592 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



city. On the other hand, it is to be hoped that the city may 

 more effectively teach the country the secrets of socialization, 

 so that the social efficiency of urban life may be reproduced in 

 the country. Rural people need to discover how city people 

 work together in compactly organized business corporations; 

 how they adjust, by many mutual concessions, their complicated 

 civic relations, how they coordinate sympathy and human needs, 

 and administer a network of social-service agencies, with greater 

 and greater efficiency through perfected organization. 



Why This Lack of Socialization? I hasten to avoid the suspi- 

 cion of lack of sympathy with country life by saying that I 

 believe this lack of socialization and cooperation in the country 

 to be due less to selfishness than to lack of social opportunity 

 and practice. In fact, these unsocial tendencies are really the 

 result of overdeveloped rural strength of character. The pioneer 

 life of the American farmers has developed heroic virtues in 

 their personality which have made them as a class the most self- 

 reliant in history. This self-reliance has been overdeveloped. 

 It has led to self-aggrandizement, jealousy of personal rights, 

 slowness to accept advice, proneness to lawsuits over property, 

 thrifty frugality to a fault, indifference to public opinion, dis- 

 regard of the opinions of experts. Doing so much of their 

 thinking alone, they do not easily yield to argument. Working 

 with the soil and with things more than with persons, they do 

 not easily respond to leadership. They are likely to view 

 strangers with suspicion because they do not know them; and 

 for the opposite reason often they do not trust their neighbors 

 nor cooperate with them because they do know them. Self-re- 

 liance overstressed leads them to distrust any initiative but their 

 own. They refuse to recognize superiority in others of their 

 own class. Positively, the resulting failure in cooperation ex- 

 plains the jealousies and feuds all too common in rural neighbor- 

 hoods ; and, negatively, it accounts for the lack of social organi- 

 zation and effective leadership. Again let me remind you of my 

 caveat, that I am not speaking of the more progressive rural 

 communities, but of rural life in general. I believ.e that these 

 generalizations are less true in the West, but most true in the 

 South and the older sections of the North and East, outside of 

 urban tracts. 



