Advice to Farmers

Dan Allosso

People have been giving advice to farmers throughout American history.  Sometimes farmers themselves have written about their favorite techniques or innovations, but often experts have tried to compile the “best practices” of the past and add new ideas developed by scientists and technologists.  The progressive era amped up this process, and turned the USDA and land grant “Agricultural and Technical” universities into big producers of information for rural people.

But that process is a story for another day.  Today, what caught my attention is an old (1880) book I found in the UMass library stacks, called Farming for Profit (online here).  Written by John Elliot Read (who claims in the introduction to be “a practical farmer, acquainted with the details of farm management, and thoroughly used to manual labor”), the book promises to show “How to Make Money and Secure Health and Happiness on the Farm.”  I think it’s interesting that even a volume designed to be an “Encyclopedic” and “Comprehensive” source of “Mechanics” and “Business Principles” in 1880 puts the rural lifestyle front and center.

Farming for Profit is a fascinating combination of late-nineteenth century technique and culture—both of which can be compared with what came after.  At some point, I’m going to make a more thorough study of how the two elements of farm tech and farm life changed over time.  For right now, I thought these items were interesting:

In the illustration at the top, across from the title-page of the book, we get a more or less classical view of farm life—not of technology.  There are no new machines in the picture, and the buildings don’t even seem to be in the best repair.  The impression I get is of an ancient and venerable way of life.  Peaceful, slow-moving, and dignified.  Later in the book, there are more practical illustrations, like this diagram of an ideal farmstead.  And in another illustration, we see more evidence of a transition in farming: the first view is of corn plants (old-fashioned ones, not the super-hybrids we're used to seeing today) that have been “drilled or planted,” while the second shows corn planted in hills.  Hill-planting was the old technique colonists learned from the Indians, so it’s interesting that it still finds its way into a manual from 1880.  That suggests that maybe the author was a practical farmer with lots of experience in the fields. 

A Nation of Minorities

Chris Beneke  

With the present birthrate, the Nordic stock will have become a hopeless minority within fifty years, and will within two hundred have been choked to death, like grain among weeds. Unless some means is found of making the Nordic feel safe in having children we are already doomed.

- Hiram Wesley Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926)

When Evans, the Ku Klux Klan’s Imperial Wizard and Emperor, offered this non-scientific demographic projection in the pages of the respectable North American Review in 1926 he wasn’t far out of the mainstream. Two years earlier, the U.S. Congress had passed an immigration restriction bill that severely narrowed the gates through which immigrants from eastern and southern Europe passed. The impending, relative decline of the Nordics was a leading justification for the measure.

Evans’ apoplexy contrasts with the relative equanimity that greeted the recent news that non-white births now outnumber white births in the U.S.—presaging a non-white majority by midcentury.* While the initial frenzy of reporting dripped with anticipated angst, the nation largely managed to keep its composure.

Interestingly, much of Evans’ vitriol—and much of the contemporary KKK’s general vitriol—was aimed at the Roman Catholic church. Anti-Catholicism didn’t come to an immediate end when the Klan imploded in the late 1920s. But it never again reached such heights.

While religion and ethnicity are very different social categories, and early 21^st domestic and international politics much different than those of pre-Great Society, Cold War America, we can still discern some revealing parallels between the conditions under which white Catholics were successfully integrated into American society and those now surrounding the growing Hispanic population. In other words, we have a historical precedent for the accommodation of a large block of new immigrants in the U.S., despite the hyperbolic fury of the extreme right and the dour pessimism of the extreme left.

Setting aside the fact that nearly one-third of all U.S. Catholics are now Hispanic, there are at least five easily identifiable parallels between 21^st-century Hispanics and 1920s-era Catholics:

1. As early 20^th-century Catholics were a diverse group bound together by an ancestral  faith, so are Hispanics from a variety of backgrounds bound together by an ancestral  language; 
2. Hispanics are approaching one-fifth of the U.S. population—as were Roman Catholics in the first decades of the 20^th, but their birth rates are likely to level off as they did for 20^th-century Catholics; 
3.The Hispanic population now includes a predominant nationality (Mexican American) that will, like Irish American predominance among early 20^th-century Roman Catholics, diminish as illegal immigration slows; 
4. Hispanics are marrying members of other ethnic groups at a rate comparable to 20^th-century Catholic religious exogamy; 
5.Explicit prejudice against Hispanics is increasingly confined to the extreme, economically marginal right—just as it was for early-mid-20^th-century Catholics.

This ad-hoc collection of rough analogies doesn’t guarantee anything about the next few decades of course. The investment firm’s stipulation that past performance is no guarantee of future results also goes for social change. And we should worry about the effects that the return of pre-World War II-levels of economic inequality might have.  Still, the case of early 20^th century Catholics is instructive and  encouraging. 

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* There are problems with the accounting, mainly because those Hispanics who identify as whites were included in the “non-white number.”  On this see Jeff Jacoby’s piece in The Boston Globe and Matthew Yglesias’s piece in SLATE.

Persistence in Folkways

Heather Cox Richardson

My sister makes the world’s best baked stuffed lobster. She learned to make it from watching our mother who, in turn, learned how from her father. But Kath has a problem. She has tried for years to get someone else in the family to learn how to make the lobsters. No one will (not least because of just how gruesome the process is, something that my marine biologist sister handles with none of the squeamishness the rest of us show). She warns us that she will take the recipe to her grave if no one will learn how to prepare it.

She might well be right, but another recipe that has come to light recently suggests that recipes do persist in communities even when lost by their originators. About thirty-five years ago, a friend’s grandmother, who lived on a nearby island, served me a blueberry cake made with molasses. She didn’t have a recipe, but she gave me approximate amounts and I wrote them down as “Gram’s Blueberry Cake.”

In my parent’s house is a shelf of local cookbooks that cover the years from the 1890s to the present. I read them occasionally; I find it fascinating to see how eating patterns change over time. I was interested to see recently that what I discovered as Gram’s Blueberry Cake has showed up repeatedly in cookbooks over the years, coming from different households. As it turns out, the woman who submitted the recipe to the local cookbook in one of its earliest appearances was one of my relatives.

Whether or not Kath’s recipe for baked stuffed lobster will come around to our great-grandchildren by way of someone else remains to be seen, but the persistence of the unusual blueberry cake recipe brings to mind an issue I’ve wondered about lately: the persistence of folkways in communities.

David Hackett Fischer explored this persistence in Albion’s Seed, when he traced the origins of four American folkways to four different European migrations. Malcolm Gladwell put great emphasis on it in Outliers, suggesting that the different experiences of various immigrant groups in America could be traced to their cultural heritage. More recently, Slate highlighted a study suggesting that modern-day German anti-Semitism bears a direct correlation to whether or not those same communities murdered their Jewish populations during the Black Death in the 14th century.

Frankly, I always found these arguments about such extreme cultural persistence farfetched. At least in the modern world, it’s hard to imagine that the forces of change do not outweigh cultural continuity over the course of even one generation, let alone hundreds of years. Even ubiquitous human conditions like racism change rapidly to reflect changing anxieties, making it hard to argue that even they reveal cultural continuity on anything but such a macro level that they have very little explanatory power.

But my recipes give me pause. If they have lived for a hundred years by word of mouth, what else has? What about attitudes and prejudices? Surely they persist, too, and surely they are crucially important when forming political affiliations, for example. But how do we, as historians, grapple with such intangible cultural artifacts in a meaningful way?