End of the Exodus

For three decades, they flocked to the cities from the land of cotton, the Great Plains, the corn belt and Appalachia. It was greater even than the great Western trek of the late 19th century. In 1940, 30.5 million Americans lived on farms. Only 10.5 million remain. Now the city-bound flow has slowed to a trickle. According to new data compiled by the Agriculture Department, the farm labor force (age 14 or older) has remained static during the past two years.

Sooner or later, the great migration had to taper off. After a quarter of a century, the revolution in agricultural techniques finally produced a kind of demographic equilibrium. One farmer now feeds and clothes 42 other people. His spread averages 377 acres, 30% larger than a decade ago. And this evolution has ensured his survival.

Urban life today is such that at least a third of the past decade's migrants in Chicago and other cities tell pollsters that they want to go home. Clearly, they cannot return until rural conditions improve. As Agriculture Secretary Clifford Hardin has proposed: "We must help create in rural America adequate job opportunities, adequate educational, library and other cultural facilities, adequate medical and dental services and all the other essentials of a good life."

Though the Nixon Administration has yet to formulate a program for rural America, some corporations have tried to encourage migration back to the country. For example, McDonnell Douglas Corp. has five plants in Tennessee. Initially, job seekers were local residents, but within a month applications were pouring in from former Tennesseans fed up with city life. The Daisy Manufacturing Co. moved lock, stock and gunbarrel from Michigan to Rogers, Ark.

Elsewhere, rural communities are trying to win back urban migrants, but as yet the demographers detect no significant wave of remigration. Nor will there be one until rural America, as Thomas Jefferson once described it, is once again conducive to "the multiplication of men susceptible of happiness, educated in the love of order, habituated to self-government, and valuing its blessings above all price."

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