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2006

Alexandre Hogue's Passion: Ecology and Agribusiness in The Crucified Land

Mark Andrew White Oklahoma State University

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White, Mark Andrew, "Alexandre Hogue's Passion: Ecology and Agribusiness in The Crucified Land" (2006). Great Plains Quarterly. 132. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/132

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:2 (Spring 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

ALEXANDRE HOGUE'S PASSION ECOLOGY AND AGRIBUSINESS IN THE CRUCIFIED LAND

MARK ANDREW WHITE

In 1939, Texas artist Alexandre Hogue com­ though brief in his or her assessment of the pleted The Crucified Land (Fig. 1), a striking painting, rightly acknowledged the conflation comparison of water erosion on a Denton, of religious morality and ecological principles Texas, wheat farm to the martyrdom of Jesus in the painting. Despite this observation, there of Nazareth. The Crucified Land was originally has been scant critical examination of Hogue's intended as the final canvas of Hogue's Erosion relationship to ecological thought or his appli­ series, which the artist began in 1932 as a con­ cation of religious ideals to the painting. demnation of the careless agricultural practices This is not to say that The Crucified Land has that had produced wind and water erosion been ignored by critics or historians, although in his home state'! When Hogue exhibited it has received less attention than paintings The Crucified Land that year at the Carnegie such as Drouth Stricken Area, 1934 (Fig. 2), and International, the painting's provocative reli­ Erosion No.2 - Mother Earth Laid Bare, 1936 gious overtones drew the notice of one critic, (Fig. 3). The Crucified Land, like its companions who referred to it as the latest in a "series of ser­ in the Erosion series, has been interpreted as mons on conservation."z The anonymous critic, Hogue's "condemnation of unwise farming prac­ tices" and his denigration of "man's ignorance of nature."3 This interpretation has been advanced repeatedly since the 1930s as indicated by Key Words: agribusiness, Frederic Clements, Life magazine's 1937 profile characterizing the ecology, Alexandre Hogue, Pare Lorentz, John Erosion series as a "scathing denunciation of Steinbeck man's persistent mistakes."4 Mark Andrew White is Assistant Professor of Art Although Hogue certainly blamed the History at Oklahoma State University. He is currently extreme erosion and dust storms of the 1930s completing a book on American abstraction during the on indifference and negligent husbandry, the 1930s. visual imagery of The Crucified Land indicates that he shifted his criticism of agriculture [GPQ 26 (Spring 2006): 67-83] to the cultural roots of such abuse through

67 68 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2006

FIG. 1. Alexandre Hogue, The Crucified Land, 1939, oil on canvas, 42 x 60 in. Courtesy of Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma. an ecological sensibility. Hogue developed a and right corners. As the gullies infiltrate the contrast in the painting between the verdant field, they threaten to undercut the cadaverous wheat grass and its implication of abundant scarecrow whose tattered overalls barely dis­ fecundity with the looming disaster of water guise his cruciform support. Future storms will erosion that slinks in serpentine lines from collapse the embankment and send him and the immediate foreground into the lush fields. his rock foundation into the rut. The farmer has plowed downhill and across Hogue's taut draftsmanship gives the eroded the contours of the land with his tractor, terrain the appearance of jagged, flayed flesh, demonstrating a seeming indifference to the and his inclusion of the wasted, cruciform environment but favoring industrial efficiency scarecrow reinforces the comparison in the and hence profit. His reckless cultivation of the painting's title between the scourging of the soil has produced the ideal terrain for water land and the torture of the Passion. Salvation erosion as departing rains at left wash away from this agricultural sin requires immediate the ruddy topsoil of North Texas and form action before the encroaching evil of erosion gullies that will expand with further erosion undermines the entire area. The sinuous gullies until the acreage's fertile potential is literally that snake back into the field add an additional washed away. The resulting wasteland will lack biblical allusion to the devious serpent and a the essential nutrients to sustain crops but will paradise soon lost to the encroaching wilder­ provide ample support for the needle grass that ness. These pervasive violent overtones in The has already crept into the field in the lower left Crucified Land, when paired with the religious - ALEXANDRE HOGUE'S PASSION 69

FIG. 2. Alexandre Hogue, Drouth Stricken Area, 1934, oil on canvas, 30 x 421/4 in. (76.2 x 107.31 cm.). Courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Art Association Purchase. references, indicate an ecological sympathy closely to contemporary commentators such as for the land as a sacred body and an attack on Pare lorentz, John Steinbeck, and Archibald the aggressive practices of agribusiness. 5 The Macleish, who not only attempted to raise Crucified Land associates the loss of paradise public awareness of the abuses of industrial with capitalist exploitation, suggesting a repu­ agriculture but also invoked religious meta­ diation of the dominion over nature that God phors to describe the environmental devasta­ granted humanity in Genesis 1:28 as a justifica­ tion of the 1930s. tion for environmental plundering dangerous Despite much of the engaging scholarship to both nature and humanity. on Hogue, critics have largely neglected his As such, The Crucified Land indicates a relationship to ecological thought, his religious reverence for nature as a sacred body, rebukes metaphors in The Crucified Land, or the dia­ the human dominion, and proposes an eco­ logue between the two. lea Rossen Delong logical relationship with the environment has noted some ecological content in his work, that emphasizes conservation. Hogue's per­ recognizing that "Hogue's work often suggests sonification of nature in the painting shares a 'cause-and-effect' relationship which illumi­ much with Depression-era ecologists such as nates the interconnections in nature, of which Frederic Clements, Aldo leopold, and Paul humanity is a part," but did not investigate fur­ Sears, who not only characterized nature as a ther.6 Hogue's use of religious rhetoric has been delicately balanced organism but also empha­ discussed to some extent by historian Brad D. sized a symbiosis with nature. It also compares lookingbill, who associated the artist with 70 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2006

FIG. 3. Alexandre Hogue, American (/889-1994), Erosion No.2 - Mother Earth Laid Bare, 1936, oil on canvas, 44 x 56 in. Courtesy of The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Museum purchase.

Sacvan Bercovitch's concept of the American Hogue's upbringing and its relationship to the jeremiad. According to Lookingbill, Hogue was Erosion series. When Alexandre was only six among those "prophetic voices" who "cried out weeks old, his father, Charles Lehman Hogue, in bewilderment about the fate of civilization accepted a Presbyterian pastorate in Denton, when observing disasters."7 The Erosion series Texas. The son would later distance himself not only attempted to alert Americans to the from the church out of disgust at internal crisis but also offered a form of catharsis for politics, and it is possible that his disdain for those suffering through environmental horrors. church dogma contributed to the criticisms Hogue's interpretation of environmental devas­ suggested by The Crucified Land.9 This is not tation as a moral failure certainly connects him to say that the artist held all of Christianity with the jeremiad, although The Crucified Land in contempt, but he may have opposed some is conspicuously absent from Lookingbill's nar­ church doctrines, such as the notion of domin­ rative. Lookingbill's argument, however, does ion over nature. not entirely explain the Christian references Alexandre's profound respect for nature in The Crucified Land. Hogue's association of would be shaped by his childhood affection agribusiness with religious symbolism ques­ for the Bishop Ranch, his sister's 50,000-acre tions, as Lynn White would do in the 1960s, sheep and cattle operation near Dalhart in the the "Christian axiom that nature has no reason Texas Panhandle, and by his time spent tend­ for existence save to serve man."8 ing the family garden with his mother. On the A further examination of the issues posed Bishop Ranch, Hogue developed a deep affinity by The Crucified Land requires a discussion of for what he called "the most luscious grassland ALEXANDRE HOGUE'S PASSION 71

FIG. 4. Alexandre Hogue, Drouth Survivors, 1936, oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in. Formerly Musee National d'Art Moderne (destroyed by fire). in the world" and would later insist that the inference to Hogue's lament for the Dalhart High Plains "never should have been plowed. ranchlands, as DeLong has suggested. Life ran Sad to relate, the grassland is gone forever."l0 the headline "Artist Hogue Feels That Grazing DeLong has noted that it was in Dalhart "that Land Was Destroyed 'First by the Fence, Then Hogue began to recognize the human capacity by Overplowing, Now by Drouth.'" The West to destroy nature's fragile balance. Reverence Texas Chamber of Commerce apparently took for the land, fascination with its expansive such offense at Hogue's Erosion series and space, and a sense of loss at its destruction were Drouth Survivors that they sent a representative attitudes which Hogue must have formed on to Dallas to buy the painting for fifty dollars so the flat, windy plains of the Panhandle."ll His that they might burn it in a public bonfireP lament for the destruction of the grasslands Hogue's love and lament for the vanished surrounding Dalhart later informed one of grasslands had a decisive influence on the his most notable paintings from the Erosion Erosion series, but his respect for nature was also series, Drouth Survivors, 1936 (Fig. 4). Like formed by his mother, Mattie Hoover Hogue. The Crucified Land, Drouth Survivors depicts Alexandre often assisted her in the family a landscape exhausted by overplowing, with garden, where she would speak of "mother the tractor identified once again as the means earth" engendering in her child "visions of a to this destructive end. Desertification is the great female figure under the ground every­ result here, through the absence of water and where, a figure which might be injured if one the power of the wind; the tractor and the were not careful."13 His early sympathy for barbed wire fence have been nearly consumed nature and his personification of it as a mater­ by the shifting dunes. Only prairie dogs and nal figure would later lead the artist to paint rattlesnakes can subsist in this wilderness, as Erosion No.2 - Mother Earth Laid Bare in 1936 the desiccated cows and denuded vegetation (Fig. 3). The painting depicts a large feminine suggest. The fate of the cattle may be a subtle form in the buff clay subsoil of the Dallas area n GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2006

with a lethal gash running through her neck. Hogue further stressed his indignation at a The plow lies nearby, the perpetrator of this butchered, violated earth by adding an ethnic heinous murder and a symbol of "the power of counternarrative to Mother Earth Laid Bare fol­ the phallus."14 Mother Earth's nude form not lowing its completion. The artist finished the only testifies to the destructive consequences painting in Taos, New Mexico, and discovered of poor farming practices, which have stripped from either his fellow Taos artists or residents away the layer of protective topsoil, but also of the nearby Pueblo that an analogous belief infers that the disregard for nature's delicate in Mother Earth could be found in Pueblo an state is a form of sexual violence, the rape of cosmology. As he later recounted in 1946, the nature. Puebloans' respect for Mother Earth had also Although Hogue credited his notion of a created a similar fear of harm: feminine earth to his mother, Mother Earth Laid Bare relied on an inveterate paradigm of I learned about the Indian belief regard­ western civilization that interpreted nature ing the Earth Mother which runs through as both "a nurturing mother" and a disorderly all animistic religions throughout the world consort, which required that "the female earth as well as throughout all time. According to and virgin earth spirit [bel subdued by the [Puebloanl beliefs the earth mother is preg­ machine."lS Hogue, however, belongs to what nant just before the sprouting in spring and Carolyn Merchant has called the environ­ a quiescent period is declared in which time mentalist counternarrative, first formulated by no iron wheels or other metal instruments the romantics and transcendentalists, which may move over or pierce the ground. They personified nature "as a powerful female to be even remove the shoes from horses.!8 revered, rather than a virgin land to be plowed and improved." This counternarrative has Puebloans forbade metal specifically "for fear largely fused with that of the feminists in the of injury to the Earth Mother," suggesting a twentieth century "to view nature as originally similar regard for nature as a fragile feminine positive and pristine, but as desecrated and body. Hogue's imagery in Mother Earth Laid downgraded by commercial and industrial Bare was so analogous that an elder of Taos development.,,16 Pueblo "thought I had managed a look-see into Hogue accentuated the visual impact of said the secrets of their beliefs."19 commercial destruction through a technique The artist was unaware of Pueblo an cosmol­ he referred to as "psycho-reality." Although ogy when he began Mother Earth Laid Bare, but this would seem to imply a relationship to he may have encountered the Taos elder by the Surrealism, as would the feminine personi­ time he began The Crucified Land in 1939. 20 fication of nature, Hogue publicly distanced Hogue clearly sympathized with Puebloan himself from that style. The Life essay defined beliefs as further validation of his own animis­ this formal technique as means of intensifying tic interpretation of nature and as a criticism the psychological resonance of the environ­ of the mechanization of American agriculture. mental devastation through aesthetic means: The lacerated furrows in The Crucified Land "By placing symbols together in neat geometric identify the tractor as the agent of violence patterns, he hopes to produce a 'superrealism' against an animate, living nature, invoking that will make the observer not only see the both his mother's warnings and the Puebloans' Dust Bowl, but also feel its heat, its despair, its prohibitions against metal implements. Both anguished death, the tragedy of its farmers."!7 the plow and the tractor's steel wheels act as In Mother Earth Laid Bare, the tightly drawn blades carving into the earth's flesh. This is geometric forms suggest an environment that particularly notable in terms of the wheels, had been fatally cleaved, chopped, and eroded since rubber tires were readily available as an to its naked essence. upgrade to almost all tractors by 1935. 2! ALEXANDRE HOGUE'S PASSION 73

Despite the influence of Mattie Hoover in the 1936 film The Plow That Broke the Plains Hogue and Pueblo an cosmology, The Crucified through vintage footage of war-era agriculture Land does not suggest the same gendering and the narrated pronouncement that "Wheat of nature in Mother Earth Laid Bare. The will win the war!" But the war effort also initi­ Christian reference in the title and the male ated a land boom that accelerated in the 1920s, clothes of the scarecrow could imply a nontra­ and cultivation in North Texas increased by 69 ditional interpretation of nature as masculine; percent between 1924 and 1929. Crop specula­ however, the eroded land is not necessarily tors were persuaded further by reports from an inference to a feminine or masculine body the railroads that advertised an annual yield of but to the flayed flesh of an animistic nature.22 wheat between thirty and thirty-five bushels. Hogue seems to have suppressed the artificial Agriculture was so lucrative in the late 1920s gendering of nature in The Crucified Land in that "There was hardly an acre of arable land order to make a fundamentally different argu­ around Dalhart which did not pay for itself ment: no specific sex or gender could be exon­ in its first year."n This striking change to the erated from the crimes against nature. Instead grasslands around Dalhart certainly caught of the implied male violence of Mother Earth Hogue's attention and would later inform the Laid Bare, Hogue argues in The Crucified Land indignation with which he treated agriculture. that all viewers are potentially liable, and the The profitability of a cash crop like wheat bloody soil that flows from the eroded farm to encouraged monoculture planting that often the lower edge of the canvas stains all hands. exhausted the soil within a few seasons. This The issues related to both Drouth Survivors kind of crop speculation produced what histo­ and Mother Earth Laid Bare indicate an unwav­ rian Donald Worster has called "a trail of exploi­ ering attack on agribusiness, which was largely tation" that created a class of transient farmers responsible for converting prairie into farm­ who moved from acreage to acreage once the land during the boom market of World War land could no longer sustain the crop and who 1. His lament for the grasslands, his animistic had no real tie to the earth. These farms were interpretation of nature, and his criticism of a often owned by an "agricultural entrepreneur kind of industrial agriculture act as ecological [who] stood for the idea that the land's true and arguments favoring conservation. But before only end was to become a commodity-some­ Hogue's connections to Dust Bowl-era conser­ thing to be used, bought, and sold for human vation may be examined, it is necessary first to gain."24 Inevitably, this environmental disregard discuss the spread of agriculture to the North resulted in a "barren earth, marked by deep gul­ Texas grasslands, its environmental conse­ lies, slashed timber, and thinning soils," ending quences, and its industrialization. with the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl. Hogue's The North Texas prairies had long since colleague Otis Dozier acknowledged such supported herds of grazing animals such as transience in Texas in The Annual Move, 1936 bison, antelope, and elk, and provided an ideal (Fig. 5), which depicted a family abandoning environment for cattle and sheep ranches in both the homestead and the exhausted land for the nineteenth century. The spread of agricul­ the next field. 25 ture to North Texas occurred primarily during The industrialization of agriculture through World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson the tractor exacerbated the environmental attempted to remedy food shortages among consequences of this practice, especially when European allies and American troops by some farmers hoped to gain greater efficiency by encouraging increased crop production in the plowing the fields immediately after the harvest Great Plains with an emphasis on wheat and in order to save time before the next planting corn. Agricultural conversion of the grasslands season. Winds and water in the intervening was seen as instrumental to the war effort, and time often eroded the topsoil, leaving a desolate Pare Lorentz would later highlight this belief wasteland. The phrase "tractored out" came 74 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2006

FIG. 5. Otis Dozier, The Annual Move, 1936, oil on masonite, 24 x 36 in. (60.96 x 91.44 cm.). Courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Eleanor and C. Thomas May Jr. to describe such an outcome, and its currency The Crucified Land indicates that he must have prompted Dorothea Lange to use the phrase as been conscious of such consequences. the title of her 1938 photograph of an unproduc­ The tractor in The Crucified Land is most tive, fallow field in West Texas (Fig. 6). likely a 1930s McCormick-Deering Farmall, The Crucified Land depicts this "trail of and most likely an F-20, although it could be exploitation" in both the monoculture of an F-12.n Farmalls proved the most popular wheat, which eventually saps the acreage of form of mechanization because they could its fertile potential, and the downhill furrows, perform multiple tasks with the assistance of which hasten the erosion. Although the farm numerous attachments such as plows, rakes, seems occupied, Hogue identified the site as and harvesters. Such improvements in tractor "an abandoned field," suggesting the tenant technology enabled landowners to mechanize may have moved on to an adjacent plot.26 The the planting and harvest, increasing efficiency degraded, linear furrows clearly point to the and profitability. The number of tractors in tractor as the agent of erosion, but it is doubt­ Texas increased from 37,000 in 1930 to 99,000 ful that Hogue limited the tractor's significance in 1938, resulting in drastic labor reductions solely to environmental devastation, consider­ and tenant evictions.2s One estimate noted ing its tremendous impact on 1930s agriculture. that each tractor displaced from three to five He could not have been unaware of the agricul­ tenants or sharecroppers, and by 1942, approxi­ turallaborers in Texas that had been "tractored mately 60,000 farm families had been displaced out" of their jobs and homes by the spread of by mechanization.29 A 1939 report from Fort mechanization, and his choice of tractors in Worth summarized the problem effectively: ALEXANDRE HOGUE'S PASSION 75

Men with resources are buying or leasing large tracts of land.... They are displacing many small farmers-those who have been successful as well as marginal farmers. Most of the large operators are using tractors, thus throwing many farm laborers out of employment .... The worker has gradually degenerated from farm owner to tenant or sharecropper and finally to farm laborer.3o

This economic degeneration of the farm worker through agricultural industrialization also led in some instances to the physical decline of such displaced individuals. Works Progress Administration supervisors in Texas FIG. 6. Dorothea Lange, Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas, 1938, gelatin silver print, 9 15/1 6 x 13 noted that "upon each visit to the office, we in. (25.24 x 33.02 em.). Copyright © the Dorothea notice that the unassigned worker is thinner, Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, his clothes more ragged, his facial expres­ City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor. sion more gaunt, his patience and endurance frayed."3! In short, the capitalist culture of crop speculation had produced a relatively sudden istration, also depicted the tractor as a sig­ mechanization of the Texas farm with erosive nificant participant in the Dust Bowl. His consequences for both the land and society. juxtaposition of a fleet of tractors with a fleet of Thus, Hogue's inclusion of the tractor in tanks during the World War I montage implies The Crucified Land not only represents a dis­ a kind of technological war to "break" the regard for the environment but also implies Great Plains soil. lorentz specifically relates an equally destructive effect for many Texas this agricultural aggression with the boom farmers. It is no accident that the scarecrow market of the 1920s by alternating images of wears the overalls and chambray shirt of the ticker tape machines and harvested wheat. typical Depression-era farmer, and its tat­ This montage, which ends with the market tered, wasted form suggests a physical decay crash of 1929, suggests that lorentz perceived comparable to the WPA reports of unassigned the environmental devastation of the Dust workers. Delong, by contrast, has argued that Bowl as the result of "an entire culture of greed Hogue lacked "sympathy with the suffering of and overindulgence, a society that has lost uprooted farmers" and that his "partisanship its moral bearings." Fin Dunaway has argued with the land" separated him ideologically that lorentz blamed "the sins of unbridled from filmmaker Pare lorentz and from writer capitalism" for the blowing dirt and eroded John Steinbeck.32 However, a closer examina­ fields found in later sequences of the film.33 tion of The Crucified Land, as the culmination lorentz was far less specific than Hogue in his of Hogue's thought on the subject of environ­ association between the tractor and economic mental abuse, indicates that the artist was hardship in The Plow That Broke the Plains, not entirely opposed to the farmer but to the but he did capture the extreme poverty in the industrialization of contemporary agriculture Midwest and the migration it produced. and to the capitalist ideology behind it. As John Steinbeck, however, clearly acknowl­ such, Hogue may have more in common with edged the tractor as the impetus behind both lorentz and Steinbeck than is apparent. environmental devastation and economic lorentz's The Plow That Broke the Plains, destitution in his novel The Grapes of Wrath commissioned by the Farm Securities Admin- (1939). Steinbeck conceived of the tractor as 76 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2006 a violent implement that increased production Both The Plow That Broke the Plains and in the short term but resulted in devastating The Grapes of Wrath indicate that agricultural consequences for the environment. As he suc­ industrialization was not simply an economic cinctly stated: "The land bore under iron, and issue but a moral question regarding fair busi­ under iron gradually died."34 But the machine ness practices and society's proper relationship was not solely to blame since it was merely a to nature. In each example, profit is positioned tool of capitalist desire. The banks and finance as both the dominant objective of agribusiness companies that held the leases on land, not and as the immoral and injurious cause behind to mention the tractors that would soon farm the economic and environmental ruin of the it, demanded increasing profitability, which Dust Bowl. Lorentz and Steinbeck utilize the required enhanced efficiency through mechani­ tractor as a representation of said ruin and the zation. This desire for capital also led to tenant capitalist greed that prompted it. evictions since "one man on a tractor can take The comparisons of Lorentz and Steinbeck the place of twelve or fourteen families."35 The to Hogue's The Crucified Land indicate that tractor operator that eventually came to take the tractor was not only perceived as an icon the tenants' jobs and raze their houses had of agribusiness and environmental catastrophe become just another inhuman component of but also often connected to an unethical and the capitalist machine, "a robot in the seat" who immoral desire for profit. Hogue, like his con­ "loved the land no more than the bank loved temporaries, regarded the tractor with mistrust the land." This automaton, seemingly fleshless and suspicion, not for its inherent properties in his concealing gloves, goggles, and rubber but for the uses to which the machine was mask, lacked all empathy with the land because put in the 1930s. His depiction of the tractor the bank had "goggled his mind, muzzled his as an agent of injury and even murder in The speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his Crucified Land asks the viewer to consider the protest." As a result, the tractor operator lost all issue of agricultural industrialization on moral sensorial and emotional attachment to nature: grounds. In this regard, Hogue's objective was "He could not see the land as it was, he could not merely the condemnation of recent agri­ not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not business practices but also the promotion of an stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of ethical, symbiotic relationship with nature that the earth."36 For Steinbeck, this lack of empathy emphasized conservation and preservation of with the land suggested an unwillingness to natural resources such as the grasslands. The regard nature as a living entity. Capitalist greed, artist later insisted that "I did not do the ero­ which discounted all aspects of nature except sion series as social comment.... Social com­ for its potential monetary value, prompted ment is negative, my interest in conservation the death of the land through mechanistic is positive."38 efficiency. As an alternative, the author pro­ Hogue's reference to conservation, when posed the figure of Jim Casy, who undergoes a matched with his lament for the vanished Christlike martyrdom toward the conclusion of grasslands and his indictment of the ethics of the novel. Casy notes early in the narrative his agribusiness, connects him to Depression-era ecological connection to nature: "There was the ecological thought and particularly that of hills, an' there was me, an' we wasn't separate Frederic Clements of the Carnegie Institution. no more. We was one thing. An' that one thing Clements characterized ecology as a concern was holy.")? Steinbeck's attack on agribusiness for biological "wholeness" in which humans, and his proposal of a different attitude to the animals, and plants act as "organs working in land is strikingly similar to Hogue's argument in unison within a great organism."39 This theo­ The Crucified Land, which not only condemns retical model emphasizes a symbiosis or inter­ agricultural industrialization but also conceives dependence among nature's disparate parts of nature as animate. that must be maintained to prevent ecological ALEXANDRE HOGUE'S PASSION 77 failure. It also identifies the introduction of redlands "to symbolize the fact that water is cut­ mono culture agriculture into the relatively ting into the very flesh of the earth, draining it fragile grasslands ecosystem as the culprit of its life-blood, crucifying the land.'>42 behind the Dust Bowl, placing the onus on By portraying such environmental disre­ humanity's disregard for ecological balance. gard as a form of execution or murder, Hogue Clements's theories were readily adopted by invoked a popular metaphor among the ecolog­ other ecologists in the 1930s who condemned ically minded commentators of the period, and the abuses of agricultural industrialization and the criticism he leveled against agribusiness in encouraged contemporary Americans to rede­ The Crucified Land compares most closely to fine their relationship with nature as symbiotic. that found in Archibald MacLeish's notable Aldo Leopold urged Americans to reject the expose "Grasslands" for Fortune magazine. It traditional definitions of the land as property is likely that Hogue had read MacLeish's essay, "entailing privileges but not obligations" and since the author discusses Dalhart and two of of progress as "the enslavement of a stable and the accompanying photographs depicted dust constant earth." Like Clements, he character­ storms battering the town. MacLeish's essay ized nature as "a state of mutual interdepen­ pointed to the agricultural boom following dent cooperation between human animals, World War I as the primary cause behind the other animals, plants, and the soils, which may Dust Bowl and criticized agricultural industrial­ be disrupted at any moment by the failure of ization in the Great Plains as a form of capitalist any of them.'>40 The idea that human beings exploitation. To this end, he detailed the story were capable of disrupting an entire ecosystem of Tom Campbell, a symbol "of the American obliged a moral responsibility to the land, and passion for power, speed, and the predictable Leopold proposed conservation as the new machine," who received a ten-year lease on the ethical paradigm. But for ecologist Paul Sears, Shoshone Reservation in Wyoming and the this symbiotic relationship might be continu­ Crow, Blackfoot, and Fort Peck reservations in ally undermined by the "diabolical power of Montana during World War I at significantly modern technology" which "accelerate[d] reduced rental payments.43 Campbell secured the speed with which [natural resources] are financing on the 100,000-acre venture from consumed" and created a culture of excess James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway that gratified human desires but exacerbated and J. P. Morgan, and this capital allowed him exhaustion of resources.41 to mechanize with heavy, medium, and light Although it is unknown whether Hogue tractors. Tractors not only allowed Campbell knew the work of these ecologists, his interest to break sod at an astounding rate but also in conservation and his criticism of agricultural helped to decrease expenses thereby increasing industrialization in the Great Plains certainly profit. By continually modifying his tractors demonstrates a similarity of thought. Clements's for greater efficiency, Campbell reduced his characterization of nature as a "great organ­ labor costs from 200 employees to 50 and his ism" would have been particularly attractive to operating costs from $7.50 an acre to $4.80 an Hogue, given his enthusiasm for the archetype acre. Mechanization through the tractor had of Mother Earth and his depiction of the land made such efficiency possible, and MacLeish as body in The Crucified Land. The personifi­ even credited Campbell's innovations with the cation of nature as an organism also implied increased use of tractors in the Great Plains: that reckless action on the part of humanity "Without Tom Campbell the tractor would could promote failure of an ecosystem, result­ have been a different and an inferior thing.'>44 ing potentially in its death. The Crucified Land For MacLeish, Campbell's faith in technol­ not only depicts just such an outcome but also ogy and his desire for increasing efficiency and equates such disregard with murder. Hogue spe­ profit typified the disregard for the environ­ cifically situated the farm in the North Texas ment that produced the Dust Bowl. The author 78 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2006 regarded such attitudes as both destructive and violent, and he too personified nature as a means of undermining Campbell's exploitive approach to the land while also encouraging his readers to develop a symbiotic relationship with nature. He defined erosion as a "Cancer of the Earth" or "an ill resulting from injury to the veg­ etative cover," and he illustrated his point with a photograph of erosion (Fig. 7) that compares closely to the foreground of The Crucified Land. In order to prevent the "murder" of the land through wind and water erosion, he prescribed "the healing humbleness of grass" as a physical and moral antidote to the greed and indiffer­ ence of Campbell and his tractors.45 MacLeish's appeal suggests that grass is a vital link in the Great Plains ecosystem and only its restoration may repair the significant damage caused by agriculture. His association between the loss of prairie grasses and environ­ mental collapse was echoed by Steinbeck's Tom Joad who blamed the failure of their Oklahoma farm on the loss of such grasses: "Ever' year I can remember, we had a good crop comin', an' it never come. Grampa says she was good the first five plowin's, while the wild grass was still in her.'>46 The eventual eradication of the prai­ rie grass results in the failure of the Joad farm, emphasizing both the precarious balance of the Great Plains environment and the symbiotic relationship between prairie grass and contem­ porary Americans. MacLeish would go even further to suggest that human lives were intimately connected to the fate of the flora. At the beginning of his essay, MacLeish confronted readers with the notable phrase from Isaiah 40:6, "All flesh is grass.'>47 In the Bible, the verse is followed by

and its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, FIG. 7. "Cancer of the Earth" from Archibald When the breath of the Lord blows upon it; MacLeish, "Grasslands," Fortune 12, no. 5 (November Surely the people are grass. 1935): 67. Courtesy of Fortune . Copyright © 1935 The grass withers, the flower fades, Time Inc. All rights reserved. But the word of our God stands forever. of Isaiah adds a prophetic tone, thus warning Although MacLeish did not maintain the Americans of the potential consequences of biblical metaphor throughout his essay, his use their disregard for the grass. ALEXANDRE HOGUE'S PASSION 79

The verses from Isaiah emphasize the eter­ gests comparisons to Hudson River landscape, nal power of the divine, but also the transitory particularly that of Thomas Cole and Frederic nature of earthly existence. Biblical admoni­ Edwin Church. For instance, Cole's Expulsion tions such as this were numerous during the from the Garden of Eden, 1827-28 (Museum of Dust Bowl, according to historian Brad D. Fine Arts, Boston), may be seen as "an allegory Lookingbill, and journalists often character­ of America's fall from grace, as the wilder­ ized the Dust Bowl as a form of divine judgment ness was increasingly destroyed by westward against human hubris. After the black bliz­ expansion and industrialisation."5o In addition, zard on April 14, 1935, the Topeka Daily State Church visited the theme of the cross in the Journal ran the headline "The Garden of Eden wilderness as a reference to a blessed nature in Destroyed When Man Turned the Sod on the works such as To the Memory of Cole, 1848 (pri­ Prairies of Kansas," and numerous other com­ vate collection), Cross in the Wilderness, 1857 mentators, particularly religious leaders, inter­ (Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain), preted the Dust Bowl as a sign that Americans and Heart of the Andes, 1859 (Metropolitan were facing expulsion from paradise.48 But as Museum of Art, New York). Lookingbill has demonstrated, those who lived While Hudson River landscape may have through the Dust Bowl generally saw its hard­ had some influence on Hogue, William Lester's ship as divine judgment for their sinful lives The Three Crosses, 1935-36 (Fig. 8) may have but not necessarily for their treatment of the been a more immediate influence. The Three environment. Crosses was exhibited alongside Hogue's The Crucified Land warns of the destruction Erosion No. 1 - Permian Red Beds, 1932 (State of the American Eden through the serpentine of Oklahoma Art Collection, Kirkpatrick gullies that slither back into the farmland, Center) in the Eighth Allied Arts Exhibition at corrupting its fertile potential, but Hogue saw the Dallas Museum of Art in 1937. Lester gives this moral failing differently. The reference traditional Christian iconography a decidedly to Eden was not simply an invocation of the Southwestern flavor by using fence posts for North American paradise, but a moral lesson instruments of martyrdom. Christ and the on the consequences of human greed. In the two thieves are nowhere to be found, so the biblical Genesis, God granted Adam and Eve skull of Adam awaits the Savior's redeeming partial dominion over the earth but forbade blood. The centurions have already gambled them from eating of the Tree of the Knowledge for Christ's garments, but the winner must of Good and Evil. Deceived by the serpent, have decided that the prize was of little worth, they succumbed to avarice and ate from the as it lay unclaimed nearby. Although The tree, resulting in their expulsion from paradise Three Crosses is admittedly ambiguous, Rick and eventually their physical death. Hogue Stewart has suggested the crosses may not only clearly drew an analogy between the greed be references to Christ and the thieves but that prompted Adam and Eve's disobedience also to settlers' graves "where the bones have and that which motivated the plowing of the been exposed by the restless elements." Lester's grasslands. Adam and Eve lost paradise when inclusion of a darkened sky, "suggesting a dust they attempted to exercise complete domin­ pall over the bleak landscape," may then be a ion over its every aspect, and Americans now reference to the perception held by some his­ threaten to lose their paradise to what Hogue torians that the environmental conditions of considered "the evil effects of erosion," which the 1930s were the result of inept pioneers, ill were prompted by an equally destructive drive suited to handle the tenuous ecological balance for profit.49 of the prairie grasslands. 51 Hogue's reference to the expulsion from an The implication of human involvement American Eden and his juxtaposition of nature in environmental disaster, filtered through with the Christian symbolism of the cross sug- Christian symbolism, would have been a clear 80 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2006

FIG. 8. William Lester, The Three Crosses, 1935-36, oil on masonite, 30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 60.96 em.). Courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art, gift of the New York World's Fair Department of Contemporary Art.

influence on The Crucified Land, but Hogue's with the ramifications of human greed evident ecological sermon is far more confrontational in the wasted landscape. The application of ALEXANDRE HOGUE'S PASSION 81 industrial efficiency to agriculture has left the a boundless, inexhaustible nature that allowed land bloody and broken with the instrument unchecked consumption and exploitation was a of its execution, the tractor, nearby. By using dangerous ideology that resulted in the human the Christian metaphors of the fall from grace and environmental tragedies of the 1930s. As and the crucifixion to condemn the sin of ava­ such, The Crucified Land represents not only rice, Hogue also posits that a form of salvation an important document of 1930s America but from this ecological disaster is possible. His a passionate embrace of ecological principles previous comments and the evidence within that still resonates today. the painting suggest that salvation can come only through a revision of thought, namely NOTES the embrace of an ecological sensibility that regards nature as a delicately balanced organ­ I would like to thank Alan Braddock and leisha ism of which humanity is only a part. Hogue O'Quinn for their thoughtful comments in the production of this manuscript as well as the edito­ would have agreed with Lynn White's charge rial board and staff of Great Plains Quarterly for all that Christianity had isolated humanity from their valuable assistance in publication. nature and fostered environmental abuse: 1. For a complete history of the Erosion series, see Our science and technology have grown lea Rossen Delong, Nature's Forms/Nature's Forces: out of Christian attitudes towards man's The Art of Alexandre Hogue (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984). Delong has noted that relation to nature which are almost uni­ "Each Erosion painting presented a different aspect versally held not only by Christians and of the blind, continual exploitation of the land neo-Christians but also by those who for which humans are clearly culpable" (20). The fondly regard themselves as post-Christians. Crucified Land was the last work that Hogue painted Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates in response to contemporary environmental condi­ tions in Texas. In 1944 Encyclopedia Britannica around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we approached him through the Associated American are not, in our hearts, part of the natural Artists to paint to additional images of erosion, process. We are superior to nature, con­ resulting in Avalanche by Wind, 1944 (University temptuous of it, willing to use it for our of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson) and Soil and slightest whim.52 Subsoil, 1946 (Oklahoma City Museum of Art). Hogue clearly noted in the information sheet he prepared for Encyclopedia Britannica that the images In light of White's argument, The Crucified depicted environmental conditions around 1932-34 Land acts as an ecological appeal for a complete (Delong, Art of Alexandre Hogue, 140). It should be revision of human attitudes towards nature noted that Delong lists 1938 as the date for Hogue's and the agricultural practices those notions Erosion No.2 - Mother Earth Laid Bare. However, the Philbrook Museum of Art says the painting was dated produced in the 1930s. Alexandre Hogue's by the artist as 1936. scathing condemnation of agribusiness as mur­ 2. "Paintings in International Art Show Reflect derous, avaricious, and destructive questions World Turmoil," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October the application of capitalist principles to agri­ 19, 1939, quoted in Delong, Art of Alexandre Hogue, culture and links him ideologically to the eco­ 130. 3. Delong, Art of Alexandre Hogue, 130; Rick logical thought of contemporaries such as John Stewart, Lone Star Regionalism: The Dallas Nine and Steinbeck, Frederic Clements, and Archibald Their Circle, 1928-45 (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, MacLeish. His image of the flayed, bloodied 1985), 108. land is not simply an indictment of agribusi­ 4. "The U.S. Dust Bowl: Its Artist Is a Texan ness abuses but also an appeal for conservation Portraying 'Man's Mistakes,'" Life, June 21, 1937, 61. The Dust Bowl as it was defined in the 1930s as a moral relationship with nature. By infer­ encompassed the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, ring that mistreatment of nature was a crime southwestern Kansas, southeastern Colorado, and against humanity as well as the environment, northeastern New Mexico. It was generally defined Hogue argued that the American paradigm of by the dust storms that plagued the region in the 82 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2006 early 1930s. Brad Lookingbill has suggested that 15. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Hogue may have been one of the first to use the term Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, paper­ Dust Bowl in reference to his 1933 painting of the back edition (1980; New York: Harper and Row, same name. Brad D. Lookingbill, Dust Bowl, USA: 1983),2. Depression America and the Ecological Imagination, 16. Carolyn Merchant, Inventing Eden: The Fate 1929-1941 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 136, n. 2. 2003), 118. 5. Although agribusiness is a term of recent 17. DeLong has argued that "Hogue was willing origin, it effectively describes a dominant trend to admit there was a surrealistic tone in some of his in agriculture since World War 1. Webster's New works, but he did not wish to be considered a sur­ World Dictionary, 2nd College Edition, 1984, realist." She finds his work closer to magic realism, defines agribusiness as "farming and the business which Jeffrey Wechsler defined as "an art of the associated with farming, as the processing of farm implausible, not the impossible, of the imagina­ products, the manufacturing of farm equipment and tive, not the imaginary." Wechsler, Surrealism and fertilizers, etc." The Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia American Art (New Brunswick: Rutgers University adds, however, that agribusiness has also become Art Gallery, 1977),38. She maintains, however, the associated pejoratively with corporate farming as Hogue's term "psycho-reality" most closely describes opposed to family farming. Agribusiness may be his style. defined in this regard as the application of capital­ 18. Hogue to Thomas Beggs, February 8, 1946, ist business practices to agriculture through the Hogue Papers, 1:10. embrace of industrial production. Mechanization 19. Hogue to Tom Kelley, May 5, 1946, Hogue and technological innovation are considered key to Papers, 1:10; Hogue to Alfred Frankenstein, May the increase of agricultural efficiency, which results 28, 1944, Hogue Papers, 2:2. in greater profitability. As such, agribusiness helps 20. Hogue first visited Taos in 1926 and returned to describe the relationships between economics, nearly every year until the beginning of World War technology, and agriculture. Wikipedia: The Free II. When he visited Taos in 1938, he showed Mother Encyclopedia, "Agribusiness," http://en.wikipedia. Earth Laid Bare to a group of his Taos colleagues org/wiki/Agribusiness (accessed October 20, 2005). that included Kenneth Adams, Emil Bisttram, 6. DeLong, Art of Alexandre Hogue, 7. Howard and Barbara Cook, Lady Dorothy Brett, 7. Lookingbill, Dust Bowl, USA, 25. Andrew Dasburg, and Ernest, Mary, and Helen 8. Lynn White, "The Historical Roots of Our Blumenschein. Hogue remembered that Dasburg Ecologic Crisis," Science 155, no. 3767 (March 10, was the first to associate Hogue's image of a femi­ 1967): 1203. nine nature with Pueblo an beliefs, and it is likely 9. DeLong, Art of Alexandre Hogue, 14. that Dasburg fostered in some way Hogue's meeting 10. Hogue to Matthew Baigell, June 14, 1967, with the Taos elder. Hogue to Frankenstein, May 28, Hogue Papers, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, 1944, Hogue Papers, 2:2. For Hogue's experiences in box 2, folder 1. While Hogue blamed agriculture for Taos, see DeLong, Art of Alexandre Hogue. much of the erosion that spawned the Dust Bowl, 21. Randy Leffingwell, The American Farm he ignored the equally important issue of overgraz­ Tractor (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, ing and its role in erosion. His bias originated most 1991), 103. likely in his attachment to his sister's ranch. 22. This may be partly supported by Hogue's 11. DeLong, Art of Alexandre Hogue, 7. Grim Reaper, 1932 (Weatherspoon Art Museum, 12. "The u.s. Dust Bowl," 60; Elisabeth Crocker, University of North Carolina, Greensboro), which "Hogue Ignites Bomb from the Southwest," Dallas depicts "a wheat-haired human face" symbolizing Morning News, May 15,1938, quoted in DeLong, Art "a death in nature itself, brought about by greedy, of Alexandre Hogue, 24. Hogue sold Drouth Survivors voracious plows of profit-conscious farmer." Hogue to the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris, but fuses a personification of the land with that of the ironically the painting was destroyed in a fire in wheat farmer to suggest both human negligence and 1948. nature's wrath (DeLong, Art of Alexandre Hogue, 13. Hogue to Frederic Allen Whiting, late 1939, 100). Hogue never transferred the drawing to paint Hogue Papers, 3:8. because he decided to work with "a less surrealistic 14. Lookingbill, Dust Bowl, USA, 40. Mother Earth attitude" (Hogue to Frankenstein, April 19, 1973, Laid Bare is Hogue's most recognizable image and has Hogue Papers, 2:3). been discussed extensively in critical literature. For 23. Archibald MacLeish, "Grasslands," Fortune further discussion, see both DeLong, Art of Alexandre 12, no. 5 (November 1935): 187-88. Hogue, and Joni L. Kinsey, Plain Pictures (Washington, 24. Donald Worster, "The Dirty Thirties: A DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). Study in Agricultural Capitalism," in Americans ALEXANDRE HOGUE'S PASSION 83

View Their Dust Bowl Experience, ed. John R. 43. MacLeish, "Grasslands," 186. Wunder, Frances W. Kaye, and Vernon Carstensen, 44. MacLeish, "Grasslands," 187-88. 359 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1999), 45. MacLeish, "Grasslands," 62, 67, 203. MacLeish originally published in Great Plains Quarterly 6 would revisit the theme of an injured earth in his (Spring 1986): 107-16. celebrated book, Land of the Free. His "book of pho­ 25. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern tographs illustrated by a poem" used documentary Plains in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, photographs from organizations such as the Farm 1979), 59. Rick Stewart has interpreted Dozier's The Securities Administration Historical Section in order Annual Move as a "reassuring survival of tradition to question Americans notions of progress. On page 42 and continuity in such an uprooting"; however, the he included a photograph from the Tennessee Valley image seems far more complex and deserves further Authority with the caption "A bleeding hillside"-newly attention (Stewart, Lone Star Regionalism, 63). plowed land in a Virginia valley after one hour of rain. 26. Hogue to Beggs, February 8, 1946, Hogue The image of extreme erosion echoed many of the Papers, 1:10. photographs included in "Grasslands." 27. The identification of the tractor as F-20, 46. Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 37. which was produced between 1932 and 1940, is 47. MacLeish, "Grasslands," 60. based primarily on the position of the engine and 48. Lookingbill, Dust Bowl, USA, 31. wheel configuration. 49. Hogue to Beggs, Hogue Papers, 1: 10. 28. Carey McWilliams, III Fares the Land (Boston: 50. Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Little, Brown, 1942),218. Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 29. McWilliams, III Fares the Land, 220. 1820-1880 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 30. Report quoted in McWilliams, III Fares the Press, 2002), 93. Also see William H. Truettner and Land, 222. Alan Wallach, eds., Thomas Cole: Landscape into 31. McWilliams, III Fares the Land, 226. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 32. DeLong, Art of Alexandre Hogue, 19. Washington, DC: National Museum of American 33. Fin Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1994); J. Gray Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: Sweeney, '''Endued with Rare Genius:' Frederic University of Chicago Press, 2005), 49. Edwin Church's To the Memory of Cole," American 34. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939; Art 2, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 44-71. New York: Penguin Books, 1992),49. 51. Stewart, Lone Star Regionalism, 69. Like 35. Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 44. Dozier's The Annual Move, Lester's The Three Crosses 36. Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 48. clearly deserves further attention. James C. Malin 37. Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 110. was the first to argue that pioneers were responsible 38. Hogue to Baigell, June 14, 1967, Hogue for the Dust Bowl, and that a knowledge of progres­ Papers, 2: 1. sive agriculture and the specific environmental con­ 39. Frederic E. Clements and Ralph Chaney, ditions of the prairies would help remedy the damage Environment and Life in the Great Plains, rev. ed. caused by this earlier agricultural generation. Malin, (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1937), 51. The Grasslands of North America: A Prolegomena to 40. Aldo Leopold, "The Conservation Ethic," Its History with Addenda (Lawrence, KS: privately Journal of Forestry 31 (October 1933): 635. published, 1947). It is possible, however, that Lester 41. Paul Sears, This Is Our World (Norman: beat him to the punch. University of Oklahoma Press, 1937), 278. 52. White, "Historical Roots of Our Ecologic 42. Hogue to John O'Connor Jr., August 29, 1938, Crisis," 1206. Hogue Papers, 2:2.