My mentor in the field of history, Dr. Carroll Engelhardt, a professor emeritus at Concordia College, Moorhead, and author of several local history books, recently published an unusual memoir of his boyhood growing up on a small farm in eastern Iowa. In The Farm at Holstein Dip, Engelhardt simultaneously walks the reader through the stories of his upbringing and the stories of a bygone way of life, that of the rural farm family. An example of the balance is a paragraph describing the seasonal nature of farming, in which he remembers that his father “readied his machinery in late March and finished corn harvest and fall plowing by Thanksgiving” two sentences after citing “April 23 and October 14″ as the “earliest and latest average dates for a killing frost.” He told me that he has received mixed reviews from readers who find themselves more interested in one side of this split between facts and reminiscences than the other, but I found the balance to be an intriguing way to achieve his broader intent — to honor many aspects of a bygone way of life, and to mourn their passage.
This is not to say that there are not still farm families — despite the protestations of politicians to the contrary, there are over a million farmers and over two million farms in the United States today. And it is certainly not to say that there are no rural areas — even on the Eastern Seaboard one has to go only about 60 miles from the I-95 corridor to find what most city folks would describe as “the middle of nowhere.” But to those who experienced or even who have learned about pre-1960s rural life, nothing is the same. Engelhardt portrays what today seems to be an epic upbringing: an farm featuring stove irons and kerosene lamps (until the REA brought electricity after the war), an outhouse (with the luxury of real toilet paper), radio plays and card games with the neighbors (until television drove people inside), and boyhood military play involving jumping off bridges 20 feet into the stream at Holstein Dip and, one time at least, shooting BB guns at one another (with the safety-first proviso to “aim low”). Some of these things — the outhouses and stove irons — are hardly missed, but others — the community lost to television and the willingness to let children take risks — warrant more thought than mere nostalgia. Time and technology have nationalized our way of life, and the imperatives of the Cold War fostered consumerism. Surely there is some way to regain at least some of what has been sacrificed to gain the benefits of modernity.
Time and technology have changed farming methods even more dramatically than family life. On a 200-acre farm that began with just 60 tillable acres, Engelhardt describes a farm with two horses, ten dairy cows, around 200 chickens, and a substantial vegetable plot growing enough different crops to fill a CSA box for sale to urban hippies today. Much of this began to change over time as mechanization brought an end to extreme diversification of crops. The arrival of combines ended the threshing rings that would travel from farm to farm threshing oats into straw, and with the end of those rings came the end of communal lunches. This trend led to today’s enormous, highly capitalized operations that grow at most a handful of row crops. These are treated as commodities and sold, rather than harvested and saved for feed or seed. This has become inevitable. Large feedlots have made small-scale animal husbandry unprofitable, and most hybrid seed is designed to be infertile (and even if it weren’t the genes are patented so as to make reproduction illegal). Again, while few but survivalists would argue for a return to sustenance agriculture, a bygone way of life forced upon its practitioners and hardly worthy of celebration, there is something to be said for smaller-scale farms and farmers raising fresh vegetables and free-range milk, eggs, and meat.
From these domestic reflections Engelhardt turns to town, and to church, and to school. Here his experiences are more recognizable from the vantage point of my own, in part because by the time he entered kindergarten the war had ended and by the time he entered high school the comparatively flush times of the 1950s had begun. Coming to town at that time meant that he saw the replacement of the prewar order with the status quo that would define rural Iowa communities until the 1980s when I saw it, albeit in a state of decline. The key differences are of course that Engelhardt’s world was more structured, just as it was on the farm: whites and blacks did not much socialize; Protestants and Catholics did not much marry; co-ed students did not much study sex-ed. This is the life my parents (born a decade later) knew, vestiges of which remained in the aisles of Pamida and Jay Drug and Howard’s Sporting Goods and the other fading stalwarts of small town life. There is little question that things were “easier” then, in a sense — as long as one was in the majority group. Life for those who were black or feminist or gay or whatever else was more challenging.
This is something that Engelhardt does not gloss over — indeed, to me, one of his key talents his ability to draw out the positive aspects of rural life in the mid-twentieth century without over-romanticizing it. He frequently makes reference to the gender roles his parents accepted — willingly but with little choice. He notes a general ignorance (in this usage a term not intended to be pejorative) of other cultures, retelling his Mother’s effort to honor a Mexican-American in-law with a culturally suitable meal — she came up with Spanish rice and spaghetti and meatballs, a “heart-felt and half-correct” effort at hospitality that nails the good intentions of a Midwestern people who nonetheless did not and still do not always know how to deal with other cultures. He tells of a minstrel show (complete with blackface) put on the 1950s as a school fundraiser. He speaks with lingering indignation of members of the community who were critical of his walking downtown with a black groomsman after his wedding. Like most Iowans, Engelhardt possesses a strong conservative sensibility, but his is tempered with a clear understanding of how things that were “easy” to the average denizen of might have felt quite different to those who were outside the dominant demographic.
Engelhardt concludes with some thoughts on the role of his book, saying that as a young man he thought of history as a field of study focused on the lives of important people from somewhere else, and only came to realize later in life — well into a career as a professional historian — that each of us are living history. This is not to say that each of us can write an interesting memoir — far from it. While the sometimes-rambling tales of our grandparents are sufficient entertainment for family gatherings, they in general would not make much of a book. But Engelhardt seeks to render his experiences more noteworthy than the average grandfatherly ruminations through the characteristic meticulousness with which he ties in his memories with history. He also has a great hook: he has lived through the transition from the old way of doing things to the new. From the radio by kerosine lamp to television and electric light, and from riding a horse hauling a threshing machine to driving a tractor hauling a hayrack, Engelhardt witnessed the death of the old order and the birth of the new, and spent a career as a historian learning how to document these changes. “Awareness that a world has vanished in my lifetime saddens me,” he writes. In some aspects this is true for anyone lucky enough to survive to a suitably advanced age. But it is more true for Engelhardt’s generation than most. Both because of that and because of his careful research and presentation of a broader historical narrative, the effort to make his memoir more than a simple narrative is to me a successful one.
As it so often has, rural America stands at a turning point today. Demographically challenged by decades of outmigration, economically confronted with business consolidation and industrial outsourcing, and increasingly marginalized politically by conspiratorial and often hypocritical Tea Party politics, dark clouds are on the horizon. A boom (quite possibly a bubble) in commodity prices and cash rents have papered over most of these deep-seated issues, but the simple fact remains that rural America faces great challenges. More than small farms has been lost; more than prayer in schools has been ended. The nuclear family is nearly as absent in America’s rural communities as it is in her inner cities. We have taken dramatic steps to reduce endemic discrimination against women and minorities, but the social cohesion that enabled that discrimination has faded as well. Simple minds see this correlation and assume causation. But there is nothing about diversity that is inherently destructive to societal bonds. Those who would lay all our problems at the feet of television are similarly mistaken. While the national celebration of idiocy exemplified by the celebrity of “Honey Boo-Boo” certainly suggests there would be some value in turning off our televisions and stepping outside to connect with people, the reality is that we have largely self-segregated ourselves into like-minded communities — perhaps in search of something that at least superficially resembles the social compact rural communities once shared. Much has been written on this topic, though little has been done to reverse the trends we face. Perhaps it is hopeless.
Ultimately, I want to insist that it is not. The CSA reference above is poignant because it refers to how all of this can be — and already is being — redeemed. Organic and natural farming, the localism movement, and community-supported agriculture all offer unique ways to revive the concept of small-scale agriculture. This is hardly an environmentalist concern. These foods taste better — really! — and are better for us. They are also cheaper if they are bought from local sources rather than the organic sections of grocery stores, and they keep more money in our communities. The search for a better way of life — less frenzied, less dense, less oppressive — in combination with the ubiquity of technology has brought educated young people back to rural communities, complementing this tendency. The readjustment to small-town life is eased by the ever-lower cost of transportation back and forth from home to larger cultural centers and ever-growing appreciation for and availability of provisions that were simply impossible to find in rural areas as little as twenty years ago. Our rural communities have never died, so they have no need to be reborn — but they have seen better days, and with a little luck, those days can return.
Or, if not, we will at least have nostalgia.
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