World War II and
its aftermath dominated the 1940s as have few events in other decades.
But beneath the overwhelming panorama of war lay domestic problems, some
of which occupied the attention of rural activists across America. Battered
by the Depression, rural society continued to lose population due to structural
changes in agriculture and the war's demographic changes. Even in a time
of relative agricultural prosperity, rural community advocates identified
the decline of small towns and rural culture as a critical social issue
which, in their minds, rivaled the urgency of the war itself. While it
was undoubtedly an emergency of unparalleled proportions, they viewed
the diminution of the small community as an even larger threat to the
American way of life. Small community advo- cates pointed out the chronic
challenges to small towns and their farming hinterlands and warned of
dire long-term consequences to democracy itself if their demise was allowed
to proceed further. By studying a specific ruralist, Louis Bromfield,
we can observe the interaction of a small-town, midwestern belief system
with the evolving mass cultural order representative of an increasingly
industrial, urban, and bureaucratic society.1
Philip J. Nelson received his Ph.D. in Agricultural History
and Rural Studies from Iowa State University and is currently teaching in
the history department at the University of Northern Iowa.
1. There exists a range of historical opinion on the
1940s. It runs from the picture of a troubled America in William S. Graebner's
The Age of Doubt (Boston, 1991) to a very optimistic America in William
L. O'Neill's American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960 (New York,
1986). In between are John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades: America
in War and in Peace, 1941-1960 (New York, 1988); John Morton Blum, V Was
for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York,
1976); Geoffrey Perrett, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: The American
People, 1939-1945 (Baltimore, 1974) and Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade-And
After: America, 1945-1960 (New York, 1961). Primary sources revealing
the existence of a small community reform movement are Arthur Morgan,
The Small Community: Foundation of Democratic Life (New York, 1942); Wayland
J. Hayes, The Small Community Looks Ahead (New York, 1947); Earle Hitch,
Rebuilding Rural America (New York, 1950); and Baker Brownell, The Human
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 27
Known today primarily for his advocacy of soil conservation
and agroecological ideas, Ohio native son Louis Bromfield also played
a prominent role in the small community reform movement of the 1940s and
1950s. He occupied what can be called the agrarian wing of the movement,
along with writer Carey McWilliams, Southern Agrarian Herman C. Nixon,
and decentralist Ralph Borsodi. All agrarians continued to view the land
as the fundamental physical, economic, and emotional basis for small communities
and even national identity. Whatever shape it took, whether it was Borsodi's
place of refuge or Bromfield's alternative to an increasingly money-oriented
and materialistic world, agrarians located the good society in the small
rural community. Bromfield tried to defend the traditional agrarian reverence
for the soil, respect for farming, and love for a rural society of small
producers by updating and modernizing the Jeffersonian vision. Although
not technically a utopian with a blueprint of the perfect society, he
searched for the ideal of the decent rural citizen, denounced those aspects
of established society which clashed with his vision of the virtuous life,
and promulgated small community principles he believed were conducive
to a better cultural order. To this end and in the face of imminent war,
he gave up his expatriate existence and left France in 1938. Upon his
return to Ohio, he created the most famous experimental farm of its day-Malabar
Farm near Mansfield.2
Bromfield not only saw threats to democracy and a
special rural way of life reflected in the dilemma of the small community,
but also to the spiritual and ethical health of American culture. He lamented
that modern mass society was turning away from time-honored traditions,
and he believed that its growing rejection of the small community was
destroying the natural, organic social bonds. The result was a moral and
spiritual crisis. In this respect, he agreed with the patriarch of small
communitarians, Arthur Morgan, who stated that "Without fairly definite
standards society will disintegrate. The small community is the best place,
almost the only
Community (New York, 1950). For an analysis of this movement,
see the author's Ph.D. dissertation "The Elusive Balance: The Small Community
in Mass Society, 1940-1960," Iowa State University, 1996. See also Richard
0. Davies, Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small- Town America (Columbus,
Ohio, 1998), for a recent history of a specific Ohio small town, about
which he concludes that the 1940s was the key decade in which the old,
traditional community was irretrievably transformed into an appendage
of mass society.
2. The context of American agrarianism is described in Clifford B. Anderson,
"The Metamorphosis of American Agrarian Idealism in the 1920s and 1930s,"
Agricultural History, 35 (October, 1961), 182-88; and Paul Thompson, "Agrarianism
and the American Philosophical Tradition," Agriculture and Human Values,
7 (Winter, 1990), 3-9. A sampling of the voluminous primary agrarian writings
of the 1930s and 1940s includes P. Alston Waring and Walter Magnes Teller,
Roots in the Earth: The Small Farmer Looks Ahead (New York, 1943), 34;
Herman C. Nixon, "Government of the People," in Cities Are Abnormal, ed.
by Elmer T. Peterson (Norman, Okla., 1946), 175; Carey McWilliams, Factories
in the Fields (Boston,
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 28
place, for stabilizing and transmitting the finest of
those ethical standards which concern the intimate relations of its members."
Bromfield also believed that the problem was caused by increasing individualism
and materialism which tended to subvert an ecological understanding of
the land and stewardship of the soil. American society was in trouble
because it had abandoned Thomas Jefferson's agrarian vision of a yeoman
citizenry. "No great democrat ever realized more clearly than himself
[Jefferson] that the survival of democracy and its growth are founded
upon the stake of a citizen in the government and the nation to which
he belongs, . . . which makes him a stockholder in a vast corporation
whose welfare was his direct interest." By arguing for the continued relevance
of the rural social order, Bromfield created a place for himself among
communitarians who maintained that the small community was the "seedbed"
of human life itself. In his own way, this Midwesterner launched a quest
to reinvigorate and reform the small rural community so that it could
once again act as the generator and fountainhead of American life. Although
his significance is easily overlooked in a decade of momentous events,
his story may well provide insight and perspective to the contemporary
interest in local community.3
Born in Mansfield, Louis Bromfield (1896-1956) learned
early in life about midwestern small-town and rural values. Prodded by
the high hopes of his family, he entered Cornell University only to withdraw
a year later to help run the family farm. Returning to college in 1916,
he studied journalism at Columbia, until his desire to experience the
world at war caused him to enlist in the United States Army Ambulance
Service in 1917. In the 1920s he worked as a reporter and night editor
in New York City. Later he was a drama and music critic and columnist.
While an advertising manager for G. P. Putnam's Sons, he published his
first novel, The Green Bay Tree, in 1924. He then began to write full
time, and moved with his family to France for fourteen years. His expatriate
years proved to be the basis of his rapid and successful rise as a novelist.
Bromfield won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for the novel Early Autumn (1926).
He and his wife became the acquaintances of many Europeans and Americans
in high society, and developed a fondness for the simple but rich lifestyles
and architecture of provincial France. The Bromfields returned to Ohio
under the threat of the rapidly approaching war. There, with royalties
from his books and screenplays, he bought three run-down farms, totaling
one
1939), and Ill Fares the Land (Boston, 1942); and Elmer
T. Peterson, Forward to the Land (Norman, Okla., 1942).
3. The basis for Bromfield's personal, agricultural, and economic philosophies
is found first in Pleasant Valley (New York, 1945). Morgan, The Small
Community, 261; Louis Bromfield, A Few Brass Tacks (New York, 1946), 172.
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 29
thousand acres, in Richiand County, Ohio. He dubbed this
place "Malabar Farm" after the verdant coastal area of Malabar in India,
the site of many Bromfield family vacations. After a speaking tour and
a brief stint as a Hollywood writer, Bromfield returned to Malabar Farm
and took up a career as an agriculturalist, ecological spokesman, and
rural visionary.4
Critique
of Modern Society
During the Great Depression, Ohio's material condition
had been as acute and desperate as any other state. Yet it was not so
much the poverty and unemployment that caught the attention of Bromfield,
but the movement away from fundamental cultural beliefs which had served
American society well for many years. He believed, along with fellow Ohioan
Sherwood Anderson, that the rise of mass society, with its twin supports
of industrialism and urbanization, had not only made city life more precarious
but had been particularly hard on the rural locale by undercutting its
traditional equilibrium. Thus, the problems of Ohio's small places were
symptomatic of difficulties experienced by all Americans. According to
Bromfield, the ultimate problem with modern society was the lack of a
balanced, progressive cultural order which worked for the average person.
Believing that the nation was at a crossroads, Bromfield wrote in 1946:
"Either we drift on and on into the depressing condition of a corporate
state, or we act to establish a redistribution of economic values and
continue as a democracy in which the rewards are free enterprise, independence,
human dignity, and freedom." Huge centralized agglomerations of people
produced weak and ineffective populations who tended to clamor for "bread
and circuses," which undercut the discipline and welfare of nations. Hence,
he railed against what he perceived as the deleterious cultural flaws
of mass society-urbanization, the "bottom-line" mentality of big business,
greedy and mindless consumerism, and a superficiality and transitoriness
which grew out of a dangerous relativity of values.5
Like liberal and radical agrarians, Bromfield focused
on the issues of security, independence, and stability for rural dwellers
and their communities. Although his utopian vision of a future perfect
society never
4. David D. Anderson, Louis Bromfield (New York, 1964),
15-16; Mark Hoy, "The Most Famous Farm in America," Audubon, 91 (November,
1989), 64-67.
5. Ohio's experience of the Depression is ably described in Eugene H.
Roseboom and Francis P. Weisenburger, A History of Ohio (Columbus, Ohio,
1953), 361-80; Sherwood Anderson, Home Town (New York, 1940); Louis Bromfield,
"To Clear the Dross," in Cities Are Abnormal, ed. Elmer T. Peterson (Norman,
Okla., 1946), 198.
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 30 |
|
attained back-to-the-land advocate Ralph Borsodi's level
of concreteness and clarity, it did spring from many of the same intellectual
roots. The two writers, as agrarians, shared a passion for Jeffersonianism
and believed in the continuing relevance of the moral agricultural order.
Medium-sized farms, each owned and operated by a family, provided the
most stability, dignity, and prosperity for both the individual entrepreneurial
units and the nation as a whole. Morality inhered in the relationship
of farmer and the land; it taught responsibility, honesty, hard work,
thrift, and perseverance. Such noble values were then passed on from generation
to generation, inviolate and incorruptible. The temptation to amass riches
was limited and moderated by the land and the nature of farm work itself.
Bromfield, like Jefferson, saw no reason why a society of equals could
not exist on the "good earth." Yeoman farmers constituted the heart and
soul of both the local community and the larger republic. Bromfield made
these points by drawing on numerous sources. For example, he approvingly
quoted John Dewey's obeisance to Jefferson: "The agrarian class is the
first in utility and ought to be the first in respect .... It is a science
of the very first order. Young men... [should] return to the farms of
their fathers, their own
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 31
or those of others, and replenish and invigorate a calling,
now languishing under contempt and oppression."6
Bromfield's idealism sought the mitigation of the
"evils" of industrialization and materialism. Highly critical of the New
Deal, he believed that the solution did not lie with more government,
at any level. In fact, he maintained that stable, self-sufficient farming
communities, loosely defined, could be largely self-governing. This was
true because pervasive dehumanization sprang from the selfishness, greed,
and puritanism of industrialists, distributors, and bureaucrats, rather
than from the economic system as such. He claimed that people lived in
"the age of irritation" because their potentials had been turned toward
destruction rather than creation, thus producing a constant irritation
that threatened to create a cancer fatal to civilization. Yet, despite
this highly negative assessment of the dominant society, he never really
adopted the confrontational, militant style of other agrarians such as
Borsodi. Instead, he preferred to withdraw and ally himself with a milder
pastoralism, embodied in the language of historian Leo Marx's "middle
landscape" and the garden. In farm life, Bromfield found an alternative
to the "tyranny" of the industrial world; the simplicity of agricultural
work and the inherent integrity and stability of ecological thinking and
action provided an antidote to the "poisoning" of the Jeffersonian vision
by a modern world seemingly out of control. He ultimately wanted to recapture
the panoply of democratic values he attributed to the agrarian communities
of Ohio and the Midwest. By focusing on utopian versions of fertile soil
and the "good farmer" and updating them to withstand the rigors of modernity,
small places would be allowed to transcend the environmental ugliness
and social horrors he saw as endemic to commercialized industrialism.7
6. Ralph Borsodi was an agrarian distributist and well-known
writer in the 1920s and 1930s who promoted suburban homesteads as the
best way for people to gain independence and strike a blow against the
encroaching industrial society. His best known books were This Ugly Civilization
(New York, 1929) and Flight From the City (New York, 1933). Bromfield,
A Few Brass Tacks, 2-7; Dewey quoted in Louis Bromfield, Out of the Earth
(New York, 1950), 296.
7. Bromfield generally blasted the New Deal on practical issues, not ideological
grounds. For example, he liked the Tennessee Valley Authority and the
Soil Conservation Service because they did ecologically sound work. See
his "New Deal's Social Medicine Plan a Snake- Oil Cure," folder Bromfield,
Louis, Box 20, MSS #364, Friends of the Land, Ohio Historical Society,
Columbus, Ohio. Anderson, Louis Bromfield, 78-154; Charles E. Little,
ed., Louis BromfIeld at Malabar: Writings on Farming and Country Life
(Baltimore, 1988); David D. Anderson, "Louis Bromfield's Myth of the Ohio
Frontier," The Old Northwest, 6 (no. 1, 1980), 63-74; Louis Bromfield,
"I Live on the Edge of Paradise," Saturday Evening Post, 222 (March 11,
1950), 22-23. For the concept of the middle landscape see Leo Marx, The
Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New
York, 1964). For a positive review of Bromfield's agroecological thinking,
but a largely negative glance at his philosophical and utopian stance,
see Randal Beeman, "Louis Bromfield versus the 'Age of Irritation'," Environmental
History Review, 17 (Spring, 1993), 77-92.
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 32
Bromfield believed that he had witnessed the general demise
of the Jeffersonian dream during his childhood in Ohio. He attributed
this to a diminution of the equanimity and potency of rural culture and
the rise of what he considered crass materialism. In response, he wanted
to recreate the intimate, warm, if somewhat circumscribed society which
had taken its strength from a close relationship with the land and animals.
His goal became the reconciliation of traditional rural values with selected
techniques of modern, scientific agriculture which emerged after World
War II. He sought further to create a home in what he believed was the
best of agrarian, rural American society. He identified his agent of utopia
in the person of the good farmer-the farmer as artist, conservator, ecologist,
and naturalist. He talked about "the good farmer, the real farmer, and
not that category of men who remain on the land because circumstance dropped
them there and who go on, hating their land, hating their work and their
animals .
The good farmer, working with nature rather than fighting
or tying to outguess it, would be perfected by healthy soil-nature's fountainhead.
The primary utopian characteristic of perfectibility could be approximated
by aligning oneself with the principles of ecology and nature. Bromfield
sincerely believed that an ideal balance existed in a natural and objective
form, and its attainment gave meaning and purpose to human life. People
were basically good, but were corrupted by society in their search for
that better life. The wayward social order prevented people from realizing
the natural laws associated with the good farmer, environmental balance,
and small-scale agricultural communities.8
That a real golden age had existed in America, particularly
the Western Reserve, Bromfield was quite certain. Simple but strong in
its material life, the nineteenth-century agrarian community exuded emotional
and psychic richness. Writing during the Depression, Bromfield traced
the rise and decline of agrarian civilization to 1914 in The Farm (1933).
It was the "story of a way of living which has largely gone out of fashion,"
although it was a "good way of life." "It has in it two fundamentals which
were once and may be again intensely American characteristics. These are
integrity and idealism. Jefferson has been dead more than a hundred years
and there is no longer any frontier, but the things which both represented
are immortal. They are tough qualities needed in times of crisis." Millions
of people experienced that time of crisis deeply in the thirties whether
they lived on farms or not. But Bromfield believed that the equalitarian
agrarian community of semi-autonomous family farms was in the process
of breakup even before the Great War. He wrote: "The Farm is a story of
8. Bromfield, Out of the Earth, 299; See Louis Bromfield's
The Farm (New York, 1933) for his thinly veiled autobiographical fictional
account of rural society in the Ohio country.
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 33
the pioneers who subdued a great, potentially rich wilderness,
and in so doing, came near to destroying its riches." At first, they got
it right: "There were no great 'industrial kings' or any 'high-pressure
salesmen' or bankers who were 'omnipotent.' There was no overproduction.
There was no lack of market. There was no unemployment. There was no starvation."
Bromfield's ideal community constituted a "natural" democracy. He likened
the good agrarian community to Bronson Alcott's world of utopias: "That
solid, prosperous, pathetically idealistic world had curiousity and a
touching desire, once so typical of America, to learn, to grow and expand,
not in the pocketbook, but in the mind and spirit."9
But then the "religion of business" arrived with its
"bottom-line" mentality and dislike of individualism and character-building
eccentricity. Bromfield maintained it had always been there, lurking in
American history in the form of Hamiltonianism. "I think that if Alexander
Hamilton had looked ahead he would have had the American dollar stamped
with the motto, 'Nothing succeeds like success.' It lies at the root of
the average American's incapacity to understand and appreciate life, of
his habit of living always to the limit of his income and often beyond
it." Neither spartan nor particularly hedonistic, Bromfield sought an
individual and collective life of moderation, in harmony with one's labor,
fellow workers, and one's physical and social environment, devoid of those
nasty alienating relationships noted by Karl Marx and all subsequent social
critics worth their salt. The paradoxical pitfalls of limitless progress
dovetailed with the "American passion for speculation, and for the abysmal
helplessness of the American in a financial depression-the American who
does not own his own home, although he has his automobile-the American
without enough saved to support his family for six months." As victims
of the new consumer society, people found their ideas of the good perverted
because "One has to keep up a false front, and a good many Americans worry
themselves into the grave struggling to maintain that bogus facade." Seduced
by the proverbial pot at the end of the rainbow, shrewd and exploitative
businessmen overtook the agrarian commonwealth and lined the growing urban
horizon with industry and smokestacks, the back streets with workers'
shacks, and their pockets with special tax breaks and contracts awarded
through "back-room deals." Once prosperous farms and villages fell into
disrepair and infertility that only pessimistic owners and uncaring tenants
could create. Without their real awareness, citizens of the Western Reserve
waged an all-out ideological battle between Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism,
and crass
9. Bromfield, The Farm, dedication, x, 69, 59.
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 34
commercialism won. "One had to be successful, no matter
how success was achieved. One must make money, no matter how one came
by it. The only hell was poverty and lack of success, and the only heaven
was material."10
For Bromfield, Ohio farming communities, and by implication
all American agricultural locales, were dependent on their people and
their respect for and knowledge of the land-a symbiotic relationship which
existed only within well-established and understood limits. These parameters
remained unchanging or, at most, open to only very gradual alteration.
Hills and forests, valleys and streams constituted the agrarian garden,
which, once "tamed," should remain free from further tampering and exploitation.
Disruption of this natural balance would inevitably yield social poverty,
both material and spiritual. Seen in this light, agriculture ideally produced
a culture of conservation. Of course, not all farmers acted as stewards
of the soil, but in the long run, Americans would find their real wealth
in the natural abundance of the land; if that capacity ever vanished,
industrial and urban civilization would necessarily disappear as well.
Bromfield believed that essential balance had been compromised even before
World War I; he ended The Farm "on a note of pessimism, regarding the
future of agriculture and that note remains because it was authentic and
justified in the year 1914."11
By 1945, with the publication of Pleasant Valley,
Bromfield's discouragement turned to optimism, "a glowing optimism," concerning
the potential of agriculture to regain its ecologically sound and culturally
vibrant and socially supportive nature. He wrote in that manner "not from
any change in conviction or point of view, but because of the great advances
which had taken place and because in the intervening period the science
of agriculture has probably made more progress than in all the preceding
history of the world." The heart of Bromfield's vision was not dependent
on a particular social or economic arrangement, but on the requirements
of healthy soil-the interface of the organic and the inorganic. Repeating
a phrase made famous by the New Deal soil conservationist Hugh Bennett,
Bromfield constantly said that "poor land makes poor people." He believed
that poor people would exploit not only the land, but each other as well.
He had seen the scarred land of the Great Plains Dust Bowl, and with it,
its scarred human occupants. He was convinced that by working with nature,
specifically the soil, one could create a whole farm, a whole life, and
a whole community. He accepted, along with other "New Agriculture" advocates
such as Bennett, journalist
10. Ibid., 181-82,177.
11. Ibid., x.
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 35
Russell Lord, and organicist Albert Howard, that healthy
soil was an integrated community of inorganic and organic elements-gravel,
sand, clay, silt, humus, water, microflora, and microfauna. As an early
agroecological thinker, Bromfield posited that no single aspect of nature
was unrelated; specialization in the extreme led to a dead end. Those
who knew how to build, utilize, and maintain fertile soil were those who
also knew the path to utopian social constructs. Thus, his thought squared
with the notion of changing the environment in order to change people.
Social character could be ameliorated through the improvement of the environment.
Cooperation with the natural laws embodied in the concept of fertile soil
would therefore yield the communitarian harmony he so eagerly sought.
12
"The
Plan" for Rural Renewal
In 1939, Bromfield began his quest to prove that a Jeffersonian
way of life could be achieved in a manner that all ordinary farmers could
duplicate. On Malabar's varied acres of gullied, worn out, Ohio crop,
pasture, and timber land, he meticulously transformed the farm into a
showplace of fertility and bounty. He demonstrated, along with his assistants,
the characteristics of organic order and intentionality by taking individual
responsibility for the healing of the land, something he believed existed
only for a short time on the Ohio frontier until overtaken by foolish,
extractive agricultural methods. Bromfield believed that a perfect natural
order already existed within the land, but that it had been sabotaged
by greedy, misguided, and ignorant techniques of farming. The natural
balance had been disrupted, and he intended to restore it by renewing
the soil. "Nature herself, if understood and given co-operation, provides
the means of health, productivity, abundance, and fecundity. It is when
these laws and balances are outraged that we arrive at disease, sterility,
and disaster."13 Bromfield coordinated
what was called "The Plan" with his main assistant Max Drake. The first
order of business was to stop the soil erosion and heal the gullies. They
and some part-time employees hauled tons of topsoil to these washed-out
areas, chiefly by means of small
12. Ibid., x; Louis Bromfield, "The
Task Before Us," Audubon, 55 (January, 1953), 20-22. For Bromfield's admiration
of Sir Albert Howard see Russell Lord, The Care of the Earth (New York,
1962), 318. One of Howard's most important works is An Agricultural Testament
(London and New York, 1940).
13. Hoy, 64-67. Bromfield, Our of the Earth, 95.
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 36 |
|
tractors with rear-mounted dirt buckets. They also adopted
experimental agriculturalist Edward Faulkner's system of "trash farming,"
especially for the most infertile hillsides. This method of renovation
involved disking and/or chisel plowing into the soil liberal amounts of
lime, manure, and starter fertilizer, plus the existing vegetation. Lime
balanced the acidic and alkaline composition of the soil; manure began
the renewal of humus; up to 400 Ibs./acre of 3-12-12 commercial fertilizer
enabled quick growth of the newly planted cover crop; and the stalks and
roots of the existing vegetation produced natural aeration and channels
for water percolation and retention. On established fields, all crop residues
and green manures (clovers, alfalfa, and alfalfa/grass combinations) were
incorporated during the fall, in a kind of sheet-composting action by
means of repeated diskings or a couple of passes with a chisel plow. The
fields of Bromfield's Pleasant Valley soon changed from anemic plots capable
of growing only thin grasses and stubborn weeds, to lush swaths of deep
green vegetation. People had called these areas "poor or 'worn-out' when
in truth they only appear so because the soil is dead-killed by a bad
agriculture which ignored the replacement of organic materials either
in the form of green
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 37
manures or of the infinitely more important animal manure."14
Malabar Farm's agriculturalists quickly adopted the
waste-fighting methods of the "New Agriculture"-soil conservation techniques,
new tillage equipment, soil fertilization and trace elements, and new
hybrids, especially in forage crops like nitrogen-fixing alfalfa and high-yielding
grasses. Bromfield's interest in high-quality hay and pasture forages
grew when he proposed a grass or sod-based agricultural system. Not only
would forage crops largely stop soil erosion, but they would also reduce
the concentrated labor requirements involved in the autumn harvest of
row crops common on America's farms. This system allowed for more hilly
and highly erodable land to return to uses better suited to its productive
capacity-forest for the steepest ground and pastures for less steep but
still erodable land. Malabar's farmers reduced erosion on regular cropland,
too, by avoiding the moldboard plow and its way of exposing bare soil.
Instead, they used a chisel plow or field cultivator which ripped through
the crop, but did not turn over the soil. The sod was allowed to die,
and then more or less orthodox methods of seedbed preparation were utilized.
This methodology left the soil exposed for a very short period of time
before planting. They demonstrated successful use of these techniques
through increasing yields of wheat, for example. From five bushels the
first year, the yield jumped to twenty the next year, to thirty in the
third year, and finally to forty bushels in the fourth year.15
The Plan also called for a program of diversified
farming, including a balance between the production of crops and livestock.
Bromfield's dairy herd and beef cattle mainly subsisted on dry hay, hay
silage, and pasture, but very little grain. These fodder requirements
allowed for a diversity of landscapes to flourish as well. Bromfield established
productive fields, permanent pastures, rank hay fields, and thick woods,
where before only sparse vegetation grew. He also planted filter strips
along creeks, and allowed other land to grow up into wildlife areas. In
addition, he built ponds, grassed waterways, terraces, and tree-filled
drainage outlets. Most of these water-handling designs did their job without
the use of underground tiles. Bromfield measured the progress of valley-wide
soil and water conservation efforts by observing Kemper's Run, a wild,
winding, but clear stream he had played in and around in his youth, but
which local farmers had straightened, making it nothing more than an eroded
drainage canal. He latched onto a species of willow called Babylonica
as the means to heal the scar on the land. "Today the little
14. Little, 27-41; Bromfield, Out of the Earth, 61-82,
95; Edward Faulkner, Plowman's Folly (Norman, Okla., 1943).
15. Bromfield, Out of the Earth, 13-58, 59, 60.
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
Page 38
stream is rarely discolored save in corn-planting time"
and "the flow has been stabilized." "As the springs throughout the watershed
come back to life and flow once more, the game fish and the water vegetation
are coming back and watercress actually grows again on the riffles."16
The most idealistic part of The Plan was Bromfield's
desire for self- sufficiency. To accomplish this, he proposed the proliferation
of small- scale projects, including bee hives, goats, sheep, all manner
of fowl, and a huge organic garden which yielded so much produce that
he needed a roadside stand to sell the surplus. People, impressed with
its quality, drove miles out of their way to buy Malabar's produce. Bromfield's
philosophy of soil fertility, too, implied that self-sufficiency was possible
with the land. Through the use of long-rooted crops like alfalfa and brome
grass, "farming from three to twenty feet down" was possible; meaning
that these plants would bring up from subsoil depths the basic mineral
nutrients necessary for healthy plant growth. Thus fields would be self-renewing
if not farmed too intensively. Although there was some scientific data
to support his theory on soil fertility, it best illustrated "[his] mystical
understanding of farming that defied both rational analysis and textbook
farm economics." Bromfield simply observed Nature, and decided largely
on the basis of intuition to mimic its ways as much as possible when acting
in the role of farmer. 17
Although Bromfield never gave up on the idea that
soil could provide most of its own inputs in the long-term, he did put
aside most of the small- scale business projects. Farm manager Max Drake
convinced Bromfield that he would go broke tying to achieve complete self-sufficiency.
Realizing that he could not do it all himself or get enough steady, good
help, Bromfield kept the dairy and beef cattle and sold the hogs, chickens,
ducks, and most of the other ancillary operations. Even then, he happily
put his many houseguests to work preparing vegetables for canning, driving
cattle, and stacking hay. Nevertheless, Malabar eventually became a grass
and cattle farm-never the self-sufficient farm originally envisioned.
Yet, it remained largely organic; herbicides, pesticides, and large amounts
of commercial fertilizer were not used. In addition, Bromfield kept the
level of mechanization manageable. Tractors were small and the machinery
in general was older and inexpensive, except for the key pieces, such
as the chisel plows and rotary tillers. In fact, he urged machinery manufacturers
to build their field equipment of rugged steel, not cast or gray iron,
thus saving farmers countless hours of downtime and
16. Bromfield, Out of the Earth, 120-22.
17. Ibid.,99-112;Little,xv.
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Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
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a large amount of hard-earned cash in broken and bent
implements.18
Soon after the institution of The Plan at Malabar,
Bromfield, concerned with the financial insecurity, economic instability,
and psychological uncertainty of the times, put into place a cooperative
plan for the operation and finances of the farm. It combined aspects of
capitalism, social planning, and mild collectivism. Malabar employed four
full-time men, who with their families lived on the farm in rent-free
houses. Additionally, the farm provided them with free food, much of it
raised on the farm. They received salaries which were above average, and
were guaranteed a share in the farm's profits. Bromfield took five percent
off the top as payment for his capital investment. Called "The Boss" by
everyone who lived at the farm, Bromfield certainly had the most influence
in its administration. His was not the only voice, however, because all
the full-time employees contributed their expertise and ideas to the farm's
operation and progress. Indeed, Bromfield's top assistant handled most
of the day-to-day operations of the farm. But the whole point of Bromfield's
endeavor was to align all actions with Nature. Human beings could fix
other human's mistakes, but there was no advantage to be gained in taking
on Nature. People had created conditions under which good farmers and
bad farmers both had lost their land for nonpayment of taxes or mortgages.
Almost fixated on the idea of security, Bromfield sought the ultimate
in permanency. "Backed by the proper capital, we should never be forced
to sell in a bad market in order to pay interest or taxes. We could often
enough, be able to deal with the ruinous middleman on our terms and not
his."19
This cooperative venture presupposed the concept of
brotherhood, which Bromfield believed to be vital to the survival of agrarian
traditions in the tough economic times of the 1930s and the global uncertainties
of the 1940s. He looked for ways to help young people get started in farming
by counteracting its high capital costs. "We sought a way to operate a
big farm without dispossessing families . . . . We sought a way of raising
the standard of living of all of us on that farm." Bromfield adopted a
nominal collectivism mixed with free enterprise, with himself as the capitalist.
Indeed, not only did he envision a better social and economic order centered
on the pastoral small community, but he moved closer to a utopian perspective
based on The Plan. The community was Nature personified; Nature was the
model of the ideal community. Nature was small in its locality; it was
massive and ubiquitous in its totality; it was
18. Anderson, Louis Bromfield, 161; Hoy, 66; Bromfield,
Out of the Earth, 263-69. Ellen Bromfield Geld, The Heritage: A Daughter's
Memories of Louis Bromfield (New York, 1962), 81-84, offers the most perceptive
and best reasons for her father's abandonment of the quest for self-sufficiency.
19. Anderson, Louis Bromfield, 127; Hoy, 66; Little, xvi, 27-41.
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Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
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extremely powerful in all its manifestations. Here Bromfield
demonstrat- ed the ideas of justice and fairness, characteristics typical
of the utopian concept of brotherhood. However, his literary biographer,
David Anderson, characterized Bromfield as becoming more and more like
Jefferson's "natural aristocrat" because of Bromfield's role as leader
of the cooperative. Yet, one need not fault Bromfield too much. There
is a need for sensitive leaders at most times and in many situations.20
Bromfield respected the inherent dichotomies of human
existence, but he thought too much could easily be made of them. He believed
that the creative act involved mind, "heart," and body, especially in
the realm of agriculture. The resolution and unification of apparent opposites
was the point of rural culture and community. There were no artificial
or contrived unities as was necessary with industrial pursuits, in which
people shaped the environment to their ends, not the ways of Nature. Bromfield
reveled in handwork as well as headwork. In his vision and action they
blended together as one. Whatever he looked at he tried to envision as
a whole, whether it was a landscape, a farm, or a community. "I have worked
and suffered . . . in the creation of something . . . -a whole farm, a
whole landscape, in which I could live in peace and with pride and which
I could share with others to whom it would bring pleasure."21
Bromfield often merged the material and the spiritual
in his thought and writings. In a Saturday Evening Post article written
in 1950 entitled "I Live on the Edge of Paradise," he extolled the virtues
of the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District-a balanced, multi-use
flood control project in central Ohio. A devastating flood in 1913 prompted
its construction. It consisted of a series of small upstream dams and
catchment basins, which Bromfield agreed were better than a few large
dams low on the river plus the usual assortment of levies. He favored
government involvement for large projects such as the Muskingum complex.
During a period of heavy rains in 1947, the Muskingum reservoirs proved
their worth by containing potential floodwaters and minimizing downstream
damage. This conservation district also created extensive wildlife habitat
which Bromfield predicted would pay for itself through increased tourist
spending. His commonsense notion of a rural good place was quite evident
when he wrote: "The pattern is there-a pattern which any child can understand.
Perhaps it is too simple and obvious. More likely it is simply not grandiose
enough or futile or expensive enough to merit the interest of most of
our planners."22
20. Little, 35-36; Anderson, Louis Bromfield, 127.
21. Hoy, 67.
22. Bromfield, "I Live on the Edge of Paradise," 94.
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Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
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Part of the paradox of Bromfield's thought resided in
the simul- taneously held desires of achieving a comprehensive unity in
a new social order and realizing the benefits of an experimental attitude.
He understood that balance between change and continuity is an issue of
paramount importance for any responsible social critic. Planned alterations
in the social order could produce extremes of unforeseen change which
could veer dramatically from the status quo. But Bromfield's brand of
agrarian radicalism tended to be of the self-limiting variety. The Plan
writ large would have simply shifted the emphases of American culture
back toward a pattern which had already existed. In the process, Bromfield
would have amended the Jeffersonian rural community with certain modern
advances in both knowledge and technology. For example, he believed in
scientific agriculture, but wanted it to support his ideal of rural life,
not industrial agriculture and its de facto abandonment of the small community.
He dared to be different, go against the American grain, and make that
difference mean something. He advocated not a political revolution, but
a revolution in the relationship of people to places. Although he eagerly
accepted the newest in conservation tillage machinery, he rejected the
emerging agricultural trends of buying bigger equipment and the latest
in automated feeding systems. He kept his farm machinery as simple and
small as realistically possible (his Ford Ferguson tractors produced at
best thirty horsepower), because he wanted machinery to serve human beings,
rather than people serving machines. With respect to technology, he differed
little from the positions taken by others in the small community movement
like Herbert Agar, Borsodi, and Baker Brownell. Technology would be simply
another piece of culture to be managed, but not manipulated, by human
beings within the general guidelines set down by Nature. "I believe that
one day our soil and our forests from one end of the country to the other
will be well managed and our supplies of water will be abundant and clean
.... as God and Nature intended, an abundance properly distributed when
man has the wisdom to understand and solve such things."23
Bromfield's experimentalism always centered on the
natural balance of organically healthy soil. Although he used commercial
fertilizer in "emergency" situations, he raged against those who promoted
complete dependence on artificial fertilizers, not so much because of
that particular technology's undesirability, but because of its promoters'
ideology, which considered the soil as a machine, not as a whole, living
thing. Bromfield lashed out at businessmen, agriculture professors, and
farmers alike who
23. Bromfield, A Few Brass Tacks, 11; Bromfield, Out of
the Earth, 297-300; Little, xvii-xix; Bromfield, Pleasant Valley, 300.
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Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
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advocated the commercial fertilizer theory, labeling them
greedy, impatient, ignorant, and arrogant. In Bromfield's view, they sought
an improper "short-cut or a means of outwitting nature." He opted for
less than maximum production in return for the maintenance of a living
soil community of plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and inorganic constituents.
This community was the main focus of his experimentalism. "Many of the
greatest contributions to agriculture in our time have not come from the
billion-dollar Department of Agriculture nor from the countless colleges
of agriculture but from a county agent or a farmer who had the power to
observe, the imagination to speculate and the logic to deduce a process
from which vast benefits have developed." Despite these criticisms of
what later would be known as agribusiness, he was able to establish some
working relationships with an assortment of representatives from fertilizer
companies, farm machinery corporations, and land-grant university agriculturalists.24
What Bromfield offered was not a revolutionary panacea
for all problems, but an essentially conservative pattern for one of the
root difficulties of modern times. He thought that the community and that
sense of belongingness formerly provided by it were missing from mid-
century America. Lack of it produced even more destructive greed, envy,
hate, and violence. The soil and landscape of small, local places provided
identity and the elusive balance between extreme individualism and complete
suffocation of personal autonomy. People needed homes, not just houses;
the land would give that if addressed in the proper manner. While reticent
about the details of his ideal community, clearly Bromfield accepted the
Jeffersonian view of a community composed of hard-working independent
farmers, small shopkeepers, and agricultural villages. Not quite that
simplistic or naive, Bromfield realized that cities were here to stay,
and were not necessarily innately evil or predatory. The publication of
Malabar Farm (1948), a record of the successes and failures of the extensive
experimental program he carried out, signaled that he had moved beyond
the concept of the farm as a Great Depression-induced security blanket,
and viewed it as a place to achieve lifelong fulfillment. "In a world
and a nation where the opportunities of the Horatio Alger hero become
steadily more restricted ... the farm is a good place . . . to find security
[and] satisfaction in living."25
Along with those who contributed articles to the decentralist
magazine Free America after World War II, Bromfield feared that democracy
could not survive in a nation so heavily structured by industrialization,
24. Bromfield, Out of the Earth, 14-17, 5, 88.
25. Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm (New York, 1947), 405.
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
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urbanization, and centralization. Therefore, he, like
them, advocated decentralization of industries and cities, not as a panacea
but as a way to short-circuit a system which was building up to a potential
catastrophe. At times he became shrill and dogmatic when it came to his
suggestions for the future of urban areas. "It is time to consider doing
away with them [cities], simply as a basis of common sense and social
and economic security." Bromfield could be equanimous, however, as when
he praised the TVA as a superb example of what could be done to develop
both industry and agriculture in a state of peaceful coexistence and symbiosis.
Industry did not require huge masses of people living in high-density
urban slums. Thus he looked favorably on the planning then being done
for a Missouri Valley Authority. Demobilization would go more smoothly
and produce more positive repercussions for the future if returning soldiers
or disgruntled urbanites could settle on a few acres near a small or medium-sized
town and work both at a nearby industry and on their land. "The one activity
co-ordinates and guarantees the security of the other and together they
provide [them] with economic security and a genuine stake in the economy
of the nation." Thus, a modification of the Jeffersonian dream would still
be viable and applicable to a nation seemingly in perpetual crisis, uncertainty,
and need for security. Bromfield's priorities emerged clearly in two mutually
supporting liberties: the "freedom of action" and the "freedom from fear
of depressions." The countryside could and should support more people,
reducing populations of overburdened cities, and at the same time introducing
more people to the greater independence, stability, and abundance possible
in well-managed and ecologically oriented agrarian communities.26
Bromfield continued this theme on an international level in his most ambitious
socioeconomic work, A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954). Similar to
the contemporary notion of bioregionalism, he pointed out the need for
an economic revolution which would reconstruct balances within major geographical
areas of the world along self-sufficient lines. Each area would work within
its natural potential, not according to arbitrary standards of financial
theory and economic manipulation. Both industrialized and underdeveloped
areas could avoid the "great industrial concentrations and the abnormal
conditions which breed not only racketeering and vice but the radical
and foreign political ideas." He believed that the peace, abundance, and
security existing at Malabar Farm could be transferred to the world at
large, thus reducing Cold War levels of fear and conflict. The solution
was the "decentralization of industry
26. Bromfield, "To Clear the Dross," 196-97.
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Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
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into smaller communities and rural areas where men can
own something, have a stake in the nation and have a reasonably normal
life for themselves, their wives and their children."27
Whether on the global or local level, Bromfield most
admired those people who were "front line" activists; and, therefore,
he disliked bureaucrats and administrators. In his experience, the most
productive people in agriculture were the field men of the Soil Conservation
Service, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Farm Security
Administration, and the County Extension Service. He had high praise for
them and their respect for public service. They, in concert with "good
farmers" everywhere, would bring about Bromfield's idealistic rural vision.
But other officials at higher levels came in for venomous treatment. He
labeled Henry Wallace a "phony farmer and scientist"; "no man in the U.S.
has less respect from the farmer." While not ready to condemn every single
aspect of the New Deal, Bromfield believed that the government's program
of farm subsidies did more harm than good. "A subsidized agriculture is
necessarily a static agriculture in which subsidies serve mainly to protect
and maintain the poor and inefficient farmer or absentee landlord who
is always looking toward high prices rather than production per acre to
give him economic solidity and prosperity." Farming for the bottom line
alone was not farming but the act of a conqueror. As with many outstanding
and notable people, life for Bromfield was art, and the good farmer was
a kind of artist. He likened the restorer of land to the best of all artists.
"The Farmer may leave his stamp upon the whole of the landscape seen from
his window, and it can be as great and beautiful a creation as Michelangelo's
David, for the farmer who takes over a desolate farm .... and turns it
into a Paradise of beauty and abundance is one of the greatest of artists."28
In this vision, farmers played the most important
role, the role of caretaker of the land, the human spirit, and the Jeffersonian
ideal. Upon these bases then, the community would rest, forever secure
in the honor and integrity inherent in the right relationships between
soil and farmer. Bromfield was unable to foresee, however, that falling
production per acre, the great enemy of the good farmer as he defined
it, would be turned around not so much by the type of sustainable agriculture
he advocated, but by heavy applications of commercial fertilizer and powerful
hybrid seeds. True, soil and water conservation methodology did spread
quickly
27. Louis Bromfield, "Our Great Stake in Agriculture,"
Vital Speeches of the Day, 11 (May 15, 1945), 470; Louis Bromfield, A
New Pattern for a Tired World (New York, 1954).
28. Bromfield, Out of the Earth, 299; Bromfield to Russ, June 20, 1947,
folder-Bromfield, Louis, box 20, MSS #364, Friends of the Land, Ohio Historical
Society, Columbus, Ohio; Bromfield, Malabar Farm, 7.
Louis
Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
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throughout the country, thus stopping the most serious
erosion situations; but few farmers adopted Bromfield's pastoral, "disturb
the earth the least" ideology. Even though many farmers subsequently adopted
conservation tillage methods, they still tended to plant fence row to
fence row. Yet, he was correct in his judgment that fully diversified
farms of the turn of the century were no longer very viable. Some degree
of specialization was necessary for making an adequate living, and that
practice would benefit the community in the long run, especially if that
specialization was based on the competitive advantages of the locale.
Bromfield encouraged the labor exodus from farming, seeing that not everyone
could be a good farmer and that bad ones tended to drag their communities
down with them. But he underestimated the power of mechanization to force
farmers off their land, and thus to depopulate and disrupt their local
communities. He had preached his gospel of organic farming and soil conservation
to crowds of farmers, scientists, journalists, and assorted visitors from
the top of a hill on Malabar Farm dubbed "Mount Jeez"; specifically, he
voiced the message that it did not take a fortune to rehabilitate worn-out
farms- that ordinary farmers without access to large amounts of capital
could replicate what he had done at Malabar. In reality, that did not
exactly ring true. American farmers did fulfill Bromfield's hope of producing
cheap, bountiful food, but they did it largely with a high-powered, highly
capitalized agricultural technique dependent on expensive commercial inputs
and a significant degree of government intervention. A society full of
rural communities based on small, efficient, low-input, organic farms
did not evolve, despite his tireless advocacy through such organizations
as Friends of the Land, the National Audubon Society, the Ohio Wildlife
Commission, hundreds of articles, and countless speeches. His desired
rural renaissance failed to materialize, even as the ideas of ecology
and low-input, sustainable agriculture were catching on across most of
the nation.29
Bromfield and even some of his reviewers knew he was
swimming against the tide, for as The Commonweal's Edward Skillen observed,
"To put over a program of such scope and importance, counter to the dominant
commercial farming trend in the United States, is enough to ask of any
man." Others were reluctant to criticize extensively his work: Myles W.
Rodehavor, reviewing Pleasant Valley, said, "It is difficult to submit
a book like this to cold, critical analysis, for not many, even reviewers,
can read very far into its pages without catching something of the author's
enthusiasm for a subject which he has lived." And ecologist Paul Sears
29. Bromfield, Out of the Earth, x-xi; Hoy, 67; Beeman,
86.
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Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community
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trumpeted that "those who teach science should read it
[Out of the Earth] and ask themselves whether, with all of their technical
discipline, they have been imparting as broad a view of the interrelations
of nature as this gusty layman, Louis Bromfield." But as Russell Lord,
a long-time Bromfield admirer noted, some people saw him as an irresponsible
anarchist. Worse, others perceived him as a novelist out of his element
who simply made facile statements and pontificated with no thought to
reality. For example, the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review unleashed
the following diatribe: "Mr. Bromfield's book is a grim warning that the
kind of 'thinking out loud' which comes out of the mouths of characters
in novels, and in which slovenly speech and slovenly thinking can always
be excused on the plea of character delineation, just won't do in a book
[A Few Brass Tacks] purporting to tell the public what's what in the world."
Nevertheless, in the end, Bromfield won to himself more friends than enemies,
and some of his contemporaries even called him the "Sinatra of the Soil"
for his unfailing and entertaining advocacy of soil conservation.30
Conclusion
Louis Bromfield's accomplishments and legacy are decidedly
mixed. He initially set out to create a "medieval fortress-manor... where
a whole community once found security and self-sufficiency." Yet, he later
admitted that "the vague and visionary idea I had in returning home seems
ludicrous and a little pathetic." Despite not finding exactly what he
was seeking, he mused that he had "found something much better-a whole
new life, and a useful life and one in which I have been able to make
a contribution which may not be forgotten overnight .... And I managed
to find and to create .... a beautiful and rich landscape and the friendship
and perhaps the respect of my fellow men and fellow farmers." The passage
of time has rendered his emphasis on agricultural sustainability no longer
radical and utopian. Today's farmers have largely integrated into modern
agriculture many aspects of conservation tillage, which owe something
to Bromfield's and Edward Faulkner's practices of mulch and trash farming.
Consumers are increasingly interested in natural food and organic produce.
However, much of the social dimension of Bromfield's modernized
30. Edward Skillen, review of Out of the Earth, by Louis
Bromfield, in The Commonweal, 52 (April 28, 1950), 73-74; Myles W. Rodehaver,
review of Pleasant Valley, by Louis Bromfield, in Rural Sociology, 10
(December, 1945), 441-42; Paul Sears, review of Out of the Earth, by Louis
Bromfield, in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, April 2, 1950,
5; Russell Lord, "Louis Bromfield, Pamphleteer," Saturday Review of Literature,
29 (June 22, 1946),17; no author, review of A Few Brass Tacks, by Louis
Bromfield, in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, July 7,
1946, n.p.; Beeman, 87.
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