It was late afternoon when I stopped at a friend’s farm. An invitation to sample three new homebrews and some freshly sliced prosciutto from a 2-year-old ham had been issued. The short drive found me passing dozens of small homes and farms. None of them could be called financially “going concerns.” Most had vegetable gardens and chickens; some had fighting cocks staked to huts; many had a steer or two in a small pasture and a few pigs in sties near the barn; one had a gutted buck draped from a pickup truck. These are features of our landscape. It’s a traditional landscape of those getting by, doing for themselves. Not quite the “self-sufficing” farms of old, but closer than most in this modern world.
Tools of the trade
In the 1930 census, one-third of “self-sufficing” farms were located in Appalachia, accounting for the majority of farms in the region. These farms generated less than $100 a year, produced more than 50 percent of their needs on the land, and bartered and traded for the rest in an essentially cashless network. In a system hallowed by custom, kinship, shared work, and shared deprivation, these hill people still led a life rich in music, folkways, food, and craft.
Cashless networks create challenges within a capitalist economy. Communities operating outside the prevailing system must always be brought inside, to the sheltering embrace of improvement, progress, and markets. A people not in search of “the civilizing influence of a cash economy” will be given it anyway. And once it’s presented, they’ll often surrender to it, for after all, the sirens’ call of cheaper, plentiful goods is hard to ignore when there is money to spend.
The 1930s were really the midpoint in a long, complicated pursuit of bringing “progress” and wages to the mountain people. That pursuit ultimately resulted in the destruction of those self-sufficing farms, the cashless society and culture, and what remained was a shell, a dependent people, and the faintest ghostly echo of that world today.
Perhaps it is a romantic streak, but I see ghosts. Ghosts of what we have lost in our drive for progress and shiny baubles. One North Carolina woman, at the brink of the Civil War, anticipated the loss to come in that conflict: “How quietly we drift out into such an awful night, into the darkness, the lowering clouds, the howling winds, and the ghostly light of our former glory going with us to make the gloom visible with its pale glare.”
A friend of mine works with non-profits and universities establishing links between the peoples of Appalachia and the Maramures region of Romania. ‘Twas a link I thought a stretch until he sent me William Blacker’s chronicle Along the Enchanted Way. It is a haunting work, beautifully written, of a land isolated and untouched yet by the capitalist economy and unaffected by the communist government just fallen—a land like ours once was, of custom, barter, and kinship, of self-sufficing farms.
During the years Blacker lived among the Romanians, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, he witnessed the impact of cash and commercial goods on that society. How quickly a rural, traditional society unravels, one outside paycheck or charity at a time, leaving a pale glare to light the path behind.
We find it hard to step outside our immediate desires and see the long-term consequences. We bemoan the loss of kith and kin, praise the handmade, the local, yet undermine all by our gluttonous drive for new markets and consumption. Left behind is the debris of formerly stable societies, slathered now with the cheap, sugary pink frosting of hope and mountains of discarded plastic toys.
On our farm, we don’t lead a self-sufficing life. We try. But even with our table loaded each night with food sourced from just outside our door, with a pantry full of jars of preserves, pickles, and canned produce from the garden, with bacon, jowls, and hams under the stairs, we conjure only a pale outline of what was or could be. We try to barter and repair the literal and figurative fences in our community. But, we fail. Those links to a self-sufficing life are now severed. We are too plugged into this economy, too enamored to envision a way out.
The problem is not just our fossil-fueled lifestyle, our globally connected train of goods and services, or our commodification of all physical aspects of our modern existence. It is our mindset. We discard with ignorance and shortsightedness and embrace the new without question.
Perhaps we mistake the lowering clouds as security and the howling winds as the sound of contented voices. Yet … if the pale light guiding my path leads me to three homebrewed beers and some home-cured prosciutto, then I’ll gladly trudge on.
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Reading this weekend: Book of Tripe: and gizzards, kidneys, feet, brains and all the rest. By Stephane Reynaud.
Well said. This is precisely the story told in Joe Bageant’s memoir Rainbow Pie. Everyone I’ve shared it with discards it out of hand as mere nostalgia. I can’t feel that nostalgia, being already two generations (or more) away from that world, but the glimpses of it I see communicate momentous loss.
Thanks for the comment and the heads up on Rainbow Pie. I’ve read and appreciated his “Deer Hunting With Jesus.” And, I would hope that these pieces are not construed by any readers as simple exercises in nostalgia. We all have our starting places when excavating the past or envisioning the future.
Cheers,
Brian
Perhaps I can relate to some of this loss a bit more than most – having had the benefit of a childhood spent on the land and at the knee of a man who was raised in such a self-sufficing environment. My father experienced first hand the transition to life moving from a farm only subsistence to a farm as one piece of a family economy where more than half of the family economy resulted from off farm wage income.
There are so many changes that have occurred over what is essentially just the last century here in the US that laying blame in one court or another is far too simplistic. Fascination with baubles is certainly one direction to spit… but we’d be long dehydrated if we attempt to spit on all the aspects of change that have lead us to present circumstance.
Even the simple mourning for a past suggested by the North Carolina woman in your piece is problematic. Would we actually pine for a long lost economy in North Carolina where only the Caucasian landed gentry could enjoy the fruits of an agrarian system built on the backs of slave labor? I will agree there is a possibility of a gentile and harmonious existence in these same environments absent the horror of slave labor. But this wasn’t how it was going down before the bullets flew.
Another difficulty I see with too simplistic a hankering for an idyllic past is the disconnect concerning infrastructure. I’ve seen many an ecomodernist turn on us for use of the internet to make these mourning observations public. Ouch. And it is more embedded in our modern life than such a simple stab might enlighten. ‘Follow the money’ might be a good mantra for more than searching out terrorists. Until such time as one can stroll across the hills and valleys to the neighbor with homebrew and seasoned ham we’ll still employ an internal combustion engine down a road and across bridges maintained by governments with taxes levied upon all. And you’ve rightly nodded in this direction at the close of your piece.
The point I want to make is that we need to be mindful of all the externalities between our modern situation and those of a seemingly idyllic past. Society has decided upon different sorts of trade-offs. Some of these trade-offs should be rethought; but some of the trade-offs were well considered and we do our forebears a disservice if we spit upon some changes from the past without considering all the conditions at play in their world.
Clem,
Thanks as always for the comments. I hope my writing does not give anyone the notion that I’m reflexively nostalgic for the past. I am however skeptical of a future based on the religion of progress. As such I frequently look to history for indications of alternatives. One cannot recreate the past, even if one wished to, there are however plenty of instructive lessons to be gleaned from a careful reading of it.
I would take issue with your quick assumption that the woman whose quote was used was a slave holder. I don’t know. I do know that the region I was writing about by and large did not own slaves. Not saying they were paragons of tolerance, just that they were poor.
Hope you and yours have a good Thanksgiving. I look forward to many more communications from you in the New Year to come.
My best,
Brian
I don’t think I was asserting that the woman in the quote was a slave holder herself. Indeed in the subsequent sentence I suggest there is plenty of opportunity for a gentile and harmonious existence in such environments. But the whole of the society was colored by the economic engine and the separatist politics of the white ruling camp. And one result of the war and all its attendant bloodshed was the end (at least on paper) of the slave economy. Much else lost too? Surely. Perhaps it might be measured as a tradeoff.
One might suggest parallels to some modern racial strife in communities around St Louis and Baltimore and other major US cities. There are lots of good people in these regions – good people of all shapes, sizes and pigments. And for many caught in too close a proximity to the firestorm it is very unfortunate. I have no silver bullet suggestion to solve the present conflagration, but I can imagine some gentile and otherwise benevolent aspect of our current way of life might get sacrificed on the way to shaping a solution.
One used to be able to board an airplane without disrobing first. The winds certainly do howl.
Thanks for the well wishes of the season. I hope you and Cindy and all your friends also enjoy this time for reflection and thanks. Toss Delores an extra treat for me 🙂
Warm regards
The flip side of oversimplification is complicating things to the point of incoherence. I’ve blogged more than a few times about the nostalgic frame, which on inspection isn’t as idyllic as nostalgia typically paints it. You’re correct in that respect. But the cost-benefit analysis most perform fails to account for lost cultural forms that have value. The hideous ones are easy to recognize and leave behind, and good riddance.
I care not a whit about some ecomodernist’s doctrinaire takedown of a comment in praise of the past that uses modern communications to publicize itself. It’s a basic category error, and it sticks in about the same fashion as someone levying the accusation “Prove to me you’re not a racist.” Like Godwin’s Law, such rhetoric derails honest discussion and inquiry without adding anything but lunacy.
I think it’s a very interesting and useful exercise to look at what we can take from the technology stack we’ve developed over the last 10,000 years and how this can be best deployed to make happy, well-functioning, sustainable societies. A nice example is Mark Shepard who’s doing some innovative work on agroeconomic systems including some tree-breeding using modern genomics techniques. Will it work? Dunno. But I applaud him for trying this mix.
Pushing back economic activity to the community and household level potentially has a range of benefits including stronger, more interlinked and resilient communities.
I think that was to some extent part of the Jeffersonian vision for America.
David,
Thanks for the comments. It is interesting how many leaders at one time or another recognized that a localized economy had benefits. Not that their interest survived the howling winds of commerce. Both Roosevelts pushed for strengthening those community ties to mixed results. Ultimately it is not from leaders that such societies arise. But instead a long train of cultural interactions seasoned with a healthy dose of geography. There is your 10,000 year timeline.
Still impressed with your fruit crop down under.
Cheers,
Brian
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