This commentary is by David Moats of Salisbury. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
Sugaring season is when Vermonters participate in that cherished rural tradition, passed down through the generations and connecting them again with the land and the seasons.
Much has changed over the years — the plastic tubing and reverse osmosis used in sugaring today — and also with agriculture as a whole. But connecting with those traditions is what many of us who came to Vermont in the 1970s were trying to do. We were trying to connect with the generation of our grandparents, who came of age in an era before the automobile, before radio and television, when a significant proportion of Americans lived on the farm. In Vermont some of them were gathering and boiling sap.
There has always been a tendency to romanticize rural living, despite the daily struggle of wresting a living from the soil. Those picturesque hill farms that consist now of meadows, woods and miles of stone walls were often just scraping by — stubborn efforts at subsistence farming, sometimes successful but often marginal. There’s a reason those farms aren’t there anymore.
In America back then a significant percentage of the population fell into the category of what may be called the peasantry. Peasant is a word with a pejorative connotation, and in the United States, other words are used, also pejorative: hillbilly, rube, redneck, hick. Sometimes these rural folks were tenant farmers or sharecroppers.
In New England, a term with a positive connotation is often used: yeoman farmer. They were people working on the land, sometimes land and homes that they owned, but sometimes land they rented or hired themselves out to work on. Some were well-off and well-established; some were on the edge of impoverishment. They formed a major segment of society that has existed for thousands of years all around the world.
Until the last 50 years, that is. This is the theme of a recent book called “Remembering Peasants” by Patrick Joyce, an Irish historian who explores the disappearance of the peasantry throughout the world and what it means to contemporary society.
He notes that the urban population of the world has risen from 20% to 60% since 1950. He says that in France — “once the greatest peasant country in Europe” — the percentage of people in agriculture fell from 23% in 1950 to 3% today.
It’s a familiar story. My grandfather grew up with numerous siblings on a farm in Maryland, and he saw there wasn’t going to be enough work on the farm for him, so he went to Washington, D.C., to study accounting. That was around 1910. Later he went to work in Idaho for the newly formed Forest Service.
He was a sagacious outdoorsman and wily fisherman and our link to the rural past. And yet my children did not know their great-grandparents, nor were they exposed to that rural consciousness, except as they encountered it growing up the 1980s and 1990s in Vermont. By then it was becoming a thing of the past.
In my early years as a journalist in Vermont, I made an effort to talk to old-timers about their memories of those old days. For one story I went out in the woods with a sugarmaker and his team of horses as it pulled the gathering tank for the collection of sap. Many of my generation tried to absorb rural ways as we could; I learned to garden. Meanwhile, Vermont agriculture, like agriculture everywhere, was consolidating and going industrial.
One of the aims of Joyce’s book is to explore what has been lost by the demise of the peasantry — in Ireland, Poland and elsewhere. Intimate knowledge of the natural world is one thing. Self-sufficiency among people who had to do for themselves is another. The stabilizing force and social cohesiveness of traditional mores have diminished. Modern life promotes individual self-expression. Peasant societies promoted cultural and social conservatism.
Thus, people fled the countryside, not just for economic reasons, but for personal freedom and the self-expression that could only happen away from the old homestead.
So if selfishness and lack of social cohesion are a plague to us today, it is worth considering how we got here. Wendell Berry has been an eloquent chronicler of the impoverishment of rural life in America. He has watched it happen in his part of Kentucky, where farms have gone out, jobs have disappeared and drugs and deaths of despair have been on the rise.
In Vermont a new generation of farmers has worked to reinvigorate life on the farm with new ideas about organic food, cheesemaking and diverse niche products for a new marketplace. This isn’t the peasantry or the old-time subsistence farmers. They are farmers by choice, a new thing, answering the global transformation of rural economies.
Farmers around the world are struggling — they have mounted protests in France and elsewhere. But the land and the value of rural living have not been forgotten. I remember how proud my grandfather was of his prolific cucumber vines and his juicy red tomatoes. I think he would approve of mine.
Read the story on VTDigger here: David Moats: Tapping the past.