Eric SloaneSelections#8

Dateline: 28 January 2014

Drawing by Eric Slaone

The original spirit of agronomy can never return any more than Park Avenue can grow potatoes the way it did in the 1700s. But a spirit is something that doesn’t die, and the reverence for the land as an inherent part of man must for our eventual survival continue to be an American heritage.

In 1958 Eisenhower summed up the nation, saying: “We have progressed from an isolated farm economy to a world industrial economy.” That “isolated farm economy” happened to be more than an economy; it was our way of life, a personal and national philosophy. In “progressing,” the individual has now become a different person in a different nation. If the pioneer could return today he would certainly be impressed by the wonders of scientific change, but he would also be aware that his unique nation was no more.

Because we have become so business-minded, it is difficult for us to realize that the early American farmer seldom was in the business of selling farm produce: instead he raised food for his own family and for his own livestock: farming was the classical way of American life. “Those who labor in the earth,” said Jefferson, “are the chosen people of God.” Washington had said: “Husbandry was the first employment and the most honorable... farming is a diving appointment.” Washington and Jefferson, like everyone else, lived active farm lives and knew well the religion of farming. Even in the 1800s, when farming began to be a business instead of a personal necessity, the farmer was still regarded as a special man with a special calling. But in the mid-nineteenth century, things changed.

Like much of early Americana, agronomy changed and began its decline during the Civil War period. Young men returned from an unnecessary war too disillusioned to go back to where they had left off: they had seen big cities and quick money. Daddy was no longer the “lord of the earth’; he was regarded as an archaic stay-at-home comic character called Rube, with shoddy clothes, rubber boots and chewing on a blade of grass. The farmstead was no longer an estate built up and left to generation after generation; from then on, children would inherit money instead, and capitalism would become as much a personal philosophy as a national economy.

—Eric Sloane, 
From, The Spirits of '76  (1976)