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Ziegler Country Life and Community COUNTRY LIFERS AND THE MEANING OF COMMUNITY: PARSING COMMUNITY IN THE TEXT OF THE REPORT OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S 1908 COMMISSION ON COUNTRY LIFE Edith M. Ziegler E-mail: [email protected] Kettering Foundation Working Paper [2010:01] October 4, 2010 © Charles F. Kettering Foundation, Inc. 2010. All rights reserved. All or portions of this work are the result of a collaboration with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. No use whatever of the material in whole or in part may be made without the express written consent of the Kettering Foundation. Any interpretations and conclusions in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, its staff, directors, or officers. Preface One of the keys to a robust democracy is the presence of strong communities made up of individuals and organizations that have the capacity to work together to solve their problems. Practices and policies of the government and of higher education can serve to strengthen this capacity, or they can inhibit it. The foundation has an interest in the historical trends that have affected the opportunities for communities to build democratic capacity and the role of institutions in that effort. Professor Edith Ziegler has conducted a significant analysis and interpretation of the meaning of community from the era of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. She specifically examines the roles of both government and higher education in strengthening rural communities, which, from Roosevelt’s perspective, were considered necessary to feed the world. Her view of this history is not romanticized; Ziegler clearly casts the sense of inequity that was present in this era. However, her analysis reveals that rural communities were considered the backbone of a strong nation. Thus it became an important mission of government and of higher education to strengthen rural communities, specifically, and to ensure that the farmer was an integral part of the networks that formed them. She provides useful descriptions and definitions of community that are relevant today. Edith M. Ziegler, PhD, is an adjunct lecturer at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW, (Australia). Her book Schools in the Landscape: Localism, Cultural Tradition and the Development of Alabama's Public Education System, 1865-1915 has just been published by the University of Alabama Press. COUNTRY LIFERS AND THE MEANING OF COMMUNITY 3 In August 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell University and offered him the chairmanship of the Commission on Country Life. This special commission was charged with investigating the deficiencies of contemporary rural living, as well as potential remedies for such deficiencies.1 Roosevelt believed that upon the farmer rested the heavy responsibility for “feeding a world which is never more than a year away from starvation,” while also preserving the fertility of the soil, preventing erosion, and properly using irrigation water.2 After an inquiry lasting five months and involving a prodigious effort to gather data through questionnaires, public meetings, and solicited correspondence, the Report of the Country Life Commission (“the report”) was submitted to the president on January 23, 1909. The burden on the farmer, the commission found, was not being met with commensurate earnings or adequate “desirability, comfort and standing of the farmer’s life.”3 1 Letter included in The Report of the Commission on Country Life, 41-46. The report was initially published as a Senate document for the sole use of Congress. It became more widely available when it was published by the Chamber of Commerce of Spokane, Washington, in 1911. The Report of the Commission on Country Life (Reprint of Document No 705, 60th Congress, 2d Session), Spokane, Spokane Chamber of Commerce, 1911. (Hereinafter this will be cited as Report of the Commission). All page references are based on this version of the report, the exception being references to the “Special Message” from the President of the United States, which was an 11-page attachment to the original report submitted to the Senate and House of Representatives on February 9, 1909. 2 Clayton S. Ellsworth, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission,” Agricultural History 34 (October 1960): 156. 3 Report of the Commission, 44. 4 While the report may be flawed in some ways, its vision of an ecologically based agriculture and a country life that could be both remunerative and richly fulfilling is regarded by present-day historians as “deeply democratic and forward looking, even prophetic.”4 In fact, as 21st-century communities seek to foster democratic participation, to heighten understanding of the relation of people to their environment, and to build on practices that make communities more sustainable places to live, the commission’s recommendations have a fresh cogency and relevance. The report eschewed the notion that partisan and special-interest politics would solve rural problems. Instead it called for the people of the open country “to learn to work together, not only for the purpose of forwarding their economic interests and of competing with other men who are organized, but also to develop themselves and to establish effective community spirit.”5 It advocated broad involvement in public work on the part of all interests and classes. Rural teachers, librarians, clergymen, editors, physicians, and others were urged “to unite with farmers in studying and discussing the rural question in all its aspects.”6 Thus they could perform their roles and employ their expertise in ways 4 Report of the Commission, 30. See also Scott J. Peters and Paul A. Morgan, “The Country Life Commission: Reconsidering a Milestone in American Agricultural History,” Agricultural History 78 (Summer 2004): 289, 311. 5 Report of the Commission, 128. 6 Ibid., 29-30. COUNTRY LIFERS AND THE MEANING OF COMMUNITY 5 that “place them inside civic life rather than above or apart from it.”7 Through such involvement and through the sort of democratic participation urged by the commission, rural people would learn to collaborate and develop beneficial solutions for local deficiencies—albeit with the assistance of specialists and technical information as required. The commission recognized a role for government and recommended that Congress “remove some of the handicaps of the farmer” and “set some kinds of work in motion.” Such work related to land and water use, public health, the marketing of farm products, agricultural extension services, rural schooling, farm credit, free parcel delivery, and so on.8 The multiple deficiencies of America’s rural life identified in the report were, in a sense, old news. Members of the country life movement (“country lifers”), which included most of those who served on the Commission on Country Life, had been wrestling with them for at least a decade. Country lifers were a loose affiliation of individuals bound by a common interest in ameliorating rural social and economic conditions, rather than by an organizational structure.9 They included urban sociologists, educators, journalists, government employees, church workers, businessmen, and other social reformers. Not all were motivated by the same anxieties, but they were generally intent on preserving the 7 Peters and Morgan, “The Country Life Commission: Reconsidering a Milestone in American Agricultural History,” 312. 8 Report of the Commission, 20-22. 9 The American Country Life Association was not formed until 1919. 6 deeply rooted agrarian values and ideals of traditional American society at a time of rapid social, economic, industrial, and cultural change—change that seemed to presage the end of an entire way of life.10 Country lifers had many specific concerns—for example, the inadequacy of rural schools—but it is possible they were also influenced by the same ancient myth that underpinned Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ideal. Jefferson held that the countryside was the unique abode of virtuous people who lived unpretentious lives and tended their acres with careful husbandry. By extension, all admirable civic qualities were derived from living in the country, which was thus the home of liberty and democracy. By contrast, the city was a place of vice and corruption whose people should be viewed with suspicion or caution.11 Roosevelt himself said, “The men and women of the farm stand for what is fundamentally best and most needed in our American life. We need the development of men in the open country, who will be in the future, as in the past, the stay and strength of the nation in times of war and its guiding and controlling spirit in times of peace.”12 10 William L. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 1900–1920 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974), 3-5. David Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture 1900-1930 (Iowa State Press, 1979), 25. 11 For a discussion of the agrarian myth in literature from classical times to the 20th century, see Paul H. Johnstone, “Turnips and Romanticism,” Agricultural History 12 (July 1938): 224-255. 12 Theodore Roosevelt writing in Outlook, April 19, 1910. COUNTRY LIFERS AND THE MEANING OF COMMUNITY 7 Roosevelt, who had elevated the executive office to be the dominant force in national government, was willing to employ a range of devices to focus on issues he believed to be of national significance and to rebuild faith in the value of political interventions for the public good. As one of these special
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