moral geography in high plains history

MORAL GEOGRAPHY IN HIGH PLAINS HISTORY

JOHN OPIE

ABSTRACT. When American society, through deliberate government action, intervenes to preserve the family farm as the locus of “good” human values and “authentic” environmental conditions, the result can be described as a moral geography. Nowhere is this clearer than in the protection of traditional farming on the High, or Great, Plains through federal funding and programs. Protection began during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s; federal support came to a close with the passage of the 1996 farm bill. These shifts deserve assessment of historic American interests in the protection of an agricultural institution and of a region at risk. Keywords: agricultural ethics, family farm, federal subsidies, High Plains, public policy,

If my land has cried out against me, und its furrows have wept together;

i f 1 have eaten its yield without payment, iind caused the death of its owners;

let thorns grow instead of wheat, iind foul weeds instead ojbarley.

-lob 31: 38-40

w h e n farm bills came up for ritual debate in the U.S. Congress every five years, much rhetoric urged that funding be continued, in order to shore up the struggling family farm. The family farm was called the wellspring of American individualism, independence, and general goodness. For almost two centuries this article of faith has risen out of the mists of rural America. Over the last sixty years in particular, since the devastation of the 1930s Depression and Dust Bowl, Americans have legislated financial and institutional support to protect these iconic farmers. Federal action is only one response to farm problems, but it deserves special attention because it has the most far-ranging effects. Nowhere have federal safeguards been more visible than on the High, or Great:, Plains. Comprehensive programs of federal price supports, low-cost loans, crop insurance, and agricultural extension directed billions of dollars to Plains people.

President Franklin D. Koosevelt reflected popular opinion when he was said to have “a romantic faith in the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent yeoman living in bucolic abundance” (Fite 1981,52). The same sentiments would be repeated in the Family Farm Income Act of 1960: “[Tlhe system of independent family farms was the beginning and foundation of free enterprise in America. . . . [ I ] t is an ever- present source of strength for democratic processes and the American ideal” (Fite 1981,133; see also Fite 1977). In 1998 A Time to Act, a study by the National Commis- sion on Small Farms, reaffirmed that “small farms have been the foundation of our Nation” and spoke of “our nation’s historical commitment to small farms” (USDA

1998). The commission pulled on national heartstrings by concluding that “the

%J DR. OPIE is a professor of environmental policy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey 07102-1982.

T ~ P Geographical Review 88 (2) 241-258, April 1998 Copyright 63 1999 by the American Geogrdphical Society of New York

242 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

greatest thing that agriculture furnished this country is not food or fiber, but a set of children with a work ethic and a good set of values.” However, the report also noted that “[ a] t present, USDA does not emphasize the needs of small farms in its strategic plan.” Its data showed that although 94 percent of America’s farms were still small in 1998, they received only41 percent of all farm receipts. A small farm was one with less than $250,000 gross annual receipts and that averaged a net cash income of $23,000. Of the nation’s 2 million farms, only 122,810, all superlarge, received the majority of farm receipts. Two years earlier, in April 1996, President Bill Clinton had reluctantly signed a farm bill that effectively reversed a long history of financial aid for farms. The president spoke of farmers’ vulnerability, the need for an adequate safety net, and continued investment in the historic infrastructure of rural America.

A CONDITIONAL MORAL GEOGRAPHY

This essay is not a tract on moral geography, if such a concept truly exists. Nor does it elaborate aversion of environmental ethics. Instead, it examines the shifts and turns of American values, how they shaped public policy, and their various impacts on the Plains (Webb 1931; Gabriel 1956; Thompson 1995). The agricultural philosopher Gary Comstock describes the decision-making process as a “sense of direction we call practical wisdom.’’ This involved pragmatic action, “knowing how to proceed” rather than “knowing that this is the only right answer” (Comstock 1987a, mi). To this expediencywe must add the detail of location. The philosopher David M. Smith has concluded that justice and sustainability are geographically and historically specific, “grounded in the lived experience of particular people in time and place as well as in the abstractions of philosophical debate” (Smith 1996,20). As Americans we have historically designated some places, such as Yosemite (Solnit, Friedman, and Beardsley i994), as good or heroic and other places, such as Love Canal (Colten and Skinner 1996), as evil or tragic. A nuclear power plant is good to some people and evil to others.

Attempts to identify moral geography have recently been made. Joan C.Tronto, a philosopher of geography, wrote, “For a society to be judged as a morally admirable society, it must, among other things, adequately provide for care of its members and its territory” (1993,126). Here I treat moral geography as a political process that is the outcome of a state of mind. I also argue that moral geography is a geographical condition, a physical reality that contains identifiable people and their environment, as defined by time and place. A moral geography is an ethical choice made about a particular people and place, and it is also an internal logic that belongs to the particular people and place. Moral geography takes hold when government policy identifies a geographical landscape and its inhabitants in need and deliberately responds to save that region.

This essay is intentionally both pragmatic and particularistic. It pays special attention to specific government policies that identified the High Plains as a vulnerable landscape with needy inhabitants and that deliberately responded to rescue the region.

MORAL GEOGRAPHY IN HIGH PLAINS HISTORY 243

A HEAVY IDEOLOGICAL BURDEN The High Plains were rarely seen in their own light; instead, they were viewed through variously colored spectacles that transformed the region into a set of predetermined expectations (Bowden 1976; Opie 1993,313-323). The historian Donald Worster concluded that distorted views helped bring about the Dust Bowl disaster of the 1930s (1992). Geographers have sometimes described this ideological load as a thick cultural context (Geertz 1973; Walzer 1996). Such a geography can be richly referential and culturally resonant, regardless of its physical realities. In the case of the Plains, thick contexts changed over time, reflecting different understandings of Plains agriculture as readily as shifts in Americans’ sense of public responsibility.

One person’s signal was another person’s noise. What are the Plains? At least six possibilities, not mutually exclusive, come to mind:

Are they a geographical zone of tantalizingly good soil but an impossibly dry climate? Are they the historical completion of the United States’ Manifest Destiny, in- cluding American exceptionalism, triumphalism, and giantism? Are they a highly productive source of commodities (widely labeled “the breadbasket and feedbag of the world”), controlled by world markets?

a Are they a growing pile of debts owed to the bank? Does the credit picture control the actions of farmers or corporations?

0 Are they a cherished and valuable lifestyle based on the image of the Jeffer- sonian yeoman farmer?

a Or, from the viewpoint of the 1990s megahog industry, are they interchangeable with other rural regions, such as the Carolinas, Missouri, and Iowa?

Can one of these mentalitks be more authentic than the others? Some geographers, like Stephen Birdsall, have concluded that diverse viewpoints, which seem to be equally valid, must be taken to be a “variable regard” of any geographical region (1996, 621). Or is there perhaps a single authentic-self-validating-view that re- quires a specific and equally authentic response?

A primary question raised by white European ventures into the High Plains was whether their invasion of the existing “natura1”system would endure. That is, would it be a nature-resembling but human-dominated ecosystem-for example, self- sustaining farmland? Or could it prosper as a broadly transformed ecosystem, dependent on the larger industrial-metropolitan infrastructure? Or has the invasion resulted in a degraded system that virtually guarantees failure of today’s farmers, if not now, then in the foreseeable future?

A GEOGRAPHY OF HOPE Do the Plains deserve the special treatment they have received? ‘Today’s plight is not a short-term crisis; it involves a long history of extreme challenges since the earliest pioneering settlements of the 1870s that reached a low point during the Dust Bowl. To cite only one example, in the successive rainless summers of 1889 and 1890 farmers

244 T H E GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

produced only 2.5 bushels of wheat an acre in western Kansas and an even less productive 8 bushels of corn (Fite 1966,126-127). The farmers reported that they were starving on “Andersonville fare,” remembering the notorious Civil War prison.

By 1901 U.S. Geological Survey official Willard D. Johnson called the rush to settle the Plains between 1870 and 1900 an “experiment in agriculture on a vast scale. . . . [ I ] t nevertheless ended in total failure, [resulting in] a class of people broken in spirit as well as in fortune” (quoted in Webb 1931,342; see also Fite 1966; Opie 1994). During the twentieth century, the long-standing challenges of the Plains were not substantially overcome. Dust Bowl events tell the same despairing story (Bonnifield 1979; Worster 1979). Exceptions were the “parity” years of 1910-1914 and sites where groundwater-albeit nonrenewable-served new irrigation technologies after 1960. Frank and Deborah Popper challenged the agrarian myth when they concluded that, “Over the next generation, the Plains will, as a result of the largest, longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history, become almost totally de- populated” (quoted in Cassel1989). If the trend continues on the Plains, farmers will number only half a million by 2000, compared with 2 million in 1950 (Popper and Popper 1987,13-14; Edmondson and Fost i991,51-52). Hence the Plains test America’s moral duty toward a troubled regional people and their difficult landscape.

Plains people were not treated in isolation, however; they were seen as imbedded in a specific geography that was equally at risk. Plains farming had transformed an ancient grassland into abundant fields of monoculture wheat, corn, and sorghum. As a result the soil, reworked from sod, tended to blow away. Groundwater, untouched until the 1960s, became an irrigation bonanza but then, just as quickly, began to dwindle. A watchful eye on the land is not new in American history. Since the days when the Puritan jeremiad announced that God delivered his judgment of society’s moral failure through natural disasters such as plagues and droughts, Americans have warily watched the nonhuman world around them for signs of divine purpose (Miller 1956; Opie and Elliot 1996). On the Plains, when farmers failed they believed they were under the divine hammer and had also betrayed the American dream. They believed it was both sinful and unpatriotic to abandon their homesteads.

In this view, the dry climate would bring a distillation of classic American vir- tues: Plains farmers were expected to live ascetic, sacrificing lives like their Puritan forebears, with an exhausting work ethic. The Plains would hammer out a purified citizenry (Smith 1996). Both human sacrifice-people at risk-and environmental sacrifice-soil erosion-helped the crops grow. Such efforts served God, the nation, and personal integrity; the reward would be the work itself. Similarly, it seemed to be a national duty to keep these truly representative Americans in the challenging landscape. The response of society to the Plains remains one of the best indicators of whether Americans continue to believe they have a moral obligation to save the family farm (Comstock 1987b). The Plains remain an in extremis region that heightens problems and tests responses. Peirce Lewis’s observation that a nation’s geography is extremely revealing about American values is particularly appropriate for the High Plains (1979).

MORAL GEOGRAPHY I N HIGH PLAINS HISTORY 245

Why this costly attention? Since the earliest days of the nation, as during the pre- ceding colonial era, access to good farmland by ordinary people was the express locus of equal opportunity and personal freedom. It offered a geography of hope, a pastoral idealism preached by Jefferson, Crihecoeur, and many others. By the nineteenth century, a near-mythic belief that life on a family farm-160 acres of diversified production in corn, beans, wheat, hay, hogs, chickens, and cows-was a su- perior way of life stood as an article of faith at the heart of Americanism.

This agrarian idealism was heavily qualified later in the century by an emphatic Social Darwinism that preached an entrepreneurial and competitive survival of the fittest. Should not economic trends run their natural course even if they would dis- place people from homes and farmland? In this empathy-challenged view, no doubt it was tragic for family farming to decline, but did this not, after all, take place within the greatest success story of modern times-high industrial food production that maintained low prices? Very often, Americans paid attention to the Plains primarily when they were highly productive and not out of concern for the region’s farmers. After World War I1 the Plains were popularly identified as the “breadbasket and feedbag of the world” that served foreign policy during the cold war, reduced the trade deficit, and raised corporate profits while providing inexpensive food to American consumers.

Most Plains farming was transformed into agribusiness after World War 11, when innovative technologies-machines, chemicals, and management-restruc- tured the agricultural industry. Diversified agriculture began to decline, while large, specialized, wholly commercialized farms became common. Contrary to political rhetoric, the tax system, government programs, agricultural research, and agribusiness practices began to discriminate against the traditional mom-and-pop opera- tion. Not the least, up to 80 percent of food production now came from agribusiness operations (USDA 1998,12,34; Penn ig81,48-49). Even defenders of the family farm admitted that it was no longer the primary solution to the problem of feeding a hun- gry world. Thus did Americans seesaw chaotically between indifference and be- nevolence in their views on high-risk farming.

By the late twentieth century, studies began to conclude that smaller family farming was not salvageable, despite the sixty-year-long effort: The going minimum acre- age on the Plains seemed to be at least 2,000 acres, and gross annual income at least $LOO,OOO (in 1986 dollars) (Comstockig87b, 401). As a result, over the last two decades a national debate has taken place on the myths and realities of family farming (Com- stock 1987a; Opie 1993, igg.+). The family farmer was still praised for personal dedica- tion, capacity to accept risk, skill at resource conservation, contribution to rural communities, personal independence, and maintenance of a satisfying quality of life. None of these worthy characteristics was attributed to agribusiness (Boehlje 1987).

But it was also noted that when family farmers encountered the environmental limits of the Plains, they in reality became long-term government clients. As a result, the American family farm has persisted for more than 100 years on the Plains-and more than 200 years nationally-as a decentralized cottage industry in an increas-


ingly industrialized world (Cochrane 1979). Ironically, after decades of incredibly difficult and costly human effort, regional farms and towns became, it seemed, artificially constructed entities that were perpetually vulnerable to collapse and largely dependent on the kindness of strangers. People continued to live on the Plains largely because of the federal dole.

Thus undermined, loyalty to the family farm faced a radical turnaround with the Federal Agricultural and Improvement Reform Act of 1996 (FAIR). Sixty years of pro- tectionism were unraveling. The bill dramatically announced that farmers would no longer be guaranteed their privileged support from the government, although it sof- tened the blow by stretching the reduction over a seven-year period. The FAIR also began to chip away environmental protection by allowing exceptions for wetland preservation and farmland conservation. This monumental shift raises questions about how Americans have historically viewed their agricultural geography.

EIGHTEENTH- AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY VIEWS OF THE PLAINS Just what is the physical condition of the region? The High Plains extend north- south entirely across the United States in a swath that is approximately 300 miles wide. Their eastern border is roughly at the 98th meridian, which neatly bisects the nation into eastern and western regions; their western border is the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where the altitude can be as high as 5,000 feet above sea level. The Plains are a region of startling climate extremes, buffeted in summer by a hot sun,dry heat, a perpetual wind, and limited rainfall. The winters are severely cold, with blizzards of wind and snow. The region is labeled semiarid because rainfall averages 12 to 20 inches a year. The term itself is relative: Historically, most American farming took place where rainfall was 30 to 40 inches a year. Corn, the frontier settlers’ primary crop, demands 30 or more inches.

Not that the High Plains lacked their own identity. The original Plains were cov- ered by a variety of grasses that lived in a symbiotic balance with each other and provided subsistence for millions of bison and antelope (Phillips Petroleum Company 1963; Costello 1969). The balance involved still poorly understood natural forces, such as enormous grass fires, climate fluctuations, and animal grazing, together with low-1evelNative American interference. Such grasslands would have continued indefinitely had Euroamericans not intervened.

Zebulon Pike first shaped American opinion about the High Plains in 1810, when he accurately reported that “a barren soil, parched and dried up for eight months in the year, presents neither moisture nor nutrition sufficient to nourish timber. These vast plains of the western hemisphere, may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa” (quoted in Allen i975,7-8). For most of the first half of the nineteenth century, explorers and travelers described the High Plains as the Great American Desert, a label first applied by Stephen H. Long in 1821 (Athern 1962). Ed- win James, a botanist with Major Long, wondered how animals survived in the region. It is striking that Native Americans had left large parts as either transitory hunting grounds or no-man’s-lands between tribes. As late as 1856 Joseph Henry, the


influential secretary of the new Smithsonian Institution, concluded that “the whole space to the west, between the 98th meridian and the Rocky Mountains, denomi- nated the Great American Plains, is a barren waste[ ,] . . . a country of comparatively little value to the agriculturist” (quoted in Wedel i975,15). After the Civil War the military commander of the Plains region, General William Tecumseh Sherman, reported that western settlement reached its workable limits at the 99th meridian; beyond, the region was “fit only for nomadic tribes of Indians, Tartars, or buffaloes” (quoted in Athearn 1962,57). For a generation, caravans of westbound settlers leap- frogged across the Plains, as did the first railroad lines.

HIGH-PLAINS SETTLEMENT AND MANIFEST DESTINY

Nevertheless, Americans looked on eventual settlement of the High Plains as a final chapter to complete the nation’s Manifest Destiny and its domestication of the conti- nent. Homesteading, which did not begin until the 1870s, continued into the 1920s. As early as 1831 Joshua Pilcher told Congress that anyone who saw the open grasslands as an impossible obstacle “must know little of the American people, who sup- poses they can be stopped by any thing in the shape o f . . . deserts” (Pilcher 1831,19). Indiana Senator G. S. Orth, member of an 1867 Republican junket onto the Plains, announced that “[ 01 ur good ‘Uncle Sam’ has come here, and he brings with him science and civilization. He intends to plant permanently a part of his great family; for he is now founding empires” (Orth 1867,49; see also Athearn 1962). Thus the High Plains were first populated under a boomer psychology that often denied geographical realities. Over a seventy-year period, fresh waves of farmers seemed always poised to step forward like troops sacrificing themselves on a battlefield. They were deliberately lured into a searing environment that was unfit for farming and left them stranded in crushing failure.

Then came what seemed like a miracle. For a decade-approximately 1878-1887 --extraordinarily heavy rains fell on the High Plains country west of the 97th meridian from Texas to Canada. A rush of new farmers concluded that by plowing up the sod, they had altered the forces of nature. Another so-called truth was added to the settlers’ arid-land creed. If‘ nature was flawed, Americans could force adjustments in it. Settlers were convinced that a new set of rules now applied to the Plains. “Rain fol- lows the plow” became the popular slogan and gained support in scientific circles (Opie 1993). Because God was on the United States’side, surely nature would con- form to God’s plan. A livable landscape could thus be imposed on the challenging Plains. Their geography could be manipulated to grow corn, sorghum, beef, and pigs. Between 1870 and 1880 the population of the western third of Kansas rose 370 percent, from 38,000 to ijg,ooo, peaking just as the rains inexplicably halted. The boom ended more suddenly than it began, its collapse accelerated by the disastrous blizzards in early 1886 in which 80 percent of all range cattle died (Fite 1966,37; Davis 1984,126). Drought returned late in the summer of 1887. After several decades of failure many farm families fled back East with the slogan on their wagons, “In God we trusted; in Kansas we busted” (Shannon 1945,307-308).


THE FIRST STAGES OF A MORAL GEOGRAPHY

Reactive political decisions treated the troubled Plains as a public responsibility. It became abundantly clear that the celebrated 1862 Homestead Act, which restricted each settler to an inadequate 160 acres, failed to suit the low-rainfall conditions west of the 98th meridian. Settlers labeled the five years of farm residency the act required before they received free title “the period of starvation.” Congress tried to legislate several environmental remedies by imposing an eastern landscape of trees and meadows on the shortgrass Plains (Gates 1968; Opie 1994). The Timber Culture Act of 1873 promised to give free title for 160 acres to each farmer who planted trees on one-quarter of his claim. The farmer had to keep them growing on 40 acres for ten years, during which time, it was believed, the trees would spread and improve the climate. Both trees and climate change failed. In 1877 Congress tried again, with the aptly named Desert Land Act, which discounted a full section of 640 acres to settlers who would water their land. The resulting irrigation ditches were often no more than plowed furrows that ran uphill and downhill.The two acts produced more fraud and speculation than honorable results. The 1912 passage of the Three-Year Homestead Act admitted that the point of starvation was far short of five years.

In 1874 and 1875 the U.S. Army, in another example of a moral response to a suffering geography, offered starving farm families clothing, blankets, and food that were added to meager private donations and reluctant state programs. This important step was invoked against the national faith in individual self-sufficiency (Fite 1966). Despite such relief efforts, the number of farms in the twenty-four counties of western Kansas declined from 14,300 to 8,900 between 1890 and 1900. Across the Plains more than 200,000 settlers felt fortunate to escape the region (Fite 1966,131). The rains returned in 1891 and 1892, but a combination of more drought and the nationwide financial collapse, the Panic of 1893, once again created desperate conditions in western Kansas: Internal crisis was compounded by external failure. This was followed in 1894 by one of the driest years on record-only 8-9 inches of rain- and a particularly heavy plague of grasshoppers (Fite 1966,129). Thus, after initial settlement and repeated attempts to create a serviceable-authentic-geography, the Plains became chronically vulnerable, keeping traditional European farming on the edge of failure. Plains settlement became a marginal society frozen in space and time that seemed never to escape its original frontier conditions and make the transition into a reliable rural society.

RELIEF BY MEANS OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

A series of technological breakthroughs seemed to compensate for the limitations of the Plains. The arrival of ready-made wooden balloon-frame houses taught farmers how to manage without trees, as did Joseph Glidden’s barbed wire for all-important fencing. Daniel Halladay’s economical semiautomatic windmill could tap shallow water tables to supply houses and farmyards. Word spread that John Deere’s new steel shear plow, as the saying went, “cut through the tough matted sod like a hot knife through butter.” Cyrus McCormick began to sell a workmanlike mechanical

MORAL GEOGRAPHY I N H I G H PLAINS HISTORY 249

reaper. It alone multiplied eightfold the land a wheat farmer could harvest and seemed destined to guarantee success for dryland farming (Schlebecker 1975,190- 191). Back East, the new roller process for milling wheat for bread encouraged larger plantings on more land. Not the least, a spidery network of railroads connected farmers with markets.

The primary innovation was dryland farming. This was not no-rain farming but low-rain farming in which certain soils, like the common Dalhart sandy loam of the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle, held some of the rainfall underneath plants. New settlers learned to prepare the land by listing-a double plow split the slice-and to leave untilled ridges as barriers against the wind. Always keeping the wind and moisture holding in mind, farmers planted corn or wheat or sorghum in the shelter of the furrows. The first settlers also experimented with hard winter Turkey Red wheat, the sorghums, and Kaffir corn the fodder crop “that never failed-that is, almost never” (Malin 1936, 131; see also Hargreaves 1977). The U.S. Department of Agriculture ( IJSDA) identified drought-resistant grains, particularly durum wheats for use in macaroni and spaghetti. Bright-eyed dryland farming spokesmen also insisted that if a farmer found the right combination of trees, shrubs, grains, fruits, and vegeta- bles, success was possible on less than a quarter-section (Widtsoe 1911; Green 1973).

None of these technological advances could increase the supply of desperately needed water, however. Rainfall totals had not improved, and the region was not blessed by major rivers. By the time of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, geologists had learned of groundwater under the High Plains: the Ogallala aquifer, containing an incredible 3 billion acre-feet of water (Opie 1993, 3). The aquifer remained too deep for the ordinary farmer to reach with modest a household well and windmill. But after World War I1 a successful irrigation system appeared-turbine impeller pumps, cheap and efficient engines, and labor-saving center-pivot irrigators (Green 1973; Splinter 1976). Plains farmers, for the first time, could ignore the lack of rain by flooding their fields with pumped water. They could control the climate by flicking the switch on a pump. Irrigation on the High Plains did not merely respond to low rainfall, it supplanted low rainfall. Independent farmers, still buffeted by the climate and falling grain prices, protected themselves by consuming-eroding-the soil and pumping irreplaceable groundwater.

AGRICULTURAL PARITY

For a time between 1900 and 1920, when international grain prices were high, Plains farmers prospered. But within months farm prices plummeted to less than half of what they had been in the summer and autumn of 1920. The resulting outcry of un- fair sacrifice from the backbone of Americaled the USDA to devise the concept of parity between the prices of farm products and those of nonfarm products (Fite 1981, 32). Behind this was the belief that farmers were entitled to a safety net that kept their lifestyle roughly equivalent to that of urban workers and promised movement toward the middle class. The USDA determined that between 1909 and 1914 incomes and costs were equivalent, or at parity. This era of parity has remained the bench-


mark by which to measure the economic well-being of farmers throughout most of the twentieth century. Economic well-being as a social good was now quantified, particularly with the concept that farmers were being treated fairly if they received 100 percent of parity.

In 1921 American farmers were living at 67 percent of parity. The concept of parity to assure fairness to farmers became a political football. By the 1940s Congress had deemed it sufficient to assure 85 percent of parity. With global needs during and immediately after World War 11, many farmers enjoyed their first real prosperity, as parity rose from 105 percent in 1942 to 123 percent in 1946. The percentage stood at between 70 and 80 for most of the rest of the twentieth century; exceptions include the bonanza years of 1973 at 110 percent and 1979 at 102 percent (Fite 1981,101). Farm- ers complained that they were subsidizing inexpensive food for consumers with insufficient reward for their effort: As a moral agent, the government was obligated to equalize the burden. In 1984, for example, parity for farmers nationwide hovered around 58: Farmers had 58 percent of the buying power their forerunners had decades earlier. The perpetual complaint was unfairness when the government did not make up the difference between market prices and parity prices (Walzer 1983). Farmers continued to believe they were not receiving a fair income for their labor and capital.

FEDERAL RESPONSES TO THE DUST BOWL

Seventy years of self-destructive Plains settlement reached a painful climax during the severe drought in the i93os, intensified by the worldwide economic collapse that had begun in 1929 (Worster i986).The federalgovernment offered to resettle farmers elsewhere, but this seemed too similar to the harsh Soviet farm collectivization that was going on at the same time. The half-million people who did abandon the land were symbolized by the Okies who headed for California and were described in John Steinbeck‘s novel, The Gr+i of Wrath, and John Ford’s popular movie of the same name. They became forgotten and seemingly superfluous people.

To compensate the remaining inhabitants €or environmental damage and agricultural helplessness, federal relief arrived in the spring and summer of 1934. This version of moral geography both shored up people and sustained the land. Because of the symbolic power of the farm family, now in a tailspin of poverty and depriva- tion, tens of thousands of patriotic citizens demanded action, millions of words poured forth from journalists and novelists, and billions of dollars were dedicated through federal programs. The New Deal offered assistance in the form of farm subsidies, credit programs, agricultural extension, and the newly created Soil Conserva- tion Service. The New Deal would spend more than 52 billion to keep the struggling independent Plains farmers on the land. This willingness by the federal government time and again to shore up the Plains against total human collapse suggests an extraordinary public sense of responsibility-or guilt-toward the vulnerable region. Worster also concluded that the soil-conservation program that began in 1935 ex- pressed a new environmental ethic for New Deal Americans: “each generation was


to leave the earth in as good shape as it had found it, or in even better shape” (1985, 30) . An agricultural ethic emerged: The Plains, once they were settled by family farmers, must not be abandoned, or even modified.

In the early 1940s rain and war, a strange mixture of good and evil, revived life on the Plains. Both production and prices rose. But, while grain production in the Texas Panhandle rose in value to $37.7 million between 1935 and 1942, it nevertheless cost taxpayers $43.3 million in federal aid. The nation had to invest $5.6 million to keep the boom going (Worster 1979,223). Even during the best of times, the agricultural Plains could not break even. Federal intervention continued to support farmers through the “little dust bowls” of the i95os, i97os, and 1990s. By August 1954, for example, the Farmer’s Home Administration and other agencies had provided $25 million in emergency loans, crop insurance, government commodity price supports, long-term loans with variable payments, grain and feed storage, short-crop alterna- tives, and sophisticated livestock marketing (Hurt 1981,141). These efforts kept the farmers solvent and on the land. Drought returned in 1974, and normal rainfall did not recur until 1978. By the 1970s the geographer John Borchert could write that there is “a widespread belief that, though there will be future droughts, there need be no future dust bowl:’ an affirmation that the moral geography had taken hold; not that the climate had changed but that government and society had learned to compensate (1971, 20). Government policy to keep the people on the land continued into the 1990s. The mid-to-late-1990s saw some of the driest years on record in western Kan- sas and the Oklahoma-Texas Panhandle, the heart of the old Dust Bowl. Dry times and black blizzards of blowing topsoil seemed to appear on a predictable two-decade cycle; so, it was believed, would extraordinary federal assistance.

THE LAST GREAT FEDERAL BAILOUT

Plains farming continued to consume topsoil and groundwater as a free commons with which to assure sufficient income. As a result, by i990,57 million acres on the Plains were described as highly erodible (defined as a pace of erosion at least eight times faster than natural processes can rebuild the soil). To turn this troubling situa- tion around, conservation-now defined officially in ecological terms-became an important part of the 1985 and 1990 farm bills. The 1985 farm bill-significantly labeled the Food Security Act-and in particular its Conservation Reserve Program ( CRP) , added environmental-protection and resource-conservation policies to traditional production-oriented and market-based farm-commodity programs (Ben- brook 1988; Vrana 1989). CRP sign-ups were higher in the Plains than anywhere else. The 1985 farm bill did more to promote soil conservation on the Plains than any other national legislation since the 1930s (Young and Osborn 1990). Low Input Sustainable Agriculture (LISA) was a new name for an old idea-profitable conservation farming-that in 1985 became a small part ($3.9 million) of federal farm policy (Stenholm and Waggoner 1990; Bird 1991).

In the 1990 farm bill a much broader concept centered on the overall health of the land. This was based on the new environmental science that connected biologi-


cal, chemical, and geologic systems involving both natural and human-induced actions on the land, water, and climate. The 1990 Food, Agriculture, Conservation and Trade Act committed the nation to link environmental protection and family farming to international competitiveness. An expanded LISA became the $40 million Sus- tainable Agriculture Research and Education program in the 1990 farm bill. Both were belated acknowledgments that soil and water mining is fatal to both farmers and their farmland and that the trouble would accelerate with expensive equipment and chemicals (Cook 1989; Ervin 1989). The farm bills of 1985 and 1990 did have a positive environmental impact, however. Between 1982 and 1992 sheet and rill erosion on U.S. cropland declined from 4.1 tons per acre to 3.1 tons per acre. Crop- residue management practices, reduced soil erosion and air pollution, and improved water quality were used on 99.3 million acres in 1994, up from 71.7 million acres in 1989 (Toner 1995).

However, Washington’s powerful General Accounting Office, in a strong voice of dissent, reported in 1993 that “CRP postpones rather than resolves environmental problems” (quoted in Licht i994a, 48). Minnesota Senator Rudy Boschwitz noted that “[wlhen farmers are required to reduce the number of acres they have in production, they usually compensate by farming the rest of their land more intensively, using additional fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides” (Boschwitz, Anderson, and Anderson 1989,451). Local townspeople worried that the more land set aside by CRP

around a given community the less demand there would be for private and public services. This could be fatal for local Plains communities. It had already been esti- mated that the rate of economic decline wherever a Plains region came under CRP

would be more than five times the national average (Harris, Habiger, and Carpenter 1989).

The 1990s also saw a shift away from equity, or social justice, to efficiency, or marketplace profitability. A moral geography was coming to an end after six decades. As the USDA Economic Research Service put it, the 1996 FAIR Act ‘(significantly changed U.S. agricultural policy” (USDA 1996a, 1). Both President Clinton and Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman remained “concerned that this bill fails to provide an adequate safety net for family farmers” (USDA 1996b). The bill dismantled the historic linkage between farm-product prices, local environmental conditions, and federal guarantees of a minimum lifestyle for independent farmers. It removed the connections between crop prices and payments to farmers, which now became out- right grants. These grants were to be reduced over seven years, to save taxpayers more than $1 billion by 2002. The marketplace became the leading guide for crop decisions even though it forced farmers to make risky forecasts about fall harvest prices at spring planting time. Agricultural risk was shifted from the government to the farmers. As for the land, existing conservation programs were kept in place for wetland protection and to keep land in agricultural use, but exceptions were written into the provisions that weakened these restrictions. So-called less environmentally sensitive land could receive an early out. Relief from conservation restrictions could also be based on “economic hardship’’ and “good faith.” In mid-1998, however, the

MORAL GEOGRAPHY I N H I G H PLAINS HISTORY 253

sense of public duty resurfaced when President Clinton dragged a reluctant Con- gress into providing drought relief for stricken Texas and Oklahoma farmers.

HOG FARMING ON THE PLAINS

By the second half of the twentieth century the Plains had slipped off most Ameri- cans’ mental map; they became a region beyond society’s edge. By mid-twentieth century, American “social space” stopped at the boundaries of suburbia, and any unique features beyond suburbia appeared to be antique, hardly relevant curiosities. Agricultural and rural America now stood on the other side as if they were in an alien zone beyond historic norms and rules. The Plains were seen as a minimalist landscape bounded only by the flat horizon and the infinite sky, where any human pres- ence shrank into nothingness. Today, to most Americans, the great grassy flatness is an interminable, mediocre place with few scenic or picturesque stops, seen as travelers rush across the thousand miles between Chicago and Denver. The High Plains are like a colonyexploited for the benefit of the nation; they may as well be as distant and strange as Chad or Bhutan (Knobloch 1996).

Internal changes have also occurred. The self-image of Plains farmers long rested comfortably on dryland wheat farming, irrigated grains, and some cattle on grassland. But an alternative vision, responding to a combination of difficult regional conditions and the resurgence of old-fashioned capitalism, instead urged farmers to become aggressive entrepreneurs. Only in this way, they were told, could they successfully compete with the invasion of national corporations. They should not sell their wheat, milo, and corn at low market prices but use it to feed higher-value commodities-cattle in their own feedlots and pigs in shiny sheds (Irsik 1997,1998). The old moral geography had protected alifestyle based on parity and middle-class aspi- rations; this alternative is closer to the economic fast track of the 1990s.

One of the best examples of the shifts in the 1990s has been the spread of industrial hog farming onto the Plains from the entirely different geographies of North Carolina, Missouri, and Iowa. The Plains are treated as an interchangeable region where a specific moral agenda no longer applies. The industry sought regions that had similar features: A weak and vulnerable economy and a sparse population that was less likely to challenge the negative environmental impacts of hog production. This the industry found in western Kansas, eastern Colorado, and the Oklahoma- Texas Panhandle country (Hart and Mayda 1997). But this economic opportunism was undermined in late 1998 and early 1999 by the collapse of hog-producer prices (Fund 1998,9). Despite a limited supply of water the Plains had the advantage of a dry climate to reduce air pollution (foul smells). To old-time wheat farmers the industrial interchangeability of hog production appeared to trivialize the Plains (Opie 1999). It encouraged indifference toward the unique landscape and classic rural lifestyle. Industrial hog production, with its stench and land and water pollution, could be imposed on the Plains because the Plains were “off the map”and outside civil society. The issue was not even the difference between good places and evil places but places that were nowhere and indifferent-and thus not even liable to misuse.


RETURNING THE PLAINS TO A GEOGRAPHY OF HOPE A recent shift hints at the revival of farmers’ autonomy. The links to Jeffersonian pastoral idealism are strong. The innovative Land Institute at Salina, Kansas, founded in 1972 by the visionary agriculturist Wes Jackson, is committed to keeping independent farmers on the High Plains by returning them to the presettlement self-sustaining grassland ecosystem, in combination with ecologically sound food production. The institute’s primary objective is “to develop an agroecosystem that reflects more the attributes of climax prairie than do conventional agricultural systems based on annual grain crops” (Piper 1986,i). The Land Institute, and other alternative operations like the Kansas Rural Center, advocate agricultural biocentrism. From a biocentric viewpoint, farming cannot be like any other industry. North Dakota farmer Fred Kirschenmann observed that “[ a] farm is not a factory-it is an organism made up of numerous suborganisms, each alive and interdependent, each affected in numerous, complex ways” by outside forces-money, chemicals, technology, market prices- that are invariably disruptive (Kirschenmann 1991, 168). This move toward self- sustainable farming would redefine the Plains in terms of bioregions, internal carry- ing capacity, and a sustainable economy (Aberley 1994).

Kenneth A. Cook of the Center for Resource Economics has called for “a new social contract between farmers and society” that goes beyond utilitarian values of competition, free enterprise, and marketplace risk. He said, “For its part, society will have to recognize the enormous cost farmers already bear to conserve natural resources and protect the environment. Taxpayers will have to be willing to share more of that burden-probably a great deal more-as external costs of agricultural production become internalized” (Cook 1989, 366). In this light, farmers should be judged not by their economic output but by their responsible use of inputs, such as topsoil and groundwater, as well as their own labor, economic risk taking, and family sacrifice. This is the ethic of stewardship. Comstock reflected widespread opinion when he argued in 1987 that the playing field was not level for farmers. Owner- operators did not charge full cost for their management services. The constant high risks of hail, drought, and other climate uncertainties did not receive appropriate compensation. The majority of American taxpayers were urban dwellers and did not recognize the challenges of a land-rich, cash-poor workplace. Americans had a public responsibility to compensate America’s farmers for their technological efficiency, environmental stewardship, and even their intangible quality of life (Com- stock 1987b, 366,406,408; Sagoff 1988).

ARE THE PLAINS Too FRAGILE TO SUSTAIN SETTLEMENT?

The early struggle of frontier settlers on the semiarid High Plains led not to a com- fortable life for later generations but only to more struggle. The Plains are still a frontier because their environment has not been mastered; indeed, because of the climate the environment may never be conquered. As a result, the old Dust Bowl region has been an inadvertent experiment station in crisis management. When the High Plains were settled as an agricultural region they also went on permanent alert, experiencing


crisis with no solution and no end. The question for the Plains, according to the geographer William Riebsame and reinforced by the earlier views of A. H. Clark and Paul Sears, is whether the region can ever truly support “the human creation of socially nurturing landscapes.” Is the grassland too fragile to sustain Euroamerican settlement? Global warming may accelerate the risk (Flores 1996). Riebsame concludes that “after a century of settlement and transformation, the Great Plains still spark controversy over the proper human use of semiarid grasslands” (1990,575).

Americans dedicated themselves to the protection of beleaguered farmers on the Plains. They concluded that human and environmental sacrifice made the crops grow, and they demanded restitution. But the ecologist Daniel S . Licht concluded: “What taxpayers have gotten for their money is continuing habitat fragmentation, ecosystem deterioration, species decline, soil erosion, water sedimentation, depleted aquifers, crop surpluses, rural decay, and demands for more government subsidies” (Licht i994b, 36; see also Licht i994a). The end of federal subsidies signified closure on sixty years of a moral geography.

Another concept, the abandonment of the Plains to light grazing or empty grassland, first came up in the 1920s, but a federal resettlement program was resented because it pushed failed farmers into reservations as if they were Indians or because it imitated Soviet collectivization. The most radical proposal was offered by the land- use planners Frank and Deborah Popper in late 1987. Let us finally admit, they argued, that more than a century of repeated farm abandonments, dust bowls, costly government interventions, and environmental destruction have resulted in the failure of the American experiment to live successfully on the High Plains. In this view, the most realistic duty toward the Plains and their people would be to cut losses and shut the region down before the troubles became even more grievous. The Poppers identified a wide swath of hopeless decline in 139,ooo square miles across the Plains from Texas to North Dakota that should be returned to its preagricultural condition (Popper and Popper 1987). This “Buffalo Commons” would become open land and wildlife refuge, “the world’s largest natural and historic preservation project,” with more income generated from tourism than agriculture (Popper and Popper 1992, 18). The question raised by the Poppers, Riebsame, and Jackson, among many others, is whether an authentic moral geography can be achieved on the Plains if it is based on industrial agriculture (Smith 1996).

Americans have learned, at the price of great suffering and cost on the High Plains, of the risks that result from altered ecosystems. When ecosystems are disrupted fre- quently and their fundamental features are stressed, their natural functions become chaotic and unpredictable. In the view of Jackson and others, an authentic, hence moral, geography on the High Plains can be realized not through agricultural giantism but through sustainability that conserves resources, prevents pollution, restores the environment, and is economically stable. Douglas Coffman advises, “Far from signifying failure, easing our death-grip on the dry plains will greatly enhance the natural productivity of the landscape, thus improving long range prospects for social and economic renewal. . . . Nature must be the chief architect” (1995,31).


Throughout our history, we Americans have been routinely engaged in massive environmental transformations. What is less recognized is that Americans have very limited means, even with the best scientific, technological, and political tools, for ameliorating or counteracting the transformations. In most cases we have not monitored or understood the changes and virtually did not even notice them. We have far to go in learning to read our natural and human geographies. For example, when only marketplace rules are applied, the consumption of the environment runs without a governor: The system is constantly slipping into runaway, with potential for great harm before any correction takes place. The engine of change can be slowed down by limiters from other priorities, such as the American reform traditions so aptly described by Mark Sagoff (1988). Likewise, a high level of environmental deg- radation can set limits at the last minute, with great potential for mischief to human- ity and the natural world, as became evident on the Plains in the 1930s (Meadows and others 1972; Meadows, Meadows, and Randers 1992). Moral geography watches over both people and land at risk.

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