Back to the Land Movements

Randal Beeman

Back to the Land Movements

Encyclopedia of Environmental History

As society became more urbanized over the centuries, various thinkers have advocated (and occasionally led) “back to the land” movements trumpeting the moral, social, economic and ecological benefits of rural life. Inspired by such diverse sources as the The Iliad, Virgilian poetry, and the writings of the French Physiocrats; proponents of back to the land movements in the US generally link their ideas to notions of “Jeffersonian democracy” or the “agrarian ideal.”

Thomas Jefferson, like many of his contemporaries, viewed farming as both the economic and political wellspring of American civilization. While advocating technological advance, Jefferson thought that independent farmers would make more wholesome citizens and sustain both a robust economy and a democratic form of government, in opposition to a nation of dependent urbanites. Abandoning constitutional concerns, Jefferson bought the LouisianaTerritory from the French in 1803 because he thought the land would an outlet for millions of future Americans to become (or remain) farmers.

Emerson, Thoreau and the transcendentalists, reflecting the European romantic’s fascination with nature,also promoted and experimented with rural living as America grew increasingly urbanized before the Civil War. Numerous other utopian type organizations in the late-19th century linked idealized social living with a back to the land ideology, including numerous agrarian colonies appearing throughout the Middle and Western US in the period.

US land policy and federally subsidized agricultural research supported the expansion of the agrarian ideal in the 19th century, as the government encouraged immigrants and native born citizens to settle the western United States with small farmers.(Congress intended the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Reclamation Act of 1902 to benefitfarmers with holdings under 160 acres in size.) As settlement moved most and the frontier was famously declared “closed” by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, many commentators feared the loss of rural life would be detrimental to American society.

Various individuals offered visions of returning to the land, even if that meant living in what became know as “suburbia.” Noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (an urbanite who had failed in his personal attempt to farm) created urban spaces, such as Central Park in New York City, as “naturalistic” landscapes aimed at preserving the beneficial pastoral nature of American life, while others, such as the devotees of the populist movement in the 1890s, demanded more support from government in preserving and developing rural life.

In 1920 the US Census revealed that, for the first time, more than half of the US citizenry were no longer engaged in agriculture for a living, though the number of farms in the US continued to expand in the 1920s. Taxpayers supportedfederal development of irrigation in the arid western regions of the USas it would provide a new outlet for people to farm, in concert with lingering notions of Jeffersonian agrarianism. Professor Liberty Hyde Bailey, among others, led the call for American to remain to return to the soil, while the State of California, the Salvation Army, and numerous other groups promoted and subsidized back to the land colonization in the 1920s.

Growing disillusionment with urbanism and commercialism prompted writers such as a group known as the “12 Southerners” to promote a return to the soil in the late 1920s and early 1930s. During the Great Depression, even while the US Government pursued a policy of removing “marginal” farmers from the land in places like the Dust Bowl, during the 1930s the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funded back to the land colonization a Subsistence Homesteads Division headed by back to the land advocate Ralph Borsodi. In books such as Malabar Farm, writer Louis Bromfield celebrated the back to the land ideal as an anecdote to the “Age of Irritation.”

Disgruntled and impoverished by the Great Depression, writers Scott and Helen Nearing left New York City in the 1930s for a farm in rural Vermont, later fleeing to Maine. Like many back to the land adherents, the Nearings rejected the mainstream American commercial lifestyle for a esthetic and naturalistic existence. A longtime critic of capitalism Nearing discussed his agrarian views in his 1954 book Living the Good Life, which would become a “Bible” for back to the land apostles in the 1970s. The appeal of rural life as an outlet for the disenfranchised continued in the 1960s. In the wake of the Watts Riots and other urban rioting, Orville Freeman, head of the USDA during the administration of Lyndon Johnson, called for an Opportunity Homesteads Division to settle urban minorities onto rural homesteads to ease societal tensions brought on by city life.

As the numbers of farm continued to shrink in the 1960s and 70s, a new back to the land movements grew out of the hippie counterculture. Disenchanted with urbanism, congestion, pollution, and commercialism, thousands of young people left the cities to go back to the land, often with a copy of Living the Good Life and the Whole Earth Catalog in their possession. While a few of the new agrarians made a successful return to the land, most succumbed to the hard realities and economics of farming, an eventually returned to a more urban existence.

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Randal Beeman

BakersfieldCollege