Love of the Land: Essential Farm and Conservation Readings from a ...

Up and through the Gilded Age of American farm and conservation writing, half of American workers depended on the farm for their income and were, quite literally, tuned in—by newspaper, magazine, journal, book, and late in the Golden Age, by radio—to farming and to the land in general. Of the remaining urbanized half, the vast majority were, by consequence, no more than a generation or two removed from the land.

Importantly, the varied, interdisciplinary readings in this historic volume come from both sides of the proverbial fence: from college-trained, urban intellectuals studying then-emerging disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, hydrology, and forestry—the way today’s scholars have made urban and suburban studies and environmental studies suddenly relevant as academic disciplines—from the farmers and foresters who made a living with their hands, and from the wilderness advocates who made a living by their transcendent ramblings, as did the likes of John Burroughs, Henry Thoreau, John Muir, and Walt Whitman. Each of the latter found, in the run-up to the Golden Age of farm and conservation writing—and often in unexpected places—a reading public hungry for their particular brand of hands-on, hard-won knowledge. In fact, the many farm-dedicated, nature-invested presses and publishers of the day soon learned that writing hard-hewn from the land proved popular among prosperous urban- and suburbanites. In fact, the moral culture of the day, threatening to the children of the nouveau riche, linked wealth and ease with “arrested development.”² In such a climate, Henry Ward Beecher preached this unlikely, fire-and-brimstone sermon at his wealthy congregation: “How blessed, then, is the stroke of disaster which sets the children free, and gives them over to the hard but kind bosom of Poverty, who says to them ‘Work!’ and, working, makes them men” (ibid 7). Little wonder that the farmer and his farm and the naturalist and his nature became the locus of a class-fascinated dialogue between those who worked with their hands and those who studied those who worked with their

² Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era 1890–1929 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1973), 6.