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112 i Five j Jack-o’-LanternSmiles Americans Celebrate the Fall Harvest with Pumpkins, 1900 to 1945 J ohn Arata, a farmer living near Half Moon Bay, just outside San Francisco, recounted a day back in the 1930s when he and his brother were returning to the family farmstead from distant fields with a wagonload of pumpkins for their hogs. “This car came along with a couple of well-dressed men” who wanted to buy pumpkins, recollected Arata, in his eighties when a journalist interviewed him in 2000. “We sold three or four for $1. We took that home, and our dad said, ‘Get the team, load pumpkins, and go sell them on the road.’”1 Before long, Arata’s father (and observant neighboring farmers) deemed the pumpkins too valuable to feed to the pigs and began to produce them for the retail market. A couple of well-dressed men cruising the countryside in their car and buying pumpkins seems innocuous, if perhaps peculiar, but this trip and the men’s purchase can tell much about Americans’ relationships with nature and rural life in the first half of the twentieth century. It is a good guess that the men did not actually need the pumpkins. Arata’s description leads one to believe that these were not local farmers but people who lived in a nearby city or suburb, so they probably owned little more land than a front stoop, much less livestock. It had been years since pumpkins had been necessary to feed a family, and the spread of canned goods and neighborhood grocery stores offered much more convenient options than a distant farm for obtaining fruits and vegetables. It is difficult to imagine a practical reason for two men in suits to stop in the countryside to purchase pumpkins. Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 113 Americans’ desire for pumpkins has defied reason and logic since before Amelia Simmons created the pumpkin pie, New En­ glanders featured it in song, and Abraham Lincoln propelled it into becoming a national dessert. As at these pivotal moments in the pumpkin’s history, so in the early twentieth century—just when the vegetable was least useful in the household economy—Americans such as the two “well-dressed men” steeped it in meaning. In 1920, for the first time in history farmers made up less than half the American population.2 The foundation of American society and its core values, rooted in rural ways of life, were under serious threat. In the words of President Franklin Roosevelt: “The American dream of the family-size farm, owned by the family that operates it, has become more and more remote. The agricultural ladder, on which an energetic young man might ascend from hired man to tenant to independent owner, is no longer serving its purpose.”3 Images of American farmers, dignified and ennobled, which appeared in governmentsponsored Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs of migrant farm workers, in American regionalist paintings of midwestern farm life, and in literary works such as James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, about southern tenant farmers, are well-known cultural responses to the dramatic change in status of rural people and ways of life in the first half of the twentieth century. Some farm families did more than just pose for the cameras. They took advantage of this new incarnation of rural nostalgia by selling a picturesque ideal in which the pumpkin had long been a prime attraction. Farmers of course sold many fruits and vegetables from their roadside stands, but the pumpkin is a particularly powerful crop to follow because demand for it was spurred by its bucolic meanings and symbolic uses in harvest displays and holiday treats, rather than by the needs of daily sustenance, as was the case for strawberries and apples. Pretty pictures and quaint stories of pumpkin farming may seem like superfluous responses to industrialization , having little or nothing to do with actual farm operations, but they propelled two men in suits to stop for pumpkins and thereby altered real places and people in profound ways. Few American farmers, if any, imagined a family fortune in pumpkins . American agriculture in the first half of the twentieth century is known for its great economic highs and lows, although the overall trend was toward greater consolidation, meaning bigger and fewer farms, and 114 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles toward increasingly industrial modes of production, signifying greater reliance on machines, synthetic inputs, and capitalization.4 Although expanding the acreage and intensity of cultivation of farm land offered growers the chance for greater profits, not to mention the ability even to stay in business, farming was a risky enterprise in an ever-fluctuating market. An investment for the future could quickly turn into overextension , debt, and bankruptcy. The late 1910s marked the high point of agricultural output, when World War I fueled overseas demand for wheat and other commodity crops. Farmers’ capacity to fulfill this demand was never greater as they got behind the latest gasoline-powered tractors to plant more productive crop varieties on expanding acreage made possible in many regions by water from new, federally sponsored irrigation projects . Although the Midwest still led the nation in grain production, California farmers developed large commercial fruit and vegetable operations. In this age of mechanization, farmers still harvested pumpkins by hand, but the impracticality of doing so became ever more evident. “The inventor of the corn-cutting device did not take pumpkins into account,” explained oneobserverofthetechnologicalchangesin1901,“andasaresultthepumpkins have to be plucked before the machine can be used, which is a great nuisance, and besides most of the pumpkins would be still unripe.”5 The newest agricultural machinery, in other words, was rolling over the pumpkin . Adding insult to injury, a 1918 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture undermined the practicality of the pumpkin’s one remaining farm function, that of livestock feed, by determining that “5 to 6 lbs. of pumpkin was equal in food value to 1 lb. of hay.”6 Inefficiency was not the pumpkin’s only liability. The demand for pumpkin production was not remotely comparable to that of major commodity crops, which deterred capitalist investment in the crop. For example, in 1919, a peak year in all agricultural output, a mere 1,674 out of 6.5 million American farms grew a total of just 3,056 acres of pumpkins (around 4 acres per farm) within more than 500 million acres of improved farmland across the country.7 Although pumpkins failed to make headlines in the annals of agricultural research and commerce, they offered some small-scale producers a chance to sustain their operations in the face of threats by larger, corporate enterprises. Newspaper and magazine articles hint at the profits, however meager, that arose from growing pumpkins for canneries, whose market was primarily the holiday pie trade. “Demand for the Distinctly Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 115 American Product Is on the Increase—A Tract of 300 Acres in New Jersey Given Up to Cultivation of the Fruit,” announced the New York Times in 1902.8 That same season, another Times article weighed in, “The commercial side of pumpkin raising is apparent when a consideration is given to the fact that the farmers supplying a single factory in Northern Ohio, for example, collectively often make as high as $15,000 to $30,000 from the sale of their pumpkins in a season.”9 Because the article did not give the number of participants in this collective, it is impossible to determine the actual economic gain for its individual producers. Nevertheless, consumer desire for pumpkin was stirring. A 1913 edition of the book Garden Farming verified this trend: “From an economic standpoint, the pumpkin is not so great value as the squash. During recent years, however, the demand for pumpkin as a filling for pies has led to the canning of this product on an extensive scale.”10 Dickinson Company laid the cornerstone for the largest pumpkin canning plant in the country when it opened a factory in Morton, Illinois, in 1925, creating opportunities for farmers there. Four years after the plant opened, Libby, McNeil and Libby, a prominent Chicago group established in 1868 that was better known as a canner of meat products, purchased it.11 Libby’s also bought factories in nearby Eureka and Washington, Illinois , where it canned peas and corn along with pumpkin. (By the later part of the century, Libby’s would control more than 85 percent of the market in canned pumpkin.) Also in 1925, the Atlantic Canning Company , in Iowa, began to provide local farmers with seeds on credit, so they could grow pumpkins to send to its factory.12 Under this type of arrangement , farmers became more like company employees than independent entrepreneurs. Unfortunately for many of them, the greatest profits were had at the processing and marketing stages, so the farmers did not benefit from the growth in the food industry nearly as much as the companies that processed and sold the food. Some farmers, as I describe shortly, would develop schemes to get around that limitation. In the 1920s, American agriculture began a steep decline. The bottom dropped out of the market when World War I ended in 1918 and farmers had no buyers for their surpluses. Together, the rising scale of production and the market downturn squeezed out many farm families, many of whom packed up and abandoned their homesteads for work in the cities. Between 1920 and 1930, rural areas lost 2.5 million inhabitants (the rural 116 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles segment dropped from 48.6 percent of the U.S. population in 1920 to 43.6 in 1930), even as the total U.S. population grew by more than 17 million.13 The financial crash of 1929 and the devastating dust storms of the 1930s radically changed the nation’s agricultural landscape. In his groundbreaking 1979 book Dust Bowl, Donald Worster argued that the two tragedies were less an unfortunate convergence of natural and economic disasters than the result of the same underlying cause: capitalism.14 In the all-consuming drive for greater profits, farmers ignored the local ecology , especially the health of the soil, with devastating effects. The same machines and business ethic that plowed profits out of the Great Plains also turned dirt and livelihoods into so much fine dust. The consequences were epic in proportion. Thousands of acres of farmland lay barren, and thousands of farm families, many of them tenants working for large corporate enterprises, were forced to abandon their holdings and head west to California in search of opportunities that did not exist. Americans turned to education, research, and direct aid to solve their farm problems.15 Science, technology, education, and government support were hallmarks of Roosevelt’s New Deal farm programs. The federal government set up protections to steady the market, such as the Ever-Normal Granary program, which established national storehouses of grain to regulate price fluctuations. Under the auspices of the FSA, the government relocated farmers to new land and taught them more sustainable practices, such as contour farming and soil conservation, based on the latest research at USDA extension stations. In these dire circumstances, the pumpkin more than held its own. Between 1919 and 1949, pumpkin production, though still extremely modest by any standard, increased by 99 percent, from 3,056 to 5,975 acres.16 Many farmers, such as the Arata family, grew pumpkins for livestock fodder . But the future was not in livestock, something the Aratas learned firsthand when the two men stopped them on the road. By 1949, the acreage of pumpkins harvested for animal feed was only 31 percent of the total acreage of pumpkins harvested that year. The remaining 69 percent was planted in either “processing pumpkins,” for canning, or pumpkins for ornamental use.17 In other words, the majority of pumpkins grown were destined for holiday uses. A 1938 guide to the state of Iowa described large fields of pumpkins near Atlantic, Iowa. “They are a variety of sweet pumpkin, the seeds Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 117 for which are furnished to farmers by the canning company on credit, bringing $5 to $9 a ton. From 10 to 20 tons are produced on an acre.”18 Farmers harvested on average 2.7 acres of pumpkins annually, so these Iowa farmers earned between $180 and $486 from pumpkins per year, exclusive of production costs, at a time when average annual income in the United States was $1,725.19 Not surprisingly, the USDA’s “East North Central” region, which encompassed Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where most canning factories were located, held by far the most pumpkin farms and acreage. The mid-Atlantic region, which was geared toward urban commercial bakeries, came in second. California harvested only 627 acres on 95 farms, in comparison with Illinois, with 1,663 acres on 179 farms, suggesting that the expansive new California produce farms did not put their resources into pumpkins. New En­ gland, long the hub of pumpkin symbolism, ranked near the bottom, alongside the South.20 Consumers’ increased desire for pumpkins arose from seemingly contradictory trends: the changing material conditions of American life and the perpetuation of historically powerful ideas about the meanings of nature and rural life. Although the basic recipe for pumpkin pie remained relatively constant, the product that made it to the Thanksgiving table and the way it got there were now radically different than in times past. In the early twentieth century, corporations began to control not only American agriculture but also every stage of the food cycle, from farm to table. They laid the foundation for America’s integrated system of food production , manufacturing, and distribution, which still dominates today.21 The development of new technologies for cleaning, chopping, preserving, and packaging foods greatly increased the types and quantities of foods available to middle-class consumers but dissociated those consumers from the growers, places of production, and natural sources of their food as never before. Flour and sugar refineries, meatpacking plants, and canning factories not only eradicated the need for local sources of most foodstuffs but also changed the very nature of many products. As William Cronon eloquently wrote in Nature’s Metropolis, consumers went from experiencing the livestock they ate as living, breathing animals to simply encountering them as slices of meat in cellophane wrappers, with no physical trace of the four-legged creatures in evidence, nor of the farmer who raised them nor the place where they were raised.22 118 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles John Cowan, in the 1906 Pacific Monthly article “The Golden Pumpkin Pie,” favorably compared pie manufacturing to the production of “armor plate, steel rails, wire nails, locomotives and other necessities of highpressure civilization.” Many consumers, however, simultaneously welcomed the new products and their convenience and felt uneasy about the lack of transparency as to where their food came from, or even what their food was.23 Concerns over safety were common responses and would fore­ shadow consumers’ fears and responses at the turn of the twenty-first century. Upton Sinclair’s castigation of the Chicago meatpacking industry ’s handling and contamination of meat in his 1906 novel The Jungle famously led to the federal testing of food additives—for example, by the “poison squad” organized by Harvey Wiley, who became the first commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It also led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.24 All in all, Americans were much farther removed from the sources and natural states of their food than ever before. Many people also began to think differently about food because of developments in food science, nutrition, and home economics. With the discovery of vitamins and other chemical compounds, consumers started to judge a food’s value more in terms of its component parts, and cooking more in terms of digestibility than in terms of taste and texture. A 1906 advertisement for the Natural Food Company stated, “Thanksgiving Day is a day of thanks in every home where the housewife has nailed the ‘pure food’ slogan to outer and inner walls. But it is not enough that the food be pure and clean. It should present the maximum of nutrition with the least tax upon the digestive powers.”25 The company’s concern for food safety and nutrition certainly took some of the allure out of Thanksgiving dinner for celebrants. The distribution and retailing of foodstuffs followed the trends in manufacturing as more and more Americans purchased food in stores rather than raising it themselves. And although local butchers and bakers still existed, by 1934 fewer than half of food retail stores were independent .26 Increasingly, consumers bought their food from local and national grocery store chains, led by the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P), which standardized the types of foods available as well as the food shopping experience. In the 1930s, most grocery stores shifted from counter service, in which employees assisted individual customers, to self-service, Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 119 in which eye-catching labels on canned foods helped to entice purchasers. One retailer enthusiastically supported the switch to canned goods when he advised grocers, “In the majority of cases canned goods deserve pushing as they are more uniform, not to mention the cheapness of the entire line when compared with the actual food value of fresh products placed on the table both from a standpoint of quality as well as quantity.”27 By 1934, according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s report “Food Retailing ,” canned goods accounted for a greater proportion (25.13 percent) of food sales than meats, bakery items, and fresh fruits and vegetables.28 The popularity of manufactured products made fresh pumpkin an old-fashioned novelty in American “stream-lined” kitchens.29 “It appears that canned pumpkin has so displaced the fresh article that the time is not far distant when directions for scooping out seeds, peeling, steaming and draining the big succulent wedges will be as outmoded in the cookery books as instructions on stoning raisins and flouring a cloth for boiled pudding,” wrote the author of the newspaper article “Our Thanksgiving Feast” in 1935.30 Capitalizing on another of the new food manufacturing technologies, the Dry Pack Corporation would introduce a ready-made pumpkin pie mix in 1945.31 A 1910 advertisement for the Connecticut Pie Company, a bakery in the heart of Washington, D.C., that rolled out thirty thousand pies a day, including “spicy-deep-rich-big-the real pumpkin pie of Yankeeland Thanksgiving,” suggests not only the economic value of pumpkin pie but also the ways in which food preparation outside the home had become big business.32 Cowan, the same man who promoted commercial pie production, wrote, “And it is largely by his pumpkin pies, baked during the Thanksgiving season, that the aspiring pie manufacturer will be judged.”33 A September 1902 issue of the New York Times reported that about three million pounds (fifteen hundred tons) of pumpkins were needed for the creation of pies in New York City alone.34 This demand probably accounts for the relatively large number of farmers who grew pumpkins in the mid-Atlantic region. When the era’s main food authority , Harvey Wiley, defined pumpkin as “a food [that] is more condimental than nutritive,” he sanctioned its long-standing use as a dessert instead of as a daily food like the squash.35 By the mid-1940s, the idea of pumpkin pie was so ingrained in consumers’ minds that women’s magazines published articles such as “Wave Your Magic Wand over Pumpkins,” encouraging 120 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles home cooks to “widen pumpkin’s food destiny” by using the vegetable in other savory and sweet dishes, not just in pie.36 When people began to buy canned pumpkin from stores instead of growing pumpkins in their fields, the pumpkin became a consumer good, as the agricultural statistics document. Turning the pumpkin into a grocery item detached consumers from the plant and the place where it originated . When manufacturers now began to reformulate the vegetable and package it in a tin can or sell it as a ready-made pie or mix, they intensified this process of abstracting the natural object from its origins. Yet the cultural history of the pumpkin runs contrary to the common story that capitalism and commodification inherently lead people to become disconnected and alienated from the natural world around them. Buying and eating canned pumpkin made many Americans feel a part of nature and rural living, and by doing so they returned profits to small family farmers. The demographic shift from farms to cities by the mid-twentieth century explains the need for people to purchase pumpkins, but not their desire to buy and eat them in the first place. A 1908 elementary school botany lesson offers some insight into that desire. After stating that she was ambivalent about leading a botanical investigation of the pumpkin’s seeds, skin, and innards, the educator explained, “I sometimes wonder if such a procedure might not prejudice the child against the pumpkin and detract just a little from his enjoyment of the real functions of the pumpkin, viz, its use in pies, and for making jack-o-lanterns. . . . [but] to have the child raise a pumpkin from the seed, harvest it and finally follow it personally into a jack-o-lantern or a pumpkin pie, the pumpkin would then have filled a happy mission as a nature-study subject.”37 The teacher wants her students to focus on the rural roots and the holiday rituals but not on the botanical specifics of the pumpkin itself. The popularity of marking the autumn by displaying and eating seasonal symbols , especially pumpkins and corn, suggests that although harvest time had lost most of its practical implications, for the majority of Americans it still held deep meaning. The highlight of an October 1903 “harvest social” sponsored by a Sunday school, for example, was a reading of Whittier’s ode to the pumpkin, after which curtains went up to reveal a cornucopia of food, including pumpkin pie.38 Even if new canning and dry-mix technologies made eating pumpkin pie possible at any time of year, Americans still preferred to eat it Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 121 in the fall and associated it primarily with their beloved Thanksgiving holiday. “Surely a Thanksgiving dinner without pumpkin pie would be an empty sham and a hollow mockery,” scoffed Cowan in “The Golden Pumpkin Pie.”39 Like any other viable holiday tradition, Thanksgiving both adhered to old practices and adjusted to new circumstances. Gimbel ’s introduced New York City’s Thanksgiving Day parade in 1921, and Franklin Roosevelt moved the holiday from the last to the fourth Thursday of November in 1936, but modernization did not diminish Americans’ patriotic zeal for the old-fashioned pumpkin.40 “Even the lordly turkey holds not a prouder place at this annual feast of all good things than does the delectable-concoction of the cooks that has come down to us from the Heroic Age of the Republic, endeared by sentiment, hallowed by patriotism , glorified by the recollections of childhood and sanctioned by the traditions of mellow antiquity,” summed up one pumpkin enthusiast.41 From sentimental turn-of-the-century postcards, which depicted rustic New En­ gland farm scenes or the 1621 Pilgrim and Indian feast, to 1940s magazine articles about “Extra Special Pumpkin Pie” that quoted Whittier ’s well-worn lines about agrarian life—“What calls back the past like the rich Pumpkin pie?”—Americans found new meanings and uses for old and familiar holiday motifs, rituals, and symbols.42 Americans expressed their continued devotion to the New En­ gland colonists in Thanksgiving pageants in which people dressed up as Pilgrims , in children’s holiday songs that preached the Pilgrims’ heroism and civic virtues, and in rosy-tinted greeting cards of pious colonial men and women with pumpkins in their hands or at their feet. Publications such as the 1918 What to Do for Uncle Sam: A First Book of Citizenship, which reported that Thanksgiving was Uncle Sam’s favorite holiday, tried to inculcate American values in new immigrants by helping them celebrate the Pilgrims and pumpkin pie as their own.43 Roosevelt’s nostalgic sentiments about the vanishing American family farm permeated popular art and literature, which gave new life to another major Thanksgiving motif, the rural homestead. Many artists and writers incorporated the pumpkin and pumpkin pie directly into their work. Their general message is familiar: the modest family farm as foundational to American national identity and as a source of core cultural values in times of change and hardship. What is less familiar is how these beliefs actually helped change the fortunes of small family farms. 122 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles The federal government played a pivotal role in making that happen. Although New Deal reformers prided themselves on rational approaches to farm economy, their programs were also sympathetic to the small family farm. Besides developing resettlement and education programs designed to keep family farms in operation, from 1936 to 1945 the FSA employed photographers to document the farmers’ plight, producing one of the most significant records of rural farm life in America.44 Through their photographs, Walker Evans, John Collier, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Russell Lee turned ordinary people and places into portraits of American virtue. Lange’s “Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936,” otherwise known as Migrant Mother, portrays a woman surrounded by her children in tattered clothing and is one of the most famous photographs of the era. Rugged and weary, the farmers standing before the artists’ cameras were transformed into symbols of hard work, simple living, and old-fashioned values that Americans historically linked to farm life. The purpose of the FSA photographs was both to validate American agrarian ideals and to garner public support for government relief programs. Americans came across these photographs in Life magazine, but they also encountered tributes to farm life while walking into the local post office or government office building. Artists hired by the Works Progress Administration decorated federal buildings from coast to coast with murals celebrating, among other themes, local rural history and culture.45 Above the mailboxes in the Rockville, Maryland, post office is a mural depicting a bucolic patchwork of local farmsteads at the foot of Sugarloaf Mountain, painted by Judson Smith in 1940. In Chilton, Wisconsin , Threshing Barley, by Charles W. Thwaites, portrays muscular men in rolled-up shirt sleeves harvesting a crop.46 The landscape photographs in the FSA collection speak as effectively about cultural values as the portraits. John Collier’s photograph of a pumpkin field near Windsor Locks, Connecticut, looks like a nineteenthcentury genre painting, with a large field of pumpkins stretched before a picture-perfect white clapboard farmhouse. The photographer’s inclusion of the dwelling turns a simple farm scene into a broader symbol of cultural identity; the picturesque pumpkin field communicates a sense of the values and character of the people inside the house. Thanksgiving also had its place in this rich photographic record. Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 123 Photographer Jack Delano visited the Crouch family in 1940 and captured humble yet hallowed images of the family’s Thanksgiving dinner. In “Pumpkin Pies and Thanksgiving Dinner at the Home of Mr. Timothy Levy Crouch, a Rogerine Quaker Living in Ledyard, Connecticut,” the family sits around a table filled with bowls of food. Their image is captured in a mirror that hangs above a sideboard displaying desserts, including most prominently two pumpkin pies. Juxtaposing the family and the pies, the photographer infuses the portrait with a sense of well-being and old-fashioned goodness. The pumpkin pies in particular cast this as a distinctly American scene. These government-sponsored works of art echoed the themes and politics of famous literary works devoted to the trials and tribulations of working farmers. John Steinbeck’s 1936 The Grapes of Wrath chronicled the life of the Joad family as they migrated to California in search of work after the midwestern dust storms destroyed their farmstead. James Agee and Walker Evans’s 1936 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men recounted in words and pictures the plight of southern tenant farmers and sharecroppers .47 American regionalist painters, including Grant Wood of Iowa, John Steuart Curry of Kansas, and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, also contributed to the genre with paintings that valorized and mythologized American small-town and rural life.48 Wood’s 1941 Spring in the Country portrays a man and a woman planting their crops with old-fashioned tools and horse-drawn plows. White, puffy clouds promise nourishing rain over their lush, rolling green fields. A church on the far hillside sanctifies this way of life. The artists, who sometimes dressed the part of their subjects by donning overalls, sought to produce an indigenous American art and painting style. In contrast to abstract art coming from Europe and eastern U.S. cities, their realist-style portraits of American farming turned to the past and to the American heartland. Although critics chastised them for being too conservative and nationalistic, and others debated the genre’s modern intent and influences, these painters nevertheless kept the old-fashioned farmer a vital symbol of national identity. During the two world wars, American artists parlayed the pumpkin’s familiar iconography into patriotic symbols of the home front, resurrecting another use for the vegetable. A Thanksgiving postcard published during World War I, for example, depicts an oversize golden pumpkin 124 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles with “Peace and Prosperity” written across it. The pumpkin embodied the simple things in life found in the classic American dream, such as the rewards of hard work in a land of opportunity, and therefore served to invigorate the war effort. FSA photographers depicted soldiers on leave sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with their families during World War II.49 Magazines and newspapers reported on the great efforts made to serve soldiers in the field some semblance of a Thanksgiving dinner and offered recipes for pumpkin pie that promised to please the serviceman in every American household .50 Just before the end of the war, the famous American illustrator Norman Rockwell created a cover for the November 24, 1945, edition of the Saturday Evening Post, titled Thanksgiving, that portrayed a soldier in uniform, just home from the war, helping his elderly yet sturdy mother John Collier (American, 1913–1992), “Harvest Market near Windsor Locks, Connecticut, 1941.” Black-and-white film. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/ OWI Collection LC-USF34-080974-D. Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 125 or grandmother peel potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner. In keeping with the nostalgic imagery of the scene, Rockwell displayed a big, fresh pumpkin at her feet, even though people at the time commonly used pie filling out of a can. The pumpkin not only represents an important component of a traditional Thanksgiving meal but more broadly communicates the illustration’s themes of domestic tranquility and the nation’s natural and moral wealth. Rockwell’s painting of this elderly woman in her rustic kitchen, along with FSA photographs of families sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner and magazine articles helping to ensure that GIs got their pumpkin pie, all come back to the idea that women’s cooking pumpkin pie was an act of patriotism. Just as bakers of pumpkin pie in the Revolutionary War era made a stand for national independence by preparing the indigenous and Jack Delano (American, 1914–1994), “Pumpkin Pies and Thanksgiving Dinner at the Home of Mr. Timothy Levy Crouch, a Rogerine Quaker Living in Ledyard, Connecticut ,” 1940. Black-andwhite film. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection LC-USF34-T01-042712-D. 126 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles homegrown vegetable for their families, and just as Sarah Josepha Hale’s disciples in the nineteenth century served up pumpkin pies to instill in homes across the country a sense of national unity based on old agrarian ideals, so women in the mid-twentieth century used their culinary skills toward political ends. Cooking and serving food played an active, not just a supportive, role in national politics. It makes sense that Rockwell, as the standard bearer of Americana, would portray a woman baking pie from scratch with a fresh pumpkin. Yet judging from the popularity of canned pumpkin and bakery pies, many women experienced no contradiction as they took advantage of the most modern manufacturing innovations and conveniences to perpetuate old-fashioned values. Thanksgiving, of course, is only part of the pumpkin’s story. Halloween is much of the rest of it. Unlike Thanksgiving, with its focus on the family and domesticated nature, Halloween reveled in mischief. While the jaggedtoothed jack-o’-lantern played foil to the pumpkin pie, it also reaffirmed the pie’s expression of the therapeutic value of nature. Instead of finding inspiration in farm life, however, it celebrated the unpredictability of nature as a force beyond human control. Honoring the jack-o’-lantern one night of the year gave a break to Americans who might feel pinned down by regimented work schedules and bureaucracies that dictated the pace and structure of their lives. Like the pie, the jack-o’-lantern was an incarnation of complex, intertwined attitudes toward social norms and the natural world. Although women still threw elaborate holiday “frolics,” with the usual party games such as bobbing for apples, Halloween celebrants in the early twentieth century also took to the streets, making the holiday a more public affair than in decades past. They headed out the door in costume for parades, trick-or-treating, and hooliganism, which ranged from minor pranks such as doorbell ringing to more serious property damage.51 Despite annual reports of violence on Halloween night in New York City in the thirties and forties, most revelers’ actions were playful affronts to social norms.52 As the master of ceremonies, the wild and mischievous jack-o’-lantern led the charge. The pumpkin’s image adorned tablecloths, mantelpieces, and endless party favors. “Here and there, in the most unexpected corners, jack-o’lanterns smiled or gnashed their teeth amid great shocks of corn or leered from lofty coigns of vantage,” described a columnist for the Ladies Home Journal in her October 1903 article “Merry Hallowe’en Larks.”53 Because Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 127 of the more public nature of the holiday, people embellished their yards with pumpkins. At her 1911 “Halloween housewarming,” one woman had “jack-o’-lanterns on the gate-posts, in the spooky corners of the cellars, and in the attic.”54 Most jack-o’-lantern figures possessed a sinister and wily character. Except for Jack Pumpkinhead, the happy, dimwitted, pumpkin-headed creature with a long wooden body created by L. Frank Baum for his Wizard of Oz series, the jack-o’-lantern depicted in most popular holiday ephemera in the early twentieth century was hardly jovial.55 Below a macabre head, it had a body, arms, legs, and feet that could be used to great advantage. Rather than being stranded on the doorstep, this jack-o’-lantern was animated and moved about. Holiday greeting cards depicted it driving cars, chasing children, riding on the backs of black cats, dancing with devils and witches, and serenading damsels.56 It pranced among the stars and cavorted with the full harvest moon. Its body might be made of vegetable parts (with corncob arms and squash legs) or mimic the human form. It moved of its own volition as an independent force and could not be controlled. As a walking personification of wild, natural spirits, this pumpkin was full of vim and vigor. It was as much devilish imp as harvest emblem. In the 1905 song “The Jack O’Lantern Girl,” the lyricist called on classic Halloween themes to editorialize about people, particularly about proper gender roles and age-old anxieties about women who step outside prescribed social boundaries. The real focus of the pumpkin tale was not nature but the corrupting influences of urban life. In this ballad, the jacko ’-lantern personifies an untrustworthy female who is beyond a man’s grasp. “The Jack O’Lantern Girl” is an attractive and urbane seductress, not the peasant harlot of bygone years. The cover of the sheet music shows a female human figure dressed in finery, prancing before a group of jacko ’-lantern-headed, stick-figure men in trench coats. The lyrics go like this: A sort of Jack O’Lantern Girl I lead them here! I lead them there! A most elusive elf am I to capture. Their sorrows deep they tell to me. Each seeks the tribute of a tear. Because they say my sympathy, To them is very very dear. I hear them all with down‑cast eye From which the tears Flow unforced. They do not note that as I cry I always keep my fingers crossed. A sort of Jack O’Lantern Girl I lead them here! I lead them there! A most elusive elf am I to capture.57 128 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles While the Jack O’Lantern Girl’s wildness and unpredictability perpetuate historical analogies between the pumpkin and women’s supposed overt and wanton sexuality, the song also expresses specific anxieties of the early twentieth century. At the time, single women were joining the work force in droves to fill service and administrative positions from office secretary to waitress—for example, the famous Harvey Girls, who worked at the well-known proprietor’s national chain of restaurants.58 The song conveys a sense of the danger, though perhaps also the attractiveness, of a working woman in the city who is not dependent on a man. Writing “Halloween,” color postcard , circa 1910s. Like the image on this postcard, most jack-o’-lantern figures in the first half of the twentieth century had a macabre head attached to an animated body. Author’s private collection. Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 129 for American Kitchen Magazine in 1902, Hannah Ayer drew on the wellknown pumpkin fairytales to speak of this unease about women’s striking out on their own: “The famous Peter—pumpkin eater—resorted to a pumpkin to help him out of a dilemma, and as in the case of Cinderella the pumpkin was quite equal to the occasion, and by aid of its shell his wife was kept within bounds. Husbands of later date, like Peter, have been disturbed by their wives reaching outside prescribed boundaries.”59 The Jack O’Lantern Girl is the woman who could not be contained and got away. As a city girl unfettered by tradition and guided by her own free will, she is anathema to the venerable pumpkin pie makers who affirm agrarian and gender ideals by domesticating the pumpkin in the form of a pie. The Light of the Pumpkin, a 1934 play by John Kirkpatrick, speaks similarly of the corrupting influences of the city. It brings together Halloween and Thanksgiving themes in a story about the recuperative powers of rural places. The play takes place in the country house of an elderly couple who await the Halloween visit of their nieces and nephews from the city. Before their arrival, the old man reflects warmly on his unwavering belief in the supernatural. Life was better when people had a healthy fear of the unknown and the powers that lurked in wild places, he says. The only fears people have nowadays, he notes cynically, are of being hit by a car and being taxed too much. As he speaks, the audience casts its eyes on a glowing jack-o’-lantern with “red, sunken eyes and evil, grinning teeth” in the center of the room.60 When the couple’s citified, twenty-something relatives arrive, the visitors are initially more concerned with their time schedules than with the old man’s tales and traditions. They have been corrupted by modern urban life. Mysterious noises echoing from nearby hillsides, however, and other clattering sounds heard on this bewitching night seem to spook away their jaded ways. “Even the sight of—of that old pumpkin—it did something to me,” says the old man’s niece. In the play, the jack-o’-lantern embodies both the forces of wild nature and the values of rural places. The characters perceive the jack-o’-lantern to be an antidote to the artificialities of modern life, and the countryside as unrefined yet more authentic than the world where they reside. Produced at the height of popularity of American regionalist paintings and of FSA works of art, The Light of the Pumpkin affirmed many Americans’ longing for the benevolent influences 130 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles of wild nature and rural life, and it confirmed the power of pumpkins to fulfill these desires. Going out and buying pumpkins became as much a part of the seasonal ritual as putting them on display. John Arata’s story about selling pumpkins to “well-dressed men” who happened by his family’s northern California farm, which began this chapter, sounds like a rarity, but it was not. Similar incidents happened across the country as consumers’ demand for fresh pumpkins for the holidays grew and their ability to find them in urban markets diminished. By the 1930s, in New York City, it was probably easier to find a pumpkin in a can than fresh from the vine. According to the New York Times: “A survey of the markets might give the impression that pumpkins and cranberries are disappearing. . . . John Egan, who regularly solves such mysteries for the Department of Markets, [explains] ‘pumpkins are heavy to ship and take up a lot of room. If there is room on a truck and there are any pumpkins around, they’ll put them on the load. But you won’t find that many, even around Thanksgiving.’”61 Unless, that is, you got in your automobile and headed to the country . The 1910 ad for the Connecticut Pie Company, which shows two men hauling off pumpkins from a cornfield, depicts the classic rustic scene, but businessmen in suits and fedoras replace the farmers in straw hats and overalls. The scene is indicative of the turn in the pumpkin market. As early as 1904, a Michigan state booster optimistically viewed the pumpkin as a key tourist attraction. He asked, “Why not bring renown to Michigan as the ‘Land of the Pumpkin Pie?’ True, Nebraska is the home of the genuine corn-fed girl, and Kansas is not without glory as the home of the grasshopper; but to have it broadly known that Michigan is the ‘Land of the pumpkin pie,’ would bring tens of thousands of tourists to our State every autumn.”62 Unable to compete with the wholesale prices offered by large-scale farms or to afford the prices demanded by rail and shipping companies, some farmers in the early twentieth century began to turn to direct marketing techniques, such as the use of roadside stands, to cut out the mid­ dlemen and salvage their family businesses. As many direct farm marketing guides explain, the keys to success were proximity to a large population center and an effective enticement.63 Contributing to the development of roadside stands in the twenties, thirties, and forties was the proliferation of automobile tourism and the persistent interest in Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 131 native rural culture, as exemplified in art and photographs of the time. Concomitant with vast road improvements and construction, the number of automobiles increased exponentially with every passing year.64 Buoyed by more disposable income and more free time, many Americans hit the road. While national park tours and cross-country road trips made popular summertime vacations, many people also piled into their new sedans for weekend trips to the country.65 Often with no clear destination in mind, families toured the countryside to take in the rural scenery. One 1940s American regionalist–style landscape painting portrays a large sedan pulling a camper along a rural road, with picturesque, rolling farmland and a quaint little farmhouse serving as the backdrop. Such places were tourist attractions. In Middletown , their study of Muncie, Indiana, Robert and Helen Lynd reported “When the Frost is on the Pumpkin,” advertisement for the Connecticut Pie Company, Washington, D.C., in the Washington Times, October 15, 1910. Urbanites’ demand for pumpkins for holiday rituals and food helped spark a new form of rural economic development— roadside farm stands. 132 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles that the “local paper estimated in June 1935 that 10,000 persons leave Middletown for other towns and resorts every fine Sunday.”66 They noted that these “all-day Sunday motor trips” were important for residents who did not have extended vacations and that some considered these jaunts “a threat against the church.”67 Most people sought not just geographical distance from home but also a less tangible separation or respite from their daily lives in and around urban centers. The automobile gave Americans greater access to and freedom to visit once remote places and people. Tourists’ presence in the countryside propelled the very forces of capitalist consumer culture that city folk were trying to escape and thereby altered the landscape to fit their expectations and desires.68 Farm families were among a large cadre of entrepreneurs who seized the opportunity to serve the growing numbers of weekend vagabonds. James Agee’s “The Great American Roadside,” an article in the October 1934 edition of Fortune , described this new phenomenon. He called roadside businesses “an American institution which is also a $3,000,000 industry, and which is founded upon a solid rock: the restlessness of the American people.”69 Gas stations, eateries, and motels all offered their own sorts of enticements , which they advertised with increasingly elaborate signage, from giant ice cream cones to massive teapots. A 1929 Massachusetts Department of Agriculture survey of 2,500 consumers indicated that more than 60 percent of the respondents stopped at roadside farm stands because of the displays.70 Roadside farm stands served a particular market niche by offering customers not only fresh fruits and vegetables at decent prices but also a chance to interact with local farmers. “For years it has been custom,” noted the author of Meet the Farmer in 1944, “to stop once each trip at a little roadside stand run by a farmer, to pick up fresh eggs, vegetables, and poultry.”71 Early on, regulators tried to ensure that farm stand operators were indeed the farm proprietors, and they discouraged the sale of nonfarm items such as sodas and cigarettes, presumably to sustain a sense of authenticity.72 New Jersey, for example, required that operators produce 60 percent of the merchandise sold at the stand.73 Farmers established cooperative roadside associations, and publications from Economic Geography to First Principles of Cooperation in Buying and Selling in Agriculture described the stands’ economic benefits for small-scale producers.74 One such publication stated specifically that a New York state farmer’s Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 133 roadside stand had lifted his farm out of the doldrums and helped sustain his operations.75 The changes wrought by the new road culture on farm communities inspired a melancholy poem from Robert Frost, who is known for his reverence for the New En­ gland countryside and his deep sense of rural nostalgia. Written in 1936, during the height of the Great Depression, the poem “A Roadside Stand” portrays the farm stand enterprise as a confrontation between struggling yet sympathetic farmers and greedy and overprivileged urbanites. He wrote: Here far from the city we make our roadside stand, And ask for some city money to feel in hand, To try if it will not make our being expand, And give us the life of the moving pictures’ promise. . . . The sadness that lurks near the open window there, That waits all day in almost open prayer, For the squeal of brakes, the sound of a stopping car, Of all the thousand selfish cars that pass, Just one did stop, but only to plow up the grass.76 Frost laments the roadside stand as American farmers’ tragic attempt to survive against economic forces and ways of life that seem antithetical to their humble rural existence. His pessimism reflects the deep desire that many people felt (and that he was famous for writing about) to hold onto a more traditional, farming way of life in America. Few practicing farmers, of course, have ever thought of themselves as anachronisms; instead, they have sought ways to modernize and improve their businesses. Although it might seem paradoxical, many of them did just that by taking advantage of the American public’s nostalgia for the quaint family farm of lore. Farmers offered all types of produce for sale, but the pumpkin proved a particularly strong enticement because it was such a potent symbol of both the old-fashioned farm and virile nature. Countering Frost’s forlorn perspective on the rise of farm stands, a children’s tale from 1937 adapted the old agrarian myth to accommodate the pumpkin roadside stand. In Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Grower, by Florence Bourgeois, a boy named Peter plants pumpkins and then creates a farm stand where people stop to buy them. He uses the money he earns to buy a bicycle. The book translates 134 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles the age-old myth of the American yeoman farmer, in which a strong work ethic brings due rewards, to the new economic opportunity offered by the roadside stand.77 By choosing the pumpkin to make her point, the author used one of the most popular and recognizable symbols of rural virtue, thereby communicating the idea that these old values could stay intact as the world changed. Alongside the FSA’s more famous images of California farm immigrants and midwestern tenant farmers is a photographic series depicting New En­ gland roadside pumpkin stands that reinforces Bourgeois’s point. Whereas the focus in the early years of the FSA program was on the hardships of the rural poor (which were also evident in Frost’s poem), as World War II approached, the emphasis changed to more optimistic subjects. In a letter to his staff of photographers in 1941, Roy Stryker, the head of the agency, instructed: “Please watch for autumn pictures, as calls are beginning to come for them and we are short. These should be rather the symbol of Autumn . . . cornfields, pumpkins. . . . Emphasize the idea of abundance—the ‘horn of plenty’ and pour maple syrup over it.”78 In response, photographers John Collier and Russell Lee captured images of farm stands heaped high with piles of pumpkins and squashes. Ironically, many of the photographs were shot in New En­ gland, where pumpkin production was meager in comparison with that of other regions but which had a large, concentrated population of urban consumers.79 These “wayside harvest stands,” as the artists identified them, were eye-catching sites of agrarian splendor. Mounds of field pumpkins, crates of crooknecks, and bins of gourds and other squashes enticed the caravans of travelers who passed before them. Unlike the spotless and stylized way in which pumpkins are displayed at stands nowadays, these appear nicked, scraped, and haphazardly piled, suggesting that farmers had not yet begun breeding varieties exclusively for display. Several photographs document the great draw that these rustic marketplaces had for urbanites. Many are crowded with women in heels and men in suits perusing the fall produce. In one photograph in a series labeled “Farmers along the Mohawk trail in Massachusetts depend on the tourist for much [of] their profit,” a farm woman dressed in a simple seedcloth dress and apron stands beside a customer in her Sunday finest who inspects the pumpkins and gourds before her.80 The two women stand as stereotypes of old and new ways of life—the rural producer and the Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 135 urban consumer. The photograph “Sales Promotion at a wayside harvest market” depicts a long-retired Model A with a family made of pumpkins seated inside it.81 Set beside the road, it is a caricature of the new breed of tourists who clambered their way into the countryside. Another, more picturesque roadside attraction is an old farm wagon piled with pumpkins that recalls nineteenth-century harvest paintings.82 It is suggestive of the ways tourists were offered a piece of Americana along with vegetables for pies. Farmers used historic motifs as enticements for urban visitors to the countryside, and the photographers exploited these themes to their own ends. Another new tradition drawing crowds of thousands to the country­ side was the pumpkin festival. A “pumpkin show” was now considered an Russell Lee (American, 1903–1986), “Roadside Stand near Greenfield, Massachusetts,” 1939. Black-and-white film. This image is part of a Farm Security Administration photographic series featuring New En­ gland roadside pumpkin stands. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection LC-USF33-012448-M4. 136 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles old-time county agricultural fair—sometimes called a “pig and pumpkin show”—in contrast to larger state fairs that displayed the latest innovations in the mechanical arts alongside agricultural products.83 What is interesting about the fairs devoted to modern innovations and the festivals that celebrated the pumpkin is that they arose out of the same trend. In other words, the pumpkin festival is not a remnant of an historical agrarian tradition. Pumpkins were nowhere to be found at colonial and nineteenth-century harvest festivals. The pumpkin festival got started just when an agrarian way of life seemed to be disappearing. The Circleville Pumpkin Show, in Ohio, was first held during the third week of October in 1903.84 Displays of corn fodder and assortments of pumpkins marked the early events, which organizers intended “to get Untitled Farm Security Administration photograph labeled “Farmers along the Mohawk trail in Massachusetts depend on the tourist for much [of] their profit,” made between 1935 and 1942. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection LC-USF34-081646-D. Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles = 137 the country folks and city folks together . . . so the city folks would be able to appreciate their efforts.”85 Yet modern food technologies, not just old agricultural practices, inspired the festival. Circleville was home to the C. E. Sears Canning Company, which began processing and packing pumpkins , corn, and other vegetables in 1873. During the fall packing season, Circleville streets were lined with long columns of horse-drawn wagons, all loaded with pumpkins that farmers brought to town for processing. The Depression, a drought, and the closure of the canning factory all took their toll on the community and threatened the survival of the Pumpkin Show. During World War II it was cancelled altogether. In the late 1940s, even as many farmers moved off their land to seek opportunities in nearby Columbus and beyond, the Pumpkin Show reemerged on “Circleville Pumpkin Show—1910.” Black-and-white film. The Circleville, Ohio, Pumpkin Show has been held the third week in October since 1903. Pickaway County Historical Society, Circleville, Ohio. 138 < Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles Circleville’s yearly calendar, and it has continued as an annual tradition ever since. Circleville was only the first of many rural communities to renew its local identity and its prosperity with the pumpkin and thereby defy the dire predictions of economic demise. Ironically, the expanding consequences of corporate capitalism, including increased wealth, technological innovations, and, adversely, economic pressures on small family farms and rural towns, made pumpkins profitable and pumpkin stands and festivals abundant. As insightful as John Arata’s father was in the 1930s about a future in pumpkins, he probably could not have imagined that one day his children and grandchildren would grow something called a “specialty pumpkin” and that thousands of tourists would pay up to $15 each just to visit the family pumpkin farm.86 ...

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