Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture

by William Conlogue

Overview

In 1860 farmers accounted for 60 percent of the American workforce; in 1910, 30.5 percent; by 1994, there were too few to warrant a separate census category. The changes wrought by the decline of family farming and the rise of industrial agribusiness typically have been viewed through historical, economic, and political lenses. But as William Conlogue demonstrates, some of the most vital and incisive debates on the subject have occurred in a site that is perhaps less obvious—literature.

Conlogue refutes the critical tendency to treat farm-centered texts as pastorals, arguing that such an approach overlooks the diverse ways these works explore human relationships to the land. His readings of works by Willa Cather, Ruth Comfort Mitchell, John Steinbeck, Luis Valdez, Ernest Gaines, Jane Smiley, Wendell Berry, and others reveal that, through agricultural narratives, authors have addressed such wide-ranging subjects as the impact of technology on people and land, changing gender roles, environmental destruction, and the exploitation of migrant workers. In short, Conlogue offers fresh perspectives on how writers confront issues whose site is the farm but whose impact reaches every corner of American society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807849941
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	01/21/2002
Series:	Studies in Rural Culture
Edition description:	1
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

William Conlogue is assistant professor of English at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Read an Excerpt

Agriculture No Longer Counts

In a Milestone of Sorts, U.S. to Drop Farm Resident Census In a symbol of a massive national transformation, the federal government . . . is dropping its long-standing survey of farm residents, a striking reminder that the family farm occupies a diminished place on the American landscape. —Barbara Vobejda, Washington Post, 9 October 1993

The numbers are as staggering as they are familiar: in 1860 farmers accounted for 60 percent of the American labor force; in 1910, 30.5 percent; and by 1990, 2.3 percent (Fite, American Farmers8; Howard 33). Now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, there are too few to count. And as farmers have disappeared, so has good farmland. Between 1982 and 1992 the United States lost nearly two million hectares of cropland, an area larger than New Jersey (Gardner 6). According to the American Farmland Trust, three thousand acres of farmland disappear to urban sprawl each day (Fact Sheet). Worldwatch observers point out that 87 percent of U.S. vegetables and 86 percent of its fruit are grown in areas of rapid urban growth (Gardner 16). Meanwhile, farm herbicides contaminate the drinking water of fourteen million Americans (Lee A3), animal confinement systems pollute hundreds of rivers and streams ("EPA"; "Why the Fish"; "Rural Opposition"), and food poisoning is on the rise as more and more food is recalled by food processors ("Hamburger"). In the 1980s, while several million Americans living in poverty were malnourished, cropland lay idle, farms were sold, and distraught farmers killed bankers, neighbors, and themselves (Lamar; Ristau 16). In the 1990s mad-cow disease entered our vocabulary, along with biotechnology, bovine growth hormone, and Olestra. Archer-Daniels-Midland, the self-proclaimed "supermarket to the world," pled guilty to price-fixing and was fined $100 million (Eichenwald A1). In 1999 black farmers won a class-action racial discrimination case they brought against the U.S. Department of Agriculture ("Judge Approves"). Whereas only a few years ago farmers could see their land with their own eyes, today they use satellite global positioning systems (Feder, "For Amber" D4). American agriculture is high-tech, big business, complex—and fragile.

Is small-scale family farming the best farming? Or is industrial agribusiness? The debate has raged in the United States since the early twentieth century; its historical, economic, and political aspects have been investigated again and again. Strangely, no one has ever fully explored the literary response, an odd circumstance since literature is the place where the debate is most fully alive and where the arguments are most clearly framed. The key questions are: How do American writers understand the debate? How have they seen agriculture implicated in issues of race, gender, class, and the environment? What habits of mind do they explore—and use—to write about farming? What rhetorical and literary means do they employ to describe farming and its accelerating disappearance? This book explores answers to these questions.[1]

My analysis of a wide range of farm-centered texts illustrates that writers have been documenting America's "massive national transformation" all along. As a body of thought, these works investigate with unflinching directness how farming still feeds and reflects its cultural contexts even as it passes from the national landscape; nostalgia and pastoral assumptions find less room in writers' depictions of farm realities than they do in critics' comments about those depictions. Because the dominant urban society tends to view rural areas as pastoral retreats or as country backwaters, literary scholars assume that writers explore farming by imagining or reworking the agrarian myth, with its self-sufficient family farmer or his country cousin, the preindustrial commercial farmer. I argue that this is simply not the case. I contend that writers articulate political and social justice positions on an urban-defined agriculture whose central figure is the twentieth-century progressive farmer, the man or woman who farms according to an industrial model. In doing so, writers refute pastoral assumptions about rural life that obscure social upheavals in what many Americans too often believe is an unchanging countryside—upheavals that are national in their repercussions.

Why study key cultural issues from the perspective of the farm text? To define the debates, one must study them, literally, from the ground up. Literature is shaped by, and in turn shapes, the culture within which it evolves. Writers lay bare the language people use to perceive an otherwise chaotic reality; the best writers heighten our awareness of the metaphors we use to understand that reality and the tropes and figures we use to organize it into something we can communicate to others. Agriculture is a physical organization of the same reality—it bounds, arranges, and systematically transforms nature into something we can eat, wear, or otherwise utilize. Both are lived—and enlivening—practices that satisfy our most basic hungers. About knowing and defining the world, both do work in the world, and how each goes about its work tells us much about our soul. Just as different cultures evolve different sign systems to facilitate communication, so those same cultures create different farm systems to produce and distribute human sustenance. And, for good or ill, just as English is threatening to dominate world conversation, so American industrial agribusiness is coming to dominate world food production.

Writers aware of industrial agriculture's hegemony make connections among language, history, and farming. Jane Smiley, for example, offers this epigraph in A Thousand Acres(1991): "The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other. We were marked by the seasonal body of earth, by the terrible migrations of people, by the swift turn of a century, verging on change never before experienced on this greening planet" (from LeSueur 39). This cyclical imagery introduces a novel—modeled on King Lear—that probes "the loop of poison" in a farm family defined by a history of class and gender discrimination, indiscriminate violence, and incest (370). This family's story, Smiley argues, is America's story.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Bonanza!: Origins of the New Agriculture

2 Challenging the Agrarian Myth: Women's Visibility in the New Agriculture

3 Disciplining the Farmer: Class and Agriculture in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Of Human Kindness (1940)

4 Racism and Industrial Farming: Actos (1965) and A Gathering of Old Men (1983)

5 From A Thousand Acres (1991) to "The Farm" (1998)

Postscript: Fixing Fence

Notes

Works Cited

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Provides a lively witness to the debate in American letters about the relative advantages and strengths of the family farm and agribusiness. Conlogue's postscript, in which he narrates his own experience of this struggle, is alone worth the price.—Choice



Challenges the prevailing tendency in literary criticism to view American farming through . . . a 'pastoral prism.' . . . Important and throught-provoking.—American Studies



In Working the Garden, William Conlogue provides readers with an exciting interdisciplinary study of farming literature. Artfully meshing literary analysis with historical, economic, and political considerations, he depicts how the changing fate of American farming has been related, affected, and evaluated in literary texts by male and female, black and white writers. Conlogue persuasively demonstrates how such literature documents the costs to American culture of the diminishment and denigration of the family farm and direct work with the land.—Patrick D. Murphy, Indiana University of Pennsylvania



Conlogue explores American literature's long engagement with agricultural issues, defining new ways of thinking about farming and writing. He demonstrates that American writers have been documenting the United States' massive agricultural transformation all along, not with nostalgia but with an eye toward how best to use 'the garden,' machines and all.—Frieda Knobloch, University of Wyoming

Editorial Reviews

In "Working the Garden", William Conlogue provides readers with an exciting interdisciplinary study of farming literature. (Patrick D. Murphy, Indiana University of Pennsylvania)

In "Working the Garden," William Conlogue provides readers with an exciting interdisciplinary study of farming literature. (Patrick D. Murphy, Indiana University of Pennsylvania)

Provides a lively witness to the debate in American letters about the relative advantages and strengths of the family farm and agribusiness. Conlogue's postscript, in which he narrates his own experience of this struggle, is alone worth the price. ("Choice")

Conlogue explores American literature's long engagement with agricultural issues, defining new ways of thinking about farming and writing. (Frieda Knobloch, University of Wyoming)

From the Publisher

Provides a lively witness to the debate in American letters about the relative advantages and strengths of the family farm and agribusiness. Conlogue's postscript, in which he narrates his own experience of this struggle, is alone worth the price.

Choice