REGION OF DISCONTENT 13 



old enough to help with the work, the better he was able to handle his 

 labor problem. If he needed more help than his own family could give 

 him, the hired man or hired hand, most probably the grown son of some 

 other farmer, was introduced to supplement the family labor supply. If 

 the farmer's wife, with the help of her own daughters, could not do all the 

 work that fell to her lot, she sought the aid of a hired girl. Neither the 

 hired man nor the hired girl was thought of as an inferior; in many in- 

 stances the hired man became a son-in-law, and the hired girl a daughter- 

 in-law. Working out as a hired man was a generally accepted method by 

 which any young man without means obtained the start necessary to begin 

 farming on his own. 15 



The ideal size of a family farm was traditionally 160 acres, and on the 

 average the actual was not far from the ideal. This was the size of the 

 farm allowed to each settler under the terms of the Homestead Act of 

 1862, but most of the farms in the Middle West had never been home- 

 steads. The Homestead Act allotted 160 acres to each settler merely be- 

 cause a farm of that size had long been considered to be about right for 

 one individual to operate. Eighty-acre farms were regarded as too small 

 for economical farming: they required the same outlay for housing, work 

 horses, and machinery as the larger farm but produced only half as much ; 

 they furnished more work than the farmer could do alone but not enough 

 to justify his employing a year-round farm hand; and in the corn belt, 

 where thrifty farmers expected about 90 per cent of their land to be tillable, 

 the corn rows were likely to be too short. 16 



Farming was definitely a capitalistic affair and required a heavy in- 

 vestment. The size of the investment depended mainly upon the price of 

 land, which varied from place to place and from time to time. A typical 

 northwestern farm, according to one estimate, in 1910 would have repre- 

 sented an investment of $12,000. Of this sum about $1,400 would have 

 been in buildings, $350 in machinery, and $1,400 in livestock the rest, of 

 course, in land. 17 Not every farm, by any means, was wholly free from 

 mortgage, while in many cases chattel loans and store bills added ma- 



15. Paul S. Taylor, "The American Hired Man: His Rise and Decline," U. S. 

 Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Land Policy Review, VI (Spring, 1943), pp. 3-17. 



16. Wallaces' Farmer, XXXIX (March 27, 1914), p. 540. 



17. Wilcox, "Northwestern Radicalism," p. 23. 



