"The Farmer and the Realities"

To what extent was the agrarian myth actually false? When it took form in America during the eighteenth century, its stereotypes did indeed correspond to many of the realities of American agricultural life. There were commercial elements in colonial agriculture almost from the earliest days, but there were also large numbers of the kind of independent yeomen idealized in the myth, men who had remarkable self-sufficiency and bequeathed to their children a strong penchant for craftsmanlike improvisation and a tradition of household industry. For a long time the commercial potentialities of agriculture were held in check by severe obstacles. Only the farmers very near to the rivers and the towns had adequate transportation. The small industrial population provided a very limited domestic market, and the villagers raised a large part of their own food. Outside the South operations above the size of the family farm were cramped by the absence of a force of wage laborers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the American population was still living largely in the forests, poised at the edge of the Appalachians, and standing on the verge of the great drive across the prairies that occupied settlers for half a century, the yeoman was by no means a fiction. . . .

From colonial days there had always been before the eyes of the yeoman farmer in the settled areas alluring models of commercial success in agriculture: the tobacco, rice, and indigo planters of the South, the grain, meat, and cattle exporters of the middle colonies. In America the spirit of
emulation was exceptionally strong, the opportunities were considerable. The farmer knew that without cash he could never rise above the hardships and squalor of pioneering and log-cabin life.  Self-sufficiency produced savings, and savings went into the purchase of more land, of herds and flocks of better tools; they erected barns and silos and better dwellings, and made other improvements. When there was spare time, the farmer often worked off the farm to add to his cash resources, at first in trapping, hunting, fishing, or lumbering, later in the maintenance and
repair railroads. Domestic politics were persistently affected by his desire for the means of getting a cash crop to market, for turnpikes and canals. The foreign policy of the early Republic was determined again and again by the clamor of farmers to keep open the river outlets for American produce.

Between 1815 and 1860 the character of American agriculture was transformed. The independent yeoman, outside of exceptional or isolated areas, almost disappeared before the relentless advance of commercial agriculture. The rise of native industry created a home market for agriculture, while at the same time demands arose abroad, at first for American cotton and then for American foodstuffs. A network of turnpikes, canals, and railroads linked the planter and the advancing Western farmer to these new markets, while the Eastern farmer, spurred by Western competition, began to cultivate more thoroughly the nearby urban outlets for his products. As the farmer moved out onto the flat, rich prairies, he found possibilities for the use of machinery that did not exist in the forest. Before long he was cultivating the prairies with horse-drawn mechanical reapers, steel plows, wheat and corn drills, and threshers. The cash crop converted the yeoman into a small entrepreneur, and the development of horse-drawn machinery made obsolete the
simple old agrarian symbol of the plow. Farmers ceased to be free of what the early agrarian writers had called the "corruptions" of trade. They were, to be sure, still "independent," in the sense that they owned their land. They were a hardworking lot in the old tradition. But no longer did they grow or manufacture what they needed: they concentrated on the cash crop and began to buy more of their supplies from the county store. To take full advantage of mechanization, they engrossed as much land as they could. To mechanize fully, they borrowed cash. Where they could not buy or borrow they might rent: by the 1850's Illinois farmers who could not afford machines and large barns were hiring itinerant jobbers with machines to do their threshing. The shift from self-sufficient to commercial farming varied in time throughout the West and cannot be dated with precision, but it was complete in Ohio by about 1830 and twenty years later in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. All through the great Northwest, farmers whose ancestors might have lived in isolation and self-sufficiency were surrounded by jobbers, banks, stores, middlemen, horses, and machinery; and in so far as this process was unfinished in 1860, the demands of the Civil War brought it to completion. As the Prairie Farmer said in 1868: "The old rule that a farmer should produce all that he required, and that the surplus represented his gains, is part of the past.  Agriculture like all other business, is better for its subdivisions, each one growing that which is best suited to his soil, skill, climate and market, and with its proceeds purchasing his other needs."

The triumph of commercial agriculture not only rendered obsolete the objective conditions that had given to the agrarian myth so much of its original force, but also showed that the ideal implicit in the myth was contesting the ground with another, even stronger ideal- the notion of opportunity, of career, of the self-made man. The same forces in American life that had made Jacksonian equalitarianism possible and had given to the equalitarian theme in the agrarian romance its most compelling appeal had also unleashed in the nation an entrepreneurial zeal probably without precedent in history, a rage for business, for profits, for opportunity, for advancement. If the yeoman family was to maintain itself in the simple terms eulogized in the myth, it had to produce consistently a type of character that was satisfied with a traditional way of life. But the Yankee farmer, continually exposed to the cult of success that was everywhere around him, became inspired by a kind of personal dynamism which called upon the individual to surpass traditions. He was, in terms that David Riesman has made familiar, not a tradition-directed but an inner-directed man. Agrarian sentiment sanctified labor in the soil and the simple life, but the prevailing Calvinist atmosphere of rural life implied that virtue was rewarded, after all, with success and material goods. . . .

Frequent and sensational rises in land values bred a boom psychology in the American farmer and caused him to rely for his margin of profit more on the process of appreciation than on the sale crops. It took a strong man to resist the temptation to ride skyward on lands that might easily triple or quadruple their value in one decade and then double again in the next. It seemed ultraconservative to improve existing possessions if one could put savings or borrowings into new land. What developed in America was an agricultural society whose real attachment was not to the
land but to the values. In the 1830's Tocqueville found this the prevailing characteristic of American agriculture: "Almost all the farmers of the United States combine some trade with agriculture; most of them make agriculture itself a trade. It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies: especially in the districts of the Far West he brings land into tillage in order to sell it again, and not to farm it: he builds a farmhouse on the speculation that, as the state of the country will soon be changed by the increase of population, a good price will be gotten for it. . . . Thus the Americans carry their business-like qualities into agriculture; and their trading passions are displayed in that as in their other pursuits."

The penchant for speculation and the lure of new and different lands bred in the American farmer a tremendous passion for moving- and not merely, as one common view would have it, on the part of those who had failed, but also on the part of those who had succeeded. For farmers who had made out badly, the fresh lands may have served on occasion as a safety valve, but for others who had made out well enough on a speculative basis, or who were beginning a farming "career," it was equally a risk valve-an opportunity to exploit the full possibilities of the great American land bubble. Mobility among farmers had serious effects upon an agricultural tradition never noted for careful cultivation: in a nation whose soil is notoriously heterogeneous, farmers too often had little chance to get to know the quality of their land; they failed to plan and manure and replenish; they neglected diversification for the one-crop system and ready cash. There was among them little attachment to land or locality; instead there developed the false euphoria of local "boosting," encouraged by railroads, land companies, and farmers themselves; in place of village contacts and communal spirit based upon ancestral attachments; there was professional optimism based upon hopes for a quick rise in values.

In a very real and profound sense then, the United States failed to develop (except in some localities, chiefly in the east) a distinctively rural culture. If a rural culture means an emotional and craftsman-like dedication to the soil, a traditional and pre-capitalist outlook, a tradition-directed rather that career-directed type of character, and a village community devoted to ancestral ways and habitually given to communal action, then the prairies and plains never had one.  What differentiated the agricultural life of these regions from the practices widespread in
European agriculture-or, for that matter, from the stereotype of the agrarian myth-was not simply that it produced for a market but that it was so speculative, so mobile, so mechanized, so "progressive," so thoroughly imbued with the commercial spirit. . . .

In America the greater availability of land and the scarcity of labor made for extensive agriculture which was wasteful of the soil, and placed a premium on machines to bring large tracts under cultivation. His demand for expensive machinery, his expectation of higher standards of living, and his tendency to go into debt to acquire extensive acreage created an urgent need for cash and tempted the farmer into capitalizing more and more on his greatest single asset: the unearned appreciation in the value of his land. The managerial skill required for success under these conditions was as much businesslike as craftsmanlike. The predominance in American agriculture of the isolated farmstead standing in the midst of great acreage, the frequent movements, the absence of village life deprived the farmer and his family of the advantages of community, lowered the chances of association and co-operation, and encouraged that rampant, suspicious, and almost suicidal individualism for which the American farmer was long noted and which organizations like the Grange tried to combat. The characteristic product of American rural society was not a yeoman or a villager, but a harassed little country businessman who worked very hard, moved all too often, gambled with his land, and made his way alone. . . .

The self-defeating tendency of relatively cheap land in a speculative society is perfectly illustrated in an intensive contemporary study of a Nebraska township by Arthur F. Bentley. This township was first settled in 1871-2. In the early days when land prices were low there was a prosperous period of rapid settlement, and the farmer's rate of profit was high whenever he had good crops; this encouraged him to buy and work more land than he could properly manage. The rapid appreciation of the price of land led him to try to realize his gains in advance by mortgaging. As fast as he could increase his loan he would do so, using the funds either to pay temporary losses or for further investment, or speculation. "It is true," Bentley observed, "the farmer may often have suffered from excessive interest and grasping creditors; but it was less frequently the avarice of the leader that got him into trouble than the fact that he was too sanguine and too prone to believe that he could safely go into debt, on the assumption that crops and prices in the, future would equal those in the present." At any rate, the typical farmer soon found himself in such a vulnerable position that one bad crop year or a brief temporary cessation of increase in land values, such as that of 1890-1, would put him on the verge of failure. Those farmers who came in early and took government land, who managed with some skill and got clear of heavy debt, made out well; those who came later, took railroad land, and made the usual errors of management were in straits. By 1892, when Bentley made his study, he concluded that a would-be purchaser who did not have enough capital to buy his farm outright and to hold it over subsequent periods of hard times "had almost better throw his money away than invest it in farming operations in Nebraska at the current prices of land and under the present agricultural conditions; unless, he be possessed of unusual energy and ability.". . .

In pointing to the farmer's commercial role I am not trying to deny the difficulties of his position or the reality and seriousness of his grievances: the appreciation of debts through deflation, the high cost of credit, inequitable tax burdens, discriminatory railroad rates, unreasonable elevator and storage charges. Populism can best be understood, however, not as a product of the frontier inheritance, but as another episode in the well-established tradition of American entrepreneurial
radicalism which goes back at least to the Jacksonian era. It was an effort on the part of a few important segments of a highly heterogeneous capitalistic agriculture to restore profits in the face of much exploitation and under unfavorable market and price conditions. It arose as a part of a transitional stage in the history of American agriculture, in which the Commercial farmer was beginning to cast off habits of thought and action created almost as much by the persistence of the agrarian myth as by the realities of his position. He had long since taken from business society its acquisitive goals and its speculative temper, but he was still practicing the competitive individualism sectors of industry and finance had outgrown. He had not yet learned much from business about its marketing devices, strategies of combination, or skills of self-defense and self-advancement through pressure politics. His dual identity itself was not yet resolved. He entered the twentieth century still affected by his yeoman inheritance but with a growing awareness of the businesslike character of his future.