Lack of Cooperation in Business
Successful farming is essentially cooperative. The most successful classes of farmers in the country, according to Professor Carver, are the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Mormons and the Quakers. All of these cooperate in their farming operations to a high degree, as well as in their social and church life. They occupy their farms permanently as family homes. Their land is not for sale, in spite of the rising values. To a large extent they buy and sell, and work their farms together, to their great mutual advantage.
The old-fashioned farm management however, which still generally persists, is competitive, and therefore wasteful and unsocial. With rapid transportation and the lengthening distance between producer and consumer, the function of the middleman has grown and his power vastly increased. Consequently on many products the rise in selling price is due to the series of middlemen through whose hands the article has passed on the way to market. Investigations at Decatur, Ill., revealed the fact that head-lettuce sold there was raised within five miles of Chicago, shipped into the city, repacked and shipped by freight to Decatur, a five-hour trip; then stored in the latter city over night; and finally displayed, wilted in the sun, in a store window, and sold to a housewife who buys it for fresh goods! If raised in a suburb of Decatur, it might have been sold at half the price, and been really fresh enough to eat. The same story of flagrant waste through poor management might be told of butter, cream, and practically all farm products which are not sold in a public market near the producer’s home.
Not only are both the farmer and his ultimate customer suffering a considerable loss from this competitive system of marketing, the process itself is bad socially, for this reason. It cuts off the farmer from his normal market, the nearest village, and isolates him and his family so that they have virtually no interests there. If the farmer should sell his product in the village stores or through a public market, or a cooperative commission house, he would have more at stake in that town. He would probably trade and go to church there, his wife would do her buying there, they would be persons of importance to the townspeople and would form friendships and social relationships there. As it is, a wall of mutual suspicion and disregard separates this family from the people of the town.
It is doubtful whether farming can be sufficiently profitable to-day, or the life of the open country be really satisfying, without some degree of cooperation in business. More and more men are realizing this; are overcoming their natural weakness for independence and are discovering numerous modern ways to cooperate with other farmers; to their great mutual advantage both financially and socially, as will be indicated later.
Lack of Religious Cooperation
The old self-sufficing and competitive methods of farming have been closely paralleled by the selfish ideals in religion; the great aim being to save one’s own soul and enjoy the religious privileges of one’s favorite type of church, whatever happened meanwhile to the community. In most country places religion is still strongly individualistic. Rural folk have seen little of the social vision or felt the power of the social gospel of Jesus, which aims not only to convert the individual, but to redeem his environment and reorganize the community life by Christian standards. Consequently rural churches are depending too exclusively on preaching and periodic revivals rather than on organized brotherliness, systematic religious education and broad unselfish service. All of these are essential.
This lack of cooperation is very widely in evidence in the division of country communities into petty little churches, so small and ineffective as to be objects of pity instead of respect and enthusiastic loyalty. In the older sections of the country, rural communities often have twice as many churches as are needed; but in the middle West and the still newer sections further westward the problem of divided Christian forces is even more serious. Many a small township has five churches where one or two would be quite sufficient, and all are struggling for existence. The problem is less serious in the South, where denominations are fewer and where union services are exceedingly common.
In a sparsely settled section in Center County, Pennsylvania, there are 24 churches within a radius of four miles. This fact was vouched for in 1911 by the Presbyterian Department of the Church and Country Life. The same authority suggests the following:
In Marshall County, Indiana, with a total population of but 24,175, there are twenty-nine varieties of churches, separating Christian people. The situation is typical and the names are so suggestive as to be worth recording: Amish Mennonite, Baptist, Primitive Baptist, Brethren, Catholic, Christian, Church of Christ Scientist, Church of God (Adventists), Church of God (Saints), Come-Outers, Congregational, Disciple, Episcopalian, Evangelical Association, German Evangelical, Holiness, Lutheran (Synod of Chicago), Lutheran (Synod of Missouri), Swedish Lutheran, Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Protestant, Pentecostal Holiness, Presbyterian, Progressive Brethren, Reformed, Seventh Day Adventist, United Brethren, United Brethren (Old Constitution), and Wesleyan Methodist.