The Melancholy Farmer
Ward, Leo L.
THE MELANCHOLY FARMER By LEO L. WARD PATIENCE, if we look at history, seems to be the agricultural virtue. The peasant always appears, with his oxen, a long-suffering gigantic figure of...
...In education he is perhaps beginning to place a hope of securing this idealism that should make his life adequate...
...There is in literature scarcely a more moving scene than that in which, on Christmas eve, Roch, the old saint of his people, sends home the whole population of the village, living in the actuality of hopes and dreams that, as they well knew, could never perish...
...There are also the suggested changes of tariff...
...He says that all inland peoples are materialistic—meaning, particularly, all inland agricultural peoples...
...Even at home, when the day is done— and even in spite of an occasional band-concert in the nearby town and perhaps a radio too—even with these is life somehow a more or less hollow affair...
...There is something wrong...
...He had tasted prosperity and its modern comforts, but he was not to continue eating of the good things...
...Always the farmer somehow has been able to get a satisfaction out of life—an abiding, resigned contentment in the work of his hands—always, until now in our own day and in the vast new country of our Middle-West...
...One of the patent and more immediate reasons for this condition is of a financial nature...
...And dissatisfaction, of course, grows naturally out of such a condition of affairs, which during the past few years has been chronic...
...Due to a lack of confidence, to the difficulties natural to the organization of great numbers of men into one efficient business company— and probably, too, to a traditional reluctance on the farmer's part to enter cooperatively into new ventures —the attempt made then at organizing a great agricultural business enterprise that could promise any large alleviation of rural financial troubles failed practically without hope of revival for some time...
...And this idealism is, of course, religion...
...In Raymont's epic story of the Polish peasant, one learns, with a sweeping intimate conviction, what religion can do toward saving a naturally melancholy, extremely overburdened people from their terrible daily despairs...
...The recent loud knocking on the doors of Congress, with an appeal for material help, has been only one expression of a discontentment which is concerned with more than the price of wheat...
...Anyone who belongs to the Middle-West, who is close to the heart of its people, knows that there is in them a disappointment—a sharp disappointment...
...But in the meantime the discontent, more or less profound as it has become, must continue to work its way to the skin— to be sweated out as best it may under the burden of the farmer's toiling...
...Which brings us to the last and most important question concerning the farmer—the American farmer...
...Somewhere from out of the prairie grasses a small and rather sudden sting of bitterness, like that of a half-grown rattlesnake, has been felt by the people, and its poison has spread through the rural sections generally...
...And this resulted in such a general frustration of effort that for the sake of preserving confidence in the cooperative principle itself it were better, it would almost seem, had the Grain Growers not made their attempt...
...but its only defect is that it is so much more easily made than carried out that the result so far has been a great amount of talking and comparatively little actual effective application of remedy...
...But if education saves the American farmer from himself and from his condition of life, then history will have something to record which will have never occurred before...
...During the war, and for a short period immediately afterward, the farmer could live practically on the same plane as the business man of equal means...
...He is waiting for anything that might occasionally lift him out of the soil...
...but the farmer had to get up and go back to his twelve and fourteen-hour day, and his salt pork...
...a movement too sound in principle to be argued about...
...But what can be done...
...This suggestion is the much considered cooperative movement...
...Why have these physical conditions brought him to such bitter impatient discontentment...
...The American farmer wants some sort of idealism...
...Only a vital religion, a living faith, can under all circumstances preserve the old and quite necessary agricultural virtue of patience...
...Cooperative movements, if not McNary-Haugenism or tariffs, can perhaps, after some time, give the farmer good markets...
...He received a profit upon his ownings which approximated a normal business return...
...A weekly band-concert, a poor movie, a cheap radio—on rare occasions, a circus—lately the Klan with all its grotesque amusement—all these and many other things the farmer will grasp at as possible, if often shoddy, satisfactions for some craving in him that he himself has not stopped to analyze...
...Of remedies suggested there have been no end...
...There is only one idealism which has ever been able to preserve in any agricultural people a full, wholesome confidence in life and its greater promises...
...One suggestion, alone, of permanent and of thorough value has been made...
...which is, of course, a partial solution toward which present conditions of over-supply naturally tend...
...What he must have is some sort of idealism—to lift his eyes occasionally from the furrow...
...But in the Middle-West, in the great grain-growing states, the farming population is so large and so heterogeneous that all efforts at anything like a general effective cooperative movement among the farmers has heretofore always failed ignominiously...
...His brother, the grocer, would continue sitting at table...
...but tariff can be at best a help, not a remedy, for the farmer's troubles...
...and this will, with time, no doubt right the leaning agricultural finances to within at least a line of safety...
...and secondly, IS3 why an increased supply resultant upon better farming would solve the difficulty of disastrously low markets...
...On the other hand, there have been those who have advocated "less farming" and fewer farmers...
...But his hope was cut short...
...154...
...That is, he cannot hope for a return from his ownings which corresponds to the business man's normal return from his ownings...
...And especially during the first few months after the war did the farmer have a taste of what modern prosperity is...
...His is a hard and laborious life at best, and he needs not only something to save him from his little daily despairs, but something also to lift him above the whole monotony of the soil...
...but, with Senator Reed of Missouri, shrewd and experienced farmers everywhere have asked to be shown the great feasibleness of any large change of present crop rotations...
...The average land-owning farmer, especially if he has any mortgage on his land, cannot hope to make any financial headway...
...Step into a local grain warehouse any time after harvest is over, when the farmers have time to gather there and talk a little, and you will know how impatient with things as they are have the men of Middle America become...
...For the bottom fell out of practically all markets, particularly all grain markets...
...and he has, in a large number of cases, slipped backward—while many have failed entirely...
...The fact is, the average mid-western farmer cannot get a business man's normal return out of his investment...
...This condition, extended over such a large territory, is a serious cause of the present discontentment...
...But if one wants to know most surely and intimately of this incipient dissatisfaction which has been growing in the Middle-West, one had best read of it, not in the newspapers which can tell only of such social phenomena as the McNary-Haugen bill, but in the conversation of the people...
...The peasant always appears, with his oxen, a long-suffering gigantic figure of toil—even when he sings as he plows...
...it is one of those questions which probably never could be settled one way or the other...
...And that was enough to awaken in him an understanding of what the new American standard of living means for human life...
...Perhaps the professor is right about the matter...
...The farmer was ready to enjoy the comfort of the prosperous middle-class...
...All of it is a thirst "for some kind of escape, some sort of sublimation by which he can live above the burdens of his toil—some kind of idealism in which he can find for himself a more satisfactory life...
...But the farmer needs more than good markets...
...The result of this is that the farmer cannot keep abreast of the American standard of living...
...His heart hoped for a legitimate amount of pleasure, and he had dreams of resting his tired body and refreshing his weary spirit with what for him were to be new luxuries...
...Or listen to them over their neighborly fences, and you will hear much more than a farmer's proverbial complaining...
...And there is the Italian, who still sings in his vineyards after these hundreds of happy years of labor...
...but as a deliberate and organized policy, this is rather a clumsy aim...
...There has been an epic patience in all peoples of the soil...
...The exodus of farmers' sons to the cities has been perhaps a more significant, if a less conspicuous phenomenon indicating how serious is the discontent...
...The one outstanding instance of a general cooperative attempt was the Grain Growers' organization of a few years ago...
...But the flux of supply and demand, it would seem, must be expected to work out the chief benefits that are possible...
...The farmer is, to an unwholesome extent, dissatisfied...
...But there is in opposition to the professor's indictment one fact in connection with the American farmer which is important...
...A dissatisfaction with their state, which is to an extent a dissatisfaction with life itself, has blown across the Middle-West like one of those "hot-winds" which the corn farmer of Illinois fears all during July and August...
...I know a professor who has a pet theory about farmers...
...There has been talk and talk, even in Congress, of the possibilities of "better farming," and of a wider variation of crops...
...and consequently the farmer cannot hope to live with the same degree of comfort and convenience as can, say, the grocer whose store is of the same value as the farmer's farm...
...Is there no possibility of remedy...
...And the large figure of the middlewestern farmer was bent over his labor again in a disappointment that has remained acute ever since...
...It may be unduly pessimistic to say so, but it surely seems that there is little hope of an effective cooperative undertaking on any adequate scale among the general farming population of the Middle-West for some years to come...
...There is only one sort that will be always adequate—the durable idealism of religion...
...Recurrent cooperative attempts will undoubtedly be able to do no little good...
...and the French peasant also, who has kept faith in life and in men under his toil because he sometimes stops working to pray...
...And patience, as well as good markets, must help in saving the farmer from becoming too melancholy...
...The scarcity of labor, most acute at times during late years, has not been the result of low wages only—but of a certain widespread and persistent feeling that life is squandered if it lives out its days in the monotony of a cornfield...
...Surely no complete and immediate remedy...
...During that time he sent his children to good schools, owned a good automobile—and perhaps for the first time in his life took a vacation or two in the form of long motor trips...
Vol. 5 • December 1926 • No. 6
