The Holy Earth. Liberty Hyde Bailey
and accomplished, with a scientist’s obvious need to speak with authority. That of course required some specialization, and he attained enough distinction “in his field” to become dean of agriculture at Cornell from 1903–1913. But his vocation clearly was not so much to a specialty or field as to country life in all of its aspects: farming, gardening, horticulture, forestry, nature and “nature-study,” animal husbandry, flower gardening, the economy and politics and culture of rural communities. You will know so much just from the titles of the books he wrote and edited. Beyond that, from the variety and number of his subjects you will suspect what seems to have been the truth: that, more than by science or even vocation, he was moved by a large and unresting enthusiasm, a liking and love, for everything having to do with the life of the countryside, human and non-human.
Liberty Hyde Bailey was born on a frontier farm in South Haven, Michigan, in 1858. He remained actively at work almost until his death, at the age of ninety-six, in 1954. The dates are agriculturally significant. He was old enough to remember his father’s purchase of a mowing machine as mechanization entered farming after the Civil War, and he lived to see the beginnings of the all-out industrialization of agriculture that followed World War II and still continues.
The vocational interests of Bailey’s life, agriculture and what he would come to call “nature-study,” were well established in his childhood. His interest in nature made him a botanist. His interest in farming made him a horticulturist. But as an observant child in a farm family, he also knew from early experience that the farm and the farmer shared the same fate. In the time of Bailey’s childhood, according to his biographer, Philip Dorf, the farmer “bought at retail” and “sold at wholesale” — a disadvantage that has remained constant and critical in the history of our agriculture until now. After the Civil War, also, the railroads grew in political power and public favor. Distance and the romance of cities became prominent in people’s minds. Farmers began to be disparaged about then, Dorf reminds us, as “rubes” or “hayseeds.”1 Perhaps for such reasons, as well as his native loyalties, Bailey’s thought and work were always directed to the worth, the prosperity, and the satisfaction of good farmers. To understand him it is necessary to keep always in mind, as he did, his three devotions: to nature, to the farm, and to the farmer.
The farm household depended upon nature; the prosperity of the farm household depended upon the farmer’s ability and willingness to keep the farm in a right relation to nature:
Most of our difficulty with the earth lies in the effort to do what perhaps ought not to be done.… A good part of agriculture is to learn how to adapt one’s work to nature, to fit the crop-scheme to the climate and to the soil… (9, this text)
This principle of adapting the farming to the farm or to the nature of the place is, or it ought to be, evolutionary and ecological enough for 2015 A.D., but Virgil said the same thing in 29 B.C. The current assumption that farming is an autonomous process safely indifferent to the uniqueness of places, let alone to an adapted “crop scheme,” is industrial, not agricultural.
The idea of the farmer as a figure of primary importance in connecting the human economy to nature stayed with Bailey all his life. The agricultural scientists of our own day find it easy to think of themselves either as scientists primarily or as developers of products for agribusiness. But to Bailey, as dean of the new College of Agriculture at Cornell, agricultural science was oriented to the land and directed to the needs of farmers:
This College of Agriculture was not established to serve or to magnify Cornell University.… If there is any man standing on the land, unattached, uncontrolled, who feels that he has a disadvantage and a problem, this College of Agriculture stands for that man.2
To Bailey, moreover, farmers were never merely producers of “farm products.” Nor, mercifully, did he ever imagine that they might become, as now, specialized producers of one or two products. In his view of them, farmers were people who lived on and from, and were directly sustained by, diverse and reasonably self-sufficient family farms. He assumes always the value of the farm family’s subsistence or household economy. He was spared the eventual scandal of “family farms” dependent on town jobs.
As an agricultural scientist committed to the improvement of farming and the education of farm people, he was concerned as a matter of course with the movement of the country people into the cities. He felt that this was to some extent inevitable, as a surplus of rural people sought work in factories and offices. “What bothered him,” says Dorf, “was that the exodus was draining off many of the best and brightest of the country boys and girls, the natural leaders of coming generations.”3 Bailey’s thought (still a good one, if tried) was to remedy the perceived dreariness of farm life by programs of “nature study,” which were meant to awaken children’s natural interest in the creatures of the natural world. The idea was to avoid the courses and sciences of natural history, and instead to take the children outdoors into the actual presence of the trees and fields, the birds and animals and wildflowers that they dependably would like better than books and facts. Nature study, Bailey said, “is an attitude, a point of view.… Its purposes are best expressed in the one word ‘sympathy.’”4 He obviously was hoping, first, that the pleasures of nature study would brighten the lives of country people, and second, that as the children of farmers grew up to become farmers themselves the sympathy derived from nature study would grow into sympathy for the land they farmed.
And here we must pause to consider how intimately Bailey’s word “sympathy” places us within our actual lives within our actual world, and how far it displaces us from the industrial world in which creatures are treated as machines and “farming” is reduced to the manipulation of machinery and chemicals.
As we look back from our time to his, Liberty Hyde Bailey may seem in a number of ways a surprising man. If we have understood that he was a modern scientist, a follower of Darwin from boyhood, who even so would invoke sympathy as the aim of nature study, then maybe we won’t be too much surprised to find that he also would write, a hundred years ago, a little book entitled The Holy Earth. People who predictably find Bailey’s adjective dated or outdated or shocking in the context of science may be at least somewhat appeased by his candor. He called the earth “holy” in perfect good faith. And he did so in deliberate contradiction to its mere materiality, believing that “there is no danger of crass materialism if we recognize the original materials as divine and if we understand our proper relation to the creation, for then will gross selfishness in the use of them be removed” (4). Moreover: “One does not act rightly toward one’s fellows if one does not know how to act rightly toward the earth” (4). He was seeing the complex and profound ethical difference, sufficiently evident then and now obvious, between perception of the earth as divine and the industrial perception of it as a source of raw materials to be extracted, processed, and consumed. Futile as it certainly was in 1915, Bailey seems to have stood that world “holy” upon the earth to mark it off-limits to the kind of mind — then, as we know, arriving in force — that is “objectively” materialist and utilitarian.
In his values, affections, loyalties, and pleasures, Bailey was a remarkably complete human being, and that completeness is denoted by the completeness of his language. Reading this book, one necessarily becomes aware of a drastic change in our language over the last hundred years: how scrupulously it has been lopped and impoverished to suit the biases of materialism or realism. In his chapter titles alone, Bailey offers freely and familiarly a vocabulary long excluded by the filters of objective truth: not just “holy” but also “good,” “kindly,” “brotherhood,” “neighbor,” “beautiful,” and “soul.” Those words, and such words, do not refer to substances or quantities verifiable by measure, but to qualities that reveal themselves as true only after we have assented to them. But they are not for that reason forceless or without effect. By this vocabulary of qualities we recognize and protect the things of measureless worth upon which our life, and all life, depends. This we can now see from the measurable failure of the industrial use of nature, which is opposed to all the qualities by which nature would be sustained in human use.
And so to Bailey, “holy” is a word of force by which to move “our dominion” from “the realm of trade” into “the realm of morals” (12). The word “dominion,”