Ramp Hollow
Page 5
Holmberg mistook condition for culture. In fact, the Sirionó lived in close proximity with whites during the end of the nineteenth century. They sometimes raided colonial rubber plantations for metal tools. They had absorbed Africans or African-Americans, as well as individuals from other Indian groups. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, they lived in grasslands, before being driven out by smallpox and enemies. White ranchers discovered them and tried to coerce them into peonage. Those who evaded capture lived a furtive existence in the rainforest. This might be why Holmberg found them always on the move, never dwelling long enough for seeds to sprout. Perhaps worst of all, though he knew that smallpox had killed many in the late 1920s, reducing the population to 150 individuals by 1945 from perhaps as many as 2,000, Holmberg learned nothing more about the epidemic. Yet this explains their cultural simplicity better than anything else. Toolmakers died before transmitting their skills to the next generation. Elders and ceremonial leaders vanished, making certain rituals impossible to perform. Groups winnowed to small numbers have simplified divisions of labor.38
Like Holmberg, we will fail to ask the right questions if we are deceived into thinking that some people have no history, that their poverty is inherent, its causes self-evident. Without knowing history, we might conclude that the 1 billion people who live in slums have always picked through garbage for food. Seeing the world without the past would be like visiting a city after a devastating hurricane and declaring that the people there have always lived in ruins.
Here is another example. An economics textbook published in 1985 begins a discussion of “late-developing countries” with this statement: “No one has produced a definitive list of causes of the poverty of the LDCs.” The authors have their own list, including “lack of physical capital, rapid growth of populations, lack of education, unemployment,” and so on. This might look like an entirely plausible set of explanations. But a historian sees their list differently—as effects, not causes. European colonizers took over the best farmland, cordoned off forests, and trapped indigenous people in wage dependency or slavery, thus undermining every structure of authority. The end of colonization often left these nations in ecological and financial debt.
Consider Haiti. Once slaves freed themselves and took over the island, their French tormentors threatened to invade with a massive force if the struggling society did not pay for its freedom. France wanted an amount equal to all former plantation property, including the lost value of the people themselves. France enforced this indemnity between 1825 and 2010, declaring it void only after an earthquake killed thousands in Port-au-Prince. The total amount charged against the country would be worth somewhere between $20 and $40 billion today. It sapped Haiti’s national income and stifled its development. The point is that economists rarely consider that poverty on such a scale is only comprehensible historically. Neither the United States nor a single country in Western Europe had to overcome the same obstacles. If poverty on such a scale is so misunderstood, if it appears to have no historical origin, then it can only be cast back upon the poor as their own failure.39
Every resident of every slum (or her parents or grandparents) once lived in an environment that sustained her most of the time. When the government sold off her woods and enclosed her land and relegated her and her family to the worst soil around, when she had nothing to exchange for money and the army arrived in the village, she found it impossible to remain. She saw her village combined into industrial latifundia under government or corporate control. Harvests from these giant fields now travel in containers from trucks to ships to trucks to big-box stores in the United States. As for her, she migrated to informal settlements of extraordinary density where she lives without sewers or clean water. She makes her living by washing car windows or by collecting metal from discarded computer parts or by prostituting herself. This explains the contradiction of more food and more hunger than ever before in human history. But it says something else—that the poverty of so-called underdeveloped countries is of recent origin.40
My purpose is to take a group of people who have been alternately praised and despised and open up their material history. The story of the industrialization of the southern mountains has been told before, but I see it in a wider gaze. Here are a few contentions. The people I am concerned with practiced household food production and vigorous exchange. The form of their economy likens them to peasants in other places and times. They traded close to home and far away, in two transactional realms. They depended on an extensive landscape that sometimes did but often did not belong to them. Governments attempted to capture the value they created through taxation (the United States) and by offering up the landscape to corporations (the state of West Virginia). The takeover of the landscape and the industrial cutting of the forest brought an end to their autonomy. Some semblance of their old economy survived into the twentieth century. It did not disappear when the mountains became real estate in the eighteenth century or when coal mining began in the nineteenth. All of this happened between the 1790s and the 1930s.
Most generally I say that the past occupants of hollows and ridges lived in a manner typical of humans all over the planet. They attained sufficiency, a makeshift existence, not always thriving but rarely starving. Mountain people ran into trouble for their own reasons. Their land use was too extensive to be maintained amid the changes they confronted. They had trouble modifying how they did things to compensate for their own increasing population. But they were never poor until they lost the forest, their ecological base. This is a vast renewable fund of resources that provides spaces for fields, food for gathering, fodder for cattle, and habitat for wild game. The base gives everything but costs nothing. It only needs to be taken care of within its own dynamics. Nothing else compares to the loss of this commons. Without the woods to provide them with commodities for exchange, they depended on wages for the money that connected them to the rest of the world. Yet dependence on wages meant subjecting themselves to corporate authority, the vagaries of coal markets, and other things out of their control. Some pronounce the coming of industrialization as necessary and even inevitable. I reject this mysticism. If we see it from the vantage of the people with the most to lose, it looks different. Nothing about the history of the southern mountains can be explained as social evolution.41
Yet I do not venerate the nineteenth-century social ecology of Appalachia as exemplary for some postcapitalist future. The settler culture and their descendants did not inhabit an Arcadia without conflict or change. Their entire history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries is one of conflict and change. I am under no illusion that they lived abundantly or easily. They sometimes wrote eloquently about the hardships they faced, but their sense of fairness and justice often did not extend to African-Americans or Native Americans. I do not believe that they always tended their land well or that they could have maintained themselves for another century. But the virtues of their makeshift have been largely erased and the historical causes of their poverty are little known to the reading public. I describe their ecological practices as fragile but legitimate. If I gloss over some of their social problems, it is because I have my eye on other things.42
Readers interested in a global history of the southern mountains might not find it here. It all depends on what global means. Perhaps a global history would trace the capital that launched coal and railroad companies to banks and bankers in Philadelphia, New York, London, and Edinburgh. It would place Appalachia at the center of a transnational migration of dispossessed peoples. If global history consists of this, then the following book is not an example of it. Yet I assume that generating capital requires combinations of labor and environments. Commodities go to sale. The rendered value takes the form of money, drips into distant accounts, and ends up spawning another circuit somewhere else. This book tells of one place where that process touched ground. Appalachia appears to be the epitome of locality, and much of what follows takes place in the folds of the mo
untains, between households and within counties. But in another sense, Appalachia’s key industrial product was unlike any other. Coal from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia powered the American Industrial Revolution. Almost everything manufactured on the Atlantic Seaboard after 1850—all the steel forged in Pittsburgh, all the cotton milled in North Carolina, all the steam-powered ships carrying all the guns and clocks made in New Haven—required the burning of coal. This is not a global history, but it is a history with global implications.
* * *
PERHAPS NO ONE WHO CONDEMNED mountain people spoke with the authority of Arnold Toynbee, the British historian and diplomat. Toynbee spent the majority of his career as a professor at the London School of Economics, where he wrote one of the most successful books of the century, A Study of History, published in twelve volumes between 1939 and 1961. Toynbee believed in civilization as an intellectual and moral stage. Some people arrive there, he asserted as self-evident; some don’t. “Man achieves civilization, not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment, but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort.”43
With these foggy lenses, Toynbee reviled the struggling farmers of the American highlands as “no better than barbarians.” Actually, he considered barbarian too kind a word for them. Toynbee defined Albanians and Kurds as categorical barbarians, ancient holdovers, never roused out of backwardness. People who had never known anything other than mud huts and goat milk didn’t bother him. “The Appalachians,” on the other hand, “present the melancholy spectacle of a people who have acquired civilization and then lost it.” How curious that Toynbee gave no thought to the historical causes for such a precipitous decline. At least it simplified his task. Not all those among the Atlantic elite wrote with Toynbee’s arrogance, but they tended to see the Appalachians the same way he did.44
The people of the southern mountains told their own stories. Emma Bell Miles’s “The Common Lot” (1908), William Zinn’s The Story of Woodbine Farm (1931), Hubert Skidmore’s I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes (1936), G. D. McNeill’s The Last Forest (1940), James Still’s River of Earth (1940), and Florence Cope Bush’s Dorie: Woman of the Mountains (1992) reveal the fierce desire for dignity and stability in circumstances forced upon them. Consider this passage from an obscure chronicle written in 1927 by a West Virginia farmer and civic leader named David Idleman: “We are sometimes conscious that in the past we have … been cheated out of our natural inheritance. It was necessary first for the homemaker to build up a civilization before the natural wealth of our community[,] here in coal and timber[,] could be developed. This being done[,] this wealth in a greater degree should have been the common heritage of our people.” Instead, Idleman lamented, “this great natural wealth went into the hands of syndicates for a nominal sum and [was] lost to the people.” Such eloquence, such historical nuance, surpasses anything that Toynbee wrote. But the categories that Toynbee relied upon are worth thinking about. He filtered everything he learned about cultures and nations through a ready-made set of developmental stages. And although these stages tell us nothing of any value about the history of recent times, to him and others they explained everything.45
2. Provision Grounds
ON CAPITALISM AND THE ATLANTIC PEASANTRY
Every savage has the full enjoyment of the fruits of his own labours.
—Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (March 29, 1763)
The modern is that subject which measures any distance from itself and redeploys it against an unlimited space of imagination.
—Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals” (2002)
THERE IS A STORY that overhangs the history of modern times. No monarchs or militaries figure in the plot. It is not a myth of peoplehood or national origin. Yet many people have told it—philosophers and merchants, geographers and presidents, schoolteachers and ministers. It recounts change in the past but lacks the specificity of events. The story moves through stages that mark the various ways that humans found food and accumulated wealth. In this purposeful fable, things happen on cue, under some unnamed force of change. One of the most important things to happen is that people stop growing their own food.1
The theory of stages begins with skin-clad hunters alone in a misty wilderness, with nothing but their bows to feed and protect them. In the Savage State, humans know perfect freedom but also relentless privation. They possess heroic virtue (in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s version), but they live by the chase. As far as the political economists were concerned, scattered hunters roaming around the mythical landscape demonstrated one distinguishing quality: they fulfilled all their own needs. The social theorists of the eighteenth century asserted that such people generated no surpluses; sustained no divisions of labor. To the political economists, savage itself did not really refer to particular ethnic groups but to any people who used everything they made and made everything they used.2
According to the story, humans increase in the passage of time. They eat up most of the wild animals and begin to coax the more docile ones into domestication. They become herders or nomads, with cattle and sheep providing the economy of what theorists regarded as a middle stage between savagery and civil society. Some defined it as barbarism, others as Arcadia, somehow actual and mythical at the same time. Virgil launched the mythical Arcadia with his description of the earthly one, a rocky upland region southwest of Athens on the Peloponnesian Peninsula. There he found simple shepherds with simple wants. Arcadia is not Eden. It’s not where you have anything you desire but everything you need. It’s a dream of sufficiency, not of hedonism.
This is why Rousseau called this moment the happiest for humankind. Painters and poets longed for the freedom it represented from rents, taxes, and other instruments of organized power. The American painter Thomas Cole depicted it in The Pastoral or Arcadian State (1834), the second of five canvases in his series The Course of Empire (1834–1836). (It is preceded by The Savage State [1834].) Smoke rises from a Stonehenge-like temple while Pythagoras sketches out his theory of right angles in the earth with a stick. Others invent dance and music. At the very center of the scene, a young herder tends a flock. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, the intellectual class of Europe and North America commemorated this stage as a time of rustic virtue, when people thrived in innocence, enjoying the freedom of savagery without its privations and the benefits of civility without its threat of tyranny and exploitation.
The emotive power of Arcadia comes from its ephemeralness. It exists as a kind of sacrifice, doomed by progress that might increase wealth but perhaps not virtue. The destruction of Arcadia is essential to this narrative. In this sense, Daniel Boone’s flight from the Kentucky wilderness he tamed but did not own is comparable to Moeris’s lament in Virgil’s Eclogue IX:
O Lycidas, we’ve lived to see the time when a stranger,
Owner of our land, could say (as we never thought could happen):
“These lands are mine: you old tenants move on.”3
But what cause did Cole attribute to dispossession and the end of Arcadian freedom? He might have identified the source as merchant or planter wealth. He might have painted slaves in cotton fields or country women bound to oppressive mills, churning out cloth. Instead, Cole painted the insidious cause lurching minutely at the left edge of the canvass. It’s a man behind a plow.
We can hear Cole’s anxiety in Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1797), where Paine begins by acknowledging the cultivation of the earth as the greatest human invention. But great inventions have unforeseen consequences: “The landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them … and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.” Cole depicted this gross inequality and the decadent imperium that he saw emerging from a
subordinated countryside in Consummation of Empire (1836), the third painting in the series.4
The series reaches its own consummation with Destruction (1836), followed by Desolation (1836). Rather than bless empire as the apex of power, if not human achievement, Cole condemned it to a violent death. Technological innovation only enabled the accumulation of wealth, the enslavement of labor, and the monopoly of land. An invasion of fur-clad barbarians wrecks the state. Cole makes the point symbolically by painting the decapitated statue of a warrior standing over a massive stump (a decapitated tree). In the last scene, everything is restored to the stable state, the deep order of things. The moon rises in silence over a single vine-enveloped pillar standing before a tranquil sea. Everything was going just fine, he seems to say, before the farmer showed up.
Few social thinkers thought of agriculture as leading to domination and tyranny, as some romantics did. Most saw it as the catalyst of civilization. “By the labor of the husbandman,” according to John Quincy Adams, “the means of subsistence are multiplied; as the earth yields its increase, population thickens.” Most of all, farmers produced more food than they needed, making possible cities, governments, and nation-states. Adams put it like this: “The fourth stage of society, may perhaps better be considered as a necessary appendage to the third, than as by itself a separate and distinct condition. The congregation of men in cities, which forms the basis of civilized life, naturally follows from their assemblage as husbandmen.” Yet Adams’s confident narrative says nothing about the troubled relationship between farmers and the state bureaucracies and financial institutions concentrated in cities. Nor does it explain why farmers became city dwellers involuntarily. But the theory of stages cannot embrace that kind of complexity. Its appeal comes precisely from the way it makes a certain kind of change seem natural when it really hides the exercise of power.5