Evolution of American Agriculture/Chapter X
CHAPTER X
Development of Agricultural Proletariat
IN THE preceding chapters we have traced the development of American agriculture and the effect of machinery both upon production and rural population. In the present chapter we will attempt to show the development of a distinctly proletarian class upon the farms.
The American census reports are utterly unreliable for the period prior to 1850, for the reason that they were entirely general in their character and failed to gather that particular information which would give an exact view of the condition of the rural population. The authorities are completely at sea as to many phases of the agricultural problem and hold divergent opinions regarding the same, thus making one man's idea quite as reliable as the other's and all of them open to question.
Only in the South, where the negro slaves constituted the laboring population, was there specialization in agriculture (in the cotton and tobacco raising industries). In the Middle States and in the North where general farming was practised, there was no genuinely rural proletariat, for the reason that the lands were cheap and the undeveloped West was open to every man who had sufficient knowledge of agriculture and enough energy to devote himself to the conquest of the soil.
So far as the white man was concerned, the perriod prior to the Civil War was an era when the farm hand was really an apprentice to the trade. The tools of agriculture were crude and the cultural processes were simple. The farmer's son, the immigrant and the bondsman worked for wages only so long as was necessary to obtain the needful instruction or to save the price of a few acres of land and secure the tools of the trade. When he had these, he became a farmer on his own account, either by the purchase of land in his home neighborhood or by migrating Westward to less settled regions.
The relations of the farmer and his hired man were, therefore those of social equals. The farm hand resided with the farmer as a member of his family—the old guild relationship of master and journeyman persisted longer on the farms than in any other industry—and, due to this near social equality, the class antagonisms so characteristic of capitalist society were very slow in developing.
But with the introduction of machinery on the farms, and the development of commercial or competitive farming, the condition of the rural population began to change. The cost of the machines with which the farmer could engage in the new farming and hold his own on a competitive market so greatly increased the capital necessary to embark upon the venture that the farm hand was forced to remain longer at his apprenticeship—the age at which men started farming for themselves began to increase—and many who would have continued on the soil, gave up the idea and sought employment in the other industries which were being developed by leaps and bounds. Others contented themselves to start on a limited capital as renters or tenants, hoping to be able to purchase land a little later on.
In 1850 the number of farms was 1,449,000 and the working population on the farms was 4,082,000 persons. Of these, 34 1-2 per cent were land owners, 1 per cent were tenants, and 64 1-2 per cent were the children of farmers, wage hands and slaves. Thirty years later (1880) when the slaves had long been freed and the settlement of the Western lands was in full swing, the number of farms had increased to 4,009,000, with a working population of 7,714,000, and of these 44.2 per cent were land owners, 7.8 per cent were tenants, and 48 per cent were children of farmers and wage hands. The proportion of land owners had increased by 28 per cent, the farm hands, children, etc., had decreased more than 25 per cent, but the tenant farmers had increased 680 per cent. The development of the railroads and the opening of the homestead lands offset to a great degree the increased cost of farm equipment; yet, relatively speaking, there were 12 1-2 per cent less farmers in 1880 than there were in 1850—the working farmers, in comparison to the total population, had decreased one-eighth.
In 1900, twenty years later, the farm owners were 42.7 per cent of the working population on the farms, a decrease of about 3.4 per cent. The tenants had increased to one-eighth of the farm population (22 3-4 per cent of the operating farmers), while the wage hands and children had decreased 1-15 to 44.8 per cent. During this period, machinery was displacing vast numbers of farmers for the total number of farmers in comparison to the total population had suffered a decrease of more than 11 per cent in the ten year period from 1880 to 1890, and from 1890 to 1900 it had practically held its own. The reason there was no comparative decrease in the farm population between 1890 and 1900 was because great numbers of men sought the farms during the hard times from 1893 to 1896, and immediately following this occurred the failure of the European wheat crop, which drove that cereal up to a dollar per bushel and suddenly made farming a profitable enterprise.
During this period the number of land owning farmers increased by 1,023,500 persons, the tenants increased 696,000, and the wage hands, children etc., increased 948,400.
Since 1900, the homestead lands have all been occupied, a great immigration of farmers from this country into Canada has taken place, and the price of land has gone up to almost fabulous figures—all of which have decreased the ratio of land owning farmers. In the nineteen years just past the number of land owning farmers has increased by 512,000 persons, a little more than half the increase in the previous twenty years. The tenants increased by 823,650, and the wage hands and others increased by 2,331,217.
The land owning farmers are now 35.2 per cent of the working rural population, the tenants are 15.1 per cent (occupying 30 per cent of all the farms), and the farm hands, farmer's children, etc., equal 49.7 per cent of the tillers of the soil.
With the working population on the farms constituting but 13 per cent of the total population, we have arrived at the point where but little more than 4 1-2 per cent of that total are land owning farmers, a little less than 2 per cent are tenants, and the remainder (6.46 per cent), are the children of farmers and wage hands. The price of farm land and the cost of farm equipment has advanced to such a figure that the farm wage worker, with an average wage of less than $35 per month (1918), has a remarkably slim chance to become a farmer on his own account and that chance growing slimmer.
The farm hand of today is no longer the potential equal of his employer, and all the old show of social equality is rapidly disappearing; only in the backwoods sections can it yet be found, and there the farm hand is usually the son of a neighboring farmer and therefore carries the status of his father. In the most developed regions the same relations prevail upon the farms as are found in the other industries, with the exception that the work is largely seasonal and therefore the employment is irregular and precarious. The farm hand has become a migratory laborer, possessing all the characteristics of his industrial brother, and faithfully reflecting the influences of so unstable an environment. Robbed of his hope of permanent economic advancement, he takes his place as a section of the great dispossessed—the agricultural proletariat.
UNCLE GOSH'S IDEA OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE
"B' gosh, ol' Izra Hinkens sez as how one o' thum W fellers threw his best plow horse in th' well——!"