The Country-Life Movement in the United States

by L. H. Bailey

THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT

The present revival of rural interest is immediately an effort to improve farming; but at bottom it is a desire to stimulate new activity in a more or less stationary phase of civilization. We may over-exploit the movement, but it is sound at the center. For the next twenty-five years we may expect it to have great influence on the course of events, for it will require this length of time to balance up society. Politicians will use it as a means of riding into power. Demagogues and fakirs will take advantage of it for personal gain. Tradesmen will make much of it. Writers are even now beginning to sensationalize it.

But there will also arise countrymen with statesmanship in them; if not so, then we cannot make the progress that we need. The movement will have its significant political aspect, and we may look for governors of states and perhaps more than one President of the United States to come out of it. In the end, the farmer controls the politics because he makes the crops on which the wealth of the country depends. There is probably a greater proportion of tax-payers among voting farmers than among city people.

Considered in total results, educational and political as well as social and economic, the country-life movement in North America is probably farther advanced than in any other part of the world. It may not have such striking manifestations in some special lines, and our people may not need so much as other peoples that these particular lines be first or most strongly attacked. The movement really has been under way for many years, but it has only recently found separate expression. Most of the progress has been fundamental, and will not need to be done over again. The movement is well afoot among the country people themselves, and they are doing some of the clearest thinking on the situation. Many of our own people do not know how far we have already come.

A transition period.

Such undercurrent movements are usually associated with transition epochs. In parts of the Old World the nexus in the social structure has been the landlord, and the change in land-tenure systems has made a social reorganization necessary. There is no political land-tenure problem in the United States, and therefore there is no need, on that score, of the coöperation of small owners or would-be owners to form a new social crystallization. But there is a land problem with us, nevertheless, and this is at the bottom of our present movement: it is the immanent problem of remaining more or less stationary on our present lands, rather than moving on to untouched lands, when the ready-to-use fertility is reduced. We have had a new-land society, with all the marks of expansion and shift. We are now coming to a new era; but, unlike new eras in some other countries, it is not complicated by hereditary social stratification. Our real agricultural development will now begin.

In the discussion of these rural interests, old foundations and old ideas in all probability will be torn up. We shall probably discard many of the notions that now are new and that promise well. We may face trying situations, but something better will come out of it. It is now a time to be conservative and careful, and to let the movement mature.

The commission on country life.

The first organized expression of the country-life movement in the United States was the appointment of the Commission on Country Life by President Roosevelt in August, 1908. It was a Commission of exploration and suggestion. It could make no scientific studies of its own within the time at its command, but it could put the situation before the people. President Roosevelt saw the country-life problem and attacked it.

The Commission made its Report to the President early in 1909. It found the general level of country life in the United States to be good as compared with that of any previous time, but yet "that agriculture is not commercially as profitable as it is entitled to be for the labor and energy that the farmer expends and the risks that he assumes, and that the social conditions in the open country are far short of their possibilities."