by Steven Stoll
Business advocates responded with revulsion. To their ears, the Division of Subsistence Homesteads sounded like the Division of Decline into Primitivism. The Austrian-born business consultant Peter F. Drucker condemned self-provisioning in 1939. “Subsistence farming represents by definition a regression from market economy and from the division of labor on which the economic achievements of our society are based.” Drucker considered it a necessary but “temporary remedy to tide the displaced farmers over until a permanent solution has been found.” Growing one’s own food, he went on, “would amount to social disenfranchisement, as the subsistence farmer is practically cut off from the main stream of social life and pushed into an isolated position outside of modern society.” And yet, Drucker and many others like him somehow overlooked the cause of the social calamity going on before them, as though capitalism itself had not caused an unprecedented regression from the market economy.34
Critics from the right also ignored the prevalence of the capitalist form of the captured garden. Its popularity extended far beyond Appalachian mining camps. Henry Ford loved the idea. In 1931, Ford made vegetable gardens compulsory for all employees at Iron Mountain, Michigan, where workers assembled the wooden portions of Ford automobiles. He threatened to fire any head of household who failed or refused to plant an area “of sufficient size to supply his family with at least part of its winter vegetables.” One journalist derided Ford’s “shotgun gardens.” The fusion of farm and factory appealed to industrialists for the many ways it capitalized uncompensated labor. Henry I. Harriman, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, chirped, “The majority of these industrial workers live where they have enough ground to raise a large portion of their food supply for the summer and to put by a certain amount for winter consumption.” Ware and Powell made little distinction between Roosevelt’s Arthurdale and Ford’s Iron Mountain. “The most hard-boiled of business men need not look upon subsistence homesteading as merely another experimental effusion of impractical theorists. The experimental stage is over.”35
In both American versions of the captured garden, residents received wages only to pay them back. The designers of both set out to ensure industrial dependency, not agrarian autonomy. The Division of Subsistence Homesteads imploded from the confusion and anxiety within and outside government over what it meant for Americans to grow their own food. For unlike victory gardens, in which homegrown vegetables patriotically (and temporarily) offset the dietary needs of soldiers overseas, subsistence gardens suggested backsliding into primitivism. Arthurdale faltered under its debilitating contradictions and fading support. The garden as a form of public relief vanished with it.
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AFRICAN-AMERICANS KNEW THE CAPTURED GARDEN WELL. As slaves, they produced their own food. Many took pleasure in this and used gardening to create a realm of freedom. After emancipation, they faced a defiant planter class, dedicated to re-creating the conditions of slavery.
The majority of freed African-Americans and their children, and their children’s children, spent their lives working land that belonged to white landowners, often the descendants of planters. Those who could not find a way to own their own farms or squat on the unvisited land of absentees worked for wages. But they often found themselves in debt to landowners and their allied merchants. In order to service their debts, they entered into an arrangement closer to slavery than freedom. The historian Pete Daniel has spent decades studying the social and environmental history of the South. He compares the evolving coercion of black farmers “to an unfinished patchwork quilt; year by year the design would change—a contract law added here, a lien law there, while lynchings, beatings, vagrancy laws, and illiteracy eventually pieced it out.” One of the first patches appeared during Reconstruction, a form of tenancy stitched in with the violence required to hold the suffocating quilt together.36
The number of nonwhite farm owners throughout the United States increased with rising cotton prices, peaking in 1920 at 175,000. They were tremendously skilled at provisioning themselves in response to declining cash incomes. When the boll weevil ripped through Georgia cotton fields in 1915, black farmers doubled their garden production. They planted okra, beans, peas, potatoes, and field corn for animal feed. They also milked cows and churned butter. One woman recalled, “We didn’t have to buy anything. Only thing … was sugar, maybe coffee. Raised our own chickens, had ham, fatback. We canned in jars … We had everything we needed.” Only black farmers who owned their land could make this adjustment. But black farmers faced a cascade of trouble during the twenty years that followed the peak of ownership. Fields flooded or desiccated. Insect pests proliferated. Prices plummeted. Between 1927 and 1934, the annual income of black farmers in one Georgia county fell by half, from $500 to under $240. Those who fell out of smallholding often signed sharecropping contracts.37
Landowners dictated the terms. Tenants grew cotton and gave half the crop to the landowner as rent. They could sell the other half. But they always needed provisions on credit before they could plow and plant. A merchant (sometimes the landowner himself) provided seed, tools, food, and other necessary things to keep the family alive and working. These necessaries were advanced against the tenant’s half, but they almost always added up to more than the value of the cotton. The merchants wrote down the difference to collect it the following year, and the same thing happened. In sharecropping, the appearance of the agrarian household in a voluntary contractual arrangement concealed a form of bondage. Tenancy increased from 25 percent of all farmers in 1880 to 42 percent in 1935, mostly concentrated in the Cotton Belt. In that year, tenants operated more than 700,000 farms in the United States, or 10 percent. Two-thirds of all tenant farmers in the South were white in 1935 and one-third were black. African-Americans operated 42 percent of Alabama farms in 1900, and their rate of tenancy was around 85 percent.38
Sharecropping substituted the slow violence of debt for the shackles of slavery. Debt can only exist between people with the legal standing to enter into contracts. Landowners took advantage of this narrow attribute of social equality in order to trap African-Americans in arrangements that really enforced their social inequality. Debt, in another sense, is an incomplete exchange. It’s what happens when two parties initiate a transaction but cannot complete it. It binds them together. Neither can walk away. But that was the point. Landowners did not want sharecroppers to complete the transaction because its purpose was to subordinate debtor to creditor. Add to this the humiliation of being controlled and living under threat, the shame and guilt of failing to pull one’s loved ones out of poverty, and the feeling of inadequacy that comes from the impossibility of remitting what one owes. Regardless of its inefficiencies and poor yields, the system lasted into the 1950s because it gave racist landowners dominance. But though sharecroppers might have looked something like serfs bound to lords, they were an entirely industrial labor force that turned out the raw material of textile manufacturing.39
The debt essential to sharecropping worked much the same way as scrip in coal mining. Though households worked entirely within capitalist assumptions, little cash money ever changed hands. The transactions that paid them often produced no currency, just an entry in an account book. To a greater extent than the families who lived in colliery towns, sharecroppers labored as households. They worked for their collective reproduction even though their most intimate garden work really served the landowner. Because they divided any cash and everything advanced to sustain every household member, the compensation per person was egregiously low. And like coal mining, sharecropping needed local police power to hold it in place. The county sheriff stood watch to make sure tenants didn’t make a run for it and along with merchants and landowners removed every other option for employment, leaving only the contract. Landowners opposed public works projects for the threat they posed to the bubble-like exploitation in many counties, unless convicts tarred the roads or laid the tracks in chained gangs.
Ned Cobb resisted t
he racial and economic strictures of tenant farming in Alabama, in part by growing as much of his own food as he could. Cobb spoke to Theodore Rosengarten, a historian who met Cobb in 1969 and recorded a series of their conversations. The astonishing memoir that Cobb dictated (in which he is known as Nate Shaw) blends his father’s tormented striving for autonomy, as a slave and then a sharecropper, into his own. Cobb put into words the assertion of racial power that he had heard from white landowners time and again during his lifetime: “‘Nigger, just go out there and do what I tell you to do, and if I see fit to take all you got, I’ll take it and get away with it.’” He says at another point, “If I could have made a livin raisin vegetables and corn crops, watermelons and such as that, I’d a let cotton alone. But I just couldn’t realize it.” Cobb once arrived in town to find that no one would buy from him. Another time, whites forced him to sell for prices they dictated, prices not high enough to justify the trip to market.40
But Cobb endured and realized a great degree of autonomy, becoming among the most successful and independent tenant farmers in the South. He and his family ate well from their garden: okra, collards, tomatoes, cabbages, squash, beans, turnips, potatoes, onions, radishes, cucumbers, apples, peaches, plums, watermelons, cantaloupes, and muskmelons. He had pigs of such size that white neighbors seemed threatened. Said Cobb, “They didn’t like to see a nigger with too much; they didn’t like it one bit. They also didn’t like his rising political activism. Cobb helped establish the Sharecroppers’ Union in 1931. All God’s Dangers (1974) belongs on the shelf next to the greatest of agrarian autobiography and description, including J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America (1977).”41
Coal miners and sharecroppers experienced the end of agrarian autonomy differently, but both engaged in a struggle against power that played out as a struggle over subsistence. The notion that capitalism eliminates household production along its frontiers is false. It spreads by absorbing the garden, the rice paddy, and the survival strategies of the village. “It is only a minority—even today, even in the core zones,” says Immanuel Wallerstein, “which come close to the ‘classical’ image of the proletariat.” The uncompensated labor of wives, sisters, sons, aunts, and uncles is essential for reproducing working-class bodies and capital itself. The captured garden is not an anachronism within the global manufacturing economy; instead, it’s essential to its functioning.42
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ANOTHER KIND OF INVASION attended the industrial takeover. Experts arrived, often employed by government agencies. They came; they saw; they wrote reports. Some of them gathered data reliably, and their conclusions could have shaped a progressive and empathetic public policy. Others relied on false assumptions rather than their own eyes and ears. They misread the people and the landscape. Tourists came, too, not to visit beside the fire as a Sunday guest but to imagine themselves in uninhabited forest.
Among the most influential studies was The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921) by John C. Campbell. Born in Wisconsin and educated in Massachusetts, Campbell became president of Piedmont College in northern Georgia in 1904, where he dedicated his career to folklore and reform. Campbell concluded that mountaineers didn’t understand the income they could derive from resources close at hand. He visited a woman who cooked her supper over embers of black walnut. Campbell pointed out that she was burning a valuable wood. “She replied that it was ‘a right smart of trouble to haul timber down the branch,’ and that there were ‘several walnut trees’ (a goodly number) about there, and moreover, they ‘didn’t need the money nohow.’ The needlessness of this waste was the more apparent as one saw on all sides cheap timber suitable for firewood.” The woman knew what the wood was worth and had her reasons for burning it. When Campbell declared her use a waste, he spoke the language of the expert class in general and conservationists in particular.
For conservationists, the opposite of waste was efficiency. The gospel of efficiency said that rivers shall not run to the sea without irrigating something or generating electricity. Fire shall not consume forests. Wolves shall not eat cattle or wild game, and valuable timber shall not be used as cooking fuel. Foresters sought the “optimum” relationship between agriculture and woodland, which usually meant that government acquired an area and then sent experts to decide what to do with it. In some cases, land needed to be utterly destroyed for the public good. The ultimate example of efficiency through sacrifice was the Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest regional plan ever conceived of or executed in the United States. Planned in the 1920s but built in the 1930s, the TVA integrated electricity generation, flood control, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development. Its nine main dams and many tributary dams flooded thousands of hollows, affecting over forty thousand square miles. Conservationists interpreted modernization as the careful use of scarce resources. Once in control of government, they eliminated managed commons with some of the same arguments that capitalists used to privatize these landscapes. In this view, folk practices wasted a forest like wildfire. Both needed to be stamped out for the benefit of all.43
Conservationists had trouble comprehending the forest as a cultural landscape. Apparently baffled by swidden agriculture, the United States Forest Service sent a psychologist to figure out why people in the Blue Ridge Mountains set fires. The psychologist worked up a patient profile. The person who set these fires lived in poverty, had a third-grade education, and consumed less-than-adequate food. Like so many other experts, the government psychologist took mountaineer poverty as a sign of moral failure, as though he had no idea what had happened to them. Further displaying his lack of wisdom, he measured them with standards they could not meet. “We saw no evidence of painting, draftsmanship or sculpture,” he reported, as though he expected to visit a school of design. Getting to the point, he declared their agriculture “outmoded” and captive to “the tradition of their forefathers who believed in woods-burning.”
According to the psychologist, the people of upland Virginia burned for two reasons: for revenge against the incursions of outsiders and because their ancestors did it. The first motive made up the lesser part of “the fire problem.” The second motive he called vestigial, “a survival of the pioneer agrarian culture.” That’s all that the psychologist said about fire as a tool for getting things done in a landscape, because he knew nothing about it. But that did not prevent him from proposing social engineering to convince every “pappy” to stop, hoping for the practice to vanish.
One other thing about this patient profile is worth mentioning. The psychologist interviewed scores of people, yet only a few of their statements appear in the report. One informant explained the purpose of fire with perfect clarity. “Fires do a heap of good … Kill th’ boll weevil, snakes, tick an’ bean beetles. Greens up the grass. Keeps us healthy by killing fever germs.” Asked if more timber would improve his life, another answered that timber holds water, preventing floods, but to cease burning would “make living harder and we’d see more rattlesnakes.” The Forest Service seems to have decided beforehand that swidden indicated a stupid folk ritual or pathological self-destructiveness. Their chosen investigator told them what they wanted to hear.
But something else operated in the report. The Forest Service increasingly privileged the desires of vacationers who complained that smoldering stumps ruined the woods and the view. “Outsiders visiting or motoring in the South during burning season … are shocked and appalled by the miles of fire running free in the woodlands and the palls of smoke that dull the sun and often make motoring hazardous.” Weekenders in their motorcars increasingly set the terms of use for millions of acres acquired by the United States. Some of it would be cut for lumber and leased for coal, but large portions would be set aside for scenery.44
In one of the largest appropriations of mountain land in the twentieth century, the Blue Ridge became a recreational reserve. In 1931, Horace Albright, director
of the National Park Service, went riding through the Blue Ridge with President Herbert Hoover. Hoover stopped to gaze into the distance and said, “You know, Albright, this mountain top is just made by God Almighty for a highway.” Albright’s plan for Shenandoah National Park included Skyline Drive. The plan also required that mountain farmers be removed from the valley. Some were employed in the building of the road. Many others served meals and made beds at new hotels. The park, the highway, and the conservationist vision contained an irony. The Park Service seized a landscape that had been shaped for centuries by Monacan hunters and Scots-Irish farmers and refurbished it as wilderness. Albright himself advanced this act of forgetting. “Here in the Blue Ridge of Virginia, in the very heart of civilized America, lies preserved for our use a bit of nature that is identical with the virgin territory found by Captain John Smith and his heroic followers.”45
Residents knew that Shenandoah National Park had erased their presence, and they tried to reinsert themselves into the narrative. In a letter to Hoover urging him to abandon the project, the farmer Lewis Willis described the region as a working landscape: “Part of it has been cleared, plowed, and pastured; and well nigh all of it has been logged at some time or another.” Willis also made an acute economic argument, that the government’s purchases would not compensate mountaineers for their losses. “Many of us who are now self-supporting cannot support ourselves by investing the sale value of our lands somewhere else.” They would not come away with enough money to purchase anywhere near the extent of land previously available to them. Another resident refused to leave. Melanchton Cliser accused the Commonwealth of Virginia of acting in the interest of a resort entrepreneur and a cabal of landowners who stood to benefit from the development of the area. When he turned down the state’s offer to buy his store and filling station, officers arrived with handcuffs. A photograph shows Cliser digging his shoes into the dust as three government men haul him away.46
