Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1033
And then we all went into the little farm beneath the old oaks; and the truck-farmer as recognizing a kindred spirit took me to a little cement-bottomed pool, with a bridge of a single six-foot board spanning it and iris all round it, and little fish.... A sort of Japanese miniature garden which he had made secretly to satisfy his craving for some sort of beauty on those bare uplands — and didn’t show anybody for fear of being laughed at. And in the most furniture-polish-scented, purple-black-velvet-seated, most dusted, most cleaned farm-house parlour that I have ever seen we were given rhubarb wine and garibaldi biscuits — a variety that I had never hoped to see again since Walter Atterbury and I used to sail the Spanish Main in the good frigate Saucy Arethusa. And departed with the car laden with more and more enormous lettuces, beets, and celery heads than the vehicle of any Rutherford, New Jersey, physician can ever have groaned under before....
And all this within sight of the Empire State Building’s tower....
And then there was tucked away somewhere a charming small dairy farmer who sold us an astonishing amount of buttermilk for a couple of cents and laughed at the idea that the great dairy companies would ever squeeze him out. He said it stood to reason they couldn’t. From round about there they had to collect up the milk and carry it forty miles to do what he called doping it. He meant, I suppose, pasteurizing. He had enough customers on West side New York, who would not look at pasteurized milk if you gave it them for nothing, let alone the local people who all wanted their milk raw.... Good for New York and the local people.
So that, yes, under the shadow of the Equitable spire, the Small Producer holds his own. It is astonishing in what small plots at the passing of the car the lines of lettuce and beets whirl round over a great surface of that flat, hardly rolling land. There is here a considerable population of quite Small Producers who all work themselves at their intensive cultivation on an acre or so, their sons and daughters coming back from their universities for the weekends and jumping straight off their push-bikes to dig or hoe or gather... or milk or feed or pluck chickens. With them no one can compete. They also have customers and to spare who will not look at cold-stored vegetables and, if customers are to seek seasonally, they consume their own produce.
The larger truck-farmers who aspire to be near-gentry are feeling the draught badly. They are — it is the same all the world over! — inclined to eschew working themselves and certainly will not let their children lower themselves by holding hoe or dibble. They have to employ Wop or Dutch or Balkan labour — usually female and not too efficient. And dear! And they are cruelly competed with by South Jersey and the great utility company-owned farms in the South. The other day a great refrigerator truck with a trailer driven by a coloured man came into a farmers’ market near Newark with a cargo of spinach and melons. These he sold at such give-away prices that the local farmers had to take much of their produce away unsold. The negro came from Alabama. It looked like the beginning of the end for the large to largish truck-farmer.
But the negro could not compete with the small, working producers.... They could undersell him all the time. They may yet save civilization.
§
Let me, then, boldly say that I like the State of New Jersey. That obviously does not matter to New Jersey. As Sidney Smith said to the child who was stroking a tortoise to give it pleasure, it is like stroking the dome of St. Paul’s to please the Dean and Chapter. But it will be useful to my small band of readers because it will make more plain my prescriptions for the saving of civilization. It is, in fact, time that we thought about the Small Producer with some intensity and the train in which we find ourselves is so leisurely that we shall be able to do quite a little thinking.
§
On the face of it there should be States other than this more suited for illustrations of this topic. I had, indeed, thought of holding it over until I got to Tennessee. But, although there is a pleasant open-air market in Memphis, priority seems to belong to New Jersey for two reasons. The first is the superior antiquity of their nursery-garden traditions. Settled later than the more Southern States it had, before settlement, its Dutch populations who much more than any English early immigrants understood the ways of the difficult art. It is true that they were driven out by the English and re-drove them out and the struggle went on for a long time, being in the south of the State complicated by incursions of the Pennsylvanian Dutch and Mr. Penn’s Quakers. And it is true that North New Jersey is climatically a little too outside the Great Route to make the perfect illustration of Small Producing at its best. But the Southern part of the State is geographically well within the Mason and Dixon Line and is climatically as admirable for the market-gardener’s purpose as you could need. So that with relative ease it supplies Philadelphia with truck, dairy products, poultry, and all the other staples of the small man, the North of the State doing it only difficultly for New York, so that its larger scale truck-men feel, as I have said, more and more the competition of the South of the State. On the other hand, the Small Producer, even in the North, holds his own very well even in among the factory chimneys and the collapsing factories. And that gives me exactly the illustration that I want.
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For New Jersey has another, an historic, claim to the market-garden hegemony, not merely of this country but of the world. It is that its first governor at his installation marched from his ship to his seat of office, bearing on his shoulder not any arm or token of viceroyalty, but just a hoe. Just that and meant it. I do not believe that any land the world over could show a like fact among its annals nor that any other new ruler from Tamberlane to Mr. Mussolini ever did the like.
I have heard that gesture called swank. But it was a true historic landmark. For not only did Edward Carteret mean to indicate to the four families who made up the population of his metropolis of Elizabethtown that he, even as they, meant to work in the fields. But he uttered for all the colonies the final pronouncement that their English rulers had given up the idea of gold-bug hunting and competing with the great Mogul in the production of indigo, gensing, ginger, and spices. From that day on America was ordered for ever to abandon get-rich-quick ideas. Alas!... Not so very long after their rulers enjoined on them such sage counsels the colonies got rid of them.
The device on the seal of the Twenty-Four Proprietors of Jersey is a pair of scales above a shock of wheat that is supported by two ears of corn.... English corn by Indian.... I should have liked it to have in the first and fourth quarters English, and in the second and third, Dutch... hoes.
§
Very well, then.... Very soon now the Small Producer must again inherit the earth and the fullness thereof... whether we like it or no. It has always been so; so it must be again. It is not merely the lion and the lizard that keep the courts of Jamshydd. The peasant’s plough passes backwards and forwards above where he sleeps. That, no doubt, gives him something to think about. And the Small Producer — the man supporting himself and his family from his plot of ground and by the work of his hands — is the one human being whom currency, finance, tariff, the refrigerator, and the machine — those arbiters of the destinies of all other mortals — cannot very much affect. Even wars cannot root him out.
All the small truck-gardens along the Marne were wiped out by the ironshod feet of troops in September 1914. But by the following March those same gardens carried as many rows of lettuce, beets, celery, and spinach as they had shown before the Germans came. To-day peaceable peoples practice in cellars with gas masks against the Day.... It would be as well if they also practised with hoes, digging-forks, chisels, awls.
It would be as well here to define the Small Producer. He is the man who with a certain knowledge of various crafts can set his hand to most kinds of work that go to the maintenance of humble existences. He can mend or make a rough chest of drawers; he will make shift to sole a shoe or make a passable pair of sandals; he will contrive or repair hurdles, platters, scythe-handles, styes, shingle roofs, harrows. But, above all, he can produce and teach his family to produce good food according to the seasons.... In sufficiency to keep his household supplied independent of the flux of currencies and the tides of world supplies — and to have a surplus for his neighbours. He is the insurance premium of his race. In short — a Man.
That ideal is, I am frequently told, disagreeable to the American mind. I do not know about that. I have lived too long in America to hazard impressions as to Americans. Sometimes I think one way, sometimes another. I will put it this way:
On my terrace over the Mediterranean I sit at the head of my table and, fixing my napkin under my chin and seizing my carving-knife, I make with that implement a circular gesture and, from the pride of my heart, exclaim:
“Everything you see on this table is my own growing... ducks, egg-plants, strawberries, peaches, melons, sweet corn, wine.... Of course the wine is not a great growth. Grown and cooked by these two hands.”
And the statement is pretty nearly true, though I actually do not grow or grind the wheat from which my bread is made.
The amiable Americans who usually attend those Sabbath feasts then make noises. They are not, of course, always the same three or four. Those who are frail of figure and lymphatic and wear pince-nez produce sounds like the “Oo’er” of Mr. Kipps... a sign that my statement causes dismay. It is the voicing of apprehension by travellers in a strange land where cellophane is not and everything is touched by the human hand.
As against that, large fellows and fine dames who have jumped blind baggages and rolled their humps in all the dangerous places of the globe will exclaim: “Swell!... Fine!... Great guy, you.... Put it there!... What have you?” (Yes, they will have been some months away from home.) And they will go off into descriptions of the two-hundred-pound squash they grew in Santa Barbara and the alligator steak from the saurian they strangled with their own hands and cooked on top of Popocatepetl.
For producing your own food becomes very soon a passion once you have entered on it. Over it you will go to great heroisms, self-sacrifices, mendacities. Every Frenchman and most English, Dutch, Germans, and Italians feel ashamed when they are quite out of contact with the earth, and a good many of them, like me, if they can do nothing more will grow mustard and cress in their soup-tureens. And I am inclined to believe that most Americans share that feeling once they are off Sixth Avenue. After all, are they not near descendants of kitchen-garden pioneers?
§
Underneath your hut is the earth; underneath your neighbour’s manor-house is the earth; under the sky-scraper that houses the bosses of your neighbour’s bosses is the earth; under the flagstaff that tops the sky-scraper and displays Old Glory to the breeze is the earth; underneath the soles of your nation as of the whole comity of nations on this globe is the earth. But you alone supply eggs, sweet corn, eggplants, string beans, peppers, chickens, peaches, butter to your neighbour. Your example may yet save our civilization.
After a few thousand years Great Truths become platitudes. In the days of Mithras men worshipped the sun; to-day you are told that if your windows and light-bulbs are of certain sorts of glass you can do without the light of the sun. This morning I read in the prospectus of a physical culture tout that fresh air is dangerous to human beings.... And you believe it... as we shall one day believe if advertisers tell us it sufficiently often that we can do without the fruits of the earth.
Like the Giant Antaeus, who preceded Mithras by a hundred thousand years, our civilization needs contact with the earth for its renewal if it is to be renewed. This has been said so often that no one believes it much.... But that we shall either return or be returned to the earth is for all us nations inevitable. Our civilization cannot escape the lot of all the proud civilizations that have preceded us. It is for us to decide whether our return shall be merely an Antaean retouching of the earth to regain strength or whether it shall be cataclysmic — a be-panicked sauve qui peut after world-disaster.
In either case it shall be the hut nestling beside the manor that shall be the last to go and the first to return. If we have already chosen the better portion we shall long have had our huts. Returned to our bean-rows we shall begin once more building up our proud civilizations. Our predecessors did that after the Fall of Rome: that is why we are here.
The marvellous human brain has discovered how we may fly in the face of God and from the empyrean destroy our fellows by the million. But, fagged out, that brain has flinched before the task of finding out how a machine that can do the work of ten thousand men under the inspection of one man alone can be got to find employment for the nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine that it has dispossessed. Still less has that poor tired thing been able to devise how to prevent us or our neighbours from razing off the earth all our cities with their populations. So that the tired brain of the architect of to-day has still more to tire itself over devising cellars — into which populations skilled in the use of gas masks — and of nothing else — may at any moment retire.
When they re-emerge there will be nothing for them but to set unskilfully to scratching a subsistence from a soil of rubble from the fallen buildings. But if they have a little kitchen-garden skill and the earth round their cities is in good shape for intensive culture they will have a chance of survival. They can have no other.... Or the ruin of our empires will come from civil strife. The end will be the same.
It would be better to achieve that end without the orgies of destruction and the settings up against walls that are so dear to our Technocrats. Our mechanical civilization seems to be crumbling beneath its own weight. It is impossible to escape the conviction that we are in a world of weakening pulses; our intelligences are enfeebled by the blood supplied to our brains by artificially grown, chemically fertilized and preserved foods. And even if our civilization could continue in spite of our degeneration, the problem of the machine dispossessing the worker must grow more and more acute within — and then between — nation and nation.
§
The problem is by no means new; civilization after civilization has had to meet it. Victorious Caesars, disbanding after interminable wars innumerable legionaries who would otherwise have disturbed their labour markets and robbed on the highways, decreed to them by ukase after ukase all the alluvial lands from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Roman Wall across Britain. The legionaries were impassioned truck-gardeners; they strengthened Rome and the traditions of their methods of gardening strengthen us still. There would have been no civilization to-day had not the descendants of the legionaries gone on truck-gardening and teaching our ancestors how to truck-garden through the Dark Ages... in Provence. In England after the Middle Ages thousands of agricultural labourers were displaced and sent starving and rioting by the populating of the fields by sheep for wool-growing. They had to be given cottage gardens or the State would have fallen. In America from the earliest days you have had in times of depression successive federal or State laws, like the Homestead Act, giving free access to arable lands. In France the abolition of primogeniture continuously breaks up the great estates. In Switzerland it is the same. Russia, curiously enough, went to the extreme in nationalizing the land and promoting mass farming. She has been forced to react in the direction of forming again a possessing, small-holding class. By a decree of March 1935, as I have said, every peasant working on the communal farms has been presented with a little over two acres of ground and his farm-house.... As his private property.
So, swing the pendulum how it will in the direction of vast, private, communally, or corporation-owned estates on which larger and always larger-scale farming shall be practised, it swings always, inevitably, back to the Small Producer, the quite small owner, working with his own hands, and the aid of his family, meticulously, his own little plot. That the bonanza farm and its vastnesses should disappear is by no means inevitable if soil-erosion in the United States should be checked, nor need we in the least wish for its disappearance. That is not our affair. The financiers and their industrially-minded opponents must arrange that as best they may according to whatever lex talionis they please. The growing of wheat, sugar-beets, or other roots in small parcels is not an engrossing occupation. It may well be left to the mechanically-minded; the raising of cattle in huge droves is a sport congenial, apparently, to certain large-lunged souls. May they prosper.
§
The only factor of our present situation that is certain to continue progressively is that of the improvement of the machine. That means the dispossessing of more and more millions of men. There is no avoiding that. It is as certain as death. We shut our eyes to both phenomena.
A second factor only not quite so certain is the progressive mental and physical deteriorating of our populations because of indoor, mechanized occupations and the consumption of inferior food. You can safely say that an immensely large proportion of our city and near-city populations never, between their cradles and their graves, taste meats or fruits unpreserved with deleterious chemicals or vegetables straight from the ground.
Both these factors, or either one of them, must lead us to disaster. Federal or World action might reduce the hours of labour worked; local regulation might ensure the supply of fresh food to small communities here or there. But only the Estate of the Small Producer, a Fifth Estate holding in an iron grasp the balance of power, can radically restore the face of the world to sanity and health. For that a change of heart is needed.... A change of ideals. No legislation can help us.
You cannot imagine a population each member of which works only an hour a day spending the whole rest of its time in the cinemas. Yet the only logical and moral end of the result of improvement in the Machine can only be either millionwise exterminations or a six-hour world working week. There is no third way. None.
But you can imagine a six-hour working week population spending considerable time and regaining its mental and intellectual health growing string beans, attending on milch goats, moving hurdles for sheep among roots, weaving woollen stuffs, thinning out woodlands, carving bedposts, painting frescoes in cinema halls, felling timber... and having all its afternoons and evenings and most of the winter months for the movies, the theatres, the concert halls, the churches, the night clubs, the dancing floors.. for fox-hunting, for fishing, for field sports, hitch-hiking, for distant travel.... Or even for the Arts.
