Review Essay: Cultivating a Rhetoric of Agrarianism

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Notes

1. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 4, 7.

2. Berry, Unsettling, 7.

3. Berry, Unsettling, 14.

4. Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, Paris, 23 August 1785, in Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 818.

5. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1962).

6. Liberty Hyde Bailey, Holy Earth (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916); J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); Wes Jackson, Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011); Frederick L. Kirschenman, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2010).

7. Eric Freyfogle, “Introduction: A Durable Scale,” in The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life, ed. Eric Freyfogle (Washington DC: Island Press, 2001), xiii–xli, xiv.

8. Freyfogle, “Introduction,” xiii.

9. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform from Bryan to F.D.R (New York: Vintage Books, 1955); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).

10. For a discussion of these movements see especially Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Country-Life Movement in the United States (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920); Bernadette Brexel, The Populist Party: A Voice for the Farmers in an Industrial Society (New York: Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2004); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Edward Winslow Martin, History of the Grange Movement (Chicago: National Publishing Company, 1874); Michael J. Lee, “The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 355–78; D. Sven Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867–1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1974); Carl C. Taylor, Rural Life in the United States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1949); Gene Wunderlich, American Country Life: A Legacy (New York: University Press of America, 2003).

11. Norman Wirzba, “Introduction: Why Agrarianism Matters—Even to Urbanites,” in The Essential Agrarian Reader (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), 4.

12. Martin P. Andersen, “Discussion in Agriculture,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 37 (1951): 463–68; James R. Andrews, “Spindles vs. Acres: Rhetorical Perspectives on the British Free Trade Movement,” Western Speech 38 (1974): 41–52; Stephen H. Browne, “The Pastoral Voice in John Dickinson's First Letter from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 46–57; Leroy G. Dorsey, “The Frontier Myth in Presidential Rhetoric: Theodore Roosevelt's Campaign for Conservation,” Western Journal of Communication 59 (1995): 1–19; Jeremy Engels, “Reading the Riot Act: Rhetoric, Psychology, and Counter-Revolutionary Discourse in Shays's Rebellion, 1786–1787,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 63–88; Robert G. Gunderson, “‘The Calamity Howlers,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 26 (1940): 401–11; John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen, “Ethnic Heritage as Rhetorical Legacy: The Plan of Delano,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 53–70; Tarla Rai Peterson, Sharing the Earth: The Rhetoric of Sustainable Development (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); Tarla Rai Peterson, “Telling the Farmers’ Story: Competing Responses to Soil Conservation Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (August 1991): 289–308.

13. Carlnita P. Greene, Janet M. Cramer, and Lynn M. Walters, eds., Food as Communication/Communication as Food (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011); Laura Lindenfeld and Kristin M. Langellier, eds., “Food in Performance/Food as Performance,” Special issue, Text and Performance Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2009); Andy Opel, Josée Johnston, and Richard Wilk, eds., “Food, Culture and the Environment: Communicating about What We Eat,” Special issue, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 4, no. 3 (2010).

14. Ross Singer, “The Corporate Colonization of Communication about Global Hunger: Development, Biotechnology, and Discursive Closure in the Monsanto Pledge,” in Food as Communication/Communication as Food, 405–27.

15. Wayne D. Rasmussen, “The Civil War: A Catalyst of Agricultural Revolution,” Agricultural History 39 (1965): 187–95.

16. David Bell, “Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror,” in Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and Rurality, eds. Paul Cloke and Jo Little (London: Routledge, 1997), 94–108; Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Kristin Van Tassel, “Nineteenth-Century American Antebellum Literature: The Yeoman Becomes a Country Bumpkin,” American Studies 43 (2002): 51–73.

17. Across subsequent decades, discriminatory practices contributed to a decline in black farmer-controlled acreage from 15 million to 2 million between 1920 and 1997. In “Track I” of the resulting 1999 settlement agreement of the Pigford case, $100 million was paid to over 15,000 black farmers, with a later “Track II” payment of $1.25 billion passed in 2010 for others among the initial 94,000 farmers who had filed claims. See Tadlock Cowan and Jody Feder, The Pigford Cases: USDA Settlement of Discrimination Suits by Black Farmers,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, no. RS20430, http://www.nationalaglawce nter.org/assets/crs/RS20430.pdf.

18. Carolyn Marvin, “The Body of the Text: Literacy's Corporeal Constant,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 129–49.

19. William P. Browne, Jerry. R. Skees, Louis E. Swanson, Paul B. Thompson, and Laurian J. Unnevehr, Sacred Cows and Hot Potatoes: Agarian Myths in Agricultural Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 13.

20. Bell, “Anti-Idyll”; Stewart, A Space.

21. James Jasinski, “The Status of Theory and Method in Rhetorical Criticism,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 249–70.

22. Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 257–82; Greg Dickinson, “Joe's Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbuck's,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 5–27; Gregory Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004); Tema Milstein, Claudia Anguiano, Jennifer Sandoval, Yea-Wen Chen, and Elizabeth Dickinson, “Communicating a New Environmental Vernacular: A Sense of Relations-in-Place,” Communication Monographs 78 (2011): 486–510; Jenny Rice, ed., “Regional Rhetorics,” Special issue, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2012).

23. See, for example, Thomas R. Burkholder, “Kansas Populism, Woman Suffrage, and the Agrarian Myth: A Case Study in the Limits of Mythic Transcendence,” Communication Studies 40 (1989): 292–307; John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen, The Rhetorical Career of César Chávez (College Station: Texas A&M University, 1998).

24. Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 222.

25. Jean P. Retzinger, “Cultivating the Agrarian Myth in Hollywood Films,” in Enviropop: Studies of Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture, eds. Mark Meister and Phyllis M. Japp (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 25–62.

26. Ross Singer, “Visualizing Agrarian Myth and Place-Based Resistance in South Central Los Angeles,” Environmental Communication 5 (2011): 344–49; Ross Singer, “Anti-Corporate Argument and the Spectacle of the Grotesque Rhetorical Body in Super Size Me,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 82 (2011): 135–52.

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Notes on contributors

Jeff Motter

Jeff Motter is Assistant Professor of Communication at Appalachian State University

Ross Singer

Ross Singer is Assistant Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University