March 2008 Archives

Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)

For too long, agricultural history has told the stories of commodity production alone. Scholarly treatments of the Columbian Exchange, meanwhile, have focused only on the organisms that traveled from place to place during the age of European exploration. According to Judith Carney, these are the blind spots that Black Rice aims to remedy. Carney’s story pairs consumption with production and knowledge systems with the seeds that crisscrossed the Atlantic.

Carney’s primary purpose may be “to place ingenuity in its proper setting”, to restore Africans to their rightful place in Atlantic history (8). And she spends a number of pages—perhaps too many, considering her emphasis on skills over seeds—carefully tracing the African origins of American rice. But one of her most significant innovations is her treatment of rice production as a knowledge system. Before the ascendance of mechanized crop production, Carney writes, “agriculture represented repositories of cultural knowledge built from generations of observation, trial, and error. Agriculture has long provided the tissue linking culture to environment, cultural identity to food” (136). The story of rice, then, must include not only its botanical heritage, not only cultivation techniques, but also how people processed and prepared it. For the Africans who carried rice cultivation to the Americas, rice was equally a crop and a food. Production and consumption were joined in a way that gave rice a long future as a staple. The West African cropping systems, to use modern parlance, were entirely sustainable.

Even given the possibility that Carney exaggerates the ecological appropriateness of African rice cultivation, it is hard to disagree with her argument that plantation economics profoundly disrupted this dynamic. This was especially the case in the processing rice, which in the colonial period had to be accomplished manually with mortar-and-pestle. The enormous scale of global consumption increased the demand for labor, transforming rice milling as “the echo of cultural identity” into “inhuman . . . labor”; mechanization of the process further eroded the cultural meaning that had been attached to processing rice (124). Commercial agriculture stretched the limits of both land and labor in the lowcountry, in part because an indigenous knowledge system for South Carolina rice was not allowed to develop gradually. The social and ecological limits went unrecognized.

I wonder if something similar may have happened in the peach industry. Peaches were not essential to the American diet, as rice was to Africans, but they played a role similar to that of apples described in Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire: hog fodder, brandy, and, occasionally, human food. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, increasing anxieties about the sustainability of cotton production and the example of the California fruit industry led more and more southern (particularly Georgia) farmers to try peaches. Increased railroad efficiency and the refrigerated railcar made northern markets more accessible, and peach production rose precipitously: from 2.7 million trees in 1890 to 12 million in 1910. Much of this increase, I suspect, comprised growers who were new to peaches and had not grown them for local consumption (some had never grown anything before). These growers got into the business for the promise of large profits. The knowledge system required to grow peaches successfully was not given time to evolve gradually.

The result, unsurprisingly, was boom and bust agriculture. Georgia growers overproduced, stretching the limits of the northern markets and making themselves vulnerable to problems like San Jose Scale, plum curculio, and brown rot. Production peaked in 1928 at 10 million bushels, declined, and finally settled into a more even pattern after World War II. The growers in the business today are mostly long-time family enterprises—the ones with the knowledge system to grow peaches reliably.

This article from B&C is a good example of how overbearing the academic obsession with nuance, complications, and power relations can be.

Reaction to Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).

Larding the Lean Earth is a provocative work. In part this stems from Steven Stoll’s knack for turning a phrase. His descriptions of soil exemplify this sparkling prose. It is “the living tissue between economy and ecology,” he writes (13), and “the tablecloth under the banquet of civilization: no matter what people build on it, when it moves all the food and finery go crashing” (14). Stoll also takes seriously his role as educator, and the text is pocked with asides to the reader that make his intent clear. Nineteenth-century reformers “knew the stuff [dung] for what it was--” he writes in one example of this technique--“the partially digested wealth of their farms in a form that could be hauled to fields and made to turn another crop” (49). Stoll presents an historical “object lesson” (as he describes his account of South Carolina agriculture), in which he hopes to persuade us of a particular land ethic (121). This ideological commitment is even clearer in the epilogue, when he boldly declares that Amish farming is not anachronistic, but “the future of American agriculture” (216).

In this way, Larding parallels an older, more polemical work, The Unsettling of America, in which Wendell Berry famously laid out his case for the two tendencies in American culture: one rootless, rapacious, always looking for the next field or community to despoil, the other fixed and attentive to developing an intimate, sustainable relationship with the land. Stoll’s work, indeed, can be thought of as a more historically precise case study of Berry’s broader thesis. Perhaps better put, Stoll is drawing from the same deep well of cultural meaning that Berry used to such dramatic effect.

One wonders whether this ideological commitment leads Stoll to exaggerate the importance of improvement and of particular people within the movement. He acknowledges, of course, that the improvers were reaching at best 20 percent of Atlantic Coast farmers. A character like John Lorain, about whom even Stoll knows very little, becomes a heroic combination of democratic sentiment and sustainable agriculture in this story. On the other hand, this forthrightness is refreshing. The reader knows where Stoll stands, and it is in the dung-laced idyll of the ecologically sensitive Amish farmer, not in the cattle factories of industrial agriculture whose stench assaults him “like a wave of heat” (9). Described as it is in Larding, it is hard to disagree with his positive assessment of closed-system agriculture.

Read closely, however, Stoll’s story is infused with more ambivalence than one might expect from the prologue and epilogue. With the possible exception of Lorain, the improvers worked not only for agricultural sustainability but also their own class interests. Their system was not friendly to upward mobility. In order to be practiced on a large scale, it would have required maintaining a sizeable pool of landless labor, enough to cart around three thousand pounds of dung every three days. And as the example of South Carolina demonstrates, the system worked only under certain environmental conditions. Where pasture grasses failed to flourish, so too did convertible husbandry.

Stoll’s greatest success with this book is suggested by his opening conceit: that “what comes out of the other end of a cow opens a dynamic view to the environment” and society (9). This retelling of the antebellum clamor over migration, I think, provides an excellent introduction to what environmental (or agro-ecological) history offers to traditional historical narratives. While undergraduates might get lost somewhat in the numerous improvers, the story itself transfers well to lecture format. It brings home a sense of twenty-first-century loss: abandoned knowledge of soil, dung, plants, animals, and working (as opposed to recreational) relationships with the land.

David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

Perhaps more than any other state, California is indelibly associated with what has been called “agribusiness” or “industrial agriculture.” The state’s specialty crops, propelled by powerful marketing organizations, have in many cases established such dominance that growers in other states have resigned themselves to local and niche markets. Georgia peach growers, for example, were national leaders at the start of the twentieth century, but are increasingly turning to local retail and mail-order gift baskets in order to boost revenue.

California’s dominance has had a seamy underbelly, however, one well documented by journalists, labor historians, and others horrified at the working conditions of California’s migrant laborers. Carey McWilliams’ 1939 Factories in the Field set the tone of righteous indignation for this brand of polemical history, a pattern that, according to historian David Vaught, has gone unquestioned for some 60 years.

In Cultivating California, Vaught asks if we even know what “industrial agriculture” means. By examining California specialty-crop growers “in the full context of their culture” (3), Vaught aims to carve out a kind of middle ground, demonstrating that some growers understood themselves neither as simple family farmers, nor as industrialist agribusinessmen, but as horticulturalists. These men were committed to “small, virtuous communities and economic development” (10). Cultivating California is a history of labor relations, but Vaught insists that such relationships be “analyzed in their agricultural context” (9). Fresno raisin-growers and Davisville almond-growers had different labor problems and proposed different labor solutions, differences that had a lot to do with their horticultural ideals.

To make his argument, Vaught follows four specialty-crop communities—Fresno raisins, Davisville almonds, Newcastle deciduous fruit, and Wheatland hops—chronologically through four periods of development. The first period, comprising the first two chapters, chronicles the crops’ commercial emergence from about 1875 to 1900. The horticultural settlement of each region except for Wheatland was accompanied by high rhetoric about the “pleasant and profitable” (44) way of life horticulture represented, as well as deeply frustrating experiences in managing labor. Chapter Three explores this continuing contradiction from 1900 to 1910, as growers adopted more progressive marketing techniques but remained dependent on the labor of Chinese and Japanese immigrants. The third period (Chapter Four) takes us up to World War I, introducing the Progressive state as a major influence in agricultural labor relations. Here Vaught reminds us that, unlike many farmers, California’s horticulturalists were anti-statist, resenting the intrusion of agricultural professionals into what they regarded as their areas of expertise. In Chapter Five, Vaught explains how this conservatism was transformed by the patriotic fervor and labor shortages engendered by World War I: “Without a pang of conscience,” he concludes, “growers now turned to translocal institutions and organizations, including the state, to control their ‘bugbear’ of labor” (186).

A couple of limitations detract somewhat from the book’s argument. First, a broader context could underscore the significance of these California specialty crop growers. It would be particularly interesting to trace the connections between the rhetoric of California growers and eastern contemporaries like Liberty Hyde Bailey and predecessors like A.J. Downing. What is the genealogy of the horticultural ideal that is so central to Vaught’s argument? Second, the organizational and governmental chaos of California’s Progressive era, which makes up so much of Chapters Four and Five, can bewilder at times. A more forceful articulation of what his study contributes to our understanding of “the roots of the states’ farm labor relations” (2) could have alleviated the confusion somewhat. Beyond a more complete picture of growers themselves, how does Vaught hope clarify the history of labor relations? Presumably, it is in tracing the transformation of specialty-crop growers from anti-statist yeomen to government-dependent labor lords with a powerful legislative lobby (Chapter Five), but this is never spelled out.

Still, Cultivating California succeeds admirably in setting apart California’s horticulturalists from other farmers and, more generally, emphasizing the diversity of California agriculture. He does this primarily by including the story of hop production in Wheatland, a choice that seems odd at first since hops were different in almost every way from California’s other specialty crops. But Vaught must refute McWilliams, who relied on the story of a 1913 labor riot on a Wheatland hop farm to argue that the farm worker unrest of the 1930s extended back into the nineteenth century. Hop producers are foils for Vaught’s real subjects, the growers of fruits and nuts. And despite the continued labor problems of the last sixty years, Vaught maintains a remarkably sympathetic posture toward these growers for whom the “moral responsibility” to farm still looms as large as the profit motive (191).

Review Essay of:

Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)

David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

Contradictions make good material for history books. Find a group of people experiencing a conflict between two sets of ideals or a collision between their noble intentions and the reality they face, and you have the potential for a good story. These kinds of quandaries may crop up somewhat less commonly as the subjects of popular histories, but academics are beholden to complexity. Like cattle with their egrets, historical traditions are symbiotically accompanied by scholarship that “problematizes” and debunks, frequently by locating contradictions.

Two relatively recent works exemplify this relationship of revision. Gary Gerstle’s American Crucible is a sweeping synthesis of two historical interpretations—America as beacon of democracy and equal opportunity, and America as racial imperialist—and combines them into one quandary-infused narrative. Theodore Roosevelt was just the first of many twentieth-century U.S. leaders who struggled to reconcile what Gerstle terms “civic nationalism” with “racial nationalism.” From the Spanish-American War to the Cold War, Gerstle argues that “these two powerful and contradictory ideals” have decisively shaped U.S. history. Gerstle skillfully keeps the contradiction in play throughout the text, neither condemning nor praising the United States. This attention to complexity is one reason why reviewers have called his work “insightful and nuanced” and “deeply textured.”

David Vaught’s Cultivating California, a tightly focused history of labor relations in California specialty-crop agriculture from 1875 to 1920, is different in almost every way from American Crucible. But Vaught’s raisin, almond, and fruit growers faced a contradiction not unlike that of Theodore Roosevelt and his ideological descendents: they sought a dignified, independent, community-oriented life and business, while depending upon the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.

In what follows, I consider each work in turn, highlighting its major themes, evaluating its argument, and delineating what I take to be its most important contributions. Without attempting to pronounce a winner, since the books are competing in altogether different races, I will argue that in its narrow scope, mundane subject matter, and attention to detail, Vaught’s study provides a helpful perspective on Gerstle’s argument. While Gerstle soars over the American political and cultural landscape, Vaught digs into the agricultural and economic specifics, providing a view of Gerstle’s synthesis from the ground.

Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Cindy Hahamovitch’s moral clarity is refreshing. Without pausing to apologize or equivocate, The Fruits of Their Labor exposes the greed, oppression, conflict, and courage that characterized the world of migrant farmworkers along the Atlantic coast from Reconstruction to World War II. Thoroughly engaged in the story—Hahamovitch’s narrative clips along nicely—I was amazed that it had not been told before. If her hope is to convince that the plight of the migrant farm worker was, as she puts it, “a product of a specific and alterable relationship between farmworkers, farmers, and the state,” then she has succeeded (13). I am convinced.

In spite of the depressing plotline, her story is actually quite hopeful—the relationship is “alterable.” In this way The Fruits of Their Labor contrasts strikingly with David Vaught’s Cultivating California, a tale of California specialty crop labor relations from the angst-ridden perspective of the growers. In Vaught’s telling, the growers were much more complex characters, men of ideals, culture, and community who struggled to reconcile their bucolic vision with their need for cheap, seasonal, labor. (Perhaps this difference is due to the different geographic settings, but I think it has more to do with the authors’ predilections.) The reader is left with more sympathy for the growers, but also more pessimism that anything could have been done to right the situation.

Still, Hahamovitch’s explanations are simplistic at times. Her argument that the “experience of becoming employers, more than changes in methods, markets, and crops . . . made a business of farming,” is intriguing, but she fails to give us a sense of this transformation from farmers to businessmen (36). I suspect that it was more complicated than she makes it out to be. Frank Whitehurst alone of all the farmers in the book comes out as a reasonable man, although she concedes that “to make him out to be the only reasonable farmer along the East Coast is unfair” (164). If this is true, his uniqueness in Hahamovitch’s account is striking.

Workers, too, sometimes seem one-dimensional at times. When comparing New Jersey’s reliance on black southern labor in the 1890s and the 1930s, she makes little of the fact that the black southerners were coming from different parts of the South (upper South in the 1890s, cotton belt in the 1930s), and that their different characteristics may have contributed to their different reception in New Jersey. It is only the New Jersey farmers that have changed, taking up “the litany of the New South as their own”—meaning that they now blame blacks for their labor problems (135). (She also does not explain what exactly this has to do with the New South—but perhaps this just reflects my own ignorance.)

Hahamovitch starts off describing farmworkers as “movers, strivers, and self-exploiters” (36). While she demonstrates decisively the first two designations, the last is only implied. Presumably she is referring to the (reluctant) willingness of farmworkers to work for unreasonably low wages and their failure to organize effectively, but she leaves me curious as to what farmworkers contributed to their own exploitation.