Julie Guthman

The agrarian vision is, of course, deeply rooted in U.S. political and cultural history and has emerged repeatedly as a trope of anticorporate sentiment. It originated with Thomas Jefferson, who opposed the centralized power sought by the Federalists. He preferred a weak federal government and argued that only agriculture and landownership could ensure independence and virtue, thereby providing the basis for a republican democracy (White 1991, 63). The vision of a nation of small, like-sized, and, ultimately, white farmers undergirded the clearance of Indians, as well as the major land giveaways of the nineteenth century, including the Homestead Act of 1862. After the so-called closing of the frontier, agrarianism was revitalized during the populist moment of the 1890s, when western farmers fought the monopoly power of the railroads and middlemen. Agrarianism saw another resurgence after the dust bowl tragedy of the 1930s, when the dust storms were attributed to agricultural consolidation and mechanization, which had pushed poor tenant farmers west to become "sodbusters" (Worster 1979). The link between ecology and farm structure first articulated by the permanent agriculture movement evolved into a call for reinvigoration of the family unit of production.