Sec. 3. #Lack of a social agricultural policy in America.# It is a common remark that the farmer lives an independent life.  This develops in him a self-reliant spirit.  He readily gives and takes simple neighborly help in informal ways, but he does not readily turn to government for aid.  While every influential urban group, organized or unorganized—­manufacturers, merchants, wage-earners—­has sought and obtained special protective social legislation, the farmer has, from choice or necessity, usually had to work out his economic problems unaided.  The exceptions are few and of small importance.  For example, the prodigal land-policy of the state and national governments encouraging the settlement of the frontiers was not a farmers’ policy.  It was originally inspired by the larger political purpose of extending the bounds of the nation; later it was advocated and fostered by a land-speculating element, linked with bad politics, in the frontier states, and not by farmers as such.  It in time greatly injured the farmers of the eastern states.  The “Granger legislation,” to regulate railroad rates, was so called by the East in a spirit of derision because it began in the distinctively agricultural states of the Northwest; but it had neither the aim, nor the result, of obtaining especially for farmers any rates that were not open to every one on the same terms.  The tariff rates on American agricultural products, placed in the acts as a matter of form, have, with minute exceptions, been ineffective to favor farmers, as the shipments were all outward and none inward, while heavy and effective rates were placed on most things that the farmers had to buy.[2]

In part the explanation of the lack of legislation favoring farmers is to be found in their small part and influence, as a class, in political affairs, outside of minor executive offices in township and county governments.  In the state legislatures farmers are few relative to their numbers in the community, and still fewer in either House in Washington.  Among the real exceptions to the otherwise fair record of the farming class in this respect is the tax on oleomargarine and the special favor accorded to farmers’ associations in the Clayton Act.  It might be cynically said that the farmer has not been “sharp” enough to get his share of the “good” things” that the business classes were passing around in protective legislation.  But farmers have, as has every economic group, interests which may legitimately be the subject of social legislation; whereas they have limited their attention to their private affairs at home and have been prone to vote patiently and proudly the “straight ticket” to elect business men and lawyers to office.