"The Task for Conservatism":
Family Lessons From The New Agrarians*
By Allan C. Carlson*
* Adapted from a talk to The Fellows of The Russell Kirk Center, Mecosta, Michigan, September 24, 2000.
In this article, I will focus on my recent book, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in 20th-Century America. I call the group of writers under scrutiny here the "New Agrarians," largely to emphasize their deliberate grappling with the forces of modernity in the 20th century. This book is, at least by intent, more than an intellectual history. I wrote this inquiry, in part, as a book of lessons for potential 21st-century Agrarians. That is, I built my narrative around this question: what positive and negative lessons can be drawn from the 20th-century Agrarian experience?
Regarding the positive lessons, I will suggest nine:
(1) Successful modern agrarianism will be countercultural, even if it labors under the "conservative" banner. I refer here to the 1934 essay called, "The Task for Conservatism." Written by the popular historian Herbert Agar, it appeared in the remarkable, albeit short-lived journal, The American Review.1 Inspired by Agar’s immersion into the work of G.K. Chesterton while an editor at G.K.’s Weekly in the late 1920’s, this article stands as a model of "activist" or "radical" conservatism.
Agar wrote, let us remember, at the very worst point of the Great Depression: one-third of American workers unemployed; the nation littered with failed banks; stock certificates issued during the exuberant 1920’s rendered worthless. In reclaiming the label "conservative," Agar argued that it had been thoroughly twisted by what he called the "apostles of plutocracy" into the defense of economic "gamblers and promoters." As Agar wrote: "According to this [strange] view, Mark Hanna was a conservative." The author sought to reclaim the term by appealing to "another, and an older, America," a time when there was virtue in and a moral plan for the nation.
Central to this plan, Agar said, was "[t]he widest possible distribution of [productive] property." For Thomas Jefferson, this had meant a nation of self-sufficient farmers. For John Adams, this had meant "an interdependent community" of farmers and modest merchants, with government holding the balance. All of the American founders, Agar maintained, had held that "a wide diffusion of property...made for enterprise, for family responsibility, and in general for institutions that fit man’s nature and that gave a chance for a desirable life." Physical property, in short, was so important to the full and rich human life that everybody should have some.
America had lost its way, Agar continued. Under current economic conditions, the ownership of property fell into ever fewer hands: "The normal human temptation to sacrifice ideals for money" had grown, lifting "the rewards for a successful raid on society to dangerous heights." A culture of widely distributed property fell under attack by "the barbarism based on monopoly." The great banking houses and financial institutions had destroyed "an entrenched landed interest" in the South during the Civil War. In 1914, the same group determined that America no longer needed an agricultural surplus for export, and it set out to destroy the independent farmer as well.
Agar called for an effort–at once "radical" and "conservative"–to restore the Property State. This "redistribution" of ownership must become "the root of a real conservative policy for the United States." As he explained, the ownership of land, the machine shop, the small store, or a share of "some necessarily huge machine" needed to become again the normal thing, in order to set the necessary moral tone for society. Agar stressed the political nature of this attempt, for it was not in line with existing economic developments: "It must be produced artificially and then guarded by favorable legislation." All the same, it was necessary in order to rebuild a humane America, a compassionate America, one that would make "for stability in family and community life, for responsibility, [and] for enterprise."
(2) The second lesson from the New Agrarians is love of the planet: an ecological sensitivity. Liberty Hyde Bailey, named dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University nearly 100 years ago, first crafted most of the themes that would characterize 20th-century agrarian thought, and this environmental passion was at the core of his vision. His most provocative book appeared in 1916. Entitled The Holy Earth, it emphasized "the oneness of nature and the unity in living things," a process guided by The Great Patriarch, God the Father. As Bailey explained:
Verily, then, the earth is divine, because man did not make it. We are here, part in the creation. We cannot escape. We are under obligation to take part and do our best living with each other and with all creatures. We may not know the full plan, but that does not alter the relation.2
Every man, Bailey said, should know "in his heart...that there is goodness and wholeness in the rain, in the wind, the soil, the sea, the glory of sunrise in the trees, and in the sustenance that we derive from the planet."
So, the agrarian also begins as a true ecologist, aware of the inner-connectedness of our lives with the rest of Creation.
(3) The third lesson is the positive value of human fertility. Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman, founder of the discipline of "rural sociology" in the 1920’s, was the New Agrarian writer most committed to dismissing the gloom of Malthusian ideas. Instead of fretting about "overpopulation," Zimmerman celebrated high human fertility and an abundance of large families as signs of social health. In his book Family and Society, Zimmerman called "an absolutely stable or decreasing population... unthinkable for the survival of a nation."3 In his massive tome Family and Civilization, he stressed that hope for the future rested on "the making of familism and childbearing the primary social duties of the citizen."4 Zimmerman’s celebration of the small family farm rested on its biological vitality, writing, "These local family institutions feed the larger culture as the uplands feed the streams and the streams in turn the broader rivers of family life."5
(4) The fourth lesson from The New Agrarians is the virtue of self-sufficiency; the recognition that liberty rests on a family’s ability to meet its own basic needs. The New Agrarian economist Ralph Borsodi emphasized the need to ground one’s life outside large impersonal institutions such as corporation or state. All families, he said, should produce two-thirds of needed goods and services within their homes, workshops, loomrooms, gardens, and modest fields. The truly "free person" was not "merely the man who has the infinitesimal fraction of the political power represented by a vote." Rather, the free man was one "so independent" that he could "deal with all men and all institutions, even the state, on terms of equality." Only the self-sufficient household could support this true independence.6
(5) The fifth lesson is the bond we hold with ancestors and posterity. The Midwestern writer, Louis Bromfield of Ohio, emphasized the linkage of generations in his great agrarian novel, The Farm. Drawing on his own family history, Bromfield described the apogee of the family farm under the tutelage of his grandparents, here fictionalized as Maria and Old Jamie. During this time, the farm was a cornucopia. The breakfasts alone on weekend gatherings were magnificent: "sausages, waffles, and maple syrup from Jamie’s own maple-grove, fresh strawberries or peaches if it were summer...hot fresh rolls, and sometimes chicken and mashed potatoes, home-dried corn, and an array of jams and preserves...." Maria presided over the day as "a kind of priestess," watching happily as all her children and grandchildren consumed what she had herself grown and prepared.7
Later, when Bromfield himself resolved to return to the land and to build the farm again, he saw this as a way to restore the bond of generations: ties to those who went before, and to those to come. As he wrote in his splendid agrarian book, Pleasant Valley: "[I sought] a piece of land which I could love passionately, which I could spend the rest of my life in cultivating, cherishing and improving, which I might leave together, perhaps, with my own feeling for it, to my children who might in time leave it to their children."8
Our humanity, said the Agrarians, rested on this family chain-of-being and its rootedness in a place.
(6) The sixth lesson, taught with special energy by the ‘Southern–or Vanderbilt–Agrarians,’ is suspicion of the industrial mindset, where the modern agrarian would serve as watchdog over industrialism’s mindless sprawl. In their book, I’ll Take My Stand, the twelve Southerners accepted industrialism when it assured "the laborer of his perfect economic security" and protected labor as "one of the happy functions of human life." Yet in the early decades of the 20th century, they said the assumption behind machines had been that "labor is an evil," the new technological devices did not so much "emancipate" workers as "evict" them. They criticized modern advertising and modern salesmanship as "the great effort of a false economy of life to approve itself." The industrial mindset, they added, damaged art, manners, learning, and even romantic love. In an insightful turn of phrase, poet John Crowe Ransom emphasized that industrialism was a force "of almost miraculous cunning but no intelligence." It had to be controlled, he said, "or it will destroy the economy of the household."9
In short, the Southern Agrarians saw as one of their central tasks the defense of humane institutions–religion, home, art, family, the acts of learning–from the revolutionary force of industrial organization.
(7) The seventh lesson from the New Agrarians is the importance of local attachment and regional identity. In his essay "Still Rebels, Still Yankees," Donald Davidson showed how differences in key aspects of life–from way of thinking to daily behavior–continued to give a marvelous variety to America.10 In Herbert Agar’s splendid agrarian volume, Land of the Free, he lashes out at so-called "world cities" such as Chicago, London, and New York. With their cosmopolitanism, their skepticism, their falling birth rate, their lack of morals, and their imitative and decadent art, such cities were the sure signs of the end of a civilization, marked by "a hospitality to death."
Fortunately, he continued, America still had a healthy "native" culture, born–as in ages past–out of farming settlements. As Agar explained:
[T]here are signs of the conversion of the intellectual class in the Mississippi Valley to the idea that if America is to have a culture of her own the intellectuals had better stay at home and take part in that culture instead of streaming to New York and becoming good little copies of an alien civilization.
He had special praise for the regional cities of Nashville (home of the Southern Agrarians) and Indianapolis (home to novelist Booth Tarkington). He might have added Cedar Rapids, Iowa (home to artist Grant Wood, novelist Ruth Suckow, and poets Paul Engle and Jay Sigmund), and other cities of the regionalist revival of the 1930’s, which had also held on to their native-born writers and artists.
As a result of their secession from the world-city, there are now four or five country towns where the local life is richer, where American Culture is closer to defining itself.11
(8) The eighth New Agrarian lesson is the necessary role of religious faith as the source and protector of community. The Iowa-based Roman Catholic Priest Luigi Ligutti was the most effective New Agrarian advocate in the 1940’s and ’50’s, as leader of The National Catholic Rural Life Conference. He stressed how the ownership of land and other productive property and the control of technology for human ends were mandates from God. "This thesis is true," Ligutti concluded, because it "fulfills God’s intention in man’s creation, because it exhibits Christ’s love for mankind, and because it furnishes all of us with the assurance of a good life here on earth and a good life for eternity."
Ligutti emphasized the historic role of various churches in building rural communities in America, including "The Mormons in the West, the Mennonites in the Middle West, the Amanas in Iowa, the Lutherans in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Father Pierz in Stearns County (Minnesota)...and Father Tracy in Nebraska." In 1946, Monsignor Ligutti joined with 75 other religious leaders–Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish–in a statement declaring "God’s intention in creation" is to allow man to live in dignity and "to establish and maintain a family." Land was "God’s greatest material gift to mankind," and "The farm is the native habitat of the family." Indeed, the farm itself bound the true community together. As Ligutti framed the appropriate words for a devout Catholic farmer:
How can I, a farmer, grow in appreciation of my noble calling? It is not merely clods of inert soil I work with, but millions of God’s invisible creatures. It is not just a wheat shoot or a kernel I behold, but God’s rain, sunshine, blue sky, captured therein and held prisoner so that on the altar [Christ] himself may become a prisoner of love.12
(9) The ninth New Agrarian lesson is the unique power of marriage, a point made with special effect by the contemporary agrarian writer Wendell Berry. Proper marriage, the Kentuckian writes, is a sexual and economic unit; the sexual function without the economic function is ruinous, with "degenerate housewifery" and "degenerate husbandry" the result. When brought together, though, the consequence is beauty. Berry describes this in his poem, "The Country of Marriage":
Our bond is no little economy
based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours,
so much for so much of an expandable fund.
We don’t know what its limits are;
that puts it into the dark.
We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought!13
based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours,
so much for so much of an expandable fund.
We don’t know what its limits are;
that puts it into the dark.
We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought!13
Marriage, so understood, is an economy of joy. Berry’s fictional character, Mary Penn, describes how, with "a joyous ache," she knew that she "completed" her husband, as he "completed" her:
When had there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole? And sometimes they would be whole. The wholeness came upon them as a rush of light...so that she felt they must be shining in the dark.14
Marriage is, in fact, a "great power" able to transform not only individuals, but the world. Held in the grip of marriage, time flows over husband and wife "like swift water over stones," smoothing and shaping them to "fit together in the only way that [human] fragments can be rejoined."
The experience of the 20th-century Agrarians was not all positive; they also taught several lessons of a more negative sort.
The first negative lesson is this: resist the temptation to use government to pursue good ends. Many of the New Agrarian projects stumbled over an embrace of state power for purposes of social engineering. Liberty Hyde Bailey wanted to use the Extension Service to "engineer a new race of farmers." Louis Bromfield called for a great, state-guided Missouri Valley Authority to reconstruct the whole mid section of America. The Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley called for a new government program, giving every landless tenant 80 acres, a house, a barn, two mules, two cows, and $300. The state would then require subsistence farming, while prohibiting the sale of cash crops. Ransome wanted all farmers to face regular inspection by state authorities to insure these ends. Wendell Berry called for price, production, and consumption controls on all agricultural products, which would in practice require a command economy.
Yet, the only true rural communities that survived the great consolidation of government and economy in the 20th century were those who fiercely kept the bureaucrats at bay. A telling example here is the Old Order Amish. In one sense, they are America’s only true anti-statist, libertarian community. That is, they fiercely fought numerous state governments, with many of their leaders imprisoned along the way, but in the end won the right to educate their children in their own way. They sought and won exemption from all forms of Federal Social Security. They have refused to accept other forms of state welfare, relying on their own community for help in emergencies. The Amish have also refused most forms of farm subsidy and support payments. At the same time, they are eager participants in local market transactions and foes of government regulation. They have grown from a community of 5,000 in 1900, most located near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to 150,000 today, with colonies in over a dozen states.15
Contrast their survival and growth with that of the rest of rural America, whose numbers fell from 30 million in 1900 to only 4 million this year. These vanished millions were the families who submitted to state authorities, who took the advice of the government Extension agents, who entered the string of state programs designed "to save the family farm," whose children attended the government schools.
They are mostly gone now: rural ghosts. It is "The Plain People" who survive.
The second and related "negative" lesson is that only a religious faith that is otherworldly and separatist is strong enough to sustain rural community within the existing economic order. Liberty Hyde Bailey complained bitterly about the growth of sectarian, fundamentalist, "Gospel-splitting" denominations in rural places. Ralph Borsodi condemned all devotion to otherworldly gods. Louis Bromfield mocked all orthodoxies and said that the "best farmers" would seldom be in churches. The Southern Agrarians were embarrassed by the Baptists and fundamentalists in their midst. Herbert Agar saw the rural Protestant churches as symbols of failure. Even Wendell Berry condemned "otherworldly" Christianity as a cause of rural degredation.
In fact, the rural virtues would survive the 20th century only among the universally condemned Anabaptist, fundamentalist, Pentacostal, and monastic communities. It appears that only a commitment to a radical "separation from the world" gives sufficient psychological or moral power to overcome the lures, appetites, and pressures of modern life.
Indeed, this truth came home to me during a June 1998 visit to a successful new agrarian community in central Texas: Heritage Homesteads. They understood this lesson, or secret, and so have survived–indeed, have grown–while others of a more secular bent failed.
The third "negative" lesson derives from the Agrarians misplaced faith in new technology. Most forcefully advanced by Ralph Borosodi, the New Agrarians held that recent innovations–especially the internal combustion engine and electricity–worked in favor of a new decentralization and de-industrialization of life. They embraced the gadgets and innovations of modern technology–indeed they claimed to be on the technological cutting edge–while still holding to the themes of tradition, stability, and family.
In doing so, they forgot that the purpose of a tool or machine–every tool or machine–is to produce the same amount of product with less human labor, or, put another way, the substitution of capital for labor. Indeed, it would be the prized internal combustion engine placed in the small tractor that would displace 19 out of every 20 Midwestern farmers over the course of the 20th century. It would be cheap electricity that displaced most of the chores done by women and children around the farming homestead.
The only alternative is control of technology: the prohibition of certain innovations that threaten community values by group or religious elders or by the state itself. However, the New Agrarians refused to go down this path, holding to the illusion that technological advance would be their ally.
The fourth negative lesson is the unexpected power of home schooling as a tool to restore and renew families and subsistence communities. From Bailey and Zimmerman to Agar and Berry, the Agrarian imagination faltered on the question of education. While all understood that the weakness of families derived, in large part, from the prior surrender of key family functions, none saw the possibility of restoring home-based education as a first step toward family reconstruction. Nor did they see that this step would be bonded to other actions of self-sufficiency, ranging from home births and maternal nursing to home gardens and simple animal husbandry. Most of the agrarians called instead for curricular reforms in the existing schools. Even Ralph Borsodi, who successfully "home schooled" his own children in the 1920’s, failed to see its universal potential, calling instead for group education led by a new elite.
Today, we live in another time of exuberant prosperity, with the value of stock certificates once more soaring. We live in a time when Mark Hanna has again become a hero to many self-styled conservatives. We live in a time marked by a degraded, dehumanizing culture, a so-called "world culture," featuring at its core "a hospitality to sterility and death." Perhaps The Agrarian Mind in some form will have another opportunity on history’s stage, in the century that now dawns. If so, I hope that these lessons gained from the experience of the 20th-century New Agrarians will be taken to heart.
Endnotes
1 Herbert Agar, "The Task for Conservatism," American Review 3 (April 1934): 1-16.
2 Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth (Ithaca: New York State College of Agriculture, 1980 [Reprint of 1915 Edition]).
3 Carle C. Zimmerman, Family and Society: A Study of the Sociology of Reconstruction (New York: D. van Nostrand Company, 1935).
4 Carle C. Zimmerman, Family and Civilization (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1947).
5 Carle C. Zimmerman, "The Family Farm," Rural Sociology 15 (Sept. 1950): 211-219.
6 See: Ralph Borsodi, Flight from the City (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1933; 1935).
7 Louis Bromfield, The Farm (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1933).
8 Louis Bromfield, Pleasant Valley (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944).
9 I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1977 [1930]).
10 Donald Davidson, "Still Rebels, Still Yankees," American Review 2 (Nov. 1933): 58-72; 2 (Dec. 1933): 175-188.
11 Herbert Agar, Land of the Free (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935).
12 See: Luigi G. Ligutti and John C. Rawe, Rural Roads to Security: America’s Third Struggle for Freedom (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Co., 1940).
13 Wendell Berry, Collected Poems, 1957-1982 (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1984).
14 Wendell Berry, "A Jonquil for Mary Penn," Fidelity: Five Stories (New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992).
15 See: Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
