But I can be called a tobacco farmer only by the same sort of categorical inference that from time to time has brought me under the suspicion or the allegation of racism. I understand very well the intellectual achievement of guilt by association. My intellect is entirely baffled and defeated, however, by the discovery that I grow wheat. On this farm?
Though I share fully, I believe, my people’s love for tobacco (rightly grown, it is a beautiful and fascinating crop), though it was long a staple of my region’s economy, and though a vital culture of family and neighborly work depended on it, I have never defended either the crop or its uses. The Surgeon General’s Report on tobacco and cancer, which made defense of the crop morally impossible, was published in 1965, before my writing on agricultural problems began.
But I have defended the federal tobacco program, as represented here by the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association. The principles of the Burley Co-op—production control, price supports, service to small as to large producers—are not associated with tobacco necessarily, but are in themselves ethical, reputable, economically sound, and applicable to any agricultural commodity. I discussed this issue pretty fully in an essay, “The Problem of Tobacco,” in 1991. In this book, I have attempted to see the Burley Co-op more clearly than before both in its geographic and historical context and in relation to what I take to be the necessity of its principles to the survival of the land and people of rural America.
It is wrong, I think, to deal with the past as if it can be simply departed from or “solved,” or brought to “closure.” It is discouraging to see the conservatives treat history as one of the “humanities” that can be dispensed with or ignored by hardheaded realists. It is both discouraging and amusing to be assured by the liberals that the past can be risen above by superior persons who, if they had been Thomas Jefferson, would have owned no slaves.
But the problems that belong to one’s history, to one’s place, and thus to one’s life, cannot in any ready or simple way be solved, and some of them cannot be solved at all. Problems such as categorical judgments against kinds of people or the production of unhealthy commodities—or land abuse or pollution or social “mobility,” to name some more—these are, for the willing, a life’s work. They can be confronted, studied, struggled with, to some extent understood, and (always to the peril of truth and justice) judged. Such, anyhow, have been among the never-finished concerns of my writing.
As the author of such writing over a good many years, I know both that I cannot and that I should not expect agreement or approval from my critics. But I think that I rightly should expect them to acknowledge fairly the complexity of my subjects, and to be honest in their use of evidence.
IV
Readers will notice that the parts of this book, although they are related to one another and to my interest in the connection of land and people, are of different genres: essays, fictions, fictions partaking somewhat of the character of the essays, and, as epilogue, a poem congenial to the essays and participating in the fiction.
The most peculiar, and perhaps the most questionable of these mixtures, is in “The Order of Loving Care,” in which one fictional character, Andy Catlett, from my novels and stories of Port William, encounters and learns from a number of my own “real life” friends and teachers. If my work had not been so incomplete in its parts, and therefore continuous over so many years, such an expedient would not have been needed. But it happens that “The Order of Loving Care” is the third of a sequence of writings specifically about the “making” of Andy Catlett’s mind, which, as it further happens, has been a theme of my Port William fiction since 1960.
With some significant differences, Andy Catlett’s life is like my own. This likeness enables me, in fiction, to bear witness to my time and place. The differences between his life and mine make my testimony subject to imagination rather than merely to the factuality of my life, which, apart from imagination, would be a bore. As fiction, a story does not have to be submitted to the burdens of a tedious pursuit and gathering of facts, or to the risk of factual error and triviality, or to apology for forgetting facts.
However, in my fiction as in my essays, I have tried always to be true to the facts of history, natural history, work, tools, economy, and economic life. Once that condition is met, I see nothing inherently wrong in asking one genre to do the work of another.
V
Though conservative politicians and organizations were always opposed to the tobacco program of the New Deal, the small farms and small towns of what is now called “rural America” (meaning nearly all of our actual country) had substantial political support throughout the 1940s. My father and his friends who led the now-defunct Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association had a significant influence in their region, and they could be heard and understood in Washington. My daughter, Mary, who continues my father’s work in behalf of small farmers, has not one ally in state or national government.
President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, proclaimed the official termination of favor to anything not “big.” And now it has been a long time since an agrarian, or any advocate for the good economic and ecological health of rural America, could be listened to or understood or represented by either of the political parties.
To wakeful persons living in rural America, aware of the abuses of the land and the people, the presidential election of 2016 brought a too-familiar “choice.” It was plain that neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton would be much aware of the economic landscapes of farming, forestry, or mining, or of the people of the land-using economies. The corporations of food, timber, minerals, and energy would have the candidates’ attention and regard, but not nearly so much the people who take the actual risks and do the actual work, and not at all the places where the work is done. The two candidates would either follow or not the longtime political custom of substituting the preservation of “wilderness areas” for conservation of nature, land, and people in the much larger portion of the country that is merely “rural.” Neither candidate could have imagined or dared the economic revisions that would safekeep in good health the land and people of every place.
The best understanding of the election that I have seen so far came to me in a letter from my friend Mark Lawson, a church pastor and professor of religion in Liverpool, New York:
It seems to me that the people who put Trump over the top were largely Rust Belt dwellers whose grandparents were forced to leave the farm for mind-numbing factory work, whose parents made a go of it with one generation of union-negotiated wages, but who were valued only as laborers and only until a cheaper means of production came along. The irony, of course, is that this segment of the population chose as the vehicle of their revenge a Manhattan real estate tycoon who got rich by exploiting bankruptcy laws and refusing to pay his own laborers (many of whom were undocumented workers). But . . . it requires no critical thinking skills to blame Muslims and Mexicans (or any other preferred scapegoats) rather than understand the long-term effects of unrestrained global capitalism.
I think that is accurate, fair, compassionate, and sufficiently critical of Mr. Trump’s supporters.
For me, the ascent of Mr. Trump, a man who indulges his worst impulses and encourages the worst impulses of others, was immensely regrettable, but it was less a surprise than a clarification. His election and his choices of cabinet members (masked as “populism,” whatever by now is meant by that) expose beyond doubt the nearly absolute ownership of our public life by the excessively wealthy, who are dedicated to freeing themselves and their corporate and of-course-Christian peers from any obligation to the natural and human commonwealth. Nothing could have made more clear the featherweight moral gravity, not of his voters, but of Mr. Trump’s rich sponsors and his party.
But the gravitas of the liberals seems to me not much weightier. What did surprise me was the revelation, after the election, of the extent of their ignorance of their actual country and its economic history, and (surely because of that) the intensity of their animus against “rural America” and the “working class” people who voted for Mr. Trump. As a rural American, I was of course fully aware of the prejudice, equally conservative and liberal, against rural America and rural Americans. I knew that “rural” and “country” and “farmer” were still