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Introduction

I

This book, like several others I have written, is intended as a part of a public conversation about the relationship of our lives, and of our communal and economic life, to the lands we live from. That no such public conversation exists presently, or has existed for the last sixty or seventy years, has never been, and is not now, an obstacle to my “contribution.”

Tanya Berry, my wife, says that my principal asset as a writer has been my knack for repeating myself. That insight has instructed and amused me very much, because she is right and so forthrightly right. It is true that my writings have often repeated certain movements of thought, which, as I must hope, have been made clearer by being repeated in changes of perception and context.

So far as I am able to name them, those habitual movements of thought, at least some of them, are as follows:

 From protest or public advocacy to work and to good work. This is akin to, sometimes the same as, the movement from universal to particular. Obviously, then, this is a movement from the public languages of commerce, politics, the media, and the news to a local, neighborly language, accurately referring to particular persons, places, and things, and to the acts by which they relate to one another.

 From the future, now for bad reasons the most fashionable of all times, to the present.

 From “job,” the manna of the economists and the politicians, to “vocation,” which is the authentic calling to the work that is properly one’s own.

 From anywhere or everywhere to home, which is not a house for sale or a site for “development,” but the place by which one is owned, year after year loved and known.

 From the global economy—which for five hundred years has plundered the land and exploited, enslaved, or murdered the people of the “foreign” or “rural” world—to a local economy that would care for and conserve all the goods of a place, including the membership of its living creatures.

 From my own depleted, disintegrated, and thus somewhat representative rural homeland to instances or thoughts by which its decline may be measured and understood.

 From reality as understood by materialism and industrialism to reality understood as divine creation, holy, whole, and beautiful.

As I look back over my work of several decades, I can see that the back-and-forth of my thoughts has hardly been graceful, as it is hardly graceful in these present pages. It will probably have to be seen as a struggle to find or recover the language necessary to speak, in the same breath, of work and love.

II

From my college years, when I first encountered the word, I have understood myself and my native culture as “agrarian.” In my writing and conversation I have often used that word, assuming, no doubt too confidently, that others understood it more or less as I did. But political circumstances, a number of “opinion pieces” in newspapers and magazines, and my own recent work as represented here have put me under pressure to define “agrarianism” as fully and exactly as I can.

I was first alerted to the need for this by a young professor’s article in a magazine of “ecocriticism,” in which he questioned the “acceptability” of my writing in view of my avowed indebtedness to I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of essays by “Twelve Southerners,” sometimes known as “southern agrarians,” which was published in 1930. My “ecocritic” assumed that any book published in 1930 by southerners would be necessarily a racist book, and that I and my writings, because of my acknowledgement of my debt, were necessarily racist as well. Those assumptions are fairly explicit. Others are implied: that agrarianism and racism are only southern; that only southerners were racists in 1930; that if a racist espouses agrarianism, then agrarianism is racist; that my own agrarianism could have come only from the “southern agrarians” and I’ll Take My Stand.

The “ecocritical” charge of racism, though I would discount it as trivial, cannot be discounted as harmless. The problem with several of the isms now prominently condemned is what we might call flypaper justice: the impossibility, once accused of a categorical offense such as racism or sexism, of establishing one’s categorical innocence. The Accuser, in these instances, is a subtler serpent than the Tempter. I am sure that some at least of the Twelve Southerners were born, as in fact I was, into a circumstance of racism that they merely accepted until the time when they were obliged consciously to deal with it. For example: Robert Penn Warren, one of the Twelve Southerners, later wrote two books conscientiously intended to be against racism. Not all the others were so penitent. Though the Accuser typically is self-exempted, an actual critic is obliged to take up the work of a particularizing judgment: Is there in the life and work of the person categorically condemned anything of positive worth that can be respected and salvaged? In the absence of the morally discriminating work of actual criticism, the Accuser sets a trap that finally catches us all. This is a variety of “liberal” zeal that falls exactly into the pattern of “conservative” zeal, condemning with ferocious righteousness the sins of other people.

In fact, I got my agrarianism by being born into an agrarian family in an agrarian community. And so I have naturally recognized it and been grateful for it wherever I have found it. I found it in I’ll Take My Stand, which certainly can be associated with racism and contains some evidence of it, but it would be substantially the same book if those contaminants were removed. Its “Statement of Principles,” to which I have given most praise, contains nothing of racism. Moreover, my closest agrarian friends and allies, beyond my family and neighbors here at home, have belonged to the Midwest, not the South.

I have found agrarianism in the conversation of living farmers, and as far back in the written record as Homer and the Bible. I am sure that it is about as old as farming, far older than writing. It would be reasonable to suppose that all professors of literature would know that Homer and the Bible cannot be competently read without granting a fundamental respect to swineherds and shepherds, planters of trees and sowers of seed. But it has been the business of both the liberals and the conservatives of our time to withhold that respect, as they have withheld it also from the lands of farming and grazing.

And so in defense of myself and of my own “side,” I offer the following definition or characterization of agrarianism as I understand it:

1 An elated, loving interest in the use and care of the land, and in all the details of the good husbandry of plants and animals.

2 An informed and conscientious submission to nature, or to Nature, and her laws of conservation, frugality, fullness or completeness, and diversity.

3 The wish, the felt need, to have and to belong to a place of one’s own as the only secure source of sustenance and independence. (The freed slaves who pled for “forty acres and a mule” were more urgently and practically agrarian than the “Twelve [white] Southerners.”)

4 From that to a persuasion in favor of economic democracy, a preference for enough over too much.

5 Fear and contempt of waste of every kind and its ultimate consequence in land exhaustion. Waste is understood as human folly, an insult to nature, a sin against the given world and its life.

6 From that to a preference for saving rather than spending as the basis of the economy of a household or a government.

7 An assumption of the need for a subsistence or household economy, so as to live so far as possible from one’s place.

8 An acknowledged need for neighbors and a willingness to be a neighbor. This comes from proof by experience that no person or family or place can live alone.

9 A living sense of the need for continuity of family and community life in place, which is to say the need for the survival of local culture and thus of the safekeeping of local memory and local nature.

10 Respect for work and (as self-respect) for good work. This implies an understanding of one’s life’s work as a vocation and a privilege, as opposed to a “job” and a vacation.

11 A lively suspicion of anything new. This contradicts the ethos of consumerism and the cult of celebrity. It is not inherently cranky or unreasonable.

Those qualities describe a person distinctly of a kind. All of them, I am sure, were never fully and evenly present in any one person, any more than all the talents and virtues of an art would be fully and evenly present in one musician or one carpenter, but I am sure also that all of them are related and that in any several of agrarian farmers all of them would be present, recognized, and clearly spoken.

They do not of course describe a perfect human being. It certainly is possible, as the young professor of “ecocriticism” perceived, for agrarians to be racists. If that association were necessary or inescapable, then as a writer and advocate I would have been out of work all my life. But it seems to me, on the contrary, that the principles of community and neighborliness, inherent in agrarianism, contradict the principles of racism, just as the Declaration of Independence, written during slavery by a slave owner, contains an unqualified precept against slavery.

As several of the writings in this book testify, my knowledge of agrarianism and my respect for it have been confirmed by my reading, but they came to me by instruction and example from my own elders when I was a boy and a young man. It has become ever plainer to me that the great unchosen privilege of my life was the survival of a predominantly agricultural economy and an agrarian culture in my home country throughout my childhood, on into the 1970s, and continuing past then in some persons and households.

The reasons for this survival all seem peculiar to my region: a mostly sloping countryside, much divided by drains and streams, and thus, except in the bottomlands, impossible to divide into large, easily tillable fields, and so congenial to fairly small farms; a way of farming highly diverse in both crops and livestock; the long-standing economy and culture of tobacco, a crop traditionally grown in small acreages, requiring work for virtually the whole year, and dependent upon an extraordinary amount of skilled handwork; and, finally, our regional version of the federal tobacco program, the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, which, by combining price supports with production control, assured a fair market value for a staple crop. For these reasons, the farms here were worked almost entirely by hand and by teams of mules and horses until the end of World War II. After that the tractors came, and the industrialization of farming began.

Suspicion of the new, of change, and a lively resistance thereto continued here until the end of the war. When daylight saving time was introduced as a part of “the war effort,” the country people here just about unanimously refused to change their clocks. They balked, and with a principled passion. I remember the younger of my grandfathers, my mother’s father (1881–1965), saying, “I would rather be a Republican than change my time.” And I remember the fierce and somewhat heartbroken resentment of my father’s father (1864–1946) against the coming of the tractors, which he lived barely long enough to see. He said the heavy rolling of their wheels would compact the soil. He was right about that, but I know he had also in mind the lightness over the ground of a good-moving team of mules, which had been his heart’s love all his life. I think that agrarianism had, and where it survives it still has, a sort of summary existence as a feeling—an instinct, an excitement, a passion, a tenderness—for the living earth and its creatures.

After the war, the old resistance fell away. The old agrarianism could not survive, in the community and its economy, the coming and the ongoing development of the new “scientific” industrial agriculture. The problem that this book confronts is that agrarianism, though obviously defeatable by industrial technologies and cheap petroleum, is nonetheless necessary to the good health of the land and the people, and the forces that defeated it have not replaced it.

III

My native country, in which I have lived nearly all of my life, is ten or fifteen miles south of the Ohio River. By so substantial a margin I missed being a Yankee and an inheritor of Yankee virtues. I am a Kentuckian, a border-stater, which, to many people, means southerner. There are important historical and other differences between Kentucky and the South, but insofar as I am not a Yankee and am descended in part from slave owners, I am too handily classifiable as southern to protest, and so be it.

Anybody subjected to so broad a classification, however, will know how useless it is to the necessarily particular life’s work of self-knowledge and local accountability. And there are the expectable liabilities. Though liberals do not have prejudices, they do sometimes deal in categorical judgments that they know to be absolutely just and true. A southern white man will learn about this without much research. That I am a southern agrarian white man accounts in part, I am very sure, for the “ecocritical” verdict that I am at least suspectably a deliberately racist southern agrarian white man.

Beyond that, and for a good many years, I have been classified in reviews of my books and in assortments of interesting facts as a “tobacco farmer.” This comes apparently from some “site” on the Internet. According to the same source, I also grow wheat. So reliably informed, even some people who have visited this farm apparently assume that in a nook or hollow well out of sight among the slopes and the woods I have a tobacco patch and a field of wheat. So far, I have not received any blame for my implication in wheat-production—which in circumstances common enough, and especially in mine, would be sufficiently blamable. But the revelation that I am a tobacco farmer typically is accompanied by the suggestion I am, as such, an immoral man, and that my writings on agriculture are therefore to be held under suspicion, if not doubted altogether.

And so I know very well that the entitlement of everybody to “alternative facts” was not invented by apologists for Donald Trump. Perhaps I am now entitled to “equal time” to present my own alternative facts to the alternative facts mentioned above. This I need to do because tobacco and the federal tobacco program are prominent themes of this book.

I live in what has been one of the most prominent tobacco-producing counties in Kentucky, which has been one of the most prominent tobacco-producing states. Members of my family have been involved in growing tobacco and in various aspects of the tobacco economy as far back as I know anything about them. My father and my brother were actively involved in the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association. As I grew up, I played and then worked in tobacco crops (along with the other enterprises of our then highly diverse farming) on family and neighboring farms. Later, after my wife and children and I settled on our own small farm near Port Royal, I worked for thirty-some years, mainly at “setting” and “cutting,” in the tobacco crops of my neighbors with whom I swapped work. But it has happened that I have never grown a tobacco crop of my own. During some of our early years here, when we were glad to have the money, I leased our “base” (the right, belonging to our place, to grow a small amount of tobacco) to neighbors. Later I swapped it for the use, not often, of a neighbor’s tractor.

I am, then, not without complicity in tobacco production. But I can be called a tobacco farmer only by the same sort of categorical inference that from time to time has brought me under the suspicion or the allegation of racism. I understand very well the intellectual achievement of guilt by association. My intellect is entirely baffled and defeated, however, by the discovery that I grow wheat. On this farm?

Though I share fully, I believe, my people’s love for tobacco (rightly grown, it is a beautiful and fascinating crop), though it was long a staple of my region’s economy, and though a vital culture of family and neighborly work depended on it, I have never defended either the crop or its uses. The Surgeon General’s Report on tobacco and cancer, which made defense of the crop morally impossible, was published in 1965, before my writing on agricultural problems began.

But I have defended the federal tobacco program, as represented here by the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association. The principles of the Burley Co-op—production control, price supports, service to small as to large producers—are not associated with tobacco necessarily, but are in themselves ethical, reputable, economically sound, and applicable to any agricultural commodity. I discussed this issue pretty fully in an essay, “The Problem of Tobacco,” in 1991. In this book, I have attempted to see the Burley Co-op more clearly than before both in its geographic and historical context and in relation to what I take to be the necessity of its principles to the survival of the land and people of rural America.

It is wrong, I think, to deal with the past as if it can be simply departed from or “solved,” or brought to “closure.” It is discouraging to see the conservatives treat history as one of the “humanities” that can be dispensed with or ignored by hardheaded realists. It is both discouraging and amusing to be assured by the liberals that the past can be risen above by superior persons who, if they had been Thomas Jefferson, would have owned no slaves.

But the problems that belong to one’s history, to one’s place, and thus to one’s life, cannot in any ready or simple way be solved, and some of them cannot be solved at all. Problems such as categorical judgments against kinds of people or the production of unhealthy commodities—or land abuse or pollution or social “mobility,” to name some more—these are, for the willing, a life’s work. They can be confronted, studied, struggled with, to some extent understood, and (always to the peril of truth and justice) judged. Such, anyhow, have been among the never-finished concerns of my writing.

As the author of such writing over a good many years, I know both that I cannot and that I should not expect agreement or approval from my critics. But I think that I rightly should expect them to acknowledge fairly the complexity of my subjects, and to be honest in their use of evidence.

IV

Readers will notice that the parts of this book, although they are related to one another and to my interest in the connection of land and people, are of different genres: essays, fictions, fictions partaking somewhat of the character of the essays, and, as epilogue, a poem congenial to the essays and participating in the fiction.

The most peculiar, and perhaps the most questionable of these mixtures, is in “The Order of Loving Care,” in which one fictional character, Andy Catlett, from my novels and stories of Port William, encounters and learns from a number of my own “real life” friends and teachers. If my work had not been so incomplete in its parts, and therefore continuous over so many years, such an expedient would not have been needed. But it happens that “The Order of Loving Care” is the third of a sequence of writings specifically about the “making” of Andy Catlett’s mind, which, as it further happens, has been a theme of my Port William fiction since 1960.

With some significant differences, Andy Catlett’s life is like my own. This likeness enables me, in fiction, to bear witness to my time and place. The differences between his life and mine make my testimony subject to imagination rather than merely to the factuality of my life, which, apart from imagination, would be a bore. As fiction, a story does not have to be submitted to the burdens of a tedious pursuit and gathering of facts, or to the risk of factual error and triviality, or to apology for forgetting facts.

However, in my fiction as in my essays, I have tried always to be true to the facts of history, natural history, work, tools, economy, and economic life. Once that condition is met, I see nothing inherently wrong in asking one genre to do the work of another.

V

Though conservative politicians and organizations were always opposed to the tobacco program of the New Deal, the small farms and small towns of what is now called “rural America” (meaning nearly all of our actual country) had substantial political support throughout the 1940s. My father and his friends who led the now-defunct Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association had a significant influence in their region, and they could be heard and understood in Washington. My daughter, Mary, who continues my father’s work in behalf of small farmers, has not one ally in state or national government.

President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, proclaimed the official termination of favor to anything not “big.” And now it has been a long time since an agrarian, or any advocate for the good economic and ecological health of rural America, could be listened to or understood or represented by either of the political parties.

To wakeful persons living in rural America, aware of the abuses of the land and the people, the presidential election of 2016 brought a too-familiar “choice.” It was plain that neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton would be much aware of the economic landscapes of farming, forestry, or mining, or of the people of the land-using economies. The corporations of food, timber, minerals, and energy would have the candidates’ attention and regard, but not nearly so much the people who take the actual risks and do the actual work, and not at all the places where the work is done. The two candidates would either follow or not the longtime political custom of substituting the preservation of “wilderness areas” for conservation of nature, land, and people in the much larger portion of the country that is merely “rural.” Neither candidate could have imagined or dared the economic revisions that would safekeep in good health the land and people of every place.

The best understanding of the election that I have seen so far came to me in a letter from my friend Mark Lawson, a church pastor and professor of religion in Liverpool, New York:

It seems to me that the people who put Trump over the top were largely Rust Belt dwellers whose grandparents were forced to leave the farm for mind-numbing factory work, whose parents made a go of it with one generation of union-negotiated wages, but who were valued only as laborers and only until a cheaper means of production came along. The irony, of course, is that this segment of the population chose as the vehicle of their revenge a Manhattan real estate tycoon who got rich by exploiting bankruptcy laws and refusing to pay his own laborers (many of whom were undocumented workers). But . . . it requires no critical thinking skills to blame Muslims and Mexicans (or any other preferred scapegoats) rather than understand the long-term effects of unrestrained global capitalism.

I think that is accurate, fair, compassionate, and sufficiently critical of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

For me, the ascent of Mr. Trump, a man who indulges his worst impulses and encourages the worst impulses of others, was immensely regrettable, but it was less a surprise than a clarification. His election and his choices of cabinet members (masked as “populism,” whatever by now is meant by that) expose beyond doubt the nearly absolute ownership of our public life by the excessively wealthy, who are dedicated to freeing themselves and their corporate and of-course-Christian peers from any obligation to the natural and human commonwealth. Nothing could have made more clear the featherweight moral gravity, not of his voters, but of Mr. Trump’s rich sponsors and his party.

But the gravitas of the liberals seems to me not much weightier. What did surprise me was the revelation, after the election, of the extent of their ignorance of their actual country and its economic history, and (surely because of that) the intensity of their animus against “rural America” and the “working class” people who voted for Mr. Trump. As a rural American, I was of course fully aware of the prejudice, equally conservative and liberal, against rural America and rural Americans. I knew that “rural” and “country” and “farmer” were still current as terms of insult. But I was not quite prepared for the venom, the contempt, and the stereotyping rhetoric that some liberal intellectuals (so proud of their solicitude for “the other”) brought down upon their fellow humans.

As the fellow humans of their fellow humans, perhaps these liberals should be a little less eager to shake hands with themselves. It is hard not to see Mr. Trump as the personification, even the consummation, of the barely divergent “freedoms” espoused by the two sides: a man, by his own testimony, both sexually liberated and fiscally unregulated, the sovereign and autonomous American individual, the very puppet of his own desires. He, more than anybody else so far, is the incarnation of our long aspiration to do individually as we please.

Meanwhile, agrarianism as I have at least partly defined it has managed to survive, to maintain the loyalty and courage of a good many people, and to keep talking. It certainly is nothing like a third political party, or situated anywhere between the present two. At least, it provides a viewpoint from which to observe and measure the effects of those two and their contention upon the actual country. At most, it is an entirely different way of living, thinking, and speaking: the way of what I am obliged to call economic realism, indissolubly mated to ecology, to local ecosystems, and to the traditions of good husbandry and good neighborhood, starting at home and from the ground up.

VI

Finally, I need to say that the word “order,” as in the title of one of the pieces of this book, now seems to me far preferable to “pattern,” as used in my essay “Solving for Pattern” of 1980. “Pattern” signifies a rigidity of form and a mechanical repetitiousness that I don’t see in nature or respect in human work. “Order,” almost on the contrary, signifies the formal integrity by which a kind of creature or workmanship maintains its identity and remains recognizable even as it varies through time, adapting to difference and to change.

The order of loving care is of human making. It varies as it must from place to place, time to time, worker to worker, never definitive or final. It is measurable by the health, the happiness too, of the association of land and people. It is partly an ideal (remembering divine or natural order), partly a quest, always and inescapably a practice.