by Steven Stoll
This is why owners encouraged families to plant gardens. A patch of vegetables and a flock of chickens reproduced the household with household labor during household hours. Time in the garden never competed with wage earning. The entire family became deputized workers, contributing their labor without compensation to subsidize the male wage. Not only that, but the companies profited from the greater health and capacity of workers; they improved productivity without buying new machinery or extending the working day. Companies either made gardens compulsory or encouraged them by providing seed and fertilizer and by offering prizes—like two or three months’ rent or a gold coin for the most beautiful plot.
To allies of the industry, gardens looked progressive, like a rejection of radicalism. In their eyes, gardening miners made the best of their situation, working with companies by beautifying the camps. The American Constitutional Association was founded by businessmen to foster “reverence for law” and Americanization among foreign-born miners. It used patriotism to dissuade immigrants from joining the United Mine Workers of America. The businessmen commissioned a survey of forty-one mining camps. “In no instance was a company found other than glad to have the people of the community utilize any available ground for gardens. Absolutely no rent is charged for a foot of garden space. In the majority of cases the company supplies a mule and plow free.” The report found that, on average, 53 percent of miners in the forty-one camps planted gardens. Agronomists estimated that the average annual value of an average yield was a hundred dollars.19
European workers brought the same skills as the mountain-born. They had almost all been agrarians themselves, most of them recently uprooted by enclosure and penury. The industry magazine Coal Age gave dispossession a cheerful spin. “The few Americans in a colliery village have been drawn from the farming population, and should naturally take readily to garden culture. The people from England, Scotland and Wales are known for their delight in all kinds of seeding and planting, and the miners who hail from Central Europe are like our own people, mostly farmers in origin, and should naturally till the soil.” The same could have been said of African-Americans, whether former slaves or those fleeing tenancy. No matter where they came from, miners must have taken pleasure in corn tassels and squash flowers. Some gardeners used climbing beans running up wire to create shaded porches that gave relief from the smoke and heat of the railroad just feet away and the barrenness of the hills.20
But the pleasures of colliery gardens did not change their exploitative purpose. An extraordinary conversation explains why. A former secretary of the United Mine Workers visited West Virginia in 1896 and reported what he saw. He noticed gardens all along the Kanawha River and commented to his tour guide that the miners were very industrious. “They are,” responded the guide, “a darn’d sight too industrious; they are so industrious that they can dig coal for almost nothing.” The secretary thought about it. “If the land in West Virginia was used as an adjunct to the pluck store in the production of coal, how were our miners in other parts of the country to meet this kind of competition?” By sustaining themselves, mining households lowered their own wages. Managers in other parts of the country copied the method.21
Yet this is only one side of the political ecology. Provision grounds became battlegrounds over the control of life and work, with companies restricting access to food during labor actions. One journalist called it “persuasion by starvation,” and pointed out that if a miner held an owner’s family hostage to starve them, “you would be unable to express your horror.” But “the mine owner who starves the miner’s wife by refusing credit acts within the limit of the law.” Mining companies could mask the violence they inflicted by depicting unions and strikers as acting illegally and indecently. They could be sure to have law enforcement on their side, lending legitimacy to their position. And by linking food and shelter to compliance, they made it look as though miners violated the terms of their employment and caused their own suffering. “Power exercised in one part of the system could evoke a response in another,” writes John Gaventa, “disobedience of a single rule could mean eviction from the game all together.”22
The key example is the Paint Creek Strike of 1912. The strike began in April. The activist Mary Harris “Mother” Jones had been organizing from time to time in southern West Virginia since 1901. The week she returned to Kanawha County in 1912, miners attacked facilities at Mucklow, burning coal tipples. The governor escalated the situation by declaring martial law, commandeering company guards, and subjecting all the accused to military courts. In July, management sent out notices of eviction after gardens had been planted. The miners appealed to the courts, but a circuit judge upheld the evictions. A labor organizer explained that the judge likened the relationship between miner and employer to that of master and servant. Miners rented their homes from the company but held no leases. They could claim no rights as tenants. Fired for any reason, they had to leave, regardless of whether they had paid for the month. The striking miners became refugees, setting up a tent city at the mouth of Paint Creek.23
When strikers attempted to return to their gardens, company guards prevented them. By August, the miners had begun to starve. Guards caught one attempting to cross battle lines. They ordered him to turn around “or they would kill him.” Driven by hunger, the man managed to outmaneuver his pursuers and got away with his cow in tow. Guards sent all the household goods of another miner floating down the river, then threatened to kill him if he tried one more time to remove his livestock. A week later, a reporter described the inhabitants of Paint Creek as having “lapsed into a state of primitive savagery, spurred on by the depredations of the private guards … The miners are desperate, and their attack centered on the company’s stores.” In the eighteenth century, James Steuart and Alexander Hamilton insisted that anyone who converted but little of the value he created into money did not contribute to society. Peasants and settlers, they both believed, were not fully part of the state. Coal miners did exactly what Steuart and Hamilton would have wanted them to do. Everything they produced took the form of a commodity. Even the beans and corn they grew contributed, indirectly, to the same end. But in what meaningful sense were they citizens? In what sense did coal mining forge a place for mountaineers in modern society?24
Yet beans and corn could not be entirely captured. Other miners during other strikes grew them in the folds of the mountains, beyond company reach, where they aided resistance and rebellion. One wrote to John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, in the midst of the 1919 walkout in Coral, Pennsylvania, “We’re not worrying about strike benefits … because we are killing hogs and gathering corn and other crops and squirrel hunting.” Two men interviewed by the Library of Congress in the 1990s recalled the sufficiency of an earlier generation. Kenny Lively said, “Because they had all those gardens, and they canned so much, and they killed that hog, they could go on strike. They could go out for two months; they were stocked and ready.” This is how small-scale domesticated food production became central to the structural war between workers and owners in the mountains.25
Regardless of the coercion and control they offered managers and the desperate objective they became for miners during strikes, industrial gardens looked benevolent to reformers of the 1930s. With the onset of the Great Depression, West Virginia miners truly became pauperized—lacking income or access to land. That’s when reformers discovered the other version of the captured garden, the one Robert Owen advocated a century earlier. It offered the United States a way of keeping the unemployed from starving while burdening them with the entire cost of their relief.
* * *
IN 1933, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT VISITED Scotts Run, a long hollow near Morgantown, West Virginia, that had become among the most destitute places in the United States. If Eleanor took a walk up Ramp Hollow, she would have seen how companies put up houses along the steep sides and tributaries of Scotts Run, like the one I saw abandoned and overgrown seventy-eight years later. Sh
e might have met families recently removed from cabins like the one I visited on Hoard Road just a few miles away. Coal production had always fluctuated with prices. Companies shut down when it didn’t pay to operate and started up again when it did. The industry expanded almost without pause from the 1880s into the 1920s. West Virginia miners numbered 78,400 in 1909. Twenty years later, the state ranked second in the nation behind Pennsylvania. One hundred thousand miners worked 830 mines, sending coal down the tracks that earned the companies $217 million in sales. But when capital vanished after the stock market crash, the mines closed, leaving thousands of people stranded. Only a paycheck distinguishes a working-class enclave from a slum, and Scotts Run had become an influenza-ridden slum. Families starved within sight of stuck and silent coal tipples, rusting in the damp atmosphere. One journalist found a family of thirteen huddled over a gasping fire, “with the children packed like sacks on the floor and one wakeful adult prodding the coals alive in order that they all might not freeze to death.”26
The only people capable of helping were the Quakers. They had invented a travel-ready humanitarian aid organization at the outbreak of the First World War. Pacifist church members could join the American Friends Service Committee as an alternative to military service. It worked so well that in 1918 President Herbert Hoover appointed the Quakers to feed and clothe German orphans and refugees. Fifteen years later, they came to Scotts Run to do the same thing. When the Quakers moved some of the unemployed to small farms where they could plant gardens and tend small livestock, Eleanor heard about it. She invited executive secretary Clarence Picket to Hyde Park for a briefing. Once in office, Franklin Roosevelt wrote the details of the Quaker resettlement program into the National Industrial Recovery Act, establishing an agency within the Department of the Interior with a budget of $25 million. They called it the Division of Subsistence Homesteads. Its most visible project was the community of Arthurdale, West Virginia, located fifteen miles southeast of Scotts Run.27
As he cooperated with industry using his right hand, Franklin Roosevelt organized plan B alternatives with his left. The fact that 30 percent of working-age Americans were eating in soup kitchens and sleeping in public parks emboldened critics who argued that capitalism had failed to deliver the most basic human needs. The Division of Subsistence Homesteads attracted antimodern social engineers, some of the same people who had supported back-to-the-land experiments for years and endorsed the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which freed American Indians from government coercion and promoted tribal authority and self-governing communities. Small-scale self-sufficiency was riding high in the highest offices of government. Stated one report by the division, “In the pinch of distress, we lose faith in the bright new world … we seek to escape our ills by a return to the land, to ‘nature,’ or to an older tradition.” A typescript report prepared for a small circle around the president announced, “A Partial Pattern for the New American Way of Life … from which dozens of similar communities may be founded.” For a moment, the president of the United States contemplated the garden as a viable mode of production.28
The Division of Subsistence Homesteads was among the most controversial relief programs of the New Deal. Gardens for the poor did not exactly give industrial capitalism a resounding endorsement. Would homesteads liberate settlers from wages and taxes? Did subsistence gardens represent a rejection of the division of labor and the economic citizenship that Alexander Hamilton tried to impose in the 1790s? Would gardening sustain the poor by itself, or would it be linked to factory wages? Would homesteaders escape exploitation under the largesse of the nation-state? The Roosevelts and a coterie of social engineers debated these questions.
They arrived at an awkward hybrid, a policy that attempted to fuse the two versions of the captured garden. In a sense, the government version looked nearly identical to that advocated by Owen and other reformers who rejected Malthusian malevolence. There is something of a response to Malthus in section 208 of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which allocated the initial funds, “to provide for aiding the redistribution of the overbalance of population in industrial centers,” toward the humanitarian resettlement of stranded workers. The project’s chief economist, Milburn Wilson, confronted the same criticism Owen did a century before—that Arthurdale represented “a retreat from the age of machinery,” a regression to an earlier stage. Wilson flipped the criticism just as Owen did. He called homesteads for the poor the essence of “a new high standard of living.”29
But the plan included another component. There would be no experiment in agrarian autonomy. The garden would be wedded to the factory. The residents of Arthurdale would grow their own food when they weren’t assembling vacuum cleaners for General Electric. Some planners objected. One insisted, “Private profit will endure just as long as that which produces profit contributes to social progress.” The planners must have felt pressured to monetize the labor of homesteaders, to keep them connected to the urban industrial world. Eleanor endorsed the factory. She had committed herself to Arthurdale. She visited often, picked appliances for the homes, and promoted the plan. “The idea is that families engaged in subsistence farming consume their own garden products … [and] shall be situated near enough to an industry for one member of the family to be employed.” She believed that wages would ensure that residents had money to buy “the things which the families must have and cannot produce for themselves.” Whether the model represented dependency or benevolence is not an easy judgment. What does seem clear is that accommodating General Electric undermined Arthurdale from the start.30
Arthurdale opened in 1934. It took shape hurriedly. Fifty prefabricated cottages arrived, but the houses didn’t fit the foundations prepared for them. The planners didn’t consult the people who would live and labor in the community about what they wanted to plant. Instead, crews spent days installing grapevines, weaving the tendrils over trellises to create a lived-in look for photographers. “Planning was done for, rather than with, prospective homesteaders,” wrote a journalist. “Perfection rather than reality became the goal.” But the bargain with General Electric caused more lasting damage. The company had no desire to enter into a social experiment and made sure that it would profit no matter what happened to Arthurdale. The deal GE worked out with the government had them paying forty homesteaders (at a time) 35 cents an hour, 36 hours a week, for 36 weeks a year to work in their newly built factory. The annual income came out to $450. But these wages did not fall into the homesteaders’ pockets free and clear. Each household returned $180 of their earnings to pay for the factory.
In other words, they started out in debt. Two socialists, Harold Ware and Webster Powell, pilloried the plan in the pages of Harper’s Magazine. “The subsistence worker has to help pay for the factory in which he works to get a subsistence wage.” That was troubling enough, but it contributed to an overall arithmetic that never worked in favor of the homesteaders. Subtracting the originating debt from income left each household $270 for dishes, clothing, tools, shoes, transportation—everything but food for a year. Any family that couldn’t cover its costs had to send someone away from Arthurdale in search of work. Even stranger, the factory only employed homesteaders on a revolving basis, meaning that households earned no wages at all for part of the year. This is why the designers placed such emphasis on food production. It had to underwrite everything—the survival of the residents, the participation of the corporation, and the cost of the factory. The planners put the residents in debt and then asked them to get out from under it with part-time work at 35 cents an hour.31
Arthurdale ran into every species of trouble. General Electric pulled out. The residents briefly made faucets. Then the government proposed that they make equipment for the Postal Service. But Congress killed the idea, some members calling it “socialistic.” The term of the original funding under the National Industrial Recovery Act expired, after which the president funded it by executive order. Residents expected too much over and ab
ove what a garden and a cow could provide. The USDA concluded in 1942 that homesteaders wanted “the security of employment and the adequacy of income which a properly functioning economy could offer them, but which the subsistence homesteads alone could not.” Residents in other settlements complained of “broken promises,” but some of their frustration came from unrealistic expectations.32
Pressure against the Division of Subsistence Homesteads mounted under intense controversy from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. Harold Ware and Webster Powell condemned the model as a dictatorial attempt to isolate potentially rebellious workers and harness them to factories. The authors compared Arthurdale to similar settlements maintained by Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. Hitler seems to have inherited a preexisting project of the German state to settle the unemployed in cottages. Ware and Powell reported that “Hitler hopes to increase his food supply, reduce unemployment, and keep satisfied (and ready for war) what otherwise might become a restless part of the population.” They pinned this same “transmutation of discontent” on the Roosevelts. They further accused the administration of “planning for permanent poverty,” or in other words, of collecting the unemployed in “self-liquidating” communities, in which the indigent provided their own relief while suppressing wages for other workers.33