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

Introduction

Introduction For many of us today, the phrase “going back to the land” brings to mind a vision of the 1960s and 1970s: of yurts and teepees and domes, of communes in New Mexico or Vermont. “Got to get back to the land, and set my soul free,” proclaimed Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock anthem. But although the eruption of creative energy that has come to be called simply “the sixties” looms large in collective memory, the back-to-the-landers of that era were just a small part of a much larger story. Americans have been dreaming of going back to the land for a hundred years or more. At the very moment when the population of the United States was turning decisively urban, some people were already beginning to calculate what they were losing. From that time on, the back-to-the-land impulse would be an enduring feature of American life, fading in and out of view, but never completely disappearing. At key historical moments, it would return in force. This book explores how some Americans at those key moments turned away from the promise of the city and looked back toward the land. The story begins long before the Summer of Love. As early as the late nineteenth century, books with back-to-the-land themes were appearing sporadically; at the beginning of the twentieth, the trickle became a flood. The writers responsible for this outpouring came from a wide variety of ideological backgrounds: they were anarchists, socialists, and progressives; promoters of the arts and crafts, the “simple life,” or the single tax. Yet they were responding to a common set of pressing social concerns. The immediate trigger was a series of financial crises: a panic in 1893 had brought on a severe depression that lasted years. A short period of recovery was interrupted by another panic in 1907. Bolton Hall, a key figure in this first back-to-the-land generation, spoke 3 for many back-to-the-land reformers when he urged city dwellers to find some way to protect themselves from these cyclical crashes, panics, and depressions. Only the “green earth,” Hall wrote, could provide a “sure refuge from blue envelopes [we call them pink slips now], black Fridays, and red ruin.”1 In the background of these recurring economic crises were other longstanding problems. Most visible, of course, were the mushrooming industrial cities and the social disequilibrium they generated: the slums, the labor struggles, the workshops filled with immigrants arriving daily from the most unfamiliar parts of Europe. Along with those Europeans, moreover, an unprecedented number of native-born rural Americans were flooding into the same cities, leaving the refuge of the “green earth” behind. They too were part of the problem . Often bringing with them the education and skills to command a whitecollar job, these native-born migrants were mostly one step ahead of recent European arrivals. Nevertheless, they, too, were vulnerable to the boom-bust cycle. Few leaders of the movement were so naïve as to believe that “going back to the land” would provide a definitive solution to the problems generated by the historic forces at work in industrial America. Most believed that real change would depend on a fundamental realignment of power: socialist revolution, perhaps, or the adoption of the single tax, or perhaps just tinkering with the existing structure by trust busting, securing the vote for women, and passing child labor laws. Bolton Hall, for one, predicted that things would get worse before they got better: “Day by day the cost of living advances[;] . . . week by week more wealth passes away from the wage-earners to the wage-getters; month by month monopoly of the necessities of life draws closer.” Hall, a single-tax reformer , believed there could be no real public solution “short of the abolition of special privilege.”2 In the meantime, though, returning to the land might offer a private remedy. Back-to-the-land advocates called it “one way out.” Some reformers thought of it chiefly as a “way out” for the poorest city dwellers. They aimed to move working people, and especially recent immigrants , out of the crowded slums and onto self-supporting farms, to perform the kind of social engineering that would make “adequate farmers” out of “young city Hebrews” or “outcast Irish Roman Catholic street boys,” as Lyman Beecher Stowe put it in the progressive Outlook magazine.3 This wing of the back-to-the-land movement included both native...