248 Singing Valleys 



were rigorously controlled. But on the subject of "dear old 

 Alma Mater" they could let themselves go. They were as 

 jealous of every one of her funny, old-fashioned eccentricities 

 as Cromwell was of his wart. 



Ultimately, however, the demand for realism was pressed 

 too hard by the student bodies to be denied. Student strikes 

 demanded a more flexible elective system, and a voice in uni- 

 versity affairs. Even Harvard has partially succumbed to the 

 ideals of cornfed culture. 



To Benjamin Franklin belongs the honor of founding the 

 first society devoted to the study of agriculture. That was 

 thirty years before the Revolution. In the two decades after 

 the struggle, similar societies sprang up in the new states. 

 Men like John Jay, Robert Livingston and Elkanah Watson, 

 the builder of the Erie Canal, recognized that the true founda- 

 tion of the nation's wealth and security was the farm. So New 

 York had its Society for Promoting Agriculture, Arts and 

 Manufactures, and at the meetings discussed such ideas as 

 "Raising Crops of Corn from Street Manure" and "The Ad- 

 visability of Turning Loose Alpine Chamois in our Moun- 

 tains." 



In the rapidly developing agricultural region west of the 

 Ohio, farmers were too busy, and lived too far apart to attend 

 meetings. When two or three of them chanced to meet at the 

 grist mill or at the wharf from which they shipped their crops 

 by boat, they swapped experiences, horses, mules or a handful 

 of seed corn. They were much too occupied with the struggle 

 of growing up with the country to take stock of how they 

 grew. The social unit was the individual family, not the com- 

 munity. Life centered about the single hearth. 



The settlers on the corn belt farms had left villages and 

 towns in the eastern states or in Europe to undergo the experi- 

 ence of isolation on the frontier. That experience had an effect 

 upon men and women from Connecticut and the Genesee 

 Valley who went to the Black Wilderness and the Illinois 



