Cities Get Youth from Farms
And what will become of this excess of children? What else than this? The farms will manage to feed them, clothe them, educate them until they come of age, when, possessed of the strong right arm, they will turn their backs on the farm and farming, and go to recruit the nerve-fagged industry of cities.
The farms feed industry, professional service, and city life with muscle, intellect, and imagination. This is the romance, and there is not a word in it of wheat, corn, cotton, or cattle. This every-day function of the farm, often spoken of lightly, almost as if it were a poetic fiction, is the solid stratum of fact upon which the plot of my story rests. The annual editorial blast, “Keep the boy on the farm,” never concerns this slowly moving stream of young adults cityward, for these are a surplus, an excess. And they must go, as sure as fate. A legion of editorials could not dam back this flow.
We are not without some definite information, moreover, as to how this surplus of farm population works its way to the cities of the nation; for a unique study has been made by the United States Department of Agriculture—of the movement of 3000 young people from a thousand farms in one community—over a period of one hundred years—a community where (and this fits into my story) the God of the Puritans has been known by the children from the days of the first log cabins. We know just which farms sent their surplus crop of young folk away. We know exactly where they went in the United States. And, furthermore, we know what vocations they recruited, and what achievements in these vocations they made. In a nutshell, we know in some measure what the contribution of human force and influence was from these thousand farms, farm by farm, to the upbuilding of the cities of the nation. The unfolding picture of this farm community’s impact upon the nation’s life during the century just passed is precisely the thing many persons have looked for to put national meaning into the daily disappearance from the farms of the surplus of young adults which every few years amounts to a strong small nation poured into city industry.
I cannot pass this remarkable study by without naming some of the men who as “exportable surplus” left the old farmstead to work out careers in cities. I will name only those whom you know, and know to honor. You remember Governor George Peck of Wisconsin. You knew him as the Peck of “Peck’s Bad Boy.” Farm number 555 among these thousand farms gave Governor Peck to Wisconsin. Governor Reuben Wood of Ohio came from farm number 119. Governor Cushman Davis, of Minnesota, afterward United States Senator, was the product of farm number 556, just as much as the wheat from that farm was a product and went into national trade. Farm number 618 gave Charles Finney to American Christendom and to Oberlin College as its honored president. Farm number 701 raised Charles N. Crittenton, gave him to the wholesale drug business in New York City, in which he accumulated wealth with which he put into operation his ideal for friendless girls. The Florence Crittenton Rescue Homes for girls in seventy-two cities of the United States tells his story. One of the little hamlets in the community produced Daniel Burnham, America’s leading architect, at home equally in Chicago, New York, or Rome, Italy.
But these brighter lights of the exodus do not by any means convey what is perhaps after all the greater influence and might of the majority of the human surplus who went forth and found their places and played their rôles as less widely known personalities in enterprises of banking, manufacture, teaching, or merchandizing, where they helped weave the fabric of America and its institutions as we know them in every-day life.
The force of this plain story of the human product of good farms, in a community where God was known, lies not in what might be considered the exceptional character of the community, but rather in the fact that the story of this particular community of farms is the story, in one respect or another, of all American farm communities. This study convinces both men of the farms and men of the cities,—as it sets their memories to work about the migrants from the land whom they have known—that as the farming communities wax or wane, so wax or wane the cities and the nation.
Many Children Virtual Pagans
And here an unsuspected villain enters my story. Do not laugh in your sleeve when you discover that the villain is a fact, merely a fact; but, by the by, a very stubborn and blistering fact. Of the fifteen millions of farm children—children under twenty-one years of age,—more than four millions are virtual pagans, children without knowledge of God. If, perchance, they know the words to curse with, they do not know the Word to live by. This saddening fact is the solemn disclosure of the recent study, already mentioned, made by the Social and Religious Institute of New York City.
A survey of 179 counties in the United States, representatively selected, enables the Institute with confidence to assert that “1,600,000 farm children live in communities where there is no church or Sunday-school of any denomination,” and “probably 2,750,000 more who do not go to any Sunday-school, either because the church to which their parents belong does not have any, or because they do not care to connect themselves with such an organization.”