Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  A Mountain Europa tells readers that historical change comes from the roar of the industrial gods. Clayton has a reverie: “It was soon plain to him, too, that a change was being wrought at last—the change of destruction. The older mountaineers, whose bewildered eyes watched the noisy signs of an unintelligible civilization, were passing away.” Fox believes in the redemptive power of ecological and social destruction, resulting in a new order. Yet the destruction only affects the mountains and their residents, never the mine or its owners. Clayton embodies this unilateral historical agency. After Easter falls dead, he walks away unharmed and unchanged.

  Fox did not publish in obscurity. He educated the eastern elite, shaping their conception of an aggressive and inscrutable white mountaineer at a time when labor violence exploded in the West Virginia coalfields. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Fox in 1894: “What you said in your letter … was so interesting that last night I read it to Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams.” Fox interpreted Appalachia to the painters Frederick Remington and George Luks, the writers Owen Wister and Richard Harding Davis, and influential publishers, including Charles Scribner and William Dean Howells. Fox went on to write The Cumberland Vendetta and Other Stories (1895), Hell-fer-Sartain and Other Stories (1897), The Kentuckians (1898), Crittenden (1900), Blue-grass and Rhododendron (1901), The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903), A Knight of the Cumberland (1906), The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), and The Heart of the Hills (1913), among other novels and articles.42

  The most revealing moment in all of Fox’s literary production might be a scene in The Kentuckians. A geologist named Reynolds responds to a journalist who says what many others must have believed—that the poor whites descended from Scots-Irish castoffs. In other words, one degenerate people came from another. Reynolds shoots back, “That is a foolish theory … Until a man has lived a year at a time in the mountains he doesn’t know what a thin veneer civilization is. It goes on and off like a glove, especially off.” Take any well-schooled, well-churched family from the Bluegrass, continues Reynolds, and put them in their own hollow. A century later, they’ll be stupid and lawless, too. Fox offered his own sociological theory: the hillbilly could become white again by removing him from the hollows. The character of Boone Stallard in the same novel is just such a redeemed savage, having attended a state university. The stories give literary force to the controlling narrative of the times. Like Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Fox thought that the metropolitan invasion would “kill” the mountaineer but save the man.43

  By 1913, however, Fox appears to have regretted his insulting and degrading depictions of mountaineers. Bitter and destitute, he wrote The Heart of the Hills, one of his last novels. A child named Jason befriends a geologist pecking around Kentucky for coal seams. The geologist tells Jason what removing coal from the hills will mean to him and his family. Later, Jason quotes the geologist in a confrontation with Colonel Pendleton, a wellborn gentleman and investor from the Bluegrass:

  He said as how you folks from the big settlemints was a-comin’ down here to buy up our wild lands fer nothin’ because we all was a lot o’ fools an’ didn’t know how much they was worth, an’ that ever’body’d have to move out o’ here an’ you’d get rich diggin’ our coal an’ cuttin’ our timber an’ raisin’ hell generally … He said that our trees caught the rain an’ our gullies gethered it together an’ troughed it down the mountains an’ made the river which would water all yo’ lands. That you was a lot o’ damn fools cuttin’ down yo’ trees an’ a-plantin’ terbaccer an’ a-spittin’ out yo’ birthright in terbaccer-juice, an’ that by an’ by you’d come up here an’ cut down our trees so that there wouldn’t be nothin’ left to ketch the rain when it fell, so that yo’ rivers would git to be cricks an’ yo’ cricks branches an’ yo’ land would die o’ thirst an’ the same thing ’ud happen here. Co’se we’d all be gone when all this tuk place, but he said as how I’d live to see the day when you furriners would be damaged by wash-outs down thar in the settlements an’ would be a-pilin’ up stacks an’ stacks o’ gold out o’ the lands you robbed me an’ my kinfolks out of.

  Jason calls everyone involved a fool. Mountaineers sell their birthright for nothing, he says, while the people from the Bluegrass (the “big settlements”) undermine themselves by tearing out the trees. The boy knows that trees hold soil, which holds water, preventing erosion. When only stones and roots remain, says Jason, folks like him will be gone. Everyone ends up with nothing. It’s a stunning rebuke. For reasons we might never know, Fox renounced everything he had accomplished during his entire career.

  * * *

  WINSLOW HOMER’S VETERAN IN A NEW FIELD and Thomas Hovenden’s Breaking Home Ties brace a quarter century better characterized by land lost than land gained. The number of farms in the United States increased between 1850 and 1900, driven by the shift of wheat planting on the Great Plains, irrigated fruit growing in California, and cattle ranching in Texas. Some of these were family farms, but during each decade more and more were profit-generating experiments in industrial agriculture. After 1910, the number of farms held steady at about 6 million, peaking at 6.8 million in 1935. The crisis of ownership that would cause the family farm nearly to disappear began during the Great Depression. By the 1970s, the number of farms had fallen to 2 million. And while thousands of families across the Midwest lost their fields of corn and soybeans during the 1980s, total acreage changed little after 1935, indicating that small farms were absorbed into larger ones.44

  Inness and Hovenden did not predict this decline. Like other artists and writers, they portrayed a more general agrarian twilight. John Ise, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, and Ole Rölvaag fictionalized the settler generation as worthy but troubled and finally as part of the past. Some of these writers presented rural life through the eyes of children or adults gazing back on childhood. They told stories of torment and failure. Garland dedicated Main-Travelled Roads (1891) to his parents, whose half century of farming had rewarded them with “only toil and deprivation,” while acknowledging their “silent heroism.” These authors moved beyond depictions of everyday privation to speculate about the fragility and possible extinction of the agrarian household.

  Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1927) tells the story of Norwegians in Dakota Territory during the 1870s. Per Hansa, the male head of household, catches only glimpses of the smallholder’s dream. “The suffering was great that winter. Famine came; supplies of all kinds gave out; for no one had thought, when the first snowfall began, that winter had come … Some had to leave their potatoes in the ground; others could not thresh the grain; fuel, if not provided beforehand, was scarcely to be had at all.” The environment pressed relentlessly against the peasant universe. In shock after a tornado shreds her sod house, Per Hansa’s wife, Beret, whispers, “Out here nobody pays attention to our tears … it’s too open and wild.” The story is haunted by madness. Per Hansa walks off into a snowstorm on a hopeless mission, an echo of the settlement itself. Children find his frostbitten body the following spring, eyes wide open, “set toward the west.”45

  Other stories stress fallen virtues. Little House in the Big Woods (1932) depicts the Ingalls family as content with little and confidently self-sufficient. “Pa and Uncle Henry traded work. When the grain got ripe in the fields, Uncle Henry came to work with Pa, and Aunt Polly and all the cousins came to spend the day. Then Pa went to help Uncle Henry cut his grain.” Young readers have been riveted by the crises and triumphs of the characters, but the novel is wrapped in nostalgia. It’s set in the narrator’s memory. It speaks to bonds of kinship that vanished along with the Big Woods of Wisconsin. This and other stories suggest no clear place for agrarians in the present.46

  Farms operated by households did not disappear just then, however. They changed into something else. They became the family farm, an attempt to conduct husbandry as a wage-paying, commodity-producing, technologically competitive enterprise. This is no
t to say that these small businesses did not produce any of their own food, nor does it say that family members and hired hands took no pleasure in agriculture. The university experiment stations (founded by the Hatch Act of 1887) and the United States Department of Agriculture (founded in 1862) urged them to keep financial records, study business, replace harvest labor with machinery, buy bird guano or bonemeal to fertilize their soils, and look upon their work as managerial. The family farm first appeared in New York and Massachusetts, represented by improved farms that made a leap into profit-making from subsistence during the era of the Erie Canal. In the decades following the Civil War, smallholders like Winslow Homer’s veteran took up arid quarter sections to grow wheat for flour milling, with all the insecurities and false assumptions built into that model. The family farm reinvested its surplus value, paid its taxes, and strove for a middle-class standard of living.

  Playing by the rules, however, often meant losing the farm. Industrialization transformed the relationship of families to their land and themselves. The more they specialized in the best-paying crop, the more alienated they became from what they produced, to the point that they became servants of their mortgaged fields. In Now in November (1934), Josephine Johnson’s novel about a Missouri family struggling through the 1930s, the narrator offers this lament: “We never seemed able to make much over. All that we saved above what it cost to live … all went into the mortgage-debt. It would have taken so little to make us happy. A little more rest, a little more money—it was the nearness that tormented.” They carried the mortgage like a bushel of rocks. “There was a bitterness in sowing and reaping, no matter how good the crop might be … And there was the need, the awful longing, for some sort of permanence and surety; to feel that the land you ploughed and sowed and lurched over was your own and not gone out from under your feet by a cipher scratch.” The family farm replaced the possibility of subsistence adversity with financial adversity, but whereas the old household could maneuver within most bad situations, the new one owed its existence to creditors.47

  Farm subsidies would seem to have offered the solution to the discordance between the homestead of a few hundred acres and the perplexing forces of the global economy. During the Great Depression, Congress paid farmers not to produce, in order to maintain higher commodity prices. The purpose of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was to preserve the number of farms and farmers and to ensure them a dignified standard of living. This thinking changed during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz reengineered the subsidy. Henceforth, the government encouraged the largest harvests with the maximum efficiency possible, resulting in the greatest quantity of corn for the lowest prices ever seen. Congress used public money to shore up the difference between low prices and the cost of production. “Get big or get out” described the new policy and the end of any pretense to promoting a way of life.

  This shift followed the changing landscape of agricultural politics. As the number of family farms declined, consolidated land came under the ownership and management of corporations. Monsanto, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland can exist in an atmosphere of low prices. They make money on small margins and titanic volume, most of it sold on world markets. Subsidies allow corporations to make a profit even when the prices resulting from supply and demand run below their costs. In other words, the policy insures them against the depressed values that they cause. The effect is to undercut smallholders in other countries by making it impossible for their crops to compete. This is how the United States has set off a race to the bottom that feeds global dispossession. Nation-states with few resources other than farmland, seeking to boost GDP, act rationally when they propose to replace smallholders with corporations. Only corporations can pay long-term leases and turn out commodity crops on an industrial scale. The use of public money, once a mechanism for keeping family farmers in business, now drives them out all over the world.48

  The American family farm was a hybrid species that didn’t survive. During the century between Reconstruction and the 1980s, public policy depopulated the American countryside one cipher scratch at a time. Patented seeds and ammonia fertilizer flooded markets with cheap food, leaving families vulnerable to the slightest market fluctuations. Since farmers of undifferentiated commodities like wheat, corn, or soybeans cannot set their own prices to compensate for their costs, they must increase yields any way they can, often by taking on debt to buy out neighbors or to purchase larger machines. Yet this chain of reasoning ushered them into bankruptcy. The boom years of the 1970s were followed by their perfect reversal. Under high interest rates and falling commodity prices, thousands of farms went out of business.

  On December 9, 1985, a third-generation farmer named Dale Burr entered the Hills Bank & Trust Company in Johnson County, Iowa, with a shotgun. He discharged it into the head of his banker. He had already killed his wife, Emily. Later that day, he killed another farmer before killing himself. His brother-in-law said that Burr was $1 million in debt. He reportedly told Emily, “I’m sixty-four years old and for the first time in my life I don’t have money for groceries.” On August 19, 1986, an Oklahoma farmer named Bill Stalder killed his wife, his son, and his daughter with a shotgun. He burned his farmhouse to the ground before shooting himself. The police found his diary in the barn. On the last page, he wrote “responsible” over and over again. A woman facing foreclosure committed suicide; so did a banker who could not stand the burden he had placed on others.49

  Dispossession has immense social consequences. It should be understood as a government policy, not as the inexorable work of historical forces set in motion with the Big Bang. If the United States had wanted family farmers, it would have done more to sustain and encourage them. Yet the commonplace narrative creates the illusion of unavoidable tragedy and historical necessity. Any Scots-Irish, Cherokee, or African-American with a cabin and garden knew that dispossession served someone else’s purpose. It was an instrument of control, not a sign of progress.

  6. The Captured Garden

  SUBSISTENCE UNDER INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM

  I want to propose a more radical notion of displacement, one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from their places of belonging, refers to the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it habitable.

  —Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)

  IN MARCH 1907, AN ITINERANT MINISTER arrived among the shanties owned by the Pocahontas Coal Company. In a sermon given where he stood, the preacher declared that the miners deserved more than the company paid them. A manager approached the visitor and invited him to dinner at his home that evening. As soon as the door closed, a squad of armed bookkeepers and clerks surrounded the preacher, clubbed his head and face, broke his ribs, and dragged him to the church, leaving him to bleed through the night on the floor. The miners threatened war when they learned about the attack. One vowed in a letter to the company president that if any of his thugs walked the streets of Davy, West Virginia, they would be “wiped off the face of the earth.”

  Everything about coal mining instigated class warfare. Whenever miners attempted to improve their lives within their constitutional rights to assemble and organize themselves, coal operators responded with violence. The camps operated like small police states, unincorporated private municipalities where company rules functioned as martial law. But while militant strikes, fought with bats, bullets, and poisonous gas dropped from military airplanes, made newspaper headlines across the country, slow violence cut across the underbelly of mining families. Their dependency on company housing and company money spent for food in company-owned stores amounted to a constant threat of eviction and starvation. Coal operators wielded subsistence as a weapon. Miners tried to take it away from them.1

  When mountain households entered the coal camps, the trapdoor of dependency slammed behind them. James W
att Raine, a professor of English at Berea College in Kentucky, had seen them seeping out of the hollows for twenty years. Raine traveled around talking to people and recording what he saw. In The Land of Saddle-Bags (1924), he wrote of their peril. The mountain man who became a miner “moves his family and a few household goods from the picturesque cabin in the cove or on the ridge to a desolate shack in the sordid village that has sprung up around the mine. He had not realized that he would have to buy all his food … He has to pay even for water to drink.” Rent on their uninsulated board-and-batten shanties ran against these families all the time, even when the mines were closed, a policy meant to “bind them as tenants by compulsion … under leases by which they can be turned out with their wives and children on the mountainside in midwinter if they strike.” Raine saw every autonomous path to money and exchange blocked, leaving them not just deprived of goods but ground down, impoverished, and subject to the “unspeakable danger … of a ferocious and devouring social system.”2

  Raine also noticed the gardens. Mining households didn’t really buy all their food, except perhaps in winter. They continued to grow it just as they had before. In fact, though most of the remaining communities of subsistence hunters and farmers in North America lost the wherewithal to provide for themselves during the last decades of the nineteenth century, self-provisioning continued on the industrial periphery. When the location of a garden changed from the hillside to the camp, its beneficiaries changed along with its economic purpose. Mining companies encouraged household gardens, and even required them, when they recognized that these gardens served their interests.3