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Editor’s Introduction by John Linstrom

In The Holy Earth, Liberty Hyde Bailey produced a manifesto of what he often called his “outlook” — something different from formal philosophy or theology, grounded in equal parts practical experience and personal affection, which he meant to condense into a book that would impact society pragmatically by inspiring his readers morally and spiritually. Simultaneously expansive and compact, growing from tradition and challenging dogma, the small volume managed both to articulate ahead of its time the idea that “human” morals and ethics ought rightly to extend beyond the merely human and then to demonstrate how that concept might be applied pragmatically to such social problems as rural planning and mapping, land conservation and preservation (significantly both, and from a farmer’s perspective), general and specialist education (from primary schools to college and then university extension), food purity and adulteration, and, ultimately, the democratic outlook of a people. The significance of Bailey’s project is finally being recognized by an increasingly broad readership today, the result of one hundred years of doing its work quietly, in the backgrounds of some of our most significant national and global discussions. This centennial edition seeks to do justice to an underappreciated landmark work of ecological thinking.

To appreciate Bailey’s significance, we need look no further than Aldo Leopold, the writer and conservationist who gave us the term “land ethic” and elaborated it both philosophically and poetically in his posthumous A Sand County Almanac of 1949. Sixteen years earlier, in his important book Game Management, Leopold states that “a few naturalists have attempted to formulate” the “philosophical problem” of the ethical response to the nonhuman, but he gives only two texts as his examples: Bailey’s The Holy Earth and a later, 1927 essay by H. F. Lewis.⁵ Leopold even concludes the first chapter of the work, titled “A History of Ideas,” with a block quote from The Holy Earth:

We are at pains to stress the importance of conduct; very well: conduct toward the earth is an essential part of it.… To make the earth productive and to keep it clean and to bear a reverent regard for its products is the special prerogative of good agriculture.⁶ (9–10 and 78, this text)

Describing The Holy Earth as the birth of a modern land ethic, then, is no stretch of the imagination (although Leopold, like Bailey, traces similar concepts as far back as Judeo-Christian scripture). The lineage is clear, from Bailey’s “morals of land management” to Leopold’s more condensed “land ethic,” which has exerted such influence over our conservation thinking and policy today. That Leopold would gesture so prominently to The Holy Earth as early as 1933 makes the lineage significant.

Of course, we need no more endorsement of Bailey’s text than that given by Wendell Berry, one of our modern prophets and a sane visionary of the agrarian ideal, in the foreword to this edition. We may also look to the work of Wes Jackson, Fred Kirschenmann, and Norman Wirzba, to name only a few of the other leading agrarian voices who speak clearly to us today and who have pointed back in their own publications to Bailey’s significance. Members of the academy who are attuned to the urgent need for a public agrarian vision have also begun to rally behind Bailey in recent years. Philosophy and ethics scholar James A. Montmarquet argues that “if there is a single ‘solution’ to be found to the problem of formulating a viable agrarian philosophy today, its main lines are to be found in Liberty Hyde Bailey’s writings and philosophy.”⁷ Scholar Ben Minteer has published important work on Bailey’s significance to civic pragmatism and argues that The Holy Earth “deserves to be on the short list of American environmental classics.”⁸ Historian of environmentalism Kevin C. Armitage argues that “Bailey’s thought was more radically ecological than any of his peers save John Muir” and cites him as exemplary of the strain of Progressive-Era conservationism that integrated nineteenth-century romanticism into the framework of American pragmatism, defying the era’s more technocratic impulses.⁹ Paul A. Morgan and Scott J. Peters use the wider corpus of Bailey’s environmental philosophy to argue that in it lie the seeds of a new “planetary agrarianism,” and that furthermore Bailey’s entire lifework — his nature-study advocacy, his leadership in the Country- Life Movement, his democratic vision for land-grant and extension education as early Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, even his academic agenda to have botanists “climb the garden fence” and bring the science of botany to bear on the study of cultivated plants (horticulture)¹⁰ — can best be described in terms of collective worldview transition, supported by organizations but enacted and lived out by everyday independent individuals, a ground-up but integrated approach to reform that speaks even more forcibly to the corporatized, industrial world of today.¹¹ Even in 1915, Bailey worried that we were too “tied up” (34, 36).

Bailey first began to commit his massive vision to book-length form in the Rural Outlook Set — four volumes that each treated his idea of a necessary “rural outlook” to counteract the dehumanization of bureaucratic society, each from a different perspective: The Nature-Study Idea (1903), The Outlook to Nature (1905), The State and the Farmer (1909), and The Country-Life Movement in the United States (1911). In 1913, just a few years after chairing President Theodore Roosevelt’s national Commission on Country-Life and after serving for ten years as Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell, Bailey stepped away from his institutional affiliations to “retire,” which meant for him the chance to focus his unflagging work on the topics that most concerned him. When Roosevelt urged him, nearing retirement, to run for governor of New York on the Progressive ticket, Bailey all but laughed the suggestion off — “Never have we needed the separate soul so much as now,” he would write a year later (88).

It was on a sea voyage in 1914 to give a series of lectures in New Zealand that he reportedly began writing down a new kind of work, one that would take all of his diverse philosophical and civic ideals and weave them into a single, condensed articulation. “On the backs of letters, scraps of paper, anything which came to his hand,” as one biographer writes, and under an open sky with the unending sea around him, he wrote the book that would most carry him into the future.¹²

While he was at sea and in the process of writing, the First World War broke in Europe, sending the conference he was traveling to, the Australasian meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, into a scramble throughout Bailey’s time in New Zealand. Many of his fellow scholars from Europe chose to return to their home countries rather than stay for the conference, although Bailey remained to give at least one of his planned lectures, on the topic of “Research as the Basis of Rural Life.”¹³ The constant news of Europe’s unraveling no doubt lent urgency to Bailey’s writing and shaped his discussion of that “war of commercial frenzy” (18).

While a global, oceanic perspective lent something of the wild “salt” to his masterful concluding chapter on “the ancestral sea” and the outbreak of the Great War imposed new urgency on the project, strong in his mind too were the influences of his humble upbringing on his parents’ farm outside of South Haven, Michigan, which had then grown from the ramshackle pioneer settlement of Bailey’s childhood into a bustling fruit town.¹⁴ He found himself visiting that farm several times in the years leading up to his New Zealand trip in order to help manage the sale of the property in the wake of his father’s death and his mother’s decline. In letters to his brother, he wrote that he hated to see the property go, but that there was no way around it — as he spent time there and helped his family let go of the place, his memories of growing up in a rural frontier community must have shaped his thinking.¹⁵ We see that influence in the deeply personal penultimate chapter on “the open fields,” which includes a description of South Haven and the surrounding countryside, as well as in the previous chapter describing the “primeval forest.” Each of these environments literally formed the “background” of his young life and the outlook he would carry with him to his last years. And, truly, the open vista of the sea did not present a scene foreign to him — in addition to his prior sea voyages to Europe and the Caribbean for his research, he grew up not much more than a mile from the shore of Lake Michigan. We cannot doubt the effect on a young child of standing on South Haven’s sandy beaches, tracing the straight line between water and sky and wondering at the vastness that stretched from infinity right up to the harbor of his little hometown. In the farmhouse of his childhood, now a museum, still sit two clumsy, rough-hewn canoe paddles with the initials “L. B.” carved into them. Alongside them, a curiously resonant artifact, lies his father’s old garden hoe, the blade worn thin, four distinct finger grooves opposite a long thumb groove rubbed into the handle’s wood through years of steady work. In some ways, the closeness of home must never have felt all that disconnected from the vastness of the world. That world lay just beyond the garden, and in it. In that sense, his “backgrounds” were much more than backdrops; as he argues in this book, these “large environments in which we live but which we do not make […] to which we adjust our civilization, and by which we measure ourselves” (97) also provided the conditions of his flourishing, and he flourished more the more aware he remained of his place in those landscapes. The cultivation of this awareness had been central to much of his writing since his first book in 1885, the year he turned twenty-seven, and now, when the conditions of his work threatened to take him too far into the “vague heresies” of abstraction (97), he finally found a way in the middle of his life to disconnect and reframe his work, independently, and reorient toward the natural and agricultural world that he saw as foundational to society. The first major book that came to him then was The Holy Earth.

According to his biographer, Bailey believed this book would last long after most of his others had faded¹⁶ — which, between those he wrote and those he edited, numbered around two hundred — but he was long dissatisfied with its success. The documentary fragments that remain of the book’s publication history attest both to Bailey’s meticulous perfectionism and to his frustrations with the book’s popular reception.¹⁷ He worried that Macmillan, his usual publisher, would not handle this new work adequately — he was known through their readership not as a philosopher, but primarily for his highly successful books that accessibly brought the latest scientific findings of horticulture and agriculture to rural readers eager for such practical knowledge. He may also have been dissatisfied with the earlier reception of his other philosophical books, like The Outlook to Nature. So he entered into a contract with Charles Scribner’s Sons, but production records indicate a book that never took off, and despite strong reviews from such prominent voices as John Burroughs and The Nation (which along with other blurbs used for promotion are reproduced in the front of this volume) the number of copies printed in the first years of production after 1915 rapidly declined. From the beginning Bailey’s protectiveness for the book was such that he managed an atypical agreement with Scribner’s, in which the editors agreed to transfer ownership to him of the metal printer’s plates in the event that they mutually decided for Scribner’s to cease publication. By 1918 Bailey had regained those plates and the book was being handled by the Comstock Publishing Company, a local company in Ithaca, New York, run by his close friends and fellow naturists John Henry and Anna Botsford Comstock. The book seems not to have fared any better with them, however, and eventually, in 1923, Bailey assented to requests from Macmillan that they be the sole publishers of whatever of his works remained in print. Yet sales still floundered.

Today, it is easy to forget that Bailey saw The Holy Earth as part of a series from the beginning, which he called “The Background Books: The Philosophy of the Holy Earth.” In his initial contract with Scribner’s, The Holy Earth is listed alongside Wind and Weather, his only full-length book of verse, which was published the following year as the second in the series. The series continued to grow as it moved from publisher to publisher, ultimately expanding to seven volumes by 1928, each one extending and complicating Bailey’s vision in important ways.¹⁸ While any characterization of Bailey’s philosophy based on any one of these volumes in isolation will fall short, it could also be said that the later volumes all grew out of what he began with The Holy Earth, which, in its sometimes strange, mosaic structure, presents the most cohesive articulation of his broad-ranging earth philosophy.

While it did end up in Aldo Leopold’s hands, the book did not experience much commercial success until World War II, when, in 1943, Bailey granted permission to the Christian Rural Fellowship to publish a cheap paperback edition to use in their outreach work. Decades after its initial publication, the book experienced a renaissance. Bailey initially granted the organization permission to print 4,000 copies, but, as leaders in the Christian Rural Fellowship began advertising the reissue and soliciting preorders among their network of churches and conservation organizations, they quickly had to increase their request to 5,000, and, by the time the reset text went to the printers, that number had climbed to 10,000. The original Scribner’s edition had not surpassed 2,100 copies. The Fellowship continued reprinting in subsequent years and even obtained permission to translate portions of the book into Spanish and a number of African languages to be distributed in the many countries where they were advocating for increased soil conservation as a spiritual practice. “Perhaps I am surprised that the book should be used as a missionary tract,” Bailey wrote in his response to the request for translation rights in 1943. “I had not written it with any didactic or propaganda purpose in mind, yet it should be applicable in any faith or with any people if my thesis is correct that out [sic] attitude towards the earth should be consciously reverent and religious.”

That edition was the first to be completely reset, and, other than writing a new “Retrospect” for the work, Bailey claims not to have looked at the book “since the proofs left my hands nearly thirty years ago” (xxvi). This is also borne out in his correspondence with the secretary of the Christian Rural Fellowship, John Reisner. For that reason, this edition takes as its basis the earlier edition, adding to it the Retrospect as it appeared in 1943, in order to present for the first time the authoritative text of one of Bailey’s most significant works. Specifically, I have used the text of the 1916 printing — in another demonstration of his commitment to the book, Bailey made six minor editorial changes along with a rewrite of the last two pages of “The daily fare” between the 1915 and 1916 printings, all of which seem clearly to reflect the author’s hand. The discrepancies are not noted here, except for an end note regarding the large rewrite. Readers familiar with Bailey’s works will note that we have taken a small liberty with the author’s name — while Bailey listed himself on nearly all of his books as “L. H. Bailey” after he dropped the “Jr.” in the 1880s, and while he spelled it that way on every edition of The Holy Earth published during his lifetime, for this edition we have decided to follow more recent convention and spell out the full name (minus the “Jr.”) that is increasingly recognized the world over for its foundational place in agrarian thought. The goal throughout has not been to produce a scholarly edition, but to do justice to the historic text and to introduce Bailey’s work afresh to new generations of readers who we hope will find in it something of the vision that has nourished and challenged so many of us over the past century.

My thanks and deep appreciation go to John Stempien, Fred Kirschenmann, Wendell and Tanya Berry, Jack Shoemaker, Lisa Gitelman, and the staffs of the Cornell University Rare and Manuscript Collections, the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division, the Prince ton University Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, and the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum. Everything good I owe to my parents, Robert and Rebecca. Whatever I have been able to offer of value to this ongoing project I would dedicate to Curtis and Ruth Johnson and to Robert E. Linstrom, and in loving memory to Marcene Linstrom, all of whom have passed along their love of the things that grow from the good earth to a deeply grateful grandson.

JOHN LINSTROM

New York City, 2015