PROCEEDINGS IOWA FAIR MANAGERS ASSN. , 197 



five per cent of its people were tillers of the soil or direct producers of 

 things to meet the needs of men, and that figure has steadily decreased 

 with each census period in the history of this nation. 



Forty or fifty years ago we found in round numbers two-thirds of our 

 people living on the soil, and when the 1920 figures were announced that 

 figure of forty or fifty years ago had been almost reversed and we found out 

 in round numbers approximately two-thirds of our people lived in the city 

 and the other one-third still upon the soil. In other words ten per cent of 

 the people of this nation live in its three largest cities. New York, Chicago 

 and Philadelphia. Twenty-five per cent of us live in cities of more than 

 100,000 population and the balance of that two-thirds or sixty per cent is 

 scattered around in the cities, towns, villages and hamlets of less than 

 100,000 in size. So we are wondering what it all means and there has been 

 a very potent and big reason for this shifting of population, for the exodus 

 from the farm toward the town. The reason has been primarily that it has 

 not been profitable as compared with other lines of industry and for a 

 like measure of effort. Then too has been the fact that it has not been so 

 profitable and it has been isolated and it requires people to stay far out 

 and removed from other families, from their friends and from social con- 

 tact, so they move to town that they may enjoy social contact, that they 

 may have better educational facilities for their children, that they may 

 have better opportunities to do things that they want to do and enjoy 

 life as we do in America that comes to us when we come up to the cities 

 and in the communities here and elsewhere. 



But the fair has done perhaps more than any other one thing to stabilize, 

 insofar as the industry has been stabilized, the business of agriculture. It 

 has done more to give them at least one annual frolic when they might not 

 only meet together and see and learn, but when they might get that great 

 and important item of social contact and rub the element of suspicion out 

 of our characters, and that is all an important thing. And it is important 

 because those of us who live in cities likewise enjoy going to fairs, and it 

 is doing a whole lot to break down that unseen hidden barrier that has 

 been allowed to grow up, done much to eliminate that and break down the 

 suspicion those of us who live in town have towards the farmer and break 

 down the suspicion the farmer has for the city when he comes into town 

 to purchase the commodities he needs. We have only to analyze the fig- 

 ures, only to look at the agricultural reports, we have only to look at the 

 condition at the present time in the agricultural world in order to realize 

 that the agriculturalist, the dirt farmer has not had a pathway of prim- 

 roses at all. 



We are told for every dollar in circulation that seventy per cent, seventy 

 cents is fundamentally farm money, and so we say it is high time that 

 business men in the cities as well as business men on the farm pay a little 

 more attention to the seventy per cent of our national business. Our 

 biggest industry is agriculture, worth more than any other industry in our 

 nation, and you men are doing that, if you are working with the agencies 

 and in your own institutions to see that he gets a fair deal, an open field 

 and opportunity to market his produce and to give him a return for his 

 labor and his investment. And then we have worked some about how we 



