A Peek at Life on N.C. Farms, 1919 Through World War II

From Times Down Home: 75 Years With Progressive Farmer. This book, containing a collection of articles and photos from Progressive Farmer was published in 1978.

1919-1929

The twenties were hard times for our grandparents on the farm, and harder by contrast to the good times of most of the rest of the country. Between 1920 and 1921 farm prices fell 44 percent. Many bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures occurred. Throughout the decade, cotton was considered a depressed industry.

In 1922 the Progressive Farmer reported figures from the Secretary of Agriculture: purchasing power of railroad employees was 51% greater than in 1913 and coal miners’ 30% greater, but the purchasing power of the farmer was 25 to 45% less than in 1913.

We are told that woman’s place is at home in spite of the fact that 8,000,000 women are forced to leave home in quest of bread. The home does not stop at the threshold. All outdoors must be her home, just as long as she must prepare her child to live there. Women’s refining influence, goodness, love, spirituality and sweetness purge a community of its rottenness and keep clean the hearth. Her glorious mission in a community is that which Christ placed in her hands to fight the devil and all his works. It is just as necessary for a woman to go to the polling booth as it is to go to church. Page 120

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The bright lights and apparent comforts of the city must have been especially tantalizing to the young. One mill girl was quoted: “Here ya draws yer own pay envelope and gives what ya wants to yer folks, but there ain’t no pay envelope [on the farm].”

Americans were out for fun—after the scrimping and sacrifice of the war, which had taught them the ephemeral, almost whimsical, nature of savings and work, and even life. Americans were ready for the reward which seemed to be rightfully theirs—the liberation brought by the harnessing of power. Mass production of automobiles had made them cheap enough for many to buy—at least “on time.” (More than three-fourths of American cars bought in 1925 were purchased “on time,” liberating Americans from the old puritan ethic of work and savings before buying.)

Washing machines and vacuum cleaners liberated them from constant bondage to dirt and scrubbing. Oil stoves liberated them from hot kitchens and chopping wood. But the greatest change was a whole industry devoted to “fun.”

Radio and movies were born to entertain. The moneyed class had always been entertained at concerts and plays. Now radio and moves brought entertainment within the range of most pocketbooks. A great mass of people were therefore liberated to being entertained, not (as formerly) by doing something, but (as the rich had always been) by just sitting there. Radio and movies brought to tightly knit communities ideas, styles, and ways of living from other places and times, liberating those communities somewhat from rigid custom. Radio and movies and advertising brought longings for things that others had or appeared to have. And not just longings for the things themselves but for the lives those people in the ads and moves seemed to be living.

Farmers complained that they had to get up too early to “sit up of an evening to hear a fine program” on the radio. And farmers, being more dependent on their land and their neighbors than on trends and styles, could turn their backs on these new “radio” ideas for a while. But plainly, they could not keep the young people from responding to them, as we see from a comment in 1926 by Mrs. Hutt, the Progressive Farmer’s women’s editor:

“The ambition of many a youth is to have a silk shirt to puff out in the breeze when he speeds to the town movies in his daddy’s new flivver.”  Page 98

1941-1945 For the Duration
For farmers, the duration had a somewhat different meaning. Most farmers in 1942 had the most prosperous year in memory with farm prices the highest they had been in a generation. The farm problem now was labor, or lack of it. Suddenly farm boys were drafted. Others went on to $4-a-day jobs in the war industry. Even women were taking war jobs. Children were taken out of school to pick cotton which was needed for uniforms, tents, harnesses for parachutes, etc. And if the labor shortage were not difficult enough, mechanical helpers were also in short supply.