The Ordnung specifies that members may not own or operate a motor vehicle, hold a driver’s license, or lend money to someone to purchase a car. Drivers may be hired when necessary. The definition of “necessity” is, of course, a slippery one. Members sometimes accuse one another of hiring drivers for unnecessary trips. Many businessmen have standing agreements with drivers who provide transportation on a daily basis.
Today Amish taxis, operated by non-Amish neighbors and members of other Plain churches, transport Amish to auctions, job sites, funerals, weddings, and family gatherings. Many of these taxi arrangements developed over the years as acts of neighborly kindness. Dozens of taxi operations function as full-time and part-time businesses. Indeed, according to one Amish woman, “We jest among ourselves that if we continue to prosper, half of North America will soon be Amish and the rest will be taxi drivers.”
In 1977 the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission (PUC) cracked down on non-Amish taxi owners who were charging fees for their services without holding a common carrier license. An abrupt crackdown on five drivers at an Amish funeral angered both the Amish and non-Amish. Responding to pressure from bus companies who could not compete with the informal taxis, a PUC spokesman justified the enforcement: “We’ve seen this thing grow like a cancer. At least a hundred people must be doing this illegally and we are going to try and cut it out. It’s a thorn in our side.”11 After fourteen months of hearings and negotiations, the PUC agreed to issue taxi permits to about forty drivers who transported the Amish. The special permits allow the drivers to charge fees for their service as long as they only transport people whose beliefs and religious convictions prevent them from owning or operating a vehicle.12
Amish concessions to car use were prompted by several factors: the collapse of the rural trolley system, the birth of Amish settlements in other counties, Amish expansion in Lancaster County, and the rapid growth of Amish businesses. Carpentry crews need transportation to construction sites, cabinet makers sometimes travel to nearby states to install “Amish kitchens,” and manufacturing establishments must find ways to transport their products.
Many Amish businesses have a non-Amish employee who provides a car or truck for company use. The employee owns the vehicle, and the proprietor pays mileage. The employee may be an unbaptized son of the owner or, more frequently, a member of another Plain group that permits automobiles. The mileage rate pays for the vehicle’s initial cost and maintenance and perhaps a marginal profit. Amish businessmen often have agreements with other non-Amish neighbors or commercial truckers to transport their products. In some cases, business owners have made “sweetheart” loans to employees, enabling them to purchase vehicles for company use. Most bishops have forbidden such “under the table” deals that amount to de facto ownership.
THE AUTOMOBILE AGREEMENT
The solution to the car riddle lies in the fine print of the public agreement negotiated with modernity. In brief, the Amish vehicle policy prohibits holding a driver’s license as well as owning, driving, and financing a vehicle. With the exception of Sundays and obvious frivolities, hiring drivers and riding in vehicles is permitted. A fascinating settlement, the bargain balances the tug of traditional values with the press of economic survival and convenience. The compromise controls the detrimental effects of the car, yet allows access to it for business and building community.
The agreement acknowledges that car ownership cannot be entrusted to the individual. If ownership were permitted, the church would lose control of the car. Ownership would intensify the pace and complexity of Amish life. Parents and youth alike would spend more time away from home at meetings and worldly amusements. Car ownership, in the long run, would not only erode the social base of the small face-to-face community, but it would also destroy the local church district—the cornerstone of social organization. The limitations of horse travel hold the local community together; uncontrolled access to cars would fragment and scatter it. The car, in short, would drain social capital out of the social system.
Hiring a taxi is inconvenient: arrangements must be made, and drivers paid. Amish taxis provide transportation, but not automatic mobility. One yields to the schedule, itinerary, fees, and mood of the driver. One Amishman explained: “When we need a driver, we call the ones who are less expensive or who we enjoy riding with. Oftentimes we must call as many as a half a dozen before we can find one who is not busy. When we want to go on a long trip, there are quite a few things to consider, such as: Does he drive carefully; does he gladly go where we want to go; does he allow us to give our small children something to eat such as pretzels or crackers to keep them quiet during the long drive; is he a pleasant, courteous driver who charges a decent fee.”13
In forging the car deal, the Amish gave up autonomy and independence, but some benefits come with the compromise. By permitting the use of cars, they are able to travel to distant places and conduct business in a kind of door-to-door limousine service without the typical costs of purchase and maintenance and without driving fatigue. In this way, the Amish have retained the virtues of simplicity as well as the convenience of modernity. It is a way of using modern technology without being enslaved by it or allowing it to destroy community. The use of motor vehicles has become essential for the fiscal survival of Amish industries. Moreover, it also links families and friends living in other counties and states.
English drivers wait while an Amish construction crew pumps gas in their trucks before traveling to a construction site.
Traveling by van also fosters community; it builds social capital. As with other things, the Amish do it together. Traveling in groups not only reduces costs but also builds community. Van loads of Amish are, in essence, portable subcommunities, keeping the Amish world alive on daily jaunts to work and on visits to relatives in far-flung settlements. They are traveling at high speeds but traveling with like-minded others in the context of community.
Controlled use of the car is a way of keeping faith with tradition while giving just enough freedom to maneuver in the larger society. The Amish believe that by turning the use of cars over to individuals, they would quicken the pace of their life, erase geographical limits, weaken social control, deplete their social capital, and eventually ruin their community. The rejection of self-propelled mobility encourages people to work near home, which helps to hold the family together. Thus the Amish took the car, the charm of modernity, on their own terms and struck a deal that enabled them to use it to enhance their community. It is a cultural compromise that baffles Moderns who miss its fine print.
THE SOD PACKERS
Tractors are standard equipment on Amish farms today, but they remain at the barn and rarely go out to the fields. Horses and mules pull plows and other machinery across the fertile soil. Why would anyone purchase a tractor and then keep it at the barn? How did the tractor riddle emerge?
Banning the car was an easy decision for the Amish. The tractor, however, was a different story. Tractors support agriculture. They enhance productivity, ease work, increase efficiency, and speed up planting and harvest. An attractive product from the merchants of progress, tractors could not be easily scuttled like the car. Tractors tantalized and enticed Amish farmers in the 1920s, 1940s, and again in the 1960s. Although there is little evidence that members of the church drove cars, they were indeed driving tractors, not only near their barns, but in their fields as well. But that is getting ahead of our story.
By the late 1880s large steam engines operated threshing machines on many Lancaster County farms. Small gasoline engines were widely used by the turn of the twentieth century to saw wood, grind feed, pump water, and power washing machines. Like their neighbors, the Amish owned and operated steam and gasoline engines and used horses to pull machinery in their fields.
In 1906, the International Harvester Company built a single-cylinder tractor, and by 1910, a non-Amish farmer on the eastern edge of Lancaster County had purchased one of the clumsy contraptions.14 Boasting the power of twenty horses, some
of the early tractors weighed as much as six tons. Due to labor shortages and the demands of World War I, all-purpose tractors were not available until the mid-1920s. The first tractors were awkward monstrosities, ill-suited for the modest farms of eastern Pennsylvania. Their wide steel wheels packed the soil, and they were difficult to maneuver in small fields. But, surprisingly, some Amish began using them.
In the early 1920s, there were probably a dozen or more Amish farmers experimenting with these sod packers in their fields.15 According to oral tradition, Moses King took his newly purchased tractor out in the field and began harrowing. The dealer who had sold the tractor forgot to explain how to stop it, so King simply drove it in circles until it ran out of gas. On several occasions, tractors were overturned by inexperienced Amish drivers. In about 1920, Ike Zook was using a noisy tractor to plow. His neighbor, Deacon Jonas Beiler, irked by the clanging noise, thought the contraption was ridiculous. So according to oral tradition, Deacon Beiler tied his horses to a post, walked across the road, and told Zook: “Now you have to get rid of this stupid thing, I’m offended by it.” Beiler was not only the deacon of Zook’s congregation, but he was also the brother of stern Bishop Ben Beiler. Zook was soon “called on the carpet” and asked to confess before the church. But liking his tractor more than the church, Zook left the Amish for the Peachey church, which permitted tractors without any qualms.
About the same time, two ministers visiting Amish settlements in the Midwest discovered that tractors were not being used there, even on large Amish farms. Upon their return, the ministers concluded that if sod packers were not needed on big farms in the Midwest, they certainly were not necessary in Lancaster County. However, the tractor experiment continued until 1923, when tractors were finally banned from Amish fields.
THE TRACTOR RECALL
Several factors tightened the Amish tractor policy. First, the wayward Peachey church permitted tractors in the field, a sure sign of decadence. Second, the early tractors were quite expensive and impractical. Horses were clearly advantageous. Although horses required feeding, they were easier to turn in the field, cheaper to buy, and did not pack the soil. Moreover, they provided free fertilizer. Third, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Amish leaders had already blessed a host of new farm equipment—mechanical manure spreaders, hay loaders, tobacco planters, and silos. In fact, the Amish were often the first ones in a community to buy the new inventions as they came on the market.16 Was not the use of tractors going just a bit too far? Fourth, Bishop Ben Beiler believed that the tractor seemed dangerously close to the car, which was already taboo. A nephew remembers the bishop saying he was afraid “that the tractor would lead to the car.” The early tractors did not have rubber tires, but they were self-propelled, mobile units—suspiciously similar to the car. Given all of these concerns, tractors were recalled from Amish fields in about 1923.
Discussions about tractors quieted down in the late 1920s. During the Depression, horse feed was cheap, and tractors were too expensive for farmers anyway. But by the late 1930s and early 1940s, general purpose tractors on rubber tires were available. They were handy for cultivating crops even in small fields. Such tractors were appearing on virtually every non-Amish farm in the early 1940s. In a single decade (1940–50), the number of workhorses in Lancaster was cut in half.
Several Amish farmers were lured by these improved tractors for fieldwork. Clearly superior to horses, the new tractors were lighter, cheaper, and more versatile. The bishops could no longer condemn them as impractical. But in the judgment of the older bishops, the 1923 distinction between barn and field was a wise line, and they stood firm. So once again, in the early 1940s, tractors were recalled from Amish fields. Young farmers were soon on their knees in front of the church promising to “put their tractors away” and vowing to stay in touch with nature, tradition, community, and God.
The issue was not entirely settled, however. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a wide array of new tractor-drawn machinery was being manufactured. The new equipment—hay mowers, hay crushers, grain combines, hay balers, and corn harvesters—required a powerful engine and was heavy for horses to pull. Horse-drawn machinery was becoming scarce as non-Amish farmers shifted to tractors. So the tractor became tempting once again. Trying to strike a balance between tradition and efficiency, some Amish mechanics built a power unit that soon claimed the nickname “Amish tractor.”
The power unit consisted of a gasoline engine on a four-wheel cart that could power various implements. It functioned, in essence, as a homemade tractor. The power unit was pulled, of course, by the symbolic horses, for as one farmer said in jest, “We need the horses to steer it.” Moreover, the ingenious young farmers were staying within a senior bishop’s rule of thumb: “If you can pull it with horses, you can have it.” But the old sage probably never imagined that horses would someday pull such modern, powerful, and shiny machines—forage harvesters, combines, and haybines. Even younger bishops were sure that the power unit was only a step away from a tractor. Furthermore, the mocking laughter of Mennonite neighbors was embarrassing.
The bishops were not fooled by the new contraption, and they held to the old line: no tractors in the field. The line has remained taut ever since.
THE TRACTOR RIDDLE
Why did the church not outlaw tractors completely? Why permit this worldly contraption to sit around the barn? Why play with temptation? When asked that question, a bishop said: “I don’t know. I can’t answer that. I still think if we don’t want to go with the world altogether, why we better use horses instead of going along with the modern way.” Although using a tractor in the field simply feels “too worldly” to this bishop, there were good reasons for drawing the line that way in the 1920s.
Gasoline engines were widely used on Amish farms by World War I. Feed silos, thirty feet high, jutted up by Amish barns. Hefty power was needed to blow chopped silage to the top of the silos in order to fill them. The gasoline engine and the steam engine were used for such high-power demands around the barn—grinding, threshing, and blowing silage. Several Amishmen owned steam-powered threshing rigs and harvested wheat on neighboring farms. In fact, Bishop Beiler’s own brother had a steam engine for his threshing rig. To outlaw tractors around the barn would have been a step backward, one that surely would have ignited a political ruckus in the church. In essence, limiting tractors to the barn amounted to freezing history on the farm, drawing a line that simply conformed to customary practice. Such a policy allowed the silage to blow and the wheat to be threshed so that things could go on much as they had before.
The ban on field tractors and other self-propelled equipment that crystallized in about 1923 remains firm today. The fear that tractors would lead to cars is the most frequently cited reason for not using them in the field. Amishmen tell numerous stories of progressive churches in other localities that permitted tractors in the field. “Before you know it, they put rubber tires on the tractors, and the next thing they are driving them to town for groceries. And as the next generation grows up, they can’t understand the difference between using a tractor for trips to town and a car. And so they get a car.”17
If tractors had been manufactured before cars, might the Amish be driving them in their fields today? Possibly. But there are other compelling reasons for banning tractors from the fields as well. They displace farm workers. In contrast to Moderns, who seek to save labor at every turn, the Amish have always welcomed work as the heartbeat of their community. The church was anchored on the farm where work, like a magnet, pulled everyone together. A tractor might save labor, but in Amish eyes that spelled trouble. With more and more labor-saving gadgets, there might not be enough work to go around for all the children. Leisure, the devil’s workshop, would run rampant. Worse yet, the loss of home work would lead to factory work and unwanted ties to the outside world. So in these ways, a labor-saving device like a tractor could threaten not only the family but the church itself.
A tractor
provides power to blow green corn to the top of a silo. Tractor wheels and farm wagon wheels are steel; hand-pulled wagons and carts may have rubber wheels.
The use of the tractor conspired against community in other ways as well. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, local farmers, Amish and non-Amish alike, worked closely together in large crews, especially at planting and harvest times. It was hard manual work. But it was good work—communal work—as the community pitted itself against the forces of nature. Self-propelled tractors would not only enable individuals to work fast and independently, but they would also destroy the neighborhood work crews that in bygone days had joined together to harvest crops. The tractor was a great labor saver but also a sure way to lose social capital and the joy of collective work.
Insisting on horses and mules in the field was also a way of perpetuating a horse subculture. Family members would continue to learn about the care and feeding of horses. Related occupations such as blacksmiths and harness makers would survive to support the horse culture—an essential infrastructure if the Amish were to keep the horse and buggy on the road. With only a driving horse in the barn, the entire horse culture as well as its supporting industries might collapse. Thus, keeping horses in the field helped indirectly to keep them on the road.18
The line drawn between barn power and field power in 1923 appears today as a perplexing riddle, but it was a sensible compromise. With tractor power at the barn, silos could be filled, grain ground, and wheat threshed as always, thus avoiding an economic setback and a political brawl. Furthermore, the bargain provided some breathing space, a time-out to observe the consequences of the new contraptions more carefully. The arrangement has served the Amish well over time. As new power needs developed around the barn, the tractor was handy and helpful.19 Today modern steel-wheeled tractors power large feed grinders, spin ventilating fans, run manure pumps, blow silage, operate hydraulic systems, and power irrigation pumps on Amish farms. They power all sorts of equipment from their power takeoff shaft, belt pulley, or hydraulic system. Tractors are also used to pull stumps out of fence rows and milk trucks out of snowdrifts. Thus, while horses protect Amish identity in the field, tractors at the barn help to boost agricultural productivity.
The Riddle of Amish Culture Page 25