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

During the years featured in Love of the Land, rural America grew into a particularly contentious relationship with the institutions pledged to serve it, changing the political landscape forever. Towards the end of the Golden Age, the American farmer was increasingly advised to view himself as a businessman rather than the animal husband, land steward, craftsperson, and all-around yeoman he had theretofore labeled himself. A pattern, conspicuous in the readings that follow, suggests itself—a pattern by which cyclical agrarian boom times beget interventionist policies that either burst the bubble outright or deflate it by virtue of sudden and suffocating attentions. Some thirty years after the wave of agricultural prosperity that began in the 1940s, for example, the American farmer would once again draw attention to himself via his prosperity; over the succeeding two decades he would once more—and yet again, it seemed, because of earlier economic and cultural gains—be told to “get big or get out.”⁶ And once more, shortly after he heeded those words, he would find himself in agricultural crisis.

Thus the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century begets, both for the American farmer and conservationist, a curious and enduring paradox, wherein experts promise to make life better, safer, and cleaner for the rural American, but do so by methods often injurious to agrarian and wilderness lifestyles. In such an environment, the agrarian and the preservationist, historically isolationist, further deepen their trademark separation. By analogy, the sick patient, or a patient thought to be sick, comes to distrust the doctor consistently able to identify the malady but unable or unwilling to provide a cure. Conversely, the doctor’s capacity for do-gooding seems predicated on the patient’s (rural and wild America in this analogy) illness to test his or her diagnosis. Wilbert Lee Anderson, in his sociologically-minded The Country Town: A Study of Rural Evolution, captures the need for both accurate diagnosis and compassionate cure thusly: “If this book had the

⁶ Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz quoted in Judy Alieson, “Embattled Farmers: 1776–2003.” www.commondreams.org (accessed December 2000).