696 
<P>t RURAL NEW-YORKER 
April 19, 1919 
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WOMAN AND HOME 
Dll 
ih’SVftl'SVfrSY 
The Gulf Between City and Country 
Bridge It with Printers’ Ink 
Forever Eating. —All those city peo¬ 
ple seem to do is make money and eat, 
then eat and make more money. And 
how they do eat! It never impressed me 
so. much as a few days ago I was in New 
York to see several shiploads of soldiers 
come back from fighting the battles of 
freedom. Quite incidentally to the main 
object of my visit. I made some observa¬ 
tions on this eating business. It makes 
no difference what hour of day or night 
you wander through the streets of New 
York, you can tind eating places open, and 
doing business. Public eating places feed 
an amazing number. You’d wonder, 
sometimes, whether anybody ever ate at 
home. They're there in the morning for 
breakfast. Breakfast no sooner ends—• 
around 11 o’clock—than the early lunch¬ 
eon-goers commence to come in. These 
eating places that I mention are the 
“quick lunch,” “dairy lunch” variety, a 
development of recent years. I take no 
account of the restaurants and hotels, 
where Dives tickles his sated palate, and 
Dives’ women folks go to show off their 
clothes and jewels. These are outside my 
ken. 
Social Life in Restaurants. —It is 
the apex of bliss in New York to dine out.' 
If you can afford to put on evening 
clothes, ride in a taxicab to some “swell 
place” to dine, go to the theater, have “a 
bite of something” after theater—usually 
a pretty substantial and costly “some¬ 
thing”—and then, after the cabaret and 
the griddle cakes, your neighbor at table, 
I say, will complain about the prices. 
“Farmers are to blame for it all. 
They're getting rich. They went and 
raised the price of milk, and now look 
what I've got to pay. A glass of milk 
costs me 10 cents! Ten cents, sir! We 
never used to pay more than five, sir!” 
A Prejudiced View. —You mingle 
among average New Yorkers, and you 
will find they have hostile views about 
farmers. You will hear such extreme 
views expressed as that “farmers are a 
bunch of Bolshevists. Wait till they get 
things their own way, and they’ll show 
you what hogs they are !” You hear weird 
solutions suggested for the shortage of 
farm labor. One, man told me: “1 tell 
you the only thing to do is to import a 
million Chinese coolies; they’re tin* best 
help in the world; work lone hours for 
small pay and live on a handful of rice.” 
Or this: “The food shortage has got to be 
solved by making farming a penal opera¬ 
tion. Take the prisoners from our jails 
and penitentiaries, and set them to work 
Farm Bureau man. waiting for him. • It 
was a very respectable audience for that 
section. So we sat around the door on 
the sunny side of the barn, talking it over 
before the Farm Bureau man got out his 
saws and things for an orchard-pruning 
demonstration, and we got to talking 
about prices for milk, and they didn’t see 
how they were going to keep it up with 
the price of feed where it is. 
The Dairymen’s Meeting. —It wasn't 
more than a week after this that I found 
myself jammed into the Utica armory, 
which was filled almost to bursting with 
members of the Dairymen’s League, as¬ 
sembled to hear about that selling cor¬ 
poration they were forming. Unity of 
purpose and enthusiasm prevailed to a 
greater extent than ever I had observed 
at similar meetings, and I think I have 
attended every meeting of this sort tin* 
League has held in Utica. Yet these 
solid, respectable, apparently honest men, 
two or three thousand of them, from nine 
States, who ask that they lie permitted to 
sell collectively their products on a “cost 
the farmer is a sharper, trying to gouge 
the city man. Every rise in the cost of 
food—no matter what tin* cause—is laid 
to tin* farmer. The city press is charged 
with fostering this prejudice. Instead of 
passing, it. seems to be getting more acute. 
Now these folks ought to get- together. 
The farmer is necessary to the city man. 
and the city man is necessary to the 
farmer. They ought to come to an under¬ 
standing of each other. 
Understanding Needed.— This lack of 
understanding, this widespread and pro¬ 
found city ignorance about farming, is re¬ 
flected in letters that appear in The It. 
N.-Y. In tin* single issue of March 22 I 
find five communications or articles which 
touch on the ignorance which manifests 
itself in the cities. A lady in Brooklyn 
writes that she gained her knowledge of 
the city milk situation from The It. N.-Y. 
that “the city press is certainly in collu¬ 
sion with the milk trust.” A man writes 
from Arrowhead Farm that “we are in 
the midst of a revolution here at home, a 
social, bloodless revolution : the farmer is 
revolting against tin* practice of being 
robbed.” Charles B. Wing, in his first- 
page article, writes of city ignorance of 
farm conditions, and says the city press 
takes advantage of if. “I will say with 
practically no qualification.” lie writes, 
“that the city press of the nation is un¬ 
qualified opposed to anything that is going 
to benefit the farmer.” The editorial on 
“One of the greatest dangers which cou- 
1 Form Bureau Man mid 11 in Audience at an Outdoor )leetinfi 
things, home in another taxi, jour para¬ 
dise is reached. If you can afford all this, 
it’s fine. If you can't afford it. you go as 
far as you can on a bluff, aping the man¬ 
ners of those who can afford it. It makes 
no difference what you do, the "eats are 
an essential part of it. Everybody has to 
eat, whether they are the denizens of the 
thickly populated East Side or the cliff 
dwellers who pay enormous rentals for 
palatial apartments on Riverside Drive. 
It is eat. eat. eat. in New York . 1 lie 
amount of food that is consumed in a day 
is prodigous. Everybody eats. If you 
have an appointment with a business man 
he will ’phone you. "Meet me at lunch at 
the Giltmore.” or at “Silver’s, or some 
quick-lunch beanery—depending mi his 
rating in Bradstreets. If you go shopping 
you lunch at one of the enormous depart¬ 
ment stores. If you hold a reunion of the 
Sons of Cattaraugus County, you have a 
banquet at $5 to $10 a plate, including 
wine and music. 
A Great Business. —As might be ex¬ 
pected. this eating habit they have m New 
York has created an enormous business in 
providing, handling, selling, preparing and 
serving food. There you have ;>,000.000 
people to feed every day in the week, and 
rarely have more than a day or two days’ 
supply ahead. But. outside those who are 
directly interested in purveying food, it is 
amazing how dense is the ignorance that 
prevails about the origin of the foods they 
eat. 
Misleading Ideas. —The man who sits 
next you at one of these white-and-nickel- 
and-tile eating places, where white-clad 
girls serve you, and white-dad men make 
farming. Some of the States prisons have 
fine farms.” Of course, you don’t try to 
refute any of these ideas. You can’t tell 
a New Yorker anything. Things that 
transpire north of Harlem are out of the 
world for this most provincial of villages. 
Farming as a Business. —Then you 
get this—I only repeat things that were 
told me in a few days’ travel up and 
down Manhattan among almost all sorts 
of people, from soldiers to bankers—you 
get this: “The trouble with farmers is 
that they don't run their business along 
business lines. Now, farming is just a 
manufacturing business. It’s a simple 
thing—you put in so much labor and so 
much material, and you take out so much 
finished product. It’s just like a mill or 
any other manufacturing business.” Then, 
when you mildly suggest that the dairy¬ 
men of New York State have been form¬ 
ing a company to do things in this very 
way that lie mentions, •lie forgets it. and 
says. “That's just tin* way with the farm¬ 
ers—they want everything. They were¬ 
n’t satisfied with making us pay 14 cents 
for milk ; they make us pay IS and 20 ” 
A Farm Audience. —Less than a week 
after I was scrambling for a seat in one 
of those white-and-marble and-tile-and- 
nickel eating places, so spotlessly clean 
and shining all the time. I was sitting on 
the sunny side of a barn up in mid-New 
York. Inside the door lazy cattle were 
eating their silage. The warm sunshine 
of early Spring streamed in through tin* 
open barn door. There was a sea of mud 
and manure over which you had to make 
your precarious way, balancing yourself 
on a six-inch plank. There was a crowd 
of a dozen farmers, an “audience” for the 
plus” basis are “Bolshevists"—if you take 
New Yorkers’ word for it. 
The Gulf Between. —What 1 am get¬ 
ting at is this: There is a wide gulf 
fixed between the city and the country. 
There is a vast amount of misunderstand¬ 
ing, bred of ignorance. On tin* one hand, 
the farmer knows little practically of the 
intricacies of food distribution in the city; 
on the other hand, and worse, is the pro¬ 
found ignorance of tin* city man regarding 
the source of food. Time was when a suf¬ 
ficient number of city men were country- 
bred to appreciate the difficulties of pro¬ 
visioning such a multitude as assembles 
in New York. Time was when a big part 
of New York was not more tlmu one or 
two generations removed from an Ameri¬ 
can farm. Consider this: Within 20 
years New York has been tin* port of en¬ 
try for millions of foreigners who were 
bred under different conditions from ours, 
who, if they were tillers of the soil, were 
down-trodden peasants ; who. if they came 
from European cities, came from the poor, 
congested quarters of those cities They 
know nothing of American farm life. 
The Melting Dot. —This mass has 
been dumped into New York City A 
large percentage remained there. They 
and their children have been assimilated 
—partly—to American ways. At least, 
they know the ways of New York City. 
The second and third generations have 
made money, and have come into positions 
of more or less responsibility. They read 
the papers, they vote, they pay the taxes, 
they ear. they buy food. But the per¬ 
centage of New Yorkers who know any¬ 
thing about American farm conditions is 
growing smaller and smaller. To them 
fronts the farmer” goes on to tell how the 
consumer's dollar is being apportioned, a 
matter which the city press rarely dis¬ 
cusses with such frankness. 
Farm Brodaganda. —The fifth mention 
of publicity is contained in the proposal 
of the Onondaga County Beekeepers’ As¬ 
sociation to advertise. This is tin* most 
constructive bit of comment from the pro¬ 
ducer on the press that I have seen in a 
long time. It hits the nail on the head. 
Why allow city dealers alone to utilize 
the city press for the spread of their prop¬ 
aganda? Why do not farmers use print¬ 
er’s ink, too? You can print protests in 
farm papers rill doomsday, but they will 
miss the mark. The bulk of city readers 
never read farm papers; they don’t even 
know there are farm papers. Their Alpha 
and < )mcga i*- the daily paper, with its 
horrible "funnies.” it<- great headlines, its 
smears of red ink. its glaring scareheads, 
its cartoons, its editorials in large type 
and simple, understandable language, its 
sporting page, and it- theatrical page. It 
is the library, the Bible, the encyclopedia, 
the almanac, all rolled into one. 
Newspaper Readers. —I forgot to men¬ 
tion that among the things they do in 
New York, they read tin* papers. When 
you enter the subway in the morning you 
grab a paper from the news-stand and 
hold it before your eyes as you sway on 
tin* strap in the crowded car. Everybody 
has a paper—a paper of some sort. You 
'■an see the headlines—English. Yiddish, 
Syrian, Chinese. Italian. Hebrew. Greek. 
Polish—in the making of papers there is 
no end. Here is tin* way to reach these 
people who eat the food farmers raise. 
(Continued on page. 712) 
