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Setting the Stage

The Birth of the Progressive Impulse, 1893–1900

By 1890, sixty-three million people lived in the United States, the majority of them making their homes in small towns and rural areas, living life much as they had before the Civil War tore the nation apart. Farming, especially prevalent in the Midwest and South, outranked all other occupations. In the North, however, once the war ended, the trend toward industrialization that had begun before the war resumed and gained momentum. In the three decades following the conflict, industrial output in the United States tripled. Approximately five million Americans – or thirteen percent of the population – worked in one of the more than 350,000 industrial firms located mainly in the Northeastern cities. By 1920, census records officially classified the United States as an urban nation for the first time in its history.

On the Farm

For many Americans, life on the farm symbolized a peaceful yet productive way of life. By the turn of the century, crop production had soared. American farmers were producing more than twice as much cotton, corn, and wheat than they had in 1870. Surpluses and profitable crop prices improved the farmers' standard of living. “In the country,” wrote Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, “it is quite possible that a permanent [farm] family should have a permanent dwelling.” While those who wrote about farming tended to highlight its positive aspects, in reality it was a demanding and risky business, one fraught with tensions.

Romantically perceived as a self-reliant people of plenty, American farmers were not immune from fluctuations in the economy. Expenses for supplies and animals continued to rise throughout the nineteenth century. Large and small farmers who wanted to increase or merely insure their output mechanized. While the use of farm machinery appeared to relieve farmers of some of the backbreaking physical labor, the purchase of new and replacement equipment put farmers constantly in need of cash and credit. As mechanization took hold, any profits from farming were spent on farm equipment, which took priority over household improvements.

In addition to the pressure to maintain status and power by mechanizing, farmers also had to compete with increasing commercialization. The 1910 federal census confirmed that family farms continued to dominate agricultural production, but the seeds of agribusiness had already been sown. In New Jersey and Maryland, commercial farmers employed seasonal migrant labor to pick beans, peas, tomatoes, blueberries, and cranberries. Increasingly, seasonal farm hands were unrelated, even foreign. Some migrant farm workers traveled from harvest to harvest their entire lives, living in shacks or tents without any benefits or ever owning land. The children of these nomadic workers suffered, too. Their parents' transiency meant that the young usually lacked both a stable home life and a proper education.

As industrial farms began to hire more employees, they introduced mass production and new management techniques to American agriculture. These more highly commercial farms raised vast quantities of agricultural products and sold them in distant markets. Commercial farms relied on rail transportation supported by low freight rates, and the rise of these large-scale enterprises reflected the changes taking place in the larger American society.

No longer could ordinary Americans expect to move west to take advantage of the allegedly free and open space. In 1890, the United States Census Bureau had announced the disappearance of a contiguous frontier line. In his speech to a gathering of historians at the Chicago World's Fair in May of 1893, thirty-three-year-old University of Wisconsin professor Frederick Jackson Turner expounded on the significance of the frontier in American history: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” While Turner's characterization of the West as the most democratic region of the nation came to dominate the American mindset for the next half century, it did not accurately portray what the Western experience meant for the majority of Americans, especially Native Americans, many of whom were forced onto reservations in the West during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s and who would not even be granted U.S. citizenship until 1924. By 1900, many of the roughly 250,000 Native Americans were farmers. A small number of Indians farmed their own land in the same way as did whites, but most Indians tried as best they could to continue communal land use practices on tribal reservations. Displaced from their ancestral lands and marginalized by mainstream society, Native Americans suffered in silence.

White farmers in the Northeast generally inherited family land that had passed down through several generations. Farm families at the time were typically nucleic, consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. Small family farmers tried to use local labor whenever they needed extra help. Regardless of the kind of farming in which the family was involved, the long production process required the cooperation of each family member. Farmers coped with challenges by maintaining strong bonds within their families and communities. Kinship ties facilitated the exchange of labor, machinery, and financial assistance. No matter how geographically isolated their land was, farmers and their families were rarely alone.

Despite the rapid pace of change around them, the work routines of farm families changed little over time. To the casual observer, it seemed like men made the decisions when it came to deciding what type of crops to grow or when to purchase equipment, while women kept the family going on a daily basis. However, Nancy Gray Osterud's study of farm women in New York's Nanticoke Valley, Bonds of Community (1991), revealed that by virtue of the degree of cooperation required to run a successful farm, men and women crossed over the boundaries of gender roles to assist each other more than historians initially realized. In other words, farm wives participated in decision making at all levels.

Women's days were hard and long, but their work was not considered as important as their husband's, primarily because women's efforts were not always associated directly with income-producing labor. What was being grown or raised dictated the kind of work demanded from women. For example, since dairy farming, and more specifically, the chores associated with maintaining large herds of cows and milking them, was so intense, women as well as children had to work on the farm. Growing corn, on the other hand, required less care latter in the season, once the plants reached a certain height. Farm women's domestic labor almost always entailed preparing food, washing clothes, and spring cleaning, essential but arduous tasks, especially in light of the fact that these chores required hauling wood and water into the home.

Life on the farm meant that the whole family, including the children, maintained the same daily schedule, waking before dawn to do early morning chores in the home or barnyard. Before heading off to the fields, the family, often joined by hired hands, ate a hearty breakfast of meat, eggs, potatoes, and porridge in cold weather or cereal in warmer weather. Coffee was the adult beverage, while the children drank milk. Farmers took a lunch break at around noon and then returned to the fields to resume their work until supper time. Most farm children attended school during the day. They left for school after breakfast but had to walk or ride the long distance to town to get there. Country schools ran from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and tended to be small, one-room schoolhouses with instruction focused on recitation. Almost every “pupil” used William Holmes McGuffey's McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, which was heavy on morality and conformity, and idealized and extolled the virtues of seemingly uncomplicated rural and village life. Evening time after dinner was generally a quiet one, with children doing schoolwork, men reading a local newspaper or perhaps Harper's or Atlantic Monthly magazine, and women sewing or mending by the light of kerosene lamps. On weekends, community suppers and church socials were popular pastimes. Annual county and state fairs where members of farm families displayed their agricultural wares and handicrafts and competed for blue ribbons provided welcome diversions from the routines of rural life.

Turn-of-the-century farmers and their families grew most of what they needed or bartered among themselves, trading surplus food for manufactured products such as tools, medicine, and liquor. They also purchased from general stores where owners tried to avoid clutter by stocking groceries on one side of the store and dry goods such as tobacco, patent medicine, thread, thimbles, candy, and shaving implements and other toiletries on the other. Gloves, stocking caps, milk pails, and cooking pots hung from the ceiling. Store keepers sold kerosene and whiskey in the back of the store. Rural merchants sold new products by demonstrating them, installing wall clocks and telephones in their stores to prove their usefulness. Fall markets in the town centers in rural areas featured the surplus products of farm wives and daughters, homemade foodstuffs and crafts such as applesauce and sauerkraut, feathers for pillows, as well as brooms, soap, baskets, and potted plants.

In general, some farmers accepted and others resisted what historian Hal S. Barron's...