Perilous Bounty vs. Golden Wheatfields

As a boy raised between the rural grainland communities of Endicott and St. John, Washington, I was surrounded by first-generation immigrant elders who had been born in Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. I enjoyed listening to their tales of “Old Country” life which seemed in many ways like other-worldly experience with heavy doses of folklore and traditions on the cusp of vanishing. Investigating their stories later introduced me to the remarkable work of British folklorist George Ewart Evans who ever remained hopeful about contemporary smallholder and rural community prospects. He recognized the possibilities of new cooperative relationships by which growers could pool resources to buy machinery and share storage and marketing facilities. He characterized these arrangements as “a return on a higher level to the structure of the Middle Ages.” The situation was not unprecedented in Evans’s view, as he cited the introduction of the heavy Saxon carruca plow to Britain in early medieval times and the enclosure movement as changes that necessitated innovative cooperative practices. The “break” in apprecation of the old ways of labor, thrift, and economy, Evans wrote in the 1960s, “has chiefly been in the oral tradition: a farm-worker of the old school, a horseman for instance, had latterly no apprentice to take up his lore; and the young—the true bearers of the tradition—have in this respect been receiving a speedily diminishing heritage. It is not so much that they are not interested…; they have now so few points of reference against which to measure it.”

Mutual dependance among neighbors and community members was more than virtue. It was necessity when harvest-time was essential endeavor and ritual for all able-bodied persons including field laborers, cooks, and craftsmen. The rise of mechanization that has reduced exhausting manual labor and technologies to facilitate communication and transportion will not abide nostalgic appeals to preserve the old ways. Evans characterizes such doomed efforts as “misguided romanticism” that is impossible in practical application and ignorant of the abiding dynamics of rural life through the ages. Aspects of social cohesiveness evident in harvest operations of former days have also diminished an isolated parochialism that limits wider multicultural understandings as well as individual opportunity in life. Moreover, a host of politicial and environmental conditions that threaten the wellbeing of farmers and rural communities cannot be understood apart from participation in global solutions.

Needlepoint Grain and Grapes Altar Kneeler, National Cathedral, Washington, D. C. (2019), Columbia Heritage Collection Photograph

 Public awareness of land stewardship takes on special significance in a day of unprecedented industrial and technological change as world population and pressure for land use continue to grow. The number of farm residents declined during the twentieth century from 42% of the nation’s population in 1900 to just 1% in 2000. After peaking in 1935 at 6.8 million, the number of U. S. farms and ranches fell sharply until the early 1970s and today there are about two million. Moreover, just 5% of farms now produce approximately 75% of the nation’s food supply. Science writers now contribute to a new literary genre of environmental despair in the wake of global warming and food insecurity with such troubling titles as The End of Plenty, Red Sky at Morning, Perilous Bounty, and cultural critic Brian Watson’s big picture Headed into the Abyss. (The phenomenon started with publication of The End of Nature in 1989 by mild mannered Methodist Bill McKibben, who now warns in Falter [2019] of significant disruption to world crop production and decrease in grain protein levels due to climate change.) Contemporary science fiction has likewise shifted in tone from the fantasy upheaval of alien invasions or asteroid impacts to speculative dystopian thrillers.

Books like American-Canadian writer William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020) depict a menacing state of corporate control and online existence substantially disconnected from the natural world. Instead of a single make-believe threat, Gibson’s characters face a convergence of intractable problems exacerbated by climate change, pandemics, and authoritarianism enabled by high tech mass communication. More disturbing if absurdly entertaining are novels by Joy Williams like The Quick and the Dead (2000) and Harrow (2020) in which characters vainly navigate through primal social upheaval in the aftermath of environmental spoliation. Williams’s latest title alludes to the ancient farm implement as cipher for humanity’s relationship to nature, and recalls a passage from Job (39:9-10) about the foolishness of tethering a wild ox to a harrow. This varied literature disdains the arrogance of publically invoked cultural pieties about responsible living. Such stories often invoke ancient myths bearing the common assumption that the wellbeing of humanity is inextricably linked to respect for the natural world’s titanic potential.

Societal expectations for tomorrow are strikingly varied. As a boy I experienced our family’s 1962 cross-state trip from the Palouse Hills to Seattle’s optimistically titled “Century 21” World’s Fair. Visitors were dazzled by exhibits on space travel and consumer abundance. A half-century later Milan, Italy, hosted the 2015 “Feeding the World” Fair with themes related to the problems of food security, sufficiency, and safety. A UN-sponsored session discussed the disturbing flatline of world grain yields since 2000, and how one billion developing world inhabitants were at risk of chronic malnourishment after decades of decline. Medieval era population peaked at approximately 300 million inhabitants but rose to a billion by about 1800, doubled to two billion in 1927, and reached three billion in 1960. Demographers at Milan predicted this exponential growth rate would result in ten billion by 2050 and bring attendant challenges for food resources, species diversity, and stewardship of soil.

Goodness, Grain, and Humankind— Thoughts Concerning Ukraine and Our Nation’s Founders

Cabrini Brothers Plaster Bas-Relief (c. 1910)
After Emmanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851)
Endicott-St. John Middle School; Endicott, Washington

How happy to think to our self when conscious of our deeds, that we started from a principle of rectitude, from conviction of the goodness of the thing [freedom] itself, from motive of the good that will come to humankind.
—Thaddeus Kosciuszko to General O. H. Williams; February 11, 1783

Day after day throughout all twelve years in the stately three-story brick school in rural hometown Endicott, notable figures from America’s past stared down at us from each classroom in the form of substantial bas-relief sculptures. Bearing the incised manufacturer name “Caproni Brothers” of Boston, these substantial plaster works resembled carved marble and spoke to the value placed on public education and art by members of our farming community who built the school in 1911. The three largest Caproni masterpieces hung against a wall of the third floor auditorium and included the famous scene Washington Crossing the Delaware which was painted some seventy years after the event by German-American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816-1868). The painter had returned for a time to his homeland and sought to support the wave of democratic revolts against European monarchies in the late 1840s. Leutze painted several other American Revolutionary War views including Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (1852) which is now held by the Los Angeles County Art Museum.

Notable battles that changed the course of world history were famously fought on fields of grain including Caesar’s defeat of Pompei in 48 BC on Greece’s Thessalian Plain at Pharsalos (Farsala—birthplace of Achilles), and English King Henry’s victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years’ War. That large military engagements took place across vast rural areas is unsurprising and came to be associated with heroic sacrifice and symbolic harvests of souls. The Schuyler Wheatfield scene is especially notable for depicting an incident associated with the 1777 Battle of Saratoga that is considered the turning point of the Revolutionary War.

We learn in school about the nation’s Founders—men and women like Washington and Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, James and Dolly Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and others who pledged their “sacred fortunes” to procure a free if imperfect nation based on democratic values. As part of this effort begun nearly 250 years ago other influential names are also familiar—army heroes Marquis de Lafayette of France, and stern Baron von Steuben of Prussia who became General Washington’s Chief of Staff and helped bolster patriot forces amidst the baleful conditions of Valley Forge. Another formidable if lesser-known foreign officer in freedom’s cause was cavalry general Thaddeus Kosciuszko (ko-choose-ko) who played a leading role in the Continental victory at Saratoga.

Emmanuel Leutz, Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (1852)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Painting at the distance of many decades, Leutze took liberties for his masterpieces of patriotic romanticism and the dramatic view of harried Catherine Schuyler, wife of Continental General Philip Schuyler and in-laws of Alexander Hamilton, combines elements of fact and legend. She is shown clad in red, white, and blue setting fire to a field of wheat on the family’s Hudson River estate presumably in September of 1777 to prevent its harvest by British troops approaching in the distance. The subsequent defeat of British General Burgoyne at the nearby Barber Wheatfield during the Battle of Saratoga in early October is considered the turning point of the American cause. The painting is remarkable not only for its depiction of a female figure in heroic wartime action, but she is shown being assisted by an African-American boy who carries a metal lamp.

Kosciuszko was a Polish nobleman and idealist, whose own privileged position in life contrasted with the democratic values he came to champion in peacetime and war. Commissioned a brigadier general by the Continental Congress and later made a member of the American Philosophical Society through Benjamin Franklin’s support, Kosciuszko nevertheless returned to Europe and helped lead the fight against autocracy in Poland as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the 1790s. Russia with far superior forces under Catherine the Great eventually prevailed against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Turks in order to gain strategic access to the warm water Black Sea ports. Russia emerged victorious in 1792, and two years later Empress Catherine herself initiated the founding of Odessa which soon became Russia’s third largest city. Russia’s roots in Ukraine stretch back much further as Kyiv is considered Russia’s founding capital and flourished in a cultural Golden Age from the 10th to 12th centuries until its devastation in 1240 by the invading Mongols.

To secure her vast newly acquired southlands from such foreign threats, Catherine instituted one of the largest and most diverse settlement campaigns in European history. Substantial numbers of Armenians, Greeks, Italians, and other ethnic groups were directed to Ukraine to live among native Crimean Tatars and Turkic peoples. Beginning in the 1760s Catherine arranged for the relocation of 27,000 peasants from her native Germany to the lower Volga region, and some 50,000 followed until the 1830s to establish Black Sea colonies throughout Ukraine. Many came in the aftermath of Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812 that inspired Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. A century later the prolific Black Sea German colonists needed more land to farm and faced increasing cultural threats from ascendent Slavic influences. Some chose to relocate as their ancestors had done, and many found new homes in America’s fertile farming districts—the Chesapeake Peninsula’s red loam country of Maryland and Delaware, southeastern New York’s “black dirt” area, the vast Midwest’s Great Plains, Pacific Northwest’s Columbia Plateau, and Canada’s prairie provinces. Black Sea German Mennonites brought Crimean “Turkey” Red wheat seed to Kansas in the 1870s which revolutionized American grain production and breadmaking.

Massey-Siemens Family Black Sea German Samovar
(c. 1890)
Palouse Heritage Collection

Those who appreciate this heritage have important reasons to be grateful their ancestors emigrated. European borders closed in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, the Communist Revolution and three-year Russian Civil War followed until 1921, and Stalin’s brutal war on religion and campaign of collectivization led to Ukraine’s catastrophic Holodomor that claimed some eight million lives in the 1920’s and 30’s. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR caused the death of 27 million people during World War II. (American World War II casualties were about one million.) No wonder Timothy Snyder’s excellent 2010 chronicle of this era and place carries the disturbing title Bloodlands.

 Eastern European immigrants and survivors came, and substantially remained, because Americans both new and old found fidelity in the ideas expressed in Kosciuszko’s 1783 letter about “deeds,” “principle,” “conviction,” and “goodness.” These terms may be variously debated today, but they did not have vague meanings to those who wrote or heard them. And while they have been lived out in ways that excluded many since the nation’s founding, they have provided a framework for freedom, security, and economic prosperity unknown on a national scale in previous history. Such core ideas are threatened today because of extremism on both sides of a political continuum that values personal benefit and perceived “rightness” above the common good—an inversion of American First Principles.

To be sure, Jefferson’s expression “pursuit of happiness” is eighteenth-century code talk for private enterprise which forms the basis of modern economic development. But in the same breath he writes of “promoting the general welfare” since he, Kosciuszko, and the Founders understood liberty to be the use of freedom to promote national wellbeing, versus licentiousness as use of freedom for selfish power and gain. The peoples of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus faced a momentous decision in 1991 when in the wake of the USSR’s collapse they voted to declare independence. Much has been written about the litany of events and political vacillations that have ensued since then. May the cause of Kosciuszko yet prevail on both sides of the Atlantic, and peace and prosperity return to the people of Ukraine’s fertile Black Earth grainlands.

Century of Change

Stories and paintings that relate unpleasant interpretations of contemporary and future existence add voice and visibility to a diverse literature of the land. Consolidation of family farms in recent decades into larger corporate enterprises and the commodification of grain—William Cronon’s “transmutation of one of humanity’s oldest foods,” warrant high regard for stewardship of the land. Reinvigoration of Americans’ deep-seeded social memory and cultural capacity can guide landowners and public officials who contend with environmental challenges and finite production acreage. As elsewhere across the country today, those who harvest crops in the Palouse Hills of my youth have reduced water and wind erosion and increased crop yields. When Conrad Blumenschein told me about leaving Russia for America just before the outbreak of World War I, ten families lived on a dozen farms of about 320 acres each scattered along the road between my hometown of Endicott and the Palouse River some seven miles to the north. (The other two landowners lived in town.) Numbering some fifty people, most attended one of two Lutheran churches in the area—the Missouri Synod in the country, and the Ohio in Endicott, and two country schools enrolled the area’s children through the eighth grade. Many of these families were related to each other, and regularly gathered for summer harvest labors, fall butchering bees, and various ceremonies and celebrations.

A half-century later in the 1960s when I began interviewing first generation immigrant elders like Mr. Blumenschein, the number of farms had fallen to nine with some consolidation of property holdings among the seven families of thirty-two individuals who remained. The size of area farms had increased to an average of 550 acres, and both country schools had consolidated with the larger town district that offered instruction through grade twelve. The price of a bushel of wheat rarely rose to $2 from 1960 to 1973, when a controversial U. S. trade deal to supply the Soviet Union with grain boosted prices to as much as $6.25. The long sought optimism felt by growers ushered in a year of equipment upgrades and land purchases encouraged by the Department of Agriculture’s “get big or get out” slogan. Favorable Russian harvests the following year coupled with reduced federal subsidies contributed to America’s 1970s “farm crisis” followed by years of economic stagnation in the countryside.

Another fifty years has since passed, and today the same area of several thousand acres that had been home to about fifty souls a century ago is comprised of just eight farms. All but one are part of larger operations tended by families who also own or lease other cropland in the area. (The average Palouse Country farm size in 2018 was 1100 acres.) Only four households are located on the same seven-mile stretch that supported ten families a century ago, and these are comprised of just five adults whose grown children live elsewhere. In between these habitations today are found the lonely clusters of dying locust trees, broken fences, and rusted equipment of abandoned farmsteads. The trend has brought debilitating effects on rural communities with closures of local stores, banks, and public services.

Nostalgia for some halcyon past contributes to the popularity of rural art, but should be tempered with consideration of what has been lost and what has been gained. These contrasting themes are considerably explored in contemporary photographic art and are the special interest of Pacific Northwesterner John Clement and Canadian John Malone. Ambivalent considerations about such trends are expressed in “Palouse” by Lewiston, Idaho, poet William Johnson:

There is always an empty house

by the road at the edge of town,

its windows whiskered with lilac

and letting in rain. Nearby,

a barn drags itself home,

and in May, daffodils trim the yard

against an ocean of wheat

that rolls in on a slow inexorable tide.

Trends in the substantial depopulation of the countryside are found throughout the nation, even as affordability of houses in small towns has helped keep some inhabited with newcomers to sustain local schools, churches, and clubs. Shrinking numbers of farmers remain as vital carriers of intimate knowledge about the land and growing conditions, and of practical skills that keep bringing forth the crops. The broader impact on rural life and labor is consistent with studies that show in 1840s pre-industrial America a farmer could produce an acre of wheat yielding about twenty bushels. This required approximately sixty hours of annual work using primitive implements like a single-shear plow and scythe. A single day’s harvest by an able-bodied reaper on as much as an acre could yield up to thirty bushels of cut grain. By 1900 a farmer equipped with horse-pulled gang plow, harrow, and drill produced a similar yield on one acre in about ten hours. An experienced crew operating a mechanical reaper and steam-powered thresher at that time could cut about forty-five acres a day for some 1,200 bushels (31 tons) of grain.

Harvests Yesterday and Today—Different Times, Identical Location

Lautenschlager & Poffenroth (1911) and Klaveano Brothers Threshing Outfits (2019)

Four miles north of Endicott, Washington

Dryland grain yields increased three-fold nationally during the twentieth century and Palouse Country yields of eighty bushels per acre are common today along with diesel-powered, satellite-guided equipment that make crop rows of linear perfection. High-capacity combines now cost as much as $700,000 and feature sidehill leveling, cruise control, and electronic monitoring of threshing functions that automatically adjust to crop load. Modern farmers invest scarcely fifty minutes in total annual per-acre labor, and can harvest three hundred acres in a ten-hour day with a combine header forty feet wide to yield some 30,000 bushels (900 tons) of wheat. Such production represents the output of a thousand reapers and twice as many binders before the Industrial Revolution. (Substantial numbers of others were tasked with carting unthreshed stalks to barns, flailing grain, tending livestock, and other related tasks.) Yet a phalanx of these modern behemoths cruising through a field of golden grain evokes appreciation for techno-mechanical ingenuity, and still stirs ancient feelings of gratitude for agrarian bounty.

Community in the Heartland

Pope John Paul II made explicit reference to farmers’ charitable obligations to the poor during an unprecedented papal visit to the American heartland in October 1979 hosted by the Diocese of Des Moines, Iowa, and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. The pope celebrated an open air Mass where a vast crowd of some 300,000—the largest in Iowa history, had assembled on a broad hillside at Urbandale, Iowa’s Living History Farms. Local St. Mary’s parishioner Joseph Hays had sent a hand-written letter to the Pope inviting him to witness the church’s “Community in the Heartland” ministry of rural study and outreach. The pontiff’s decision to visit the Iowa countryside led to weeks of preparation by members who broke from customary harvest routines to host the special ecumenical event. Surrounded by area church and civic leaders, the pope led the service from a massive platform fashioned of white oak from a century-old corn crib. The temporary sanctuary was draped with an enormous quilted banner designed by Fr. John Buscemi of Madison, Wisconsin showing a cross with four colorful contoured field patterns symbolizing the seasons. From this peculiar setting, Pope John Paul II delivered a homily urging his hearers “in the middle of the bountiful fields at harvest time” to embrace “three attitudes… for rural life”—humble gratitude, land stewardship, and generosity toward the poor.

Jeff Whitton, Northwest Harvest Poster Art (2010), Columbia Heritage Collection

General Convention of The Episcopal Church Banner, Salt Lake City (2015), Elizabeth DeRuff

American farmers participated more directly in domestic gleaning programs in the 1980s as well as in similar global aid projects. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, a group of Pacific Northwest growers formed WestWind Ministries in 1991 in response to appeals from newly independent Russian leaders to provide food and medical assistance to schools and orphanages in the Russian Far East. A coordinated effort involving the National Association of Wheat Growers, Washington-Idaho Pea & Lentil Association, and The McGregor Company of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon led to delivery of over a thousand tons of aid to areas in greatest need. Farmers hauled truckloads of wheat for processing into flour while Northwest barley, lentils, and beans were combined into nutritious soup mixes.

When Russian President Boris Yeltsin made an unprecedented visit to Seattle in September, 1994 to report on newly normalized relations between the two countries, he cited “this help in our hour of need” in the context of the food campaign as a key factor in his historic decision. Yeltsin’s gala reception was hosted by Washington Governor Mike Lowry, himself a native of the Palouse Country hamlet of Endicott, Washington, where his father had managed the local grain growers cooperative in the 1950s. Lowry’s dedication to humanitarian causes and migrant farm worker causes was the subject of many tributes following his passing in 2017. Officiant Kacey Hahn of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Renton opened the late governor’s memorial with explicit reference to moral responsibility from Leviticus 23:22: “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner.”

Penry Williams, Mass for the Reapers (1858), National Museum of Wales

Kansas farmer-philosopher Oren Long has contributed for decades to agrarian periodicals and his local paper, the Valley Falls Vindicator, to offer insight on topics ranging from food security and social unrest to seed rates and meaning in art. In a 1983 New Farm article, Long underscores the vital understanding that rural experience is at once terrestrial and transcendent. “My farm is my refuge from the deception and hopelessness that haunts this intrusive commercial world. …I am an inseparable part of a great biological scheme of things and the greater contribution toward the complexity and harmony of that scheme, the greater will be the beauty of my world and the greater my significance to it.” In this way rural experience is understood to impart beauty to life in ways long expressed by agrarian painters and writers who have shown the abiding value of sowing, reaping, and other “cooperative arts” practiced with attention to land care and the less fortunate.

“Header in the Wheat”—The 2019 Harvest Commences

Our grain harvest began the first week of August as we joined with our Palouse River neighbor Joe DeLong to cut our crop of Crimson Turkey (“Turkey Red”) wheat at his farm. The DeLong place is located several miles upstream from our Palouse Colony Farm between the communities of Endicott and St. John. We’ve been working with Joe for several years as he takes meticulous care of his land and is a master mechanic whose magic touch keeps equipment of almost any vintage purring like new. Below is a picture of the first round in the Turkey wheat with Joe at the helm of his Model 453 International Combine. (The “header” is the detachable assembly in front of the combine with sickle cutting bar and rotating reel that feeds the grain back into the machines threshing mechanisms.) Crimson Turkey is a high quality hard red winter bread wheat indigenous to the Black Sea’s Crimean Peninsula. Flanking the strip of ripe grain is a lower stand of green oats that Joe will use for livestock feed, and above is a colorful hillside of Sonoran Gold soft white spring wheat which should be ready to harvest in about two more weeks. The latter is one of the earliest grains raised in the Pacific Northwest as period accounts trace its origins to at least the 1850s after seed stock had likely found its way north from California. Sonoran is a Mediterranean landrace wheat that was introduced by the Spanish to Mexico as early as the 16th century and eventually became a staple of Southwest cuisine for flour tortillas, Indian frybread, and numerous other flavorful foods.

Crimson Turkey Harvest

The picture below was taken this past spring when colorful native “sunflower” balsamroot set the hillside overlooking our Palouse Colony Farm ablaze in vibrant yellow and greens. The brown summer-fallow field covering the lower flat now hosts a fine crop of golden Scots Bere barley, the “grain that gave beer its name.” This ancient variety has grown in the northern British Isles since at least the 4th century AD when it was likely introduced by Roman legionnaires sent north to occupy the region.

Arrowhead Balsamroot overlooking Palouse Colony Farm

Although we transport our grain to a cleaning and storage facility in the rural community of Thornton about eighteen miles northeast of the farm, grain handling modernization has recently come to our nearby hometown Endicott. In the early 1880s, Endicott was platted by the Oregon Improvement Company, a subsidiary of the Northern Pacific Railroad, on its strategic branch line that tapped the fertile Palouse grain district along a route from the main NPRR transcontinental line at Palouse Junction (present Connell, Washington) eastward to Endicott, Colfax, and eventually Pullman and Moscow. A complicated network of feeder lines then tapped the northern and southern parts of the region. Construction of the central line, known in the late 1800s as the Columbia & Palouse, led to use of heavier rail than along other tracks which came to be an important factor many decades later for upgrading regional grain shipping operations.

Whitgro Unit Train Loading Facility, Endicott, Washington

With the merger of local farmer Endicott and St. John grain storage cooperatives in recent years into a larger entity known as Whitgro, a decision was made to construct a new storage and train loading facility in Endicott since the line there had been constructed with rail weight capable of carrying 110-car unit trains. The project called for construction of seven new immense steel grain silos to be located adjacent to a series of several other larger ones which brought total capacity in Endicott to approximately 3,100,000 bushels. The new storage facility was designed for rapid one-day loading of the trains which are capable of holding 100 tons of grain per car for a combined unit capacity of 420,000 bushels. Grain is trucked to town from farms and other elevators in all directions for shipment downline to tiny Hooper and then on to Portland for shipment worldwide. Work commenced on the enormous project last fall and the facility became operational just in time for this year’s bountiful harvest. The two R. R. Hutchison photographs below show grain storage at Endicott about 1910 when men worked long hours to carefully arrange 110 pound sacks along the railroad in tall stacks and in wide wooden flat-houses. Makes one grateful for trucks and augers.

A Mystic Sheaf and the Origins of Farming

Harvest season back home in the Palouse Hills often brings to mind bygone high school days. Trips from our Palouse Colony Farm to nearby Endicott lead past the school where I attended all twelve years, and where I served as principal in the 1990s. One of the great privileges of my education career was to return as a colleague with Mrs. Louise Braun, who had been my high school English teachers. She was a woman of capacious mind with expectations that students read and appreciate Shakespeare and Robert Frost with the same enthusiasm shown for sporting events. A native of tiny Viola in the Idaho-Washington Palouse borderlands, Mrs. Braun guided our uncharted literary journeys across time and place with the peculiar incentive—highly controversial among faculty and parents, that once a week we could spend class time reading Farm Journal, Field & Stream, or any other periodical of our own choosing. “Reading is the main thing,” she would say in the context of expanding young minds. 

To my mind, our most formidable high school read was the epic poem Beowulf through which we battled for many days to make sense of alliterative Old English expressions that related ancient Scandinavian lore. This was a time before Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings had ushered in a resurgence of interest in classical fantasy literature. Mrs. Braun’s reminder that many of us had descended from these tribal peoples provided modest encouragement to continue our study of this oldest English long poem. The poem’s opening lines in Lesslie Hall’s modern translation, however, invoked intriguing agrarian reference:

Lo! the Spear-Danes’ glory through splendid achievements
The folk-kings’ former fame we have heard of,
How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle.
Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in numbers
From many a people their mead-benches tore.

Queries about Old English “Scyld the Scefing,” which may be translated “Shield Sheafson” or “Scyld of the Sheaf,” provided an remarkable glimpse into mystical realms also described by Tolkien in his legendarium of Middle-earth. The namesakes of the eponymous Scyldings’ (Sköldings) Danish royal house founder in Beowulf are associated with the crucial roles as historical protector of the people (Shield) and as agri-cultural hero (Sheaf). In the mythic past he arrived as a foundling from the west who washed up in a boat on the shore of Jutland’s Old Anglia. The golden child’s head rested on a pillow of grain stalks, and he would grow into a strong and wise ruler who was the ancestor of Beowulf. Like a medieval Triptolemus, Scyld also taught his adopted people the first principles of farming and husbandry. Tolkien further explored aspects this legendary figure who is also mentioned in lesser known works of Old English literature like William Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum (“Deeds of the English Kings,” 1125) and the eighth century Historia Langobardorum (“History of the Lombards”). Tolkien’s imaginative rendition drawn from these several accounts is beautifully expressed in the poem “King Sheave,” published posthumously with “The Notion Club Papers” in Sauron Defeated (1992): 

In golden vessel gleaming water
Stood beside him; strung with silver
A harp of gold neath his hand rested;
His sleeping head was soft pillowed
On a sheaf of corn shimmering palely
As the fallow gold doth from far countries
West of Angol. Wonder filled them. 

Tolkien’s telling, the boy ascended a hill and sang a song of “sweet, unearthly, words in music woven strangely.” His hearers marveled at sounds miraculously dispelling the darkness and terror that had long gripped the region. From “King Sheave” descended many sons and their nations—Danes and Goths, Swedes and Northmen, Franks and Frisians, Swordmen and Saxons, Swabians and English. In the magnificent Scandinavian epic of Beowulf, Tolkien found a magisterial Anglo-Saxon antecedent of mythic grain king and culture hero skillfully interwoven with dynastic history to form an English national identity.
 

Farmhouse, Statehouse, White House — Agrarian Motifs and American Politics

Most everywhere in small town America local folks can provide names of favorite sons and daughters who left town to make a positive impact on the wider world. Many would like to think that youthful experiences born of rural community experience instill values of cooperation, hard work, and service to others that are evident in the lives of those who remain and others who head off to make lives elsewhere. Those of us raised in places like Endicott and St. John, Washington, heard many times about the exploits of locals raised on area farms who went off to distinguish themselves far beyond the rolling hills of the Palouse Country. I remember taking my E-SJ Middle School students in the 1990s to interview Carl Litzenberger, whose grandfather, Henry, was among the founders of our Palouse Colony Farm in the 1880s. Carl and his brothers were quite the adventuresome spirits and he told us about seeing a biplane fly over the Union Flat wheat field where he was working one day and deciding right then and there that we would do that someday. And so he did—studied blueprints, ordered parts, and built the thing with his brothers in their barn back about 1918 to become a true barnstormer. Carl became acquainted with Emelia Earhart, Pancho Barnes, and host of other Roaring Twenties celebrities before another career of training World War II Army Air Corps pilots. He eventually served as a private pilot for political leaders back East before returning to the Northwest.

Endicott Union Elevator Company and Flathouse Railroad Grain Sack Storage (c. 1920); R. R. Hutchison Photograph Collection, WSU Terrell/Allen Library, Pullman

There are many tales like this to share, but one of the most notable individuals to hail from our home was Washington Mike Lowry—born in St. John and a graduate of Endicott, who served in Congress in the 1980s and as Washington’s governor in the 1990s. Mike’s parents were vital members of the community as Bob managed the local grain growers cooperative in the 1950s while Helen taught school in nearby LaCrosse. I remember well when Mike returned to Endicott in 1992 for a downtown rally at which he announced his candidacy from the back of a wheat truck. Not long afterward in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Mike helped in significant ways to facilitate the Operation KareLift project that provided Northwest food and medicine to children’s hospitals and orphanages throughout the Russian Far East. We were saddened to learn of Mike’s passing this past spring and joined in a celebration of his life at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Renton near Seattle last May. Washington’s former governors were attendance along with other leaders who offered eloquent remarks on Mike’s longstanding commitment to the less fortunate. For me the most memorable reminiscence came from Pastor Kacey Hahn who recalled how last fall she asked for volunteers from the congregation to help with arrangements for a month-long tent city on church property for area homeless. She remembered that Mike had been among those who raised his hand but thought little more about it until coming to work early one weekend and hearing loud whistling from the downstairs laundry room. She investigated and found Mike making music while folding a mountain of clothes from the newcomers. At the memorial service Pastor Hahn asked how many retired politicians, or those from other walks of life, would spend time in such anonymous service, or as volunteer advocates for migrant farmer housing and the host of other humanitarian causes Mike so fervently pursued.  

As I continue to compose my treatise on harvest motifs in agrarian art and literature, my thoughts have turned to their use as political campaign slogans and images. The transformation of America from the land of self-sufficient yeomen to commercial farmers using labor-saving equipment took place throughout the nineteenth century when the rural populace still worked hard and sought land ownership, but depended increasingly on cash crops transported by newly constructed railroads to Eastern and foreign markets. The concurrent advent of improved agricultural mechanization fostered larger farm acreages and greater need for communities with bankers, merchants, grain brokers, equipment dealers, blacksmiths, and workers in other businesses and trades. The time increasingly witnessed a shift in rurality from small-scale farming as an end itself to consolidated land holdings that supported an array of local businesses, and held land value in similar regard to the old attachment to the land itself. Yet the agrarian myth of diligence, honesty, and independence had enduring appeal and remained a powerful symbol of the nation.

John McNevin, engraved by John Rogers, Washington at Mt. Vernon (1859); Steel engraving on paper, 7 x 10 ⅛ inches; New York Public Library

Vermont genre artist Junius Brutus Stearns (1810-1885), famed for his series on the American Founders, depicts a harvest scene in George Washington—Farmer (1850) in which the president, a reincarnation of the Roman general Cincinnatus, is clad in formal wear while conversing with his overseer as grain is cut by Mt. Vernon’s slaves. The symbolic scene is inspired by ancient writers like Hesiod, Virgil, and Horace whose writings in praise of husbandry formed the basis of a classical education for American upper classes, but overlooks the brutal realities known to toiling workers deprived of opportunity to own land. Cereal grains were raised in the South to a much lesser extent than cotton and tobacco, but agricultural mechanization came more slowly. The iconography of the benevolent harvester president as national patriarch and gentleman farmer was well established by the early nineteenth century. Popular prints followed Stearns’s painting including the fanciful harvest scenes of Washington at Mt. Vernon by Nathaniel Currier (1852) and by John Rogers (1859). The stereotype of hardworking, noble scythe-wielding agrarian remained a powerful image for nineteenth century politicians who sought to capitalize on public regard for rural rectitude and the patriotic farmer-leader. For this purpose various party organizers designed broadsides with agrarian imagery to promote candidates with campaign prints like William Henry Harrison, the Farmer of North Bend (1840), and Farmer Garfield Cutting a Swath to the White House (1880). The approach apparently reaped the expected benefits as both candidates, and many other seeking other offices, were elected.        

Currier & Ives, Farmer Garfield Cutting a Swath to the White House (1880); Lithograph, 13 x 10 ⅝ inches; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress