The Holy Earth. Liberty Hyde Bailey
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to Bailey’s significance. Members of the academy who are attuned to the urgent need for a public agrarian vision have also begun to rally behind Bailey in recent years. Philosophy and ethics scholar James A. Montmarquet argues that “if there is a single ‘solution’ to be found to the problem of formulating a viable agrarian philosophy today, its main lines are to be found in Liberty Hyde Bailey’s writings and philosophy.”7 Scholar Ben Minteer has published important work on Bailey’s significance to civic pragmatism and argues that The Holy Earth “deserves to be on the short list of American environmental classics.”8 Historian of environmentalism Kevin C. Armitage argues that “Bailey’s thought was more radically ecological than any of his peers save John Muir” and cites him as exemplary of the strain of Progressive-Era conservationism that integrated nineteenth-century romanticism into the framework of American pragmatism, defying the era’s more technocratic impulses.9 Paul A. Morgan and Scott J. Peters use the wider corpus of Bailey’s environmental philosophy to argue that in it lie the seeds of a new “planetary agrarianism,” and that furthermore Bailey’s entire lifework — his nature-study advocacy, his leadership in the Country- Life Movement, his democratic vision for land-grant and extension education as early Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, even his academic agenda to have botanists “climb the garden fence” and bring the science of botany to bear on the study of cultivated plants (horticulture)10 — can best be described in terms of collective worldview transition, supported by organizations but enacted and lived out by everyday independent individuals, a ground-up but integrated approach to reform that speaks even more forcibly to the corporatized, industrial world of today.11 Even in 1915, Bailey worried that we were too “tied up” (34, 36).
Bailey first began to commit his massive vision to book-length form in the Rural Outlook Set — four volumes that each treated his idea of a necessary “rural outlook” to counteract the dehumanization of bureaucratic society, each from a different perspective: The Nature-Study Idea (1903), The Outlook to Nature (1905), The State and the Farmer (1909), and The Country-Life Movement in the United States (1911). In 1913, just a few years after chairing President Theodore Roosevelt’s national Commission on Country-Life and after serving for ten years as Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell, Bailey stepped away from his institutional affiliations to “retire,” which meant for him the chance to focus his unflagging work on the topics that most concerned him. When Roosevelt urged him, nearing retirement, to run for governor of New York on the Progressive ticket, Bailey all but laughed the suggestion off — “Never have we needed the separate soul so much as now,” he would write a year later (88).
It was on a sea voyage in 1914 to give a series of lectures in New Zealand that he reportedly began writing down a new kind of work, one that would take all of his diverse philosophical and civic ideals and weave them into a single, condensed articulation. “On the backs of letters, scraps of paper, anything which came to his hand,” as one biographer writes, and under an open sky with the unending sea around him, he wrote the book that would most carry him into the future.12
While he was at sea and in the process of writing, the First World War broke in Europe, sending the conference he was traveling to, the Australasian meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, into a scramble throughout Bailey’s time in New Zealand. Many of his fellow scholars from Europe chose to return to their home countries rather than stay for the conference, although Bailey remained to give at least one of his planned lectures, on the topic of “Research as the Basis of Rural Life.”13 The constant news of Europe’s unraveling no doubt lent urgency to Bailey’s writing and shaped his discussion of that “war of commercial frenzy” (18).
While a global, oceanic perspective lent something of the wild “salt” to his masterful concluding chapter on “the ancestral sea” and the outbreak of the Great War imposed new urgency on the project, strong in his mind too were the influences of his humble upbringing on his parents’ farm outside of South Haven, Michigan, which had then grown from the ramshackle pioneer settlement of Bailey’s childhood into a bustling fruit town.14 He found himself visiting that farm several times in the years leading up to his New Zealand trip in order to help manage the sale of the property in the wake of his father’s death and his mother’s decline. In letters to his brother, he wrote that he hated to see the property go, but that there was no way around it — as he spent time there and helped his family let go of the place, his memories of growing up in a rural frontier community must have shaped his thinking.15 We see that influence in the deeply personal penultimate chapter on “the open fields,” which includes a description of South Haven and the surrounding countryside, as well as in the previous chapter describing the “primeval forest.” Each of these environments literally formed the “background” of his young life and the outlook he would carry with him to his last years. And, truly, the open vista of the sea did not present a scene foreign to him — in addition to his prior sea voyages to Europe and the Caribbean for his research, he grew up not much more than a mile from the shore of Lake Michigan. We cannot doubt the effect on a young child of standing on South Haven’s sandy beaches, tracing the straight line between water and sky and wondering at the vastness that stretched from infinity right up to the harbor of his little hometown. In the farmhouse of his childhood, now a museum, still sit two clumsy, rough-hewn canoe paddles with the initials “L. B.” carved into them. Alongside them, a curiously resonant artifact, lies his father’s old garden hoe, the blade worn thin, four distinct finger grooves opposite a long thumb groove rubbed into the handle’s wood through years of steady work. In some ways, the closeness of home must never have felt all that disconnected from the vastness of the world. That world lay just beyond the garden, and in it. In that sense, his “backgrounds” were much more than backdrops; as he argues in this book, these “large environments in which we live but which we do not make […] to which we adjust our civilization, and by which we measure ourselves” (97) also provided the conditions of his flourishing, and he flourished more the more aware he remained of his place in those landscapes. The cultivation of this awareness had been central to much of his writing since his first book in 1885, the year he turned twenty-seven, and now, when the conditions of his work threatened to take him too far into the “vague heresies” of abstraction (97), he finally found a way in the middle of his life to disconnect and reframe his work, independently, and reorient toward the natural and agricultural world that he saw as foundational to society. The first major book that came to him then was The Holy Earth.
According to his biographer, Bailey believed this book would last long after most of his others had faded16 — which, between those he wrote and those he edited, numbered around two hundred — but he was long dissatisfied with its success. The documentary fragments that remain of the book’s publication history attest both to Bailey’s meticulous perfectionism and to his frustrations with the book’s popular reception.17 He worried that Macmillan, his usual publisher, would not handle this new work adequately — he was known through their readership not as a philosopher, but primarily for his highly successful books that accessibly brought the latest scientific findings of horticulture and agriculture to rural readers eager for such practical knowledge. He may also have been dissatisfied with the earlier reception of his other philosophical books, like The Outlook to Nature. So he entered into a contract with Charles Scribner’s Sons, but production records indicate a book that never took off, and despite strong reviews from such prominent voices as John Burroughs and The Nation (which along with other blurbs used for promotion are reproduced in the front of this volume) the number of copies printed in the first years of production after 1915 rapidly declined. From the beginning Bailey’s protectiveness for the book was such that he managed an atypical agreement with Scribner’s, in which the editors agreed to transfer ownership to him of the metal printer’s plates in the event that they mutually decided for Scribner’s to cease publication. By 1918 Bailey had regained those plates and the book was being handled by the Comstock Publishing Company, a local company in Ithaca, New York, run by his close friends and fellow naturists John Henry and Anna Botsford Comstock. The book seems not to have fared any better with them, however, and eventually, in 1923, Bailey assented to requests from Macmillan that they be the sole publishers of whatever of his works remained in print. Yet sales still floundered.
Today,