The Evolution of the Country Community / A Study in Religious Sociology

by Warren H. Wilson

THE EXPLOITER

The third type in American agriculture is the exploiter. Between the farmer and the husbandman there is an economic revolution. In fact the exploiter himself is a transition type between the farmer and the husbandman. "The fundamental problem in American economics always has been that of the distribution of land," says Prof. Ross. The exploiter is, I presume, a temporary economic type, created in the period of re-distribution of land. The characteristic of the exploiter is his commercial valuation of all things. He is the man who sees only the value of money.

It was natural that with the maturing of an American population, the exploitation of the natural resources should come. We have exploited the forest, removing the timber from the hills and making out of its vast resources a few fortunes. We wasted in the process nine-tenths for every one-tenth of wealth accumulated by the exploiter. We have exploited the coal and iron and other minerals. The exploitation of the oil deposits and natural gas reservoirs has been a national experience and a national scandal. The tendency to exploit every opportunity for private wealth has characterized the past two decades.[7]

There are those who exploit the child vitality of the families of working people, and the States have put legal checks in the way of child labor. The exploitation of the labor of women has gone so far as to threaten the vitality of the generation to be born, and laws have been passed which forbid the employment of women except within limits. The ethical discussion of the past decade is largely a keen analysis of the methods of exploitation of resources, of men and of communities, and an attempt to fix the bounds of the exploitation of values for private wealth.

There are those who exploit the farm. "Farms which from the original entry until 1890 had been owned by the same family, or which had changed owners but once or twice, and whose owners were proud to assert that their broad acres had never been encumbered with mortgages, since 1890 have been sold, in some instances as often as ten times, in more numerous instances four or five times, and a large part of the purchase price is secured by encumbering the estates!"[8]

Agriculture, especially of the Middle West, is affected in all its parts by the exploitation of land. To a traveller from the Eastern States, the selling and re-selling of farm land, without fertilization or improvement by any of the successive owners, is a source of amazement.

"The new lands opened under the Homestead act of half a century ago were often exploited for temporary profit by soil robbers who were experts of their kind. Owing to such farm management, the yield of the acre in the United States gradually decreased. Very little intensive farming was done."[9]

The commercial exploitation of land dissolves every permanent factor in the farm economy. The country community of the land-farmer type is being undermined and is crumbling away under the influence of exploitation. The pioneers were a Westward emigration, pushing Westward the boundaries of the country at the rate of fifty miles in a decade; but since 1890 emigration has been eastward, and it is made up of farmers who move to ever cheaper and cheaper lands to the East, the tide of higher prices coming from the West. Already in central Illinois the values of land seem to have reached the high water mark. About Galesburg "the Swedes have got hold of the land and they will not sell." Among the last recorded sales in this district were some at prices between two hundred and two hundred fifty dollars per acre.

It is not generally understood that this exploitation of farm lands has extended over nearly the whole country. Its spread is increasingly rapid in the last two years. In the Gulf States and the Carolinas and in Tennessee and Kentucky prices of farm land have increased in the last five years from twenty-five to one hundred per cent. Even in the most conservative counties in Pennsylvania the prices of farm land have increased twenty to twenty-five per cent.

The sign of this exploitation is a rapid increase in the market values of farm land, due to frequent sale and purchase. This increase is independent of any increase in essential value to the farmer. The net income of the farmer may have been increased only five per cent, as in the State of Indiana, whereas the values of farm land have increased in the same period more than one hundred per cent. That is, the speculative increases have been twenty times as much as the agricultural increase.