Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Marty Kraft <martyk@allspecies.org>]

Paul

I just read this info on the Bioregional list. I'm glad that you posted  
it here. I was thinking of doing it myself.

Marty
On Sep 14, 2006, at 10:49 AM, Tradingpost wrote:

> 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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