thousands of farmers. Before his town job quite died, he rented a piece of land, with a house on it, and demonstrated his worth so well to a Farm Land Bank that its officers turned over to him a near-by farm ‘at the end of the road.’ Through the winter months he was heeled in and safe. His case is one of a ‘natural-born’ experienced farmer who could see nothing in farming while land was high, but had enough capital to make a start when land grew cheap and jobs scarce.
IV
This secluded vale lies between main highways on which the other side of the migration is in evidence. Along these highways houses are being built on small plots of land by persons who expect to remain, selling their time when they can, and using their unsalable time to raise food chiefly for their own consumption, although some operate roadside stands in fair weather. These folk are better ‘found’ than the others in the old dilapidated farmhouses in the valley. While some of the new residents along the highway have lost jobs within the past three years, they came to the country with capital enough to finance themselves. Others have part-time jobs in the near-by city; others are artisans ‘on call.’ Given a fair amount of employment, these newcomers are fairly safe from serious losses occasioned by inexperience, since their agricultural operations are on a small scale and secondary to the wage activities which are expected to provide cash for taxes, clothes, and other necessaries.
A small subsistence farm, begun in time, often becomes the bulwark of advancing years. Consider Mr. Brant, who owns seven acres of land, mostly in apples, of which he sold five hundred dollars’ worth this year. His small flock of chickens is self-supporting, since he sells enough eggs to pay for feed, and has eggs and fowls for his family. His garden fills the cellar with canned vegetables. Altogether his work returns a most comfortable living for himself and his wife.
‘These three years have been hard years,’ said Mr. Brant. ‘In 1931 I ran behind, but on the three-year spread I am all square and have lived as usual. I bought my seven acres in 1908 when I was working for the railroad. We lived on it summers only, for nine years. I built a new house in 1917 — fortunately a low-price year. I remained on the pay roll two years longer, finished settling for the house, and then broke away to work my land in earnest. A man with as little land as I have must make his time count. Last autumn I filled crates with windfalls when I had nothing else to do, and sold them for cider for cash enough to fill my coal bins for the winter. On a larger place windfalls go to waste. If I had never taken a piece of land, I should be out of a job to-day. As it is, I can see life through nicely, and keep doing something useful to the end.’
This evolution of a railroad worker into a farmer took eleven years, during which he had two occupations, one of which outlived the other. At sixtyeight he is a broader man than if he had followed either of his occupations to the exclusion of the other. Whoever talks to him will go away fortified against the notion that an increase in small-plot farming means an inevitable drift toward the peasant point of view in America. A small farm does not necessarily have a small, narrow man for its occupant. Mr. Brant keeps in touch with the world through his newspaper and radio, forms his own judgment, and speaks out in meeting. Just now he is telling his neighbors to forget those foreign debts and why.
There is nothing new in this increase in small-plot farming after the Brant model, but the process in evidence since the turn of the century is being speeded up sharply. Farms from 100 to 174 acres numbered a million less in 1925 than they did in 1900, while holdings both larger and smaller increased. The number of farms from 5 to 20 acres increased 250,000 in the same period, and farms from 20 to 49 acres nearly 200,000. By 1935 there will probably be more 5-to-20-acre farms than 100to-174-acre farms, the most popular size since the early days of the Republic.
V
Small farming operations give the key to the future of this back-to-theland movement. Within another year practically all the vacant farmhouses will have been occupied, yet there will still be millions of persons eager to move to farms and small plots. The prospect is that, owing to technical advances, at least 3,000,000 more of the present unemployed must find rural work, since there would be no room for them even if industry were suddenly to revive. This estimate is conservative, with due allowance for an increase in salesmen and servicers. A situation so pressing may call for financing beyond the limits of ordinary business prudence. The Federal Government is already backing both farmers and public relief with credits. No matter how unemployment relief is organized, it is evident that the more people grow food, the fewer will have to be fed at public expense. Consequently the Bankhead bill, which provides lending up to $1000 for ‘those who desire to acquire and live on subsistence farms,’ may conceivably save in urban relief as much as it spends on rural financing.
Meanwhile the independent farmer raising money crops is fighting for his life, with all the political power he can muster. Yet working farmers, as contrasted with political farmers, do little talking against this back-to-the-land trek. Instead, most of them look upon it as a natural process, likely to restore a balance of power which tipped too far toward the city during the thirty years from 1900 to 1930. It gives them at least one practical benefit — cheap and earnest labor at low wages, at almost any price. It means self-support; farmers are less disturbed at seeing a new hand at work in a near-by field than they are at the spectacle of the country supporting millions of persons in idleness. That affronts their common sense.
Even if every out-of-work townsman in the country were to grow his own food, I think farmers would cheer rather than lament. As practical men they would conclude that the direct savings in taxes would more than compensate for a possible decline in prices. The tax is a tangible local affair, while farm prices are affected by so many factors, operating over the nation and the world, that their rise and fall are almost as the acts of God, over which man has no control. Even if farmers had to take a money loss as a direct result of migrations from town to land, they might still favor the backto-the-land movement. They believe that all men should earn their bread, even though it be in the sweat of their brows.
So the farmer appears to accept this migration as stoically as he accepts the weather. He realizes that the return of population to the land can no more be checked than the falling rain; but no rain lasts forever, and this drive, he fancies, will soon be slowing down. The fact that millions of persons are still left in the towns who sooner or later must try living on the land has escaped his attention. In the long run, how the farmer feels about it will depend on his personal relations with newcomers. If they keep up the moral and social lone of the community, little fault will be found with their marketing operations.
Always the point should be stressed that, whenever possible, the back-tothe-land movement should be also ‘the return of the native.’ The returning native is acquainted with neighbors, soils, and methods. He stands a better chance of sustaining himself, and he also knows what is expected of him. Both villages and farm neighborhoods are to-day naturally suspicious that a newcomer and his family may become public charges, adding to the tax burden of the community. A man with relatives in the neighborhood has someone to vouch for him. Neighborliness has its economic as well as its social side, since trade there depends on barter to a great degree. The liked and trusted newcomer can trade his spare time for the use of a neighbor’s horses, tools, and seeds; he can even sell future time for food in a pinch. If he has meadow but no cow, he can trade grass for milk. When short of some needed tool, he can go down the road and borrow. Country folk are kind, but they want to know the sort of folks they are dealing with; and no wonder, for, where contacts are few, personalities become important. Once accepted as a neighbor, a newcomer finds his lot eased in all directions.
The clannishness of country folk has little economic selfishness in it. If a town carpenter comes to a village to ply his trade, he may find the carpenters already on the ground combining against him. Farmers react differently; there are too many of them to make the produce of one more farmer felt in the price levels. They know that their real competitors are the weather, insects, middlemen, railroads, and the acquisitive urban life in general. A good deal of sympathy is being wasted on farmers because their numbers are being increased at a time when prices are abnormally low, on the theory that more farmers will mean larger surpluses and still lower prices. That is the city man’s way of reasoning, not the farmer’s. Even during acute agricultural distress, most farmers look upon agriculture as the good way of life, think of the farm as a home site rather than as a business, and see the return to the land as a triumph for their point of view. The wisest of them know, too, that the more farm votes are available, the more consideration the farmers will get from government.
VI
As Americans return to the land under stern economic pressure, they are entering agriculture under conditions which some think may depress them toward the condition of a rude peasantry, more interested in lowstandard security than in education or politics. Thus far America’s social work has been aimed chiefly at raising the standards and relieving the distresses of city dwellers; more attention should now be paid to the rural scene, especially to rural schools, churches, public health, highways, and the development among farmers of just pride in their localities and occupations. Motor cars can be used to make available most of the essential services of the town, as has been demonstrated by motorized library service in New York State.
The effort to bring the best features of urban civilization to the rural districts may be crippled by lack of funds, but if so the country folk may bestir themselves to cultural efforts of their own. There is little danger of rural America going peasant if those who work on the land receive fair prices for their labor and risks. In the end, America can scarcely deny them that, for their political power is again rising with the increase in rural population, and they are getting ready to toss a few heavy-weights off their backs.
While both the American farmer and the European peasant till the soil and tend animals, their attitudes toward life are far apart. The peasant considers his place in the world as fixed, while our farmers are still touched by the pioneer spirit. They hope to regain the position their fathers occupied in an America which held economic independence dear. When the farmer sees men and women cutting loose from bread lines to join him on the land out of respect for the same tradition, he must admire their fortitude; and, while reserving the right cannily to size up each individual, he stands ready to welcome worthy newcomers to the ancient and honorable fraternity of the soil. Together the two great groups — the independent farmers and the subsistence farmers — will try to realize the good life on the land, where toil brings forth that upon which all men, wherever circumstanced and situated, must depend for life.
This exodus from the cities constitutes a national, a state, and a local problem crying for guidance and control such as Canada and Germany and many other countries have given it. Only experienced farmers in hard training can prosper or even endure in the hardest of all agricultural eras in memory. Every lesson of experience and observation runs against the greenhorn’s risking capital and wasting time on a sizable farming operation. Many of those who fare forth in hope to the land will return worse off than they were at the outset. The cases of success cited in this paper all have a farm background, in which experience was gained early and could be later applied in need.
But there is more promise, and less danger, for the newcomer in smallplot, part-time farming. Then a family settles upon a small tract, raises part of its own food, rigidly restrains its spending, and looks for cash to occasional or continuous work in neighboring towns and cities and industries by certain members with definite skills. There is flexibility in this way of life; relatively little capital is required to set it going, and those who measurably achieve it win for themselves a double grip on existence — with one hand they hold the land, with the other they reach for the pay roll. This double grip on life must be increasingly sought by the millions who are being displaced by machinery and subjected to the recurrent disasters threatened by cyclical unemployment.