Civilian Defense--Upstate
I
FOR some weeks after the bombing raid on Pearl Harbor the public consciousness of the whole United States, in city and country alike, was pretty well dominated by the phrase ‘civilian defense’ and by the thoughts and problems associated with those omnipresent words. It was a preoccupation that undertook to organize itself by means of mass meetings convoked as promptly as possible after December 7 to review the whole subject of civilian defense and to instruct the ordinary citizen in what he and his family could, should, and must do about it. In the typical enough New England small place to which I belong the state of the public interest was proved by the attendance, which far exceeded even that of any recent year at that red-letter annual function, the town meeting; and I gather that the same unusual intentness was shown virtually everywhere else.
Those who attended found the two hours uncommonly instructive, if not in quite the ways counted on by either those who had called the meeting or those who had made a stern duty of attending it. There were, besides the local business man who served as chairman, four speakers. The first represented the state organization for civilian defense, and he explained the newly improvised communications system by which the forewarning of any presumably impending air raid would be distributed to various points. The second speaker represented the county, and his subject was first-, second-, and third-degree air-raid alarms and how the county organization proposed to flash the state’s forewarnings on to selected representatives of the towns and villages. The third was a municipal fire chief who had made a studious hobby of bombing in all its aspects; for forty minutes he elucidated his charts and graphs of demolition bombs, penetrating bombs, incendiary bombs, with a good deal about their mechanics, their chemistry, their trajectories when discharged from given altitudes at given speeds, the dimensions of the craters produced in different kinds of soil, and the effects of the bombs on different types of office-building construction. The closing speaker, a young man who had had a week’s intensive training in a civilian air-raid school and received a certificate of proficiency, analyzed the duties of air-raid wardens, gave a character sketch of the ideal warden, and closed with ten minutes on the standard poison gases, first-aid treatment of the victims, and the chemistry and technique of decontamination.
The state of mind in which we adjourned — and in which most of us remain two full months later — can be summed up in a few specific observations and reflections as automatic to our kind of audience as its breathing. The chief of them are these: —
1. From first to last we did not hear a single mention of the word ‘barn,’ or the word ‘hay,’ or the word ‘woods,’ or the word ‘cattle.’ Instead, our attention was systematically directed to reinforced concrete, the safest place to be in a skyscraper, the operation of first-aid stations for damaged or shell-shocked cats and dogs, and the method of preventing large plate-glass windows from adding avoidable casualties to the inevitable ones.
2. It gradually dawned upon us, as speaker followed authoritative speaker, that the science of air-raid protection in teeming city blocks and crowded subways and twenty-floor office buildings is all the science of air-raid protection there is. There simply is no code, because there can be none, for dealing with, say, an incendiary bomb that penetrates the roof of a wooden barn into forty tons of hay dry enough to be put into a barn. And the lack of such a code struck us as being, on the whole, not too alarming. On the subject of air raids a consensus of us had already agreed (a) that Hitler would ultimately feel obliged, by some hook or crook and at any cost, to get bombs dropped on the Atlantic seaboard, and (b) that what small loads of explosive he might succeed in getting here would by that time be worth their weight in platinum and could not conceivably be squandered on anything less than first-class military objectives.
3. More important by far, we discovered that we had unconsciously been taking a rather broad view of what civilian defense meant and included, or ought to mean and include — a good deal broader view than any sanctioned or even recognized by our official mentors on the platform. To them, civilian defense was mitigation of the effects of air raids — that and nothing more. To us rural people, us farming and farmminded people, it had just not occurred before that the really important aspects of the war were scheduled to be brought home to us on the wings of enemy bombers. We had thought that preoccupation was for the cities, the centres of industry, the great foci of the transportation systems, the airports. The questions in our minds as we trooped into the assembly hall were such as these: How can we, by getting together as a community, speed the joint effort? What can we make our land count for, over and above what it counts for in normal times — our land being, in effect, all we have to offer or to work with? What is our small appointed part in the fearfully complex national job of getting things running as they ought to run? Exactly what must we collectively know and be prepared for, to make sure that nothing we do as individuals will turn out a waste, a hindrance, a misfit? In short, what, if anything, can we of the country do for the cities that may soon be in the thick of these horrors now being so thoroughly inventoried for us—horrors that, a thousand chances to one, our countryside will continue to be spared?
II
The answer, as in private reflection and neighborhood discussion we have been working it out, is one that we fear may prompt some of our urban critics to murmur ‘Yankee bargain!’ We are thinking, they will charge, two thoughts for ourselves to every one for our city neighbors and for America. We must even be prepared to hear someone blurt out the harsh word ‘exploitation.’ It is, in the circumstances, almost inevitable.
What we rural households and communities want to give the cities in 1942 — and for the duration — is asylum for those of their inhabitants who are not directly serviceable to either the military or the industrial aspects of the war effort where they are, but who are as likely as others to be victims of ‘enemy action,’ as the austere official phrase calls death broadcast upon the helpless. And what, for the duration, we want to receive from the cities is, in two syllables, labor. In fact — to state the case in the three syllables of a phrase that will now have to be dug out from under the odium we have been heaping upon it for two generations — we want child labor.
To the city’s side of this interchange we shall come in a moment. First, consider briefly our side of it, the country’s side.
The war came to us long before Pearl Harbor, long before the United States was overtly in it. It did not, to be sure, drop upon us through the air. There has been nothing very spectacular about its devastation, nothing out of which to manufacture front-page headlines. Yet its destructiveness is fully as formidable in the long run, if not so instantaneously visible, as that of intensive bombing; and its coverage is infinitely wider, more consistent, and more predictable. The war began to reach us — the war, I mean, as disaster — before it materially disturbed the rest of America, and indeed at a time when much of America saw war in the guise of a blessing, a restorer of longlost prosperity. It came upon us rather gradually, in a sapping, mining, eroding operation of which we had begun to be uncomfortably aware by the summer of 1940. In the summer of 1941 our awareness was acute to desperation. Our national involvement in declared war has not changed the process in any way. It has merely accelerated it to the point where we hardly dare think about the summer of 1942. Yet if we do not think about it, and to uncommonly good purpose, we know that we are lost.
What we are increasingly desperate about is simply the war-produced phenomenon that detached observers sum up in the cool, impersonal, not unfamiliar phrase, ‘labor shortage.’
Always before, the small farm could squeak through its short-handed emergencies somehow, if only by arranging an exchange of services between neighbors or recruiting able-bodied schoolboys. Today, the possible makeshifts have all but ceased to exist. The professional hired man, of course, long ago went away to a machine shop. The submarginal small farmer, the harassed and debtridden fellow who made ends meet by working out part of the time and doing everybody else’s work better than his own, has sold his scrub cows to the butcher, left his run-down land idle, and housed his family in a trailer or parked it on relatives; he is taking his dollar an hour and overtime in a war industry. Those who are just too young for the draft, enlist in the Navy or, rejected, earn more than a man’s peacetime wages in a factory; and the very schools patriotically abet them by handing out June diplomas in February. The farm youngsters who always liked to work out summers and in spare time find that they are now too sorely needed at home. The summer boarder who used to pitch in for the fun of it — and really accomplish winders by main strength and awkwardness — is not likely to be a summer boarder in 1942. And the foot-loose unemployable who used to turn up at the kitchen door with his offer to ‘do anything’ and sleep in the hay — even he has not been seen or heard from for months.
It is perhaps not as widely understood as it ought to be that any farm, large or small, diversified or specialized, profitable or insolvent, has to have extra labor at certain definite seasons, on pain of ceasing to be a farm in any competent sense. The problem of civilian defense is, for the countryside, this problem before all. Unless it is solved, there will presently be little or nothing left in the countryside to defend.
Here, let us say, is a northern New England barn cellar with a hundred tons of stable manure in it that ought to be on thirty acres of hay land when the snows melt and the spring rains come. Without extra labor it is certainly not going to be spread until next year’s firewood is cut and sledded (which also calls for an extra hand) or the lumbering done (two more extra hands) for the additional small buildings that must go up (more help) if the farm is to meet its share of the government’s revised expectations. That means that the manure will keep on accumulating until the latest favorable time, which will almost certainly coincide with the March-April sap run — itself another demand for outside help, and a louder one than ever in a year when, because of the sugar shortage, maple products have become an integral part of civilian defense broadly construed. If lack of man power makes it impossible to get that manure spread on the mowings, what will be the exact consequences? First, the land that ought to cut sixty tons of July hay and a good September aftermath will cut perhaps forty tons and no aftermath. Secondly, the land will run down, as land does when you take from it without putting back. Thirdly, the wintering of twenty-some cows in abundance and maximum production will have been cut down by a third, and that when the requirement of total civilian defense is that the herd be expanded. Fourthly, the main and most reliable source of the farm’s income will have been cut down in the same proportion, and with it the farmer’s ability to contribute what he knows is his fair share of the war effort through the purchase of defense bonds.
Incidentally, if the dearth of auxiliary labor makes the haying period itself dawdle along over weeks where it should take days, — and it is precisely in haying time that the labor shortage has been the most acute in every recent year, — the effect will be nearly the same as if the land were not manured, for the protein content of overripe hay or persistently rained-on hay may be reduced by a full third.
Multiply this particular impasse by the immense number of farms affected. Multiply it again by the number of farm operations that require extra hands if they are to be at all efficient, from corn planting through berry picking to corn husking. You perhaps begin to get some inkling of the general truth that the cumulative devastation of a farming region by chronic labor shortage makes the effects of blitzkrieg look trivial, transient, and reparable.
The countryside must, in fine, have a labor reservoir if it is to hold up as a going concern, a provider of indispensable sustenance. In this emergency it has lost every single one of its normal sources of labor, some to the armed forces, more to the cities and their industries. It does not begrudge the losses, since they seem to be necessary to the whole program. But it insists, because the thing is so painfully obvious, that replenishment must come from somewhere. And as things stand it is utterly unable to conceive where this shall come from unless the cities are to give back some sort, of substitute. You can no more starve productive regions of man power, if they are to continue productive, than you can cheat a single field of manure without destroying its capacity. The war effort has reaped our crop and exported it to the towns. The towns will now have to replace it with some sort of working equivalent, exactly as every sound manager puts a share of the earnings of his business back into the business.
The country is the city’s business always, but in these days more crucially than ever. And this the city dweller may discover some morning, if the country’s dire need is not promptly apprehended and dealt with, by reading in his daily news that he must henceforth get the milk for his children and the cream for his coffee on ration cards.
III
We can see nothing for it, then, but that the cities, and especially the seaboard cities, must quickly face the necessity — in the end they will discover the desirability — of lending the rural regions great numbers of their young for the term of the emergency.
Why the young particularly? Because they will add so needlessly to the casualties if high explosives begin to fall on the great centres. Because, from the point of view of either war production or civilian defense, they are a liability at home, whereas they could rapidly become an important asset in the safe open spaces. Because they are teachable, absorptive, consciously or unconsciously hungry for a great deal that the country has to give. Because participation in the affairs of the farm, a practical and instinctive awareness of the eternal cycles of seedtime and harvest, birth, growth, and death, is education in the profoundest sense and the very best possibility open to what is known as progressive education — a fact already exploited by the recent multiplication of farm schools for city children. Because a strong representation of the city’s youth, entrusted to the country for an uncertain period and scattered far and wide throughout it, will bring it home to the city, as nothing else could do, that its stake in the country is real, not theoretical.
Not that it is any service to either side to pretend that there are no immediate difficulties in the way of such a proposal, or that the kind of adjustment called for will not involve a degree of real sacrifice all round. The city youngster and the rural household accost each other under a handicap of mutual patronage and pity. Each seems to the other inconceivably green, ignorant, and unapproachable. Public agencies and free services being what they are in the modern city, even a slum child is likely to look upon himself at first as having been shifted into an underprivileged existence. The farm’s plumbing seems to him primitive, its heating arrangements antediluvian, its diet fantastic, its clothing uncouth, its hours of work and of rest outrageous, its speech crude, its diversions artless. It takes time — fortunately, the young have time — for him to discover that these items and the others, like the city counterparts he is used to, are extremely pat answers to inevasible conditions. The diet, for instance, he finds to be one on which long, healthy lives have always been lived, intense cold defied, and the fatigue of hard work noticeably eased.
The difficulties are admittedly real. But they are not too great or too numerous to be overcome, and they are dwarfed by the reasons for overcoming them. After all, most of them are not greater than (or much different from) the difficulties faced without a qualm whenever children go away from home to a boarding school. A single flight of enemy planes over Manhattan Island, even if not a bomb were dropped, might bring a multitude of reluctant parents to the discovery that mountainous objections to having their children in the Berkshires or Vermont had suddenly become molehills.
The ultimate guarantee that the difficulties, mentioned and unmentioned alike, will take care of themselves fast enough is simply the kind of farms and the kind of farm folk in question. It cannot be made too clear and emphatic that this proposal has nothing to do with that potent political hobgoblin, the ‘farm bloc.’ The farm bloc is agricultural big business; it is invested capital from sources alien to the land; it is pressuregroup lobbying; it is interest on mortgage bonds; it is exploitation of American soil for quick dividends; it is the city reaching out octopus-like tentacles to swallow what was once the country. To it and all its works the prospective hosts of the city’s young people are completely alien and nearly as hostile as any city merchant is. We are speaking here simply of the one-family, hundred-acre, twoor three-horse non-mechanized farm, operated by individuals, individualists, Persons — folk used to adversities, very long on patience and philosophic resignation, longer still on contrivance, invariably fond of young creatures human and other, not conspicuously keen about making money (though mostly very intent on saving it if possible), and on the whole well content if they can get their obligations met, their children educated, their land employed for what it is worth and — a burning issue — improved a little each year.
The character of the households involved is, too, the best of guarantees against the exposure of any visiting child to work beyond his strength or to undesirable interference with his schooling. The small farmer has traditionally, I believe, rather a hard name as an exploiter of his own children. He may have deserved it in time past, but there can be only a negligible justification for it today. The county in which I live is an excellent cross-section of the whole of rural New England and areas westward to the Great Lakes. It contains specimens of every kind of establishment from the enormous chain farm operating its own tank trucks to the broken-down end-ofthe-road place half farmed by a family little above the grade of squatters. If any appreciable abuse of children’s time and strength existed in the region, it would be notorious, and those at fault would be made too uncomfortable to persist. They would be, in a local phrase of large and potent implications, ‘spoken to.’
Here is a faithfully exact illustration of the present-day part played by farm children in farm chores: —
When my small daughter was four she began to tease me for lessons in milking. One day I let her sit between my knees on the milking stool, and after a while her insignificant hand had the triumph of extracting a barely visible jet of Guernsey milk. After that she seldom missed a milking. Usually I let her perform for two or three minutes, and presently for longer. One morning when she was six I, being wretchedly ill, tottered out to the stable half an hour late, to find that she, without a word to or from anybody, had grained the cows, pitched down their hay, hoed the manure down the chute, covered the floor with clean litter, brushed the animals, and milked the first cow dry — all at her own pace, but with results I could not have told from my own. Anyone who knows children will not need to be told that I found her in a state of high glee and mighty pride. Now, on the verge of seven, she is not easily kept from doing far more in the stable than her parents think good for her. Incidentally, being feminine enough to dislike the way the standard technique of milking thickens and misshapes the hands, she has been at pains to learn an alternative method that obviatas ‘milkmaid’s hands.’
That is about how farm children begin to make themselves, in every department, useful; and it is an instructive enough picture of how the youngest evacués would begin. Naturally, nobody with any sense would dream of proposing that they be distributed hit-or-miss without supervision or safeguards. The occasion has provided us with an opportunity to initiate a vast number of children into habits of industry, thrift, self-reliance, and general competence that most children used to have and that all of them would be permanently the better off for having. Furthermore, we should be able almost entirely to avoid the early ills of the British evacuation system, devised in haste to achieve physical safety and nothing else, and for a time so badly mismanaged that it produced wholesale misery for parents, children, and hosts alike.
And incidentally we ought to be able to rusticate an immense number of city youngsters, from just under the draft age down to twelve or so, with a negligible minimum of drain on the public purse. There are farm families by tens of thousands that would think it a privilege as well as a duty to support a reasonably energetic boy in return for spare-time work that he would have the time of his life doing, and even to pay him what they could afford for his summer work. And let no one overlook the reasonably energetic girl, for whom the opportunities are quite as interesting, both indoors and out.
The December mass meeting that so bewildered us could and should have laid the foundation for just such a program of give-and-take as that here outlined. There was probably not a single person present who did not consider air raids a decided possibility for New York and Boston, an extreme improbability for our hinterland. Yet no one put the two opinions together or drew an inference from them, no one mentioned the word ‘children’ or the word ‘evacuation,’ no one said that we could do a lot to help city youngsters who might also do a little to help us. Why should we not have used that meeting to sound out the community, to arrive at a preliminary estimate of its potential hospitality, to collect the pledges of households already minded to commit themselves, to agree on temporarily abating or abolishing the school tuition fees for nonresidents? Why should not rural communities everywhere have been doing that sort of thing and forwarding their gathered data by counties to the states, until there existed a complete picture of what the country, on its own initiative, was ready to give the city and to ask of it? The result could have been one end of a complete evacuation program, ready for the setting up of suitable agencies at the other end; and the very existence of the invitation would have created a powerful pressure toward prompt response and energetic action.
As it is, valuable weeks have been lost, during which we have drifted along in a dazed inertia. The danger is that it may turn out to have been a fatal inertia. Fatal it will certainly be if nothing is done until one of our big cities finds itself under a rain of disaster from the skies. Wholesale evacuation will then be ordained, of course, and it will be carried out in an unplanned, hysterical, and extremely expensive way that can offer the evacués nothing good but safety from bombs, and the commandeered hosts nothing but a trifle of expense money for no end of bother and worry.