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The New Environmental Politics and Its Antecedents: Lessons from the Early Twentieth Century South

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 72; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1540-6563.2010.00262.x

1540-6563

James C. Giesen, Mark D. Hersey,

American Environmental and Regional History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size James C. Giesen is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University, where he directs the department's graduate concentration in Agriculture, Rural, and Environmental History. Mark D. Hersey is an assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University. The authors would like to thank Alan Marcus for his thoughtful readings of this essay. Notes James C. Giesen is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University, where he directs the department's graduate concentration in Agriculture, Rural, and Environmental History. Mark D. Hersey is an assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University. The authors would like to thank Alan Marcus for his thoughtful readings of this essay. 1. 1. Michael Pollan, “Farmer in Chief,”New York Times Magazine, 9 October 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy‐t.html, accessed 3 August 2009.2. 2. Ibid. Pollan has also written on food and agriculture in a number of essays and books. See Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991; Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's‐Eye View of the World, New York: Random House, 2001; Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, New York: Penguin, 2006; Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, New York: Penguin 2008. Pollan keeps an archive of his magazine and newspaper writings at http://www.michaelpollan.com.3. 3. Pollan, “Farmer.”4. 4. Ibid.5. 5. Ibid.6. 6. Ibid.7. 7. Ibid.8. 8. Ibid.9. 9. Ibid.10. 10. Even earlier the federal government had been in the business of giving land in the West to would‐be farmers who promised to move there and cultivate it for a certain number of years. Thus, it might be argued that subsidized farming in the United States dates back to legislation enacted under the Articles of Confederation.11. 11. For background on these acts and the history of the USDA as a department see R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History, Purdue, IN: Purdue UP, 2002, chapters 4 and 5; Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917, Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1999, 314–39; Alan Marcus, Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy, Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1985, 161–87.12. 12. States of the former Confederacy were slow to build land‐grant colleges in part because they weren't in the Union when the program began. Still, even those states that founded land‐grant schools in the late 1870s and 1880s did very little to make them viable educational institutions.13. 13. In making such an assertion, we are glossing over a protracted fight between the commercial chemists working for the fertilizer‐producing industry and the state chemists whose job it was to test the authenticity of the claims made by commercial fertilizer manufacturers. By the end of the 1880s, however, the commercial and state chemists had reached a truce, and their connections grew closer over the ensuing years. This early debate notwithstanding, there is no question that the state departments of agriculture and the land grant schools encouraged the use of commercial fertilizers. For more on the contest between state and commercial chemists, see Alan Marcus, “Setting the Standard: Fertilizers, State Chemists, and Early National Commercial Regulation, 1880–1887,”Agricultural History 61, 1987, 47–73.14. 14. W.L. Hutchinson, “The Marls of Mississippi,”Mississippi Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin, No. 4, 7 November 1888.15. 15. Ibid.16. 16. Eugene B. Ferris, “Early Recollections of the Mississippi A. & M. College,” unpublished manuscript, Ferris Family Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, box 7, folder 117.17. 17. It was only marginally more effective in its secondary purpose: providing for African‐American land‐grant schools. While these were organized in southern states, they remained perpetually and grossly under funded. What's more, according to professors and farm reformers at the time, most of their students attended the schools with the hope of escaping farm life, not returning to it.18. 18. Hurt, American Agriculture, 193.19. 19. For an analysis of the debate in the 1870s and 1880s over the shape and intent of education at the land grant schools, see Alan Marcus, “The Ivory Silo: Farmer‐Agricultural College Tensions in the 1870s and 1880s,” Agricultural History 60, 1986, 22–36. [Google Scholar]20. 20. Eugene B. Ferris, “Early Recollections of the Mississippi A. & M. College,” unpublished manuscript, Ferris Family Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, box 7, folder 111.21. 21. Ibid.22. 22. Ibid.23. 23. The cattle tick and Rocky‐Mountain grasshopper had awoken some federal investigation, but created no permanent shift in the relationship between farmers and the state.24. 24. Knapp's philosophy can be seen in the Hatch Act itself, which he helped to write. (See Marcus, Agricultural Science, 171–87.)25. 25. James C. Giesen, “The South's Greatest Enemy? The Cotton Boll Weevil and Its Lost Revolution,” unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 2004, 171–85.26. 26. Ray Goldberg and John Davis, both professors at Harvard's Business School in the late 1950s, are generally credited with coining the phrase “agribusiness.” Though they may have used it informally at Harvard earlier, it was the publication of their jointly authored A Concept of Agribusiness in 1957 that brought the term into common usage (Ray A. Goldberg and John H. Davis, A Concept of Agribusiness, Boston: Harvard U., 1957).27. 27. Giesen, “The South's Greatest Enemy?,” 193–7.28. 28. Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture 1865–1980, Lexington, KY: U. of Kentucky P., 1984, 68–77.29. 29. United States Country Life Commission, Report of the Commission on Country Life reprint, New York: Sturgis and Walton Company, 1917 [from here: USCLC Report], 17–18.30. 30. Ibid.31. 31. USCLC Report, 18–19.32. 32. Ibid. Policy makers would come to agree with this assessment, but would encourage voluntary associations of farmers (cooperatives) to combat the issue; farmers whose crops were aimed at local and niche markets proved able to generate influential co‐ops, but those who produced basic commodities could never generate the kind of widespread loyalty they needed to exert much in the way of market force (see David Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, 189–93).33. 33. Liberty Hyde Bailey, The State and the Farmer, New York: MacMillan, 1908, 31.34. 34. Ibid., 49.35. 35. Ibid.36. 36. Ibid., 50.37. 37. Ibid.38. 38. Quoted in Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, 15.39. 39. See for example Linda O. McMurry, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, New York, Oxford UP, 1981, 25–70.40. 40. George Washington Carver, “How to Build Up Worn Out Soils,”Tuskegee Agricultural Experiment Station[from here: T.A.E.S.]Bulletin No. 6, April 1905, 4.41. 41. He also, at times, found himself out of step with Booker T. Washington, who had a great deal of respect for Carver as a scientist and teacher, but questioned Carver's capacity as an administrator and found him “wanting . . . in ability” when it came “to the matter of practical farm managing which will secure definite, practical, financial results” (see Booker T. Washington to George Washington Carver, 26 February 1911, Box 8, George Washington Carver Papers, Tuskegee University Archives [from here cited as Carver Papers, TUA]). For more on this see McMurry, George Washington Carver, 52‐70, and Mark D. Hersey, “‘My Work Is That of Conservation’: The Environmental Vision of George Washington Carver,” unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, 2006, 202–34, 351–83.42. 42. George Washington Carver, “Fertilizer Experiments on Cotton,”T.A.E.S. Bulletin 3, November 1899, 3–4. See also George Washington Carver, “Experiments with Sweet Potatoes,”T.A.E.S. Bulletin 2, May 1898, 3–5.43. 43. George Washington Carver, “One of the Most Interesting Farms in Alabama,” Report Submitted to Tuskegee Institute, July 31, 1915, Box 65 Folder 2, Carver Papers, TUA; George Washington Carver, “What Shall We Do for Fertilizers Next Year?,”T.A.E.S. Circular, November 1916.44. 44. George Washington Carver to Booker T. Washington, 26 January 1911, Box 8, Carver Papers, TUA.45. 45. Ibid.46. 46. Ibid. It is worth acknowledging that even prior to the 1920s a debate over the nature of “humus” raged. Influenced, perhaps, by the insights of the nascent field of ecology, one of the nation's leading soil microbiologists, Selman A. Waksman, pointed out in 1926 that earlier efforts to determine the chemical make up of humus were foolish since it varied from place to place and depended on “the organisms taking part in the decomposition and upon the environmental conditions influencing these processes” (as quoted in Alan I. Marcus, “The Wisdom of the Body Politic: The Changing Nature of Publicly Sponsored American Agricultural Research Since the 1830s,”Agricultural History 62, 1988, 4–26.) Carver, however, was not interested in recreating the chemical makeup of humus. He was interested in working decaying organic material back into the ground to enrich the eroded and exhausted farms on which many of those he sought to help labored.47. 47. “Council Report in the Booker T. Washington Papers at the Library of Congress—Department of Research, Exp Sta., 1912,” Box 68, Carver Papers, TUA.48. 48. Ibid.49. 49. See, for instance, George Washington Carver, “Some Choice Wild Vegetables that Can Be Gathered Now,” n.d., Box 64, Carver Papers, TUA, and Carver, “Saving the Wild Plum Crop,”T.A.E.S. Bulletin 12, June 1907.50. 50. Pollan, “Farmer.”51. 51. George Washington Carver, “Three Delicious Meals Every Day for the Farmer,”The Negro Farmer and Messenger, 10 February 1917, 3–4.52. 52. Pollan, “Farmer.”53. 53. Ibid.54. 54. See “Dr. Carver Writes Soil Conservation Report,”The Tuskegee News, 17 September 1936, as quoted in Peter Duncan Burchard, George Washington Carver: For His Time and Ours, Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, 2005, 158.55. 55. George Washington Carver to Frank Campsall (Henry Ford's secretary), 10 November 1942, as quoted in Burchard, George Washington Carver, 121–2.56. 56. See Hersey, “‘My Work Is That of Conservation’,” 425–63, and Mark D. Hersey, “Hints and Suggestions to Farmers: George Washington Carver and Rural Conservation in the South,” Environmental History 11, 2006, 239–68. [Google Scholar]57. 57. James Wilson, “Farm Conservation,” 3, James Wilson Papers, B6, F17, Iowa State University Archives.58. 58. Historians have yet to produce a scholarly biography of James Wilson, despite his impressive resume and obvious importance in the expansion of the USDA. A biographical account of Wilson was published in 1930, and a dissertation completed in 1964 centered on his term as Secretary of Agriculture. Both highlighted his confidence in the promise of agricultural science to improve the lives of farmers. Indeed, in that regard he was very much a man of his time. An obituary carried by the New York Times alludes to the same fact and is available online at http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive‐free/pdf?res=9E05E0D81F31E03ABC4F51DFBE66838B639EDE. See Early Vernon Wilcox, Tama Jim, Boston: Stratford Co., 1930; and Willard L. Hoing, “James Wilson as Secretary of Agriculture, 1897–1913,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1964.59. 59. Much of the agricultural history literature in recent decades has addressed one facet or another of the rise of agribusiness (see for instance Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003).60. 60. The First World War saw tractor‐use boom (see Danbom, Born in the Country, 180, 194, 236). In part this was due to the increased need for labor‐saving machines with many rural young men enlisting. But largely, this was due to a significant technological advance: a tractor with power take‐off, which enabled the tractor's engine to drive an attachment as well as the wheels. In 1918, International Harvester offered the first production tractor with PTO, making the machines of infinitely greater use to farmers. Even so, the real explosion in tractor useage came during the 1920s. Fewer than 4 percent of farmers owned a tractor at the close of the First World War; by 1930, the number of tractors on American farms had more than tripled, climbing to 920,000. The 1930s saw another half million added to that total, and by the end of World War II, there were 2.354 million tractors, amounting to a tractor on about 40 percent of the nation's farms. As the pace of mechanization quickened and the number of farms shrank in the wake of the Second World War, the ratio between tractors and farms became inverted. By the 1970s, there were more than one‐and‐a‐half tractors per farm.61. 61. Bailey, The State, 59.62. 62. “Dean Curtiss Attributes Agricultural Depression to Use of Tractors, Trucks, and Automobiles,”Farm Implement News (n.d.), Charles F. Curtiss Papers, Iowa State University Archives, Ames, Iowa, B1 F8.63. 63. Ibid.64. 64. Ibid.65. 65. Henry C. Wallace, Our Debt and Duty to the Farmer, New York: The Century Co., 1925, 49, 58.66. 66. Wallace, Our Debt, 194–6.67. 67. Ibid.68. 68. Wallace, Our Debt, 229.69. 69. Calvin Coolidge, “Address Before the Annual Meeting of the American Farm Bureau Federation, Chicago, Ill,” 7 December 1925, available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/, accessed 20 August 20, 2009.70. 70. Ibid.71. 71. Quoted in Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History, second ed., New York: Oxford UP, 2009, 161. In many regards such a complaint was typical of the era, which saw an emphasis on “Nature Study” in elementary and secondary schools. That doesn't diminish the irony, of course, of the complaint coming from Brooklyn, which a generation earlier had been arguably the leading truck‐garden community in the nation.72. 72. Ralph Borsodi, The Distribution Age: A Study of the Economy of Modern Distribution, New York: Appleton, 1929, 221–2.73. 73. Ibid.74. 74. Ibid., 266.75. 75. The historical literature on New‐Deal agriculture is, of course, voluminous. A quick and useful synopsis of the New Deal's effect on rural America (including an explanation of the CCC) can be found in Danbom, Born in the Country, 206–32.76. 76. Scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the inequities of New‐Deal legislation in the South. Some of the best known are Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue, New York: Oxford UP, 1978, and Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era, Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina P., 1996.77. 77. Pollan, “Farmer.”78. 78. Ezra Taft Benson and Carlisle Bargeron, Farmers at the Crossroads, New York: The Devin‐Adair Company, 1956, 94.79. 79. Ibid., 100.80. 80. See for instance Kathryn Marie Dudley, Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America's Heartland, Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 2002, 23.81. 81. See Ralph Borsodi, “The Case Against Farming as Big Business,” in Nancy P Pittman, ed., From The Land: Articles Compiled from The Land, 1941–1954, New York: Island Press, 1988, 87. Few mid‐century reformers were as outspoken as Borsodi, but he was hardly alone. Men like J. I. Rodale and Louis Bromfield were also critical of agricultural policy. In fact, by the time Butz was enjoining farmers to “get bigger, get better, or get out,” other well known critics like Rachel Carson and Wendell Berry had emerged on the national level. Carson shocked the nation by pointing out that the widespread over‐application of synthetic petrochemicals—in agriculture and elsewhere—carried serious ramifications. Berry echoed many of Borsodi's criticisms, pointing out that by the USDA's reasoning, the gradual disappearance of small farmers represented “a kind of justice: it [was] their own fault; they ought to have been more efficient; if they had to get bigger in order to be more efficient, then they ought to have got bigger” (Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1986 [1977], 63). See as well Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.82. 82. Borsodi, “The Case,” 87.83. 83. See Hightower, Hard Times.84. 84. Ibid., 117.85. 85. Ibid., 138.86. 86. Ibid., 200.87. 87. Danbom, Born in the Country, 239.88. 88. The EPA has a useful online reference about agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution, see http://www.epa.gov/owow/nps/agriculture.html, accessed 20 August 2009.89. 89. Pollan, “Farmer.”90. 90. Ibid.91. 91. Ibid.92. 92. Ibid.93. 93. Ibid.94. 94. Ibid.95. 95. Ibid. The emphasis on environmental improvement through consumer choices is readily visible in the literature of many environmental organizations. The Environmental Defense Fund recently sent out a mailer that included a list of “10 Things You Can Do to Fight Global Warming!”, such as which included washing clothes in cold water, installing low‐flow showerheads, replacing old appliances with newer energy‐efficient ones, minimizing the use of automobiles, and adjusting your thermostat. Pollan, no doubt, would lament the fact that it said nothing about changing your eating habits. A more complete guide is available at http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=820, accessed 20 August 2009.96. 96. Pollan, “Farmer.”97. 97. See for example Eckardt S. Beck, “The Love Canal Tragedy”, EPA Journal, January 1979, available at http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/lovecanal/01.htm, accessed 16 January 2010.98. 98. Pollan, “Farmer.”99. 99. Dr. Seuss, The Lorax, New York: Random House, 1971; Terri Birkett, The Truax (Chesterfield, MO: National Wood Flooring Manufacturing Association, 1994).100. 100. Pollan, “Farmer.”101. 101. Joseph N. Belden et al., Dirt Rich, Dirt Poor: America's Food and Farm Crisis, New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, 2.102. 102. Ibid., 3–8, 172.103. 103. Another indication of the growing prominence of agricultural concerns is the fact the month before Pollan published his letter, National Geographic ran an issue with a cover story on “Where Food Begins” (see cover page, National Geographic, September 2008).104. 104. Julie Bosman, “Politics Can Wait: The President Has a Date,”New York Times, 31 May 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/nyregion/31obama.html, accessed 3 August 2009.105. 105. Kate Brett and Brian Hartman, “Foodies Celebrate White House Veggie Garden,”http://ABCNews.com, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=7110660&page=1, accessed 20 March 2009. This is not to say that Pollan alone persuaded the Obamas to plant a vegetable garden. Indeed, The Chicago Tribune noted that “[m]ore than 100,000 people asked the president to plant a garden on the White House lawn, according to Kitchen Gardeners International, a coalition of gardeners whose mission is to inspire and teach people to grow their own food” (Rebecca Cole, “Obamas Ready to Start a White House Garden,”Chicago Tribune, 20 March 2009, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi‐garden‐talkmar20,0,6578094.story, accessed 3 August 2009).106. 106. Pollan, “Farmer.”