Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America
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Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780299250737 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wisconsin Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2011 |
| Series: | Studies in American Thought and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 290 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Dona Brown is associate professor of history at the University of Vermont and author of Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century.
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Back to the Land
The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern AmericaBy Dona Brown
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin SystemAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-25074-4
Introduction
For many of us today, the phrase "going back to the land" brings to mind a vision of the 1960s and 1970s: of yurts and teepees and domes, of communes in New Mexico or Vermont. "Got to get back to the land, and set my soul free," proclaimed Joni Mitchell's Woodstock anthem. But although the eruption of creative energy that has come to be called simply "the sixties" looms large in collective memory, the back-to-the-landers of that era were just a small part of a much larger story. Americans have been dreaming of going back to the land for a hundred years or more. At the very moment when the population of the United States was turning decisively urban, some people were already beginning to calculate what they were losing. From that time on, the back-to-the-land impulse would be an enduring feature of American life, fading in and out of view, but never completely disappearing. At key historical moments, it would return in force. This book explores how some Americans at those key moments turned away from the promise of the city and looked back toward the land.The story begins long before the Summer of Love. As early as the late nineteenth century, books with back-to-the-land themes were appearing sporadically; at the beginning of the twentieth, the trickle became a flood. The writers responsible for this outpouring came from a wide variety of ideological backgrounds: they were anarchists, socialists, and progressives; promoters of the arts and crafts, the "simple life," or the single tax. Yet they were responding to a common set of pressing social concerns. The immediate trigger was a series of financial crises: a panic in 1893 had brought on a severe depression that lasted years. A short period of recovery was interrupted by another panic in 1907. Bolton Hall, a key figure in this first back-to-the-land generation, spoke for many back-to-the-land reformers when he urged city dwellers to find some way to protect themselves from these cyclical crashes, panics, and depressions. Only the "green earth," Hall wrote, could provide a "sure refuge from blue envelopes [we call them pink slips now], black Fridays, and red ruin."
In the background of these recurring economic crises were other longstanding problems. Most visible, of course, were the mushrooming industrial cities and the social disequilibrium they generated: the slums, the labor struggles, the workshops filled with immigrants arriving daily from the most unfamiliar parts of Europe. Along with those Europeans, moreover, an unprecedented number of native-born rural Americans were flooding into the same cities, leaving the refuge of the "green earth" behind. They too were part of the problem. Often bringing with them the education and skills to command a white-collar job, these native-born migrants were mostly one step ahead of recent European arrivals. Nevertheless, they, too, were vulnerable to the boom-bust cycle.
Few leaders of the movement were so naïve as to believe that "going back to the land" would provide a definitive solution to the problems generated by the historic forces at work in industrial America. Most believed that real change would depend on a fundamental realignment of power: socialist revolution, perhaps, or the adoption of the single tax, or perhaps just tinkering with the existing structure by trust busting, securing the vote for women, and passing child labor laws. Bolton Hall, for one, predicted that things would get worse before they got better: "Day by day the cost of living advances[;] ... week by week more wealth passes away from the wage-earners to the wage-getters; month by month monopoly of the necessities of life draws closer." Hall, a single-tax reformer, believed there could be no real public solution "short of the abolition of special privilege." In the meantime, though, returning to the land might offer a private remedy. Back-to-the-land advocates called it "one way out."
Some reformers thought of it chiefly as a "way out" for the poorest city dwellers. They aimed to move working people, and especially recent immigrants, out of the crowded slums and onto self-supporting farms, to perform the kind of social engineering that would make "adequate farmers" out of "young city Hebrews" or "outcast Irish Roman Catholic street boys," as Lyman Beecher Stowe put it in the progressive Outlook magazine. This wing of the back-to-the-land movement included both native-born progressives like Stowe and leaders of immigrant communities like Joseph Krauskopf, head of Philadelphia's most advanced Reform Jewish congregation. These reformers founded agricultural schools, arranged for the distribution of tiny garden plots on vacant city lots, and helped to organize large-scale colonies in remote areas.
More often, however, this first generation of back-to-the-land enthusiasts aimed their advocacy elsewhere: at that very large pool of recent migrants who had come not from Russian shtetls or Italian villages but from American hinterland towns. The writers who targeted this audience were influenced by their reading of Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, and Henry George. Mostly, though, they shared a broad commitment to the homegrown, non-Marxist, radical tradition historians have termed "producerism." They envisioned a return to the land as a means of preserving artisanal skill, personal autonomy, and household self-sufficiency in the face of a rising tide of mechanization, monopoly, and consumerism.
They targeted workers in the middle ranks for good reasons. In the early years of the twentieth century such workers were feeling the full impact of the rapid transformation of their shops and offices. Rural Americans who migrated to cities found work in settings that were changing as quickly as the factories and sweatshops that employed many European immigrants. Big businesses were squeezing out small-scale independent proprietors everywhere, opening up a host of low-wage white-collar positions just in time for the new arrivals to enter them. The evidence suggests that back-to-the-land ideas found the most support among the rapidly growing ranks of clerical workers, sales workers, and high-status (but poorly paid) professionals, along with the skilled crafts workers who occupied the jobs just the other side of the blue-collar/white-collar divide. Like those at the bottom of the job hierarchy, such "middling" workers might consider a return to the land because they hoped it would guarantee them basic food and shelter. But they were also motivated by "producerist" values. Some distrusted the new consumer temptations they and their children faced in the cities. Others feared a loss of autonomy, sensing that the power of giant corporations was rendering them increasingly dependent and helpless, making them "cogs in a wheel" that turned relentlessly and without their consent. Most advocates of a return to the land for these "middling" workers did not advise them to take up commercial farming on a large scale but to acquire a few acres outside the city, where they could reduce their expenses by growing their own food.
Ebb and Flood
The first back-to-the-land movement peaked during the years just before World War I. (Each of the first three chapters of this book explores that first movement from a different angle.) After the war, it faded from public view. As Bolton Hall acknowledged in 1926, in the new political climate, all radical and progressive causes were forced to become "less conspicuous." They did become less conspicuous, but they did not disappear. In southern California, for example, the back-to-the-land idea moved onto new ground, losing some of its associations with radical social agitation as commercial real estate developers joined back-to-the-land promoters to foster a common landscape of "little lands." (Chapter 4 explores this transformation.)
Bolton Hall predicted in 1926 that the radicals would reemerge when "winter comes to booming 'prosperity'"—and he was right, of course. Economic "winter" arrived in the 1930s in the form of the Great Depression, creating many new opportunities for back-to-the-landers. Like other progressive reformers who found themselves propelled into positions of power by the mobilization of the New Deal, progressive back-to-the-landers were handed a chance to put their plans into practice during the thirties, this time with more credibility than ever before and with federal funds. The projects they implemented were the culmination of struggles begun a generation earlier, designed to address social problems that had been on the lists of progressives for years: slum tenements, farm tenancy, and the assimilation of immigrants. (The story of these projects is told in chapter 5.)
New Deal programs marked the culmination of the progressive back-to-the-land vision in another way, too. Although it may seem natural today to assume that the idea of going back to the land was rooted in nostalgia, many early back-to-the-landers would have found that notion absurd. They were fond of arguing that their movement led not "back" but "forward" to the land—"Forward to better things than man has ever known in the past." Future-oriented, often technocratic, they were convinced that the forces of history were on their side. New technologies, they believed, were luring people irresistibly to the suburbs and making household self-sufficiency easier. One 1916 magazine article laid out the promise in its title: "Electricity Will Do the Drudgery in Densely-Peopled Garden Cities."
Many New Dealers shared this faith in a rural future made easier by technological advances. Opponents of their back-to-the-land projects accused them of nostalgia: one socialist critic dismissed the projects as "little modern Arcadias." But to supporters, the plan to move factories and their employees from deteriorating city centers to cleaner, less crowded rural areas seemed not retrograde but preeminently scientific and modern. This was the position endorsed by Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, who dressed it in fittingly modernist architectural forms in the prototype of Broadacre City that he set out in 1932. Reformers with this attitude typically rejected as too romantic the very phrase "back to the land." Ralph Borsodi used the term "homestead" in his 1929 This Ugly Civilization, and New Deal advocates coined the phrase "subsistence homestead" for their projects.
By the time the New Deal and the Second World War were over, this progressive wing of the back-to-the-land movement had played its last hand. Postwar liberals would still attempt to ensure security, independence, and autonomy for citizens—but they would use Social Security programs, worker's compensation, and a full employment economy, not self-sufficient homesteads. Government analysts Russell Lord and Paul Johnstone delivered the consensus judgment of New Deal experts when they concluded in their 1942 study of subsistence homesteads that Americans did not really want to live in Arcadian simplicity or even to become pioneering "homesteaders." They wanted more cash and more consumer goods: "Good housing with earth to dig in, a chance to garden, elbow room, a wholesome and beautiful place in which to rear children—such things are good and widely desired. But they do not function as a substitute for an adequate cash income and security of employment."
Other back-to-the-landers—those with a more "producerist" sensibility—traveled in a different direction. (Chapter 6 explores their story.) Increasingly wary of the power of the federal government as well as of the pervasive control of monopoly capital, they found allies among those who were rediscovering American regional identity as a counterweight to the centralizing tendencies of both government and business. Among those allies were the Southern Agrarians, whose 1930 manifesto I'll Take My Stand opened the Depression-era debate by linking regional distinctiveness with the survival of the self-sufficient farm. This wing of the back-to-the-land movement turned against an uncritical faith in progress. The editors of the decentralist magazine Free America, for example, condemned the policies of Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, who maintained in 1939 that "decommercializing" agriculture would be a "backward step." The editors argued that it was precisely the continued adherence to "backward" self-sufficiency that had kept some farmers solvent while others had been forced off their land. "Mightn't this wholesale misery"—dispossessed tenants, farm bankruptcies, even the Dust Bowl—"have been averted by decommercialized, more self-sufficient agriculture?" They concluded defiantly: "We prefer the 'backward' method."
This wing of the movement—decentralist, regionalist, sometimes nostalgic—did not disappear after World War II. Its ideas were kept alive through the 1940s and 1950s by small groups of pacifists and other marginalized dissidents. Borsodi's School of Living continued to publish a decentralist journal, and up in Vermont, a small group of radicals settled around Pikes Falls, where Helen and Scott Nearing lived until 1950. Even in the wake of the postwar economic boom—even after New Deal and Great Society programs had created a very different type of "social security" for many Americans—the old dreams did not completely disappear.
In the 1970s, a new generation of back-to-the-landers once again embraced the old vision of self-sufficiency (chapter 7's subject). But some elements of the vision were changing once again. In this generation, the nostalgia could be unabashed. In 1979, John Shuttleworth, the founder of Mother Earth News, offered his own childhood memories of the 1930s as a model for what he wanted his pioneering back-to-the-land magazine to accomplish. In those days, Shuttle-worth recalled, "people still controlled their food supplies and their housing and their transportation and their work and their entertainment and all the other aspects of their lives on a very direct and a very personal basis." They were "free men and women" whom government and corporations "left alone."
This passage, with its homage to family and community independence, was characteristic of Shuttleworth's increasing identification with 1930s-style decentralism. But Shuttleworth also added something entirely new to that inherited vision. In the second issue of Mother Earth News in 1970, he invoked the old motive for a return to the land—"This magazine is about ... giving people back their lives"—alongside a new one: "stopping the rape of the planet." In adopting an environmentalist perspective, Shuttleworth was typical of his generation of back-to-the-landers, who had a profound sense of the vulnerability of the natural world and of the planet itself—"Mother Earth." In the 1910s, back-to-the-landers had feared nationwide economic crisis: "black Friday and red ruin," to reprise Bolton Hall's phrase. Those who came of age during the Depression faced that "black Friday" and were prepared for worse: chaos, violence, the end of capitalism or of democracy. In the 1970s, back-to-the-landers added entirely new concerns to the old list: pollution, scarcity, and an overcrowded planet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Back to the Land by Dona Brown Copyright © 2011 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: The First American Back-to-the-Land Movement
1. The Back-to-the-Land Project
2. Adventures in Contentment: Some Back-to-the-Land Writers and Their Readers
3. Who Wants a Farm?
4. From Little Lands to Suburban Farms
Coda: Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City
Part 2: Returning to Back to the Land
5. Subsistence Homesteads: The New Deal Goes Back to the Land
Coda: Ralph Borsodi Rejects the New Deal
6. "I'll Take My Stand" (in Vermont): Decentralizing the Back-to-the-Land Movement
Coda: The Nearings Invent Their Own Vermont
7. Back to the Garden: The 1970s
Epilogue: Home, Land, Security
Notes
Index