The farmer aims to make his mark on the land. He in turn is marked by that effort, quite literally. My earliest childhood memories of my father are of the physical toll that farming takes on a body. His thumbnails, for instance, always seemed to be deep purple — badly aimed swings of a hammer will do that. And his upper back was polkadotted where the sun tanned it through the holes in his shirt.
When I was a teenager working alongside him, my own appearance must have been similarly striking. In 1978, at the tail end of the worst winter of the century, my hands turned black. To keep water thawed for the hogs to drink, we burned small kerosene heaters under the tanks. Once or twice a day, I would have to knock the accumulated soot off a dozen or so heaters, refill them with fuel, and trim the felt wicks with a pocketknife. You could do all this with Mctor Davis Hanson gloves on, but it took twice as long. The kerosene dissolved the soot, and the oily black worked its way so far into the pores that I don’t think my palms turned fully pink again till summer.
The sheer physicality of the family farm — the pig stink and the locust- tree perfume, the skinfrying heat and the eyelash-freezing cold, the sound of barbed wire ripping denim just before it rips the skin — came back to me reading Victor Davis Hanson’s Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea (Free Press, 289 pages, $ 23.00). The dust-jacket photo of Hanson — a farmer by birth and temperament, and now accidentally a professor of Greek at California State University in Fresno — shows that he, too, has been marked by life on the land. If you look closely, it tells much of the story of his book.
Hanson is standing in front of a barn, the unlikeliest classicist you have ever seen. The camera has caught him on a bad hair day, but that’s the least of it. His shirttail is out, and you can see he’s wiped his hands on it. The workboots are not laced all the way to the top. His filthy trousers are tucked halfway into one of them. He is ever so slightly leaning back on his heels. Like the barn behind him with its patched, corrugated-tin roof and unpainted siding, he looks weather-beaten. And he is.
But not just the weather has beaten Hanson. So have depressed commodity prices; disastrous planting decisions; crookedness at the local cooperative that marketed his crops; and the flagging demand for raisins, the mainstay of the San Joaquin Valley farm Hanson once ran full-time with his brothers and cousin.
This is not, then, the book of a dilettante professor who farmed as a hobby. Hanson was the real thing, a fifth-generation California viticulturist. He was also, as it happens, trained in the classics. As a result, when the agricultural depression of the 1980s deprived him of his livelihood of choice, he returned reluctantly to the university and has since become a noted historian of ancient Greece, if still no ordinary academic. To wit:
Last year I built a stone-block wall all around the house and yard, a 550- foot circuit, 6 feet tall, 3,000 feet of steel re-bar, 50 cubic yards of concrete foundation, more a fortress really than a mere enclosure. No bank, no hoodlum, no broker will make it inside that wall. They may, like the Spartans in Attica, ravage the countryside outside the circuit, battle with family skirmishers on patrol, but the house itself will be safe. Knowledge of the principles of classical fortification and siegecraft (poliorcetics) and ancient Greek masonry is not entirely without use.
This will doubtless go down like a spoonful of ipecac with his university colleagues. Likewise, this pungent passage about the yeoman agrarians Hanson reveres:
You more urbane readers, I imagine that you would not want any of these family farming holdouts at a university lecture, a golf outing, or a group therapy session, much less on a weekend retreat or conference panel. . . . You see, as Theophrastus knew, the tanned crack in their behinds too often peeps out from their sinking Levis. . . . They track mud on your linoleum and leave dirt on your sofa. By them the young, sensitive homosexual who grew up across the road is dubbed “the boy who went queer up in the Bay Area”; the wealthy Armenian raisin packing elite are reduced to “the long-nosed thieves”; the grape picker on permanent disability with the fused back is greeted with “always siesta, huh, amigo?”; the industrious but undercapitalized farmer without inheritance is cruelly dismissed as “the know-nothing about to go belly up.”
For the sake of his wife and children, I hope Hanson has tenure.
Fields Without Dreams, it must be said, is an unrelievedly pessimistic book. Hanson tells in unsparing and fascinating detail of the collapse and near-bankruptcy of his family’s farm. He looks back in sorrow and in anger. If the farm laborer and family farmer are by his lights inherently noble creatures, all others, especially those who earned a living while he was failing, are ignoble.
The vocabulary of abuse is stunning. Only the farmer earns his daily bread. Everyone else in America is just after “lucre” and “pelf” (even his mother’s earnings as a jurist he describes as “lucre that accrued from the law”). ” Mushmouths in white shirts” are “covetous and rapacious.” A stockbroker is a ” high-salaried parasite.” And what of the professors who see the American farm as “the criminal spawning ground of homophobia, sexism, racism, and capitalism”? Hanson wonders what historians of the future will make of this ” curious late twentieth-century species, this whiny lamprey who slithers amid the swamp of American materialism only to turn back out of the muck to stick his tiny fangs into his bloated mother, now pouty over all the ingested pabulum that has made him fat but colicky.”
The first third of the book is a sustained act of aggression in this vein, with Hanson dropping hints that he is striking a rhetorical pose (“The sophisticated and discerning reader finds the yeoman’s simplistic distrust of brokers and merchandisers pathetic, his mind surely paranoid if not unstrung as well”). But Hanson’s prevailing aggression is against himself: He feels a deep sense of shame at having failed where his ancestors gritted their teeth and survived. He loathes all the non-agrarians in his midst, and is now one of them.
He has a larger, less solipsistic purpose. Hanson wishes to resuscitate the voice of the Greek poet Hesiod, whose Works and Days was a “melancholy” and “angry account of the necessary pain and sacrifice needed to survive on the land.” He wishes to do this not simply as a corrective to the romanticism of Virgil, whose Georgics lauded “the harmony and community of the countryside” and who has proved a durable and saccharine influence on American memoirs of the farming life.
Like the older Greek poet, Hanson thinks there is a recognizable agrarian type, found in “families whose sole support, whose only occupation, is growing food.” This yeoman is not always pleasant or couth, it is true, but he is necessary to a healthy democracy. In his struggle to master nature he masters himself, and his leavening presence in the polis “creates a stability that leads to affluence and greater freedom.”
Hanson is convinced that the sturdy yeoman agrarian is an endangered, if not quite extinct, species in late twentieth-century America. He is further convinced that extinction is inevitable, that his own failure to make a go of it is the future of American agriculture writ small. Farming will go on, on a much smaller scale than the family farm with hobbyists, and on a much larger scale with vertically integrated agribusiness. But a crucial type of citizen will disappear, with dire political consequences foretold in the fourth century B.C.:
Once that Greek system of autonomous city-states based on agrarian notions of small farming, constitutional government, and infantry militias vanished, classical Greek culture was lost. Literature became stylized and repetitive. Taxation and military expenditure soared. Authoritarianism replaced popular government. Without the agrarian infrastructure there was no middle to frame, support, and mend an egalitarian society. All that is a historical fact, not a romance, not an agrarian yarn.
The book’s larger argument is obviously self-serving, though that doesn’t mean it is wrong. As one of millions who have turned their backs on the self- denying struggle to scratch a living from the soil, 1 suppose it is equally self-serving on my part to see the demise of a certain style of agriculture as of no special consequence for the fate of the republic.
Still, I am simply not as convinced as Hanson that agriculture on a large scale — it is a continental country after all — precludes the fostering of the yeoman’s virtues. Many “agribusinesses” are family farms in disguise, taking on a corporate form as the only sane response to the fractured ownership that stems from the demise of old-fashioned primogeniture. And Hanson’s grasp of economics is suspect at times: “True, there exist real laws of supply and demand in farming,” he writes, a concession on the order of admitting that, after all, gravity does make fruit fall from the tree. Most government agricultural subsidies raise the price for consumers, not lower them, as Hanson seems to believe. Finally, I am not so sure that the stern virtues Hanson prizes are exclusively concentrated in so small a portion of the population, or that the decline of family farming presages the fading of these virtues, rather than the other way around.
But these are demurrers about a vivid work that on the whole is more honest about people who live on the land than any of recent vintage. Fields Without Dreams is a deadly serious book, but it is enormously entertaining as well.
If indeed a hardy race of agrarians is vanishing, Hanson has drawn the portrait of them that deserves to survive. It honors them in just proportion to their merits, which are considerable. Victor Davis Hanson, let it be said, though no longer an agrarian through and through, is still a citizen of great stature.
By Richard Starr
