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5 Subsistence Homesteads The New Deal Goes Back to the Land As Bolton Hall had predicted, “winter” did come once again to the American economy. Those who had scoffed at reformers during the boom years of the 1920s now turned to them once more. And Hall himself lived to see his words vindicated. In 1935, at the age of eighty, he was in the news again. One journalist described his career with a tone of bemused admiration : “When he was a wealthy young lawyer and writer Mr. Hall used to get locked up or driven from a hall for preaching single tax or birth control.” Now, the story continued, “he alone survives the rousseausque excitements of four or five decades ago.” (Perhaps it seemed like “four or five decades ago,” but it hadn’t been quite that long.) To this writer, Hall now seemed like a “prophet.” For all these years, he and his comrades—a “little band of equalitarians”—had been pressing for a more “equitable distribution of wealth.” Without it, they had warned all along, “something would blow up.”1 Now that something had “blown up,” everyone seemed to agree that people should get back to the land. Businesses, charities, city and state governments rushed to cobble together back-to-the-land projects for people who were unemployed or on relief. The Survey (the journal of record for social workers) kept track of some of those efforts, which at first amounted to no more than simple community garden projects. In 1931, the magazine reported, the mayor of Minneapolis was planning a garden project for two hundred families. In 1932, it noted, “gardens for the unemployed have graduated from 141 the hit-or-miss methods of last year into a nation-wide relief project.” The state of New York expected to award small plots of land to fifty thousand workers that year, and the International Harvester Company was offering gardens to its laid-off workers in a dozen cities. The American Friends Service Committee had established subsistence gardens in the devastated coal mining communities of Kentucky and West Virginia. In half a dozen cities from Akron to Seattle, real estate boards had turned over vacant lands to relief agencies for cultivation.2 Celebrities weighed in, too. Henry Ford had long been interested in creating a class of workers who would have one foot on the land, one in the factory. The decentralized factory villages Ford designed in the 1920s had provided workers with small plots of land they could cultivate in slack times. Now these models took on new relevance.3 After the crash, Ford funded a series of newspaper advertisements urging governments and business owners to find land for the unemployed. In 1932, he set an example by providing gardens for fifty thousand of his Detroit automobile workers.4 (Unfriendly critics called these “shotgun gardens,” because Ford made them mandatory for all his workers.) Another prominent supporter was the well-known health and bodybuilding enthusiast Bernarr Macfadden, who had become a media mogul by the 1930s. In both his tabloid, the New York Graphic, and his more respectable weekly journal, Liberty, Macfadden plugged the back-to-the-land idea as the single most effective solution to the problem of unemployment. By one count, Macfadden ran no fewer than fourteen back-to-the-land articles and editorials in Liberty between August 1931 and August 1933. In 1932 and 1933, Macfadden even sent his firm’s public relations expert to lobby Congress for governmentsponsored back-to-the-land colonies.5 Farm journalist Russell Lord commented rather skeptically on the high profile of these new back-to-the-land advocates: “Hardly a week goes by but some new leader of public opinion discovers the space between cities”—the countryside—“as a God-given dump for the unemployed.” Lord depicted those “leaders of public opinion” as a little hysterical: “The land! That is where our roots are!’ Henry Ford has cried”; “‘Get Back to Earth,’ Mr. Hearst’s New York American urges in bold-faced type.” And as Lord reported, it was not just media figures who jumped on the bandwagon. Government agencies were hiring more clerks to deal with the increase in applications for homesteads, and Manhattan businessmen were discussing soil types. Little wonder that publishers got on board, too, sending word around that they wanted more “idyllic” farm literature from their writers.6 142 Returning to Back to the Land E [18.221.41.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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