REGION OF DISCONTENT 15 



There were two principal types of landlords. One was the retired farmer 

 who, at perhaps sixty years of age, gave up farming and moved to town. 

 Sometimes he rented to a son or son-in-law or nephew, and thus to a 

 prospective heir, but in most cases he counted on enough from rent to take 

 care of his needs. Thousands of these retired farmers had begun life as 

 farm hands and had then become tenants, then farm owners, and at last 

 retired farmers able to live on their rents and the interest on their savings. 

 Many of them continued to take an active interest frequently too active 

 an interest for the tenant's peace of mind in the farms they had left. 

 Retired farmers often found that they had underestimated the expense of 

 living in town and were inspired to drive new and harder bargains with 

 their tenants, while in their communities they became "stationary" citi- 

 zens, men who could be counted upon to vote consistently against better 

 schools or city improvements on the sole ground that anything that might 

 raise taxes was wrong. 21 



Another type of landlord was the investor, or as he was more likely to 

 be called, the speculator. Farm land in the Middle West had for many 

 years risen steadily in value and was thus considered by many investors 

 to be safer than any bond, mortgage, or security on the market. Counting 

 in the prospective rise in value of the farm, landownership seemed to 

 promise a higher rate of return than any comparable investment. Invest- 

 ment-minded landlords, unlike the retired farmer, might know nothing 

 whatever of farming, and some of them were totally unconscious of the 

 need of keeping up the fertility of the land they owned. The worst of 

 them seemed to "regard the farm as something like the old-fashioned 

 coupon bond, from which they can clip coupons twice a year on the partic- 

 ular day and date on which they are due, whether crops are good or bad." 22 



While some farms fell to landlord-investors through the foreclosure of 

 mortgages, there was another quite different cause of landlordism. Many 

 prosperous farmers, convinced that land values had reached too high a 

 figure, sold out their farms and moved north, west, or south to newer and 



21. Report of the Country Life Commission (60 Congress, 2 session, Senate Docu- 

 ment 705, serial 5408, Washington, 1909), p. 21. 



22. Wallaces' Farmer, XXXIV (January 8, 1909), p. 40. See also E. H. Thomson 

 and H. M. Dixon, A Farm-Management Survey of Three Representative Areas in 

 Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, U. S. Dept. Agri., Bulletin 41 (Washington, 1914). 



