.864 
The RURAL. NEW-YORKER 
June 7, 1924 
Hope Farm Notes 
In New York City there is an unwrit¬ 
ten law about wearing straw hats. A 
farmer knows somewhat by instinct when 
a piece of land is fit for plowing. His 
laws are written by Nature—the bud or 
leaf, the color of the grass, the condition 
of the grain, are like a printed language 
to the good farmer. He can usually look 
at the clouds and discount the weather 
prophets on local conditions. It is dif¬ 
ferent in the city, and New York is sup¬ 
posed to represent the abode of the most 
citified “eit” in America. Habits and 
customs are largely man-made and many. 
Unwritten laws are more compelling and 
more generally observed than the laws 
made by the legislature or city govern¬ 
ment. What is known as mob psychology 
enters into the government of New York, 
and it is curious to observe how it works. 
At many ball games, great meetings, prize 
fights or demonstrations, there would be 
riot and murder ofttimes if it were not for 
the unwritten laws of mob psychology. 
People somehow feel that they must act 
in a certain way, “play the game,” and 
observe certain rules which others will 
observe. The people of great cities seem 
to be governed more through their aimise- 
ments and their class or mob habits than 
by any written laws. A banker puts his 
money and securities behind a glass win¬ 
dow or partition or a thin wall of wood. 
There are only a few guards, yet usually 
the property is secure. During the day 
several hundred people come and go to 
the bank. Any half dozen of them could, 
if they cared to combine, take eledge 
hammers and break through the flimsy 
defense and get at the property. Cen¬ 
turies ago that property would not have 
been safe unless it had been hidden be¬ 
hind stone walls and iron bars. Now it 
is safe behind windows of glass, largely 
because it is the personal habit of the 
public to respect property rights. For 
we can readily see that these same peo¬ 
ple who pass by these protecting glass 
windows, within a few feet of the money, 
with never a thought of taking it, might, 
within an hour, change to a mob and 
smash down these frail defenses. His¬ 
tory is full of cases which prove this. 
On one day plain people of ordinary 
common sense go about their business 
soberly, impelled by habits or unwritten 
laws which take all the initiative out of 
them and make them just small parts of 
a great social machine. The next day 
some thought of real or fancied wrong 
will break up the habit and give each 
man some crude and clumsy idea of per¬ 
sonality which will turn him into a sav¬ 
age. Therein lies one of the great dan¬ 
gers of modern city life as I see it. It is 
substituting factory-made character for 
the real old-fashioned thing. The aver¬ 
age city-bred and trained man boasts that 
he is a free American—but he isn't. In 
truth he is more of a trained slave—not 
an individual, but merely part of a mob, 
with a curious veneer civilization has 
spread over him. This veneer is made 
for the most part of unwritten laws, 
plastered on by a combination of selfish¬ 
ness and a false idea that a “cit” is al¬ 
ways superior to a farmer—that the so- 
called conveniences and luxuries of town 
life must be superior to country air and 
sunshine and a chance to put one’s feet 
onto a piece of land and say “This is 
mine!” I think a man must have fol¬ 
lowed a very winding path down from the 
heights of civilization when rather than 
claim that he owns a piece of the earth 
he takes pride in saying “This piece of 
pavement belongs to my landlord.” There 
is no other industrial class in the world 
which would have stood the “deflation” 
and financial injustice which has been 
meted out to the farmer without starting 
a revolution. Country people have car¬ 
ried themselves through it because they 
are less subject to unwritten laws which 
rarely get in deeper than the skin. With 
them written law is a part of their being. 
If they ever get to be such creatures of 
mob habit as city people are now we shall 
have to find a new name for the republic. 
* * * * * 
But I started out to speak of straw 
hats. One could write a book on the way 
the straw hat has influenced American 
history. When I was a boy the greater 
part of these hats (the cheaper grades, 
at least) were made in the country by 
farmers and their families. I know that 
I spent a good share of my spai*e time 
braiding rye straw. It was a five-strand 
braid. We were taught to keep counting 
“under two and over three” as our fin¬ 
gers worked the straw into long braids. 
My aunt had a set of “forms” made from 
plaster of Paris, supposed to represent 
the sizes of various well shaped heads. 
She twined these braids of straw aroxmd 
these forms and sewed them together un¬ 
til she had—a hat! Buyers and dealers 
came around and bought these hats—to 
sell again. These were the blessed days 
w T hen farmers received far more of the 
consumer's dollar than they do now. ex¬ 
cept in cases where one has a roadside 
max-ket or some special delivery. Those 
of us who raised and prepared the straw 
and then braided and sewed it into hats 
got 55 to 60 cents of the final retail price. 
We made a good hat. Rain could not 
melt it, and wind could not tear it apart. 
It did not carry any fashionable bx-and, 
but it come out of an honest farm work¬ 
shop. I shall ever think that the nation 
has lost something in character and pow¬ 
er when we changed from the farm shop 
to the sweat shop. The change came. 
Impox-ted straw and imported labor beat 
us. This work of hat making was trans¬ 
ferred from the farm to the town. There 
was a tremendous rush of immigrants from 
Europe after the Civil War, and work 
must be provided for them. Many were 
crowded into our Eastern’ factory cities ; 
others went West to open up farms. And 
both cut into our job as New England 
farmers—cut into it with* a deep wound. 
The foreigners who remained in the fac¬ 
tory towns took from the country people 
the business of making hats, clothing, 
tools, shoes, shirts, and even bread. In 
my comparatively short life I have seen 
most of these enterprises transferred 
from farm houses and country neighbor¬ 
hoods to crowded cities. As a result the 
brightest and best of the farm young peo¬ 
ple chased that farmer labor income into 
town or tried to keep up the farm at a 
disadvantage. And not only that, but 
many of these old-time farmers put their 
very labor income at wox*k against them. 
The 25 cents of the dollar which they ob¬ 
tained by making the hat did not remain 
in the community. Part of it was in¬ 
vested in mill stocks. The capital thus 
acquired di'ew more and more of the 
bright children away from the fai-ms. 
More of this labor income from the hat 
making was invested in Western farm 
mortgages. These farmers let their own 
farms run down through lack of capital 
in order that farms in Iowa or Kansas 
might prosper, so that the meat and 
bread they produced might feed New 
England and leave her practically de¬ 
fenceless in time of famine or food short¬ 
age. 
* * -Jf mc * 
All this comes back to l’oost in my 
mind when this year, for the first time 
that I can remember, Nature steps in 
and bi*eaks up one unwritten law of the 
great city. It is understood that on May 
15 every man who pretends to be some¬ 
body must put on a straw hat 1 The 
store windows suddenly appear full of 
straws, the papers print great page ad¬ 
vertisements, and all the forces of social 
propaganda are set in motion to compel 
men to live up to this straw-framed un¬ 
written law. There will be 50 times as 
much thought and discussion given to 
this social scarecrow of straw as was 
given to the bonus argument or the tax 
bill discussion. There are not many 
country men who know from experience 
the foi’ce of such a social habit. I once 
saw two respectable men appear on the 
street about June 1 wearing black hate. 
The crowd first ridiculed them. The men 
resented that, and the good-natured crowd 
grew angry and became something of a 
mob. They hustled those two men, tore 
off their black hats and trampled them in 
the dirt. These victims had their assail¬ 
ants arrested, and the justice laughed 
them out of court. He practically told 
them that they ought to know better than 
to challenge a fixed social habit. When 
the Romans wear straw 7 hats, hang your 
black hat on the shelf or stay at home. 
And how do such unwritten laws w 7 ork 
into society? They come as the result 
of propaganda. This one comes from the 
people who have straw hats for sale. The 
designer in Paris, and all the big and lit¬ 
tle men who handle and sell straw hats 
had some little responsibility In the mob 
violence of the crowd which destroyed 
those two black hats! That is the way 
changes are made in oxir habits of food, 
clothing, and labor or loafing. Probably 
one trouble with us when we made hats 
in the old farm kitchen was that..we tried 
too hard to save evei’y cent we made so 
as to turn it over to those who could use 
it to injure our own business. Perhaps 
if we had spent a little of it for advertis¬ 
ing our hats and cultivating the psychol¬ 
ogy of our customers we could have held 
our business longei 7 . But I have learned 
one strange thing this year. There is 
only one thing stronger than an unwrit¬ 
ten city law, and that is Nature. This 
Spring has been so cold and wet that 
May 15 came and went without straw. 
Even up to June 1 the majority of folks 
w 7 ore their old hats! The army of people 
who live by making or selling or clean¬ 
ing hats are in a panic, for without stx-aw 
they can only make a gold brick in the 
hat business. And this incident has given 
xxie renewed courage. Nature is the mas¬ 
ter. These unwritten laws run for a 
time, and then Nature dips her finger 
into the wind, the froet, the rain or the 
drought, and writes a veto message which 
cannot be overridden by man. The farm¬ 
er is the man closest to Nature. He has 
long been the victim of these unwritten 
laws—some of them practiced right at 
home. Sending his money away to other 
interests is one of them. Some day he 
will wake up and write a veto message 
on the earth that will be heard from 
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