Incredible Springville and Its Art

Next stop of agricultural interest on our summer road trip was Springville, Utah. Founded in 1937, Springville’s acclaimed Museum of Art Soviet and Russian Collection holdings are among the nation’s most extensive for rural subjects that include numerous harvest scenes painted in the 1890s by members of the Church of Latter-day Saints Paris Art Mission. I thank docent Judy Mansfield for helpful information on the remarkable story of the museum’s vast holdings. Springville’s Soviet and Russian Collection began unexpectedly in 1989 when museum director Vern G. Swanson first embarked on a series of trips to the USSR on behalf of the Grand Central Art Gallery Education Association. Swanson met Russian artist Vladimir I. Nekrasov (1924-1998) of Moscow’s Surikov Art Institute who introduced him to important works of Russian Expressionism and Social Realism that led to a major exhibition at Springville in October 1990 and eventual artwork purchases for the museum.

Springville Art Museum; Springville, Utah

Mahlon Young, The Farm Worker (1938)

Successive assaults upon the Soviet Union’s rural populace in the 1920s and ‘30s involved Stalin’s brutal campaigns to collectivize agricultural lands and against religion that led to widespread violence and famine. Millions of peasants perished or were displaced from their native villages through the imposition of these policies to abolish private property and modernize the economy. Russia remained a major producer of grain until this period which witnessed the expropriation of commodities from landed peasants (kulaks) who had withheld harvests in order to boost prices. Stalin’s push to industrialize the country at all costs required the provisioning Soviet cities, agricultural mechanization, the mass murder and exile of kulaks, and the exodus of vast numbers of younger rural residents to urban areas. The impact of these forces was devastating to traditional Russian village life and crop production. The nation was plunged further into cataclysm after war with Germany commenced in 1941.

As people and landscapes suffered, authors and artists sought memory for solace as well as lament. The glorification of communist principles through state-sanctioned Socialist Realism governed official Soviet art and literature from the 1930s to 1980s. Muscular representations of urban and rural life that lauded labor and socialist ideals generally characterized the approach, but later strains featured honest views of everyday life reminiscent of the French Impressionists and Taos Expressionists. Marx had viewed artists and writers as valued members of an intellectual vanguard promoting revolutionary change. Leon Trotsky later wrote in Literature and Revolution (1924) that their insights revealed the nature of society and if freely expressed would help guide the revolutionary struggle. Stalin, however, had no tolerance of art for art’s sake. His authoritarian policies sought conformity and denigrated individuality—the basis of creativity.

Konstantin Topuridze, People’s Friendship “Golden Sheaf” Fountain (1954)

Exhibition of Economic Achievements, Moscow; Wikimedia Commons

Unless about earlier periods or other places, Soviet depictions of internal discontent and tragedy were forbidden in favor of sentimentalized worker characterizations of the proletarian dream. The character of Soviet monumental art was famously exemplified in Vera Mukhina’s 80-foot steel sculpture Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer (1936) that was built to crown the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Plated in radiant chrome-nickel, the massive female figure designed by Mukhina (1889-1953) grasps a sickle alongside her hammer-wielding companion in striding poses that symbolized the nation’s aspirations. After the Paris fair, the sculpture was relocated to the entrance of Moscow’s sprawling All-Union Agricultural Exposition on the city’s north side where substantial halls showcased numerous aspects of crop, livestock, and food production. Architect Konstantin Topuridze (1905-1977) designed the enormous Golden Sheaf (People’s Friendship) Fountain (1954) as one of the park’s centerpieces that features a towering grain sheaf encircled by three colored glass cornucopias and sixteen bronze statues of young women who symbolized the Soviet republics. (In 1959 the complex’s name was changed to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements and has come to include a grandiose amusement park, year-round trade shows, concert hall, and pavilions featuring space exploration and technological advancements.)

Idealized paintings of country life like Arkady Plastov’s Harvest Festival (1937) and Field after Harvest—Sheaves (1954) by Yuri Kugach show bountiful fields and smiling brigades of kolkhoz (collective farm) laborers clad in red neckerchiefs and head scarves enthusiastically driving farm equipment or tending threshing operations. Plastov, born to a family of icon painters near Simbirsk on the middle Volga, also painted works like Harvest (1945) and Spring (1954) that risked official condemnation given his Impressionistic renderings of commonplace scenes devoid of political sentiment. Harvest is a discomforting view of an aged reaper sharing a meal in the field with three children scarcely old enough to shoulder such responsibilities. Completed in the last year of a war that had inflicted enormous suffering throughout Europe, the scene also inspires appreciation for the home front brigades of women, children, and the elderly who labored for years to sustain soldiers and civilians. Plastov’s dynamic, colorful Haymaking (1945) shows a shirtless teen flanked by two elderly men and a woman who cut grass near a copse of birch trees.

Kugach, who settled in the Tver countryside after the war, went on to establish the Moscow River School in 1974 to revive the dramatic style of Repin, Levitan, and other Russian Realists. Ambidextrous painter Nikita Fedosov (1939-1992), Yuri Kugach’s nephew, became a prominent member of the group and painted numerous country scenes including Last Rays and Overcast Field (1966). Muscovite Victor Ivanov studied with Kugach at Moscow’s Surikov Institute of Art in the late 1940s and in the 1960s became a leading member of the Avant Garde Severe Style that depicted the grim austerity of post-war Soviet life in opposition the naïve depictions of Socialist Realism. Artists like Ivanov risked establishment censure but painted throughout the Khrushchev reform era in ways that recalled the 1910s Futurism of Kazmir Malevich and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Ivanov painted numerous harvest scenes like Harvesting near Ryazan, Men Resting at Harvest, and Women Harvesting (1965). These spare, balanced compositions in irregular blocks of olive, mustard yellow, and chestnut contrast rural toil with the rustic beauty of the Russian countryside.

Dmitry I. Slobodin, Untitled Donbas Harvest Scene (1982)

Gouache on paper, 17 ¼ x 22 inches

Columbia Heritage Collection

A native of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, Dmitry I. Slobodin (1929-2005) graduated from the Art College of Lugansk and became a master of Impressionistic palette-knife paintings in tempura and oil earth tones that depict the quiet beauty of his native land while resisting the artificiality of the regime’s officially sanctioned Socialist Realism. Slobodin’s untitled Donbass Harvest (1982) shows mottled field rows of tawny cream with shadowed forest greens beneath a gleaming orange ribbon of setting sun. At left far in the distance beyond a darkened tree-lined swale one can almost hear the hum of a late model Rostelmash self-propelled combine throwing a roiling cloud of yellow-white chaff. The red machine appears to be opening up a field of ripened grain at day’s end near at base of a broad gentle slope in a scene of bounty and peace.

Daily Bread, Liberty, and the Orphans of Ukraine

Ethos Stone Mill Ukrainian Grain Loaves
Richland, Washington

If you’ve ever eaten a slice of bread you can thank Ukraine. That’s not an exaggeration. The flavorful grains that transformed the North American prairies during the nineteenth century into a continental breadbasket were varieties native to Ukraine’s famed Black Earth districts of Crimea and Galicia.  To be sure, Americans had previously consumed something called bread, but virtually all colonial and early American wheats were soft white and red varieties that made exceedingly dense loaves and are used today for scones, biscuits, and pancakes. The pedigree of most any modern hard kernel bread wheat can be traced back to famous “Turkey Red” and “Scotch Fife” that actually have nothing to do with Turkey or Scotland. Through happenstance of pioneer delivery and cartographic misunderstanding, Ukraine’s proper claim as historic and contemporary provisioner to the world is often overlooked.

Putin’s campaign to annex substantial portions of its peaceful southern neighbor is inflicting trauma upon its residents on a scale unprecedented since World War II in a twisted quest to restore some semblance of great power status. Today Ukraine’s annual production of some thirty million tons of wheat accounts for 12% of the global export supply. Together with Russia’s output, annual wheat production of the two countries exceeds the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Australia combined and represents one-third of world wheat exports. Ukraine is a leading supplier to Moldova, Lebanon, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Indonesia to which deliveries are now at risk. As a result of the present conflict grain prices have soared. Much was made by Kremlin spokesmen before the outbreak of war about the need to reaffirm a broader Slavic cultural solidarity from western influence. But in the wake of Russia’s declining population and moribund economy, Ukraine’s agricultural bounty has surely been an important factor in Putin’s malevolent calculus.

This is not the first time that someone has terrorized the inhabitants of the fertile steppes. Russian demographers have documented how the murderous calamities of Stalin claimed more innocent lives than did Hitler. None was more horrific than the 1932-1933 Holodomor when as many as ten million peasants were starved to death in southern Russia during Stalin’s campaign to expropriate grain for Russia’s industrial cities to the north. No greater genocide has taken place in modern times, and the experience remains a searing legacy among Ukrainians. In 1930 and 1931, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty wrote from the comfort of his Moscow apartment in flattering terms about Kremlin initiatives to modernize the Russian economy. He also pointed out that leaders in the United States and Great Britain had not appreciated Stalin’s genius. Duranty even received a Pulitzer in 1932 for his series on the Bolshevik Revolution which he composed against the backdrop of show trials in Moscow that led to the imprisonment and mass executions of Stalin’s rivals.

Enter essentially unknown but courageous young Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who decided to do more than parrot official accounts of conditions in Ukraine after hearing rumors of catastrophe. At great risk to his own safety, Jones donned the clothes of a Soviet commoner and journeyed by rail to Ukraine in the spring of 1933 where he witnessed unimaginable carnage and reported it to a skeptical world press. Once bustling villages were eerily silent except for the occasional cry of children, imposing church edifices had been boarded up on orders from above by burly militiamen who forbade public worship. Within two years Jones himself would be executed in likely retaliation by the Soviet secret police for daring to write the truth. Since Putin’s rise to power, at least forty-four Russian journalists investigating his doings have been murdered, as have numerous political rivals. The ministries of evangelically minded Russian Orthodox leaders in the spirit of martyred priest Alexander Menn have also been significantly obstructed.

Those of us with ancestral ties to the region recall stories of family elders’ distress that the emerging evidence of evil in the 1930s seemed lost on so many fellow Americans. Our grandparents recalled the feeling of helplessness when they gathered with neighbors after Sunday church services to read the latest news from relatives who remained in Russia. We have kept these yellowed pages all these decades as reminders to never take freedom for granted, to help others in dire straits, and to affirm inconvenient truths. One of our letters from that time reads: To begin with, we send you greetings in the name of the Holy Spirit. I will let you know that we are without parents. Where they are is unknown to us [and] only to God. We think they received the same treatment as others so is very bitter for us children. Will you not take mercy on us because we are lost children and will not be long on this earth. …Please send us help because we are orphans.

Our elders did send help that made all the difference for those who managed against human odds to survive and build a new life in the aftermath of famine, war, and the USSR’s eventual collapse in 1991. I was in Russia numerous times that year and afterward in response to overtures from the Russian Academies of Sciences and Education to establish faculty and student exchanges between universities in Russia and Ukraine and members of the U. S. Consortium of Christian Colleges and Universities. Dozens of these relationships flourished until Putin rose to prominence. Under his oppressive regime such relationships summarily ended as well as the collaborative social services programs they had fostered to address the challenges of foster care and orphanhood in our countries.

Vibrant democratic initiatives and educational exchanges did continue in Ukraine. I traveled to Crimea in the summer of 2010 for meetings on global orphan care and was amazed by the vibrancy of life in the capital city of Simferopol. My gracious hosts were local residents who expressed hope for the future under Ukraine’s nascent democracy. They smiled, talked of prospect for better lives, and enjoyed relationships with Americans and other Europeans. We drove south across the undulating expanse of recently harvested grainlands to the historic Black Sea port of Sevastopol where a double row of massive steel silos glistened alongside ships being loaded for delivery worldwide. Our conversation turned to opportunities for service that would have been impossible before Ukraine’s independence. Now after three decades an unprecedented interfaith consortium of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant church leaders was forming an indigenous “Ukraine Without Orphans” (UWO) movement to find caring homes in-country for Ukraine’s 30,000 adoptable orphans.

The number seemed staggering, but “UWO” was no mere slogan. Sasha, Marina, and my other new friends were seriously committed to a nation without orphans. They found inspiration in a theme verse about seemingly overwhelming odds: “There is a lad here with five barley loaves and two fish, but what are these for so many people?” (John 6:9). If divine provision could feed 5,000 using an anonymous lad’s unselfish offering, why couldn’t a nation without orphans be possible? (And perhaps, they wondered aloud, a “World Without Orphans”?) To this end the UWO consortium soon grew to involve 400 churches of all confessions in Ukraine as well as 110 public and charitable organizations that included a presidentially appointed Commission for Children’s Rights.

As a result of this commitment and as a percentage of its population, no nation on earth has accomplished more to address orphanhood in the last decade than Ukraine. In 2010 Ukrainians adopted 2,247 orphans while 1,202 were adopted internationally, and by 2015 the total number of in-country adoptions since 2010 reached 11,300. By 2021 the number of children eligible for adoption had fallen to 4,920 for a dramatic 83% reduction of adoptable orphans. (In Ukraine as elsewhere, significant numbers of children have been in residential care who have at least one adult who retains parental rights.) UWO leaders pledged to not rest until all such children had been placed in caring homes, and their dedicated efforts attracted the attention of care givers worldwide. Their inspiring example helped launch “Without Orphan” movements elsewhere in Europe as well as in Africa, Asia, and South America, and has also contributed to improved foster care initiatives in the U. S. and Canada.

The tragic aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now threatens to undo the remarkable progress UWO childcare providers have made and has greatly complicated conditions for orphans and vulnerable children. Ukraine’s unfolding national nightmare is also presenting Americans with fundamental choices about civic and moral responsibility given the consequences of our own domestic politics and foreign repercussions. Authoritarian rulers of the past century like Stalin, Hitler, and now Putin have zealously applied the propagandistic “Big Lie” approach to obscure their nefarious intentions. Hitler blamed the Jews, Stalin blamed peasant farmers, and Putin astoundingly is blaming Nazis. Historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny (2017) of cardinal lessons we should have learned from 20th century experience. Number 10 reads: “Believe in Truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” 

We must brace for the fallout of economic dislocation that will test the mettle of any who subscribe to core principles of liberty and justice for all. They aren’t free. Standing in solidarity with Ukrainian freedom fighters will come at a cost. “Give me liberty or give me death!” can be easily thought or shouted, but the events of the past century have abundantly shown that American freedom and prosperity is inextricably linked to the wellbeing of like-minded nations throughout the world. Americans aren’t being asked to put their lives on the line in Ukraine, but we will pay more for a gallon of gas and loaf of that bread with Ukrainian roots.

Both courageous and vainglorious voices have been raised in the drama that is being played out on the world stage these dark days. The courageous promote the general welfare of the community, nation, and world. They have names like Zelensky and Blinken, and those who have been prime movers in the Ukraine Without Orphans movement like Sasha and Marina of A Family for Every Orphan. The people of Ukraine, whose harvests have long been blessed as daily bread for millions throughout the world, now need our support as they face a humanitarian disaster that may well drag on.

Facing invasion from the north in ancient times by powerful aggressor Assyria, the Prophet Isaiah asked how the religious might live out their faith. He answered: “Share your bread with the hungry and provide the wanderer with shelter” (Isaiah 58:7). Patriots young and old of Ukraine who have hosted our visits are putting their lives on the line for faith and freedom. They have shown me up at gatherings by loudly singing from memory all six verses of the Woody Guthrie classic, “This Land Is Your Land” about the “sun come shining” and “wheat fields waving.” They also know the somber refrain sung throughout the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, Gospodi, pomiluy—"Lord have mercy.” Let us pray that it may it be so, and instead of complaint that good hearts here and abroad will help sustain their deliverance.

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Dr. Richard Scheuerman resides in Richland, Washington, and is a founding board member of A Family for Every Orphan, which promotes indigenous adoption in Ukraine and a dozen other countries. A longtime school administrator and professor emeritus of education at Seattle Pacific University, he is also author of Hardship to Homeland: Pacific Northwest Volga Germans, and Harvest Heritage, a history of agriculture and heirloom crops. Please consider a one-time donation to A Family for Every Orphan’s Operation Harvest Hope fund.

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.

“Give Us This Day”: Daily Bread and A Home for Every Orphan

This past week brought another opportunity to travel west of the Cascades to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula as Sequim was the site of an amazing organization’s annual meeting. A Family for Every Orphan (AFFEO) has long been endorsed by our families and Palouse Heritage as one of the most consequential non-profit groups focused on strategic solutions for the global orphan crisis. AFFEO is a leader in the concept of “indigenous adoption” through which caring families in other countries are challenged and equipped to promote domestic adoption in places where orphans have traditionally been institutionalized and shunned by mainstream culture. With the cost of Americans adopting children from abroad routinely ranging from $15,000 to $25,000, the expense of indigenous adoption is often less than $1,000 with funds needed for home repair and orientation seminars. In this way, AFFEO has facilitated the placement of thousands of children since it was founded ten years ago by a dedicated group of young people, many of whom have served in America’s armed forces.

German Decorative Plate (c. 1965), Palouse Heritage Collection

AFFEO executive director Micala Siler, a graduate of West Point, is passionate about strategic interventions to place orphans in caring homes in countries where they presently reside. With approximately 10,000,000 orphans presently available for adoption worldwide, she described important AFFEO initiatives underway in eight target countries—Ukraine, Romania, Kyrgystan, Russia, Ghana, Uganda, Bangladesh, and India. As I listened to the various presentations made by Micala and other team members who had come at their own expense from various parts of the country and world, I marveled at how such a group of successful young people could gather with such a spirit of determination to make a positive difference in the lives of children they would never know.  

A Home for Every Orphan Board Meeting Table Spread (October, 2018)

In recent years I have traveled to Kiev, Moscow, Singapore, and other places in order to better understand the global orphan crisis and promote adoption. When the AFFEO board first gathered together from their far flung travels in Sequim this past week, I was pleased to see a flavorful spread of artisan breads at their host’s welcoming table. Through mutual friends many on the AFFEO team know about our work with heritage grains, and in this day of war refugees on the Horn of Africa, Mediterranean boat people, Central American immigrant caravans, and other turmoil, I sometimes wonder how children and parents in these circumstances manage to survive. Of course some don’t. While attending the subsequent AFFEO presentations, I found myself drawn to the Fourth Petition in the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). I recall reading some time ago that the last five words of that verse are a translation of a Greek term unique not only to the Bible, but in all of ancient literature. That we might be part of others’ “day-by-day” provisioning through whatever means available to us seems to be a task of utmost nobility. For these reasons, we are honored to donate a portion of all Palouse Heritage proceeds to AFFEO’s work.

Zane Grey’s The Desert of Wheat (Part 1)

This post is the first of a three-part series about Zane Grey, the father of the modern Western novel, who spent time in Eastern Washington in the early 1900s to write his agrarian-themed novel The Desert of Wheat.

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For many years I kept a copy of Zane Grey’s novel, The Desert of Wheat (1919), on my bookshelf. I confess it was mostly there because the title had piqued my hope that the famed Western author might have once turned his attention away from Southwestern cowboys to farmers in the Northwest. A few pages into the book confirmed its setting to be on the Columbia Plateau. But encounters on its opening pages with “motor-cars” and labor organizers led me to set it aside in favor of what I thought might be more interesting reads. Only in recent weeks did I return to the book after realizing that Grey had composed it amidst the convolutions of American involvement in World War one hundred years ago. So I pulled it off the shelf again and this time found myself immersed transported through compelling prose to a remarkable time that I found had high relevance to many issues of our present day.

Best-selling author and conservationist Zane Grey (1872-1939) is considered the father of the modern Western novel. He wrote eighty books with nine selling over 100,000 copies in their year of initial publication, including the quintessential Western classic Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) which became a million-seller. Even today sales of his many works typically reach 500,000 copies annually. Grey’s novels and some 300 short stories were known for idealizing the American frontier spirit with archetypal characters inhabiting moral landscapes who exemplified the Code of the West—integrity, friendship, loyalty. British poet John Masefield and Ernest Hemingway considered his writing praiseworthy and others compared allegorical storylines laden with struggle and mystery to the ancient Beowulf saga and Star Wars science fiction trilogy. Though some critics found Grey’s plots to be formulaic, several of his works ventured beyond worlds inhabited by cowboys and desperados to explore contemporary issues, and human influence on landscapes.

Zane Grey’s The Desert of Wheat first appeared in a series of articles published in May and June, 1918, issues of The Country Gentleman

Grey and his wife, Dolly, journeyed from their home in Pennsylvania to the Pacific Northwest during the summer of 1917 and traveled through eastern Washington in July. That same tumultuous month Alexander Kerensky was named premier of the Russian provisional government after revolutionaries toppled the Romanov monarchy, and a major German World War I counter-offensive commenced on the Eastern Front in Galicia. Grey closely followed world events through newspaper reports sought to incorporate their impact on American national life into his writing. He had been encouraged by The Country Gentleman editor Benton Currie to compose an agrarian-themed story for serialization the following year.

Davenport Hotel Hall of Doges, Spokane, c. 1915, Washington State Historical Society

While attending a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in July at Spokane’s opulent Davenport Hotel, Grey and A. Duncan Dunn, regent of the state’s agricultural school in Pullman, discussed the plight of the region’s farmers since Northwest grain markets and labor unrest seemed highly related to unfolding international events. Inspired in part by events in Russia, the Industrial Workers of the World (“Wobblies”) sought to organize itinerant harvest laborers throughout the wheatlands in order to hold out for raises from two to three dollars for a customary ten-hour day of intense physical labor tending the annual threshing operations. The Wobblies were strongly opposed by farmers on economic grounds, and many throughout the country considered their socialist leanings a threat the moral and political order. The inland Pacific Northwest was also heavily populated by immigrant farmers of German ancestry from central Europe and Russia. Grey’s story would also explore the tensions within families and communities created by complex relationships between heritage and nationalism.

Zane Grey, The Desert of Wheat Manuscript Opening Lines (1917), Library of Congress

Grey’s “The Desert of Wheat” would first appear in several installments of The Country Gentleman in the spring of 1918, and Harper’s published the first of numerous printings in book form in 1919.  His earlier works had been known for vivid descriptions of action and environment, as well as respectful inclusion of Native Americans and minority cultures. This new work appealed to both reviewers and the general public, and opened with lines inspired by his summertime journey across the Columbia Plateau’s vast farming district:  “Late in June the vast northwestern desert of wheat began to take on a tinge of gold, lending an austere beauty to that endless, rolling, smooth world of treeless hills…. The beauty of them was austere, as if the hand of man had been held back from making green his home site, as if the immensity of the task had left no time for youth and freshness. Years, long years, were there in the round-hilled, many-furrowed gray old earth.”

Right: W. H. D. Koerner, “The Undulating Sea of Wheat,” Country Gentleman Magazine (May 14, 1918)

Through dialogue about Bluestem and Turkey Red wheats and rattling threshers under the hot harvest sun, the story lauds the hard work and struggles of taciturn Kurt Dorn, son of an elderly German immigrant farmer. Young Dorn faces drought, blight, and the elements in order to support his father, and experiences World War I prejudice and rural labor strife. Although Grey’s characters are not typically prone to mystical reflection, Dorn and protagonist love interest, Lenore Anderson, ponder the significance of change in their own relationship, his  enlistment and brutal experience of European battle, and deeper meanings of wartime damage to culture and conviction. As do few other books in Grey’s considerable corpus, The Desert of Wheat exemplifies his lifelong compulsion to express “Love of life, love of youth, [and] love of beauty.” Dorn and Anderson’s dialogue further attest to the wastefulness of war and Grey’s own ambivalence over conceptions of patriotism and heroism. Literary historian Christine Bold characterizes Lenore Anderson as the personification of humanity’s spiritual core—a “Western version of Ceres,” and like waving heads of grain frequently described she symbolizes renewal amidst an odyssey of life, loss, and land.

Landrace Grains and Heirloom Fruit — Palouse Colony Farm and DeLong Ranch

Even after great holiday sales, we remain well supplied with our Palouse Heritage Sonoran Gold pastry flour as well as our long awaited Crimson Turkey bread flour, known back in the day as “Turkey Red” though it ancestral homeland is actually south Russia and Ukraine. Until this flavorful grain was introduced to the United States in the 1870s, virtually all bread in the country was made from soft white wheats and other grains more suited for making biscuits, pancakes, and flatbreads. Our crop yielded well and is already being used by several Northwest bakeries including Damsel and Hopper Bakeshop in Seattle, Ethos Bakery in Richland, and Culture Breads in Spokane.

Palouse Colony Heritage Grain and Transfering from Wheat Truck to Totes

Two venerable elders now in their nineties and familiar with Crimson Turkey were raised on farms near our Palouse Country hometown of Endicott. Don Schmick and Don Reich now reside in neighboring Colfax, and I recently asked them about it. “That’s the grain we saved for our own use!” Don Reich recalled. “There’s nothing in the world that makes a bread so satisfying as flour from that wheat.” Don Schmick related a similar story and said that his immigrant farmer father made a annual trip every fall south of the Palouse River to the Pataha Flour Mill east of Pomeroy where the family’s precious Crimson Turkey wheat was ground into flour for the family’s needs throughout the year. Both men remembered that their mothers especially favored mixing about two-thirds of the wheat flour with one-third rye flour to make a delicious tawny-colored loaf that didn’t last long.

Joe navigating through a sea of Palouse Heritage wheat at DeLong Ranch (2017)

This past August we also returned to historic DeLong Ranch located several miles upstream from our Palouse Colony Farm and where we have worked for several years with neighbors Joe and Sarah DeLong to raise heritage grains. Joe’s ancestral connection to this scenic area is singular in significance to regional history as it is not only the oldest farm in the area, but also property that has been continuously farmed by the DeLong family since the late 1860s. Joe’s resourceful ancestor, also named Joseph DeLong, raised grain, extensive gardens, and livestock, and also planted an extensive orchard on fertile bottomland bordered by towering pines along the river. I have long been fascinated by the family’s remarkable saga and have written previously about it in previous blog posts and the book Palouse Country: A Land and Its People.

We’ve long been impressed by Joe and Sarah’s regard for the health of the soil and they have worked hard over the years to raise crops using natural rotation systems with minimum artificial inputs. The farm’s remote location also provides a rare glimpse into the “Palouse primeval.” Substantial virgin sod remains along both sides of the river that abounds with wildflowers in spring and summer and hosts deer, racoons, coyotes, eagles, and occasional meandering moose and elk. In addition to the landrace grains we raised this past year at Palouse Colony Farm, Joe and Sarah grew Red Walla Walla and Sonoran Gold wheats, and famed Purple Egyptian barley. Red Walla Walla is a rare soft red variety actually native to southern England that was traditionally used for biscuits, flatbreads, and for imparting a rich, tangy flavor to craft English wheat beers. 

An unexpected adventure during this summer’s DeLong harvest was a visit to his family’s ancient grove of plum trees that are clustered at the foot of a grassy bluff close to the river. I had noticed the ripe purplish red fruit while riding the combine with Joe near the fence-line that separates the trees from the field. He informed me that the trees likely harkened back to the senior Joe DeLong’s time and contained four distinct varieties faithfully recorded in old ranch records—Bulgarian, Hungarian, Egg, and Petite.

DeLong Heirloom Plum Trees

Grandma’s Plum Delight

I mentioned seeing the trees at lunch time and Sara and Joe invited me to pick as many as I’d like since there were far more than their family could use. So armed with a large metal bucket from a nearby shed I ventured back to the spot in the hot afternoon and joined a herd of cows meandering through the plum trees. Indeed the trees were loaded with fruit and in no time my bucket was overflowing. I couldn’t tell a Bulgarian from a Petite but found that they all tasted wonderfully sweet. I had been staying in town with my sister and mother, and later that night when I reported on my discovery, Mom proceeded to tell me how to distinguish several kinds. The next day while I returned to the harvest field, she went to work making plum sauce as a topping for pancakes and breads, and also prepared “Plum Delight,” a crispy dessert with crumbly topping I remembered well from my youth. She agreed to provide me with her recipe which we share here with hopes it might grace your table sometime soon.

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Plum Delight

Topping

• ½  cup Palouse Heritage Sonora flour
• ½ cup oats
• ½ cup brown sugar
• ⅛ teaspoon salt
• ¼ cup melted margarine

Filling

• 3 cups sliced plums
• 1 tablespoon Palouse Heritage Sonora flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• ½ teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine plums, flour, sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon together in a bowl and put into ungreased 1 1/2-quart baking dish. Combine all topping ingredients in another bowl. Mix until crumbly and distribute over the plums. Bake in 350 degree oven for 45 minutes or until crispy and golden brown on top.

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