the captured garden: the political ecology of subsistence under capitalism

The Captured Garden: The Political Ecology ofSubsistence under Capitalism

Steven StollFordham University

Abstract

Household subsistence food production did not disappear under capitalism; instead, itfunctioned within the circulation of capital. British lords and American mining companymanagers realized that the same practices that once resulted in autonomy for peasantsand mountain-dwelling households could be absorbed, “captured,” to subsidize wages.This article considers the captured garden in two forms. The first resulted in capitalaccumulation, while the second sustained the unemployed without public assistance.Both appeared in West Virginia between the 1880s and the 1930s. Gardens moved intothe coal camps, encouraged and compelled by the companies. During the GreatDepression the Roosevelt administration established the Division of SubsistenceHomesteads, combining gardens and factory wages as a relief program. Both formsillustrate the paradox of subsistence production under capitalism: A practice that forcenturies created no surplus value could be made to do just that; an institution once thestronghold of the household could cause dependency and immiseration.

There is a story that overhangs the history of recent times. It says that societiespass through stages from hunting to herding to farming to the buying andselling of commodities, including land and labor. The story holds that everystage supplants the one before it. Yet while political economists defined subsis-tence food production as belonging to a savage past, they also knew that it con-tinued within the circulation of capital. Adam Smith described a class of“out-servants of the landlords,” who “receive from their masters … a house, asmall garden for pot herbs, as much grass as will feed a cow, and, perhaps, anacre or two of bad arable land.” British capitalists did not eliminate self-provisioning when they extinguished the rights of peasants to the commonlands but absorbed it–in a sense, “captured” it–reassigning the garden and live-stock from their longstanding role as the stronghold of the household to thereproduction of industrial labor.1

In the United States after the Civil War the last communities of subsistencehunters and farmers lost the wherewithal to endure, including Cheyenne andSioux forced onto reservations, African-Americans forced out of the Georgiawoods by fence laws, and southern whites forced to flee barren hillsides forthe company towns operated by coal mining corporations. Yet they did notsurvive on wages exclusively. When mining companies recognized that house-hold gardens served their interests, they declared them acceptable, evennecessary.2

International Labor and Working-Class HistoryNo. 85, Spring 2014, pp. 1–22# International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2014doi:10.1017/S0147547913000471

This article considers the capture of the subsistence garden in two forms––capital accumulation and public relief. Both appeared in West Virginia betweenthe 1880s and the 1930s. The same gardens that once produced beans andsquashes as part of a hierarchy of mountain land use arrived in colliery villagesafter corporations gained title to hollows. Later, the United States attempted toresettle unemployed coal miners in industrial villages, as part of the Division ofSubsistence Homesteads. My purpose is to explore the political ecology of thehousehold garden at the moment when it changed locations from thecommons to the company, from the ridge above the mine to the yard next tothe shanty. Yet the political ecology of the captured garden also includes resist-ance to its logic. All over the Atlantic World provision grounds became con-tested ground between the poor and the powerful over who would controlfood and the terms of labor.

Political ecology is the study of power relations as expressed in conflict overlandscapes and land use. It regards every environmental change as the outcomeof contending political interests. Scholars whose writing considers commonresources and enclosure in the United States include Steven Hahn, KarlJacoby, Louis Warren, Mark David Spence, and Sara Gregg. While thecommons figures in the story I tell here, its destruction (by way of logging) pre-figures the capture of the garden. The fight for the commons continued fordecades and plays a part in the transition to wage labor that I will discuss, butmy interest is with the dislocation of subsistence into a regime of wage work.3

Historians of capitalism have been writing about how casual work outsideof wages helped early industrial working-class households to survive and howwomen, in particular, did everything from peddling to gardening. As JeanneBoydston explains, “Within the household, wives’ labor produced as much ashalf of the family subsistence. Beyond the household, the value of houseworkaccrued to the owners of mills and factories and shops, who were able to pay‘Subsistence’ wages at levels which in fact represented only a fraction of thereal price of workers’ survival.” Yet this literature considers unpaid laborwithout the control of the landscape that preceded the scramble for subsistence,and it adds gardening to a list of casual occupations rather than treat it directly,as a specific form that became a location of struggle. This article, and the book ofwhich it will form a part, would have been impossible without the works ofenvironmental historians, historical geographers, economic anthropologists,and historians of Appalachia, including Don Mitchell, Wilma Dunaway,Michael Dove, Ronald Eller, Mart A. Stewart. Mark A. Lause, Paul Salstrom,Mike Davis, and Nick Cullather.4

Coal companies did not invent the captured garden, the British aristocracydid. Landlords realized that they could ensure adequate nutrition for theirworkers and reduce the sums they paid in wages by shifting the burden ofsurvival onto laboring households. Although the cottar had existed for centuriesand continued under capitalist social relations, most political economists––whotook it upon themselves to describe and justify capitalism––ignored the arrange-ment, preferring a simplified social physics based on the behavior of individuals.

2 ILWCH, 85, Spring 2014

Lords knew better, however, that production and consumption remained collec-tive activities for workers only recently dispossessed of the common lands, andthey literally capitalized on the longstanding skills and desires of formerpeasants.

A household consists of any group of related people who live together,pool their resources, and eat from the same pot. Life under the roof andaround the table is a cooperative venture and a struggle for power that has asits singular goal the survival of its members. This logic of survival leads agrarianhouseholds to self-exploit, meaning that they invest any and all labor necessaryto feed and reproduce themselves, regardless of whether or not the monetaryvalue of their crops or animals justifies the expenditure. In other words, the“product” of the peasant household is the peasant household.

This drive to survive as a collective did not diminish in those instanceswhere households lost access to land and became an asset to those whoemployed them. Writes Hans Medick, “Family economic production becameeffective above all because of the inclination of the poor, landless producersto fall back on ‘self-exploitation.’” When wives, sisters, young sons, and grand-parents pulled weeds and thinned potato stems, they made up the differencebetween an inadequate wage distributed over all the members of the familyand the hunger in their stomachs. By expending their own labor-power to repro-duce the labor-power of the male wage earner they became––in effect––co-earners of the wage. Employers accumulated additional capital as though bymagic––without paying more workers, extending the working day, or purchasingadditional tools. In this way, gardens increased exploitation, defined as the valueworkers received in wages as a portion of the total surplus value they created.5

The earliest example of this self-exploitation for capital was the cottar: onewho paid rent (often deducted from wages) on a small house and garden locatedon an estate. John Sinclair represented the interests of enclosing lords when hesuggested that the cottar, “raise, by his own labour, some of the most materialarticles of subsistence for himself and his family.” Cottar households couldeven sell some of what they raised in local markets, but not enough to makethem independent. Instead, they would continue to “assist the neighboringfarmers, at all seasons, almost equally as well as if they had no land in their occu-pation.” Sinclair figured it all out: Hired hands needed only three acres andeighty days a year to raise all or most of their food. The work would take up“bye hours” and Sundays, leaving 285 days for “ordinary hand labour.” Onesource from 1808, cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to cottages asa form of “bondage.”6

But nowhere did the cottar achieve greater popularity among British capi-talists than in Ireland. In the 1840s dislodged Irish peasants composed an indi-gent labor force, obtainable, wrote Sir Robert Kane, “on lower terms thanalmost any other in Europe.” There was only one problem: Starving peoplecan’t work. “Supplied only with the lowest descriptions of food,” in Kane’s icyassessment, “they have not the physical ability.” The solution: Let them feedthemselves. Landowners substituted cheap soil nutrients for expensive wages,

The Captured Garden 3

allowing them to invest their money elsewhere and still purchase a higher stan-dard of work. Cottars would improve their diets and gain a sense of proprietor-ship that might keep them from rising up (as Irish workers did time and againduring the nineteenth century). In one example, households received tenroods of land, each, or about one and a half acres. Lords allowed them togrow only potatoes, which the laborer (and his family) could cultivate“without interfering with any regular daily employment he may have, andthus without diminishing his regular weekly earnings.” Add a pig and thegarden became a tiny improved farm. The pig could be fed from peelings andpotatoes too small to cook; its dung returned nutrients to the soil; and once fat-tened it wound up on the table.7

Yet this capitalist-dominated, working-class garden also had a public orbenevolent identity. Rather than feed households in the midst of a wage, itfed them in unemployment. Here reforms took the lead and introducedvarious schemes meant to defeat the malevolent Thomas Robert Malthus.Parson Malthus argued that machines generated redundant humans, burdeningalmshouses, churches, and the state. Malthus never bothered to consider thesocial causes of poverty; instead, he took industrial capitalism as a stage ofsocial evolution and regarded all those displaced by it the drag and dregs ofsociety and better off dead. Socialists hated Malthus (none more so than KarlMarx) and came up with every imaginable workaround to his horrifyingmath. In the 1840s, Robert Owen came up with one of the first plans toemploy paupers: They would plant gardens.8

Owen had a grandiose notion of what he and others called “spade husban-dry,” to distinguish it from horse husbandry. The spade would replace the plowin most fieldwork, freeing land from supporting animals and making it availablefor the support of humans. Eight humans could live on the area needed to feedone horse, as Owen figured it, resulting in a nearly one-to-one ratio of sixtymillion British poor to sixty million British acres. The redundant wouldescape their oblivion by becoming the very beasts of burden that the richalways assumed them to be, but Owen refused that comparison. Instead, hetold his readers that the spade garden represented progress not backwardness,improvement not stagnation.

When Owen’s critics claimed that “to exchange the plough for the spade,would be to turn back in the road of improvement,” he countered thatmethods closer to the hand resulted in finer crops and a richer countryside.“Little do they imagine that … the change from the plough to the spade willprove to be a far more extensive and beneficial innovation than that whichthe invention of the spinning-machine has occasioned.” He announced it as,“an advance in civilization.” The gardens would be at the center of cooperativevillages, redirecting those in flight from the sooty cities into productive ruralwork. Nothing about the spade husbandry expressed radicalism or autonomy,but rather its opposite. As another reformer put it, child paupers would betrained “in habits of subordination and industry.”


Although the public form did not necessary result in accumulated wealth, itattended the enclosure of the commons. In this sense, plots for the poor main-tained a healthy and available labor supply. No less an advocate of enclosurethan Arthur Young suggested internal colonies, in which sixteen millionpeople would support themselves and pay £2 million in taxes annually, “amuch greater addition to our wealth, income, population, and strength, thanwe now receive from our brilliant oriental dominations of Bengal, Bahar, andOrixa.” Young imagined fields and fields of cottars whose taxation amountedto rent paid to Parliament, an arrangement that would have benefited lordsby externalizing the cost of maintaining the dispossessed.9

This description of the garden under capitalism, however, hides the conflictover subsistence that land in the hands of the working class always provoked. Nosooner had cottars, indentured servants, slaves, and tenants appeared in land-abundant North America than they revolted against the legal regimes thatbound them to the creation of value. In the 1840s renters in Hudson RiverValley organized to destroy a system of feudal leases dating to the first Dutchgrants, eventually joining with the National Reform Association. Founded in1844 by three printers (one of them, Thomas Ainge Devyr, a former BritishChartist), the NRA asserted a radical agrarian platform dedicated to settlingthe landless on the public domain and a limit on the acres any individualcould own. It was a working-class movement for land reform that tied liberationfrom wage slavery to ownership of the means of subsistence. The simple point:agrarian practices within capitalist social relations were much less controversialthan the assertion of those practices for the purposes of creating autonomy fromcapital.10

Both British versions of the captured garden appeared in West Virginia.Extractive industry made cottars of their employees; later, Franklin andEleanor Roosevelt reinvented Owens’s spade husbandry as Arthurdale, a com-munity founded as a project of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads. Yet wefirst turn to miners and their families, who used gardens to maintain a modicumof the autonomy they lost when companies logged the free-range forest. Duringthe first decades of coal mining, managers and workers locked arms in a strugglefor power mediated through the control of land, labor, and food.

In West Virginia during the 1880s, a grinding, structural conflict began, inwhich coal companies wielded subsistence as a weapon, while miners continu-ally tried to it take it away from them. But before capitalists could capturethe garden, the ecology that had long harbored a self-provisioning mountainculture had to be shocked and transformed.

The relocation of subsistence practices from hollows and ridges tocompany-owned camps followed the destruction of smallholder environmentsin the Southern Mountains after the Civil War. Capital came to Appalachiaafter the Revolution when absentee investors engrossed tens of thousands ofacres, much of it the best quality bottom lands. Some of the uplands alsoentered private ownership, but no speculator or planter who owned realestate on an incline had any plans for it in the 1790s. Instead, the uplands


belonged to white families who had fled the rising cost of land on the Atlanticplain to make a life in thousands of tiny valleys called hollows or coves.The second wave of capital arrived in the 1880s, in which joint-stockcompanies secured title to the uplands in order to extract coal, iron, and millionsof trees.11

We can only appreciate the capitalist takeover of West Virginia by knowingsomething about the agrarian world that it supplanted. Up to the 1880s in somecounties, later in others, highlanders practiced a spectrum of land use that beganwith the forest. Cattle grazed in openings and pigs snouted around for nuts androots. People took food from the forest directly by hunting in all seasons andforaging for spring plants, like ramps (an onion), that held them over untilgarden greens matured. The forest asked for no money and little labor, yet itgave commodities for exchange. In other words, the forest generated moneywithout costing money, and this made it crucial to the economy of the mountains.Fields came next, where corn (or rye) made feed for livestock in winter, starchystaples for people, and added to the cash balance by providing the raw materialfor whiskey.

Next to the homeplace itself stood the garden, a space of about two acres.Beans and squash formed the mainstay––greasy beans and cut shorts, half-runners, Kentucky wonders, Logan giants, and peanut beans––prepared byboiling with cured pork. Mountain beans reflected local tastes and hybrids inmany shapes and textures––mottled, spotted, shriveled at the ends, and fat.The people also harvested cushaw, a smooth winter squash that can grow to30 inches and 20 pounds, using it for soups and breads. A professor ofgeology wrote in 1876 of these “men without means,” who preferred huntingto farming yet planted gardens as their mainstay. This “pioneer,” made a clear-ing next to the cabin that “served to support his family along with a hog or two,and possibly a horse and a cow, with fowls, and the abundant game in the forestsaround.” West Virginians, like other self-provisioning peoples in NorthAmerica, regarded their gardens as an expression of household identity,where favorite foods and cooperative labor represented the culture of thefamily.12

It was a landscape they possessed tenuously. Adverse possession andunrecorded deeds sometimes made their titles vulnerable to outside challenges.Once metropolitan capitalists realized the potential value of the lumber andminerals underneath cabins and gardens, they set out to gain hold of landthrough legal and extralegal means. One method was to secure rights totimber. Clear cutting the forest destroyed the ecological and economic anchorof mountain autonomy. Of the 10 million acres that had never been cut in1870, only one and a half million remained in 1910. In the seven yearsbetween 1907 and 1914, one thousand mills turned out at least one billionboard feet of lumber. By 1920, logging had removed the original blanketingwoods of the Southern Mountains and turned it into 30.4 billion board feet,leaving only small pockets of trees. Desperate to replace the cash that theforest had once provided, households in freefall turned against the forest


itself. One resident lamented that the need for money, “has led our people alongall the streams which can float a raft, to denude the forests of the magnificenttimber which they afford, often sacrificing it in the most prodigal manner,”forcing them to scavenge for tanning bark once the large trees were gone.The blight that killed the American chestnut––crucial for its finely workablewood and calorie-dense nuts––accelerated the fall into poverty.13

Like the enclosure of any commons, the assault against the highland forestthrew people into wage work in order to make up the difference between theirhousehold needs and the few and declining resources they still controlled. Ityielded labor in addition to lumber. A writer for the West Virginia geologicalsurvey lamented, “During a comparatively few years nearly the whole popu-lation which originally earned its living from the ground has been pushed outfrom places of seclusion into a whirl of modern industry … Thousands ofyoung men were induced to enter mines, factories and logging camps.” Thewriter further noted that extractive industry turned entire regions, “whichabounded in beautiful forest scenery into unattractive and ugly wastes ofland … beyond all hope of repair.” A publicist for the coal industry had seenland companies acquire property and lease it back to the head of householdwho had once owned it, “thus leaving a friendly guardian to keep … theirtitles clear.” This is how households accepted wage work. They entered a feed-back loop set off by population increase and accelerated by forest destruction.As their old economy became more risky they participated increasingly in itsdestruction.14

When households threw themselves on wages, their gardens moved withthem. But the relationship between subsistence practices and industrial wagesdid not begin in the coal camps but in the hills, where families maintainedplots as security against seasonal unemployment and for retrenchment duringstrikes. James Still describes this precarious condition through his depiction ofthe Baldridge family in River of Earth (1940). Poised between their cabin onthe cutover and the shanty in the squalid camp near the Blackjack mine, thefamily clung to, “the scrap of land our house stood upon, a garden patch, andthe black birch that was the only tree on all the barren slope aboveBlackjack.” Picking wild hay after a rain, Mother tells Father that she dreamsof having livestock again. The conversation escalates into a debate over thefate of the family:

“If we had us a cow her udders would be tick-tight,” Mother said. “It would be asight the milk and butter we’d get.”“Won’t have use for a cow at Blackjack,” Father said. “I hear the mines are goingto open for shore. They’re stocking the storehouse …”

“I had a notion of staying on here,” Mother said, her voice small and tight. “I’magain raising chaps in a coal camp. Allus getting lice and scratching the itch …

Can’t move a garden, and growing victuals.”“They’ll grow without watching. We’ll keep them picked and dug.”


Mother wants constancy and continuity; she wants wages as a choice, not a com-pulsion. Father wants to move the family without giving up the growing victualsthat insure them against arbitrary unemployment. They both know that bettingeverything on Blackjack, without a garden beyond the reach of company man-agers, would lead to misery.15

Like the Baldridges, households that sent men to the mines did not move tocamps right away, and those that did often maintained plantings high and awayor ate the beans cultivated by family members who remained in the hollows.Mountain gardens did not subsidize wages but the other way around––wagessupplemented subsistence food production. We know how well this arrange-ment worked. Workers with a secure and remote source of food carried them-selves like free people and vexed labor managers. It is why Justus Collins,vice-president of the Louisville Coal and Coke Company, operating at FlatTop Mountain, West Virginia, despised local-born miners. In 1905 Collins intro-duced larger coal cars in an attempt to manipulate workers into longer hours forthe same pay (per car). The men refused. They slowed their shovels or droppedthem altogether, disappearing for days at a time. In response, managers turnedaway anyone with an alternative means of support or who wanted to use wagesto attain freedom from wages. Manager Bert Wright of the Pocahontas CoalCompany made this entry in his journal in August of 1898: “Attempted contractwith B. P. Good called off. His intentions are to make enough cash to pay forsome stock and land.” Wright complained every day of a lack of disciplinedworkers.16

By around 1900, if not before, managers attempted to create dependentpopulations of miners––people from other counties or other countries with nokin in the hills and no idea where they were––a labor army that would over-whelm the situational advantages that provided mountain-born miners withretrenchment. Justus Collins referred to them as “Hungarians,” regardless ofwhere they came from, as in, “I would suggest that we get a carloadof Hungarians … The miners we have, as you know, will not work but threeor four hours a day.” Testimony given to Congress in 1888 revealed howmining corporations succeeded in keeping “thousands of surplus laborers onhand to underbid each other for employment … hold them purposely ignorantwhen the mines are to be worked and when closed, so that they cannot seekemployment elsewhere.”17

This is how families identical to the Baldridges ended up in villages identi-cal to Blackjack. Once Hungarian or Irish or African-Americans arrived in thecoalfields, they became artillery for breaking the defiant highlanders. Two daysafter the miners at Louisville Coal and Coke refused to fill the larger cars,Collins evicted all those who lived in the camp. A week later the first train of“Hungarians” arrived. A sociologist who knew the game called the immigrantinflow “a godsend” to employers: “Foreign labor was introduced into an indus-try not from lack of hands but in order to replace the too-demanding natives.”The strategy of retreating to the hollows would never work the same way


again. All of the sudden, survival required local men to adhere to industrialdiscipline.18

Once households entered coal camps, they became renters and debtorsunder the constant threat of eviction. In 1924 James Watt Raine, professor ofEnglish at Berea College in Kentucky, described mountain people leavingtheir depleted hollows to enter the camps. The mountain man who became aminer, said Raine, “moves his family and a few household goods from the pic-turesque cabin in the cove or on the ridge to a desolate shack in the sordidvillage that has sprung up around the mine. He had not realized that hewould have to buy all his food … There is no acorn or hickory mast for hishog, so he puts it in a pen and tries to feed it on table scraps … He has topay even for water to drink.” Raine reported that rent on their shanties ranagainst miners all the time, even when the mines were closed, a policy meantto “bind them as tenants by compulsion … under leases by which they can beturned out with their wives and children on the mountainside in midwinter ifthey strike.” One journalist called it “persuasion by starvation,” and pointedout that if a miner held an owner’s family hostage to starve them, “you wouldbe unable to express your horror.” But “the mine owner who starves theminer’s wife by refusing credit acts within the limit of the law.” This is evidencefor the key part subsistence played in the class war between workers andcapital.19

Subsistence food production existed within the economics of coal mining,but in order to fully understand it, we need to see it along with the tactic com-panies used to avoid paying wages. Scrip is any substitute for legal currency.Coal companies issued scrip (in the form of a coin or coupon) redeemable forgoods in a store owned by the company or aligned with it (sometimes referredto as “pluck-me” stores). The practice favored the company by obscuring thedollar amount of the wage. Scrip looked like an I-owe-you, but it flipped thatrelationship by putting the worker into a circuit of debt: Employers paid outless than miners needed to live, advanced them necessities against futurelabor, and charged them interest on the unpaid balance. Managers probablywould have agreed with Karl Marx that wages represented a sliver of thevalue workers created, which workers then handed back in exchange for foodin order to “reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existingworkers, and to bring new workers into existence.”20

The garden solved a problem for the coal operators. Scrip still requiredcompany stores to purchase food, usually from outside the region. But currencywas scarce in Appalachia as late as the 1940s, and companies had begun to makepurchases by check, transferring money directly to eastern banks, which com-pounded the scarcity of circulating currency. This motivated managers to linksurplus family labor with surplus land above the mines.

A patch of vegetables (often combined with a pig to eat table scraps, or acow, and often chickens for meat and eggs) reproduced the household withhousehold labor during household time without competing with wage-earningwork. It fed workers almost equally as well as if they had no land in their


occupation. Companies profited from the greater health and capacity of workerswithout investing in machinery or extending the working day, and this is whythey either made gardens compulsory (except for single men) or encouragedthem by providing seed and fertilizer and by offering prizes, like two or threemonths rent or a gold coin for the largest, most productive, or most beautifulgarden. Managers took advantage of the psychological uplift that corn tasselsand squash flowers lent to the bareness of the camps, and company publicationsare replete with references to gardens as emblems of patriotism and beauty.United States Coal and Coke, operating at Gary, West Virginia, convened acommittee of agronomists that estimated the average annual yield at $100 andthe total value of gardens in the village at between $15,000 and $20,000.Historian David Corbin estimates that vegetables provided between ten andtwenty percent of household income in the years before and during WorldWar One.21

Migrating workers, including Irish, Italian, and Eastern European men,brought the very same skills as the mountain-born. They had also been recentlyuprooted by enclosure, famine, or debt. Coal Age gave dispossession a cheerfulspin:

The few Americans in a colliery village have been drawn from the farming popu-lation, and should naturally take readily to garden culture. The people fromEngland, Scotland and Wales are known for their delight in all kinds of seedingand planting, and the miners who hail from Central Europe are like our ownpeople, mostly farmers in origin, and should naturally till the soil.

The same could have been said of African-Americans, whether former slaves orthose fleeing tenancy. No matter where they came from, miners must haveexperienced a green and thriving domestic space as a powerful symbol of perma-nence and sufficiency; their gardens must have given them satisfaction, dietarydiversity, and even a sense of ownership.22

The pleasures of the garden, however, did not change its exploitativepurpose. As Marx put it, “The consumption of food by a beast of burdendoes not become any less a necessary aspect of the production processbecause the beast enjoys what it eats.” These pleasant domestic spaces madelife worse, not better, for miners everywhere, and some observers at the timeunderstood this. A former secretary of the United Mine Workers reportedfrom West Virginia in 1896, where he noticed gardens all along the KanawhaRiver near Charleston. He commented to his guide that the people must bevery industrious. “They are,” responded the guide, “a darn’d sight too industri-ous; they are so industrious that they can dig coal for almost nothing.” The unionsecretary reflected, “His answer set me thinking. If the land inWest Virginia wasused as an adjunct to the pluck store in the production of coal, how were ourminers in other parts of the country to meet this kind of competition?”Gardens were impoverishing, in the sense that they lowered the wages ofother miners.23


Yet this is only one side of the political ecology. Subsistence became a bat-tleground over provision grounds, with companies restricting access to food onthe vine during labor actions. The key example is the Paint Creek Strike of 1912,also in Kanawha County. The strike began in April, and between May and Julymanagement sent out notices of eviction––after gardens had been planted. Theactivist Mary Harris “Mother” Jones arrived in the county, and miners attackedfacilities at Mucklow, burning coal tipples. In September thousands more joinedthe original strikers, and the governor escalated the situation by declaringmartial law, commandeering company guards and subjecting all the accusedto military courts.

Cut off from their homes and supplies, and with no money, the strikersbegan to starve. Guards fought strikers during July and August, and one oftheir tactics was to prevent anyone from returning to their homes for food.Guards caught one miner who was “ordered to leave the creek or they wouldkill him.” Driven by hunger, the man found a way back to his shanty andmanaged to get away with his own cow in tow. Guards floated the householdgoods of another miner, Frank Rosse, down the river, leaving his livestockbehind, then “threatened to kill Rosse if he attempted to go after them.” Aweek later a reporter described the inhabitants of Paint Creek as having“lapsed into a state of primitive savagery, spurred on by the depredations ofthe private guards … The miners are desperate, and their attack centered onthe company’s stores.” By linking home and subsistence on property that theyowned and could legally control, the coal operators could deprive strikingminers of both at the same time.24

Household food production sometimes served the needs of miners as ameans of resistance and rebellion. One wrote to John L. Lewis, president ofthe United Mine Workers, in the midst of the 1919 strike in Coral,Pennsylvania: “We’re not worrying about strike benefits … because we arekilling hogs and gathering corn and other crops and squirrel hunting.” But itis difficult to determine if the statement refers to plantings inside or outsidecompany property. There is no evidence to suggest that the gardens locatedinside coal camps served as a weapon that miners used against the companiesor that they resulted in anything other than a cottar-landlord relationship.Changing that required unionization and walkouts. Gardens did indeed havepolitical implications, but these almost always worked to the advantage of thecompanies.25

Subsistence food production served the ends of capital accumulation bysubsidizing wages, transferring an older peasant ethic of self-exploitation andcollective survival to a different economic regime. Yet in spite of the coercionand control that it enabled among managers and the desperate objective itbecame for miners during strikes, the gardens behind industrial shantieslooked benign, even benevolent to reformers during the 1930s. After the begin-ning of the Great Depression, West Virginia coal miners truly became pauper-ized––without an income or access to land. That is when reformers discoveredthe other version of the captured garden, the one Robert Owen advocated a


century earlier. They sought a way to move the unemployed to safety whilegiving them the burden of their own relief, and the garden offered a way.

In 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt came to Scotts Run, a long hollow nearMorgantown, West Virginia, which had become among the most destituteplaces in the United States. Thousands had converged there before andduring World War One to take the relatively high wages companies paid. “Fora distance of several miles,” stated a government report, “the banks of thisstream were lined with houses.” Then the war ended. Only a paycheck separatesa working-class enclave from a slum, and Scotts Run quickly became aninfluenza-ridden slum. Families starved within sight of stuck and silent coaltipples, rusting in the damp atmosphere after decades of loading railroad carsand river barges. One journalist found a family of thirteen huddled over agasping fire, “with the children packed like sacks on the floor and one wakefuladult prodding the coals alive in order that they all might not freeze to death.”

The only people willing to offer aid were Quakers, having just returnedfrom feeding orphaned children in Germany and Eastern Europe. When theAmerican Friends Service Committee moved some of the unemployed tosmall farms, President Herbert Hoover took notice. The Roosevelts befriendedthe AFSC’s director, Clarence Picket, and once in office they wrote the details ofthe Quaker program into the National Industrial Recovery Act, establishing anagency within the Department of the Interior with a budget of $25 million. Theycalled it the Division of Subsistence Homesteads. Its most visible project was thecommunity of Arthurdale, West Virginia, located fifteen miles southeast ofScotts Run.26

As he cooperated with industry using his right hand, Franklin Rooseveltorganized Plan-B alternatives with his left. Thirty percent of working-ageAmericans eating in soup kitchens and sleeping in public parks emboldenedcritics of capitalism who argued that it had failed to deliver the most basichuman needs. The Division became home to antimodern social engineers,some of the same people who supported back-to-the-land experiments andendorsed David Collier’s promotion of American Indian communities as repre-senting universal human ideals. Stated one report by the Division, “In the pinchof distress, we lose faith in the bright new world that only recently promisedblessings once undreamed of … and so we seek to escape our ills by a returnto the land, to ‘nature,’ or to an older tradition.” A typescript report preparedfor a small circle around the president announced, “A Partial Pattern for theNew American Way of Life … from which dozens of similar communitiesmay be founded.” For amoment, the President of theUnited States contemplatedthe garden as a viable mode of production, using it as a hedge against the factoryand upholding it as the central practice in a new (and old) way of life.27

The Division of Subsistence Homesteads, however, was among the mostcontroversial relief programs of the New Deal, not so much because of thelimited extent of land given to resettled workers but because of what gardensfor the poor said about capitalism, industrialism, and the idea of progress.Would homesteads liberate settlers from wages and taxes or would they be


combined with wages? Would they mirror the provision grounds in the moun-tains or the patch in the mining camp?

Henry Ford enthusiastically endorsed the cottar model, and he was notalone among American industrialists. In 1931 Ford made vegetable gardenscompulsory for all employees at Iron Mountain, Michigan, where workersassembled the wooden portions of Ford automobiles. Ford threatened to fireany head of household who failed or refused to plant an area “of sufficientsize to supply his family with at least part of its winter vegetables,” promptingthe Washington News to deride these patches as “shotgun gardens.” Ford(among many others) loved the fusion of farm and factory for the many waysit concealed uncompensated labor. Henry I. Harriman, a utility executive andpresident of the United States Chamber of Commerce chirped that, “Themajority of these industrial workers live where they have enough ground toraise a large portion of their food supply for the summer and to put by acertain amount for winter consumption. Their shelter cost is much less. Theaccessibility of wood supply makes fuel costs for heating and cooking almostnegligible.” With these examples in mind, wrote socialists Harold Ware andWebster Powell, “the most hard-boiled of business men need not look upon sub-sistence homesteading as merely another experimental effusion of impracticaltheorists. The experimental stage is over.”28

The Roosevelts and the coterie of social engineers who designed theNational Recovery Act argued and lobbied the issue from both sides, finallydrawing up a policy that looked like an awkward hybrid between the two versionsof the captured garden. In one sense their solution looked nearly identical to thatadvocated byOwen and other reforms who despaired ofMalthusianmalevolence.There is something of a response to Malthus in Section 208 of the NationalIndustrial Recovery Act, which allocated the initial funds, “To provide foraiding the redistribution of the overbalance of population in industrial centers,”toward the resettlement of “stranded” industrial workers. “There is a pessimism,”wrote a Wisconsin economist in 1933, fearing redundancy, “that millions of theunemployed of our cities cannot hope for jobs for years to come.” The chief econ-omist of the homestead project, Milburn Wilson, confronted the same criticismOwen did a century before––that Arthurdale represented “a retreat from theage of machinery.” Instead, Wilson conceived of it “as a part of a new high stan-dard of living.” The Division expressed an antimodernist moment.29

In the conception that went forward, however, residents assembled vacuumcleaners for the Electric Vacuum Cleaning Company, a subsidiary of GeneralElectric. Wages became integral to the homestead communities, with some plan-ners insisting that “private profit will endure just as long as that which producesprofit contributes to social progress,” though they knew that subsistence servedthe interests of manufacturing, not the other way around. Eleanor tried to sellthe ungainly thing to the public. “The idea is that families engaged in subsistencefarming consume their own garden products … [and] shall be situated nearenough to an industry for one member of the family to be employed in afactory a sufficient number of days in the year to bring in the amount of


money needed to pay for the things which the families must have and cannotproduce for themselves.”30

Arthurdale opened in 1934 after taking shape hurriedly. The math neverworked in favor of the homesteaders, who were required to pay for the construc-tion of the factory out of their wages. This is the essence of the contradiction atthe core of the project: The settlers bore the cost of the factory while offsettingtheir wages with maize and melons, an arrangement that put unbearablepressure on the gardens to compensate for every deficiency in the plan. WhenGeneral Electric backed out, it started a revolving door of manufacturers. Inthe end the Roosevelts proposed government-owned factories, including onethat would make equipment for the Post Office. Congress killed the idea,however, with some members calling it socialist.31

The conflict over unemployed miners growing vegetables next to littlehouses in industrial villages had to do with who owned the labor of theworking class and what economy would prevail over the landscape.The Roosevelts and their social engineers saw Arthurdale as a compromisebetween agrarian autonomy and an endorsement of capitalism, but any senseof compromise was lost on commentators to the left and right of the NewDeal. They saw manipulation or abdication, fascism or a retreat frommodernity.

Writing in Harper’s Magazine, socialists Harold Ware and Webster Powellcondemned homesteads as social control intended to isolate potentially rebel-lious workers and harness them to factories, creating a class of industrial serfs.The authors compared Arthurdale to similar settlements maintained byAdolph Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. Hitler seems to have inherited a preexist-ing project of the German state to settle the unemployed in cottages. Ware andPowell reported that “Hitler hopes to increase his food supply, reduce unem-ployment, and keep satisfied (and ready for war) what otherwise mightbecome a restless part of the population.” This is the same motive theypinned on the Roosevelts, calling it the “transmutation of discontent.” Theyalso accused the administration of “planning for permanent poverty” or of col-lecting the unemployed in “self-liquidating” communities, in which the indigentprovided their own relief while suppressing wages for other workers. Instead,the authors wanted “agricultural land … organized on a co-operative basis,”or socialist communities, and they didn’t mince words about the politicaleconomy they saw in the government’s version: “Chattel slavery was abolishedby the Federal Government in 1863. In 1935 the Federal Government has estab-lished what is in effect a state of serfdom.” Ware and Powell attacked both thecapitalist and benevolent forms of the captured garden, arguing for a genuineredistribution of land.32

Business advocates and others to the right of the Roosevelts alsoresponded to homesteads with revulsion. They declared schemes intended togrubstake the unemployed a species of defeat, and even the end of the nation-state. The Austrian-born business consultant Peter F. Drucker condemned self-provisioning in 1939: “Subsistence farming represents by definition a regressionfrom market economy and from the division of labor on which the economic


achievements of our society are based.” Drucker considered it a necessary but“temporary remedy to tide the displaced farmers over until a permanent sol-ution has been found.” Drucker said that growing one’s own food, “wouldamount to social disenfranchisement, as the subsistence farmer is practicallycut off from the main stream of social life and pushed into an isolated positionoutside of modern society.” Philip La Follette, former governor of Wisconsin,returned from a tour of Germany, circa 1933, and despaired of the families hehad seen “digging their living out of the soil in the primitive fashion of our ances-tors centuries ago.” La Follette believed that such people opted out of the socialdivision of labor. “What have they left behind them?” he pleaded, “the taxes,the rent, the mortgages, stores, factories and farms … they are leaving behindthem the economic system.”

A representative of the American Engineering Council worried thatsociety would collapse if people grew their own food for their own needs,writing, “Subsistence farming is not possible unless we are willing to destroypractically everything that we now call desirable in our present civilization …

Farmers must be able to pay taxes and to purchase clothing and other necessarymanufactured products which they are not now capable of producing.” With hismisplaced fears the writer somehow overlooked capitalism as the cause of themost destructive social calamity to afflict the United States in the twentiethcentury.33

Comment from the right expressed a fear of household food productionthat goes back to the seventeenth century: People who consume their ownproduct do not contribute to the growth and expansion of capital, of employ-ment, of social wealth; they do not exchange in markets or participate in thestate. In their eyes, the Division of Subsistence Homesteads amounted to akind of Division of the Rejection of Capitalism or the Division of EconomicPrimitivism. That the United States would deploy labor and land in any otherway than to generate private wealth struck them as regressive.34

Arthurdale freighted more anticipation and heavier ideals than it couldcarry. Caught in a no-mans-land between competing ideologies, subsistencehomesteads maintained their settler populations in the short term but failedto survive the Great Depression. The garden as publicly funded relief in theUnited States vanished with it.35

In 1913 Rosa Luxemburg wrote, “Capitalism depends in all respects onnon-capitalist strata and social organizations existing side by side with it.” Acentury later anthropologists and historians are just beginning to explore thesimultaneous existence of capitalist and noncapitalist modes of production, aswell as their sometimes codependant, sometimes mutually beneficial relation-ships. The captured garden is one such relationship. It refers to the relocationof household subsistence practices from hollows to coal camps or from agrarianautonomy to industrial dependency. Its British origins during the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries suggest that it took two main forms––cottars on estatesowned by capitalists and allotments given to the unemployed. Both forms


institutionalized subsistence as part of the process of recreating a labor force,shifting part of the burden of survival from wages to the workers themselves.36

Beans tasted the same on the ridge as they did in the Pocahontas coalfieldsand at Arthurdale, but beans in such differing circumstances transmitted differ-ent social relations. Before the enclosure and clear cutting of the forest, beans onthe ridge complemented a complex land use that included grazing cattle, plant-ing rye, distilling whiskey, collecting tanning bark, and gathering chestnuts.Beans in the coal camps served the interests of capital over those of households.All their garden products must have given workers and families a sense of placeand sufficiency, yet the ultimate economic advantage from these plantingsbelonged to the companies.

The captured garden was also a pitched battle and a controversy. Duringstrikes miners and their families fought company managers over the controlof food and, thus, for the capacity to continue in the resistance to company dom-ination over their lives. During the Great Depression the United States experi-mented with subsistence homesteads by attaching garden and factory. The goalwas not merely to provide settlers with cash but to find a middle way between anantimodernist philosophy and a procapitalist one. Both forms of the capturedgarden illustrate the paradox of subsistence production under capitalism: Apractice that for centuries created no surplus value could be made to do justthat; an institution once the stronghold of the household could represent depen-dency and immiseration.37

NOTES

1. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776; reprint, New York: Bantam, 2003), 33–35and 161–162. My thanks to Jennifer Klein, editors Thomas Miller Klubock and Kate Brown,an anonymous reader, and Andrew Kordik.

2. Immanuel Wallerstein observes, “Somewhere in a remote village at this moment anon-wage worker is producing a surplus in which, via multiple intermediaries, each one of usis partaking, if to different degrees. But this particular transfer of surplus is well hidden fromview because its traces are swallowed up, in the obscure facts of the life cycle of thenon-wage worker’s cousin, the wage worker of the peripheral areas.” Immanuel Wallerstein,Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 1991), 164 and Capitalist World Economy (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1978), 127–29. Sidney Mintz, “Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian?”Review II (summer 1978) and “Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries,” Historical Reflections6(summer 1979). Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economyand the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC, 2000). Political economiststended to obscure their favor for enclosure, but James Steuart stated his outright in AnInquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (London, 1767).

3. Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and theTransformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1985); Karl Jacoby, CrimesAgainst Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of AmericanConservation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2003); Louis Warren, The Hunter’s Game:Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, CT, 1999); MarkDavid Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the NationalParks (New York, 2000); and Sara Gregg, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, theNew Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (New Haven, CT, 2013).


4. Jean Boydston, “To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and AntebellumWorking-ClassSubsistence,” Radical History Review 35 (1986): 9 and “The Woman Who Wasn’t There:Women’s Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States,” Journal ofthe Early Republic 16 (1996): 188–90. For more on the literature of the household subsidy tocapitalist accumulation, see Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Workand Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979); Wilma A. Dunaway,“The Double Register of History: Situating the Forgotten Woman and Her Household inCapitalist Commodity Chains,” Journal of World-System Research 7 (2001): 2–31; ibid.,Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South (London, 2008); ibid.,“Nonwaged Peasants in the Modern World-System: African Households as Dialectical Unitsof Capitalist Exploitation and Indigenous Resistance, 1890–1930,” Journal of PhilosophicalEconomics 4 (2011): 19–57; ibid., “The Semiproletarian Household Over the Longue Dureeof the World-System,” in The Longue Duree of the Modern World-System: In Memoriam toFernand Braudel, ed. Richard E. Lee, (Albany, NY, 2012). Don Mitchell, Lie of the Land:Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapols, MN, 1996); Wilma A. Dunaway,First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (ChapelHill, NC, 1996); Michael Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoplesand Global Markets in Borneo (New Haven, CT, 2011); Ronald Eller, Miners, Millhands, andMountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville, TN, 1982);Mart A. Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Grow”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the GeorgiaCoast, 1680–1920 (Athens, GA, 1996); Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, andthe Republican Community (Urbana, IL, 2005); Paul Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path toDependency: Rethinking a Region’s Economic History, 1730–1940 (Lexington, KY, 1994).And see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of theThird World (New York, 2001); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold WarBattle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, 2010). Subsistence agriculture is often misunder-stood as a minimum output––no more than what people need to live. But this is part of thestory capitalist writers have told about it, not how it actually functioned. Subsistence means pro-duction for use, which includes exchange. The anthropology of economy among agrarian house-holds is crucial to countering the false assumptions and outright slander of conventionaleconomics. I have benefited from Dove, Banana Tree at the Gate; Robert McC.Netting,Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, SustainableAgriculture (Stanford, CA, 1993); Stephen Gudeman, The Anthropology of Economy:Community, Market, and Culture (New York, 2001); James Scott, The Moral Economy of thePeasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT, 1977; Ester Boserup,The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economies of Agrarian Change UnderPopulation Pressure (New Brunswick, NJ, 1965); Paul Robins, Political Ecology (Malden,MA, 2004), 12–13. On political economy and political ecology: David Graeber, Debt: TheFirst 5,000 Years (New York, 2010); David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and LosAngeles, CA, 2000); George L. Henderson, California and the Fictions of Capital(Philadelphia, PA, 2003); Ed White, The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflictin Early America (Minneapolis, MN, 2005); Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow ofCivilization (Chicago, 1993); Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature (Athens, GA, 1984);John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York, 2000); JamesScott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (NewHaven, CT, 2009); R. J. Johnston, Peter. J. Taylor, and Michael J. Watts, Geographies ofGlobal Change: Remapping the World in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1995); KarlZimmerer and Thomas J. Bassett, Political Ecology: An Integrative Approach to Geographyand Environment-Development Studies (New York, 2003); Jack Ralph Kloppenburg, First theSeed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000 (New York, 1988); GuntherPeck, “The Nature of Labor: Fault Lines and Common Ground in Environmental and LaborHistory,” Environmental History 11 (2006): 212–38.

5. Medick continues, “The origin of modern capitalism is not in any case to be separatedfrom the specific function, which the ‘ganze Haus’ of the small peasant household carried out inthe final, critical phase of its development which was at the same time the period of its demise.This insight… illustrates the essential function which the preservation of pre-capitalist enclaveshas had and still has for the evolution and stabilization of capitalist societies.” Hans Medick,“The Proto-Industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and FamilyDuring the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism,” Social History 1


(1976): 299–300; Marjorie Griffin Cohen,Women’s Work, Markets, and Economic Developmentin Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto, 1988), 36, quoted in Salstrom, 64. Karl Marx, Capital,Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York, 1976), 717–18. Historian Elizabeth Dore observes ofNicaraguan peasant, their means of livelihood endured in the capitalist periphery, “because itbore most of the costs of survival.” So-called “backward” forms of production, like peonageand sharecropping, could be more profitable than paying wages. Elizabeth Dore, Myths ofModernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua (Durham, NC, 2006) and MichaelPerelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History ofPrimitive Accumulation (Durham, NC, 2000), 20.

6. One lord is quoted as saying, “The management of his little plot, cheerfully and profit-ably occupies all the leisure hours of the poor man, his wife and family––hours which mightotherwise have been ruinously wasted in some one or other of those beer-houses.” EdmundDawson, Spade Husbandry; or, an Attempt to Develop the Chief Causes of Pauperism andDistress (London, 1833), 33. John Sinclair, Observations On the Means of Enabling aCottager to Keep a Cow: By the Produce of a Small Piece of Land (London, 1801).

7. Robert Kane, Industrial Resources of Ireland (Dublin, 1844), 378; J. L. W. Naper,Suggestions for the More Scientific and General Employment of Agricultural Labourers(Dublin, 1844), 22–23. “In every crop of potatoes, it may be expected that some will provetoo small for the purposes of cooking; and a portion of the large sized ones is generallypeeled off,––and thus after every meal there will be some little refuse for the trough,” citedin “The PoorMan’s Garden,” Cottager’s Monthly Visitor 10 (1830): 178. One political economistobserved that in some countries farmers and laborers made up a single class, “like the miserablecotters of Ireland.” Henry Fawcett, Manual of Political Economy (London, 1863), 118.

8. On Malthus, Marx, and the working class, see Foster, Marx’s Ecology, chap. 3.9. Robert Owen, The Economist (August 18 and 25, 1821), 75–77. Owen did not reject

industrialism. He saw the spade husbandry as a kind of marriage to the factory, a way oftaking the best of both and fusing them in a socialist laboratory into a hybrid system thatwould employ the powers of nature in sustaining human communities. Also see Dawson,Spade Husbandry, 24. Arthur Young, Annals of Agriculture 1 (1790): 60. Owen’s notion tookactual form as allotment gardens. According to Jeremy Burchardt, allotments became viableduring the Napoleonic wars as a response to food shortages and starvation among the poor.Burchardt found four stated reasons in the economic literature of the 1790s for grantingworkers access to land: “increasing the material welfare of the labourer, improving his or hermorals, saving money for those of higher social status and benefiting the country at large.”Burchardt, The Allotment Movement in England, 1793–1873 (London, 2002), 15–16.

10. For early examples of cottars in Pennsylvania, see Paul G. E. Clemens and Lucy Simler,“Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester, County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” inWorkand Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 106–8, quoted in JamesA. Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism: Collected Essays (Boston, MA, 1991), 257.For the antirent war in the Hudson River Valley, see Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom:Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York, 2002).On the National Reform Association, see Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, andthe Republican Community (Urbana, IL, 2005). The Homestead Act of 1863––long demandedby working-class reformers––came about for reasons other than their urgings but as a warmeasure to siphon off Confederate soldiers and as a means of occupying the Great Plains,thus supplanting the Plains tribes.

11. The story is significantly more complex than this. Overlapping claims, stemming fromtwo (or perhaps three) landholding systems, came into conflict during the 1880s and 1890s. Yetthe sources of this story rarely include documents written by mountain families. At the EasternRegional Coal Archive in Bluefield, West Virginia, and at the West Virginia State Archives inCharleston, I found three letters by members of a single family in McDowell County during the1880s among the hundreds of documents I reviewed. Handwritten deeds are more abundant,but they only define a given piece of land by elements in the landscape.

12. Mark F. Sohn, Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture, and Recipes (Lexington,KY, 2009), 42: “Mountaineers don’t look for the greenest, straightest, cleanest beans. In somecases it seems that the worst looking, most mottled beans are the old varieties that have the bestflavor … brown spots, shriveled ends, large seeds, stems, and leaves.” Mathew Fontaine MauryandWilliamM. Fontaine,Resources ofWest Virginia (Wheeling, 1876), 63; RichardWestmacott,African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South (Knoxville, TN, 1992).


13. Exactly how and why local deeds were insecure is beyond the scope of this essay.Judges sometimes upheld local deeds against prior claims, stemming from colonial grants orpurchases invalided by adverse possession. Companies resorted to many tactics to overcomeownership. For logging and its effects see George Summers, The Mountain State: ADescription of the Natural Resources of West Virginia Charleston, WV, 1893), 97–98. Amongthe most significant histories of economy and dispossession in Appalachia include, Dunaway,First American Frontier; Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency; Ronald L. Lewis,Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change inWest Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee,The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (New York, 2000);Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers.

14. Alonza Brooks, Forestry and Wood Industries (Morgantown, WV, 1910), 44–46;Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York, 1989),357–60; Summers, Mountain State, 97–98; John Solomon Otto, “Forest Fallowing in theSouthern Appalachian Mountains: A Problem in Comparative Agricultural History,”Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133 (1989): 33; Bettye Hobbs Pruitt,“Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,”William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984): 335; John Fox, Jr., “The Future Kentucky Feuds,”Collier’s (June 15, 1904): 15.

15. James Still, River of Earth (Lexington, KY, 1940), 50–51.16. Letters from Justus Collins to Glen Jean (July 20 and 22, 1905), Justus Collins Papers,

West Virginia University, West Virginia Collection; Bert Wright, diary (August 16, 1898),Pocahontas Land Company Papers, Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Bluefield, WestVirginia; George L. Fowler, “Social and Industrial Conditions in the Pocahontas CoalFields,” Engineering Magazine 27 (1904): 387. The miners had contracted to be paid by thecar, and then the company brought in larger cars, thus lowing the cost of loading a ton ofcoal. Mary Harris “Mother” Jones saw the practice first hand. She quotes a miner at theDietz mines in Virginia: “Well, we made a contract with the coal company to fill those carsfor so much, and after we had made the contract, they put lower bottoms in the cars, so thatthey would hold another ton or so.” Mary Harris Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones(Chicago, 1925), 9. Notes Ronald Eller, “By ignoring work schedules, mining routines, andother innovations which worked at cross-purposes with their traditional way of life, theysought to maintain their individualism and freedom from authority. In this manner, theyhoped to benefit from the economic rewards of industrialization without sacrificing their long-held cultural values.” Ronald Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization ofthe Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville, TN, 1982), 167.

17. The term “Hungarians” for foreign workers seems to have been common usage. See“From Sewell [West Virginia],” United Mine Workers Journal (June 12, 1902).

18. Referring to a strike among mine workers throughout the bituminous coal regions ofVirginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, one observer explained, “The causes whichled up to the strike were various; but at bottom it was due to one,––the constant reduction inwages through several years, which had brought the miners and their families to the verge ofstarvation.” Wages per week ran from $3.00 to $4.00. Rent on company house: $2.00 to 2.50per month. One coal company reported paying 39 men a total of $228.98 for 2 weeks or 2.87per man, per week. See J. E. George, “The Coal Miners’ Strike of 1897,” Quarterly Journalof Economics 12(1898), 186–208. Letters from Justus Collins to Glen Jean (July 20 and 22,1905), Justus Collins Papers, West Virginia University, West Virginia Collection; George L.Fowler, “Social and Industrial Conditions in the Pocahontas Coal Fields,” EngineeringMagazine 27 (1904): 387.

19. James Watt Raine, The Land of Saddle-Bags: A Study of the Mountain People ofAppalachia (New York, 1924), 237–40; “Imported Workers,” United Mine Worker’s Journal(May 17, 1891).

20. Marx, Capital, 717–18. On debt in its many forms, see David Graeber, Debt: The First5,000 Years (New York, 2012). Issued currency always creates opportunities for putting peopleinto debt. John AlexanderWilliams,Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Mary BethPudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L.Waller,Appalachia in theMaking: TheMountain Southin the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995); “Persuasion by Starvation,” United MineWorkers Journal (June 12, 1902). Companies attempted to force miners to use only theirstores: “If you don’t deal in the store, you run the risk of being discharged. When men are


paid a little money they are watched, and if they are seen going into any other store than the oneowned by the company for which they work, they as a rule are discharged.”A. B. Smoot,UnitedMine Workers Journal (June 4, 1896).

21. Edward O’Toole, “Colliery Yards and Gardens,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 201. The Board ofAgriculture drew attention to the invisible value of household gardens in general, withoutspecific mention of miners’ gardens: “Every farmer and farm laborer has his kitchen garden,which yields a considerable percent of the family support. If an accurate computation of theactual value of these kitchen gardens could be made the magnitude of the figures would aston-ish most of us.” Quoted in Thomas Clark Atkeson, “Horticulture in West Virginia,” FifthBiennial Report of the West Virginia State Board of Agriculture (Charleston, 1900), 352.World War One made food procurement even more difficult and increased interest in house-hold gardens. “The problem of transporting perishable foods, such as garden truck, has evenin normal times been difficult, and now with every carrier loaded to capacity with staplefoods, munitions for war and materials for their manufacture, it will be impossible to transportperishable foodstuffs in quantities sufficient to meet our needs.” Quoted in C. A. Matheny,“Food Conservation,”Our Own People (August 1918 and September 1919), 17. Company inter-est is well illustrated in coal-company publications: “The Garden Contest,” Our Own People(October 1918); “Gardens and Playgrounds in Mining Towns,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 336–37;Frederick W. Whiteside, “Beautifying A Coal Mining Camp,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 549; “FrickCoke Co.’s Welfare Work,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 470. In 1924 the West Virginia CoalAssociation estimated that fifty percent of the state’s miners planted vegetables and keptsome livestock. The number was as high as seventy percent in some counties. See DavidCorbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners,1880–1922 (Urbana, IL, 1989), 33–34, 123. On money transfers between companies andbanks, see Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, 30–34.

22. “Gardens and Playgrounds in Mining Towns,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 336–37. NettieMcGill investigated mining communities in West Virginia in order to evaluate the quality oflife for children. She reported that seven-tenths of residents planted at least beans, corn, pota-toes, tomatoes, and cabbages. McGill found that residents who managed to live outside coalcamps felt more strongly about their autonomy and had larger and more robust gardens.Among these families, “Some commented on the difference the produce made in their standardof living and in their ability to save money; others spoke of the enjoyment which they derivedfrom working in their gardens, especially as a change from work inside the mines. In fact, thepossibility of having more land to cultivate was frequently given as one of the great advantagesof living outside the mining towns.” Nettie McGill, The Welfare of Children in Bituminous CoalMining Communities in West Virginia(Washington, DC, Children’s Bureau Publication No. 117,1923), 53, 75.

23. Marx, Capital, 718. Ex-Secretary P. McBryde speaking to Tom Farry. “West Virginia,”United Mine Workers Journal (June 4, 1896). Paul Saltrom notes of the subsistence economy,“By continuing alongside outside-controlled industrialization, the continuing networks ofmutual aid served to reduce wage demands and thus to transfer Appalachia’s wealth (in theform of labor’s products) outside the region. The long-term effect of continued low-money net-working among industrial workers was that the workers subsidized U.S. industry at their owneventual expense.” Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, 127. Letters from JustusCollins to Glen Jean (July 20 and 22, 1905), Justus Collins Papers, West Virginia University,West Virginia Collection.

24. Of course, that is not the end of the story. At that point the miners called in their ownreinforcements––kin and other allies from other counties described in the press as “backwoods-men.” “Political ecology,” indeed: Said one reporter, “Every ravine affords ground for a deadlyambush.” The guards and other military men, “unaccustomed to the guerrilla warfare of thebackwoodsmen cannot hope to cope with the situation.” United Mine Workers Journal (July11, 1912); “Terror Reigns in West Virginia,” United Mine Workers Journal (August 1, 1912).Congress concluded any workingman constantly robbed of his wages by the company store,subject to rents he must pay in every season, whether working or not, and under the gun ofhired security guards, “armed as the corporations see fit with army revolvers, or Winchesterrifles, or both, made detectives by statute … provoking the people to riot and then shootingthem legally … is virtually a chattel of the operator.” Quoted in “Coal Industry,”Encyclopedia of Social Reform (New York, 1897), 303. At exactly the same time three countiesto the south of Paint Creek, the superintendent of United States Coal and Coke, at Gary, West


Virginia, personally awarded prize-winning gardens, stating, “The vegetable patches are almostinvaluable to those who tend them for they assure them of fresh vegetables throughout thegreater part of the year.” Quoted in O’Toole, “Colliery Yards and Gardens.” Lawrence R.Lynch, “The West Virginia Coal Strike,” Political Science Quarterly 29 (1914): 630–37.

25. Corbin,Life, Work, and Rebellion, 33–34. According to Corbin, other miners said, “Weneeded a garden… we didn’t always have enough [money] for food even when I was working.”Said another, “Our garden saved us during all those depressions, and when I was out of work.”

26. General Information concerning the Purposes and Policies the Division of SubsistenceHomesteads, Circular No. 1 (Washington, DC, 1933), 4; Malcolm Ross, “PermanentPart-Time,” Survey Graphic 22 (1933), 266; “Quaker Relief Efforts in Europe, 1914–1922,”http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/friends/AFSC/lanternslides.htm (accessed November 4,2013).

27. Committee for Economic Recovery, Arthurdale: A Partial Pattern for the NewAmerican Way of Life (Washington, DC, 1937); Millard Milburn Rice, “Footnote onArthurdale,” Harper’s Magazine (March 1940), 441; United States Department of theInterior, Division of Subsistence Homesteads, General Information concerning the Purposesand Policies the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, 4; Tate, “Possibilities and Limitations ofSubsistence Homesteads,” Journal of Farm Economics 15 (1934): 530.

28. “Shotgun Gardens,” Pittsburgh Press (August 30, 1931); “Stirred up by Henry Ford’s‘Shotgun Gardens,’” The Literary Digest (September 12, 1931), 10; Orville Merton Kile, TheNew Agriculture (New York, 1932), 151; William E. Zeuch, “Social and EconomicSignificance of Subsistence Homesteads,” Journal of Farm Economics 17 (1935): 711. Andsee Business Week (September 2, 1931), 23. For an article by an industrialist, see HenryI. Harriman, “Factory and Farm in Double Harness,” New York Times Magazine (October15, 1933). Samuel Crowther, Myron C. Taylor, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., and Henry Ford, A Basisfor Stability (Boston, MA, 1932), chap. 13. This work has a chapter dedicated to decentralizedproduction.

29. Noble Clark, “Will Back-To-The-Land Help?” Survey Graphic 22 (1933): 456. Clarkheld various positions in the experiment station at the University of Wisconsin. MilburnWilson, “The Place of Subsistence Homesteads in Our National Economy,” Journal of FarmEconomics 16 (1934): 73–84; Committee for Economic Recovery, Arthurdale: A PartialPattern for the New American Way of Life.

30. Eleanor Roosevelt, “Subsistence Farmsteads,” Forum 91 (1934): 199–201.31. Ware and Powell showed that the government wanted homesteaders whose suffering

“could be attributed to the depression,” rather than those who were destitute before 1929, inorder to exclude those thought to be endemically poor. No African-Americans were allowed,regardless of their qualifications or need. Those chosen to participate did not come from themost destitute among the stranded miners at Scotts Run but from a middling sort with somemeans. Lack of cash incentivized families to send members out of Arthurdale for work inother states, depriving the community of needed labor. One government agent summed upthe government’s position regarding another community––“Cumberland homesteads cannotbe called a success; neither can it justly be called a failure.” Yet Arthurdale, along with themore than thirty other subsistence communities (in Minnesota, Alabama, Iowa, Ohio, andCalifornia), lessened the suffering of approximately one thousand people. It says somethingthat many residents considered the years they spent there the best and most privileged oftheir lives. For a positive view of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads and a communityin Minnesota, see Timothy J. Garvey, “The Duluth Homesteads, A Successful Experiment inCommunity Housing,” Minnesota History 46(spring 1978), 2–16; Russell Lord and Paul H.Johnstone, A Place on Earth: A Critical Appraisal of Subsistence Homesteads (Washington,DC, 1942), 49, 177–185; Ware and Powell, “Planning for Permanent Poverty,” 517. Congressheard testimony on January 24, 1934.

32. Ware and Powell, “Planning for Permanent Poverty,” 513–24; Davis, “A BlackInventory of the New Deal,” The Crisis 42 (1935), 141–42. Harold Ware lived between 1889and 1935 and was the Communist Party’s top expert in agriculture. He died in an automobileaccident. In 1952 Whittaker Chambers accused Ware of being a Soviet spy.

33. Peter F. Drucker, “The Industrial Revolution Hits the Farmer,” Harper’s Magazine(November 1939); La Follette and American Engineering Council quoted in Noble Clark,“Will Back-To-The Land Help?” Survey Graphic 22 (1933): 456. Said the United StatesChamber of Commerce, “Agriculture might sustain itself on a lower hand-to-mouth level, but


http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/friends/AFSC/lanternslides.htm

it will not sustain the great industrial super-structure we have built upon it.” Also quoted inClark, ibid.

34. The criticism of business leaders came directly from political economy and in no wayexpressed an accurate understanding of agrarian people or their economy. On politicaleconomy and its conceits, see Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism. On agrarians and theirstate and market relations, see Dove, Banana Tree at the Gate.

35. The “victory” gardens of the two world wars relied on citizens to grow their own foodas an act of patriotism. They assumed access to land and increased the food supply, freeing upfood for shipment to soldiers overseas.

36. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913; reprint London, 1951), 365. Forexamples from the anthropological study of simultaneous modes of production and peasantarticulation, see note 4.

37. Gardens continue to be controversial. Two examples make the point. Chinese factoriesin Shaoxing, in East China’s Zhejian Provence (and elsewhere) have rooftop gardens whereworkers grow vegetables for use in the company cafeteria––an example of corporations usingfood to subsidize wages. In contrast, consider the South Central Farm, where 350 families(representing about 1,000 people) cultivated fourteen acres of a formerly industrial lotbetween 1994 and 2006. After allowing the gardens at first, the City of Los Angeles sold theland back to its previous owner, who then evicted the community and bulldozed the farmafter a failed campaign to save it. The gardeners felt deeply invested in the space and threatenedto defend it. One said, “Just think if we assemble, two from every family, and you know we’lleach grab a hoe, and no one will get past us.” South Central Farm is well documented. Onestudy found “a range of 100–150 species across row crops, trees, shrubs, vines, cacti, and herbac-eous plants” in cultivation. Devon G. Peña, “Farmers Feeding Families: Agroecology in SouthCentral Los Angeles,”A lecture delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, October 12,2005, acequiainstitute.org/researchreports.html (accessed November 4, 2013). Two documen-tary films have been made about the South Central Farm. See especially, Scott HamiltonKennedy (director), The Garden (Black Valley Films, 2008). Chinese factory gardens are notwell advertised, but a few web sites have documented them. See http://www.wired.co.uk/news/wired-aperture/2012-06/aperture-14-june/viewgallery/284940 and http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2012-06/13/content_15499515_2.htm (both accessed August 2013). Somesources cite food safety as a motivation for gardens at factories, because ground and riverwater are severely polluted.


http://www.wired.co.uk/news/wired-aperture/2012-06/aperture-14-june/viewgallery/284940






http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2012-06/13/content_15499515_2.htm



the captured garden: the political ecology of subsistence under capitalism

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