Yeoman Citizens: The Country Life Association and the Reinvention of Democratic Legitimacy

Democracy is an attitude rather than a right or political system. It is won, not on the battlefield or at the ballot-box, but in the change of the personal attitudes of those who have toward those who have not. (Sanderson, 1938, p. 5) For scholars familiar with agrarian traditions in America, it is no surprise that the above epigraph was written by an American farmer. Dwight Sanderson's view of democracy came from his experiences farming during the 1920s and 1930s, two decades that were equally devastating for those who lived on the land (Phillips, 2007, p. 36). His view of democracy as an attitude of equality "of those who have toward those who have not" was indicative of rural folk's belief that equality was the ground upon which democracy could grow (Sanderson, 1938, p. 5). Sanderson was but one voice among thousands of farmers in the American Country Life Association working "at the grass roots" of society (Taylor, 1930, p. 6). The American Country Life Association was formally organized in 1919 as a collection of rural folk concerned with their declining economic, environmental, social, and political position. While most of its membership and leadership were farmers and ranchers, the association also consisted of educators, clergy, merchants, and others living in rural America. In short, country lifers were composed of those concerned with the increasing marginalization of those who live from the land. The American Country Life Association published a monthly magazine, Rural America, held state and national conferences, and disseminated these conference proceedings and magazines to its membership. Rural America addressed a rural audience and covered topics ranging from methods of planting and harvesting to political problems facing their domestic and international counterparts. From the beginning, African Americans, Jewish Americans, and Mexican Americans were important members, as were the women who served in leadership. Articles arguing for and against domestic rural policies were common and farmers, both male and female, were the magazine's reporters. The American Country Life Association's conferences were held in every region of the country and the proceedings consisted of published speeches and committee minutes delivered to conference attendees, often numbering in the thousands. With the end of World War I, farmers were in a position far worse than at the end of the nineteenth century and mired in an economic depression due to oppressive debt accumulation prompted by the federal government's assertion that farmers had a moral duty to expand production to feed the U.S. and its allies. Sarah Phillips (2007) observes, "Besieged by this postwar contraction, farmers found themselves caught between the low prices they received for farm products and the high prices they paid for nonfarm items" (p. 36). The debt farmers accrued from wartime expansion of their operations could not be settled with low post-war prices and farmers were left destitute. For example, in 1919, wheat cost $2.19 per bushel but fell to $1.05 by 1929, plummeting even further after the stock market crashed in October (Danbom, 2006, p. 187). According to R. Douglas Hurt (2002), "By 1920, European recovery, international competition from Australia, Argentina, and Canada for the beef and wheat trade, and high American surplus production caused prices to fall precipitously" (p. 221). Farm tenancy had dramatically increased, bankruptcies were at an all- time high, and commodity prices were at their lowest level in more than a decade. Low prices coupled with war-time debt accumulation created a situation that, for country lifers, appeared irreversible. The American Country Life Association began to publicly question how the state could so quickly turn its back on the very citizens it had praised just a few years earlier by challenging the legitimacy of the state's authority. Country lifers believed that any democratic state must work for the benefit of all citizens, not just the privileged few. …