Our Benevolent Feudalism

CHAPTER IV
Our Farmers and Wage-earners

The increasing dependence of middleman and petty manufacturer has already been considered. The same pressure which bears upon these bears also upon farmer and wage-earner. The editorials and the oratory of election years, it is true, supply us with recurring pæans over the independence, the self-reliance and the prosperity of these classes, and such graphic tropes as “the full dinner pail” and “the overflowing barn,” become the party shibboleths of political campaigns. Plain facts, however, accord but ill with this exultant strain.

I

In most ages the working farmer has been the dupe and prey of the rest of mankind. Now by force and now by cajolery, as social customs and political institutions change, he has been made to produce the food by which the race lives, and the share of his product which he has been permitted to keep for himself has always been pitifully small. Whether Roman slave, Frankish serf, or English villein; whether the so-called “independent” farmer of a free democracy or the ryot of a Hindu prince, the general rule holds good. Occasionally, by one means or another, he gains some transitory betterment of condition; the Plague of 1349 and the Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381 won for his class advantages which were retained during three generations. But in the long run he is the race’s martyr. Under a military autocracy his exploitation was inevitable. There is no reason for it now, for the lives and well-being of the rest of mankind are in his hands: were the working farmers organized as the manufacturers and the skilled artisans are organized, and could they lay by for themselves a year’s necessities, they could starve the race into submission to their demands. But the thing is not to be; nor, indeed, is any marked change to their advantage likely to happen, for, so far as current tendencies point, the future is to repeat the past.

In our day and in our land both force and cajolery conspire to keep the peasant farmer securely in his traces. He cannot break through the cordon which the trusts and the railroads put about him; and even if he could he would not, since the influences showered upon him are specifically directed to the end of keeping him passive and contented. Our statisticians assure him of his prosperity; our politicians and our moulders of opinion warn him of the pernicious influence of unions like the Farmers’ Alliance, and further preach to him the comforting doctrine that by “raising more corn and less politics” he will ultimately work out a blissful salvation. Sometimes he must burn his corn for fuel; often he cannot sell his grain for the cost of production, even though many thousands of persons in the great cities may be hungering for it; frequently he cannot afford to send his children to school, and in a steadily increasing number of cases he is forced to abandon his farm and become a tenant or a wanderer. He is puzzled, no doubt, by these things; but they are all carefully and neatly explained to him from the writings and preachments of profound scholars, as “natural” and “inevitable” phenomena. His ethical sense may be somewhat disturbed by the explanations, but he learns that it is useless to protest, and he thereupon acquiesces.

A sort of symposium on the joys of the farmer is to be found in the September number of the American Review of Reviews. Mr. Clarence H. Matson writes of improved conditions due to rural free delivery of mails and a few other reforms; Mr. William R. Draper dilates upon the enormous revenues which have flowed to the farmers during the current year, and Professor Henry C. Adams contributes a symphony on the diffusion of agricultural prosperity. A fourth article, by Mr. Cy Warman, furnishes a rather discordant note to the general harmony, since it shows a large and increasing immigration of our prosperous farmers into Canada. Some 20,000 crossed the border last year, according to Mr. Warman, while during the first four months of 1902, 11,480 followed, and indications pointed to a total of 40,000 emigrants for the present year. The official figures of the Canadian Government, since published, partly confirm these estimates. The number of immigrants from the United States for the year ended June 30, 1902, was 22,000. The number for the current year will probably be larger, for according to a Montreal press despatch of September 17th: “The immigration from the American to the Canadian Northwest has assumed much greater proportions this year than ever before, and land sales to Americans are daily reported. The latest large sale is by the Saskatchewan Valley Land Company, which has sold 100,000 acres in Saskatchewan to an American syndicate for $500,000.”

“The American farmer,” sententiously and truthfully remarks Professor Adams, “does not hoard his cash.” He gives no reason for the fact, and the determination must be left to the reader. “The American farmer,” he further remarks, “is, as a rule, his own landlord.” This statement reveals a very serious misapprehension of the facts. Something more than every third farm in the United States, according to the recent census, is operated by a tenant. Moreover, the proportion of tenants is constantly rising. For the whole country, tenants operated 25.5 per cent of all farms in 1880, 28.4 per cent in 1890, and 35.3 per cent in 1900. Further, the tendency is not confined to particular sections, but is common to the whole country. During the last decade the number of tenant-operated farms increased relatively to the whole number of farms in every State and Territory except Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. In Maine tenantry decreased seven-tenths of 1 per cent, in New Hampshire five-tenths of 1 per cent, and in Vermont one-tenth of 1 per cent. For the twenty-year period, as was pointed out in Chapter II, the only exceptions to the general increase are Arizona, Florida, and New Hampshire.

The recent census, out of its abundant optimism, does not segregate these facts, and makes no general comment other than that tenantry has increased and that salaried management is believed to be “constantly increasing.” The bulletin on “Agriculture: The United States” does not even furnish a general classified summary of the data on tenantry. But the separate reports give the statistics, and out of them the following table is compiled: —

INCREASE OF FARM TENANTRY

1 Including Indian farms

2 Excluding Indian farms.

3 Dakota Territory.

There were 2,026,286 tenants in 1900, an increase in twenty years of 97.7 per cent. There were 3,713,371 owners, part owners, “owners and tenants,” and managers, an increase in twenty years of 24.4 per cent. During the twenty-year period owners in Washington increased less than fivefold, tenants tenfold. Utah shows a doubling of the number of owners, and a quadrupling of the number of tenants. South Dakota, compared with Dakota Territory in 1880, reveals an increase of owners of two and one-half times; of tenants, eighteen times. There are 28,669 fewer owners in New York State than in 1880, and 14,331 more tenants. Ownership has declined and tenantry advanced, both absolutely and relatively, in New Jersey. The great farming State of Illinois has 15,044 fewer owners and 23,454 more tenants than in 1880, and even the young Territory of Oklahoma, wherein one might expect to find evidences of increased ownership, reveals, for the ten-year period, a two-hundred-fold increase of tenantry and only a sixfold increase of ownership.

From the foregoing table it will be seen that while during the previous decade relative tenantry declined slightly in several States, the tide has since turned. Though the Southern States generally show the greatest proportion of tenants, the greatest percentage of increase is revealed in the Border, Northern, and Western States. Tenants operate 62.4 per cent of all the farms of Mississippi, 61 per cent of those of South Carolina. But while the former is a growth since 1880 from 43.8 per cent, and the latter from 50.3 per cent, Oklahoma (the comparison in this single instance is with 1890) increased the percentage of its tenant-operated farms from seven-tenths of 1 per cent to 21 per cent. Washington doubled its percentage, Montana and Utah very nearly so. Nearly one-third of the farms of New Jersey are tenant farms, and more than one-third of those of Kansas and Nebraska. Each of these three States doubled its relative percentage of tenant farmers for the twenty-year period. Even in New York the proportion has grown since 1880 from 16.5 to 23.9 per cent. As marked as is the showing, the whole situation is not revealed by the figures, for the term “owners” in the reports includes “farms operated by individuals who own a part of the land and rent the remainder from others,” and “farms operated under the joint direction and by the united labor of two or more individuals, one owning the farm or a part of it, and the other or others owning no part but receiving for supervision or labor a share of the products.”

This remarkable growth of tenantry would be considered, in any other than our own complacent days, as an alarming, even an appalling fact. So blithely and for so long a time have the changes been rung upon the alleged fact of independent ownership that everybody, including professors of political economy, assumes its truth. But even when its baselessness is clearly shown we shall hear little of an alarmist nature from our publicists and teachers. Rather it may be expected that their pronouncements will change with the changing times, and that we shall soon hear reiterated gratulations on the development of tenantry. Is not the humble tenant’s security greater, are not his troubles less? Need he worry over taxes, foreclosures, and the like? Not at all; and besides – not the least of considerations to our paternalistic moulders of opinion – there is much reason for satisfaction in the fact that, having no land to mortgage, he will not be led into wildly prodigal habits of life by a too ready recourse to the money-lender.

Considering the growth of tenantry, the increasing migration to Canada, the flocking of rural residents into the cities, and the frequent outright abandonment of farms in several sections of the country, the unsophisticated onlooker may naturally wonder at the tales of agricultural prosperity which from time to time appear in public print. Mr. Draper, in the article previously mentioned, speculates somewhat ingeniously over the financial returns due the farmer for his crop for the present year. The figures are certainly imposing when looked at as totals. The wheat crop will sum up 700,500,000 bushels, and each bushel will sell for 60 cents, making the net value $580,100,000 – a rather curious result, by the way, not obtainable by any of the ordinary processes of mathematics. The corn crop is to bring $776,985,300, and the remaining crops follow, with large values attached.

But reduced to individual earnings, values of farm products (according to the census, products other than those fed to live stock) reveal a rather meagre diffusion of prosperity. Of the 5,739,657 farms in the United States, 1,319,856 are listed in the census as hay and grain farms, for the reason that hay and grain comprise 40 per cent of their total products. The average size of these hay and grain farms is 159.3 acres, and the average value of this product per acre in 1899 was $4.77. The number of miscellaneous farms is 1,059,416, with an average acreage of 106.8, and a product value of $4.12. Live-stock farms number 1,564,714, with an average acreage of 226.9 and a product value of $3.47. Thus the average productive yield of 70 per cent of all the farms and 80 per cent of all the farm land in the nation ranges from $3.47 to $4.77 per acre. Flowers and plants, it may be noted for comparison, yield the comfortable return of $431.83 per acre; but their effect on the general census is but slight, since the average product value of all farms is but $4.47 per acre. But let no one suppose that all this munificent sum goes to the farmer. He pays 43 cents per acre for labor and nearly 7 cents per acre for fertilizers. The net income is thus $3.97 per acre.

The size of farms is increasing, though actual agriculture is probably confined to smaller holdings. The average was 136.5 acres in 1890; it is now 146.6 acres. The tendency varies in different parts of the country. Nebraska increases her average from 190.1 acres in 1890 to 246.1 acres in 1900. Kansas shows almost identical figures, while the New England States show little change, and the Southern States generally show reduced averages. The relation of size of farm to kind of tenure is, however, the main point, and here one discovers matter for reflection. Farms operated by cash tenants have 102.7 acres apiece, by owners 134.1, by managers 1514.3. The growth of manorial estates is dimly revealed in these figures, and there is no need to doubt the census bulletin’s reserved admission that farms operated by managers are believed to be constantly increasing.

The subject of the changing status of the farmer – a change which involves his ultimate reduction to a sixteenth-century level – is too large to receive adequate treatment in these pages. By all considerations it deserves the space of a generous volume. For present purposes there remains to be said that even where apparent ownership is retained by the working farmer, effective ownership is determined in other quarters. He is the joint tenant of the farm implement trusts, of the new harvester trust, of the produce trusts which fix the value of his products, of the railroad trusts which fix the rate of transportation to the market, and in the arid West of the water trusts. Thus, even though he boasts the possession of a title-deed to his land, the holding is in reality of the nature of a fief, held at the mercy of several superiors; and the tithes which he pays, though less formally levied and exacted than were the redevances of the mediæval peasant, are as many and well-nigh as burdensome. And he must pay or go; for there is no remission from his superiors, as in olden days, on account of drouth, floods, locusts, or murrain.

II

With the decline of the petty trades, the growth of the combinations, and the concentration in fewer hands of the machinery of production, the subordination of the wage-earner becomes more certain and more fixed. If ever he were a free agent, – in the sense and to the degree that any one in human society can be free, – the day is passed. Through agencies constantly augmenting and extending, he is “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in,” to a narrowing circle of possible efforts. Divorced from the land and from the tools of production, he can live only by accepting such wages and conditions as are offered him; and the terms are always such that the kernel of his product goes to some other man, while the husks and the tares remain his own portion. The patronizing orators of Labor Day and of campaign times sometimes delight to symbolize him as a sturdy Gulliver, though it needs little reflection to see that it is the Gulliver of Brobdingnag, and not that of Lilliput, that more correctly figures his present status. The mass of current tendencies tends to fix him as a dependent – a unit of a lower order in a series of gradations running up to the Big Men. “The corporation,” writes Mr. Richmond,⁴ “holds of the State, and its officers hold of the corporation, and their retainers, managers, and servants all hold the tenure of their employment from their superiors in office, from the highest to the lowest.” But whether corporation, or partnership, or individual, employs the laborer’s services, his status is practically the same. Trade-unions and other labor societies tend to modify that dependence; and occasionally social legislation, when it runs the fierce gantlet of the courts, exerts a further modification. But it is coming to be recognized that there is a limit, perhaps now nearly attained, beyond which the labor societies can exert no influence; and as for social legislation, as will be shown farther along, it has certainly reached its culmination.

To the natural causes making for the laborer’s subordination have been added in recent years certain conscious and deliberate forces. There is a collective pressure brought to bear upon his wages; there is a collective antagonism maintained against his unions; there is a growing movement in the direction of holding him for the term of his profitable service to the company or corporation by which he is employed, and there is a judicial tendency to pretend still to regard him, despite his changing status, as an economically free agent, able to do what he wills, and to protect himself from all injustice.

III

The assurance of villein fidelity is a prime need of a feudal order. The fidelity need not be personal, as in the old days; instead, the altered ceremony of “homage” may take in whole regiments by a single rite. Recent acts of the great employers make strongly for creating inducements for this fidelity. In spite of instances of conduct like that of the coal magnates of Pennsylvania, there is a growing tendency to unite for life-long service the careers of the more faithful workers with the corporations by whom they are employed. “Model workshops,” and even “model villages,” are unquestionably increasing in numbers. Their character is almost pure paternalism – “enlightened absolutism,” Professor Ely calls it. Rarely have the workers themselves the slightest word to say as to their construction or conduct. What is thought to be good for them, what is thought will win their devotion, is given them. Whether at Pullman, Ill., at Dayton or Cleveland, Ohio, or at Pelzer, S.C., the general spirit manifested is the same. The perfervid chapter on “American Liberality to Workmen,” which Mr. Nicholas Paine Gilman gives us in his volume, “A Dividend to Labor,” contains dozens of instances wherein employers have indulged their benevolence by the gift of flower-pots, wash-basins, and other cultural paraphernalia to their employees. Mr. Victor H. Olmsted, in the Bulletin of the Department of Labor for November, 1900, gives another, though somewhat duplicated, list; and the Rev. Josiah Strong’s monthly journal, Social Service, furnishes a current record of such benevolences. The providences of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company alone make a remarkable showing. This corporation has even a “sociological department,” and it is at present building a $10,000 mission at Bessemer, near Pueblo. The plan of the mission, we read, is to have a refuge, with all modern improvements, for “floaters,” or the unemployed. These wayfarers may make a temporary living by working in an attached woodyard. In all its camps in Colorado this company has established kindergartens, libraries, and, in remote places, grade schools for the children of its employees. Its hospital at the Pueblo works is said to be the best equipped in the West. “It is the announced purpose of this corporation,” we read, “to solve the social problem.”

Model workshops and the distribution of relief are but a small part of the tendency. The giving of old-age pensions, particularly by railroad companies, has recently taken on the dimensions of a national movement. The pension system is not a conspicuously expensive one, for the numbers of workmen who live long enough to avail themselves of its benefits are but scant. The sums paid out for pensions by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Relief Department in eighteen years average $31,185.85 yearly – about the salary of a first vice-president – and the employees themselves have borne a considerable part of the expense. A total of 697 pensions has been granted during this time, but 365 of the beneficiaries have considerately died, and thus reduced the expenses.

The pension system as it obtains among railroads is more or less an outgrowth of the relief association begun by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company on May 1, 1880. Prototypes can possibly be found, but this instance is the first of any consequence. The State of Maryland revoked the charter of the association in 1888. This was an embarrassing interruption, but by no means a fatal one, for the society was immediately reorganized as a department of the company. The plan was to pay accident, sick, and death benefits and old-age pensions, the company contributing $33,500 yearly, and the employees paying monthly dues based on their wages. Section 100 of the regulations for 1889 declares that “the fund for the payment of pensions will be derived wholly from the contributions of the company,” a change from the earlier method in the direction of pure paternalism. The usual age for pensioning is sixty-five years, and the president and directors determine the roll.

The Pennsylvania Railroad Voluntary Relief Department was begun in 1886. In a number of respects it followed the details of the earlier association. As to pensions, however, it put the matter forward by arranging for the gradual growth of a superannuation fund out of the department’s surplus. There were six companies, according to Mr. William Franklin Willoughby’s “Workingmen’s Insurance,” that before 1898 had created regular insurance departments. These were the Baltimore and Ohio, the Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania west of Pittsburg, the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, the Philadelphia and Reading, and the Plant System. Though in two or three instances the plans have been altered, all these companies founded their pension systems on employees’ contributions.

The Pennsylvania’s fund reached the figure set for it January 1, 1900, and the pension system was proclaimed. On the first day of 1901 the Chicago and Northwestern put in operation a gratuitous pension system, appropriating $200,000 for the purpose. The beneficiaries, all of whom must have been thirty years with the company, were divided into two classes: first, those seventy years old, who were to be retired and pensioned at once; and second, those from sixty-five to sixty-nine years inclusive, who were to be retired and pensioned at the discretion of the pension board. The rate fixed is one per cent per year of service of the average monthly pay for the preceding ten years. An employee whose average wages were $55 per month, and who had been with the company for thirty years, would thus receive $16.50 a month.

The Illinois Central proclaimed its pension system July 1, 1901. On March 1, 1902, the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western took the same course, appropriating $50,000. The terms are somewhat more liberal, in that only twenty-five years’ service is required, and that some employees may be retired between the ages of sixty and sixty-five. The Metropolitan Street Railway Company followed on March 6th, and the Philadelphia and Reading Company on May 21. The details, while varying somewhat, are in the main alike for all of these companies.

Though the experiment is a comparatively frugal one, there is no doubt that it brings compensatory returns; for it serves to keep quiescent and faithful large bodies of men, and perhaps to loosen the bonds of the labor-union. It holds in servicemen above thirty-five or forty-five years of age, for they know the difficulty of securing work elsewhere; and it feeds them with a more or less illusory hope of an ultimate pension. Indeed, the motive of inducing a closer dependence of the laborer upon the employer is more or less frankly confessed. “Under it” (the pension system), reads the Lackawanna’s advertisement to the public, “the road and its employees are to be more closely knit by substantial ties.” The president of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company, however, sounds a more altruistic and benevolent note. “My object in establishing this department,” he is quoted as saying, “is to preserve the future welfare of aged and infirm employees and to recognize efficient and loyal service.”

Despite such benevolent professions there are grave grounds for scepticism regarding the tangible benefit of the system to the employees. If Hope lingers with them, it must be because, as Mr. William Watson sings, “airiest cheer suffices for her food.” For both the ascertained results of an eighteen years’ operation of the system, and a moment’s glance at conditions surrounding the new applications of it, point to a most rigorous limitation of its benefits. In the first place, there is a growing disinclination to employ in any industry men past forty-five years of age. The new regulations of the Philadelphia and Reading reduce even this limit ten years, prohibiting the taking on of employees past thirty-five years of age, except by the approval of the board of directors of the company, although in special cases where unusual qualifications are desired the age limit may be waived. So general is this attitude of employers that the Chicago Federation of Labor was recently moved to the passing of a resolution proposing that “every unemployed man forty-five years of age who cannot show what the charity authorities call ‘visible means of support’ shall be mercifully shot in a lawful and orderly manner.” Moreover, the chances of a railroad employee reaching the age of sixty-five or seventy years are about equal to the chances of winning a large sum at policy. Discharges are frequent and arbitrary, and usually there is no appeal. Aside from this, the casualties are enormous. Of the 191,198 railroad workers classed as trainmen employed throughout the country in 1900, 1396 (or one in every 138) were killed, and 17,571 (or one in every 10.8) injured. The corrected figures for 1901 (given to the public in August of the present year) show about the same percentages. Of the 209,043 trainmen, 1537 (or one in every 136) were killed, and 16,715 (or one in every 12.5) were injured. Thanks to the new safety appliances, casualties caused by coupling and uncoupling cars declined by 84 killed and 2461 injured; but in other classes of accidents the percentages brought the averages to near the previous figures. At best, the chances of maiming or death constantly increase with every one of the twenty-five or thirty years’ service required for the earning of a pension. In the Metropolitan (now Interurban) Street Railway service, where accidents are few but discharges many, the benevolent instincts of the president will prove difficult of realization. This official admitted that discharges had at one time reached an average of 300 a month. An employee informed the author that he knew of but two or three men in the entire service whom the published terms entitled to pensions, while another employee conceded a possible dozen.