The Rural Life "Problem" a Century Ago

Historiography and a bit of City & Country

Plunkett in 1923

Sir Horace Plunkett, The Rural Life Problem of the United States, 1919 (originally published as a series of articles in Outlook, 1908-9)

Plunkett was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, born at Dunsany Castle, the 3rd son of the 16th baron (Lord Dunsany the author of The King of Elfland's Daughter was the 18th baron) who became a leading figure in the movement for home rule and developed the idea of Irish rural cooperatives.  Interesting guy, might warrant a closer look.

Plunkett’s thesis in this book, which seems to have influenced a lot of American sociologists and County Life reformers, was that “the city has developed to the neglect of the country” and that out of Roosevelt’s three pillars of Country Life, “better farming, better business, better living,” the business problems of farmers should be addressed first.  Plunkett referred briefly to his experience in rural Ireland and also to Denmark, which has come up so many times in the primary texts I’ve read that it probably demands some attention.

Being an aristocrat, Plunkett had access to American leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and James Jerome Hill.  He portrayed these men as being genuinely concerned with “The Future of the United States” (title of a 1906 J. J. Hill speech I need to find a copy of), and especially with soil conservation.  Plunkett argued for a strong connection between what he saw as the two key elements of Roosevelt’s administration, conservation and rural life improvement.

During the first phase of the industrial revolution, Plunkett said “economic science stepped in, and, scrupulously obeying its own law of demand and supply, told the then predominant middle classes just what they wished to be told. Social and political science,” he continued, “rose up in protest against both the economists and the manufacturers,” which, if true, might be an interesting way to look at the development of these disciplines.

Interesting for an analysis written a hundred years ago, Plunkett introduced the idea of a “world-market” and said rural neglect was caused in part by the fact that “reciprocity” between city and country “has not ceased; it has actually increased...But it has become national, and even international, rather than local. Forty-two per cent of materials used in manufacture in the United States are from the farm, which also contributes seventy per cent of the country’s exports.” But the complexity of new trade patterns and supply chains hid the mutual dependence of city and country. Plunkett concluded “until...the obligations of a common citizenship are realized by the town, we cannot hope for any lasting National progress.” 

If there was specific blame to be laid, Plunkett directed it not at the system as a whole, but at profiteers.  “Excessive middle profits between producer and consumer may largely account for the very serious rise in the price of staple articles of food,” he said. But even though urban middlemen were to blame and the problem impoverished rural people at the same time it aggravated poor city people, he argued that “the remedy...lies with the farmer” rather than with legislative action or government reform.  

Although he didn’t explain how the system had managed to marginalize them, Plunkett suggested that excluding rural people from the political sphere had damaged democracy.  Farmers’ experience of the cycles of nature, which Plunkett pictured as slower and less mutable than the commercial and industrial processes city people lived with, gave them a more balanced political sense.  City dwellers’ “one-sided experience” might account for “that disregard of inconvenient facts, and that impatience of the limits of practicability, which many observers note as a characteristic defect of popular government.” Plunkett also suspected farmers might be less amenable to “the cruder forms of Socialism...perhaps because in the country the question of the divorce of the worker from his raw material by capitalism does not arise.” American farmers were not alienated from their means of production because most of them were proprietors. Had this been a problem in tenant-farmer dominated Great Britain?  But in the US, even if they weren’t fully capitalists in the sense that urban industrialists were, Plunkett seemed to say, at least they weren’t victims of capitalism in the same way urban wage-earners were. Plunkett avoided any reference to the ethnic immigrant contribution to American life, with the exception of a subtle nod to the success his countrymen had achieved, infiltrating urban politics.

Plunkett tried to call for “a moral corrective to a too rapidly growing material prosperity,” but he failed to identify the motivation behind the “reckless sacrifice of agricultural interests by the legislators of the towns.”  The issue he avoided confronting directly seemed to be the increasing unevenness of the prosperity he cited. Even in rural areas, the rewards were going disproportionately to the few.  And in most cases, profits were captured by the middlemen at the expense of both rural producers and urban consumers.  

Suggesting that even though they had no public voice, farmers “keep a full stock of grievances in their mental stores,” Plunkett warned of “serious unrest in every part of the United States, even in the most prosperous regions.” Compared to urban people, rural Americans’ “material wealth is unnaturally and unnecessarily restricted; their social life is barren; their political influence is relatively small.  American farmers have been used by politicians, but have still to learn how to use them,” he said. This was at least partly due, Plunkett believed, to the way the west had been settled.

Based on his personal observations of the Middle West in the 1880s, Plunkett said “settlers, knowing that the land must rise rapidly in value, almost invariably purchased much larger farms than they could handle...they invented a system of farming unprecedented in its wastefulness.  The farm was treated as a mine,” and soil fertility was turned into corn crops year after year, without fertilizer or crop rotation. Though averse to blaming government, Plunkett did recognize the “opening up of the vast new territory by the provision of local traffic for transcontinental lines was an object of national urgency and importance...the policy of rewarding railroad enterprises with unconditional grants of vast areas of agricultural land,” he concluded, was “one of the evidences of urban domination over rural affairs.”

“Under modern economic conditions, things must be done in a large way if they are to be done profitably,” Plunkett said, “and this necessitates a resort to combination.”  Combined effort had three benefits: economies of scale, elimination of “great middlemen who control exchange and distribution,” and political power. For better or worse, he said, “towns have flourished at the expense of the country by the use of these methods, and the countryman must adopt them if he is to get his own again.” But farmers, Plunkett admitted, being “the most conservative and individualistic of human beings,” were unlikely to organize themselves into joint stock companies and hand over control to others.  

Plunkett’s solution, the farmers’ cooperative, acknowledged the fact that “when farmers combine, it is a combination not of money only, but of personal effort in relation to the entire business.”  While this description was not exactly accurate (farmers produced a standardized product, but there were limits to centralization and scale economies relative to say, steel production; so the economic comparison with industry is complicated), Plunkett was trying to emphasize that the “distinction between the capitalistic basis of joint stock organization and the more human character of cooperative system is fundamentally important.” Compared to Ireland, where Plunkett had been instrumental in developing rural co-ops, “as things are, the [American] farming interest is at a fatal disadvantage in the purchase of agricultural requirements, in the sale of agricultural produce, and in obtaining proper credit facilities.” Cooperatives could address each of those needs.

The long-term result of “better business,” Plunkett said, would be “Better Farming and Better Living.”  Cooperatives could begin a process of renewing rural social bonds, leading to a new neighborhood culture.  Rather than trying to “bring the advantages of the city” to the country, rural communities would “develop in the country the things of the country, the very existence of which seems to have been forgotten. After all,” he concluded, “it is the world within us rather than the world without us that matters in the making of society,” once the physical necessities like clean water, medicine, and electricity have been made available by attending to “better business.”

Plunkett was well aware that his “subject is rural, my audience urban.”  This may explain why his final chapter de-emphasized the establishment of business-oriented cooperatives and focused instead on education and socialization.  One point he did make was that existing rural organizations and national groups such as the Grange and the Farmers’ Union could all be enlisted into the cause of helping establish and support rural co-ops.  It would be interesting to read further and see why the Country Life Movement ignored this advice (as I suspect they did) and stuck with a top-down approach; and if this limited its reach and efficacy.