The Old Countryside

  Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes from the “Gardner Farm” in New York.

The countryside: A rural place where people live and work, mostly as farmers, hence a landscape molded (within practical limits) by the hand of man--fields and fences, woodlots and logging trails, gardens and wildflowers, a handsome blend of civilization and the natural world. This is, of course, a landscape of the past, an idealized sketch, but its topography is incidental to my theme, the ideational significance of the old countryside and what happened to it.

No one thinks about it any more. Books are written about every aspect of the American past in the unflagging quest to identify ourselves, to say who we are, but no one considers the countryside. Of course, not many people (relatively speaking) live there now, and fewer are farmers; but even in the days when most Americans lived and labored there it was not consciously considered, not as a major factor in the formation and maintenance of the Republic.

In the past, before the Civil War, there was only one countryside, although its physical expression varied widely from region to region, from the vast sugar plantations of Louisiana, served by slave labor, to the wheat fields and fruit orchards of the Middle Atlantic States, to the small general farms of New England. Farming in America was always a business, we never had a peasantry or, except in pockets, a tradition of subsistence farming. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, farmer presidents who gladly left the executive office to return to their extensive plantations, were preoccupied with perennial agricultural conundrums, striving to solve problems of soil fertility and crop rotation in order to increase production and make more money. They looked to life on the land, however, as more than just a way to earn a living—in this they were representative men of their time—as, in fact, the basic source, the wellspring, of republican virtue--Jefferson quite explicitly so, in conscious contradistinction to Hamilton, who was already looking ahead to a manufacturing and the commercial republic. Jefferson was thinking of the “sturdy yeoman” aspect, the man of independence on his own land, (a point developed by Victor Davis Hason in his excellent book about his family farm in California, The Land Was Everything) and while farmers can be as slavish and conformist as anyone else, I think the argument is sound. But I am getting at something else, something that is much more difficult to define, a tone, a coloration of thought impressed on farmers’ minds by the daily vicissitudes of their calling.

 There is a puzzle about the Founding—the Constitutional Convention itself, the Federalist papers, and the other polemical documents of the time—which is seldom remarked: the absence of utopian schemes. When you consider that America was a magnet for utopians in succeeding decades, that seems odd. Most of these projectors, however, were not Americans, and they were always looked at askance, as eccentrics. The American polity was hostile to utopianism for intellectual and religious reasons, but also because most citizens were farmers who, by the very nature of their vocation, looked upon all human projects with a skeptical eye. There is no occupation without hazard and contingency, but farming confronts its practitioners with the inescapable knowledge that any success and victory in the struggle with nature is temporary, that all plans and works can be swept away in a moment, that the sea of chaos ever laps at the upbuilding of order. Realism, irony, wry acceptance—these were the keynotes of the farmer’s character in the old countryside, and they can be heard, a steady ground bass, beneath the shrill tones of spread eagle ballyhoo in the decades from 1800 to 1860.

The countryside began to divide after the Civil War, when the railroads opened the west for agricultural development, with the concomitant invention of machinery that made large-scale farming practical. Manufacturing and transportation changes made it possible, and big cities as well as fast shipping to overseas ports made it profitable. In other words, the growth of the post-Civil War countryside was bound up with the growth of the commercial republic, which itself was fast becoming the new source of moral and cultural inspiration, so it is not surprising that before the century was over this countryside would be regarded only as a business proposition. Appropriately, this is the countryside known today as the home of agribusiness, “factories in the fields,” where most of America’s crops are raised across the country in nearly every state, although we think of the midwest as its center. Most people are vaguely aware of it, commonly as the association of crops with places--Kansas wheat, California vegetables, Florida citrus, Wisconsin cheese--but really very little is known about this countryside, so little that urban sophisticates are apt to think of farmers as boorish clodhoppers, dull oafs crudely exploiting the land.

I had a revelatory experience with a New York farmer some years ago. We were walking though a new field of asparagus, checking the growth, when I asked a question. His response, as we slowly made our way down the rows and I continued my queries, encompassed the specific chemical and mineral needs of the crop, the nutrients available in this field; what and how much fertilizer had to be added, the soil profile’s effect on drainage, how many inches of rain the asparagus needed and what he might reasonably expect, the general state of the market, alternative marketing methods compared, techniques of picking and handling the crop to maximize profit--and that was just one crop in one small field. This was a family farm, a bit of the old countryside; but the knowledge and intelligence shown in the farmer’s answers is common among American farmers of whatever type. Modern American farmers deploy a range of technical knowledge about land, crops, animals, machinery, and markets that makes them some of the most highly skilled and ingenious workers in the world. You may be sure that this countryside is taken seriously by everyone involved in agribusiness, including farm machinery manufacturers, plant breeders, speculators in pork bellies, and so on, but only as an economic entity.

The old countryside, the one that had been taken seriously for its ideational role as well as its economic aspect, went into a decline as the new countryside prospered. The Southern plantations, along with their particular ethos, were destroyed in the Civil War, and even though small farms elsewhere were still profitable, their share of total production fell steadily as their numbers declined and the productivity of the new countryside increased. Gradually the land was built over by increasing population spilling out of the cities, reducing the range of the old countryside to those remoter areas where real estate values had not appreciably risen. The farming population in both countrysides went down year by year, further diminishing its presence on the ground and in the American mind.

The change I have just blandly described in summary fashion was essentially completed by the 1920s (the old countryside lingered in pockets into the 1960s. According to Hanson it hangs on, beleaguered, in the grape-growing districts of California) but its course was neither simple nor without conflict and heartbreak. The old countryside was always over-populated because its farms could not be economically subdivided for succeeding generations. After the Revolution, it was New Englanders, especially Vermonters, who flowed into Western New York and the Old Northwest to open up the new lands, and the post-Civil War migrations that created the new countryside were composed largely of Southerners and New Englanders. The full potential of this countryside, with its new methods and outlook, was not wholly realized for some time, and most of those who went west, so many of them homesteaders, carried with them the old ideas and ideals. What they were doing, they thought, was reestablishing on more spacious grounds with richer opportunities the ways of sturdy, self-reliant individualism that had served their forbears well in the past. There had been competition back home, of course, but it had been constrained within a settled society with its established rules of conduct, its familiar markets (whether nearby or in the West Indies), its frugal expectations and demands; now, thanks to the railroads that had brought them there (and often sold them their land), they were competing with distant strangers for markets far away. In a sense, they were unwitting pioneers of the sort of globalization process we hear so much about today. I well remember my grandfather, a native Vermonter, telling me that when he shipped his pigs from his Wisconsin farm to market at the turn of the century, the price had fallen so far that the freight charges amounted to more than he got for the pigs. The Granger movement, beginning in the 1870s, and the initial rural stages of the Populist movement a little later, were doomed struggles by those small farmers to preserve their way of life and ethos. They were defeated by many things, but the principal one was the different way of thinking that governed the new countryside: Farming here was not homesteading (with all that implied) but a tough business involving the farmer in a bewildering congeries of relationships with other distant farmers, railroads, machinery manufacturers, grain elevators, commodities traders, and hungry populations thousands of miles away. It required new thinking in place of the old, new ways of acting, and lots of capital. After World War I, when the demand for food overseas suddenly fell, the marginal farms all over the west were either abandoned or merged with larger farms. The old countryside was finished, and the new was now fully established.

The turning point was symbolized in 1920, when for the first time the number of living Americans born off the farm surpassed those born on it. The irrelevance of the old countryside in the national consciousness was marked by a double defamation by cultural sophisticates as the pestilential lair of rednecked yahoos, and by genteel sentimentalists as the picturesque home of quaint folkways and colorful characters.

As Currier and Ives prints demonstrate, the old countryside always evoked sentiments as well as sentimentality, but now much (but not all) of the sentimentality was transformed into a reactionary fixation (e.g., Southern Agrarians). Today, its delusions animate Green efforts to return much of the U.S. to a wild state, and writers in country magazines (often inspired by Wendell Berry, an admirer of the Agrarians) who attack modern agriculture, tree trade, and everything American in the most rabid terms. For these ideologues, the countryside is not a subject to think about, but a weapon.

The old countryside was killed by a gradual turn away from the agrarian ideal a long time ago, ratified by the development after the Civil War of a new countryside dedicated to commercial agriculture, pure and simple. The productive function of the old countryside steadily diminished relative to the new, and while belief lingered to the end, it was a severely attenuated, defensive faith; it is hard to nourish a transcendental belief in a way of life that no longer seems to serve much of a purpose beyond the monthly milkcheck, and which is made to seem increasingly irrelevant to the rest of the nation. When faith was robust, it gave a backing, a density, to all the acts of that life, but it depended on a working relationship with the natural world as well as assurance that the rest of society saw the farmer as at least an equal partner in the construction of America as a material fact and an idea.

Working in the old countryside, wresting a living from the natural world, created a relationship between man and nature that was different from the one that most of us, merely observers, have. When the endeavor was serious, when the well-being of a family depended on the crop, when one labored for a lifetime, day in and day out, with and against the forces of nature, the experience varied, by orders of magnitude, from the life of a hobby farmer, a hiker, a birdwatcher, an admirer of sublime views. Whatever a farmer’s physique or strength, he had an array of physical skills unknown to the modern urbanite, because from his earliest years he had to learn to accomplish tasks speedily and efficiently. He knew the point of leverage of any object, just as he knew the zone of danger around any domestic animal; he knew how much strength to use on any job, and how much time, and he could tackle unfamiliar jobs successfully because he knew their underlying physical principles. A countryman lived in a state of alert tension with the natural world, but within that field of force he moved at ease; there was a competent surety about his movements. Over a lifetime, the most sapient seemed to become forces of nature themselves, able to anticipate and move with natural forces in a way that created an illusion of mastery.

Long familiarity with a landscape, the product of years of labor with it and within it, created a profound, unsentimental, inarticulate attachment to place and a largely unconscious appreciation of the esthetics of form and proportion which, in conjunction with their belief in themselves as the agrarian bulwark of the nation, goes far to explain the beauty of the human interventions in the old countryside--the architecture of houses and barns, the layout of villages, the pattern of fields and hedgerows and fences--composing a harmony never seen in the new countryside where agribusiness holds sway.

Some people who had a nearby summer cottage stopped at our farm one day to buy eggs and butter, and they asked me to show them around the place, I walked over the fields with them, explaining how we had revitalized the rundown farm, pointing out the flourishing fields, the restored fences, the reforestation work, and so on and at the end of it they asked me if I, who had such a mundane relationship with nature, could appreciate its beauty in the way that they, free of such trammels, did? They were academics (Princeton) folks who tend to think they have a monopoly on intelligence and sensitivity, so the snobbery, crudity, and stupidity of the question was not surprising, especially when you add to that the modern urbanite’s bottomless ignorance of the countryside, but still I was taken aback. After all, I had just taken them on a tour during which, while I had not gushed about my feelings, I had certainly demonstrated my love for the land in all its aspects, but they were blind to all of that: the only appreciation of nature they could recognize was the old romantic ecstatic pose before a sunset, a mountain view, or a brightly plumaged bird. Their outlook was impoverished not only by the conventional prejudice that those who do physical work are too dull to possess the finer sensibilities granted only to the genteel, but also by the view, so common today, that sees beauty solely in wild nature. This has always seemed shallow and barren to me, but I have been influenced by my knowledge of the old countryside, where beauty was a harmony of nature and the hand of man.

The subject of the old countryside is so smothered in sentimental clichés and egregious misinformation that it is difficult to say anything about it without being misunderstood, to speak of the old countryside with respect and feeling is to invite inane remarks about “corporate farming destroying the planet” or smug assertions that “You can’t turn back the clock, you know.” In fact, I have great admiration for the achievements of modern farming: Long may it prosper, and long may it continue to confound its silly and ignorant critics. Nor have I any expectation that the old countryside can be revived. My intention has been descriptive and analytical, to tell the story of the passing of the old countryside as I have experienced it, and to try to understand the whole phenomenon. It is a tale of loss and gain, and necessarily, because of my predilections, the stress has been on loss. Yet, as I reread what I have written, I realize that much of what I have described is superficial: It is not the disappearance of a certain rural scene and its way of life that is the most significant loss. What has gone with the death of the old countryside has been a large piece of our patrimony, of the values, ideas, and attitudes that have made us Americans. We are apt, when we think about the Founding, to emphasize the idealism, the optimism, the boundless horizons opened before us by the first great democratic experiment. We would do well to remember, not only that many of the Founders were farmers, but that no matter whether they lived in the burgeoning cities or actually on farms, they existed in the context of the old countryside whose ways of thought acted as a check, right up to the Civil War, on the utopianism latent in the American promise.

Any victories won in the struggle with nature are transient. Because that struggle in the old countryside was so intimate, every man soon learned to recognize in himself and in his projects the same inexorable forces of entropy and mortality he worked with every day in field, woodlot, and stable, so he had a much more realistic sense of human possibility and human limitation than those without such direct, compelling experience, a sense that was conducive to humility and a bone-deep skepticism about human wishes.

That life bred a pervading sense of irony, not about their rooted ideals like patriotism or religion, but about human desires. Today we are swollen with delusions about precisely these material things the old countrymen were skeptical of, and shallowly ironic about the profundities of life. It is the loss of that old habit of mind that I mourn now, in an era of materialistic utopianism.     *

“There is no outward sign of true chivalry that does not rest on a deep moral foundation.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe