Enemies in the Field 341 



And something to look at, out the window, besides endless 

 cornfields. 



The factories called the farmers' sons. Young men who had 

 been born on the land gave up the sky above their heads to 

 stand in one spot for eight hours, five and a half days a week, 

 and make one carefully regulated motion over and over again. 

 When a siren blew, they filed out to return to homes squeezed 

 shoulder to shoulder along a shadeless street. And to suppers 

 out of cans, heated up on gas stoves, by wives who knew all 

 about Mary Pickford and nothing at all about salting pork 

 or putting down eggs. Life was so much easier for them than 

 it had been for their parents or grandparents, who had bought 

 the acres from the government or from the railroads, that they 

 should have been happy. But they weren't. For one thing, 

 this mechanized existence gave them no opportunity to make 

 use of the adaptability which is the most valuable part of the 

 American heritage. Through a number of generations on the 

 American soil this hereditary characteristic was in process of 

 development in the race of pioneers. On the farms, as on the 

 frontier, opportunities for its expression were constant. Sud- 

 denly, within a single generation, the need for this quality was 

 cut down. The push-button era gave a man with a genius for 

 making shift no outlet for his gift. "The exercise of the 

 adaptive function," to quote the author of Man the Unknown, 

 "appears to be indispensable to the optimum development 

 of man." A life laid out by efficiency and industrial engineers, 

 with no droughts or blizzards in it, is a sorry sort of existence 

 for sod-busters' sons. 



The booming of guns over Belgium started the tide of mi- 

 gration in America back to the farms. Farming which paid 

 dividends became a desirable occupation. Men raising food 

 were exempted from war service. Under the stimulus of war 

 and world markets for farm produce, men plowed up aban- 

 doned fields which had been left to the Canadian thistle, but- 

 terfly weed and the wild rabbits. Lands which had been turned 



