Rural Problems of Today

by Ernest R. Groves

It is by no means otherwise today. The farmer has to be efficient in a peculiar kind of self-control. He needs to invest labor and foresight in an enterprise that affords to the usual person little of the opportunity for quick returns, the sense of personal achievement, or the satisfaction of the desire for competitive face-to-face association with other men which is offered in the city. Men who cultivate on a very large scale and men who enjoy unusual social insight as to the significance of their occupation are exceptions to the general run of farmers. In these days of accessible transportation we have a rapid and highly successful selection which largely eliminates from the farming class the type that does not naturally possess the power to be satisfied with the slowly acquired property, impersonal success, and non-dramatic activities of farming. This process which eliminates the more restless and commercially ambitious from the country has, of course, been at work for generations. It has tended, therefore, to a uniformity of mental characteristics, but it has by no means succeeded in procuring a homogeneous rural mind. The movement has been somewhat modified by the return of people to the country from the city and by the influence on the country mind of the more restless and adventurous rural people who, for one reason or another, have not migrated. In the far West especially, attention has been given to the rural hostility to, or at least the misunderstanding of, city movements which attempt ambitious social advances. It is safe to assume that this attitude of rural people is widespread and is noticeable far west merely because of a greater frankness. The easterner hides his attitude because he has become conscious that it opens him to criticism. This attitude of rural hostility is rooted in the fundamental differences between the thinking of country and of city people, due largely to the process of social selection. This mental difference gives constant opportunity for social friction. If the individuals who live most happily in the city and in the country are contrasted, there is reason to suppose that the mental opposition expresses nervous differences. In one we have the more rapid, more changeable, and more consuming thinker, while the thought of the other is slower, more persistent, and less wasteful of nervous energy.

The work of the average farmer brings him into limited association with his fellows as compared with the city worker. This fact also operates upon him mentally. He has less sense of social variations and less realization of the need of group solidarity. This results in his having less social passion than his city brother, except when he is caught in a periodic outburst of economic discontent expressed in radical agitation, and also in his having a more feeble class-consciousness and a weaker basis for cooperation. This last limitation is one from which the farmer seriously suffers.

The farmer's lack of contact with antagonistic groups, because his work keeps him away from the centers where social discontent boils with passion and because it prevents his appreciating class differences, makes him a conservative element in our national life, but one always big with the danger of a blind servitude to traditions and archaic social judgments. The thinking of the farmer may be either substantial from his sense of personal sufficiency or backward from his lack of contact. The decision regarding his attitude is made by the influences that enter his life, in addition to those born of his occupation.

At this point, however, it would be serious to forget that some of the larger farming enterprises are carried on so differently that the manager and owner are more like the factory operator than the usual farmer. To them the problem is labor-saving machinery, efficient management, labor cost, marketing facilities, and competition. They are not especially influenced by the fact that they happen to handle land products rather than manufactured articles.

Much has been made of the farmer's hand-to-hand grapple with a capricious and at times frustrating Nature. This emphasis is deserved, for the farmer is out upon the frontier of human control of natural forces. Even modern science, great as is its service, cannot protect him from the unexpected and the disappointing. Insects and weather sport with his purposes and give his efforts the atmosphere of chance. It is not at all strange, therefore, that the farmer feels drawn to fatalistic interpretations of experience which he carries over to lines of thought other than those connected with his business.

A second important influence that has helped to make the mind of the farmer has been isolation. In times past, without doubt, this has been powerful in its effect upon the mind of the farmer. It is less so now because, as everyone knows, the farmer is protected from isolation by modern inventions. It is necessary to recall, however, that isolation is in relation to one's needs and that we too often neglect the fact that the very relief that has removed from country people the more apparent isolation of physical distance has often intensified the craving for closer and more frequent contact with persons than the country usually permits. Whether isolation as a psychic experience has decreased for many in the country is a matter of doubt. Certainly most minds need the stimulus of human association for both happiness and healthiness, and even yet the minds of farmers disclose the narrowness, suspiciousness, and discontent of place that isolation brings. It makes a difference in social attitude whether the telephone, automobile, and parcel post draw the people nearer together in a common community life or whether they bring the people under the magic of the city's quantitative life and in this way cause rural discontent.

The isolation from the great business centers which has kept farmers from having personally a wide experience with modern business explains in part the suspicious attitude rural people often take into their commercial relations. This has been expressed in a way one can hardly forget by Tolstoi in his "Resurrection," when his hero, from moral sympathy with land reform, undertakes to give his tenants land under conditions more to their advantage and, much to his surprise, finds them hostile to the plan. They had been too often tricked in the past and felt too little acquainted with business methods to have any confidence in the new plan which claimed benevolent motives. It is only fair to admit that the farmer differs from others of his social rank only in degree, and that his experiences in the past appear to him to justify his skeptical attitude. He has at times suffered exploitation; what he does not realize is that this has been made possible by his lack of knowledge of the ways of modern business and by his failure to organize. The farmer is beginning to appreciate the significance of marketing. Unfortunately, he too often carries his suspiciousness, which has resulted from business experiences, into many other lines of action and thinking, and thus robs himself of enthusiasm and social confidence.

A third important element in the making of the farmer's mind may be broadly designated as suggestion. The farmer is like other men in that his mental outlook is largely colored by the suggestions that enter his life.

It is this fact, perhaps, that explains why the farmer's mind does not express more clearly vocational character, for no other source of persistent suggestions has upon most men the influence of the newspaper, and each day, almost everywhere, the daily paper comes to the farmer with its appealing suggestions. Of course the paper represents the urban point of view rather than the rural, but in the deepest sense it may be said to look at life from the human outlook, the way the average man sees things. The newspaper, therefore, feeds the farmer's mind with suggestions and ideas that counteract the influences that specially emphasize the rural environment. It keeps him in contact with thinking and events that are world-wide, and unconsciously permeates his motives, at times giving him urban cravings that keep him from utilizing to the full his social resources in the country. Any attempt to understand rural life that minimizes the common human fellowship which the newspaper offers the farmer is certain to lead to unfortunate misinterpretation. Mentally the farmer is far from being isolated in his experiences, for he no longer is confined to the world of local ideas as he once was. This constant daily stimulation from the world of business, sports, and public affairs at times awakens his appetite for urban life and makes him restless, or encourages his removal to the city, or makes him demand as much as possible of the quantitative pleasures and recreations of city life. In a greater degree, however, the paper contents his mental need for contact with life in a more universal way than his particular community allows. The automobile and other modern inventions also serve the farmer, as does the newspaper, by providing mental suggestions from an extended environment.

A very important source of suggestion, as abnormal psychology so clearly demonstrates, at present, is the impressions of childhood. Rural life tends on the whole to intensify the significant events of early life, because of the limited amount of exciting experiences received as compared with city life. Parental influence is more important because it suffers less competition. This fact of the meaning of early suggestions appears, without doubt, in various ways and forbids the scientist's assuming that rural thinking is made uniform by universal and unvaried suggestions.