The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunity. Fiske George Walter
What tribute to country life is inscribed on the Washington Union Station? It is a just tribute?
2. – Can you accept the “Country Boy’s Creed”?
3. – Why are so many city boys studying in agricultural colleges? How is it in your own state?
4. – Discuss some of the disadvantages and drawbacks of modern city life.
5. – Why is country life attractive to you?
6. – What do you reckon among the privileges of living in the country?
7. – Discuss the real optimism you find in the “challenge of the difficult” in country life.
8. – How do you explain the “back-to-the-soil movement” from the cities to suburban and rural villages?
9. – Show how the real “Country Life Movement” differs from this.
10. – Mention some of the early plans for rural welfare in America.
11. – What part have the agricultural colleges had in the Country Life Movement?
12. – When did rural betterment first become a national issue in the United States?
13. – What definite rural needs did President Roosevelt mention in his message to the Country Life Commission?
14. – What special call for rural leadership did this Commission voice?
15. – What do you think about the program for rural progress which the Commission proposed to Congress?
16. – What do you think about the proposal to establish a parcels post?
17. – In what special ways do the farmers’ interests need safeguarding?
18. – Make a list of improvements which you consider necessary in the country sections you know the best.
19. – Name as many agencies as you can which are making a better rural life.
20. – On what do you base your faith in the new rural civilization?
CHAPTER III
THE NEW RURAL CIVILIZATION
Introductory: Rural Self-Respect and Progress
The faith of the country life movement is justified by the remarkable rural progress of the past generation. City life has been revolutionized by inventive skill, modern machinery, new forms of wealth and higher standards of efficiency and comfort; but meanwhile this marvelous progress has not been confined to cities. To be sure depleted rural districts, drained of their best blood, have not kept pace. But suburban sections in close partnership with cities have shared the speed and the privileges of urban progress, and meanwhile healthy, self-sustaining rural counties, scorning any dependence upon cities except for market, have developed great prosperity of their own and a remarkably efficient and satisfying life, even though population may have somewhat declined.
This is so radically different from the life of the past, we may justly call it a new rural civilization. It is distinctly a rural civilization, not merely because of its characteristics, but because it is a triumph of rural leadership and the product of rural evolution, by fortunate selection and survival in the country of efficient manhood and womanhood best adapted to cope with their environment.
Thousands who failed in the country have gone to the cities, where it is often easier for incompetence to eke out an existence by living on casual jobs. Thousands of others have found better success in the city because they were better adapted to urban life. Often the net result of the migration has been profit for the country community which has held its best, that is, the country born and bred best adapted to be happy and successful in the rural environment.
Where you find the new rural civilization well developed, you find a self-respecting people, prosperous and happy, keeping abreast of the times in all important human interests, keenly alert to all new developments in agriculture and often proud of their country heritage. Because of this new prosperity and self-respect, ridicule of the “countryman” has ceased to be popular among intelligent people. The title “farmer” has taken on an utterly new meaning and is becoming a term of respect.
All this marks a return to the former days, before the age of supercilious cities, when most of the wealth and culture and family pride was in the open country and the village. To be sure in some sections of America this frank pride in rural life has never ceased. The real aristocracy of the South has always been mainly rural. Many of the “first families of Virginia” still live on the old plantations and maintain a highly self-respecting life, free from the corrosive envy of city conditions, often pitying the man whose business requires him to live in the crowded town, and rejoicing in the freedom and the wholesome joys of country life. The hospitable country mansions of the South still remind us of the fame of Westover, Mount Vernon and Monticello as centers of social grace and leadership; and the most select social groups in Richmond welcome the country gentlemen and women of refinement from these country homes, not merely because of the honored family names they bear, but because they themselves are worthy scions of a continuously worthy rural civilization. They have never pitied themselves for living in the country. They do not want to live in the city. They are justly proud of their rural heritage and their country homes.
Conquering the Great Enemy of Rural Contentment
The depressing effect of isolation has always been the most serious enemy of country life in America. Nowhere else in the world have farm homes been so scattered. Instead of living in hamlets, like the rest of the rural world, with outlying farms in the open country, American pioneers with characteristic independence have lived on their farms regardless of distance to neighbors. But social hungers, especially of the young people, could not safely be so disregarded, and in various ways the social instincts have had their revenge. Isolation has proved to be the curse of the country, as its opposite, congestion, has in the city. The wonder is that the rural population of the country as a whole has steadily gained, nearly doubling in a generation, in spite of this handicap. Obviously the social handicap of isolation must be in a measure overcome, if country life becomes permanently satisfying. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that the new rural civilization has developed many means of intercommunication, bringing the remotest country districts into vital touch with the world.
Among the factors that have revolutionized the life of country people and hastened the new rural civilization are the telephone, the daily mail service by rural free delivery, the rapid extension of good roads, the introduction of newspapers and magazines and farm journals, and traveling libraries as well, the extension of the trolley systems throughout the older states, and the rapid introduction of automobiles, especially through the West.
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