Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America

Ch. 6 - “I’ll Take My Stand” (in Vermont)

6 “I’ll Take My Stand” (in Vermont) Decentralizing the Back-to-the-Land Movement The New Deal subsistence homestead programs met with criticism from all sides. From the right, Ohio senator Robert Taft led Republican congressional resistance, attacking the entire New Deal for its socialistic innovations , reckless spending, and dangerous expansion of government power. Virginia senator Harry F. Byrd, a leader of the conservative Democratic coalition, targeted the subsistence homesteads in particular for their wasteful spending and collectivism. On the left, many commentators viewed the projects with an equally critical eye. Malcolm Cowley of the New Republic set out his magazine’s position in a 1933 article “How Far Back to the Land?” He ridiculed the “small farm racket” as a “wistful” search for “primitive, arcadian simplicity.” Cowley argued that any such effort to transform people back into “peasants of the thirteenth century” would be dissolved by the irresistible forces of modernity: “money, automobiles, radios, Greta Garbo.”1 Louis Hacker, a Marxist economist on the faculty at Columbia, launched a similar attack in Harper’s Monthly. First of all, Hacker wrote, this “romantic dream” of “little modern Arcadias” would be very expensive. Perhaps they might actually be able to revive “the ancient handicrafts of spinning, weaving, wood working, pottery making” and “similar pursuits of a contented peasantry ,” but he estimated it would require $10 billion to create the “thousandodd Brook Farms” that would be necessary to make a dent in the nation’s 172 problems that way. Worse than the cost, Hacker entertained a dark suspicion that the Roosevelt administration, “hard driven by the contradictions of its own position,” might find the homesteads’ dependent populations politically useful and even “seek to build up exactly such a sheltered peasant group” to bolster its power to “withstand the revolutionary demands of the organized industrial workers.”2 Such things were being done in Germany and Italy, Hacker pointed out. While critics on the right feared that Roosevelt had Stalinist ambitions , leftists feared that he would take Mussolini and Hitler as models. The Decentralists Ralph Borsodi shared these fears of the Roosevelt administration’s will to power. But he did not share the critics’ animosity toward subsistence homesteads or the back-to-the-land agenda. Borsodi believed deeply in the “small farm racket” that Malcolm Cowley despised, and he spent much of his career encouraging people to revive the “ancient handicrafts” Hacker dismissed. By the time Borsodi broke with the Dayton subsistence homestead project in 1935, he had forged a new connection with a loosely organized group of thinkers who were neither laissez-faire Republicans nor New Deal liberals, neither fascists nor communists. In 1937, Borsodi helped to found a journal called Free America, which would speak for this “third way.” By the second year of publication , the editors had settled on the term “decentralist” to describe their views.3 Borsodi’s fellow editor Herbert Agar, a journalist and public historian, played a key role in bringing together the coalition that created Free America. In the first issue, Agar defined the ideological parameters of the magazine. He began by invoking the Vanderbilt University writers known as the Southern Agrarians. Their defense of the traditional rural life of the South in the 1930 manifesto I’ll Take My Stand had offered the first clear alternative to the “triumphant plutocracy,” materialism, and “uncritical worship of bigness” that had dominated the nation in what Agar called the “high unpleasant noon of Coolidge prosperity.” Next, Agar credited a group of “third-way” British reformers known as distributists with teaching him personally to “recognize the enemy I wanted to fight.” (Distributists advocated the widespread “distribution” of property and the reestablishment of an economy of self-sufficient farms and autonomous, small-scale workshops.)4 Finally, Agar enumerated the other allies of Free America: the agrarian Catholic Rural Life Conference; the cooperative movement; the single-tax movement; and Ralph Borsodi himself, who, like the Agrarians “back in the days of Coolidge,” had attacked “plutocracy and the worship of bigness.”5 “I’ll Take My Stand” (in Vermont) 173 E Agar summarized the common goal of this alliance with a deceptively simple phrase: “economic democracy.”6 Like the distributists, American decentralists envisioned a world in which everyone had access to productive property—to the tools and materials that would allow them to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves. Like the old producerist radicals of the turn of the century, they...