“Churches Detour—Tenants Ahead”
It is old stuff, in a way, this cheerless story of farm tenants and religion. Pick up, as I have done, either at random or quite methodically, booklets, chapters, articles, or pamphlets dealing at first hand with the farm tenant, and the tale of his religious handicap runs drearily, hopelessly to the same sad end. For example, take this rather mild statement from a member of Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission:
“The farm owner who has moved to town and is renting his land cannot be expected to be a real, vital force in the rural church. Nor can the tenant who has a one-year lease, or whose tenure is uncertain, be expected to cultivate the Christian graces by intimate fellowship with his neighbors and associates; in other words, to take root in the community and become a part of it.”
“Why, then,” it will be asked, “try to dress up the outworn subject again?”
The plain answer, without any apology, is simply this: The farm-tenant case, as a phase of religion in eclipse, has not yet cast an image on the American mind. The American church,—and I class together all the Christian bodies in this sweeping term,—the Christian conscience of the American church has apparently reversed itself and “passed by on the other side” of this bedeviled situation. Now such an attitude, such collective behavior, is ruthless, well nigh unforgivable, and in fact incomprehensible. Words must continue to be spoken until the church ceases to detour around the tenant.
The Flood of Tenancy Unabated
And first of all, in order to see the gravity of the case as it stands, one must sense the resistless character of the sweeping flow of tenancy itself. Decade by decade the flood has risen. In 1880, 25.6 per cent. of the farms in the United States were tenant farms; in 1890, 28.4 per cent.; in 1900, 35.3 per cent.; in 1910, 37.0 per cent.; in 1920, 38.1 per cent.
If one looks a little closer at the regions where the flood is highest—almost over the dikes, so to speak—the truth strikes home a little stronger. In the east South-central States, containing Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, the percentage in 1880 was 35.2; in 1890, 38.6; in 1900, 49.1; in 1910, 52.8; in 1920, 49.6. In the west south-central area, containing Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, the percentage in 1880 was 35.2; in 1890, 38.6; in 1900, 49.1; in 1910, 52.8; in 1920, 53.2. In the west north-central area, containing, as a very vital part of American agriculture, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, the percentage in 1880 was 20.5; in 1890, 24.0; in 1900, 28.6; in 1910, 30.0; in 1920, 34.1.
When the United States Census Report for 1920 came out and was scanned, it was discovered by every one that in the decade between 1910 and 1920 the flood of tenant farms had in number gone down in some States a little, as in Alabama and Mississippi, a fact which brought a decline in the east south-central area from 52.8 per cent. in 1910 to 49.6 per cent. in 1920. But lest the friends of agriculture in America should be put under ether by this disclosure, Dr. C. L. Stewart, now professor in the University of Illinois, while a member of the United States Department of Agriculture, in a statement entitled, “The Persistent Increase of Tenant Farming,” called attention to the fact that the bare number of tenant farms is a less accurate index of the sweep and meaning of tenancy than the acreage involved and the value of that acreage:
“When measured on the basis of acreage and value, the number of rented acres per thousand and the number of dollar’s worth of rented land per thousand was not only higher (in 1910 and 1920) than that shown on the preceding basis (number of rented farms), but has been growing at much faster rates during both of the decades since 1900, especially during the decade just ended.... In the light of this analysis, the tide of tenancy is shown by the latest census to have continued with little or no abatement.”