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AgriCulture: The Politics of Being Rooted
AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes:
A few weeks back, I wrote about a friend, Mondy Raibon, who I thought personified the concept of being “deeply rooted”—attached to his land through a family history that gave the land a particularly strong pull and meaning for him. Mondy, I’m pleased to report, did further research and found out not only that his community of Galilee, Texas was a documented Freedom Colony, but that he actually knew one of the characters described in a book about these communities by University of Texas historians, a much-beloved County agricultural agent.
I must admit to being quite taken by the romance of this deep connection to the land. Whenever one is that swept up by the romance of anything, it’s a good idea to take a step back and get some perspective. Today’s New York Times provided precisely that perspective from an unexpected quarter—a report on the obstacles faced by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, currently head of the International Monetary Fund, should he seek to run for President of France. What might disqualify this eminently qualified man from office, the Times reported, is that he is not “deeply rooted” in the land the way a farmer might be.
According to one critic, legislator Christian Jacob, Mr. Strauss-Kahn is the antithesis of “deeply rooted.” He is a “BoBo,” or bourgeois bohemian (French shorthand for urban intellectual). He does not represent the image of “the France of terroirs and territories,” and according to Mr. Jacob is out-of-touch with the soil and the mystery of “la France profonde.”
These comments have stirred considerable controversy among those with historical memories in France, as they echo the images invoked by the antisemitic French far right in the period leading up to World War II. Mr. Jacob has denied any antisemitic sentiment, saying that he intended only to convey that “as a farmer, I don’t recognize myself or identify with him. He doesn’t incarnate the rural world, that’s all. I reacted with my peasant core, as a farmer.” Apparently, from his point of view, France is still a country where happy peasants till the soil and bring their produce to market in horse drawn carriages.
Maybe it’s because I am myself a rootless cosmopolitan aspiring to be a farmer, but I find the juxtaposition set up by Mr. Jacob to be a particularly painful and even ugly one. Can’t we indulge the romance and mystery of feeling a deep connection with the soil without evoking a dark nativism that targets the “other?” This is not just an issue in France. Recall the “bumiputra,” or sons of the earth, who invoked a similar romantic attachment to the land in Indonesia half a century ago as they slaughtered their own cosmopolitan minority, the Chinese.
And I can’t help but wonder why Mr. Jacob thinks that agricultural rootedness qualifies someone for leadership while being an urban intellectual disqualifies. Given that it’s President’s Day weekend, we might contemplate our own society’s verdict on this opposition.
In the early days of our history we elected a number of Presidents, including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who demonstrated that there was no contradiction between intellectual achievement and farming, and who were equally comfortable in cosmopolitan urban and in rural environments. Their tradition lived on in the mid-twentieth century in the person of Vice President Henry A. Wallace, an innovative farmer and cosmopolitan intellectual. In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, we saw rural resentment manipulated into a nativist movement whose adherents espoused sentiments similar to Mr. Jacob’s. But we also saw effective political alliances develop between the deeply rooted agricultural population and the great urban masses, exemplified by the Democrat-Farmer-Labor movements of the upper midwest .
Today, nativism still lurks (as in those who doubt that President Obama is truly American), but so does the spirit of the DFL alliance, as we see in Wisconsin today. Apparently, the number of Americans who place high value on agricultural rootedness when choosing leaders is quite low . We certainly seem to prefer presidential candidates who look somewhat credible in jeans and a flannel shirt posing on Iowa hay bales—they all do it, after all. But the list of modern presidents with intimate knowledge of farming is miniscule—Harry S. Truman, who worked for his father’s cattle farm for a time, and Jimmy Carter, who came from a Georgia peanut farm. (I, of course, exclude LBJ, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, owners of show ranches.) We romanticize the attachment of farmers to the land, but not, it seems, to such an extreme degree that we make it a litmus test. That’s probably a good thing.
As for me, I do think that if someone could actually run a farm sustainably and, without government subsidy, make it profitable, that person would have demonstrated the intelligence and skill to make a good president. If that person had a deep emotional connection to the land, I would consider him or her to hold positive values with which I agree. But were anyone to posit that such a background made that person more American and more fit to be a leader as a result, I would be very wary indeed. —Mark Scherzer
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Posted by Rural Intelligence on 02/23/11 at 04:03 PM • Permalink
