It is a natural condition for people to crave self-expression. In years gone by men who have been born and reared on the farm have left it and gone to the city, in order to find a place for the expression of their talents. This migration has done more to hinder than to set forward the cause of civilization. People who live in the country must find their true expression in their respective neighborhoods, just as much as do people who live in the city. You cannot continually take everything out of the country and cease to put anything back into it. The city has always meant expression—the country, repression. Talent usually goes to the congested centers of population to express itself. For generations when a young man or woman has had superior ability along some particular line and lived in the country, their friends have always advised them to move to a large center of population where their talents would find a ready expression. You and I, for instance, who have encouraged them to go hither, have never thought that we were sacrificing the country to build the city. This has been a mistake. We all know it.
Over fifty years ago a country doctor became the father of two boys. In age they were five years apart. The doctor brought them up well and sent them away to a medical school. Unlike most country-bred boys who go to large cities, when they finished their courses they went back to the old home town and began their practice. By using their creative instincts, organizing power, imagination, and initiative, it was not long before they became nationally known. People call their establishment “the clinic in the cornfields.” To-day these “country doctors” treat over fifty thousand patients. Their names are known wherever medical science is known. Railroads run special sleepers hundreds of miles to their old home town in Olmstead County, Minnesota, which, by the way, is one of the richest agricultural counties in America. The great big thing about these two men is that they found an opportunity for the expression of their talents in a typical country community. They didn’t go to a large city, they made thousands of city people come to them.
Conservatively speaking, there are over ten thousand small towns in America to-day. More than ten million people live in them. These communities are often meeting places for the millions whose homes are in the open country. Rural folks still think of a community as that territory with its people which lies within the team haul of a given center. It is out in these places where the silent common people dwell. It is in these neighborhood laboratories that a new vision of country life is being developed. They are the cradles of democracy. It is here that a force is necessary to democratize art so the common people can appreciate it, science so they can use it, government so they can take a part in it, and recreation so they can enjoy it.
The former Secretary of Agriculture aptly expressed the importance of the problem when he said:
“The real concern in America over the movement of rural population to urban centers is whether those who remain in agriculture after the normal contribution to the city are the strong, intelligent, well seasoned families, in which the best traditions of agriculture and citizenship have been lodged from generation to generation. The present universal cry of ‘keep the boy on the farm’ should be expanded into a public sentiment for making country life more attractive in every way. When farming is made profitable and when the better things of life are brought in increasing measure to the rural community, the great motives which lead youth and middle age to leave the country districts will be removed. In order to assure a continuance of the best strains of farm people in agriculture, there can be no relaxation of the present movements for a better country life, economic, social, and educational.”
THE LAND OF THE DACOTAHS
A skilled physician when he visits a sick room always diagnoses the case of the patient before he administers a remedy. In order to comprehend thoroughly the tremendous significance the Land of the Dacotahs bears in its relation to the solution of the problem of country life in America, one must know something about the commonwealth and its people.