Bones of Plenty

Preface

Preface INHIS INTRODUCTION to Facing West: TheMetaphysics ofIndian-Hating and Empire-Building (1980), Richard Drinnon remarks, "The record of history is nearly barren of authentically novel responses to novel circumstances ." If I can be forgiven for beginning this preface to a new edition of The Bones ofPlenty with a pun, I will say that the tragic fact he states so succinctlydoes, indeed, constitute a major impetus for the writing of many novels, including this one. No matter how many absurd repetitions of human folly and political cynicism I have been obliged to observe, I still cannot bring myselfto shrug my shoulders and say, "The more things change, the more they are the same." George Steiner recently wrote, "It is one ofthe responsibilities ofthe novel to chronicle small desolations. These are sold shortinthat harsh artifice ofselective recall we set down as history." This novel tells a story that had to be told, and I was the only one who could tell it. (These, I believe, are the only two reasons a serious writer writes.) This book tells of the '~small desolations" which the history of the Great Depression records only as statistics. President Roosevelt's New Deal was far from being an "authentically novel response" to the crisis in which millions ofmen, women, and children suffered desolations that profoundly scarred their lives, if, indeed those lives were not utterly ruined. Perhaps a truly novel response fifty years ago might have prevented the current repetition ofso many ofthe events I describe inthis book. Again we have desperate pleas for moratoriums on farm loans and mortgages, we have farmers organizing to stop sheriffs' auctions, and we have thousands of farmers going bankrupt, despite all the government subsidies which, in a very unnovel way, usually seem to help most the rich and powerful. As I write, an eighteen-year-old Minnesota farmer's son has just been convicted of shooting and killing two bank officials who were seeking to sell the family farm, which they had already repossessed. Bruce Rubenstein, writing about l¥ vii the case in the Twin Cities' City Pages (May 2, 1984), describes for us how things have not changed-except to get worse: Ifever an isolated event [asmall desolation] served to illuminate a much larger situation, then this was it. In 1977 suicides in rural Minnesota hit an all time high-227-and they've stayed high since. . . . In 1982 a record number of farms, over 5000, were put up for sale in Minnesota . . . . Twenty-five percent of U.S. farms market over 80 percent of all agricultural products sold. The last 65 years have seen the relentless replacement of the family farm by the huge, technologized farm. . . . In 1920there were five million farms in the United States. Today, with roughly the same acreage under cultivation, there are less than two million farms. . The local lender, ... the unwitting tool of Wall Street, . . . has always made a handy target for the farmers' frustrations. . . . The situation ofthe small dairy farmer like James Jenkins provides striking evidence that American agriculture is a rigged game. A critic has said of Maupassant that he wrote out of anger at the difference between the way things are and the way they ought to be. I hope no reader will be able to read this book without feeling some of that anger, and without feeling led to ponder the tendency, apparently so deep in most of us, to try to fix a problem by doing more of what got us into the difficultyin the first place, as Drinnon painfully observes. The ultimate illustration of this tendency-our attempt to solve our nuclear weapons dilemma by building more and more nuclear weapons-must not blind us to the many other examples of that unimaginative conservatism to which the writers of novels so frequently try to draw our attention. Today we see one frightening example in these very fields which, fifty years ago, seemed about to blow away in clouds falling into the Atlantic, clouds so heavy with precious topsoil that New York City needed street lights at noon. We are now caught in a vicious circle in the production of our daily bread (and all our other food) which begins in these fields and embraces not only their problems but many others as well, in such areas as transportation and marketing. The genesis of this circle is, in large part, an economic system that seems no closer to addressing the necessities of saving our planet and equitably distributing...