11. North Pacific Hay, Pasture, and Forest Region.
It is useless to deny that out of these different regions with the different products come varying patterns of rural life. Economic backgrounds, habits of life, and cul tural routine form significant contrasts.' The Kansas wheat farmer uses casual labor and tills broad and pro ductive acres with the most modern of farm machinery. The hog and beef producer of the Corn Belt, slave to his plow, drill, and cultivator until the corn is laid by, rushed for a spell at harvest, spends most of his year in pretty leisurely fashion, watching his live stock turn corn and roughage into good sound meat. The wheat farmer of the Great Plains, the apple producer of the Northwest, the orange grower, and the raisin producer each spends one period of the year in throbbing effort followed by long stretches with nothing special to do. The poultry man, the dairyman and butter fat producer, faced with a steady round of daily duties, fewer lulls, and fewer periods of intensity, has a life and a diet both full and varied with something new for almost every day in the year. The truck farmer of the South Atlantic coast, a hand and knee farmer on small patches, keeps in close touch with a sophisticated urban market and suffers no lack of vitamins in his diet. The southern cotton tenant, with his one mule and single plow, living on salt pork and corn bread, has cotton to plant, chop, and pick, and nothing to do until next year. Provided due considera tion is given to America's common institutions and her ubiquitous industrial culture with its standardized prod ucts, it may be helpful to regard these natural regions in terms of the culture areas of the anthropologist.
Each of these regions has its own resources and eco nomic capacities based on its products and partly determined, as Professor Turner has said, when the geo logical foundations were laid down. On topography and agricultural production have been erected industrial su perstructures which have created other economic interests in fabricated goods. It is these rival economic interests that have resulted in sectionalism. A section may be de fined as a region seeking to realize economic interests in political action. It is regionalism in politics that has given content to the designation of the American Congress as "an assembly of geographic envoys." It is Professor Turner again who has given this view its brilliant expres sion: "We in America are in reality a federation of sec tions rather than states. State sovereignity was never influential except as a constitutional shield of the section. In political matters the states . . . act in sections and are responsible to the respective interests and ideals of these sections. Party policy and congressional legislation emerge from a process of sectional contests and sectional bargainings. . . . Legislation is the result of sectional adjustments to meet national needs." 12 The tariff for the
industrial North Atlantic states and the agricultural re lief demanded by the Farmers' Block of the Corn, Wheat, and Cotton Belts offer an obvious contemporary illus tration.
It has been suggested that the reason for America's cultural unity is the absence of national and racial differ ences. Again this is an overstatement. Outside cities, there exist racial groups definitely related to regions and to production of particular types of crops. Variety is added to American economic and cultural life by occa sional settlements of Italians, French, and Germans en gaged in vine and truck culture, Mexican casuals in Texas, Japanese and Chinese farmers in California, and Poles in the Connecticut Valley. The place of the Penn sylvania Dutch and of the Scandinavians and Teutons in the wheat culture of the Central Plains is more im portant. New York Yankees, Chester County Quakers, Georgia Crackers, though of the same racial stock have developed differently. As Ezekiel points out each group has "its own standards evolved out of custom, tradition, and environment." 13 The Census of 1920 revealed interesting data on the economic levels of the different regions." Over one-third of the value of farm property in the United States and two-fifths of the value of the farm land were found in the Corn Belt. The Corn Belt also contained one-fourth of the value of live stock in the country, and about one-half of the value of farm implements and machinery was re ported from the Corn Belt and the Hay and Pasture Region. The value of farm buildings was found to be high est in southern Pennsylvania, next in the Corn Belt, the Spring Wheat Area, and the Hay and Dairying Region. It was lowest in the Cotton Belt. Tractors were located chiefly in the Corn Belt, Spring Wheat Area, and South Pacific Region. Over one-third of the automobiles on farms were found in the Corn Belt, and the rural tele phones were concentrated in the Corn Belt and the Hay and Dairying Region. The lowest ratios for automobiles and telephones were found in the Cotton Belt. Running water and electric lighting systems in farm homes were found mostly in the Hay and Dairying regions of New England and the South Pacific Area. When urban cen ters are included it is shown that the North Atlantic Coast states, with less than a third of the population, paid over one-half of the income and profit taxes ap propriated for the nation as a whole.' A study of read ing habits of the population shows that New England, New York, and New Jersey have distinct preeminence. The draft records reveal the fact that the best physical fitness was found in North Central and Mountain states, and the lowest in the industrial Northeast. A mapping of the men and women of eminence as listed by Who's Who shows that over half of those included live in the northeast Atlantic states, although a little less than half were from that section.