Arthurdale--a New Chance
I
THE citizens of Morgantown, West Virginia, saw as they passed up High Street that morning that there was an unusual crowd of miners about the Welfare House. Crowds of miners about that house had been a normal sight in recent years, but as a rule the men had been apathetic, waiting listlessly for their turn. This morning there was no listlessness, but an air of eagerness and expectancy. They milled about the door, talking excitedly of their ‘chance to get in.’ For this was the morning when the first applicants for homesteads at Arthurdale were to be examined. And Arthurdale meant a new chance in life for them, the chance for a home at last after years in company houses in mining camps.
A big-boned chap, his face marked with the pallor of the undernourished, told his story to the man who stood beside him as they waited. ‘I came over here from Randolph County when they opened up these mines after the war. It looked like easy money for a few months, then the bottom began to drop out. And you know it’s been tough going these last years. These folks in the city are yapping a lot about the depression. We had the depression in the camps years before they ever heard of it. And many a time when I’ve come home to a chunk of sowbelly and a can of beans, one can for the whole family, I’ve wished I was back on that little old farm up in Randolph County. We did eat there. But I sold out when I came up here and the money’s gone long ago, and there was no way to get back to Randolph County except to walk, and no farm to walk to.
‘We had had no taste of green stuff for years till those Quakers came along and helped us to start the gardens up on top, nothing but those damned beans, and I thought I had eaten all the beans I wanted when I left the army after the big scrap. Many a day down in the mine I have found myself wishing we were back on the farm, where the kids could have some place to play, and where, if we did have hard scraping to pay the taxes, at least we had enough to eat. Now if I can get one of these homesteads at Arthurdale I’ll kiss that dirty old mining camp good-bye. And I reckon that’s about the way you feel.’
The listener shifted his quid of tobacco and nodded his assent, and there were heads nodding all around as though he had spoken for the crowd. For most of those in the mines had once been farmer folk on small holdings back in the hills, or peasants from Southern Europe. They knew something of the ways of the earth and the rewards it offers to those who plough and sow. When the boom came after the war and the world needed coal, they had followed the lure of high wages, as had many another to other mining camps or industrial cities. And they thought, as most of us thought, that the golden days would never end. But they did end, and now they were waiting for their turn to be heard at Welfare House, waiting for the word that would open the way to a new chance, or send them back to the camps.
II
Arthurdale! Much has been written about it, and the eyes of many outside the mining camps are turning to it. For many are wondering if the experiment there being conducted is not the answer to some of our most serious problems.
Arthurdale lies just at the foot of Briery Mountain, the last great ridge of the Alleghenies, in northern West Virginia. And, as the earth did not suddenly give over its desire to thrust itself skyward into mountains, it is part of a gently rolling section that lies between the mountains and the hills along the river. It is good land. John Fairfax, who had been trained by one of the most astute and land-wise farmers this country has ever produced, George Washington, lord of Mount Vernon, picked it out when all that section was covered with forest, and when the Indians still roved the hills. One of the cabins that he built of hewn logs for his slaves still stands. It is a reminder of a hard system. The new white houses that dot the farm lands about it represent an attempt to escape from a new slavery, a slavery to fear and hunger, a thing that ought to be as alien to America as the older slavery came to be.
About each of the white houses lies the holding of the family, the homestead, of five acres or less. Behind each house is a combined cow shed and poultry house. Before each is a bit of lawn with a flower garden, and the rest of the holding will be used for the planting of an orchard and the subsistence farming, which, in plain words, is the growing of food for family use. There need be no fear that the homesteader will be an additional competitor in the commercial farmer’s market. He is not transferring his trade. He is simply providing for himself the opportunity of eating regularly, instead of sporadically, food that his own toil has produced, rather than the bitter bread of charity — and food that will be richer in vitamins than ‘sowbelly and beans.’ He will have room, air, sun, food, and a root cellar and preserve closet for the winter. And he will have opportunity to turn his face to the sky instead of to the earth, to watch the long summer wane, and the color come on the mountains, and the snow fall and pass, and the redbud turn the hills to new splendor and the dogwood fleck them with white, instead of being shut away among the slag piles down in one of the ‘hollers.’ And he will have neighbors — not so closely crowding in upon him as in the camps, but neighbors just the same, for scattered over the tract are fifty houses already tenanted and one hundred and fifty more in process of construction.
A group of communal buildings forms the heart of the settlement. Among these is a library, and a schoolhouse with a gymnasium and playgrounds. An old church, no longer used, was found in a near-by village and moved here to be used again for the offices of religion and as a community hall for lectures, movies, and other like things. Miss Elsie Clapp, who has carried out a very successful experiment in rural education in Kentucky, will work out a programme of education, both for adults and for children, that will be closely integrated with the community’s fife. Politically the community will be part of Preston County, but in purely local matters it will be self-governing after the pattern of the New England town meeting.
It is plainly evident that, while the lot of the homesteader will be infinitely better than it was, yet his little holding will not enable him to maintain that standard of living which is desired for all Americans. He would be only slightly benefited if he were lifted out of the penury of the mining camp to become a peasant on a patch of ground. He could eat, but he could not pay taxes, nor buy clothes and other necessities. Neither could he pay for his homestead, as he will be required to do. This problem is to be met by providing part-time work in some industry. It grows more clearly evident that the development of the machine not only makes possible but demands the staggering of the hours of the laborer, so that he will work half the time and be free from the shop the other half. In his leisure time the homesteader will grow food on his little farm. To provide for his wageearning time, negotiations are now proceeding with industrial interests looking to the placing in the community of one or more small factories.
It was originally planned to set up here a government plant to manufacture post-office supplies, but a Congressional mandate blocked that. In the meantime the homesteader is not idle. From the forge near the community centre comes the clangor of iron upon iron as the smith and his helpers turn the black bars into shapes of beauty. A well-organized branch of the Mountaineer Craftsmen’s Coöperative engages a larger group in the making of furniture, and in some of the houses the looms are busy weaving rugs. There remains much land to be cleared, and many houses to be built; these tasks furnish work and wages for those not engaged in the shops, and will continue to provide for them until the factories are open. There has also been ample time to work gardens, plant orchards, and beautify the grounds about the houses. The results obtained, in spite of the dry summer, would indicate an eagerness to make the most of the opportunity.
III
This is what the lucky miner who was chosen will share in. What was the situation out of which he escaped, and which thousands of other miners and their families must endure until the lesson of Arthurdale is borne in upon the operators and further extension of the homestead idea is developed in this territory?
A close look at a typical mining camp in the Upper Monongahela Valley will give the answer. This description will not fit all of them, but of many it is true.
Through the valley runs, from south to north, the Monongahela River. Steep hills rise from its banks, and at irregular intervals are the famous ‘hollers’ where the coal is mined. These are breaks in the hills (gulches or canyons they would call them in the West) through which flows a small creek or ‘run.’ The outcrop of the coal can be seen on the sides of the hills, and the mines are usually drifts into the hillsides following the level of the coal vein. Competent geologists have called this section the Ruhr of America. There are four great workable veins through most of the valley. But amid all this great natural wealth are great numbers of families in acute distress, living in wretched houses under unsanitary conditions, the victims of despair, and ready fuel for the social incendiary’s torch.
For example, there is Scott’s Run, which a famous world traveler described after his journey through it as ‘the damnedest cesspool of human misery I have ever seen in America.’ The hills rise abruptly from the little stream, with just enough room for a wagon road and a railroad and a succession of slag piles. The houses in the camps cling to the hillsides and are reached by a series of goat paths. Many of them are of flimsy materials, hastily thrown together and built without any regard for the comfort of those who live in them or for the sanitary necessities which ensure good health. In one camp, in one of the cross hollows running off from the main one, the toilets were erected over a little stream, which in turn ran through several other camps before its polluted waters finally reached the river. In practically all of these camps, there is no room for gardens, no place for children’s play, no proper privacy for family life.
Conditions were bad enough when the operator was making money. They became intolerable when the mine went into the red and the operator had no money with which to make repairs. Many mines were closed, but the poorest of the miners lived on in the camps, unable to find the funds necessary for moving to another place. Families have lived for years on the verge of starvation, with a badly balanced diet producing digestive diseases which impair the efficiency of adults and are fatal to the development of strong, normal children. This is unquestionably an important factor in the alarming child mortality in the state. The West Virginia Department of Public Health’s statistics show that while the mortality from diarrhœa and enteritis among children in the United States as a whole, for the years 19261932, was 17.6, for West Virginia, for the same period, it was 60.2.
The report of a social worker to the welfare authorities concerning one camp describes conditions typical of other abandoned camps: ‘In the little section of —— Hill there are twelve houses near together. None of them are fit to live in, hardly fit for animals. There are sixteen families in those houses. They all report the place as overrun with rats at times. Coal is carried from the railroad or dug from an old mine. Water has to be carried up a steep hill half a mile or more. Most of them have rain barrels. There are six toilets in the group; several families have none at all; others are using common ones. Drinking was reported by the people themselves in all the families but two. Ten of the families have had one or more members in jail. The health is poor. The doctor warned the nurses before they went into the community that they must take great care, for almost everyone has some sort of social disease. The moral standards are very low.’
It is not to be wondered at that some have sunk so low as this report indicates; nor that some of the fiercest labor wars this country has known have been fought in these hollows; nor that other dangers to the state, which we complacently overlook before the comfort of our fires, may sometimes develop under these conditions. Stuck away behind the hills, crowded closely together, with no resources outside themselves and little there, people inevitably begin to think alike and can easily become the prey of trouble makers or demagogues. Up almost any hollow of the district will be found huge burning slag piles poisoning the air around with their sulphurous fumes, but these poisons are not nearly so perilous to the health of the community as is the human refuse — injured men, worthless men, trouble makers, men without morals. The poison which arises from these human slag piles is a good deal more virulent than sulphur smoke. Its cost to the community, in welfare charges and prisoner maintenance, is beyond computing.
This feature of slum life — the cost to the taxpayer — is often overlooked by those who think that the removing of slums is an economic impossibility. The fact is that it is an economic absurdity to permit them to continue. In one of the worst slums of Cleveland it was found that the cost to the public in services and activities ran about seven and one-half times the potential taxes from the area, and that only about three and one-half per cent of the taxes were paid. It was therefore to the public interest to destroy that slum. In the same way it is to the public interest to destroy every slum, for the danger each presents to the future is enormous.
The miner who yearned for the little farm up in Randolph County has his fellow many times multiplied in many widely scattered communities. With employment uncertain, such men cannot even feed themselves, for they have no land. They are but repeated evidence of the uneconomic fashioning of our economy. And they are a social menace. It must always be remembered that the bloodiest revolutions spring from the ranks of the socially misplaced.
Arthurdale, then, is not an expression of utopianism; in the largest sense of the word, it is a practical experiment, an endeavor to cure Scott’s Run and the conditions to which Scott’s Run gives rise.
IV
It is because Morgantown was ready in a peculiar way that the first subsistence homestead was established near it.
There are two things which make the city — West Virginia University, and the coal fields about it. The first has brought to the community a group of people acutely interested in the social problems now facing the country. The second provides a laboratory demonstration of these problems. For coal, as everyone realizes who knows anything about it, is not an unmixed blessing. Nothing in America’s industrial development, with the exception of Negro slavery and its aftermath, has caused so much human misery as have its bituminous coal fields.
A group of men and women who were concerned about the conditions in the coal camps set up, a number of years ago, the Council of Social Agencies in order to give intelligent direction to the very unintelligent aid received by the needy from the old political sources, and to supplement that need where possible. But the task of changing the conditions in the camps soon proved too great for their resources. The Children’s Bureau was approached. They in turn laid the matter before President Hoover. He called in the American Friends’ Service Committee and turned over to them what remained of one of the relief funds of the war days. They began in the camps about Morgantown that programme of child feeding which was to be extended through the upper Appalachian coal field, utilizing to the full the help of the Council and its volunteer workers.
With the coming of spring a gardening programme was launched, and in the summer the kitchens of the churches were used as canning centres. On the steep hillsides, in little plots beside the slag piles, and on the level land on the hilltops the gardens were planted. Gradually the gardeners in the camps were organized into clubs with their own officers. Now these meet at stated intervals for conference as to their common problems. In 1933 this movement had developed to the point where the thirty-four clubs in the county raised, in addition to the food that was eaten fresh, $59,453 worth that was canned for winter’s use, by that much lowering t he demand for charity and by that much increasing their self-respect. This fact has been impressed again and again on those who are so fortunate as to sit in conference with the leaders of these clubs. There is something about them that is strongly needed in American life, with the depression deepening the pauper spirit. For it must be remembered that, however necessary charity is as a temporary expedient, long-continued charity corrodes the spirit. Other means should be found to keep people alive. This was the problem that confronted Morgantown.
The next project that was developed was the making of furniture and the weaving of rugs. Two points were selected for the beginning of the experiment, both of them abandoned camps. A maker of split-bottomed chairs from back in the mountains, the possessor of old family secrets of chair construction handed down from father to son, taught the unskilled who also aspired to make chairs. Simple tables of colonial design were attempted. The native woods, hickory and walnut, of which there is an abundance on the hills, were utilized. An old woman born in Czechoslovakia knew how to make lace; an Austrian woman knew the mysteries of embroidery. Anyone who had any skill to contribute, or any desire to acquire a skill, was enrolled in the Mountaineer Craftsmen’s Coöperative Association. With the exception of the Welfare Secretary and the Quakers (who received merely their subsistence) everyone connected with these enterprises was a volunteer.
V
But after all this was done it seemed as though only a beginning had been made in meeting the need. And in the search for further means of preventing the increase of pauperism the idea presented itself: ‘Why not evolve new homesteads and settle these men who will never work in the mines again, as well as those who are employed only a day or two a week (and that means practically all the working miners), on little holdings of land where they can raise enough food for their families and so make the danger of starvation or malnutrition an impossibility?’ Most of the men in the mines knew how to grow food. They had demonstrated what they could do with their little patches of gardens. There was plenty of land that could be had cheaply. It would be infinitely better than relief, which the local political units could no longer bear anyhow. And Federal Relief no one wanted permanently if another remedy could be found.
There were some too who remembered certain facts in American history. They remembered that after the Revolutionary War the wilderness which was then Western Virginia and Western Pennsylvania had been largely settled by those who had fought under Washington and, finding no jobs when the war was ended, had received land grants from the government. Zackwell Morgan, who had given his name to the town, had been one of Washington’s soldiers.
They remembered also that while the Civil War was being waged the Congress had passed the National Homestead Act, and that many a soldier who had left his place in industry to shoulder his musket, and found that place gone when he laid his musket by, went back to the land, clearing his acres and breaking the sod in his old blue coat, thus making a living for his family. Both of these wars had been followed by years of depression, and both depressions had been in a measure met by a return to the land.
Why could not the current depression also be met — at least in some measure — in the same way? Of course there were no longer any 160acre homesteads to be had, no new wild lands to be tamed and shaped to the uses of men, but there were plenty of small holdings available, and the cost would be infinitely smaller than the continued keeping of families alive by the dole, under whatever name it masqueraded.
They remembered further that there had been a time before the great industrial cities began to grow when industry and small farming were carried on together. The manufacture of charcoal iron in these same mountains was an example. There was a village near the Forge, where the workers lived. Each had his little holding about his house, his own cow, pigs, and chickens, his own garden and fruit trees. The owner of the Forge had his farm near by, and when the time came for ploughing and sowing the Forge was left with enough men to keep the fires burning while the others went into the fields.
So, too, during the harvest. When the time came for cutting fuel for the winter each man went out to the woods on the mountain side and cut it and corded it, and he was ready for the cold winds and the snows. The grain was ground in the mill below the Forge and life in the community was self-contained and independent.
Why could not something like this be done about the mines, and those terrible mine camps and their threat to child life and to the health of the community, moral and physical, be ended forever? And the men who had been injured in the mines, who had lost an arm or a leg or an eye (and there are thousands of them) — these would never cut another ton of coal, but they, also, could be given a chance to live.
This was the thinking that lay behind the idea of the Subsistence Homestead. They who thought of it realized that the answer was not to be had in a day, but as they dealt in the palliatives the immediate emergency demanded and their resources made possible they dreamed the larger dream and began the effort to translate the dream into deeds.
It was not a difficult task to convince the hard-thinking Quakers who were at the head of the relief forces that the plan was a wise one. They went to Washington with the proposal and laid it before President Hoover. But the depression was in full swing by this time and his mind was so absorbed by other enormous difficulties that he was not able to see the possibilities the plan offered. And perhaps he did not think it wise to burden his successor with responsibility for a programme that could not hastily be carried through. With the coming of the new administration the matter was taken up again.
It was in line with the ideas already being considered by President Roosevelt and his advisers, and when the National Industrial Recovery Act was passed in the early summer of 1933 it contained the following section: —
Sec. 208. To provide for aiding the redistribution of the overbalance of population in industrial centres $25,000,000 is hereby made available to the President, to be used by him through such agencies as he may establish and under such regulations as he may make, for making loans for and otherwise aiding in the purchase of Subsistence Homesteads. The money collected as repayment of said loans shall constitute a revolving fund to be administered as directed by the President for the purpose of this section.
On July 21, 1933, the President directed Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, to organize the Division of Subsistence Homesteads in his department to carry out the purposes of this section, and delegated to him the powers granted the President under the Act. An Advisory Committee, composed of leading industrialists and students of social problems, was set up to collaborate with the Division, and a policy was devised which contemplates a programme of long-time character.
The Director of the department has pointed out that ‘because of the nature and purposes of the problem involved, and the limited fund in comparison with the need, the programme of the Division will consist in aiding in the establishment of a series of demonstration projects which will test out the practicability of various types of projects under the varying sets of conditions found in different parts of the country. Best use of the available appropriation will be made by setting up demonstration projects which will point the way to a programme of a more permanent character.’
The first project was the one begun at Arthurdale.
VI
In view of the experimental nature of the whole effort, — who in America in the summer of 1933 knew anything final about this new thing called a subsistence homestead? — it was to be expected that mistakes would be made, just as they have been made in every other experimental laboratory in the world.
The most serious mistake was in the ordering of ready-made houses for quick construction. They were too light for a cold country like this mountain land. They required costly reconstruction. In fact, it is a question whether it might not have been wiser and more economical to burn them up as they were taken from the railroad cars. But they were ordered because the authorities were eager to get one homestead project going at the earliest opportunity, so as to learn from watching it in operation what was necessary for other places.
Moreover, there were some mistakes that were due to the meddling of local politicians. That situation, however, has been sternly dealt with and is not likely to occur again. It has been demonstrated clearly that a man does not have to be a Democrat to have a homestead, or to share in the shaping of the idea. And the mistakes that have been made here at Arthurdale will not be repeated elsewhere. At thirty-six points in the country other similar projects have now been begun, all of them designed to meet the conditions which have resulted from the depression.
Much has been learned from Arthurdale which will be of great value. In this connection it must be remembered that the Federal Government and the states have established many experimental stations for the breeding of plants, trees, cattle, and horses; that we have made tremendous advances as a result of these; that we have spent thousands of dollars learning about the methods which should be followed in developing some new strain or idea. In the cause of a new kind of life which has significant possibilities, the experimental community has also come into being under governmental auspices.
It is further hoped that these demonstration projects will provide intelligent guidance to industry in the process of decentralization. In recent years industrial leaders have become increasingly aware of the advantages of decentralization, of the establishment of small units in rural communities where the cost of living might be reduced, and where the worker could acquire a garden homestead on which to raise food to eke out his wage income, and to which he could retire when the period of maximum earning power had passed. With the lengthening of the average age, the provision for the latter years must become a more and more pressing social problem.
No wonder that there has been a steady procession of industrial leaders to Arthurdale, to see at first hand what is being done there.
It is not believed by any of the most ardent advocates of the homestead plan that it is going to solve all the problems, economic and social, with which our age is confronted. It is not a panacea. There is reason to believe, however, that it will cure some of the ills of the body politic, and that it may aid in curing some others not immediately connected with the depression. It will be remembered that the fathers who established this nation were convinced that democracy would be most surely preserved by those whose independence was assured by the cultivation and ownership of the land. Jefferson held pretty strong views on the subject. ‘Those who labor in the earth,’ he wrote, ‘are the chosen people of God, if He ever had a chosen people, in whose breasts He has made a peculiar deposit of substantial and genuine virtue.’ And in another place he said: ‘Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous; and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberties and interests by the most lasting bonds.’
Perhaps the homesteaders may aid in the rebuilding of a Jeffersonian Democracy in America. That alone would make the experiment worth its cost.