Agrarian of the Week: The Victory Garden.

The television show, not the World War Two institution from which it takes its name.

Somewhat quirky and odd, the long-running show commenced in 1979 and was hosted by the late James Underwood Crockett originally.  I recall it from the Roger Swain era, however, which apparently from the mid 1980s to 2002, which surprises me as I recall watching it with my father, and not thereafter.  He died in the early 1990s.  Swain, with a huge red beard and suspenders was ahead of his time in the hipster movement, held a PhD in biology, so he knew his stuff.  It apparently ceased production in 2010.

One interesting thing I'll note is the name, The Victory Garden, which takes its name from the gardens people were urged to plant in World War One and World War Two to counter food shortages.  While both wars were obviously horrific, this aspect of the home front remains fondly remembered, and therefore the name is familiar.

Canadian World War One Victory Garden poster.

Agrarian(s) of the Week: The Southern Agrarians.

Farm in Louisiana, 1940.

A few weeks ago, with John Pondoro Taylor, on our companion blog Going Feral, we made a controversial entry.  Keeping with that theme, we do the same here.

If a person has agrarian interests, there's no escaping The Southern Agrarians as there is not escaping their magnum opus, I'll Take My Stand.  It is one of the great, if highly flawed, works of modern agrarian thought.

The irony, I suppose, of the work and the group needs to be mentioned from the onset. They did not make their living from the land, although it's not necessary to do that in order to be an agrarian. Rather, they were twelve men of letters who wrote what amounted to an agrarian last stand, which they were very conscious of it being at the time.  They were:

• Donald Davidson, from Tennessee, poet, essayist, reviewer and historian. He was also a segregationist.
• John Gould Fletcher, from Arkansas, poet and historian.  He was the first Southerner to win the Pulitzer Prize
• Henry Blue Kline, a writer educated at Vanderbilt who taught at Tennessee, before ironically taking government employment for the rest of his life.
• Lyle H. Lanier, an experimental psychologist from Tennessee.
• Andrew Nelson Lytle,, also of Tennessee and also of Vanderbilt. a poet, novelist and essayist
• Herman Clarence Nixon, of Alabama and a political scientist.
• Frank Lawrence Owsley, also of Alabama and Vanderbilt. a historian
• John Crowe Ransom, of Tennessee and Vanderbilt poet, professor, essayist
• Allen Tate, poet, and of Tennessee and Vanderbilt.
• John Donald Wade, of Georgia, and a professor at Harvard and Columbia, biographer and essayist
• Robert Penn Warren, of Kentucky, and who was a university professor in a variety of universities, and a poet, novelist, essayist and critic, later first poet laureate of the United States
• Stark Young, of Mississippi, a novelist, drama and literary critic, playwright

What marks them is their monumental work, which was a Depression Era, anti-New Deal, strike against the modern world and capitalism. It is flawed, in that its view of the American South was highly romantic, and frankly they were not bothered by its inherent racism and manged to basically not even see it.  The work, while important, includes muted strain of Lost Cause yearning which are not admirable at all.  Indeed, it's hard not to notice that they didn't notice that the class that was hurt the most by New Deal farm policies were African American tenant farmers.

Still, as noted, there'rs no escaping this work.  It remains the magnum opus of American Agrarianism.

Agrarian of the Week: Diocletian

Diocletian (Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus) was Emperor of Rome from 284 to 305, brining in the system in which the Empire was split in half and ruled in two separate administrations.  In that capacity, he was the Emperor from 284 to 286 and Emperor in the Eastern half of the Empire, the more important part, from 286 to 305.

There are definitely things not to like about Diocletian, but there are admirable things as well, chief among them being that he retired, something unusual for Roman Emperors, and went back to his villa to farm.

We've included him for that reason.

He famously stated, when being asked to return to power to resolve conflicts that had arisen follwoing his retirement:

If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn't dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.

If only more in power had those thoughts. 

Agrarian of the Week, Wendell Berry

Surely known to everyone who might stop by this blog, polymath intellectual Wendell Erdman Berry of Kentucky is a farmer, a novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, and profound cultural critic.  His writings have had an enormous impact on a variety of areas, not the least of which being American agrarianism.

Last edition:

Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week, and Agrarian of the Week, Tom Bell.

Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week, and Agrarian of the Week, Tom Bell.

Wyoming rancher Tom Bell, a Fremont County rancher who lost an eye from flak during World War Two, fits both of these categories this week.

Indeed, he nearly defined them.

So, too, the memories of youth return on occasion to bring the warmth of old friendships remembered and old experiences renewed. Some of my fondest memories are of the dog days of August. Then much of the ranch work was done and cares slipped away. School was in the offing but far enough away to leave free time. And even after school hours, there was still time to slip away and meditate beside some branch of the river — a retreat unsurpassed even yet in my mind’s eye.

It was during those days that we often fished. Two boys and a girl, a boy and a girl, two boys, and on many occasions — a boy. Whether together or alone, the memories recalled are always pleasant.

We caught fish, sometimes excitedly, but mostly we just fished. It didn’t really matter. They were the pleasant hours when teenage cares could be temporarily submersed.

Tom Bell.

Bell was born in Winton, one of the variety of Sweetwater County mining towns that once existed before they boiled down to Rock Springs and Green River.  His parents moved him to Lander when they took up farming during the Great Depression.  He graduated from high school in 1941 and lost his eye as a crewman on a B-24 run over Austria.  He graduated from the University of Wyoming with a Masters in Zoology/Ecology in 1957, was a founder of the Wyoming Outdoor Council and the High Country News, as well as being a rancher.

Agrarian of the Week, Thomas Jefferson.

 

Thomas Jefferson is on that cast of characters that's gone from deeply admired as a hero to treated as a goat in later years, the latter due to his problematic relationship with slavery, that latter being uniquely personally problematic in his case.

Jefferson was an agrarian, but he was not a member of the agrarian class.  Indeed, as a planter, his class was in some ways in opposition to the yeomanry.  But he saw them as the foundation for the republic and feared the day when that would cease to be the case, an act which led to his support for acquiring Louisiana, which he inaccurately believed would give the country 1,000 years breathing room.  His warnings once seemed too dire, but now seem to be rapidly coming into fruition.

Agrarian of the Week. G. K. Chesterton

 

Agrarian of the Week. Emiliano Zapata.

 

The land belongs to those who work it with their hands.

Emiliano Zapata.