Roots, in the literal sense, connect life and earth. They transfer nourishment, anchor against the winds, and bind things together. Grace Olmstead’s new book, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind, is about roots, both literal and metaphorical. Partly an elegy for the farming community in which she was raised, partly a reflection on the transient, frenetic life that has become the American ideal, the book examines the things that make communities work, the things that built them, and the things we have lost.
Olmstead was raised in Emmett, Idaho, where her ancestors were among the early settlers. She moved away, as bright young people often do, but never truly left that place behind. We are all products of our upbringing and our environment, and we carry our hometowns in our hearts wherever we go. Even those who cannot wait to leave town when they come of age are forever shaped by the place where they grew up, if only in their opposition to it. For those who loved their community, the connection is even stronger.
“What do I owe the past?” Olmstead asks. “What do I owe the people who invested in the land that raised me? What do I owe the places where I’m from?” These are hard questions in a land that was made by pioneers, and relatively recently at that. When British scientists analyzed the DNA of Cheddar Man, a 9,000-year-old corpse found in Somerset, England, they found a modern-day relative of his living just 15 miles away. America is not so sedentary.
Waves of migration have swept the United States, disarranging the people and the landscape that came before. We once considered the frontiersman the quintessential American. Now, mass culture eschews that archetype, but what replaced it is just as unmoored. “Our cultural touchstones,” Olmstead writes, “from Disney movies to pop songs, suggest that separation, independence, and departure are inherent to true triumph. Those who stay put — who take over the family business, say, or live in their hometown — are considered failures.”
At the heart of America’s idea of itself is doing more, doing better, getting richer, climbing to the top. To say that the place you are from is good enough feels like a betrayal of that idea. Saying it is actually better than New York, Washington, or Los Angeles sounds downright mad to those who spent their lives trying to get away.
But change does not only come to the bustling cities. Olmstead traces the economic shifts that affected Idaho farmers and how their work is different today than it was for her great-grandparents a century ago. Consolidation and a focus on foreign markets made farming, that most local of callings, an international business. Some innovations, such as mechanization, are inevitable, but others come in the name of economic efficiency. This has made food cheaper — a good thing! — but Olmstead wonders at the costs of such efficiency. “We care about cheapness to the detriment of wholeness,” she writes.
The focus on roots runs through the book. Olmstead grew up in a region known for fruit, the trees for which require years of cultivation before they can be harvested. This lengthy cycle requires long-term thinking: Farmers had to look 10 or 20 years ahead, not to next fall. And in the dry country of Idaho, even annual crops demanded serious planning and work.
Farming in Idaho thus required people to put down roots to match those of their crops. Not everyone who passed through Olmstead’s corner of the West did so. Some were “boomers” in the original sense of the term, those who followed a commodity boom and left when it went bust. Others, such as the Chinese immigrants who made up a quarter of Idaho’s non-Indian population in 1870, were pressured to leave by persistent prejudice. But those who did remain (“stickers” in her terminology) built something meant to last.
Those “roots” anchored the “little platoons” that Edmund Burke said are “the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” Small communities drew pioneers together to do the things they could not do alone. Help your neighbors while accepting their help yourself, and before long, you will have built yourselves a community. That community, as Burke wrote in a slightly different context, is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
But change always comes, even to the most stable and long-lived communities. Burke did not reject all change and characterized his own society as having “indeed been in a progressive State of improvement.” Nearer to our own time, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote that “to be conservative is not merely to be averse from change … it is also a manner of accommodating ourselves to changes, an activity imposed upon all men. For change is a threat to identity, and every change is an emblem of extinction.”
It would be easy to slip from wistfulness to nostalgia when faced with that “emblem of extinction,” and Olmstead admits that nostalgia “can make us blind: it can prompt us to view complicated, messy places with a false simplicity or sentimentality.” But she does not completely reject the pull of an ideal past. “Homesickness can become a way to identify the best parts of the past and carry them forward,” she says, “even as we leave behind things that ought to be reformed or abandoned.”
How much of the past can be carried forward when the things that created it are gone? The communities that arose through mutual aid did so because they had no other option. There was no big government in these newly settled lands; to get something done, people had to do it themselves. The people relied on each other, and that reliance built strong bonds of trust and shared interest. Can, as Olmstead suggests, “an IV of cash straight to the bloodstream” reinvigorate a place when responsibility does not follow with it?
Cash did not build these communities. Work did. Government funds, no matter which local organization they are filtered through, show people the value of government, not community. But if the people themselves supply that investment, and if they stay around to guide it and participate in the community it builds, perhaps the rootedness that made Emmett, Idaho, and thousands of other farm towns can be reborn.
Neither liberal nor conservative orthodoxy can seem to offer a solution for dwindling farm communities. Perhaps there is no solution, but reading Olmstead’s reflections on her home and family should make us want to find one.
Kyle Sammin is a lawyer and writer from Pennsylvania and the co-host of the Conservative Minds podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @KyleSammin.
