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xi FOREWORD Gene Logsdon i don’t know when i’ve read a book so profoundly uplifting and at the same time, so devastatingly depressing as this account of farm life written by a genuine and obviously gifted intellectual man of letters who decides to raise chickens during the Great depression. it is sort of like what would have happened if Michael Jordan decided to give up basketball at the height of his career to make a living knitting potholders. to watch a man who would later write some of the most penetrating and acclaimed history about nineteenth-century politicians ever published, giving himself utterly to the demands of a hardscrabble farm while making every farming mistake in the books, well, it is the kind of cultural miasma out of which great art can arise. that is what happens in this book, but not in a predictable way. his forlorn, even pathetic situation does not inspire in Charles Wiltse the kind of tobacco road lament about the hardships of rural life that one might rightfully expect, but instead a searing and brilliant commentary into the kind of capitalism that rules our economic situation. his examination remains almost always clearheaded and objective, going beyond the suffering and disappointment of depression-era agriculture to question both democratic and republican approaches to fiscal problems. his observations about how government and private economic policy played crucial roles in agriculture at that time are critical and penetrating and very applicable to the current recessionary times and extreme partisanship. What emerges is the best explanation i have read so far for why there is such a thing as a rural liberal. in these days of xii * foreword simplistic red and blue states when public opinion so often assumes a liberal/conservative geo-cultural division, Wiltse shows how culturally logical it can be for someone to be both politically liberal and financially conservative at the same time, and wary of both too much private power and too much public power. Wiltse argues that while government help for farmers (or anyone else) may be socialistic, government is the only entity powerful enough to curb and control private capitalist greed from taking advantage of the working class. he does not argue from generalities , but from the brutal, everyday struggle to make a living at what should be humankind’s highest calling: producing food. he explains, better than i have been able to do, why i call myself a redneck liberal. this is a book that seems to have been written in the 1930s and for the 1930s, but is even more appropriate for today. i know because i lived then and still live, with my chickens, in the here and now. on the one hand, Wiltse’s sensitive and humbly artful writing can help society out of its extreme partisanship today. on the other hand, for all those many eager and angry young people who are deciding to try to find independence in small farming and local food business, Wiltse describes the details of farmwork with great accuracy and clear-eyed realism. if you are going to raise chickens, you need to know the dark side of it too. ...

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