Title: Tracing the Social Idea of Going “Back-to-the-Land” Author: Jessica M. Prody Affiliation ~ [email protected] Abstract In this essay I analyze the evolution of going back-to-the-land through three iterations of the back-to-the-land movement. Analysis of Ten Acres Enough, Living the Good Life, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle illustrates that back-to- the-land movements were comprised of individuals seeking to escape social stressors and driven by broad political objectives. Going back-to-the-land is a product of particular moments in time, and while some themes have remained attached to the trope (such as self-sufficiency and the virtues taught by labor), the underlying social anxiety, tone, politics, and scope of movement practices that the term connotes are distinct in each period of its use. Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 2 of 24 Going “back-to-the-land” may be the most American of social movements. Founding father Thomas Jefferson (1785) saw an agrarian ethic as central to a working democracy, arguing that farmers were the “most valuable citizens” (n.p.). Farming, he contended, taught self-sufficiency and produced investment in one’s place that encouraged patriotism and democratic participation. The prominence of agrarian ethics has ebbed and flowed throughout U.S. history, gaining significance in eras in which individuals returned to the land to find virtues urban and suburban society lacked. What individuals sought from the land has changed throughout time, but no other movement has emerged and reemerged as often as the back-to-the-land movement. In spite of its frequent presence, the movement has received little direct attention from scholars. Brown’s (2011) historical tracing of going back-to-the-land is one of the few academic studies of the movement’s evolution. Most studies mention the back-to-the-land movement in larger contexts, writing about back-to-the-landers in the context of 1960s and 1970s hippies’ communes (Miller, 1999) or as part of broader agricultural transformations (Conkin, 2008). The back-to-the-land movement is worthy of more extensive rhetorical study. Back-to-the-landers have produced a multitude of memoirs, letters, newsletters, periodicals, and how-to-guides that reflect the historical eras of their time and have shaped social thought regarding food, community, economy, agriculture, and environment. Within this movement everyday acts become political statements, and individuals construct lives outside the bounds of traditional social institutions. Part of the reason this movement has not been given much attention is because it is not traditionally political. Back-to-the-landers cannot be tied to a singular position on the political spectrum (Brown, 2011, p. 30); nor do they spend their time petitioning or protesting existing political structures (Jacob, 1997, p. 5). In lieu of shared political or structure, back-to-the-landers have been united by practices—most central to these practices, arguably, is being able to feed oneself and family from what one can produce working the land. Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 3 of 24 Relying on the approach of Wrage, who advocated exploring the social history of ideas in rhetoric, I analyze the evolution of going back-to-the-land through three texts of three different movement eras: Ten Acres Enough (from the early 20th century), Living the Good Life (prominent in the 1960s and 1970s), and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (representative of the contemporary era). I argue the iterations of going back-to-the-land were products of their time, and while some themes have carried through the eras of the movement (such as self-sufficiency and the virtues taught by labor), the underlying social anxiety, tone, politics, and scope of movement practices are distinct. Going back-to- the-land has evolved from signaling a desire for self-reliance and control over one’s place, to one that denoted a counter-culture, to one reclaimed of local food culture and built of community. Tracing “Back-to-the-Land” as a Social Idea In his 1947 essay, “Public Address: A Study in Social and Intellectual History,” Wrage encouraged scholars of public address to tudy the text and the role of rhetoric in the evolution of social thought. Wrage encouraged students of public address to “contribute in substantial ways to the history of ideas” (p. 453). For Wrage, studying rhetoric involved the study of “transmission.” He was concerned with exploring “[t]he reach of an idea, its viability within a setting of time and place, and its modifications […] expressed in a vast quantity of documentary sources” (p. 452). Because, Wrage argued, rhetoric is created with the explicit intention of appealing to particular audiences, and audiences are made up of society’s members, rhetoric is uniquely positioned to give a sense of the social mindset of audiences and their eras. Wrage encouraged scholars to identify the social patterns of ideas that the text taps into, how it uses those ideas, how it alters them, and/or how it speaks against them. Rosteck’s (1998) argued that Wrage offered a way to “read together text and history” (472-473). Wrage’s complex definition of “ideas” allowed a critic to read culture as text. One can learn about the culture in which the text is produced, the culture in a particular historical moment in which the text has Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 4 of 24 resonance, and/or the culture that develops in part because of the text’s influence. Ideas, it would appear, are culture “realized—materialized—in practice” (p. 477). From this perspective, analyzing rhetoric allows one to “read” how ideas circulate within a culture and across history—how rhetoric shapes cultural thought, how social evolution shapes social ideas, how rhetorical themes emerge and reemerge at different points in history, and how new ideas get attached to existing tropes. This study engages Wrage’s approach as read by Rosteck, assuming that texts written and heavily circulated during particular historical eras can tell us something about the social thought in particular moments in time and throughout history. The questions I ask include: (1) how have the ideas of going back-to-the-land changed; (2) what has remained consistent; and (3) what in the rhetoric has been lost and rediscovered? The three memoirs in this analysis are examined as rhetorical texts that are representations of social thought in particular eras of the movement. Memoirs were, and continue to be, the primary way through which back-to-the-landers justified their actions, detailed their new lives, lauded the virtues of their lifestyle, and presented themselves as models for others to follow. Tracing the movement through memoirs allows me to analyze the evolution of going back-to-the-land and understand how it has shaped and been shaped by culture. The texts I have chosen to analyze are: Ten Acres Enough by Edmund Morris, Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. They are representative of back-to-the-land rhetoric in particular eras, as demonstrated by republications, circulation and citations in other back-to-the-land sources. In addition, historians have identified them as influential texts. Brown (2011) identified Ten Acres Enough as the “prototype” of early back-to-the- land books. Originally published in 1864, “it had gone through twenty-five editions by the 1880s and was reprinted thereafter in 1890, 1905, 1912, 1916, and 1928,” and had additional reprints in 1996, 2004, and 2008 (p. 13). Living the Good Life has had similar longevity and influence to that of Ten Acres Enough. It was first published in 1954 and then again in the 1970s. Agnew (2004) explained the book “reigned as the bible of the back-to-the-land movement” in the 1960s and 1970s (p. 12). Ten Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 5 of 24 Acres Enough and Living the Good Life have been kept alive by contemporary back-to-the-landers who have looked to these texts, and the authors that wrote them, for guidance and encouragement. Ten Acres Enough was cited by the Nearings, had sections reprinted in Mother Earth News, and is still reviewed by contemporary readers on amazon.com (Brown, 2011, p. 13). Living the Good Life also continues to resonate with contemporary readers, who write reviews on amazon.com lauding its advice as “timeless” and full of “good lessons we would do well to heed today.” Although Kingsolver’s text has yet to achieve the iconic status the earlier back-to-the-land texts have, Brown (2011) cited the best selling text as a notable example of the new back-to-the-land memoirs making their way to book shelves today (p. 231). As one of the early texts of this new wave of the movement, with its folksy, how-to style, and with Kingsolver’s mass appeal as a popular contemporary fiction and non-fiction author, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has the potential to achieve the status the Morris’s and Nearings’ texts have in the past. Collectively, analyzing these texts provides snapshots into particular eras of the back-to-the-land movement and the specific rhetoric of those times, but this analysis also allows for a more complete picture of back to the land rhetoric to emerge, as one can see how ideas moved through the eras, remaining present, ebbing and flowing, or developing anew as back-to-the-landers shaped their movement and their rhetoric in response to particular social contexts.