Why agricultural history matters, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the farm

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted to this, and I offer you my apologies.  The end of the semester always brings about a flurry of activity and this semester was no exception, save for the fact that I had fewer exams than normal to grade.  I’m still working on my paper, and my summer job starts on Sunday at a local museum, so no glorious inactivity as there was last year at this time when I had to take foreign language classes in order to satisfy new departmental requirements.  But there are better things to right about than these random thoughts.

I’ve not spent a lot of time writing about things academic here, and as such I thought that I would get a jump back into the blogosphere by considering my chosen field and what it means for the understanding of American history as I see it.  Wow, I really didn’t mean to sound so pretentious, and no, it doesn’t come naturally.  Maybe I’m just nervous about laying something like this.

In my mind, you can not truly understand the nature of America’s history without understanding understanding the importance of the role that agriculture plays in it.  Until eighty years ago, the majority of Americans earned their living through farming and related support industries.  After the initial European settlement of the East coast failed to turn up the precious metals and gems they though awaited them, joint-stock companies turned to commercial production of agricultural goods in order to turn a profit.  We as a country have fought wars over the nature of agricultural labor.  Western migration was fueled not by those who sought to establish stores and industries but by those seeking land and the opportunity to farm that land as they saw fit.  Farms have supported soldiers through increased production and suffered when those soldiers marched and fought over those same fields while also providing the very same soldiers embroiled in combat.  Farms required towns for supplies and markets, and those towns grew into major cities because the population could rely on outlying farms for food rather than raising their own.  The industrial revolution could have never occurred without an equal revolution in farming that freed an “excess” population to run the mills and factories that became part of the international market revolution.  In short, agriculture has been intimately tied to every major development in our communal history.

This is not meant to be a bucolic view of a smiling American peasantry.  American agriculture has been equally marked by the isolation and sometimes deprived nature of rural domestic life.  All money and labor on the farm went to support the farm, often to the detriment of women and children.  Financial panics and depressions effected rural America often in a harder manner than they did the urban environment, and farmers, those often described as the pastoral and moral backbone of this country, rose time and again with weapons and anger to try and change their perceived wrongs.  It might correctly be said that the majority of violent upheavals throughout the history of this country, the threats that came close to bringing down the government, were started and fought by farmers.

Agricultural history is so much more than numbers and crops and tractors and cows.  Perhaps it might be best redefined as agrarian history, for all parts of the historical experience are equally valuable.  To understand all of these aspects is to truly understand the history of America.

Excuses, excuses

Please excuse my lack of posts here in the last week.  It’s the end of the semester and besides grading, I’m in the process of finishing up possibly one of the most painful projects I’ve ever undertaken, so nothing new here to muse upon.  I’ll be back in prime (?) form in a few days.

Steps to writing a paper

1. Procrastinate like mad.  Checking the mail, walking, etc. until the due date.

2. Check out your sources.

3. Glaze pottery you made two months ago.

4. Help friend going through exams decompress.

5.  Write a paragraph.

6. Nap.

7. Catch up on all your afternoon talk shows.

8. Nap again.

9. Scramble like hell to get something on paper.

10. Make stuff up as you go along (Hesiod’s use of new John Deere technology placed him squarely outside the window of the peasant world.)

11. Read blogs.

12. Write in your own blog.

13. Realize the paper is VERY late and hand in whatever you have before the semester ends.

Food Traditions and Traditional Foods

One thing I am intrigued by are food traditions and regional foods.  As a nation, we’ve forgotten the value of a good meal shared with family and friends, as well as those foods that are associated with region.  I love to cook and as such, I’m always on the lookout for farm cookbooks and cookbooks that purport to contain “traditional” recipes, and usually I’m disappointed.  Better Homes and Gardens and McDonald’s have gone a long way towards destroying any sense of these older ways.  My favorite recipes are the ones that I learned from my grandmother.  Chuck roast with potatoes and carrots (I still can’t get the carrots to carmelize the way she could), boiled supper, and chili.  Good meals, meals meant to be shared with people.  We now rush from place to place, cramming food into our gullets whenever we can and forgetting the value of slow.  Slow to raise, slow to cook, and slow to enjoy.

What brings today’s post up to the fore?  Tomorrow’s article in the New York Times accessible here.  Commodity agriculture and American rushing have taken regional foods and forced them to the breaking point.  Thank God that there are places like Seed Saver’s Exchange and agricultural history museums that keep these breeds and traditions alive.  So the next time that you think about what to plant in your garden or what you’re going to have for dinner, think about tradition and make something new that’s old again.

It’s 1919 all over again

Living in a flyover farm state, life and news is naturally tied to agriculture, and for reasons beyond research, so am I.  I’m the son of a nearly two-hundred year line of farmers, and so the soil is very much in blood.  Mix that with a knowledge of farm history, and everything going on today begins to sound very familiar.  Farmers find a new way to profit, and they put commodity crops in as far as the eye can see with no thought to the future.  Then the freight train causing the light at the end of the tunnel hits them right between the eyes.  Where’s this coming from?  Today’s Des Moines Register has an article here.

The Golden Age of agriculture, when farmers had purchasing parity with urban consumers due to higher prices, ran from about 1905-1910.  Prices began to subside until the rise of World War One.  With the onset of the war in Europe and the build up of the American armed forces on the edge of our involvement, farmers were told to grow as much as possible to support the war effort and to help feed our allies and the refugees of Europe.  Crop prices were so good that farmers bought more land, newer implements, and even luxury goods since the end was nowhere in sight.  America was truly meant to feed the world, and the War years proved it.  And then came the peace.

Hoover’s food administration bought goods for another year after the armistice in order to feed Europeans living in devastated areas, but within a year American stopped sending food subsidies, and since the war was over, Congress ended relief services for Europe.  Farms in France began to recover and produce food again; the end of American agriculture feeding the world was in sight.

Within six months of the end of relief efforts, farm prices began to crash.  Corn in Iowa topped out at more than $2.50 per bushel, only to crash down to less than fifty cents per bushel due to the market glut.  Wheat crashed even worse.  Farmers who overextended themselves on credit lost everything because they thought the good times would never end.  Corn was so cheap that it was easier to burn it in a cook stove than to take it to market.  Hogs were shot and dumped into ditches to rot rather than try to sell them.

It’s the same story that we so often repeat in the agrarian history of this land.  Prices go up and we overextend, only to pay the human price later.  Farms are lost, men looked to as the backbone of Jefferson’s perfected world commit suicide in the face of total loss, and another generation moves into the city hoping to recover financially.  Forty years after we entered the agricultural depression of the 1920s, Earl Butz told farmers across America to plant fence row to fence row and made food an economic weapon; we’d feed the world and end communism.  We paid the price in the 1980s, after we raped the nations ecology and created the greatest glut of commodities that this country ever knew.  With ethanol and the unreasoned rush to biofuels, we’re doing it again.  And now we face food riots around the world due to the high cost of basic food items like rice and corn.  These are just the beginnings of the new problem.  Biofuels from food seems to be the answer now, and with it comes over production.  What will happen when food is no longer the answer?  What will happen when the next great answer comes along and makes corn ethanol no longer viable?  When that day comes, farms will get real cheap real fast.  The next crash is right around the corner, and we as a country have yet to learn our lesson from 1919.

PQS

It’s well enough to start a blog and attempt to open communication with other historians and grad students out there in Cyberspaceland, but I think there’s something I need to lay out on the table other than my research that I’ve been dealing with.  I have one hell of a strong case of PQS: the Post-Quals Slump.  I took my exams in the fall and passed them, and ever since I just can’t find a way to get motivated.  TV has been sucking my soul out through my eyes, especially unintelligent TV like Maury Povich and the Discovery Channel show about hauntings, complete with bad acting.  I’ve been reading for fun and ignoring everything else.  Gawd I wish that I could shake this, because I still have a project to work on from last semester, as well as dissertation synopsis to hand in by finals week.  Has anyone else out there dealt with this?  Do I embrace my PQS and find ways to work when I’m motivated, or do I fight like hell and get back on an artificial track?

Random Commercialism for the Day

I love reading Thoreau.  Wallking, Walden, Thoreau’s nature writing and thoughts on society speak volumes to me.  When I’m lucky enough to find the time to read something for “fun,” the odds on favorite is HDT.  So I was cruising the internets two weeks ago and found this.  Nothing celebrates the man who searched for the deepest core of the meaning of existence than selling stuff with his face on it.  To be fair, the money goes to support the Thoreau Society and the preservation efforts they undertake, but there’s still something a bit wonky about merchandising on America’s most famous hermit.  So I bought two t-shirts and a bumper sticker.

The one thing that still makes me wonder about HDT is the fact that he went to the woods to live deliberately, but never spent more than one or two nights away from his friends in Concord.  Visitors often came to the cabin on a regular basis, and every few days at the minimum he went back into town to dine with them in return.  At first it saddened me, to think that this great recluse, our ascetic transcendentalist, wasn’t so ascetic.  Yet who among us can truly say that they would gladly shun the society of man for two years and more?  Does it effect the profundity of HDT’s work?  Not in my mind.  His words still ring out to me like truth.

Was he that far off the mark?

Today was that point in the teaching of the second half of American history where the ugly 1970s popped up, and as so many do, the person I TA for stopped to make fun of Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech. Things are bad, and it’s your fault, America. I even chimed in a little bit. Heck, it’s always fun to point a little fun at peanuts Carter.

But something made me curious about it all. I had heard so much about the speech in the past, yet I had never taken the time to listen to or watch the actual speech. Oh Blessed Internet, keeper of all things good and or mundane, it held the answer for me; instead of jumping immediately to the task at hand for the afternoon, I searched until I found Said Speech. I’m now deep into the third time watching and reading it, and I find myself personally agreeing with what the President said back in the summer after my fourth birthday. The speech is here.

Carter is speaking to an America on the verge of self-destruction in some ways, and you can tell by his voice and by his body language that he vehemently believes everything that he’s saying. Every word about the cost of rampant individualism and consumerism comes from his heart. One of the greatest speeches an American president has delivered in the last quarter of the twentieth century, one of the few that carried true emotion in it, has come to be known as one of the straws that broke the camel’s back and is now used to mark the downfall of an idealist. Perhaps Peanuts wasn’t so nuts after all.

If you take what Carter says on that evening in 1979 and give them the context of the early 21st century, aren’t these the words we would want to hear from a sitting President facing the world as we know it today? We face another energy crisis, a war, and a recession that may in fact blossom into something more brought on by a rogue government with delusions of monarchical power. We stare energy-driven price increases and the downfall of the over-inflated “middle class” directly in the face, and we have a mad man driving us to edge of conflict after conflict. What would America do if the finger of disappointment wagged in our faces now, some thirty years after Carter told us our shortcomings.

And there lays that crux of the matter. Carter pointed out our flaws, something we as a people hate. Carter dared step beyond the lip service of politics and chose to confront head on the real issues facing America. We have become a lazy nation, a nation consumed with consumption for status and ease. How many of our children would now willingly choose to take a job in a factory that required a blue collar? If those jobs even existed in this country anymore, I would dare say none. We want ease without cost, responsibility without real responsibility, profit without work. If it can’t be done while sitting down and on a computer that you can sneak a look at your email on while doing “work,” we don’t want to do it. We relegate the rule of this country away from the power of the ballot into the hands of those who have the slickest message and prettiest manner of speech. We are a country without an interested citizenry, ripe for overthrow if only for the price of a new iPod or an ease of lifestyle that seemed so fictitious in the mind of Bradbury’s Fireman.

Perhaps Carter wasn’t too far off the mark after all. I’ve found a new respect for the Gentleman from Georgia.

Catching up

Sorry that it’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been dealing with the last great chest cold of winter as well as grading exams, so there’s really been nothing new to report.

This might very well be a good time to lay out my basic research idea, and then build upon it in the next few days. The idea for my dissertation goes something like this. In Southern history, the Yeoman plays not just a theoretical role but a very real role in the social order. The yeoman farmer in the South occupied a social position above the free white laborer and below the planter class. The yeoman owned his own farm and his own labor, operating his land in a manner somewhere between self-sufficiency on the lowest end up to and including market interaction with the intent to make a profit. (Yes, I know that self-sufficiency doesn’t really exist, it’s just the easiest and nicest way to piss poor.) This allowed small farmers to occupy a politically significant place within Southern society as a political foil to the planter class that tended to dominate the economic system. In some ways, this is the very role that Jefferson foresaw in his ideal agricultural United States.

While Southern yeoman studies are squarely established and non-controversial, the presence of the yeoman model for Northern agriculture is non-existent. In fact, it is rare indeed to see any historian use the term yeoman to describe the small independent farmer of the Midwest, where Jefferson’s ideal state of existence came closest to fruition. Because of the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, land disposal in the North was based on orderly surveys and the sale of lots restricted to quarter-sections (160 acres.) While there are indeed extant farms of several thousand acres, in the antebellum rural Midwest (rural being redundant here,) the average farmer in Iowa owned and operated his own 160 acres in any way that he saw fit. Yet this population, as I said, is never referred to as yeoman. Market activity should not be a factor in this decision to not use the descriptor, as Southern yeoman also operated within the confines of the market economy of the South as much as Northern farmers did. As such, was the concept of yeoman agriculture absent from North during the antebellum era, and if it was, why?

In order to look at this concept of the yeoman Northern farmer, I intend to compare the bordering states of Iowa and Missouri, one state free and the other state slave. Missouri farmers, immersed within the slave economy of the upper South, should be tied to the normally understood use of the term yeoman. How is it that Iowans did not, or were not, identified by the same term when only separated by two political constructs: a state boundary and the presence of slaves. I firmly believe that the term is applicable to Northern farmers, and as such will be researching this accordingly. Of special interest will be if the political usage of the term changes as the secession crisis and war approached.

So that’s where I stand. If you read this, what do you think on this issue? It’s both a matter of agriculture and politics. How is the yeoman defined, and is that definition regional or generally applicable? Is the term itself applicable across geographic boundaries in the various regions of this country during the nineteenth century. The next year or so will tell.

Where it’s at…

So I should be grading exams, but that’s about as much fun as setting one’s self on fire. Best gaff by a student in an exam several years ago: Groucho Marx invented communism. Wow. Good to know that I’m reaching the masses. *bangs head on desk*

I find myself facing an interesting debacle with my dissertation project. The Adviser no longer resides within my department, and all communication is via email and the phone. I ran my project by him about two months ago, and he really seemed to be on board with it. Friday I ran the idea past the Program Head, who thinks that she’s my adviser, and her reaction was “prove it to me and I’ll let you do it.” Isn’t the whole process of research and writing the dissertation proving what you’re doing? How do I “prove it” in a 20 page prospectus in order to justify what I want to do? Has anyone else run into this issue? Maybe it’s the correct response, I’m not sure.

Part of the opinion is that what I want to do isn’t part of the pervue of the Program Head. She writes cute stories about diaries and kids in Kansas and such things. She’s what we refer to as Kitchens and Kids. I, however, study farmers and farms and how they are framed in society and politics. As the name of this blog infers, I am Cows and Plows. I am an agricultural historian, or at least I want to be when I grow up. This is the foundation for one of the big problems that I’m facing in grad school. The Program Head, also to be known as the Queen of Darkness, holds little more than signature power over me. She wants to create a department of Rural Historians, and rural history to me holds nothing attractive for me. Go ahead and edit your diaries and tell cute stories about Laura Ingalls Wilder, just don’t make me listen to it. It’s not real history. If you dare disagree with the Queen of Darkness, your life becomes a living hell. I’ve seen it happen.

So how do you deal with Evil trying to bend your research over? I’ve usually tried to go with appeasement in the past, just to make sure that people get along and can work together, but at this point in time, with this project determining my future, I’m not so ready to make others happy. In fact, I’m actually ready to be rather combative and stand up to do what I want and tell Evil to stuff it. My funding for next year, my last year of funding, has been assigned, and she can’t yank it from under me as the contract has been signed. I’m off campus after that. So much fun watching people hate each other.