The Disunited States
THE DISUNITED STATES DR. GLENN FRANK, editorial-writing president of the University of Wisconsin, has always been a master of sharp and vividly phrased contrasts. He outdid himself recently in...
...The outlook of American labor, whether urban or rural, may fairly be said to move in the opposite direction...
...Other alleged conflicts might be disposed of similarly...
...It is true that when the talented country boy goes to Boston or New York, as he so frequently does, he usually sloughs off a great deal of his provincialism without putting on the brand popular in the city...
...That the urban mind is always on one side of a question and agricultural opinion on the other happens not to be true...
...and although he is, under present conditions, hardly so likely to find an opportunity to improve his lot as the city-worker, he is also far more secure against periods of depression and unemployment...
...The industrial worker has, however, one advantage: the giant enterprises which pay his wage are as a whole far better able to control production and capitalization than is agriculture as a whole...
...But why should a man who plants 200 acres of wheat and milks a small herd of cows be likened to the United States Steel Corporation...
...The man from the boulevard and the man of the furrow are fighting for the control of the American future...
...Liberalism"—we understand Dr...
...There are two Americas within our borders—an America that takes its cue from the city and an America that takes its cue from the country," he asserted, holding that the first has steadily pressed the second back...
...The philosophy which the successful group among our citizenry has virtually accepted differs in no great degree from the doctrine by which Europe swore prior to the war...
...Thus visualized, the farmer is really not less well organized than his urban equal...
...Meanwhile the individual farmer ought, one believes, to try to join with his fellows in something far more like a labor union than like a board of directors...
...He should be compared rather with the man he tends to become when he leaves the plow and moves to town—the tradesman, the mechanic, the professional worker...
...Farmers in particular have been indifferent to this necessary readjustment...
...He cannot depend permanently upon being subsidized or nursed by state or federal governments...
...But it is not unified and seldom articulate...
...Divided by racial, religious, social, political and educational lines, it is the great American enigma...
...It is true that corporate industry is much more competently engineered than farming is...
...The deeper conflict we are witnessing is, it seems, less a struggle between town and country (though this is very real and important) than a struggle between ideals sponsored in behalf of American civilization and the ideals which actually govern the American laboring masses...
...Frank to mean by this word anticlanism of all sorts rather than sophisticated emancipation— merely assumes different forms in some metropolitan areas than it clings to in certain farming states...
...He outdid himself recently in an address to assembled Kiwanians by asserting that one great dramatic conflict is tearing the United States asunder...
...But we too frequently ignore the thousands of excellent citizens who dwell on farms or in small towns and attain to a reasonable attitude toward life and their fellowmen which the harried city-dweller can only envy as he watches the newspapers which myriads of his fellow subwayites peruse or studies the ideas they applaud...
...We must effect "social readjustment between the dying and the dawning of a social order...
...One doubts very much that "literalism" abounds in the country while "liberalism" flourishes like an elm in Central Park...
...The agricultural part of America must organize as the rest of American enterprise is organizing or the farmer will be lost in the shuffle," said Dr...
...Frank...
...It presents itself under so many guises that it may occasionally be mistaken for something else, but a little probing will unmask its real character...
...Labor of almost all kinds is poorly unified in the United States, a few trades constituting fortunate exceptions to the general rule...
...Few will deny that the conflict between city and country here outlined exists...
...Farm relief depends upon rationalization of produce distribution—a matter as unthinkable apart from government aid as the rise of American railroads or manufacturing enterprise is unthinkable apart from government aid...
...As a matter of fact, there are probably just as many "literalists" in great cities as in the Bible belt...
...The trail of these antagonistic Americas can be followed in the national assemblies of our churches, where liberalism fights literalism, and in the national conventions of our political parties where, by and large, city men stick with city men, and country men stick with country men, despite the powerful demand for party regularity...
...It is a philosophy which steadily tends to become less conservative in some respects (spiritual, moral) and more conservative in others (material, social...
...Take, for instance, the matter of organization...
...If on the one hand the prejudices which it harbors engender hysteria and illwill, the strong and healthy conservatism of its living is the chief reason why the moral and social record of the nation, in an era of spiritual unsettlement, is so strikingly characterized by steadfastness and integrity...
...The conclusions which may be drawn from this antithesis are large and interesting...
...The world inside which individual economic or political units coalesce must not be divided against itself if all wish to maintain "a permanently and progressively great existence...
...Nevertheless one thinks that neither it nor its consequences should be unduly simplified...
...Whether or not the rural districts can succeed in perfecting cooperative organization is, the speaker held, a matter of general social concern...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 11
