Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  Political economists only complained about subsistence food production when it enabled smallholders to avoid market compulsion. Adam Smith knew that the same gardens that seemed like a holdover from a savage past could also further the circulation of capital. Smith described a class of “out-servants of the landlords,” who “receive from their masters … a house, a small garden for pot herbs, as much grass as will feed a cow, and, perhaps, an acre or two of bad arable land.” British capitalists did not eliminate self-provisioning when they enclosed the commons but absorbed it—in a sense, captured it—reassigning the garden and livestock from their long-standing role as pillars of household autonomy to their new function of subsidizing the wages of laborers.4

  The captured garden took two forms—private accumulation and public relief. The former appeared much more often, with many more examples, than the latter. Both appeared in West Virginia between the 1880s and the 1930s. The same gardens that once produced beans and squashes as part of the spectrum of mountain land use arrived in colliery villages after corporations gained title to hollows. Later, the United States resettled unemployed miners in industrial villages, as part of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads. The story of dispossession in West Virginia and capitalism in the Atlantic World includes the political ecology of the household garden at the moment it moved from the commons to the company, from the clearing next to the cabin to the yard beside the shanty. Yet the captured garden also provoked resistance to its logic. All over the Atlantic World, provision grounds became contested grounds between the poor and the powerful over who controlled food and the terms of labor.

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  COAL COMPANIES DID NOT INVENT the captured garden; the British aristocracy did. Landlords realized that they could ensure adequate nutrition for their workers and reduce the wages they paid by shifting the burden of survival onto laboring households. Political economists tended to ignore collective arrangement, preferring a simplified social physics based on the behavior of individuals. But lords knew that the drive to survive among workers was a collective undertaking. When wives, sisters, young sons, and grandparents pulled weeds and thinned potato stems, they made up the difference between an inadequate wage and their bodily requirements. In effect, by expending their own labor to support the male earner, they became co-earners. Employers accumulated additional capital as though by magic—without raising wages, extending the working day, or purchasing additional tools. In this way, gardens increased exploitation. They allowed employers to pay below the market price for work.5

  The earliest example of the captured garden was the cottar: one who paid rent on a small house. The agricultural improver John Sinclair represented the interests of enclosing lords when he suggested that the cottar “raise, by his own labour, some of the most material articles of subsistence for himself and his family.” Cottar households could even sell their extra in local markets, but not enough to make them independent. Instead, they would continue to “assist the neighboring farmers, at all seasons, almost equally as well as if they had no land in their occupation.” Sinclair figured that hired hands needed only three acres and 80 days a year to raise all or most of their food. The work would take up “bye hours” and Sundays, leaving 285 days for “ordinary hand labour.” One source from 1808 refers to cottages as a form of “bondage.”6

  But nowhere did the cottar achieve greater popularity among British capitalists than in Ireland. In the 1840s, dislodged Irish peasants composed an indigent labor force, obtainable, wrote Sir Robert Kane, “on lower terms than almost any other in Europe.” There was only one problem. Starving people couldn’t work. “Supplied only with the lowest descriptions of food,” in Kane’s icy assessment, “they have not the physical ability.” Landowners allowed them to feed themselves, substituting cheap soil nutrients for money. Irish cottars improved their diets and gained a sense of proprietorship that dissuaded them from rising up (as they did time and again during the nineteenth century). In one example, households received ten roods of land each, or about one and a half acres. Lords allowed them to grow only potatoes, which they could cultivate “without interfering with any regular daily employment he may have, and thus without diminishing his regular weekly earnings.” Add a pig and the garden became a tiny farm. The pig could be fed from peelings and kitchen waste. Its dung returned nutrients to the soil. Once fattened, it wound up on the table.7

  Other versions of the cottar appeared in North America. The biggest difference between them was that most of the arable land in England belonged to lords in the seventeenth century, but no one owned Virginia and Massachusetts. Land purchased or otherwise acquired from Indians posed a problem for Virginia tobacco planters because no immigrant had any reason to stoop for someone else. For a time, men fleeing enclosure indentured themselves with the promise of a freehold at the end of their term. But planters realized that only permanent bondage would assure them a constant workforce. Captured Africans could not write home to warn others not to make the mistake of indenture. This is one reason why planters preferred them by the eighteenth century. Chattel slavery amounted to an enclosure of labor-power. To put this more generally, capitalist ventures need to assemble land and labor. Where labor is abundant, enclosing land brings the two together; where land is abundant, labor must be captured.

  Various coercive labor systems arose in response to the abundance of unencumbered land. The Homestead Act of 1862 made farms on the Great Plains available for next to nothing. It actually installed the principle of sweat equity—use as the basis of ownership—into law. This is part of what impelled landowners in the South to find a way of binding black and white households to cotton-growing. They needed workers who would turn out the commodity year after year as though all that free land didn’t exist. The agrarian household was itself a coercive institution. Whether in Puritan New England or the Appalachian backcountry, fathers imposed labor discipline and limits to freedom in what must have felt like indenture. Teenage children owed their families a certain term of labor before gaining the right to strike out for themselves.8

  In England in the nineteenth century, the captured garden also appeared in a benevolent form. Rather than feed households in the midst of a wage, it fed them in unemployment. Here reformers took the lead and introduced various schemes meant to defeat the malevolent Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus argued that new machinery made certain humans redundant, useless. In his mind, their pointless existence burdened almshouses, churches, and the state. He never bothered to consider the social causes of poverty. Instead, he took industrial capitalism as a stage of social evolution and regarded all those displaced by it as the drag and dregs of society and better off dead. Socialists hated Malthus (none more than Karl Marx) and came up with every imaginable workaround to his horrifying math. In the 1840s, the social reformer Robert Owen published one of the first plans to employ paupers. They would plant their own gardens.9

  Owen called his method “spade husbandry,” to distinguish it from horse husbandry. The spade would replace the plow in most fieldwork, freeing land from supporting animals and making it available for the support of humans. Eight people could live on the area needed to feed one horse, Owen calculated, resulting in a nearly one-to-one ratio of 60 million British poor to 60 million British acres. The redundant would escape Malthusian oblivion by becoming the very beasts of burden that the rich always assumed them to be. But Owen refused that comparison. When his critics claimed that “to exchange the plough for the spade, would be to turn back in the road of improvement,” he countered that intensive gardening resulted in finer crops and a richer countryside. “Little do they imagine that … the change from the plough to the spade will prove to be a far more extensive and beneficial innovation than that which the invention of the spinning-machine has occasioned.” He announced it as “an advance in civilization”: progress, not backwardness; improvement, not stagnation.

  But anyone who thought that Owen’s benevolence placed a burden on the rich or in any way offered
a socialist alternative to capitalism misunderstood it. Whether he realized it or not, the unemployed’s growing of their own food maintained them as a healthy and available supply of labor for industry. As another reformer put it, child paupers would be trained “in habits of subordination and industry.” No less an advocate for lordly interests than Arthur Young recommended internal colonies. He imagined 16 million people supporting themselves well enough to pay £2 million in taxes annually, “a much greater addition to our wealth, income, population, and strength, than we now receive from our brilliant oriental dominations of Bengal, Bahar, and Orixa.” Parliament would have collected this money like rent, an arrangement that would have aided lords by externalizing the cost of maintaining refugees from enclosure.10

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  EXTRACTIVE CORPORATIONS MADE COTTARS of their employees. But the relationship between subsistence and wages did not begin once families moved to coal camps. It began while they still lived in the hills. Families maintained plots as security against seasonal unemployment and for retrenchment during strikes. In River of Earth (1940), James Still tells the story of the Baldridge family. Poised between their cabin on the cutover and the shanty in the squalid camp next to the Blackjack mine, the family clung to “the scrap of land our house stood upon, a garden patch, and the black birch that was the only tree on all the barren slope.” Picking wild hay after a rain, Mother tells Father that she dreams of having livestock again. The conversation escalates into a debate over the family’s fate:

  “If we had us a cow her udders would be tick-tight,” Mother said. “It would be a sight the milk and butter we’d get.”

  “Won’t have use for a cow at Blackjack,” Father said. “I hear the mines are going to open for shore. They’re stocking the storehouse…”

  “I had a notion of staying on here,” Mother said, her voice small and tight. “I’m again raising chaps in a coal camp. Allus getting lice and scratching the itch … Can’t move a garden, and growing victuals.”

  “They’ll grow without watching. We’ll keep them picked and dug.”

  “I allus had a mind to live on a hill, not sunk in a holler where the fog and dust is damping and blacking. I was raised to like a lonesome place…”

  “Notions don’t fill your belly nor kiver your back.”

  Mother was on the rag edge of crying. “Forever moving yon and back, setting down nowhere for good and all, searching for God knows what,” she said … “Forever I’ve wanted to set us down in a lone spot, a place certain and enduring, with room to swing arm and elbow, a garden-piece for fresh victuals.”

  Mother wants constancy and continuity. She had followed her husband from coal camp to coal camp before. This time, she wanted to hold the family on the very edge of Blackjack without allowing them to fall in. Father argues that he’s better at mining than farming, and all that matters is what he brings home. “It’s bread I’m hunting, regular bread with a mite of grease on it. To make and provide, it’s the only trade I know.” Yet Father also knows that growing victuals beyond the reach of company managers insures the family against arbitrary unemployment, that betting everything on Blackjack would lead to misery.11

  The drama unfolds in tiny spaces, with the reader standing in the room as someone sleeps or food is prepared. In the smokehouse one evening, Father digs a plow blade into the salt box to count the rinds of pork within. The possibility of hunger hangs like a ghost. Two cousins come live with them at great cost. “‘It’s all we can do to keep bread in the children’s mouths,’ Mother told Father. ‘Even if they are your blood kin, we can’t feed them much longer.’” She knows that the beans stored from last fall aren’t enough to hold them over until the garden yields. Father becomes grim and determined. He tells Mother that he’ll go to the store. But Mother knows they won’t give him credit. “‘We’ve got to live small,’” she says. “‘We’ve got to start over again, hand to mouth, the way we began.’”12

  Mother’s contribution to the existential decisions of the household would have been out of the ordinary. Men dominated families to such an extent that many women felt imprisoned. One Kentucky woman referred to her husband as “a very bad & dangerous man” after she rebuffed his demand for land she inherited from her father. In her testimony before the circuit court, she described her husband and his brothers standing over her as she signed the deed. “She cried and begged and … says that this was her own land that she did not intend to sell.” Perhaps no woman from the mountains expressed the day-to-day oppression like Emma Bell Miles. She was born in 1879 and grew up in Red Bank, Tennessee. In “The Common Lot” (1908), Miles tells the story of a young woman who must decide whether or not to marry a local boy. The story is set against the backdrop of her mother’s drudgery and sadness. “Life had resolved itself, for her, into conditions of greater or lesser weariness … Her day was always long, her night was short; she had no time to think of the sunshine and roses in her own dooryard.” In the end, with no other options, the young woman accepts two cows and a cabin and hopes for the best. “Before them,” writes Miles of the new couple, “lay the vision of their probable future—the crude, hard beginning, the suffering and toil that must come.”13

  Men and women faced the failing ecological base and the decision to move to coal camps together, though they experienced these hardships differently. Like the Baldridge family, households did not move right away, and those that did often kept fugitive plantings somewhere high and distant or ate beans cultivated by family members who remained in the hollows. They held on to the simulacra of autonomy amid an industrialized landscape in which survival increasingly required dependency on wages. When garden and forest reinforced each other, subsistence did not subsidize wages but the other way around. We know how well this arrangement worked. Workers with a functioning commons and a secure source of food carried themselves like free people and vexed labor managers.

  This is why Justus Collins hated local-born miners. Collins served as vice president of the Louisville Coal and Coke Company, operating at Flat Top Mountain. In 1905, he introduced larger coal cars in an attempt to trick workers into more work for the same pay. The men refused. They slowed their shovels or dropped them altogether, disappearing for days at a time. They could walk away because their kinship networks could still sustain them. Some managers turned away anyone with an alternative means of support or who admitted to using wages to regain household autonomy. Bert Wright of the Pocahontas Coal Company made this entry in his journal in August 1898: “Attempted contract with B.P. Good[,] called off. His intentions are to make enough cash to pay for some stock and land.” Wright complained every day of workers who showed up only when they had no other option.14

  By around 1900, if not before, managers attempted to create dependent populations of miners by importing them from other states and countries. Workers with no kin in the hills and no idea where they were composed a more pliable labor army. Managers used emigrants to overwhelm the situational advantages of mountain-born miners. Justus Collins referred to imported workers as “Hungarians,” regardless of where they came from, as in, “I would suggest that we get a carload of Hungarians … The miners we have, as you know, will not work but three or four hours a day.” Testimony given to Congress in 1888 revealed how companies succeeded in keeping “thousands of surplus laborers on hand to underbid each other for employment,” how they held these workers “purposely ignorant when the mines are to be worked and when closed, so that they cannot seek employment elsewhere.” The journalist Henry Lloyd gave testimony to the Interstate Anti-Trust Conference in 1893. He described a laborer who was “virtually a chattel of the operator,” constantly robbed of his wages by the company store, subject to rents he must pay in every season (whether working or not), and under the arbitrary authority of private security guards, “armed as the corporations see fit with army revolvers, or Winchester rifles, or both … provoking the people to riot and then shooting them legally.”15

  This is how families identical to t
he Baldridges ended up in settlements identical to Blackjack. Once Hungarian or Irish or African-American workers arrived in the coalfields, they became artillery for breaking the defiant highlanders. Two days after the miners at Louisville Coal and Coke refused to fill the larger cars, Collins evicted those who lived in the camp. A week later, the first train of “Hungarians” arrived. A sociologist who knew the game called the immigrant inflow “a godsend” to employers: “Foreign labor was introduced into an industry not from lack of hands but in order to replace the too-demanding natives.” The strategy of retreating to the hollows would never work the same way again. All of a sudden, survival required local men to adhere to industrial discipline. For a time, Mother and Father held on to their garden and cabin overlooking the mine. But with the possibility of autonomy falling away with the forest, when a money income required submission to company control, they felt compelled to give them up.16

  In the coal camps, subsistence became a source of corporate power. This happened because companies often took over state-like services wherever they operated, especially where counties exercised little or no authority. They built roads, hired their own police departments, and even established governing bodies. In one example, Fairmont Coal imposed a nonunion collective bargaining process. It established a system of “industrial representation,” composed of powerless committees. The company dictated every “agreement” and determined the breadth of “representation.” The anthropologist David Graeber explains that corporations copied the bureaucratic techniques of government, “techniques that were thought to be necessities when operating on a large scale.” For our purposes, the most important of these state-like services allowed companies to avoid paying wages. They minted their own money.17

  Coal companies issued coins or coupons, called scrip, redeemable in stores owned by the companies themselves or allied merchants. The system obscured the dollar value of work by paying and charging miners in unconvertible units. It also kept miners in hock to the companies. Owners paid out less than miners and their families needed to live, subtracting rent, medical services, and even funeral expenses. Whatever scrip miners had left, they handed right back to management for food. If their scrip fell short of their household needs, they ended up in debt, their flour and bacon charged against future labor, with interest. A hard-won raise bought workers nothing. Companies simply recollected it by jacking up prices at the store. But scrip did not lower the fixed costs of coal mining. Sustaining a workforce required owners to spend limited cash reserves to import food from outside the region.18