American Prosperity

Norman Angell

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, May-June 1928]

NORMAN ANGELL has recently concluded an extensive tour of investigation into conditions in the United States and here are a few of the observations he makes as a result.

"If the visitor would leave the towns and go on to the farms particularly in the South and South-West, in the Dakotas, in the wheat belt he would find a difference of standard so great in degree from that of the cities as to make an entirely different kind of life. No longer an air of lavishness and prosperity, but an oppressive atmosphere of poverty and insolvency; of decrept and tumble-down houses, poor food, tramp's clothing, anxiety, debt, and hopelessness. And this is a third, perhaps more, of the Golden America."

He remarks: "The town-bred American, whom the ordinary European visitors meet, will deny the truth of the picture, and the denial will often be sincere. For already we have in the American cities a generation that has not known the soil, and knows next to nothing of the conditions which obtain on the farm. . . .

Mr. Angell says the ignorance of the average town-bred American of the vast gulf separating the American of the town and the America of the farm is amazing, and adds, the real struggle is between "the man on the land" and the industrial organization emanating from the cities.

"Virtually everything that the farmer had for sale had to be sold at a world (a Free Trade) price. But everything he had to buy, including things like freights as well as things like machinery, clothing and the rest, was bought at a highly-protected price. No industry in the world could, year in and year out, stand such one-sided treatment, and American farming has not stood it. . . .