(emphasis added)
The political ideal of a democratic and self-governing nation, as Thomas Jefferson saw it, could best be entrusted to a society that was predominantly agrarian--more specifically, a community of small, self-sufficient family farms. In Query XIX in Notes on the State of Virginia, a discussion of the advisability of establishing manufacturing in the new nation, Jefferson stated his conviction that agriculture, not manufacturing, should be the primary economic base of the country, not because it would be economically advantageous--he knew it could not be-- but because it would assure the best kind of society. Manufacturing, and its attendant commerce, as European evidence had so graphically shown, distorted relationships among men, bred dependence and servility, and spawned greed and corruption which became a canker on the society. A nation of husbandmen, on the other hand, each of whom owned his own plot of land, who was free and beholden to no one, would assure the preservation of those qualities on which the strength of a republic depended. (1)After the War of 1812, when the colonies' trade with Europe was disrupted, Jefferson would change his mind about the need to establish a manufacturing base in the new nation but his faith in the special virtue of agricultural occupation remained with him to the end of his life. Like Roman Republicans some two millenia earlier ("... it is from the tillers of the soil that spring the best citizens...") he believed that the moral security of a nation rested in its agricultural community: "Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age or nation has furnished an example." Working directly with nature, "... looking up to heaven, [and down] to their own soil and industry...", farmers were in closer communion with nature's beneficent influence and so with the divine laws and moral principles inherent in the universe: "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God", endowed by the Creator with "substantial and genuine virtue"--it is they who keep alive the "sacred fire". (2)
The political vision of a nation of independent farmers was made credible by the fact of geography--a vast expanse of territory which, Jefferson believed, would absorb the expansion of an agricultural community for centuries to come. This immense territory would not only assure economic security to all who settled on it, but would in itself be a safeguard against the kinds of economic and social inequities that were characteristic of the European experience. Where land was always available to anyone willing to put his labour into it, no one ever need be exploited by anyone else.
The French cartographer, Crevecouer [sic (Crèvecoeur)], writing about the time of the Revolution and describing his own farming experience in New York state, imagined the redeeming effect this fresh new landscape would have on the distressed European immigrant who compared what he found with the situation he had left behind: "Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings,.... We are a people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory ... united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they are equitable. ...We have no princes for whom we toil, starve and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing in the world." (3)
What began to evolve in the American consciousness was a sense of its unique place in history, of a new and different society in the making, conceived on the ideals of democratic self-government and nurtured by a bountiful landscape that would exert its own regenerating influence on its inhabitants. What was no longer possible in Europe, except in stale literary formulas, could become reality in America--the common farmer secure on his own property, blessed by God and nature--and committed to the values of the republic.
For a century after Jefferson formulated his agrarian ideal, rural life was imbued with a special significance in American political rhetoric. The image of the farmer and his family on their small, well-ordered farm became the icon of this ideal society--industrious, proudly independent, honest and incorruptible. Political speeches, magazine articles and illustrations, literature and art paid homage to this wellspring of the American ethos--the homestead as symbol of the moral order of the nation. "According to the basic rhetoric", says Sarah Burns in Pastoral Inventions, "... it was only in the country that life could be pure, simple, and good. True republican values, benefiting the entire nation, were nurtured and cherished in the American farmer's field and homestead. Self-reliant and happy in their isolation, cultivators of the soil provided the necessary antidote to the dangerous urban forces so feared by Jefferson." Paintings such as those of the Hudson River School and Currier and Ives prints portrayed scenes that spoke of rural contentment and plenitude--gently rolling landscapes, farmhouses nestling comfortably in river valleys, scenes of berry-picking, harvest frolics and barefoot boys. The compositional elements of such scenes, says Burns, emphasized the harmony implicit in the rural place: the comfortable balance of masses, curving lines, smooth transitions from plane to plane, the even ratio of sky to earth. The arduous effort of agricultural work as well as scenes of marketing and the use of agricultural machinery to do the hard work of the farm were downplayed. (4) Such elements were neither romantic nor did they fit into the Jeffersonian vision of an America in which commercial enterprise and the machine were meant to play subservient roles.
The literary and visual imagery of rural America portrayed what was true for a short time, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when agricultural tasks were still carried out in largely traditional ways. As early as the 1830's, however, the first effects of technology were beginning to transform the way in which work was being done. For those who had the capital to invest, mechanization allowed larger tracts of land to be worked, and transportation technology encouraged the production of surpluses for distant markets. Those without the capital or whose farms were topographically unsuitable for large machines found themselves at a disadvantage in an economy that was becoming rapidly commercialized. In the East, a notable proportion of once self-sufficient farms, unable to hold out in the new market economy and, particularly by mid-century, from the competition of large farms in the West, began to show signs of deterioration. While the image of the agrarian ideal continued to be invoked in speeches and literature and art, photographs of the period and the occasional magazine article began to reveal that New England farms, rather than being the rural idylls of popular imagination, were often as likely to have become places of neglect, if not of squalour.
The American public's enthusiasm for machine technology easily overrode the few misgivings that were voiced. The rhetoric for the new ideology of machine-as-progress did not so much reject the kinds of political and emotional appeals that had been made on behalf of the agrarian ideal as revise them to fit the new version of the source of the nation's well-being: Machines would assure the economic security of the nation; they would turn even waste lands into productive use, making all of America a garden; they would allow the leisure time needed for an electorate to keep itself informed and to participate in public affairs, thus assuring the continuation of an egalitarian society; nor were machines an inimical element in the environment, since they operated according to the same laws of nature as the rest of the universe, were part of the same divine plan; nor was there any need to fear that the use of machines would reproduce the same unfortunate social conditions as now prevailed in the Old World: the special, benign influence of the American landscape would neutralize any such tendency. The pursuit of happiness was thus translated from a scene of agrarian simplicity and modest self-sufficiency into one of the almost unimaginable progress promised by the machine. Not the least of the motivations behind this revised pursuit and its attendant commerce was the expectation of wealth it would bring.
The problem with agriculture in a democratic nation, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the French historian who visited the United States in the early 1830's, is that, of all the useful arts, it improves most slowly: "To cultivate the ground promises an almost certain reward for [the farmer's] efforts, but a slow one." In the rural idyll, it turned out that the yeoman farmer on his modest farm, so praised by Jefferson and Crevecouer [sic] for his supposedly steadfast virtues, was as anxious to become part of the get-rich-quick race as anyone else. Even before farming became commercialized, land itself had become a speculative commodity; public lands auctioned off for settlement were bought up in the expectation of being resold at a profit, and farmers were in the front ranks of speculators. Most farmers in the United States, de Tocqueville continued, have made agriculture itself a trade: "It is unusual for an American farmer to settle forever on the land he occupies; especially in the provinces of the West, fields are cleared to be sold again, not to be cultivated. A farm is built in the anticipation that, since the state of the country will soon be changing with the increase of population, one will be able to sell it for a good price .... In such fashion the Americans carry over into agriculture the spirit of a trading venture, and their passion for industry is manifest there as elsewhere." (5)
In Jefferson's agrarian theory, the husbandman's civic virtue would be preserved by his independence from commercial dealing. Yet barely more than half a century after he had set down his theory, Henry David Thoreau would decry the alacrity with which the American farmer had traded his self-sufficiency and independence for one of subservient compliance to the demands of the market-place. Taking the typical Concord farmer as his example, this husbandman, who was supposed to be the embodiment of the nation's ideals, was only too willing to exchange his farm, its produce, even his own integrity for the dollars he could get for them. One could see him, he said, " ... creeping down the road of life, pushing before him a barn 75 by 40 ... and 100 acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot ... ", all a ready offering for the sake of trade; and his greed for material gain is such that he "would carry the landscape ... would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him." Agriculture was once considered a sacred art; Romans like Cato and Varro speak of the husbandman as "pious" and "just", his occupation with nature connecting him most closely to the gods. The American farmer knows no such reverence for his calling; instead, "By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit ... of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives." (6) If the spirit of the new nation were to be nurtured and sustained anywhere, it was not going to be in the yeoman farmer's field.
The enthusiasm which Jefferson and many of his contemporaries had for the promise of the West as the stronghold of republican character imbued it from the beginning with a significance that would make it one of the most potent myths in American history. The East might be compromised by the need to establish a manufacturing base to assure the country's economic independence, but in the vast territory to the west, vacant lands that they believed would take centuries to fill, the social and political aims of the nation would be realized to the fullest; by a society of independent landowners, removed from the taint of commercialism, and loyal to their country's republican ideals.The agrarian ideology that captured the popular imagination became incorporated into official government policy, beginning with Jefferson's own programs, but it was the growing perception of the sheer size of the territory beyond the Alleghenies that encouraged a heady optimism that a radical political vision could indeed become reality. The seemingly inexhaustible supply of land would ensure, in Jefferson's equation, the moral and political integrity of the republic. In 1851, when Representative George Julian of Indiana spoke to Congress in favour of distribution of free land to settlers in the West, his praise of an agricultural community could be assumed to echo the national sentiment: "The life of the farmer is peculiarly favorable to virtue .... His manners are simple ... his nature unsophisticated ... [He] lives in rustic plenty, remote from the contagion of popular vices ... ." (7) To make land available for freehold farming, in family-sized homesteads, could only be seen as fulfilling a special mission of American society.
The reality of western settlement failed to live up to the agrarian ideal almost from the beginning. In the rapid expansion of the territory, the yeoman farmer was accompanied, and often preceded, by real estate speculators, cattle barons, railroad companies and "captains of industry" only too willing to exploit a social mythology for material gain. Early federal policy, committed to promoting expansion, did little to prevent land grabs and monopolistic practices. The Homestead Act, passed in 1862, which allowed for transference of a quarter section of land to a homesteader who had worked the property for five years, also initiated a public land system which allowed unprecedented land speculation. Railway companies, for example, which had been granted vast tracts of land, were able to sell off more land in the next thirty years than was allotted to homesteaders in the same period by the Act itself. (8) Not the least among the speculators who saw land as commodity were farmers themselves. In times of general prosperity, as in the early 1850's that saw a boom of expansion into the Midwest, spurred by high wheat prices and easily available credit, farmers speculated, as did others, that rising prices would turn land into fortunes. When such periods were followed by depressions, farmers who had overextended themselves in land and equipment were faced with foreclosures.
The continuing push westward soon encountered another problem. Despite the few voices of caution that the land and climate beyond the 100th meridian were undependable for agriculture, stubborn optimism discounted geographical limitations, bolstering itself with folk myths and pseudo-scientific claims: rain would follow the plow, planting of trees would have a beneficial effect on the climate, and steam from passing trains would form clouds of vapour which would come down as rain. Supported by government policy and the propaganda of cynical speculators, the extension of settlement to the Pacific could be seen as nothing less than fulfillment of the nation's Manifest Destiny. Instead, it turned out that the arid plains were not so easily turned into a productive garden. Despite occasional good years, the western farmer found himself engaged not in some Emersonian beneficent relationship with nature but in hard struggle against it; battles with drought and soil erosion, made worse by inappropriate (if not greedy) farming methods, and extremes of climate and plagues of grasshoppers.
More than any other factor, however, development of the West was determined by the speed with which technology overran traditional farming practice and transformed the landscape of Jefferson's agrarian vision of small, self-reliant landholders to one dominated by ever-larger, mechanized farms tied to commercial interests. On the flat plains of the West, agriculture was defined almost from the beginning by the use of power machinery which in turn allowed working of large tracts of land and, with surplus production, a corresponding demand for easily accessible market and financial centres. In the process, the small, self-dependent farmer found himself enmeshed in a commercial network over which he had no control; transportation costs, variable markets, business middlemen. Large-scale enterprises undermined the viability of subsistence-sized farms and these began to give way to larger holdings often worked by tenants. (In Nebraska, by 1900, the tenancy rates had increased to one-third.) (9) Further west, the heavy machinery needed to break up the tough prairie sod, and larger farms needed to secure a living in the uncertain climatic conditions required capital beyond the means of many small homesteaders. Increasingly, western agriculture began to be dominated by commercial and political interests that overrode small landholders' concerns."One of the most significant facts of American intellectual history", writes Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land, "is the slow and inadequate fashion in which the momentum of the new forces was appreciated or, to put the matter another way, the astonishing longevity of the agrarian ideal as the accepted view of Western society." (10) So potent was the myth, and so pervasive in the oratory that it persisted despite growing evidence that the homestead farmer on his 160 acres was becoming increasingly vulnerable to forces he could not manage. He, too, had bought the myth that he was the noble and virtuous mainstay of American society, most especially that he was independent, and that government would protect his interests. Instead, by the 1870's, he found that government policy favoured bankers and merchants rather than settlers, and that he was at the mercy of railways, elevator companies and steamship lines, of unscrupulous promoters and disadvantageous land distribution policies. (11) The yeoman farmer, once bearer of such high expectations, found himself at a distinct economic disadvantage in a West that was increasingly commercial, industrial, corporate and urban; in this new economy, he had become a second-class citizen.
By the last quarter of the [19th] century, the perception that had held for so long was changing. American agriculture was no longer the economic mainstay it had once been: The rapid pace of industrialization after the Civil War and the growth of cities had shifted the locus of power. In response to rising agrarian radicalism, legislators began to acknowledge that in the country's rapid industrial and commercial expansion the farmer had been neglected and was in need of help. By this time, agriculture found itself pitted against industrial and urban interests, and negative images of the rural community, of ignorant and greedy farmers began to appear.In literature, a few writers began to push aside the debris of romanticizing mythology and popular stereotypes; of lone-riding cowboys and gun-slinging "adventurers"; that had characterized most 19th century fiction about the West and to write about the real conditions of the rural community. Writers like Hamlin Garland who had grown up in the West and had known the austerity of life on a farm wrote from personal experience of the unattractive facts of farmers' lives. In his Foreword to Main-Travelled Roads, Garland speaks with bitterness about the reality which he encounters again on a return visit to the West in 1887. Travelling from northern Iowa where he had grown up to southern Dakota where his parents had moved, he speaks of the "... ugliness, the endless drudgery, and the loneliness of the farmer's lot .... The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains ... the helpless and sterile poverty" of it all. (12)
The low point in American agriculture came with the Depression of the l930's when falling commodity prices in world markets combined with dustbowl conditions to create a major economic crisis in the farming community. Congressional investigations reporting in the early 1940's on the state of many farm families painted a grim picture: " ... of agrarian distress, insecurity, and social inequality hardly matched in western Europe. Half a million sharecroppers in a state of feudalism; half a million migratory workers roaming the highways; another half million farm families scratching for subsistence on submarginal soil: these are the members of our agrarian society." (13) While similar conditions prevailed elsewhere, there is perhaps a special note of poignant irony in this description when it is considered against the background of Jefferson's belief that a cornerstone of the nation's values; its commitment to the freedom and dignity of man; would be secured in its agricultural community, the republic's "natural aristocrats".
The American farm of the 20th century bears little resemblance to Jefferson's happy vision. The number of farms has steadily decreased (less than one-tenth of the American population now lives on farms compared to nine-tenths in Jefferson's time), such farms are more likely to be dependent on considerable capital input, and more likely to be run by tenants. Yet the pastoral image of the good American farmer, still tied in the public imagination to the democratic ideal, has persisted in the 20th century, even if invoked less frequently or insistently. The images embedded in the American consciousness, says Sarah Burns in Pastoral Inventions, continue to be expressed in films, in "back to the land" movements, in sympathetic response to news of economic crises in farm communities, in the popularity of farm artifacts and artists like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Grant Wood. Nostalgia for the simple virtue of America's rural past (or, rather, as it was imagined to have been) has become big business. The advertising world has capitalized on the image of natural goodness implicit in the farm scene, "confident that the powerful sentimental and ideological associations of rural imagery will ensure our complicity in the commercial fiction of wholesomeness and naturalness." The symbols that we respond to, she says, "mask truths and proffer illusions ... They keep alive a vision of America that almost never was, is not, and never will be." (14)
In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave an address to the American Historical Society in which he presented what was to become known as the "frontier thesis": that the most potent shaping force in American history was the open, westward-moving frontier; that the colonist who had to deal with the primitive conditions of the frontier shed the baggage of Old World institutions, including those of the urban East; and that, in so doing, a "new man" emerged; practical and inventive, resourceful, inquisitive, and highly individualistic; and through the way in which the colonist adapted to the frontier there evolved social, political and cultural institutions that were uniquely American.The frontier was defined as the point at which agricultural settlement met wilderness, "the hither edge of free land". (15) At this juncture of civilization and nature--a point of truth--the environment exacted adaptations that took precedence over inherited cultural forms forging, in the process, new responses to new needs. As the frontier pushed further west, and the influence of Europe receded accordingly, it was these new forms that became, in turn, the basis of further adaptations, so that what evolved was progressively different, progressively more American. The institution of greatest importance that was shaped in this way was democracy; in its particular, American version, not born of any preconceived theory, nor transported from Europe. "It came stark and strong and full of life out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier." (16)
The availability of free land was a key element in this evolution for it provided a safety-valve against any threat of social or economic oppression to the east; in the free lands of the frontier there was always re-affirmation of equality through economic security. The frontier was a force not only against privilege but against exclusion in other ways. Unlike the predominantly English landowners of the South and Northeast, the West took in immigrants from other parts of Europe and so became a more diverse society, a mix of different nationalities and religions that became more representative of American society as a whole. The East had become a replay of Old World ways, the South had its slavery problem, but the West was free to all comers who would escape oppression of any kind; it was thus the breeding-ground of truly democratic institutions.For Turner, as for Jefferson a century earlier, there was a direct connection between democracy and agricultural communities. It was in "the lowly tillers of the soil", those who worked closely with the revitalizing influence of nature, that one would find those attributes of character needed to sustain a nation in republican health. It was the farming community, this society of small landowners, who were the true makers of the American republic.
Turner's theory as an explanation of the forces that had shaped America gained wide attention, in part because it supported a long-held belief in the importance of agriculture and the family farm in American society but also, and perhaps even more importantly, it had a strong patriotic appeal. The West represented values that were particularly American; the western frontier, where free men interacted with nature, spawned those qualities of individualism, practicality, inventiveness, and the restless energy born of freedom that set America apart from other nations.
The problem with the thesis, based as it was in agrarian theory, was soon apparent. Three years before Turner delivered his address, the Superintendent of Census had declared the frontier closed. If Turner's equation of democracy with the availability of free land was no longer valid, the question became one of identifying some other source in American civilization that would sustain (or, possibly, had already been sustaining) its political principles. This Turner was never able to do. The agrarian philosophy that was the basis of the thesis (as well as the popular myth of the goodness of rural life) also largely ignored the impact of industrialization which was transforming American society in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Henry Nash Smith (Virgin Land) says of the shortcomings of this theory: "The philosophy and the myth affirmed an admirable set of values, but they ceased very early to be useful in interpreting American society as a whole because they offered no intellectual apparatus for taking account of the industrial revolution ... Agrarian theory encouraged men to ignore [the revolution] altogether, or to regard it as an unfortunate and anomalous violation of the natural order of things." (17) As a result, attention has been diverted from problems created by industrialization and, in the theory's implicit distrust of cities and industry, impeded cooperation between agricultural and industrial interests.
The social theory that there is a strong connection between agrarianism and democracy, a belief strongly held by Jefferson, Crevecoeur and many of their contemporaries, and most notably later by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, has been one of the sustaining myths of American political life. Its hold on the public imagination, reluctant to give up on a belief that has carried such a weight of patriotic zeal for so long, has continued to affect national legislation into the 20th century. In President Roosevelt's speech to Congress in 1937, for example, in which he decried the extent to which tenancy had become a factor in agricultural life, can be heard strong echoes of Jefferson, Crevecoeur, Turner. The report on Farm Tenancy stated: "Sturdy rural institutions beget self-reliance and independence of judgment .... Vigorous and sustained action is required for restoring the impaired resources on whose preservation continuance of the democratic process in this country to no small extent depends." (18)In Turner's thesis, the kind of democracy that had taken shape in the West--in such a vast space, with such "largeness of design"--was unlike any the world had ever known. Yet he conceded, in a paper published ten years after he had first presented his frontier thesis, that this democracy was in danger, overtaken by forces that defied the visionaries of the 18th century: " ... the very task of dealing with vast resources, over vast areas, under the condition of free competition furnished by the West, has produced the rise of those captains of industry whose success in consolidating economic power now raises the question of whether democracy under such conditions can survive." The material resources of the West have been largely exhausted; what the West can now contribute, in their stead, is in "the realm of the spirit ... the domain of ideals and legislation." (19) Henry David Thoreau, who had criticized the Concord of his time for the same bent on material gain might have allowed himself a wry grimace at Turner's summation of what had happened to the West; except that, as Wallace Stegner, a western writer, notes, Thoreau's own antisocial attitude would have been of little help in shaping a different West.
In Farming and Democracy, A. Whitney Griswold challenges the view that there is any causal connection between an agrarian society and democracy. History from ancient times on simply does not bear this out. The agrarian community has been traditionally politically conservative; Aristotle noted that farmers would tolerate any tyranny as long as they were allowed to keep their property. In England, it was only when other interests took precedence over agriculture and the power of the landed aristocracy was broken that democratic institutions began to flourish. Socially, economically and culturally, the agrarian community has lagged behind its urban counterpart. Despite Jefferson's brave vision, it is not likely (as Aristotle also noted) that the farmer who is poor and over-worked will take an active part in political affairs. The intellectual stimulus for radical ideas such as democracy has invariably come, as it did in England, from cities. (20) (And on this note, it might be added that while the American West may feel resentful about its second-rate status vis-a-vis the East and the farmer about his urban, business counterpart, the stimulus for the conservation and preservation of what is left of the West's resources has come primarily from the urban centres of the East and despite the resistance of those still-maverick western conservatives who would brook no interference in their right to exploit what is left.)
In "Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur", Wallace Stegner looks again at Crevecoeur's description of the emerging American, "this new man" in a new world who, through hard work, would improve not only his own lot but build the kind of society that had been denied him in the Old World. The most valued attribute of his new condition is the freedom he enjoys from oppression of any kind; but, Crevecoeur emphasizes, this is not a freedom that precludes social responsibility; this regenerated man is committed, at the same time, to the welfare of both his family and the community. It was part of Jefferson's theory as well that the virtue of the American pioneer farmer would be stimulated by his active participation in social and political matters. This is not, as Stegner sees it, the kind of pioneer who took control of the West. The folk hero of popular mythology was indeed self-reliant, enduring, physically competent, and an individualist; but he was also self-righteous, socially irresponsible, resistant to authority, and ruthless often to the point of violence. Whether the moving frontier of the West (unlike the more settled and stable Midwest) ever knew democracy is a moot point. The modern equivalent of this frontier individualism lives on in the Silicon Valley or conglomerate executive who exhibits the same lack of concern for interests outside his own as did the old cattle barons. It is as if the frontier, with its lack of commitment to place, were still moving. In a bitter note, Stegner says: "The hard, aggressive, single-minded energy that according to politicians made America great is demonstrated every day in resource raids and leveraged takeovers by entrepreneurs; and along with that competitive individualism and ruthlessness goes a rejection of any controlling past or tradition."The West may yet find itself, says Stegner. After the maverick entrepreneurs who have exploited its resources and abused the landscape have moved on, " ... when the agribusiness fields have turned to alkali flats and the dams have silted up ... ", and when the romanticizing mythology of the cowboy West has finally been put to rest, it is with those who have stayed and formed communities that a culture born out of adaptation to place may yet emerge. (21)