My Drift into Rural Sociology.

This article focuses on rural sociology. Professor H.C. Taylor, University of Wisconsin, referred to the fact that little was known in a systematic way about the play of social forces in farm life, and virtually nothing as to the metes and bounds of rural communities. Dr. Taylor's conversations about agriculture and country life brought into author's thinking an organic set of problems, quite new to him, which lighted up and set in order the prevailing manifoldness of farm life which he knew, a routine of tasks which, while it had brought to him much delight, had always been saturated with mysterious troubles. Thereupon all his previous experience with farm life, with farm people, with villages, towns and cities was repolarized. Meaning and value came into my rather motley impressions and ideas of farming. The U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt's Country Life Commission had for several months been stirring the press with its hearings in state after state, giving rise to a spontaneous movement for a new type of civilization among farm and village people.