It is a yellow dawn on the northern plains as I settle into a sunny place for some reading. My head pivots frequently, from the hazy rays streaming through corn raised by farmers of perilous tenure and destined for markets on shaky footings, to the yellowed manuscript pages on the table before me. Through them I enter the mind of William C. Hunter, as he contemplates the past and future of agriculture.
Archivists at NDSU have dated the manuscript to 1932, which is at least approximately right. The work is a typescript for an address, with a pencilled addendum, to which I will refer later, on the final page.
The author, William Hunter, was a professor of history and a department head at North Dakota Agricultural College. He was an Illinois farm boy with a PhD from Princeton. Those who recognize his name today do so because they are familiar with the history of NDAC, now NDSU, that he wrote, and published through the Institute for Regional Studies, under the title Beacon Across the Prairie. The title of the manuscript before me now is, “Has the Decline in Agriculture Been a Chief Cause of the Fall of Nations?”
The prose resonates. Writing under the influence of the Great Depression, Hunter notes that it is “a period of questioning arising out of our existing economic conditions.” Writing from North Dakota, and more specifically its agricultural college, he observes that “we live in an area that is almost entirely dependent on agriculture for its well being.” Hunter therefore launches a review of the longue durée, searching for a rationale whereby the country might be persuaded to double down on agriculture as the foundation of national prosperity and civic virtue.
By the time I studied agricultural economics at a land-grant university, we were inclined to mock this sort of impulse, which we labeled “farm fundamentalism.” We figured it was time for agriculturalists to embrace what we called “Freedom to Farm” and put their trust in markets. We sensed, too, that if we wanted to join the ranks of the cool kids, we needed to embrace urban values, because everything cool came from cities.
In his historical review, Hunter makes a good case for agricultural determinism: civilizations arose in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in India, in China, and around the Mediterranean based on agricultural productivity. Rome, he argues, “was essentially an agricultural state” that planted colonies to encompass additional productive lands. This nurtured, Hunter says, a cadre “of brave and hardy citizen soldiers, cultivating their own fields, and ready to take up arms in defence of the state.”
Rome fell, Hunter says, on account of climate change, long-term drouth--remember he is writing in the early years of the Dust Bowl. Coming out of the Middle Ages France had the advantages to become the seat of agricultural civilization, but lacked proper institutions for it, and so Britain emerged to champion enlightened and assertive agriculture. Britain then passed the torch across the Atlantic to America, where agricultural civilization came into full flower. Yes, civilizations rose and fell according to their agricultural fortunes.
Now we come to that pencilled page, where Hunter revises his conclusion. “In the light of our modern sociological viewpoint,” he concedes, “I feel constrained to throw my opinion in with those who feel that the city is the determinant of civilization. It is in the metropolis that the fate of those who till the soil is determined.”
Your world, Professor Hunter, and welcome to it. I never was one of the cool kids.
~Tom Isern
