| Chapter : | America’s Love of the Land: An Introduction |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
ultimately, electricity and radio. Still others, including agriculture extension specialist Don Hofstrand prefer to speak not in terms of gilded epochs but what Hofstrand calls “waves of farm prosperity” to include not only the late 1800s but also the period of high production and high prices during the mid to late 1940s.5
The debate over the chronological bookends of farming’s Golden Age is not, however, the thrust of this volume. Instead, the real import of the moniker Golden Age is in the coin of the realm it suggests—in the sudden interest in everything the farmer and the naturalist had to say, and perhaps even more so, what was said and written about the farmer and the naturalist.
The twenty-first century reader will find it difficult, no doubt, to imagine the political, literary clout made possible by the 50 percent of Americans daily earning their living from the land: whether by farming, ranching, lumbering, or from a host of related occupations. Our times offer no ready analog for the popularity of farm and conservation writings between 1880 and 1920. These days periodic surveys administered to youth—polls such as those sponsored by Junior Achievement—list doctor, businessperson, athlete, and teacher to be the most sought-after professions, with no single profession garnering more than 10 percent of the youth vote. Thus, contemporary America is occupationally diverse by comparison with the Golden Age; its reading tastes and political priorities are likewise more diffuse.
In this light, today’s reader, rightly, comes to appreciate the singularity of the age that produced the farm and conservation readings collected in Love of the Land. One reads in them an unprecedented national absorption in a constellation of agrarian vocations and avocations, a nexus encompassing the related fields of conservation, forestry, horticulture, botany, hydrology, geology, forestry, and agriculture together with the educational, governmental, recreational, ecclesiastical, and entrepreneurial institutions formed in service to agrarian communities.
5 Don Hofstrand, “The Changing Face of Agriculture,” AgDM Newsletter, March 1999. http:www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/articles/hof/HofMar99.htm.