Senator STEVENSON. Since June, the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor has been asking questions about rural Americans-small farmers and farmworkers-and the land on which they live.

Our inquiry has brought us face to face with a vast upheaval in rural American-upheaval the more remarkable because it is, for the most part, unseen and unheard by most Americans.

Even those who have noticed it have not fully understood it. Often, in speaking of life in rural America we resort to statistics-and the figures sometimes disguise as much as they reveal. They tell us, for example, that Americans in great numbers have been leaving the farms and moving to the cities. But the numbers do not capture the hidden meaning of the rural migration: ruined hopes, deserted homes-a dying way of life.

The American dream, whatever else it may mean, has always had something to do with free men tilling their own soil: prosperous, independent citizens in control of their own lives, enjoying a full and fair return for their hard work.

The dream goes a long way back. Thomas Jefferson was its most eloquent champion. But it is still very much a part of our image of ourselves. Most of us still believe, or want to believe, that a man of modest means can survive and prosper by his own toil on land he calls his own.

There are some these days who consider that version of the American dream quaint, if not obsolete like the buggy whip or the potbellied stove. They call themselves "realists." They are devoted to progress and efficiency. They advance a new sort of ideal for rural America which emphasizes "bigness" and "economies of scale." They do not mourn the passing of the family farm and the small town. They tell us that today the earliest version of the American dream is little more than a nostalgic fantasy.

I am not so sure. I am not ready to abandon that old dream until we study the alternatives—until we examine the new way of rural life admired by these so-called realists.

If reality must mean bankruptcy and frustration for the small farmer and farmworker, then what price reality?

If "progress" in rural America means hunger, disease and malnutrition, poor medical care and low educational standards, bad housing and decaying communities, then what price "progress"?

If "efficiency" means that we must have a permanent underclass of migrant workers, economically depressed and dispossessed, then what price "efficiency"?

If "economies of scale" mean that our cities must bear the pressure of rural outmigration, with its burden of welfare payments, unemployment, and social tension, then we can rightly ask if "reality" is worth what it is costing us.

We are concerned, in these hearings, about the human story which lies behind the statistics of rural change.

Since World War II, the number of farms in America has declined from 5.9 million to 2.9 million. Fewer and fewer people—or businesses- -own more and more land.

In California, for example, 3.7 million acres of farmland are now owned by 45 corporate farms. One corporation, Tenneco, controls more than a million acres in California, and leases another 700,000 acres.

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Nearly half the agricultural land in that State is owned by a tiny fraction of the population.

More than half the land area of the State of Maine, I am told-52 percent is owned by about 12 corporations. And 80 percent of Maine's land area, by one estimate, is held by absentee owners.

In 1969, the largest 40,000 farms in America, less than 2 percent of the total number, accounted for more than one-third of all farm sales. In 1960, only 1 percent of Florida's citrus lands were held by large farming-canning corporations. Now fully 20 percent of those lands are in such ownership.

Farmer Jones and Farmer Smith, those durable figures in American folklore-and American reality—are being displaced, all over America, by newcomers to the farm with names like Tenneco, Gulf & Western, Goodyear, Monsanto, Union Carbide, Kaiser, Boeing, and Dow Chemical, to name a few.

Meanwhile, one and a half million small farmers in America and a million migrant and seasonal farmworkers live in poverty.

In the face of figures like these, I think that it is important that we ask some hard questions:

What is the real meaning of this vast change? Are we promoting, in the name of efficiency and progress, the disappearance of the independent farmer-the decline of rural life?

What is the meaning, in human terms, of a radical new pattern of land ownership? Are large corporate owners enhancing the quality of rural life, or ignoring it in a headlong quest for profits? Is rural America owned, in short, by farmers or by fastbuck artists?

Is the U.S. Department of Agriculture living up to its self-declared "moral and legal responsibility to farmers and farmworkers"? Or is it, through indifference, or design, or soulless "realism," abetting the destruction of the family farm-and of farm families?

Is public policy benefiting the public? Or do farm subsidies, tax breaks, wage laws, land reclamation projects, and agricultural research work inure to the special advantage of the biggest and richest farmers only?

If that is the sum total of U.S. farm policy, we must face the fact that we are not helping farmers we are subsidizing Simon Legree. Beyond these questions lie questions about the kind of America we are building:

Will it consist of teeming, troubled cities on the one hand—and a wasted rural landscape on the other?

Will a citizen in the America we are building be able to find a decent, independent life in a small town or on his own farmland? Or will he be a nameless worker in a vast food-processing combine, managed by a corporate owner?

Will rural America be dominated by its own citizens or by absentees who care greatly about profits, and only vaguely about the quality of rural schools, rural hospitals, and rural life?

Will the goal of public policy be a decent standard of living for all Americans or simply a higher level of profits for some?

Not too many years ago, we were a largely agricultural nation. The experience of rural Americans was the experience of a majority.

A generation ago, when economic disaster struck, John Steinbeck was there to sketch the devastation of the rural poor in unforgettable

detail. Walker Evans took his camera down the back roads of America and fixed in the American mind his stark gray images of empty houses, deserted farms, and rusting plows.

Now we live in cities. When we leave them, we race to our destinations in airplanes or on superhighways. What is happening in rural America, much of it, happens out of our sight and hearing. Rural Americans, no longer a majority, have lost voices which once spoke for them.

But the fate of America is still bound up intimately with their fate. The plight of our cities arises almost directly from their plight. All of us have a responsibility to concern ourselves with the questions which are facing them.

Our purpose is to find a national policy whose effect is not simply "efficiency," or "progress," or "economy of scale," but a decent life for all rural Americans.

In pursuit of such a policy, we are asking questions:

What is happening in rural America? Why is it happening? Who is responsible?

To begin with, we must ask who owns rural America-and so far in these hearings, it appears, no one in America knows.

Senator HUGHES. Mr. Chairman, I simply would like to compliment the chairman on an excellent statement this morning. The analysis of what appears to be the problem in rural America and our hopes for it is excellent. I certainly would like to be associated with it in the record.

Senator STEVENSON. Thank you very much, Senator. I am greatly encouraged and fortified by your interest, your hard work on this subcommittee. I am grateful for it. Thank you for your kind words.

Our next witness is Prof. Paul Wallace Gates of the University of Kansas.

Professor Gates was formerly a professor of history at Cornell University. He is familiar with the extent to which land grant colleges, in particular the Land Grant College of Cornell, are concerned about many of the questions which confront us.

He has served as chief consultant to a congressionally authorized Interdepartmental Committee of the Public Land Law Review Commission. He served on the staff of the Hoover Commission, on the staff of the Justice Department's Land Division, on the staff of the Bureau of Reclamation and Irrigation of the Interior Department. He has served as a professor in Wisconsin and California within the past 3 years.

He is familiar with land ownership patterns and their effects in those States.

Professor Gates, we are grateful to you for joining us this morning. STATEMENT OF DR. PAUL WALLACE GATES, VISITING PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS, LAWRENCE, KANS.

Mr. GATES. Thank you, Senator Stevenson. I think I should add to that I am a born New Englander, raised and studied in New England, have devoted my teaching experience largely to New York State, upstate New York I should say, but my research interests have been in the West, in the public land area of the West. I have devoted an amount of time, equal I suspect, to 5 years at least, in research in the

States of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and California.

I do not pose as an agricultural economist, and I would like to make it clear that I am a historian, and I will deal with the historical background of the problem rather than with the present issues. I am not able to comment on those present issues in the way that the agricultural economist or the rural sociologist can do.

With that as a brief introduction, I would like to proceed to read my paper, Mr. Stevenson.

One thing that has impressed me about the attitude of the young people toward our institutions is that they are not concerned merely with America's great capacity to produce in both the agricultural and industrial sectors. What they consider more important is the social costs of the methods we are using, the costs to our resources and to our environment. And we who are interested in the Nation's agricultural policy should also be concerned with the effect of those policies upon the most precious thing, our human resources.

At one time an ideal was held before the American people of making a nation of independent freeholders, and that was our attraction for people in other lands. Surely in a nation possessing such a large public domain this ideal would have seemed capable of accomplishment. However, financial problems initially necessitated disposing of the public lands to produce revenue for the Government.

Gradually this policy was modified in a more liberal direction until 1862 when the Homestead law was adopted. Under this liberalized land system hundreds of thousands of migrants from the older declining areas of the East and from peasant stock in Northern Europe rushed to the West to take advantage of the free lands, many having little realization of the hardships they would have to undergo before they could gain ownership of their tracts.

The results were spectacular. In a century 26 new commonwealths were created out of the public lands of the United States, in addition to three territories, which were shortly to be admitted. By 1900, 2,404,000 farms had been created outside the cotton South, which I have excluded because of the statistical problems relating to the plantation economy and the later sharecrop method of farming. Of this number, 30 percent were tenant operated.

Jefferson's ideal of a nation of small owners had not been completely achieved but surely the figures show that the public land system had worked fairly well in that direction. The Homestead Act marked a high point in the liberalization of the land system. Later measures that were planned to adapt the free land policy to the dryer portions of the Great Plains accomplished their purpose to some extent but were so carelessly drafted that they contributed even more to land accumulation by cattle, lumbering and speculative interests.

A few reformers, some of the populist leaders, Henry George, and other critics of the time, saw evidence of four pathological weaknesses in American society: (1) the rise of tenancy, which the Bureau of the Census first became sufficiently aware of in 1880 to include in its data collection, (2) the growth of farm mortgages (the data on which was first to attract attention of the census takers in 1890), (3) the increasing evidence of land accumulation in the hands of corporations

and men of capital, though no census data then or later was to be available, and (4) the alarming movement of farmers' sons to cities.

Henry George brought some of these issues to public attention in his "Our Land and Land Policy in 1869," and in more details in his "Progress and Poverty." George had a wide following abroad and among many intellectuals but not among the politicans.

No President has been more sensitive to these and other social issues and to public reaction to them than Theodore Roosevelt. He became convinced that farm problems were not being satisfactorily met by the scientific work of the colleges of agriculture, the extension services, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and decided to call upon a most distinguished group of leaders to study them.

Rural America's most eloquent spokesman, Liberty Hyde Bailey, dean of New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University, was asked to head the Country Life Commission and with him were appointed Gifford Pinchot, who was doing so much to alert people to the need for forest and water conservation, Walter Page, an eminent editor and publicist, and Kenyon Butterfield of Wesleyan University. They were asked to study the problems of farm folk and to report to the President the issues most needing attention.

After extensive hearings held all over the country, at no expense to the Government, the Commission presented a down-to-earth report, thoroughly practical and homey, and well worth reading today. The problems to which it called attention, in vain, have since grown worse.

The Commission was appointed at a time when farming was just reaching one of its most prosperous periods but the drift from the farm to the city, particularly by the young, was worrying many authorities and to it the Commission turned its attention.

Better education for farm children with emphasis upon rural life, more attention to rural health problems, were recommended but Bailey also in a masterly way drew attention to the existence of the fundamental underlying causes for the relatively meager income farm people received. These were land speculation, monopolistic control of water and power sites, excessive wastage of and concentrated control of a large portion of the standing timber of the country, and wasteful cutting practices and restraints on trade which substantially increased the returns to capital and costs to consumers.

Not until 1889 were any limitations placed on the amount of public lands individuals could acquire and even thereafter the restrictions were not particularly effective. During the course of the previous century a very considerable portion of the public lands had been first acquired for speculation by land companies, eastern capitalists, and groups largely operating in the timber and cattle industries. Few States had been more affected by this large-scale speculation in public lands than Michigan from which Bailey had come.

The strictures against this speculation and the unfortunate effects of it which are included in the report of the Commission might well have been taken verbatim from Michigan papers; diffusion of population and thin development resulting in the slow extension of roads, schools, churches, and other social institutions, slow introduction of transportation improvements so necessary for the farmers to market their surpluses, the heavier debts resulting from the higher prices