"My country, 'tis of thee!" / Or, the United States of America; past, present and future. A philosophic view of American history and of our present status, to be seen in the Columbian exhibition.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

The natural question occurs, why does not the farmer change his business as hundreds of thousands of mechanics and other men are doing every year? The answer is that it is impossible for him to do so. He cannot leave his farm without ruin to his family, for to neglect to plant and cultivate is to lose the credit upon which in ninety-nine cases in a hundred he must subsist. He cannot sell his farm at auction under the hammer as if it were a city house or a village residence, for purchasers of farms are the rarest of all purchasers of real-estate in the United States. This is not in accordance with European precedent or supposition, but it has been demonstrated in every State, and almost every county of the Union.

Does all this mean that farming will not pay? No. Farming will pay if backed by capital as well as practical knowledge. But it is almost impossible that the American farmer of the present generation shall have any capital from any source whatever. Farming, when conducted intelligently, can be made profitable in any portion of the United States by a man with sufficient money in his pocket. Hiram Sibley, one of the most remarkable men whom the United States ever produced, was, at the time of his death, in 1888, managing four hundred different farms in nine different States of the Union, conducting all through correspondence, and he made it his boast, in which undoubtedly he was honest, that from each of these farms he secured a profit. But Sibley was a millionaire twenty times over, probably forty times. Whatever his farms needed they could have at once, and at the lowest market price, for he always had cash to pay for whatever he wanted. Nevertheless, this successful farmer, this millionaire, this thorough-going man of business, said, to the day of his death, that there was no more pitiable character in the United States than the farmer.

Nobody knows more about any one special business than the man who does not have to attend to its details, so there is a widespread opinion and assertion that the trouble with the farmer is that he is improvident. Men call attention to the expenses, apparently unnecessary, which he is continually making, particularly in the direction of comforts and even luxuries for his family. But what can the farmer do? Everywhere east of the Mississippi river he is near a village. His children go to school with those of the village. They learn of comforts and luxuries to which they are not accustomed at home. They talk about them. They think about them. They long for them. The farmer himself is a human being. Any one who mistakes him for a boor makes a terrible blunder. Whenever it is in his power to make his home more comfortable he does so with a degree of earnestness that is almost terrible. He is anxious to save himself from the possible imputation, by his own children, of being a less careful provider than any one with whom his family are on intimate terms.

When there comes a year in which crops promise well, the farmer will buy anything that his family may want, if he can pay by giving his note of hand, to fall due after the yield of the year is sold. Makers of sewing-machines, organs, pianos, venders of furniture and bric-a-brac, agents of subscription-books, go first and most steadily to the farmers with their wares. The farmer will give his note, the vender will find some one who will discount it, and in the end it must be paid or compromised. If the crops go well everything is paid—perhaps. If not, the farmer is deeper than ever in the morass of debt. He has the consolation, apparently slight, though it is great to him, that his family has enjoyed some of the benefits of villagers whom they have envied, and that some day, somehow, he will get even with the world for it. Perhaps this apparent extravagance of his will keep his family together longer than the family of his neighbor A or B or C, from which the boys have drifted into village stores and shops, and the girls into domestic service in the town, or perhaps into factories, all to avoid the hard work, but still more, the loneliness and barrenness of the average farmer’s home.

How helpless and unpromising is the present condition of the American farmer can best be imagined by a glance at the farming interest as it exists at present in the New England States. Here, within the lifetime of the present generation, mills have dotted the sides of every river and brook that has sufficient power to turn a wheel. Thousands of people are gathered closely together every few miles along these water-courses, working in mills and factories, and absolutely dependant upon the surrounding country for their food supplies. Yet in no other section of the country are there so many abandoned farms. A short time ago the twelve best farms in the State of Vermont were practically abandoned because it seemed impossible to their owners to work them without a loss, and a bill was introduced in the Legislature to exempt these particular farms—which, again I repeat, were the best in the State—to exempt these farms from taxation so that some one might be persuaded to work them. It is not that the farmers have no market for what they produce, but that the finer farm products, or what in the larger cities are called the products of market-gardening, are of a nature so perishable that the profitable promise of a good soil may be speedily lost by the loss of the field itself after gathering.

Even near the large city of New York, where some men pay the interest on land worth five thousand dollars per acre for the sake of tilling it for market-gardening purposes, there are thousands of acres of ground utterly neglected year after year, as they have been for the past twenty years. It is possible that some of these might have been tilled to profit, but, with a steady demand for labor in the cities for which sure and frequent pay is guaranteed, the farmer’s sons and daughters left their home, and the father was left without assistance and without means to hire help. Even had he hired it, the results would have been the same—the balance on the wrong side at the end of the year.

Frequently the suggestion is made that the farmers should receive a bounty from the Government or from his State on special products, and this system, so far as individual States are concerned, is in partial operation. The farmer himself is distinctly of the opinion that, while legislation provides special relief and assistance for nearly every other class in the industrial world, he should not be neglected. When he begins to demand such assistance, as he is now quite willing to do, there will be before the public a question of greater magnitude than any labor problem which has yet appeared. Special legislation has an unpopular sound, but the fact exists, as any follower of Congressional and legislative proceedings well knows.

The granger movement in the West was the initial of this attempt at improving the farmer’s condition. Like other great popular movements, it began with a sudden impulse, in which there was more earnestness than intelligence; yet any observer of the necessities of the farmer and the management of the railways knows that there was a substantial basis of sense to it. For a great many years the railways took the lion’s share of the farm’s yield, on the plea that it cost that proportion of the value of the crop to move corn or wheat or pork to market. Why it took so large an amount is well known in the case of many roads, which by watering their stock or subsidizing construction companies were capitalized at several times their value. In the future efforts of the farmer to secure recognition and proper compensation for his service, the factors of the problem may not be so distinct, but, unless something is done in the direction of legislative assistance, the farms of the West must in time be deserted as largely as those of the eastern States, in which there are now thousands of farms in which not only the land, but the buildings, are without occupants, and are at the service of anyone who may be fool enough to occupy them—that is the farmer’s way of putting it.

It has frequently been suggested that the farmer could save largely from the financial results of his year’s work by participating in co-operative movements for the supply of stores and other necessities of his family on his farm. It may not be known to theorists that this suggestion has nothing new in it. It occurred to the farmer in hundreds of counties, and he endeavored to act upon it. But what can a man do in the way of purchasing from first hands, who has no capital with which to purchase? Farmers’ stores and farmers’ clubs were tried, to a large extent, forty or fifty years ago, all over the States which now are the most populous section of the Mississippi valley. Sometimes the effort resulted in the establishment of depots of supply for farmers alone, but a single year of bad crops, whether caused by drought or insect pests or overflows, or any other cause entirely outside of the control of the farmer, would cause the ruin of any establishment which chanced to be started with capital sufficient only for a little while.

As before stated, and as must be kept in mind in each and in all considerations of the farmer’s lot and the farmer’s future, the agriculturist of the United States is almost always a man without capital, and a man whose constant struggle is to be equal by his output to his daily demands. When a farmer’s store failed, the deficiency had to be made up in cash, even if some of the backers had to sell their estates. Bankruptcy proceedings or “arrangements” with creditors were not easy. It is no exaggeration to say that it would be far easier, in most parts of the United States, to sell a white elephant or a million-dollar diamond than to turn a farm into cash at short notice, although the seller were willing to submit to a ruinous sacrifice. There are hundreds of thousands of farmers in the better and more fully settled States, who for years have had their estates in the market, and been willing and anxious to sell at a loss, yet have been utterly unable to find a purchaser, except among men of their own class, who had no money to pay in advance and who could simply offer a mortgage as security for future payment, and from which mortgage, in case of default on interest or principal, nothing could be obtained for a year or more, and even then only after proceedings most uncomfortable to institute and likely only to result in a terrible sacrifice to the creditor. The number of men who are “land poor” in the agricultural districts of the United States is almost beyond computation. The man who has a farm of two or three hundred acres, nominally valued at a hundred dollars per acre, is supposed to be worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars and quite good for all his debts. The truth is that often he suffers more for lack of some small necessity for which cash must be paid than the city mechanic or laborer, who receives only a few dollars per week for his services.