But a man’s free condition is of two parts: the instinctive freeness he experiences as an animal dweller on a planet, and the practical liberties he enjoys as a privileged member of human society. The latter is, of the two, more generally understood, more widely admired, more violently challenged and discussed. It is the practical and apparent side of freedom. The United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write their plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state. This is a fact and should give every person pause.

  To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be free, in a social sense, is to feel at home in a democratic framework. In Adolf Hitler, although he is a freely flowering individual, we do not detect either type of sensibility. From reading his book I gather that his feeling for earth is not a sense of communion but a driving urge to prevail. His feeling for men is not that they co-exist, but that they are capable of being arranged and standardized by a superior intellect—that their existence suggests not a fulfillment of their personalities but a submersion of their personalities in the common racial destiny. His very great absorption in the destiny of the German people somehow loses some of its effect when you discover, from his writings, in what vast contempt he holds all people. “I learned,” he wrote, “… to gain an insight into the unbelievably primitive opinions and arguments of the people.” To him the ordinary man is a primitive, capable only of being used and led. He speaks continually of people as sheep, halfwits, and impudent fools—the same people from whom he asks the utmost in loyalty, and to whom he promises the ultimate in prizes.

  Here in America, where our society is based on belief in the individual, not contempt for him, the free principle of life has a chance of surviving. I believe that it must and will survive. To understand freedom is an accomplishment all men may acquire who set their minds in that direction; and to love freedom is a tendency many Americans are born with. To live in the same room with freedom, or in the same hemisphere, is still a profoundly shaking experience for me.

  One of the earliest truths (and to him most valuable) that the author of Mein Kampf discovered was that it is not the written word, but the spoken word, that in heated moments moves great masses of people to noble or ignoble action. The written word, unlike the spoken word, is something every person examines privately and judges calmly by his own intellectual standards, not by what the man standing next to him thinks. “I know,” wrote Hitler, “that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than by the written word….” Later he adds contemptuously: “For let it be said to all knights of the pen and to all the political dandies, especially of today: the greatest changes in this world have never yet been brought about by a goose quill! No, the pen has always been reserved to motivate these changes theoretically.”

  Luckily I am not out to change the world—that’s being done for me, and at a great clip. But I know that the free spirit of man is persistent in nature; it recurs, and has never successfully been wiped out, by fire or flood. I set down the above remarks merely (in the words of Mr. Hitler) to motivate that spirit, theoretically. Being myself a knight of the goose quill, I am under no misapprehension about “winning people”; but I am inordinately proud these days of the quill, for it has shown itself, historically, to be the hypodermic that inoculates men and keeps the germ of freedom always in circulation, so that there are individuals in every time in every land who are the carriers, the Typhoid Marys, capable of infecting others by mere contact and example. These persons are feared by every tyrant—who shows his fear by burning the books and destroying the individuals. A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction that comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off—even before the political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumbrance.

  [ August 1940 ]

  THE PRACTICAL FARMER

  My publishers have presented me with H. A. Highstone’s book Practical Farming for Beginners, the sly inference being that I have much to learn. Publishers are on the whole well satisfied to have their writers disappear into rural circumstances, but they are genuinely concerned about how we put in our time. I am sure that, like parents whose children have left home, publishers are often visited with vague forebodings, sudden twinges of fear, the feeling that something is about to fall on writers—an eight-pound striking hammer perhaps, or a fit of loneliness.

  There are ample grounds for this alarm. When a person who has been accustomed to making his living by writing attempts to combine this heavy work with the even heavier work of growing some of his own food, the consequences may be grave. If recent book lists are any indication, the country must be overrun with writers who are whipping their environment into shape for publication. The strain is very great, on both nature and man, and I sometimes wonder which will crack first. There is something ominous about an impatient author, with a deadline to meet, keeping petulant vigil in a pumpkin patch so that he will be on time with his impressions of fall.

  For me, always looking for an excuse to put off work, a farm is the perfect answer, good for twenty-four hours of the day. I find it extremely difficult to combine manual labor with intellectual, so I compromise and just do the manual. Since coming to the country I have devoted myself increasingly to the immediate structural and surgical problems that present themselves to any farmer, be he ever so comical in his methods and his designs. I have drifted farther and farther from my muse, closer and closer to my post-hole digger.

  The blurb that accompanies Practical Farming for Beginners states that the book will be welcomed by “an increasing number of American people who, fed up with the pressure of city living, are going back to the land for their livelihood.” That shows that publishers do not understand the situation. Pressure of city living? No pressure that I ever knew in town compares with the pressure of country living. Never before in my life have I been so pressed as in the past two years. Forty acres can push a man hard even when he isn’t in debt, provided he loves them and is an easy victim to the stuff he reads in the bulletins. Pressure! I’ve been on the trot now for a long time and don’t know whether I’ll ever get slowed down. Today is our bean harvest, and even the beans in their screw-top jars are under pressure (ten pounds) in our new pressure canner, so hot are we to get them processed in one-third the time it might otherwise take. And when there is pressure up in the kitchen, it transmits itself to the whole place, and the tension becomes noticeable in all departments.

  One morning a few months ago, during a particularly busy time, when I awoke I didn’t dare get dressed: I knew that my only hope of getting an overdue piece written was to stay in bed—which is where I did stay. I told my wife it was a slight sore throat, but it was a simple case of voluntary confinement. It was the first time I had ever taken to bed in the full blush of health simply because I didn’t dare face the economic consequences of putting my pants on.

  Mr. Highstone’s book presents a formula for subsistence farming, that is, farming for consumption rather than for profit, farming to produce all one’s needs. It is the best diagram of that scheme I have studied. It is hardboiled, sound, persuasive, and convincing. On that account I regard it as one of the most dangerous of books, capable of destroying whole families, wiping them out like flies; for it suggests that any city man of average ability can create, within a couple of years and with his own hands, a satisfactory and secure economy based on the land, independent of any other source. This I do not believe. I believe that relatively few city-bred men are capable of achieving self-sufficiency through farming, and that, on the whole, the ones that might be capable of it wouldn’t be particularly interested in it. Mr. Highstone is obviously a man with a gift for organization. He possesses a dauntless spirit, a keen financial sense, and the sort of mechanical ability that makes him jack-of-all-trades. He even writes well. He is informed, and he tells what he knows. His chapter called “The Chicken Trap” could only have been written by a man who had experienced the disappointments of an ill-planned poultry venture and who had learned to hate the very guts of a hen. It should certainly be read and digested by any person who dreams of lightening his old age by collecting eggs at sundown.

  Briefly Mr. Highstone’s formula is this:

  To sustain yourself on the land, you must first get straight in your head that there is to be no nonsense about “making a profit.” There is to be no buying of chicken feed by the bag and marketing of eggs by the dozen cases. You must simply create a farm that will produce, directly, everything you need including a small regular cash income (not profit). Any deviation from this course will get you into hot water. Furthermore, you must have enough capital at the start so that you won’t be mortgaging your future. Mr. Highstone tells you how many thousands of dollars you will need to get started, how many acres you must buy (how many in grass, how many in grain, how many in gardens), and he names the animals you will need, the number of tons of every grain you must produce, the extra amount of cream and eggs you must sell to provide the monthly check, and the equipment you will need in house and barn. He faces life with confidence, and by the time you have read the book you, too, will face life with confidence and will believe that you can harness a team and hold a plow.

  To create a self-sustaining farm, he says, you must have the following set-up:

  Three cows.

  One hundred hens (no more, no less).

  A team of horses (which you buy after reading Farmer’s Bulletin 779, “How to Select a Sound Horse”).

  Three or four hogs. (Usually Mr. Highstone is much more specific than this and says definitely three, or definitely four, but in this case there is a little leeway and you can decide between three hogs and four hogs.)

  A hive of bees.

  Enough land to grow all the feed for the above animals and for yourself and family, namely, ten tons of grain, fifteen tons of hay, and the usual vegetables and fruits. That’s what you have to have. From these animals and this land you will receive all the food you and your family need, plus forty dollars a month—$25 from eggs, $15 from cream.

  The principle on which this method of subsistence works is this:

  The cow is the foundation on which the structure is built. The cow provides the means of producing, from the land, the indispensable commodities, milk, butter, and cheese. Furthermore the cow provides skimmilk, the by-product that makes diversification possible. Skim milk contains the protein that makes chickens lay eggs and makes hogs grow. This protein is ordinarily provided (on profit-and-loss farms) by expensive concentrates bought at a grain store—laying mash, hog ration, etc. Mr. Highstone will have you buy nothing, and he is very stern about that. It’s forbidden, and if you start slipping and buy a bag of grain, your whole structure will topple. The cow also provides surplus cream, which is saleable and from which you get a monthly check, along with a check for the eggs that the hens laid because they were fed skim milk and that they wouldn’t have laid if they had been on a straight grain diet.

  The author admits that there is nothing new or original about this scheme; his contribution is in establishing the correct balance and in pointing out the fallacy of disturbing the balance by adding here or subtracting there. Thus the scheme fails, for instance, if the farmer reduces his hens to a flock of twelve or increases them to a flock of five hundred; twelve hens won’t provide extra money from the sale of eggs, and five hundred hens will turn into a poultry farm and will take more time than a diversified farmer can give and will consume more food than he can raise on his property.

  Mr. Highstone, being himself a practicing farmer, knows one important truth about country life: he knows that farming is about twenty per cent agriculture and eighty per cent mending something that has got busted. Farming is a sort of glorified repair job. This is a truth that takes some people years to discover, and many farmers go their whole lives without ever really grasping the idea. A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus. The repair aspect of farming looms so large that, on a place like my own, which is not really a farm at all but merely a private zoo, sometimes months go by when nothing but repair goes on. I can get so absorbed in the construction of a barn door that I can let the spring planting season go right by without ever opening the ground or sowing a seed. If I were engaged in making myself self-sustaining, I should perhaps be a little wider awake; but I know, from experience, that at any given moment of the year I would be found doing the wrong thing, and with a dull tool. I mention this because the weakness in Mr. Highstone’s book is not in his plan for subsistence but in the people who are going to carry it out. In spite of all his warnings, there will be plenty of them who will get sidetracked, probably along the line of some special hobby, hitherto unindulged. I have been fooling around this place for a couple of years, but nobody calls my activity agriculture. I simply like to play with animals. Nobody knows this better than I do—although my neighbors know it well enough and on the whole have been tolerant and sympathetic.

  Mr. Highstone wisely insists that the man who intends to get a living from the land begin not by studying agronomy but by learning to hollow-grind an ax and file a saw. He insists that you equip yourself, immediately, with dozens of tools and implements including a pipe vise, a drill press, a forge, and a 2-horse stationary gasoline engine. “The fact,” says Mr. Highstone, “that a man may be unfamiliar with some of them should never daunt him.” I have a strong suspicion, although I know nothing about Mr. Highstone, that his years in the city were spent dreaming not so much about fields of ripening grain as about a shop equipped with a pipe vise. The ecstatic passages in his book are not the ones dealing with husbandry and tillage but the ones dealing with edge tools. He demands that the subsistence farmer equip himself right at the start with four hundred dollars’ worth of implements and tools, including a walking plow, a two-horse spike harrow, a one-horse row cultivator, a wire hayrake, a mowing machine, a buck rake, a stone boat, a farm wagon, a roller, a disk harrow, and a long list of tools ending with an assortment of nuts and bolts, washers, and wood screws. (Incidentally, he forgot a crowbar, a clawbar, a block-and-tackle, and a pair of tinner’s snips, without which my own life would be empty indeed.)

  In all this, and in fact in his pattern for a self-contained farm, he seems to me essentially sound. It is only in his assumption that a city man of average intelligence, strength, and will power can operate a self-contained farm that he appears fanciful. Some of the bald statements in his book are open to question. He says: “Anyone with brains enough to pound sand can successfully raise chickens.” I think that is a misleading pronouncement. Raising chickens (except in very small quantities) is partly luck, partly experience, and partly a sort of gift, or talent.

  In another place Mr. Highstone actually suggests that the subsistence family harvest its own grain crop by mowing it with a mowing machine and making sheaves by hand. Remember that the grain harvest is ten tons, or 200 sacks of grain each weighing one hundred pounds. And remember also that the grain harvest comes at the same season as the canning—those 600 Mason jars that have to be filled. It would take a large family of stalwart sons and daughters to put through that program without cracking. Some of the jars are going to crack even if the children don’t.

  The life of self-sufficiency in this 20th century is the dream of persons with a nostalgic respect for early American vitality and ingenuity. It conflicts, temperamentally, with modern ways. If I were to attempt to put myself on a self-sustaining basis I know that for practical reasons I would have to throw the master switch in the cellar and send my regrets to the Power Company, not simply because I couldn’t afford to buy power on forty dollars a month but because the possession of power in the household leads on into paths that are inimical to self-sufficiency. They lead direct to the profit (and loss) system. Mr. Highstone devotes a section to the septic tank and sewage-disposal system; but my first step in the direction of security on the land would be to abandon all flush toilets, not because I don’t approve of them but because they can destroy one’s economy. People differ about plumbing. Mr. Highstone proposes to lick plumbing with a pipe vise. His is the manly approach. But I know my limitations. The practical way for me to lick plumbing is not to have any. I would also have to abandon my electric refrigerator, my electric water pump, my electric water heater, my electric lights, and I would have to sell my furnace and use the coal bin for storing root vegetables. There are days when I could take the leap with a glad cry; there are other days when I would hesitate.