Eulogies and Apologies

LOTS OF PEOPLE have taken turns being America's heroes: Presidents, astronauts, soldiers, and ballplayers. Still, even the sixties' counterculture proved that some things don't change. The farmer is still America's great mythical figure. Thomas Jefferson said farmers were the backbone of the nation. In the ensuing 200 years, whenever Americans imagined their national virtue had strayed, they looked for it in the countryside--right up to Max Yasgur's farm. Not that these romances kept city people from squeezing farmers to death. Massive "agribusiness" and a few stubborn, independent souls are all the growing economy has left us of America's rural wellsprings of virtue.

Mark Kramer's Mother Walter and the Pig Tragedy is an uneasy eulogy for the dying remnant. It's the foreshadowing of a requiem we'll probably be too busy to sing, for an eccentric community, which Kramer calls "Clabberville," of western Massachusetts farmers. The book is not a romance; it doesn't try to win you back to the land with the cheerleading tone of some pseudo-Movement drivel. The book is personalized journalism, comprising 28 pieces which Kramer wrote for the old Phoenix. These are honest first-hand sketches of the blessings and limits of rural existence, and the book's problems, like its virtues, stem from Kramer's half-observer, half-participant, stance.

The strengths of the book are clear. Kramer takes off on small incidents or seemingly narrow subjects, like the farming of different kinds of corn or the ecological dangers of weekend snowmobiling. By describing rather than preaching, he conveys a broad sense of people's lives and of political problems. He writes with a great deal of feeling, often nicely understated. He describes city slickers moving in to make a quick buck or to enjoy the country on weekends at the farmers' expense, and the giant farm supply corporations which generally make farmers' lives miserable. But he doesn't bludgeon you with self-righteousness or drown you in sentiment. He realizes that he doesn't have to; the political facts and personal portraits speak for themselves.

But if he doesn't have trouble understanding and describing Clabberville, Kramer does have trouble understanding and describing himself. His usual inclination is to leave out his personal life entirely. The decision was a wise one, and he should have kept to it. Excepting the two or three uncomfortably self-conscious essays, the book stands as a valuable piece of social history.

But Kramer feels all-too-keenly that he is writing as an outsider. He feels compelled to justify, presumably to his radical readers, not only the appropriateness of his writing but also his decision to move to the country. The result reveals much of the psychology shared by Movement people of the last college "generation"--those who got out by 1970 or so.

Kramer was born in Brooklyn, educated at Brandeis and Columbia. His roots are middle-class and urban; he was ripe for Movement politics. The end of the sixties found him writing for the Liberation News Service in New York, immersed in the same moral and political confusion shared by radicals who realized they couldn't manipulate the world into justice. He discovered, as he implies repeatedly, that you're no use working for others if you don't feel you're working for yourself. He moved to the country to restructure his life; he is doing good work and being a good neighbor.

BUT KRAMER SEEMS to feel guilty. He thinks pious altruists of the Ralph Nader ilk, like the archetypical Jewish Mother, will look at him scoldingly for not working harder to get what he wants. The radicals of five years ago will think he's sold out. Radicals today may not understand his confusion; most current organizers for domestic self-determination movements never really thought of themselves as ascetics. Unfortunately, Kramer doesn't distinguish between the kind of Movement politics that was getting him and most people nowhere in the sixties and the present prospects for constructive Movement politics, in which country radicalism definitely plays a part.

Toward the end of Mother Walter, Kramer writes:

Ofcourse I'm sure I'm not doing the most good I could be doing for other people. But I don't so much have the proprietary view of "people out there" as possible patrons of my services--that one not very oppressed must be a full-time doer of good. What little I know I am happy to share, but I no longer have earth-shaking ministrations to purvey. You wanna know about rutabagas, I'll tell you about rutabagas. You wanna know about how to make a correct revolution? Me too.

If Kramer is saying you can't force people to do what you want, he's right. If he's trying to justify his own retreat from over-immersion in a kind of political action that had very little immediate effect, he needn't bother. If he's trying to say that you can't figure out how to make correct revolution, he's wrong. And the problem is that I don't think he believes himself either. As "curator" of a way of life which besides its narrow cultural horizons also, in Kramer's eyes, embodies creativity, cooperation, close contact with people and with the proverbial means of production, he is doing more good than he ever did pondering sociology at Columbia. And most of the book suggests that he knows it.

FOR EVIDENCE that Kramer's political analysis is sounder than the confusing self-revelatory passages of Mother Walter, you can turn to "The Quality of Naivete," an introductory essay he wrote for The Growth of Industrial Art. This massive volume is a re-issue of Benjamin Butterworth's 1892 collection of drawings of early tools right up to the then-latest advances in American technology. The self-satisfied texture of this beautiful book speaks more eloquently than any written passage could for the peculiar sensibilities of the late nineteenth century businessman.

Kramer's essay is a radical rehash of populism and the origins of unionized labor. He writes like a good journalist, with a knack for vivid description of those events which did most to shape the consciousness of "the people." He is not making a subtle argument, not digging for causes. He is instead trying to convey an alien character of mind, to make us appreciate that the misery and insecurity of the poor could co-exist with calculating businessmen who sympathized very little.

After reading this essay, it's even easier to appreciate Mother Walter as a revealing book which also contains more than enough enjoyable essays and pictures to justify occasional rereading and passing the book on to friends. I think Mark Kramer tried to tie too much together too soon, but considering that the essays were written over a three-year period, the consistent quality of most of the book is impressive. Maybe next time, he won't feel compelled to apologize.