by Steven Stoll
7. “Kansas Farmers and Illinois Dairymen,” Atlantic Monthly 44, December 1879, 717–25; Mock, “Drought and Precipitation Fluctuations in the Great Plains During the Late Nineteenth Century,” 37.
8. Fite, The Farmers’ Frontier, 104–105.
9. The Iowa State Register, quoted in Ostler, Prairie Populism, 27; Veblen, “The Price of Wheat Since 1867,” graph I; Fite, The Farmers’ Frontier, 106–108. The grade in this example was No. 2 spring wheat.
10. Fifth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor of the State of Minnesota (St. Paul, 1895–1896), 121–31. On short-term mortgages and drought, see Ostler, Prairie Populism, 18–19. On falling prices and general conditions on the Plains, see Hargreaves, Dry Farming on the Northern Great Plains, 4, 9–10. Polk, Agricultural Depression. Its Causes—the Remedy, 10–11.
11. Fite, The Farmers’ Frontier, 110–11.
12. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 7–9; Norris, The Pit, 129.
13. Kellie, “Stand Up for Nebraska,” in Kellie, A Prairie Populist, 129. Kellie’s emphasis. The Homestead Act institutionalized sweat equity, but populists wanted the idea extended to farmers in debt. For anger over the demise of small farms, see Polk, Agricultural Depression. Its Causes—the Remedy, 21.
14. Sanders, Roots of Reform, 7–8.
15. Wells says: “As a further part of such a system, it is claimed that the farm must be devoted to a specialty or a few specialties, on the ground that it would be almost as fatal to success to admit mixed farming as it would be to attempt the production of several kinds of diverse manufactures under one roof and establishment.” Wells, Recent Economic Changes, 462. The number of farms over 1,000 acres in Kansas increased 349 percent between 1880 and 1890 and 237 percent in the next decade. Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, Volume V, Agriculture, 82.
16. Van Dyke, “The Red River of the North,” 806; Dondlinger, The Book of Wheat, 75–77, 89, 99; Wells, Recent Economic Changes, 462. Additional sources: Fargo Board of Trade, Green Pastures and Vast Wheat Fields; White, “The Business of a Wheat Farm.”
17. This and the previous paragraph depend on Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, especially C. Van Woodward’s forward; Special Field Order, No. 15 (January 16, 1865); New York Times, October 8, 1862, Trinkley and Hacker, “Archeological Manifestations of the ‘Port Royal Experiment’ at Mitchelville, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.” On African-American farmers after the Civil War, I consulted Smith, “Black Agrarianism and the Foundations of Black Environmental Thought”; Franklyn, “Grendada, Naipaul, and Ground Provision,” 71; Foner, Nothing But Freedom, 25, 40–45; Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 241; Schlotterbeck, “The Internal Economy of Slavery in Rural Piedmont Virginia”; Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe,” 93.
18. The prevalence of planting in small spaces among freed people showed up on the first page of Harper’s Weekly (May 21, 1870) in an illustration of freed people planting a garden in front of a cabin, “A Spring Scene Near Richmond, Virginia.”
19. Andrews, The South Since the War, 100; Otto, “Reconsidering the Southern ‘Hillbilly,’” 325; Petty, Standing Their Ground, 35–36, 41.
20. A Georgia landowner said, “The stock law will divide the people … into classes similar to the patricians and plebeians of ancient Rome.” This quotation and others in the present and previous paragraphs I owe to Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism, 241, 248–50. “An Act to Better Protect the Lands and Farming Interests of the 741st District, G. M., Known as Reynolds District of Georgia, Taylor County, and for other purposes,” 315. Andrews, The South Since the War, 100, 206–207.
21. Most of this paragraph is derived from Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence, 50–51. Second Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1886, 31.
22. “Given the litany of disadvantages they confronted,” writes the historian Adrienne Monteith Petty about North Carolina, “it is a wonder that there was growth in the number of small farm owners at all.” Petty, Standing Their Ground, 41. Also see Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 138–41.
23. Thoreau, Walden, 3–4, 58–59, 170–75; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 50–51. Both quoted the same passage from the Gospel of Matthew (6:19). “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.”
24. Thoreau, Walden, 214–15; Gross, “The Great Bean Field Hoax,” 495–96.
25. Emerson, “Farming,” Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, 135; “Wealth,” Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5, 67.
26. Emerson, “American Scholar,” Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, 83. Emerson’s emphasis.
27. Emerson, “Wealth,” 122.
28. George Inness, Short Cut, Watchung Station, New Jersey (1883), Philadelphia Museum of Art.
29. Marx, Machine in the Garden, 9. For an example and a critique of this book, see Noble, Death of a Nation.
30. Interpretations of Lackawanna Valley are abundant. See Marx, Machine in the Garden, 220, and Novak, Nature and Culture, 149. (Novak calls it “one of the most puzzling pictures in American art … a shocking picture.”) Williams, Deforesting the Earth, 264.
31. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind; Farland, “Modernist Versions of Pastoral,” 907; Dugdale, The Jukes.
32. Allen, “Mountain Passes of the Cumberland,” 569. For another description, see Graffenried, “The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mills.”
33. Allen quoted in Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Minds, 27–29.
34. Farland, “Modernist Versions of Pastoral,” passim. I learned of all the sources in this paragraph from Farland’s remarkable article.
35. Among the only anthropological studies of consanguinity in Appalachia—a survey of 140 years of marriage records taken from four counties in eastern Kentucky—concludes that rates of marriage between people of the same last name “do not seem extreme enough to justify labeling intermarriage as something unique or particularly common to the region.” (Incest has not been particularly characteristic of the poor or ignorant. DNA taken from the mummies of Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty reveals that the parents of King Tutankhamun were siblings.) Marriage between first cousins is not considered incest and is legal in twenty states, including California, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York. It is illegal in West Virginia. Some still slander Appalachia as inbred. In 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney said before the National Press Club that his maternal grandmother descended from someone named Cheney, “So we had Cheneys on both sides of the family—and we don’t even live in West Virginia.” See Tincher, “Night Comes to the Chromosomes”; Lapidos, “How the Mountain State Got a Reputation for Inbreeding”; DeMause, “The Universality of Incest,” 123–64; and Dugdale, The Jukes, 12–14. On incest among royal Egyptians, see Wawass, “King Tut’s DNA.” Life on the periphery of the urban core was replete with domestic violence. For a scholarly treatment, see Daniels and Kennedy, eds., Over the Threshold, Intimate Violence in Early America.
36. The region includes portions of Passaic, Bergen, and Morris counties in New Jersey. One of the only journalistic accounts of the Ramapo people is “A Community of Outcasts,” Appleton’s Journal 7 (March 23, 1872), 325. Also see Cohen, The Ramapo Mountain People.
37. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879), intro.; George Inness, remarks at “The George Dinner: The Great Banquet at the Metropolitan Hotel,” The Standard (January 22, 1890), quoted in Bell, George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy, 136.
38. All the paintings mentioned can be viewed at www.the-athenaeum.org. Quick, George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné, 11. Inness made one written statement about Short Cut. In 1889, the painting belonged to the American Art Association, which entered it in the International Exposition in Paris without informing Inness. It won a gold medal,
but that did not seem to impress the artist: “I positively refused to be represented by a single picture which is not fairly representative of my present work.” Bell, George Inness, 134.
39. The editor and novelist Abraham Cahan noticed the same immigrants leaving their garden homes and flowing toward city work. Eisenberg, Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey, chap. 6; Cahan, “The Russian Jew in America,” 135; “History of Montclair,” www.montclairnjusa.org; Census of the United States (1870 and 1880); Inness, Jr., Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness, 183.
40. “The Virginia Vendetta,” New York Times, November 2, 1889. In the same source, see “Deputy Sheriff Shot: Lawlessness in West Virginia,” February 1, 1891, and “West Virginia Moonshiners Arrested,” May 3, 1893. The urban press accused striking workers in 1877 of “savage cruelty,” comparing them to the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho who destroyed the forces led by George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Richard Slotkin explains the metaphorical use of Indians as enemies in stories about the streets of New York and Chicago, with capital and the police on one side and workers as Indians. See Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 480–83. Waller, Feud, 185, 204–205.
41. Fox, A Mountain Europa; Fox, Blue-grass and Rhododendron, 8–10. In the latter essay, he writes, “Unaffected by other human influences; having no incentive to change, no wish for it, and remaining therefore unchanged … the Southern mountaineer is thus practically the pioneer of the Revolution, the living ancestor of the Modern West.” This paragraph benefited from Wilson, “Felicitous Convergence of Mythmaking and Capital,” 5–31.
42. Wilson, “Felicitous Convergence of Mythmaking and Capital,” 5–31.
43. The Kentuckians, quoted in Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Minds, 74–77. I am in debt to Shapiro for the kernel of this paragraph.
44. USDA Economic Research Service, “Farms, Land in Farms, and Average Acres Per Farm, 1850–2012,” www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery.aspx.
45. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth, 416, 338–39, 453.
46. Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (1932), 199. Tony Waters writes of the Little House series, “The descriptions of Wilder’s parents in Little House on the Prairie resonated particularly well with the peasants I observed in Tanzania who would feed themselves, build houses, hunt, raise animals, and doctor their own illnesses.” Waters, The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture, 22.
47. Johnson, Now in November, 76. Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 124–27.
48. The phrase “Get big or get out” is usually attributed to Butz, but it might have come from a farmer describing the policies of Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson or from Benson himself. See New York Times, October 19, 1958. For recent news on subsidies, see Krotz, “Small Farms and the Farm Subsidies Scandal,” Huffington Post, February 3, 2011, www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-krotz/small-farms-and-the-farm-_b_817869.html. Between 1995 and 2008 farmers in Carroll County, Arkansas, received $8.22 million. Seventy-seven percent of farmers received no money at all. Eighty percent received just $250 a year. Where did it all go? Half of it went to 10 percent of farmers in the country. See James B. Stewart, “Richer Farmers, Bigger Subsidies,” New York Times, July 19, 2013.
49. Ann Marie Lipinski, “A Farming Legacy Wiped Out,” Chicago Tribune, December 11, 1985; Keith Schneider, “Rash of Suicides in Oklahoma Shows That the Crisis on the Farm Goes On,” New York Times, August 17, 1987.
6. The Captured Garden
1. Letter from an anonymous miner in Davy, West Virginia, to the management of the Pocahontas Coal Company (March 11, 1907), in Justus Collins Papers. Bliss, “Coal Industry,” Encyclopedia of Social Reform; Raine, The Land of Saddle-Bags, 237. On the Battle of Blair Mountain, between an army of coal miners and the United States military, see New York Times, September 3, 1921.
2. Raine, The Land of Saddle-Bags, 230, 237, 241.
3. Non-wage work and the role of the household in subsidizing capital is well understood by scholars. Immanuel Wallerstein observes, “Somewhere in a remote village at this moment a non-wageworker is producing a surplus in which, via multiple intermediaries, each one of us is partaking, if to different degrees. But this particular transfer of surplus is well hidden from view because its traces are swallowed up, in the obscure facts of the life cycle of the non-wageworker’s cousin, the wageworker of the peripheral areas.” Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science, 164, and Capitalist World Economy, 127–29. Wilma Dunaway elaborates in “The Centrality of the Household to the Modern World-System,” 1–2. And see Von Werholf, “Production Relations Without Wage Labor and Labor Division by Sex,” and Arrighi and Saul, “Socialism and Economic Development in Tropical Africa,” 149. Mintz, “Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian?” and “Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries.”
4. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 33–35, 161–62. Raine, The Land of Saddle-Bags, 237.
5. Medick, “The Proto-Industrial Family Economy,” 297–300. Medick writes, “The origin of modern capitalism is not in any case to be separated from the specific function, which the ‘ganze Haus’ [entire household] of the small peasant household carried out in the final, critical phase of its development which was at the same time the period of its demise.” Cohen, Women’s Work, 36, quoted in Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, 64. The historian Elizabeth Dore observes of Nicaraguan peasants that their means of livelihood endured in the capitalist periphery, “because it bore most of the costs of survival.” Dore, Myths of Modernity, 20–23. This is a little different from the family wage that Marx describes in Capital. Marx, Capital, vol. I, 518–19, 717–18. For more on the household in the world economy, see Wallerstein and Smith, “Households as an Institution of the World-Economy,” in Smith and Wallerstein, eds., Creating and Transforming Households, 21.
6. One lord is quoted as saying, “The management of his little plot, cheerfully and profitably occupies all the leisure hours of the poor man, his wife and family.” Dawson, Spade Husbandry, 33. Sinclair, Observations on the Means of Enabling a Cottager to Keep a Cow. Emphasis added. Dunaway notes that the cottar relationship existed in Appalachia outside of mining camps in First American Frontier, 104.
7. Kane, Industrial Resources of Ireland, 378; Naper, Suggestions for the More Scientific and General Employment of Agricultural Labourers, 22–23; Henry Fawcett, Manual of Political Economy, 118. “In every crop of potatoes, it may be expected that some will prove too small for the purposes of cooking … and thus after every meal there will be some little refuse for the trough,” cited in “The Poor Man’s Garden,” 178.
8. For early examples of cottars in Pennsylvania, see Clemens and Simler, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” in Work and Labor in Early America, 106–108, quoted in Henretta, Origins of American Capitalism, 257. All sorts of workers’ movements and organizations appeared to fight land monopoly. For the Anti-Rent War in the Hudson River Valley, see Huston, Land and Freedom. On the National Reform Association, see Lause, Young America. One of the founders of the NRA was Thomas Ainge Devyr, a former British Chartist.
9. On Malthus, Marx, and the working class, see Foster, Marx’s Ecology, chap. 3.
10. Owen, “On Spade Husbandry,” 75–77. Also see Dawson, Spade Husbandry, 24. Young, Annals of Agriculture, vol. 1, 60. Owen’s notion took actual form as allotment gardens. According to Jeremy Burchardt, allotments became viable during the Napoleonic wars as a response to food shortages and starvation among the poor. Burchardt, The Allotment Movement in England, 15–16.
11. Still, River of Earth, 50–51. Still spent most of his life on the Dead Mare branch of Little Carr Creek, Knott County, Kentucky.
12. Still, River of Earth, 7–10.
13. Description and quotations from Weise, Grasping at Independence, 216. Miles, “The Common
Lot,” 145. “There is no economic independence for women … Unless a young woman has a father unusually prosperous, she must get married. It is the only economic position open to her.” See Raine, The Land of Saddle-Bags, 226.
14. Letters from Justus Collins to Glen Jean (July 20 and 22, 1905), Justus Collins Papers; Bert Wright, diary (August 16, 1898); Fowler, “Social and Industrial Conditions in the Pocahontas Coal Fields,” 387; American Constitutional Association, Life in a West Virginia Coal Field, 27. The miners had contracted to be paid by the car, but then the company brought in larger cars, thus lowering the cost to the company by reducing the number of cars workers could load in a day. Jones, Autobiography of Mother Jones, 9. Notes the historian Ronald Eller, “By ignoring work schedules, mining routines, and other innovations which worked at cross-purposes with their traditional way of life, they sought to maintain their individualism and freedom from authority.” Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, 167.
15. The term Hungarians for foreign workers seems to have been common. See “From Sewell [West Virginia],” United Mine Workers Journal, June 12, 1902. The quotation from the sociologist comes from “Coal Industry,” Encyclopedia of Social Reform, 303.