New lives for old

For two winters we had met together and amused ourselves together. That was what counted—counted even more than the work we had done together. Perhaps you wouldn’t think that this social intercourse and the establishment of this common pioneer background was of any great importance, but if you had been one of us you would surely have felt its importance. It made us one big family as nothing else in the world could have done. Church societies build up as many barriers as they break down; so, too, do fraternal and political societies. But here we went back to a meeting ground which kept us shoulder to shoulder with one another and with our common past. Men and women can be entertained together when nothing else is possible.

Then again, I don’t suppose city folks know what a New England winter means to a New England farmer. Winter doesn’t mean much in the city except a complication with coal bills. Routine work goes on in the same routine way and the amusement of the beaches is shifted to the amusement of the theaters. But in the country Nature shuts up shop and there is a complete change of work and way of living. It’s a period of exile for many and a period of loafing. Men and women are shut up with themselves, or at best with their own. Six months of this isn’t good for anyone. Every old spite and grudge and grouch fattens and grows strong. Men get surly and women get cranky. Men eat too much and women cook too much. If a man hasn’t any pet grievance of his own he has plenty supplied him by the press and magazines. Farmers read too much of murders and sudden death, of corruption in business and politics and society. They have too much time to think over that stuff after they’ve read it and they don’t exercise enough to work it off. City folk stand it because they read and forget and don’t take it seriously. But I tell you some magazine publishers have something to answer for in the picture of city life they have drawn for country people whether true or not. As I’ve heard Hadley say, “’Pears to me like everything’s rotten to-day.” It makes men careless about being rotten themselves when they think all the rest of the world is.

The value of our meetings didn’t end with the meetings themselves. People who had been born and brought up together met in true neighborly fashion for the first time through the Pioneer Club. This was because we furnished them a common interest. This led to more every-day intercourse that winter—to neighborhood calls and neighborhood parties. Ruth helped this along wonderfully. She entertained a good deal herself and helped others entertain, but I tell you she had her own ideas how this should be done. She wouldn’t have any fuss and feathers, such as we had experienced in the suburbs. People didn’t have to dress up in their best bibs and tuckers to call on her, and there was neither bridge nor cakes nor teas nor ices. People dropped in just as they were and brought their sewing with them. For the younger people she devised the Miles Standish play with such materials as she had at hand. Then there were charades and old-fashioned games and what not—everything simple, everything inexpensive, everybody friendly and at ease. She kept the women, both young and old, astir all winter long and gave them something else to think about besides the next day’s cooking, washing or mending. She even helped them simplify these necessary duties and taught them a more wholesome standard of living. From morning till night she was a teacher, but no one except myself realized this. She set everyone an example in her house and astonished them with the ease with which she did her own work and cared for three children without wearing herself out. They never found her too busy to stop for a moment and never discovered her with either a headache or a lame back. Over and over I’ve heard her say to them, “Housekeeping is only a play game.” Then she would laugh until you couldn’t help believing that it really was. And to her it was. God bless her—to her it was. It was wonderful how far the influence of her laughter carried.

And all this while we had been strengthening the pioneer idea, too. We found that older people responded to its spirit almost as eagerly as boys do to the same thing in a simpler form as expressed in the Boy Scout movement. There isn’t a boy with red blood in his veins, whether raised in New York, London or a country village, who isn’t stirred by the hardy principles that govern your true scout. It’s amazing to see how much of that spirit is in their blood; how gladly they return to more primitive conditions. Boys brought up in luxury taste their first real meal when they munch a slice of bacon sizzled over the embers of a wood fire or a potato cooked in the ashes. They learn the real meaning of sleep when at the end of a hard day’s hike they roll up in a blanket in the open. Boys are born pioneers the world over—even to-day. The spirit is educated out of them in many cases, more’s the pity, but after all it remains at the basis of every real man.

So when at our meetings, directly and indirectly, we harped upon this idea and argued that the fun of living was within ourselves and not outside ourselves; when we insisted that the more we depended upon things outside ourselves for happiness, the less we responded; when we argued for a simpler standard in our clothes, our food, our surroundings, our amusements and a heartier dependence upon our work, we saw its effect. Much has been said about the advantage to farmers of the telephone, the rural mail which keeps them in daily touch with the outside world and labor-saving devices which make their work easier, but honestly I believe that if in the end this saves them from some evils it brings evils of its own which they haven’t yet learned to overcome. If these things save them from drudgery and monotony of one type it isn’t long before they face drudgery and monotony of another type, when they are allowed to dwell upon that feature of their work. There isn’t in the world a bigger drudge leading a more monotonous life than your city clerk who keeps agents scouring the world to furnish him amusement for his idle hours and to make the routine of his work lighter. And he’s just as apt to go crazy as your lonely farmer if he doesn’t learn to seek the joy of living within himself and not in his surroundings.

We tried particularly to get at the young man in our town and make him feel it isn’t the wilderness and virgin land and homesteads that makes your pioneer, but facing bravely whatever conditions may confront him, relying upon his own efforts to win through them. It takes as much of a pioneer to work three acres as one hundred and sixty; a man is as much of a pioneer who forces worn-out land to yield, as one who clears virgin land of rocks and stumps. It isn’t the nature of the work but the attitude of the man towards his work which distinguishes the plodder from the pioneer.

It is especially easy to appreciate this fact when dealing directly with Nature. Every farm is a newly claimed homestead, if you choose to look at it that way. And even if it has been worked a hundred years there isn’t a season when there is not real pioneer work to be done. As for the raising of live stock, it is done to-day much as it was two hundred years ago, except for greater attention to details.

It may seem strange to some that just a fresh point of view on the same old world makes so great a difference. It didn’t, however, surprise me, because I had sensed the effect of this in my own life. If in the days when things were going well with me as a clerk with the United Woolen Company anyone had told me that I’d come down to digging in the subway as a day laborer, I’d have felt disgraced. Such work seemed like sheer animal-like drudgery. So it is, if you go at it that way. On the other hand, when I saw it as the pioneer work it really is, I went at it with better spirit than ever I did adding up another man’s figures for him.

Two abstract things then we had accomplished besides the practical: the establishment of both the social spirit and the pioneer spirit among ourselves. We were together like one big family and we were working in a movement that might fairly be called the Man Scout movement. That’s just exactly what it was. It was alive with just the same wholesome out-of-doors adventurous spirit that characterizes the boy scout movement. I guess it’s a pretty safe bet that anything which appeals universally to boys will appeal universally to men. It was so in our town anyway.

The next step then—the coöperative step—came about naturally and almost inevitably. No one planned it and no one so far as I remember suggested it. It would have been a dangerous thing to suggest directly. As a phrase it smacked of socialism and there were mighty few socialists in our town. Our inheritance and our training was all against it. There wasn’t a man so poor that even if he was willing to make a martyr out of himself would let anyone else make a martyr out of him. The worse off he was, the more independent he became. He would rather play a lone hand at a losing game than win by joining his troubles with those of someone else. Your bred-in-the-bone New Englander is a solitary man who, when pressed to the wall, turns and fights his own fight. He’ll unite against a common outside enemy but not against his own. It’s this spirit that made our nation, but it’s this spirit too which is to-day destroying the man himself. With a closer knit civilization demanding coöperation he is as a rule so jealous of his personal rights that he balks. And after all, that’s the pioneer spirit too.

Coming into town as an outsider I was in a position to see certain things that were not apparent to those born and brought up here. That is always possible to anyone approaching a new business with his eyes open. I had found it so when I began work as a ditch digger. Within a year I detected flaws to which those who had given their lives to construction work were blind. I was unburdened with bewildering details and prejudices. So in this town my eyes were fresh and I viewed the village not altogether from the unit of my own farm but as a whole. I was a stockholder in a corporation owning a million and more dollars’ worth of buildings and land, and employing hundreds of hands. Consequently I was able to consider any new project not only as it affected my own small interest but as it affected the whole corporation. The question of raising our own meats then was not with me merely a question of keeping a beef, some sheep, pigs and chickens for myself but a matter of saving the corporation the thousands of dollars which would result in the general undertaking. So it was natural enough to me when the matter of buying full-blooded breeders came up which were beyond the means of any one individual, to suggest that the Pioneer Club, which represented the corporation, should do something towards making this easy. I had no idea of any general coöperative plan in doing this, but the idea was just the spark needed to kindle that whole burning issue.

We wanted a good Dorset ram which would cost in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars; we wanted a good bull which would cost in the neighborhood of six hundred dollars. Unless a man went into either business extensively such an investment wouldn’t pay. It seemed natural enough then for us all to club together and buy shares. But if we did this, why shouldn’t we do more? There was the whole problem of marketing still confronting us. We had solved it in a crude way last spring but that only served to show us what might be done with a perfected organization. Out of this was born with scarcely any talk, scarcely any planning and almost full grown, the scheme which finally welded us into one compact business firm—the Pioneer Products Company. The idea had been growing all this time and we didn’t know it. When we did recognize it, it seemed so natural and obvious that everyone marveled that we hadn’t thought of it from the beginning. It’s merely another example of what a rut farming folk have fallen into.

There isn’t any business on the face of the earth that lends itself so readily to coöperation as farming. Every country village consists of a small compact body of men living side by side and almost to a man engaged in buying the same products, manufacturing the same products and selling the same products to the same market. And these products are the universal necessities of life. It might be possible for men to get along without coal, without oil, without steel, even without beef, but they surely could not get along without wheat and corn, without vegetables, without eggs and milk. And yet these communities instead of holding the world by the throat are themselves the prey of the world even with their own products. With common interests, common foes, with a common plant and a common organization they still are the common victims of a hundred diversified outside interests. This is solely because the outside interests—like the banks—are allowed to treat with them as small weak units instead of as one large strong unit. And this after coöperation has been taught them by their government, by every business in the land, by every labor organization. It is, as I have said, this branch of the pioneer spirit which has been both their salvation and their undoing. But that it is possible both to preserve this and curb it we proved to our satisfaction with the Pioneer Products Company.

Holt read up on the subject and he found that coöperative farming which was so novel to us in the East had long been in successful operation in the West and South. That’s just the point. So are a hundred other good things. We in the East have urged our young farmers West until we have drained the East of its best. We have sent them forth like missionaries in such numbers that now we need some of them back as missionaries to ourselves. It’s those same men in the West who have been first to seize upon the new ideas in agriculture, while their eastern brothers have gone along in the same old ruts. New England as a whole has been treated like one vast deserted farm not worth anyone’s trouble. The Government itself treats it as such. It’s eager enough to spend millions on draining projects in Florida or irrigation projects in the West while there are whole townships in the State of Maine in as primeval a condition as they were at the landing of the Pilgrims. It’s actually so. If Maine were located in Oregon it would be to-day the richest State in the Union. But as sure as fate the old-world pioneers will soon rediscover it if we don’t ourselves, for to them Maine is the Far West.

I find I get switched back to that theme every time I trace a new feature of our development.

As I said, Holt read up on the subject of coöperative farming as he always read up on every new subject before tackling it. About the first thing he ran into was the history of the Eastern Shore of Virginia Produce Exchange—an enterprise which reads like romance. Every farmer in New England ought to read it. Holt gave a talk on it before the club and everyone listened in amazement. Here was a good farming country settled by industrious well-meaning farmers who raised good stuff, but who in 1899 found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy. It was each man for himself and sometimes they sold their crops for half what it cost to raise them. As individuals they couldn’t reach their market without giving up their profits to commission men and railroads. Then someone organized the exchange and so poor were its members that a membership fee of only five dollars was charged with the privilege of paying only twenty-five cents down and the rest in installments. During the first year the organization shipped four hundred thousand barrels of produce; ten years later it was shipping one million four hundred thousand barrels. It now handles every year one million barrels of Irish potatoes and eight hundred thousand barrels of sweet potatoes. During the last three years it has done an average business of two million five hundred thousand dollars a year. It has lifted a stagnant community into a prosperous community within a decade.

Another example was the Southern Texas Truck Growers’ Association which was organized in 1905. At that time the farmers were producing about five hundred car loads of onions a year and not making a living from them. The following year they shipped nine hundred cars; the next year one thousand cars; the next year two thousand cars, and in 1910 twenty-five hundred cars valued at one million five hundred thousand dollars.

We had twenty more such examples for encouragement but we didn’t need any of them. Our own needs suggested our own remedy and that spring the Pioneer Products Company took out its charter.