The family farm is one of America’a most powerful and enduring symbols, and its potency remains undiminished despite well over than a century’s worth of decline and disappearance. This once most common of institutions has been recalled and eulogized in terms ranging from the bitter to the nostalgic, but few commentators, particularly those with actual farming experience, have chosen to describe the family farm ideal the way New Hampshire historian and philosopher Ron Jager does. Humanities reporter Kevin Gardner spoke with Jager about his conception of the “romance” of the family farm.
Gardner: Even for those – that is to say most of us – who do not have to rise at 4 a.m. every morning to slop the pigs and do the milking, the use of the word romance to characterize American farm life might seem the descriptive whim of someone who never laid eyes on the business end of a cow or worked himself breathless to get a load of hay into the barn ahead of a thunderstorm. But Ron Jager has good reasons to use the word, and the credentials to back it up. Here he reads an early passage from his childhood memoir, Eighty Acres.
Jager: (track 2 - :28, reading) I started plowing at about age four, but I was not a prodigy, just a fanatic. In my earliest recollections I am following my father as he is plowing – tramping patiently behind him, furrow after furrow after furrow, hour after hour after hour. Monotonous and repetitive as it was, somehow it gave me an intimate share in my father’s wondrous operations, whose scope and grandeur mesmerized me, drawing me on, mile after mile. Perhaps a normal kid would have used his creative imagination in a sandbox; but I had a congenial sandbox substitute in the back forty that required no brains at all: just follow the furrows.
Gardner: Ron Jager’s fascination with furrows did not exactly spring from an aversion to using his brains: though he grew up on a small farm in western Michigan, he eventually earned his doctorate at Harvard, and spent many years as a professor of Philosophy at Yale. The family farm, for him, is at once a place and an idea; a memory, and even a kind of aspiration. But, a “romance”?
Jager: (:56) I’m using it there in a very broad sense – that’s it’s part of America’s self-image. The family farm is a kind of national icon, and has been from the very beginning of the country, and now, it’s not by any means the reality it once was, but it has the same sort of rhetoric and the same sort of resonance for a lot of people, and in that sense it has taken on a romantic aura, so I mean it in a sort of broad-gauge historical self-definition.
Gardner: Tracing the origins of this self-definition, Jager runs down a partial list of America’s founders – he calls them the founding farmers – and points out that the enthusiasm of men like Washington, Adams, Madison and Jefferson for the farming ideal had its roots not only in their personal lives, but also in their hopes for what America would become. In this, they found inspiration in the writings of classical antiquity.
Jager: (5:35) Every one of them read Cicero, read Cicero’s essays on farming, they all read Virgil, and Adams frequently makes reference to classical writers - it’s astonishing the reading these fellows did – and these are all agricultural writers. (7:12) The point is that there was a whole discourse about the importance of an agricultural society, the importance of agricultural values and communities of farmers as being the kind of backbone of a decent republic. It’s a part and parcel of their understanding of the way in which the American republic was to be built, to a large extent upon Roman models.
Gardner: Jager makes a subtle connection here, for the word romance, in addition to its more familiar meanings, also denotes things linguistically derived from Latin sources. More directly, a romance is also a story, one in which, to quote my dictionary, “the scene and incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life.” For Ron Jager, the romantic aura of the family farm depends not only on our relative ignorance of its actual hardships and uncertainties, but on an anxious and unfavorable comparison between that life and our own today.
Jager: (24:09) It’s a familiar fact that there’s so much that’s both confusing and complex and difficult and unmanageable about life in the beginning of the 21st century that one thing the family farm idea conjures up is a simpler time, a better time. Values were explicit, family units were whole and concrete, communities were solid and known to each other – it’s really seductive, because for the most part most of us don’t know very much about what it really was like, how laborious it was, how deprived in many senses, of ordinary comforts and so on, so I do think it’s our perception, on the whole somewhat negative, of our own culture, that makes this image so attractive.
Gardner: Overlays of resentment, misperception, and nostalgia may tinge our romantic view of the family farm ideal with considerable irony, particularly in a place like New Hampshire, where tourism and technology are the new cash crops, yet much of the rural landscape is still defined by the shapes and structures of our agricultural past. Ron Jager appreciates the irony, but he also points to something genuine in our admiration for an older way of American life, to values perhaps best expressed by those like himself, who have left their farms, but not their farming roots, behind.
Jager: (14:40) That environment was a great place to grow up, it was a great environment to be a child. One learned all kinds of basic things; about how to fix things, about how things worked together, you learned responsibility, you had to take care of animals, you learned humility, you had to live under the aegis of weather you couldn’t control and climates that weren’t in your power, and you had to learn stewardship, not to waste things, to recycle them, and so on. And I think these are authentic values, authentic perceptions and memories. (28:51) There are people out there who want to know about that story, and that makes them sort of hard core traditional Americans, I think.
Gardner: Ron Jager will present his program, “The Romance of the Family Farm”, on Tuesday, March 19, in the Pembroke Town Hall, at 7pm. He’ll read from his books, Eighty Acres and Last House on the Road, and continue his own personal romance with the themes and imageries of the American family farm. For NHPR, I’m Kevin Gardner.
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