Above all, however, the myth was powerful because the United States in the first half of the Nineteenth Century consisted predominantly of literate and politically enfranchised farmers. Offering what seemed harmless flattery to this numerically dominant class, the myth suggested a standard vocabulary to rural editors and politicians. Although farmers may not have been much impressed by what was said about the merits of a noncommercial way of life, they could only enjoy learning about their special virtues and their unique services to the nation.
Moreover, the editors and politicians who so flattered them need not in most cases have been insincere. More often than not they too were likely to have begun life in little villages or on farms, and what they had to say stirred in their own breasts, as it did in the breasts of a great many townspeople, nostalgia for their early years and perhaps relieved some residual feelings of guilt at having deserted parental homes and childhood attachments.
They also had the satisfaction in the early days of knowing that in so far as it was based upon the life of the largely self-sufficient yeoman the agrarian myth was a depiction of reality as well as the assertion of an ideal. Oddly enough, the agrarian myth came to be believed more widely and tenaciously as it became more fictional. At first it was propagated with a kind of genial candor, and only later did it acquire overtones of insincerity. There survives from the Jackson era a painting that shows Governor Joseph Ritner of Pennsylvania standing by a primitive plow at the end of a furrow.
There is no pretense that the Governor has actually been plowing—he wears broadcloth pants and a silk vest, and his tall black beaver hat has been carefully laid in the grass beside him—but the picture is meant as a reminder of both his rustic origin and his present high station in life. By contrast, Calvin Coolidge posed almost a century later for a series of photographs that represented him as haying in Vermont.
In one of them the President sits on the edge of a hay rig in a white shirt, collar detached, wearing highly polished black shoes and a fresh pair of overalls; in the background stands his Pierce Arrow, a secret service man on the running board, plainly waiting to hurry the President away from his bogus rural labors.
That the second picture is so much more pretentious and disingenuous than the first is a measure of the increasing hollowness of the myth as it became more and more remote from the realities of agriculture. Throughout the Nineteenth Century hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of farm-born youths sought their careers in the towns and cities. And such will continue to be the case, until our agriculturists become qualified to assume that rank in society to which the importance of their calling, and their numbers, entitle them, and which intelligence and self-respect can alone give them.
Rank in society! He became aware that the official respect paid to the farmer masked a certain disdain felt by many city people. The growth of the urban market intensified this antagonism. In areas like colonial New England, where an intimate connection had existed between the small town and the adjacent countryside, where a community of interests and even of occupations cut across the town line, the rural-urban hostility had not developed so sharply as in the newer areas where the township plan was never instituted and where isolated farmsteads were more common.
As settlement moved west, as urban markets grew, as self-sufficient farmers became rarer, as farmers pushed into commercial production for the cities they feared and distrusted, they quite correctly thought of themselves as a vocational and economic group rather than as members of a neighborhood. In the Populist era the city was totally alien territory to many farmers, and the primacy of agriculture as a source of wealth was reasserted with much bitterness.
Bryan spoke for a people raised for generations on the idea that the farmer was a very special creature, blessed by God, and that in a country consisting largely of farmers the voice of the farmer was the voice of democracy and of virtue itself. The agrarian myth encouraged farmers to believe that they were not themselves an organic part of the whole order of business enterprise and speculation that flourished in the city, partaking of its character and sharing in its risks, but rather the innocent pastoral victims of a conspiracy hatched in the distance.
The notion of an innocent and victimized populace colors the whole history of agrarian controversy. It was the late of the farmer himself to contribute to this decline. Like almost all good Americans he had innocently sought progress from the very beginning, and thus hastened the decline of many of his own values. Elsewhere the rural classes had usually looked to the past, had been bearers of tradition and upholders of stability.
The American farmer looked to the future alone, and the story of the American land became a study in futures. To what extent was the agrarian myth actually false? Those forests, which provided materials for early houses and barns, sources of fish and game, and places for livestock to root or graze, together with the fields in between, which were better suited to growing corn than cotton, befitted the yeomanry, who yearned for independence and self-sufficiency. Yeoman farmers usually owned no more land than they could work by themselves with the aid of extended family members and neighbors.
Many yeomen in these counties cultivated fewer than acres, and a great many farmed less than Instead, yeoman farmers devoted the majority of their efforts to producing food, clothing, and other items used at home. The cotton that yeomen grew went primarily to the production of home textiles, with any excess cotton or fabric likely traded locally for basic items such as tools, sewing needles, hats, and shoes that could not be easily made at home or sold for the money to purchase such things.
Specifically, the vision of the yeoman farmer was one of the important American archetypes moving into the progressive era. Small farmers are just one part of the larger group of farmers involved in agricultural interest groups. Middle Class The South, before the Civil War, included a middle class of white farmers and professionals who did not own slaves, but owned land. In the book he used statistical data to analyze the make-up of southern society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was generally thought.
Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats favored the term " yeoman " for the independent land-owning farmer. Plain Folk argued that southern society was not dominated by planter aristocrats, but that yeoman farmers played a significant role.
Owsley believed that shared economic interests united southern farmers. A clear line demarcated the elite, but according to Burton, the line between poor and yeoman was less distinct. However, Stephanie McCurry argues that yeomen were clearly distinguished from poor whites because yeoman owned land.
They were "self-working farmers ," distinct also from the elite because they physically labored on their land alongside any slaves they owned. Wartime shortages increased the economic divide between planters and yeoman farmers ; nevertheless, some planters honored their paternalistic obligations by selling their corn to plain folks at the official Confederate rate "out of a spirit of patriotism.
In social and geographical context, there are different definitions of a yeoman farmer. What was a major contradiction in the attitudes of southern yeoman farmers? They were staunch supporters of slavery even though they rarely owned slaves.
A yeoman thought of himself as a farmer who liked to work on his farm. The difference was that the landed gentry and the aristocracy did not farm their land themselves, but let it to tenant farmers. It was very respectable to be a yeoman, rather like it is to be middle class today.
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