The Land Was Everything
Letters from an American Farmer
by Victor Davis Hanson
Free Press, 288 pp., $ 24
There is an argument, typically heard from left-leaning analysts, that family farmers are falling victim to corporate monopolies and misguided government policies. But in The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer, Victor Davis Hanson argues that we, the non-farmers, are both the perpetrators and the victims in this social transformation. He sees our demands for convenience, sanitation, and cheapness as the driving force in agriculture and the looming extinction of the family farmer as a threat to a healthy democracy.
Victor Davis Hanson is a fruit farmer in the San Joaquin Valley and a professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno -- perhaps best known for his co-authorship with John Heath of Who Killed Homer?, the widely praised and widely attacked 1998 vivisection of Classics programs in America.
He brings both his professions to bear in a series of essays about the realities of farming and the contribution of farming to society. In an interplay between his farming experience and the ideas of classical antiquity, he seeks to draw out the universal truths of farming: The ancient Greeks, he argues, "knew that man farms not merely to be fed, but also to learn how his society should be organized."
Farmers, as Hanson sees them, are "eccentric, independent citizens vital to consensual government." The kind of society we enjoy grew not from nomadic hunters but from those who cultivated the land. Our best social forms depend upon a tension between the city and the countryside, with the farmer as the touchstone -- a conservative and practical anchor.
Ever since Thomas Jefferson, Americans have held up the family farm as an ideal way of life. But Hanson is not a traditional romantic. The loss he sees is more elemental, more tragic: It is the loss of the corner-stone of civilization. But neither is Hanson a populist in the Southern Agrarian tradition of Wendell Berry, who has said, "The question of the survival of the family farm and the farm family is one version of the question of who will own the country, which is, ultimately, the question of who will own the people."
For Hanson, the loss of the family farm is not a power struggle so much as a bleeding away of a social structure that provided the essential experience for the development of democratic man. One of the main themes of The Land Was Everything is that the experience of farming creates a particular kind of wisdom, a unique way of knowing. "Does a man understand the universe because he can read Descartes, or does such insight arise only after he has lost his ripe crop a day before harvest?" For Hanson, the farmer's wisdom comes from a constant struggle with nature and from a daily balance of intellect and brawn: An "active mind tempered by muscles creates a tension at the heart of knowledge."
A good deal of Hanson's focus is on the tough life of the farmer and the "enemies" with whom he battles. We learn of the struggle against viruses, bacteria, fungi, insects, weeds, mammals, birds, and weather. A whole chapter debunks the myth that farming is serene, simple, and timeless -- and the myth that all farmers are nice and all big businessmen wicked. "People must realize that farming is . . . a very unpleasant and brutal task to bring food out of the dirt."
Indeed, Hanson spends so much time on the hardships of farming that the reader may be left wondering why anyone would ever choose to farm -- though, in fact, the rewards of farming are so great that many farm families take on extra jobs just so they can continue doing it. Also absent from Hanson's treatise are the wives and children. We learn almost nothing about how farming nurtures them or what contribution they make to our society. Hanson's world of farming is peopled with men.
But about those farming men, Hanson is clear. In farmers, Hanson sees a refreshing antidote to our confusion and paralysis in the face of evil:
I think the reductionist farmer alone, almost ridiculously so, understands the mind of his nation's enemy far better than the professor or diplomat. No, the farmer as fighter says quite honestly and without censure to drop the bomb on Hiroshima if that is what it takes to stop the onslaught of those who hate us and would shoot us down and would behead and torture millions of the weaker.
Hanson's farmers are "curt and blunt, due to their solitary existence" and "always harried and versatile." They are stubborn, rude, honest, dutiful, eccentric, law-abiding, skeptical, tightfisted, "property-owning voters." They are fatalistic. Farmers, Hanson says, "learn only how to accept, not change, fate; to understand, not to reinvent, man; to seek out faith, when reason is exhausted."
In an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek romp through the philology of farming, Hanson defines grapes as the fruit "once boycotted by those who never wished to eat them" and wine as "a tasteful and elegant product of grapes, which are always assumed to be picked by nonunion help but are never boycotted." The consumer is "a well-meaning soul who wishes natural fruit of unnatural size, color and durability, all at an unrealistic price," and the farmer is "praised fulsomely in the abstract, avoided religiously in the concrete."
With a title like The Land Was Everything, one would expect Hanson to concentrate on what the land means to farmers. But the essence of what he means is captured in the book's last chapter, where he writes:
And was it true that to Aristotle and Xenophon land was everything -- that the ownership of a small plot, hard farmwork, the forced separation from the urban manifestation of the species, the war to master nature and work the ground with the back and shovel alone solved the age-old dilemma between democratic freedom and republican responsibility, between dearth and greed, autonomy and slavishness, equality and liberty, crudity, and effeminacy? Mostly, yes.
But this is a philosopher's assessment of the land. The farmer's actual experience is more aptly captured in words like those of a woman living on the great plains, Margaret Hawkins: "Sometimes, when we are moving cattle in the morning fog, the light breaks through onto the hills and the fog opens and we can see the clouds. It is on these beautiful mornings that the soul is restored. I have a love of the land, a love for a handful of dirt."
Hanson runs, as does anyone who writes about rural America, the risk of over-generalization. His experience is not the one most Americans picture when they think of farming. He is the fruit farmer of California, not the bread-basket farmer of the Midwest or the truck farmer of New England or the cotton farmer of the South. Hanson's farming is on the frontline, in the battleground of the urban fringe and suburban growth. Hanson admits he is "a wannabe farmer . . . with primary employment elsewhere," and this having a foot in both camps provides him with perspective, but robs him of true immersion in farming. (On the other hand, he is not all that unusual, for many farmers today have off-farm jobs -- though not typically as Classics professors.)
Hanson, something of a reductionist, seeks to explain the social by drilling down to the individual: Farming produces a certain kind of man, which in turn produces a certain kind of social order. (I suspect Hanson's sociologist colleagues at the university would not readily agree.) The grounding in truth is what Hanson sees as the defining characteristic of farmers. The farmer "cannot use diction, dress, or social protocol to mask intent, much less disguise disgust or mitigate the expression of anger." But it is this fact and the farmer's conservative and solitary ways that work against his collective action and doom him to fall divided rather than stand united.
Hanson is certainly one of our more analytical and erudite agricultural apologists. He effectively communicates the complexity and paradox inherent in farming and in the social issues surrounding it. His text, rich with ancient analogy and vivid description, leads us time and time again back to the themes of his argument.
But, in the end, he offers neither hope nor solution. Those readers who come to The Land Was Everything looking for policy advice or a call to social action will be disappointed. He does, however, want us to know what we have lost. "Not food, not security, but the countryside whose culture created America and from time to time knocks it back to its senses" is what is at stake with the loss of family farms. He laments: "That the land is now nothing is the real diagnosis of modern man's mysterious spiritual illness." One does, however, get the sense that Victor Davis Hanson himself has learned something: Through farming, he has found a sense of personal redemption in living a life based on the lessons learned on the farm.