Crace, Berry, and Progress in Modern Times

Jim Crace’s 2013 dystopian novel, Harvest, transports readers to a sixteenth century English village to experience a week of celebration, intrigue, and disturbance that marks the end of harvest. Area residents gossip and gather in the barley field but are more concerned with the recent arrival of several vagrants than the momentous events about to engulf them. The story is told from the standpoint of Walter Thirsk, who after residing there for a dozen years is himself a relative newcomer to a place. “We should face the rest day with easy hearts,” he muses, “and then enjoy the gleaning that would follow it, with our own Gleaning Queen the first to bend and pick a grain. We should expect our seasons to unfold in all their usual sequences, and so on through the harvests and the years.”

National Colonial Farm, Piscataway Park, Accokeek, Maryland

The strangers who camp nearby are refugees from enclosure of open lands, and their coming coincides with that of a man of uneasy silence the villagers call Mr. Quill for the peculiar instrument he carries for his work: “We mowed with scythes: he worked with brushes and quills. He was recording us, he said, or more exactly marking down our land.” Quill is making a map and compiling numbers, measuring locations of streets, houses, and fields. He informs his rustic hearers that such work is about “improvements” being done on behalf of the manor estate’s absentee heir who is zealous for improvements to enlarge the estate by enclosure and replace fieldworkers with sheep which will also render gleaning obsolete. “We know enough to understand that in the greater world,” Quill explains, “flour, meat, and cheese are not divided into shares and portions for the larder, as they are here, but only weighed and sized for selling.” The old order of Enough is being displaced by More. To be sure, pre-enclosure landscapes were not idyllic spaces since commoners depended on hard labor and the vagaries of the seasons for their welfare. But conditioned by faith and custom, daily anxieties were moderated by community fellowship and shared resources from the commons.

Kentucky farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry’s book A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (1998) is rooted in lifelong experience on the land and considerations of beauty, hard work, crops, and the natural world:

                  Harvest will fill the barn; for that

                  The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

                  And yet no leaf or grain is filled

                  By work of ours; the land is tilled

                  And left to grace. That we may reap…. (No. X [1979])

One of Berry’s first public addresses on trends in consolidation of family farms and land care took place in July, 1974, at the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium held in conjunction with Spokane’s “Expo ’74.” The world’s fair was promoted as the first international ecological exposition and Berry’s passionate talk, delivered from scribbled notes on a large yellow pad, included a call for “a constituency for a better kind of agriculture.” The presentation inspired organization of the Northwest Tilth movement for sustainable farming, and also became the nucleus of Berry’s best-selling book The Unsettling of American: Culture & Agriculture (1979). 

Barn and Fence Rails, National Colonial Farm

In his 1979 essay, “The Good Scythe,” Berry grapples with the meaning of progress in modern times. He recalls buying a “power scythe” for cutting grass on a steep hillside near his home, but soon found that the anticipated advantages of reduced labor were offset by the machine’s temperamental motor and considerable racket. The turning point came when a neighbor showed him an old-fashioned scythe that was comfortable to handle and efficient. “There was an intelligence and refinement in its design that make it a pleasure to handle and look at and think about,” Berry observed, and he promptly replaced the powered machine and gas can with a wooden-handled Marugg scythe and whetstone. Berry does not dismiss mechanical innovation; the scythe, after all, is an improvement on the sickle. But he found the episode to have “the force of a parable” about life, labor, and definitions of progress. He advocates a time-honored approach for judging claims of saved labor and short cuts, and warns against the embrace of technological solutions that tend to bring longer working hours with greater equipment expense.

21st Century Gleaning at Home and Abroad

French film-maker Agnès Varda’s documentary, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, winner of the Mélès Prize for Best French Film of 2000, offers controversial interpretation of Millet’s iconic painting The Gleaners (1857). Distributed in the United States as The Gleaners and I, the movie shows how poverty need not deprive individuals in any age of dignity and humor. They may be compelled, however, to overcome significant social and economic obstacles to eke out an existence. The film has contributed to a broader, contemporary definition of gleaning to include the gathering of unwanted foods of all kinds—bread, fruit, vegetables, and fish, as well as other castaway resources. Varda’s sobering images of oppressed, vulnerable  and often young souls, illustrate the disturbing trend of income inequality in modern societies where “gleaning” remains a salient reality for many, and its potentially harsh consequences. Her work also suggests possible solutions in the food service sector through the stewardship of surplus distribution via urban pantries and community food banks.

2nd Harvest Delivery Truck Trailer Mural (2018), Spokane, Washington

This more broadly defined concept of gleaning was described in The Other America (1962), Michael Harrington’s influential study of hunger and homelessness that shaped Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s War on Poverty. In the wake of growing public awareness, social service and religious groups have formed new partnerships in recent decades to develop food security programs to distribute perishable produce and processed foods. At least one-third of food produced annually today in America—as much as 40 million tons valued at approximately $75 billion, is wasted due to spoilage and inefficient storage and distribution. Applying the idea of gleaning to such lost resources, a group of Phoenix activists organized the country’s first urban food bank, Second Harvest, in 1975 (known as Feeding America since 2008). Similar humanitarian efforts followed in Portland (Interagency Food Bank, 1975), Chicago (Food Depository, 1978), Seattle (Food Lifeline, 1979), New York City (City Harvest, 1982), and spread to many other large cities. Some of these endeavors are affiliated with denominational benevolent ministries including the Society of St. Andrew Gleaning Network (United Methodist Church), Evangelical Lutheran of America Church World Hunger, and Catholic Relief Services Hunger Campaign.

Palouse Heritage Landrace Sonora Wheat at Lenwood Farm, Connell, Washington, John Clement Photograph

Brad Bailie of Lenwood Farms near Connell, Washington, produces organic grain and vegetables, and regularly works with local churches and crews of Feeding America gleaners to supply 2nd Harvest and other regional food banks. He explains his and other farmer-contributors’ motivations in both practical and moral terms: “Sometimes growers have surpluses because commercial buyers have certain commodity specifications by size or weight. This can leave a considerable amount of quality produce in the field, and we don’t like seeing such waste. We also believe that the blessing of a bountiful harvest brings responsibility to share with others.” The opportunities and responsibilities that come with abundant harvests are also evident in revivals of the ancient Passover Festival among religious fellowships throughout the world. Israel’s celebrated and prolific composer, Matityahu Shalem (1904-1975), wrote numerous folks songs for contemporary Jewish worship including Passover celebrations when the first sheaves of barley are cut for presentation at the temple. His popular Shibbolet Basadeh (Ear of Grain in the Field) is sung and danced to traditional choreography shaped by Shalem’s experiences on a kibbutz in western Galilee where he tended flocks and fields after relocating to Palestine before World War II.

For religious thinkers like Shalem, meaning still retains a supernatural sanction derived from humanity’s simultaneous temporal and spiritual nature. Contemplation of the harvest labor and its bounty can be perceived in the particularities of agrarian experience whether along a Galilean shore or Dakota slope. 

The McCormick Reaper

I couldn’t help but smile at the special childhood memory brought to mind recently when local historian Manton Bailie, lifelong resident and farmer in rural community of Mesa, Washington, showed me some old farm equipment in rusty retirement at this place. When Manton told me about playing on the old horse-powered mechanical reaper it instantly brought back memories of my own Palouse Country boyhood. Although the old McCormick reapers on the hillside above our house had largely been invaded by the branches of cherry tree, a skinny youth could still wiggle down between wooden draper roll and outside iron wheel and dream of driving a tank.

Edwin Fulwider, Manton Poe (Manton Bailie’s grandfather of Mesa, Washington), The Ford Times (September, 1953)

The effectiveness of mechanical reapers like Manton’s and my grandfather’s equipment led to their widespread use throughout the country and subsequent improvements further reduced the need for rural laborers and rendered traditional field gleaning virtually impossible. While some loss of kernels took place as grain heads could shatter from the reaper’s wooden reel paddles, the stalks were effectively captured to be bound, carted, and threshed. But the ancient grain varieties native to Europe for thousands of years and introduced to the New World as early as the 1500s remained essentially unchanged until twentieth century plant genetics spawned hybridized cultivars resistant to shattering and lodging. The inexorable shift to technological modernity eclipsed eons of social and economic relationships that had guided human endeavor since the beginning of recorded history.

Reaping in the Olden Time; Above: Reaping in Our Time (1857)

“Reaping at Syracuse,” Harper’s Weekly (August 1, 1857)

The momentous tilt that brought greater productivity can be dated with some specificity through art and literature from the period. Explicit depiction of the new horse-power order was shown graphically in an August, 1857, issue of Harper’s Weekly. The unattributed author and artist depicted a gathering during the previous week of the influential U. S. Agricultural Society near Syracuse, New York. Crowds had surrounded a grain field there to witness a competition among ninety-five different mechanical reapers. A grand parade of contestants preceding the event led through an impressive castle façade adorned with colorful flags and banners casting mythic significance on the mechanical marvels, jousting drivers, and patron inventors.

“…[T]he days of the sickle are over,” proclaimed the reporter, who advised readers, “Lay it up—the old tool—in a museum, on a fair cushion; label it, number it, …for the time is coming when the sickle will be as rare as the headsman’s axe or the Spanish blunderbuss. We must have a machine like a steam-engine, with two horses to draw it, which shall tear devastatingly through a field of oats or wheat, cut ten feet wide of grain at a stroke, and lay it all ready for sheaving.” The advent of this “startling mechanical enterprise” would lead to the manufacture of an estimated 200,000 machines the following year, with one of the biggest beneficiaries of such land office business being the manufacturer of the Syracuse contest’s gold medal winner—the McCormick’s Reaper.

Defining Harvest, Explaining Print-Making

Although the words “reap,” “thresh,” and “harvest” are often used synonymously today, important distinctions define their use in period literature and among many farmers today. To reap is to cut grain either manually by sickle or scythe, or with a mechanical cutting bar, while threshing, or thrashing, refers to the separation of kernels from heads (spikes) of grain stalks by striking them with a wooden flail, the treading of animals, or being machine-run. Harvesting in former days meant the gathering and storing of unthreshed stalks, but since Early Modern times harvest has also come to mean all of these summertime operations.

B. F. Wetherbee, The Harvest Moon (1881), 10 ½ x 27 ½ inches (c. 1900 reprint)

In addition to oil and watercolor paintings featured in this series, art prints represent several production techniques. Artists have used intaglio methods by incising an image into a copper plate with an instrument to render a soft etching, or by using a burin to create a sharper engraved print. Intaglio is also used for mezzotint by roughening the plate for a print of greater surface contrast. Woodcuts are made through a relief process in which grooves are carved on a soft wood surface bearing the artist’s design so it remains standing in relief and is inked for the print. Wood engravings are similar but the spaces between the image’s lines are left standing above the surface and the design itself prints in white. Lithography is a planographic process in which the picture is drawn and treated with inks and solutions on a flat stone or metal surface to make multiple black and white or color impressions.     

Gleaning’s Early Modern Revival

Through arrangements with the US Department of Agriculture made possible by my friend and fellow historian Alex McGregor of Colfax’s The McGregor Company, I was recently able to visit Washington, D. C. and document works of agrarian art in our national collections. Among many highlights was seeing the gritty paintings of 1930’s New Deal artists like Ben Shahn as well as classical European works. Among the most beautiful were paintings on exhibit in the National Gallery by Jean-Antoine Watteau who turned to prevailing art academy representations that emphasized the human form of workers rather than the conditions of their lives. Rembrandt van Rinj, Nicholas Poussin, and Bernard Fabritius also rendered the biblical story of Ruth and Boaz in exotic settings and costume with a sacred gravity far removed from the period’s gritty realities in rural Europe. Not until Enlightenment attitudes supplanted aristocratic sentiment were peasants more fully reintegrated with aspirations of the rising middle class through art and literature consistent with era’s ideals of fraternity, progress, and rights of the common man. Enlightenment literary attention to gleaning is also notable for its association with feminine aspects of harvest and the state’s professed benevolent concern for the destitute.

USDA Whitten Building Entry Court; Washington, D. C.

Studies of customs and laws on gleaning challenge conventional interpretations that conflict over the poor’s harvest share arose with the emerging market economies of early modern Europe. But very few and obscure references to gleaning are found the late Roman period with the term virtually unknown in documents from the sixth century AD for the next six hundred years. References to the practice that emerge again in twelfth century English and French village by-laws regulate compensation of workers, describe limits to gleaning in village commons typically reserved as pasture, and are not explicitly associated with the poor. The raking of stalks missed by wielders of sickle and scythe had likely become one of the several steps embedded in the typical harvest cycle in which all able-bodied workers participated. 

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Ceres (c. 1718); Commissioned for Pierre Crozat’s Paris Palazzo, oil on canvas, 55 ¾ x 45 ½ inches; Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

The dominant narrative has held that as private ownership of land and the enclosure movement weakened villagers’ traditional communal rights and the aristocratic great estates, capitalistic demands for productivity eroded moral commitments to the impoverished. But gleaning had become conventional harvest practice and had long since lost its distinct association with the indigent. Population increase since the seventeenth century and the growth of Europe’s cities created substantial numbers of landless poor. Rather than addressing the new realities with comprehensive interventions for public welfare, state officials variously enacted archaic gleaning laws that fomented conflict in the countryside instead of ameliorating needs of the dispossessed. Church leaders often invoked religious rhetoric to justify such government efforts by attempting to apply ancient Levitical imperatives and the story of Ruth to distinctly new economic realities emerging in Western Europe.

Shakespeare, Sickles, and Scythes

A few years ago my longtime Tri-City photographer friend, John Clement, and I found ourselves in the pleasant Hessian village of Schotten, Germany, about forty miles north of Frankfurt, a. M. We were helping to lead a tour of that scenic region and I had special interest in learning about farming practices there past and present. John, who is National Photography Hall of Famer, was quite taken by the colorful exhibits in the towns “Homeland” museum which presented information on rural life in past centuries. Liana Vardi (1993) has documented that since the Early Middle Ages gleaning was one of several essential steps in efficient communal harvest for lord or landowner. The process included cutting grain with sickles (or scythes more commonly after the twelfth century), tying and piling sheaves to dry and gather, gathering lost stalks with rakes, and finally carting the crop by wagon to a barn or shelter. Threshing the stalks to remove the nutritious kernels might take place soon after harvest or during winter.

John Clement, Early Modern Harvest Art and Tools Exhibition (2014); Vogelsberg Heimatmuseum; Schotten, Germany

That evidence of gleaning in the biblical sense is little known in medieval art or literature is not as much a matter of peasants understanding the ancient concept as the era’s cultural paradigm of communal sufficiency. Although substantially denied prospect of improved economic conditions, serfs nevertheless could expect the essentials of shelter and sustenance, and access to nearby pasture “commons” provided forage for cattle and sheep. Families and small groups could roam “open” forests beyond manorial fields to gather wood for fuel and gather berries, mushrooms and other resources to supplement diets.

Disruption of European cultural patterns during the fourteenth century took place in the wake of periodic crop failures from 1313 to 1321 due to changes in climate, followed by the Black Death of the 1340s. Famine, plague, and pestilence ravaged throughout the continent to render apocalyptic significance to reaper and scythe as harbingers of death, metaphors since ancient times for widespread loss of life. These conditions raised new considerations during the Middle Ages of mortality and the human condition in this present life. The “bending sickle compass [swath]” of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 119 claims all mortal lovers as if stalks of ripened grain, and elsewhere the bard uses sickle and scythe (e.g., Sonnets 100 and 106) to represent Time.

Agrarianism as Essential Discipline

Many folks will recognize the colorful flowing Great Depression farm art of Thomas Hart Benton. American regionalist painters like Benton and Marion Greenwood sought to portray the tensions of rural social and economic change wrought by the Great Depression and global farm commodity markets. Their British contemporaries included writers George Ewart Evans and Lady Francis Donaldson, and renowned artist-author Claire Leighton. Themes of sustaining values amidst economic dislocation were also subjects of the stirring 1930s harvest photography of Federal Security Administration photographers Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, and Arthur Rothstein.

Ben Shahn, Wheat Field (c. 1958), From Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher (New York, 1971), 8 ⅞ x 12 inches

Rural change in the wake of world wars, the rise of consumerism, and environmental challenges have been explored more recently in essays and stories of conservationists like Russell Lord and Wallace Stegner. As founder of Stanford University’s Writer’s Workshop, Stegner mentored a new generation of influential regionalist authors including Edward Abbey, Scott Momeday, and Wendell Berry. Traditional themes of deliverance drawn from the Bible have been expressed anew in such modern art as Chagall’s Ruth Gleaning the Grain (1960), Ben Shahn’s Wheatfield—Ecclesiastes (1967), and recent operatic works by Lennox Berkeley and James Niblock. One of the founding “mystic artists” of the abstract Northwest School, Mark Tobey (1890-1975) painted After the Harvest (1970) and The Harvest’s Gleanings (1975) with the small, overlapping brush strokes that suggest the Oriental influence of his spiritual beliefs.

The reciprocating influences of agrarian art and literature offer important understandings to this contrasting complex of cultural ideas involving fulfillment and struggles with rural labor, individual and cooperative endeavors, and the facts and fictions of life on the land and impacts of technology. Progressive change to promote well-being of the countryside and future generations can be unwisely limited by amnesia as well as nostalgia. Amnesia is forgetting about cultural legacies bequeathed by ancestors and society, while nostalgia appeals to life in some halcyon past often overlook very real challenges of such times. We remember places, mark lines and verses, and appropriate elders’ counsel for synergy and solidarity to foster human flourishing and to safeguard natural resources for future generations. For these reasons aesthetic understanding through agrarian art and literature remains an essential discipline.