New lives for old

It’s natural to be over optimistic in the first flush of success in a new venture, but in this case there was no reaction. Outside of the financial success the experiment had been for every member of the club, which meant practically every member of the village, our most notable achievement had been in rousing the community spirit. We had all got together in a fashion that distinguished us from our neighboring towns. People from outside began to speak of us residents of Brewster as Brewsterites, which to my mind was significant. If our prize system hadn’t accomplished any more than this it had been worth while. This was just the spirit we wanted as a basis for working out more in detail our pioneer idea. Ruth and I hadn’t forgotten our lesson from the pioneers of Little Italy, that half the secret of earning more money is to save more money, and that to do this means a simpler standard of living. This was one of the things that I had talked over with Holt and Barclay and the committee with the result of a hearty endorsement from Holt, a mild endorsement from Barclay, and an agreement from the committee not to oppose. They all admitted anyway that something must be done to keep interest alive during the long winter months.

Now I had no definite plan in mind beyond a vague notion to rouse if possible an interest in the romantic lives of our ancestors—to bring home to those of to-day the possibility of making our own lives just as romantic and independent and venturesome. Whatever we accomplished grew out of talks between Holt, Ruth and myself, but to a still larger degree out of incidents that grew out of the undertaking itself. Our whole enterprise developed from within itself. We planned nothing except along general lines and forced nothing.

For example, here is one thing that turned up unexpectedly. Holt came to me one day and said he had run across a moving picture man who was in town with a view to installing a moving picture show. The latter had been to Moulton, who owned the opera house beneath which his store was located, and had tried to make a bargain with him to rent the hall.

“Why in thunder don’t we do it ourselves?” was Holt’s question to me.

“As a personal business venture?” I asked.

“As a business venture for the club,” he answered. “There’s no doubt but what a moving picture show is going to be started here sooner or later. You can’t prevent it. If an outsider conducts the business he carries off the good money of our members, he forces us to buck against a rival interest and he runs any old films he chooses. If we run it ourselves we can make it part of our winter’s amusement, select our films, and turn back into the club treasury everything over running expenses.”

“And if we lose?”

“We can’t lose. Wouldn’t do any harm to try it anyway, and if we do lose it’s a safe bet it would scare off any outsider from ever trying it.”

Holt’s argument seemed sound. The capital required was not much; enough to pay the rent of the hall which we had to hire once in two weeks anyway and the price of installing the plant which was only a matter of a few hundred dollars. But the most attractive feature was the opportunity this would give us to select films that would serve our ends—picture plays of the landing of the Pilgrims, Indian fights and what not to say nothing of purely educational features on plant growing, proper sanitation and so on. Then the negative side was also worth something—the chance to cut out the plays that might have an unwholesome tendency. The more I thought of this the better the idea seemed, so that I offered to advance the necessary capital without interest to be paid back out of the profits—if any there were.

We put the matter before the club at the next semi-monthly meeting and the idea received enthusiastic endorsement, as it naturally might be expected to do when it promised amusement, a possible profit and no risk. Whereupon we closed with Moulton and opened negotiations with a leading film house for the lease of a machine. Holt undertook the business management of the enterprise and nothing could have suited him better. He was a born publicity man.

“I’m going to make the neighboring towns pay most of the running expenses,” he declared.

“How?” I inquired.

“You wait and see.”

I waited and did see. He ran two shows a week—one on Wednesday which he called Pioneer Club night, and one on Saturday evening. The films for both were identical but for the Wednesday night show he charged members of the Pioneer Club only five cents’ admission with the result that they filled every available seat in the hall. The Saturday night show cost ten cents and being a repetition of the first naturally didn’t attract but a few of the members. But he plastered the neighboring towns within a radius of ten miles with green handbills that again filled his hall. He let himself loose on these and had as much fun as a schoolboy out of his attempts to whet curiosity.

We held our semi-monthly meetings on two of the four Wednesday nights and on this occasion had one or more of the films as a free entertainment following the business meeting. It was in connection with this that we also inaugurated our pioneer talks.

At the beginning Holt and I were the speakers, although later as our treasury grew fat with the proceeds of our picture show we used some of the money to bring in lyceum lecturers and at least once a month some specialist from the Agricultural School. Our subjects were limited either to American pioneer history of the East or to practical talks on farming. One thing we insisted upon was that they must be put into popular and entertaining form. For instance, I in my first talk had as my subject “Early Tillers of New England Soil.” I spent a good deal of time at the city public library in looking up my material, picking out interesting facts about the nature of the soil at that time, the implements in use, the difficulties that had to be overcome and the results obtained. I put a good deal of emphasis on the difficulties as compared with those of to-day and yet pointed out how cheerfully the early settlers went at their task because they worked at it in freedom. In connection with this we ran a film that was supposed to describe the departure of the Pilgrims from England and their landing in this country. It was wonderfully vivid and made it seem almost like an event of yesterday.

Holt treated in much the same fashion “The Fighting Spirit of Our Ancestors.” I tell you he made a warrior of every man in the audience before he was through and a warrior’s mother of every woman. We ran with this a realistic Indian fight film.

At another talk Ruth spoke on the “Women of Early New England,” describing their lives and their work and what the women of to-day owed to them. “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” was the film we used with this and it was so popular that it led later on to the acting of a series of tableaux founded on Longfellow’s poem. This was the big social event of the winter, coming at Christmas time and ending with a dance.

The Lyceum speakers took up various phases of New England life in a more scholarly fashion, and all were well received. But the serious work of the winter came with the lecturers from the Agricultural School who considered the subject of live stock in New England—an interesting question if not a particularly romantic one. They discussed the matter of why we should raise our own meats instead of importing them from the West. And really, for a community like ours, there didn’t seem to be anything at all to be said against the proposition. If there were obvious objections to keeping chickens, pigs, and cows in a tenement, they certainly didn’t hold here. And yet there hadn’t been a steer raised for meat in our town for twenty-five years. We didn’t even raise the corn to feed our cows on. Even pigs were scarce, while eggs and chickens were actually bought to a large extent from the city market. On the face of it nothing could seem more absurd. With land enough and labor enough to supply ourselves we allowed ourselves to be supplied from land several thousand miles away. And it wasn’t because we got our goods cheaper. We paid prices that almost drove us into bankruptcy. We might with as much logic have imported our water.

Now the only explanation of this that anyone could see was that convenience, which is another word for laziness, had led us into the habit and this habit had become so fixed that it now seemed like a necessity. Of course it wasn’t argued that we could raise meat on any such wholesale scale as is done in the West where the plains furnish free fodder, or in the corn belt where corn could be raised at a price for stock feeding impossible to us. But raising enough to supply at least the home market didn’t involve those conditions. There wasn’t a man with a farm who couldn’t feed a portion of his hay and corn to beef to better advantage than he could sell it, who didn’t have grazing land available for that purpose that at present was only growing up to useless small growth. Even when balanced against the question of whether the feed couldn’t at a better profit be turned into milk, a field was still left open for beef enough to supply the local market.

Another lecturer took up the matter of sheep raising. It wasn’t so very long ago that every farmer in New England had a small flock of sheep as much as a matter of course as he had a horse. To-day with the price of mutton and lamb soaring, with wool at a premium, a flock of sheep on a New England farm is a curiosity.

Now if there were dearth of land, if the advancing population from the cities had sent up real estate values this would be a perfectly natural result. But the exact opposite is the case. The deserted farms sprinkled all through New England, farms left to grow up to waste timber, farms on the market for a song, would seem to prove that much. Idle pasture land around such farms as are worked further disproves that it isn’t lack of land that has brought this about. Then what in Heaven’s name is the cause of this wasted opportunity?

I can answer only so far as I studied the men about me. The opening of the big western grazing fields did at first have its effect in sending down eastern values of live stock. Thousands of sheep fed by nature permitted a price even with a terrible waste, even with expensive marketing, that discouraged eastern farmers. But that was twenty-five years and more ago. To-day prices are different and should again encourage eastern stock raising at least for local markets. But in the meanwhile our eastern farmers have fallen out of the habit. It has become a proverb that sheep don’t pay—just as, for that matter, it has become a proverb that chickens don’t pay, cattle don’t pay, pigs don’t pay, hay don’t pay or, in brief and as Hadley was constantly reminding me, “Nothin’ don’t pay.” He spoke with more truth than he thought when he said that. It’s a fact that “nothin’ don’t pay,” but everything else does pay.

Now as the Agricultural School expert insisted, a flock of one hundred sheep carefully looked after in the East can be made worth as much as five hundred or a thousand half neglected on the western plains. The only condition modern methods impose on modern farmers is that such things as are raised shall be cared for. There must be no waste. That is doing nothing more than carry to the farm the principles which govern all modern businesses. The day of allowing sheep, cattle, chickens, or produce to care for themselves and taking what is left, has passed. The only unfortunate feature of this new system is that it involves on the part of the farmer hard work. In getting out of the habit of raising such things as are raised to-day in a big way in the West, the New England farmer has gotten out of the habit of hard work. That’s the gospel truth in a nutshell as it was shown up in our town. With the pioneer movement shifted to the West, all the pioneer qualities went with it. Deserted farms don’t necessarily mean bad farm lands; they mean bad farmers, lazy farmers, uninspired farmers. Once again I find myself getting back to this as a fundamental truth and once again I bring up as proof the fact that the minute you place upon these acres an old-world pioneer like Dardoni you see the land spring to life as by magic.

Pigs and chickens, how to select the stock, how to feed them and house them were treated in the same manner by other speakers from the school. I was surprised in how scientific a manner this business has been worked out. Take for example the matter of the by-product, manure. One speaker made the statement—it sounded rash enough but he assured us that it was based on statistics—that the annual loss in America through the incompetent handling of barnyard dressing, amounted to six hundred million dollars. This represents just so much wasted nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash. One speaker presented a table showing the value in dollars and cents of dressing per one thousand pounds, live weight. Sheep produce thirty-four and one-tenth pounds per day, valued at twenty-six dollars a year; calves sixty-seven and eight-tenths, valued at twenty-four dollars a year; pigs eighty-three and six-tenths, valued at sixty dollars a year; cows seventy-four and one-tenth pounds, valued at twenty-nine dollars and twenty-seven cents a year; horses forty-eight and eight-tenths pounds, valued at twenty-seven dollars and seventy-four cents a year. And this is merely a by-product.

I tell you those figures did us good. Those of us who were in the habit of holding our breath in awe at mention of the capitalization of the steel trust, held up our heads and felt more like men when we realized that we were in a sense stockholders in a business that put that trust completely in the shade. For example, the annual production of eggs in the United States is about 1,293,800,000 dozens. At the average price of eggs the total value of these is $452,830,000—nearly five hundred million dollars a year. Added to this, more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of poultry is consumed. And this is only one item. Consider that in the State of Wisconsin alone the value of the butter and cheese products for a single year runs over eighty million dollars; consider that the wheat crop is worth annually considerably over a billion; that vegetables alone represent another annual value of over two hundred and fifty million and you get some idea of what a business the same farmer who is laughed at in the comic weeklies is doing. The crop for the year nineteen hundred amounted to more than three billion dollars. And that represents without a doubt another three billion of waste, for there isn’t a nation on the face of the earth that so uneconomically plants and reaps and markets its harvest. Why shouldn’t we farmers carry ourselves proudly? Why instead of being the butt and plaything of financiers shouldn’t we hold those same men at our mercy? These were questions that before the winter was out more than one man asked of himself.

One other point came up for discussion in the course of the winter and that was the question of specialization; of whether as a community it would pay us better to center our efforts upon some one line such as dairy products, meat products, vegetable products or what not, or whether it wasn’t better as small farmers with no particular advantages of soil or market for us to carry on diversified farms. On the whole the latter was the opinion of the school experts and also carried the strongest appeal to the majority of us. If every man kept at least one cow, a hog or so, a few sheep and a few hens, he first of all was then in a position to supply himself—and after all a man is his own best market—and secondly it gave him a more regular income as his stock didn’t develop for the market all at one time; and thirdly, he didn’t put all his eggs in one basket. A man specializing for instance in poultry is apt by disease to lose his whole flock and the same is true of his herd or his hogs. A diversified farm makes a man independent of market conditions. If poultry is low and eggs high he can keep his pullets for eggs. If beef is low and butter high, he can keep his cows for milk and vice versa. In other words, he isn’t forced to sell at certain times regardless of what the market is.

One thing, however, was insisted upon, that so far as possible a man should keep the best of each kind. This led to the subject of breeding, and this led in turn to the question of whether to this end it wasn’t possible for us as a group to invest in a common breeder—a blooded bull, a blooded ram, which as individuals none of us could afford. And this again led, as about everything we touched upon that winter had led, to the question of closer coöperation. Two hundred years ago the Indians and various other forces which to-day seem to us only romantic led our ancestors to coöperate in a certain way; to-day economic conditions are bringing about the same result. In February the one thought that was uppermost in the minds of us all was coöperation.