Theodore Roosevelt's Country Life Commission.
1960; Duke University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1533-8290
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
Resumopendence on July 4, 1873, against oppression by the railroad monopoly which had established an absolute tyranny over the farmers unequalled in any monarchy of the Old World. Two decades later the platform of the Populist party added the idea that an inadequate currency system stemming from governmental injustice was impoverishing the farmers and producing two great classestramps and millionaires. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, such leading clergymen as Josiah Strong and Roland Hyde Hartt looked at the country churches from their New England pulpits, and saw them as dying institutions, consisting of prophetless ministers who mouthed an obsolete theology as they indulged in bitter sectarian rivalries, and a laity which was degenerate and declining in numbers. The Report of the Committee of Twelve on Rural Schools, prepared for the National Education Association in 1897 by leading school administrators headed by the farm-born Henry Sabin, was merciless in its evaluation of the cherished one-room country schools. Literary men like Hamlin Garland in Main-Travelled Roads (1891) created a farm picture showing weary men and women struggling in vain against cultural barrenness, mounting mortgages, and steaming manure piles. One writer in the Atlantic Monthly walked off the deep end by recommending that the first step that should be taken in the direction of intellectual development and rational social enjoyment was the abandonment in the open country of prairie farm homes and the establishment of farm villages.1
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