Day 5 in the archives: the listening tour

I only had a half day in the Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers today, and most of that was spent in Box 24. Last Friday, I immersed myself in correspondence from everyday farmers and other rural workers to members of the Commission on Country Life, chaired by Bailey, which I discussed in that day’s post. The Commission collected information in other forms than correspondence, however — the most quantitative in the form of its half million questionnaires circulated among rural people across the country, but, on the more qualitative end, the Commission also went on a listening tour across the country, holding hearings in which people from the surrounding countryside were invited to come address their concerns to the Commission members directly. Led by Bailey, and sometimes having to split into two groups for the sake of coverage in the incredibly limited time span they had to work with, the Commission made thirty stops in their whirlwind tour in November and December, 1908. You can see the list in this excerpt from the Commission’s published report:

from my copy of Report of the Commission on Country Life, 1909, in its book form published by Sturgis & Walton in 1911

What I saw today were the minutes of those meetings. Of the thirty stops listed here, I could find minutes for twenty-one meetings. I feel gratitude across time to the stenographers who scribbled down and then had transcribed such thorough notes. For instance, the list above doesn’t tell you that the day after the November 11 meeting in Athens, the Commission held a second meeting in that city at the Knox Institute, a private school of secondary education for African Americans, or the particular nature of the issues debated there. It also doesn’t tell you that the meeting that another of the Commission’s delegations held on the 11th in Raleigh was specifically held at the state’s A&M College, an agricultural college (now North Carolina A&T University) established for African Americans under the Second Morrill Act due to North Carolina’s refusal to racially integrate their tertiary agricultural education. It doesn’t tell you that in Richmond, VA, one Dr. Frazell emphasized that in the agricultural colleges, the “head and heart should be trained,” thus quoting one of Booker T. Washington’s famous lines in Up from Slavery and elsewhere, nor that one of the speakers would be W. T. B. Williams of the in/famous Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. It also doesn’t give a glimpse into the discussion of “Indians” as self-sustaining farmers in Tuscon, of the warm description of Mexican farm workers in El Paso, or of the heated arguments over Chinese and Japanese labor in Sacramento and Fresno. You can’t get a sense, in this list or the report’s terse overview, of the fact that the December 5 meeting in Spokane, WA filled the room with 75 to 100 people at a morning session, prompting presumably a change of location for the later afternoon session, which drew “about 200” to come speak their minds and hear what their neighbors had to say about the current state and the future of their community. The meeting adjourns with the stenographer writing “Senator McClosky offered a Resolution looking to a permanent Commission on Country Life, which was unanimously adopted, and filed with the Commission.”

You also don’t get the details about when the room erupts into applause or cheers (as it often does when the case is made for the parcel post, interestingly), or the occasional disagreements that break out between neighbors. Similar themes recur again and again in these sessions — checks to middlemen, better roads (to combat isolation, to make it easier to get to market, and even, as one speaker argued at the North Carolina A&M College, to help combat segregation in the South along with the spread of the telephone), instituting a parcel post to lessen reliance on the railroads, combating unfair pricing set by the cities…

my copy of the Commission’s Report, as it was eventually published in book form (which is actually missing some of the material from the original report, as I’ve found)

Once the Commission had completed its tour and had the minutes transcribed, once they had shared among themselves the piles of letters from farmers around the country, and once the data from the tens (or hundreds?) of thousands of circulars had been tabulated, summarized, and interpreted by U.S. Census staff, the Commission had the impossible task of distilling their findings — distilling essentially the voice of rural America — into a concise statement. Bailey took charge in this process, assigning some of the writing to each of the other Commission members and going himself through the arduous process of editing as well as writing much of the report, then distributing each draft to the full Commission and setting the terms for the seven of them to respond and argue it out either by mail or in person. The report went through eight full revisions before the final draft could be submitted to Washington on January 23, 1909. I spent a little time going through these drafts — there is incredible potential in this textual collection. Large sections had to be cut or overhauled time and again before the full Commission could sign on. The material cut is as interesting as what was eventually published. The seven members clearly felt the weight of the task upon them and wanted to do the very best they could to contribute to the future of rural America.

And, while their efforts were not in vain — the parcel post, the modern highway system, rural electrification, and others of their suggestions would come to fruition in the decade or so following the report— the politics at the time were against them. In the short term, a Congress weary of Rooseveltian projects and commissions refused to appropriate further funding to help the Commission to further “digest” the material, and the newly elected President Taft seems to have been ambivalent about the document. Roosevelt even wanted a permanent Commission established as a part of the federal government. It wasn’t until 1911 that the report was published as a book — the same year that Bailey published a book of his own, expressing his personal estimates on the issues facing American rural culture, titled The Country-Life Movement in the United States. Stymied by Washington, the movement was to be taken up by the people…

For some context, see my intro post. To get in touch, use my website.

The archive archive: Intro | Days 1–3 | Day 4

Insights all gleaned from Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21–2–3342, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.