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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Story of the Agrarians
  • Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:49:00 -0600


This account of the Agrarian Movements of the 1930’s is unfamiliar to
many, but given our focus it bears learning about. Those of us here are on
the cutting edge of a new agrarian movement being brought about, not by
joining something, but simply through our individual efforts to survive and
live more sustainably and sensibly. It's not about some idle nostalgia but
struggling to find a good life amid the disasters of today and those yet
to come. (Personally I'm not fighting "Leviathan", just working around or
outside it, refusing to support it as far as possible.)


paul tradingpost@lobo.net

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
--Henry David Thoreau
-------------

Can Leviathan Be Tamed?: The Story of the Agrarians*
http://www.profam.org/pub/fia/fia_1512.htm#Can%20Leviathan%20Be%20Tamed?

*From the Regional Meeting of the Philadelphia Society, New Orleans,
Louisiana, September 20-21, 2001.

How did the Agrarian Movements of the 1930’s, Northern as well as
Southern, fare when they faced the same question in their day that has now
been posed again: "Can Leviathan Be Tamed?"

The economic-political goal of the agrarians and their
chestertonian-distributist allies was creation of the property state: one
built on the widest possible diffusion of ownership of productive property,
starting with land. Their vision was of a robust countryside composed of
small subsistence farms with "happy farmers" (that’s John Crowe
Ransom’s phrase), jovial and fertile wives, and plenty of rosy-cheeked
children. One distributist writer described this ideal way of life in this
manner: "A comfortable home in which to labor and play, with trees and
grass and flowers and skies and stars; a [vegetable] garden; fruit trees;
some fowl; some [goats and a cow]; some bees; and three big dogs to keep
the salesmen out–and I, at least, have time for love, for children, for a
few friends, and for the work I like to do." Villages and small towns would
dot the countryside as well, where local shops would craft the necessary
machine-made goods for local consumption, and merchants would provide those
few things–such as coffee–that the farms could not supply themselves.
Modest cities would be centers of regional identity, where the poets and
writers and musicians growing out of folk culture would gather to celebrate
their special place on earth, to publish, and to perform.

The enemy of the agrarian vision in the 1930’s–the leviathan that they
most feared–was not the centralizing State, per se; broadly, the enemy
was industrialism, the spread of industrial organization and its
premises–the pursuit of efficiency, a highly refined division of labor,
the steady substitution of capital for labor–into every corner of life.
More specifically, the enemy was what they labeled finance capital, which
Herbert Agar defined as "the barbarism based on monopoly," a system of
"commercial buccaneers" who built their wealth by plundering the people.
These were hard words.

Notably, the agrarians argued that this economic result was not the
consequence of natural historic change. Rather, they saw the giant
joint-stock corporations of the early 20th century as the consequence of a
grant by the State of legal privileges, ones denied to families and
individuals. These privileges included: limited liability; perpetual life,
protecting the corporation from the hazards of death and inheritance taxes,
to which family enterprises were subject; and the ability to issue stocks,
bonds, and debt instruments, giving the corporations huge advantages in
raising capital. They saw large corporations as tools of economic
centralization: they leveled small-shops, family business, local producers,
and regional diversity. This, in turn, served the process of political
centralization, indeed, making it easy. The Northern agrarian Ralph Borsodi
called Articles of Incorporation "veritable letters of marque," granting
corporate leaders immunity from their criminal acts: "the charter which the
state grants to the organizer of a corporation is a commission to embark
upon the adventure of doing the investing public with impunity."

Again, hard words. Of course, such charges carried a certain force in the
early 1930’s. The abandoned hulks of many great factories and the
unemployed millions standing in relief lines seemed to testify to the false
promises of finance capital, which was, in turn, the consequence of the
incestuous relationship between "big money" and the State.

This left the Agrarians facing a problem, however: the work of Finance
Capital had already been done. The 48 states had issued thousands of
corporate charters over the last 100+ years; vast numbers of farmers had
lost their land to banks, insurance companies, and large corporations; many
people were still on the land–the farm population of 1935 was still
larger than it had been in 1900, about 30 million–but tenants now
outnumbered owners: How could the regime of small property be restored?

For some, the reluctant answer was to turn to leviathan itself, to the
central State, and use it now to undo the damage done earlier. Phrased
another way, the necessary task was to employ the central State to rebuild
a traditional order already corrupted by the earlier corporate project of
the various states.

Indeed, this is how we might view some parts of the New Deal of the
1930’s: as an attempt at traditionalist reconstruction through federal
agency. Most modern conservatives, of course, scoff at the very idea: the
Federal government can never get things right (except, it seems, in
national security affairs); the New Deal was radical, socialist, a
failure–opinions backed by a fair amount of evidence.

Nevertheless, a more charitable reading of the New Deal experience suggests
that the Agrarians may have made some progress during the 1930’s in their
admittedly difficult task. For example, the Subsistence Homestead program,
initially part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, was a remarkable
experiment in rural renewal and one partly inspired by the Southeran
Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. Between 1934 and 1940, about 200
federal homestead projects took form, in all corners of the country. New
homes set on 4- to 10-acre plots, large family gardens, chicken coops, and
family cows were the common features of these places. Photos of smiling,
rosy-cheeked children resettled from urban or rural slums in these lovely
garden homes and fields filled the government reports. Beyond this
propaganda, it appears that some of the projects really did work such as
Granger Homesteads in Iowa, informally guided by the Agrarian Catholic
Priest, Luigi Ligutti.

Alternately, consider the Tobacco Allotment program, also instituted in the
New Deal years. To this day, the contemporary agrarian writer Wendell Berry
insists that this strategy of production control "has worked well. In my
part of the country, it has ensured the survival of thousands of small
farmers for more than half a century."

The agrarian project rested on another, usually implicit, requirement.
Rebuilding a decentralist order in America, one resting on a healthy
regionalism and one requiring time to work out, meant that America must
turn inward. Foreign adventures and foreign wars must be avoided, for they
would fuel and guide leviathan in the wrong ways, and threaten those gains
that had already been achieved. Herbert Agar caught the spirit of this
agrarian need in his 1935 book, Land of the Free: "It is our job to save a
corner of the world from the despotisms that encroach on Europe." The best
traits in American life were not those copied from the old continent, "but
the traits we have freely adapted, or else originated–the traits which
are our own." Where regional cultures in America–the South, the Middle
West, the Far West–were signs of "a new affirmation of life," world
cities such as New York and Chicago were corrupted by "cosmopolitanism" and
"stricken with sterility."

Indeed, as war spread over Europe in 1939, many of the agrarians logically
sympathized with the America First campaign: holding that the U.S.A. should
stay out of the conflict. As Father Ligutti, newly appointed executive
secretary of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, explained in
early 1941: "If we are to maintain [the American way] we must continue and
develop the works for social and economic reconstruction within our beloved
land and we must not go out in battle array to save periodically our
democracy."

Global war was unpredictable, however: the leviathans of Central Europe and
the Asian coast had their own intentions; and America wound up in their
way.

It was the Fall of France and the Battle of Britain in 1940 that led
Herbert Agar to abandon his earlier arguments and to favor American entry
into the war. At first, he tried to cast Britain’s struggle as a kind of
agrarian conflict: the British were fighting "for a chance for decent men
and women to live their lives without cruelty.... They [want] to be left
alone to tend their gardens...." Where England was deindustrializing,
Germany represented "total industrialism on the march."

Other agrarians still remained deeply distrustful of Leviathan at War. The
ever faithful Donald Davidson warned in early 1941 that American entry into
the war could only result in a "highly industrialized, centralized, and
socialistic order." Responding to Agar’s call for intervention, Davidson
continued: "I should have thought agrarians and decentralists would oppose
our entry into the conflict when such, no matter what results might be
achieved in Europe, would probably be ruinous to their hopes for a healthy
reconstruction in America."

Yet later in the year came Pearl Harbor, which in the space of an hour
closed off the debate. Agrarian reconstruction would be shelved; leviathan
must be unleashed, for total war.

Some writers, gathered around the distributist/agrarian journal Free
America, tried to find "decentralist straws" in the new gale of
centralization. Lewis Mumford, for example, argued that wartime social
planning "must...establish every new industry, every new highway, every new
housing development" in new "decentralized" suburbs. Another writer wanted
to "Decentralize the War Effort–Now!" by spreading federal agencies
around the country and writing war propaganda on a region-specific basis:
as in, I suppose, "Buy bonds, y’all." Stringfellow Barr wanted to create
a world republic, arguing that "decentralists and agrarians ought most
surely to be in the ranks of those who have discovered the TNT concealed in
national sovereignty." Alas, these arguments actually testified to the
frailty of the term "decentralism" as a meaningful intellectual construct
and the shutting down of the real agrarian project.

In a wonderful book entitled Kinship With the Land: Regionalist Thought in
Iowa, 1894-1942, the late E. Bradford Burns describes the end of
regionalism, agrarianism, and a distinctive folk culture in one Midwestern
state: "After December 1941," he writes, "one national goal exacted the
full attention of everyone: to defeat the Axis power in Europe and
Asia....The war scattered the sons and daughters of Iowa to faraway
places...[All] Iowans lifted their sights to global horizons, and they,
thus far, have found it difficult to focus internally again."

The more thoughtful agrarians simply retreated from the political stage.
Their fear of the domestic consequences of war had no prospects for a
hearing after December 7. In the great push for victory, American farms
would be quickly mechanized and consolidated; talk of subsistence
homesteads and horse-drawn plows suddenly seemed to be sentimental
foolishness. Between 1941 and 1945, a full quarter of the American farm
population would flow into military service or defense work in the
cities–most never to return. The great emptying of the American
countryside had begun. Finance Capitalists, the so-called "Plutocrats" of
the 1930’s, were transformed almost overnight into widely admired
captains of industry, the efficient mobilizers of America’s productive
might, the architects of victory.

Some of the agrarians–notably Agar and John Crowe Ransom–would
repudiate their agrarian work. Others simply drifted away to other concerns
in life. But a few–such as Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, Frank Owsley,
and Father Ligutti–tended the small agrarian flame, turning toward more
literary or scholarly projects, or to a focus on life after the war.
Sometimes, I suspect, the agrarian flame became very private, residing only
in their hearts.

Leviathan had been loosed, in all its power, to fight a global war, to
eliminate the great evils of that time; it must have its Day. The remaining
agrarians would wait for a later day, after the Fury had passed, when some
imaginations might once again be inspired by the vision of a well-settled
countryside full of happy, rosy-cheeked children.







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