Essays From West of 98: A Presidential Ideal

How did the holders of our highest office feel about agriculture and rural America?

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📷: new childrens’ farming exhibit at the Museum of the West Texas Frontier

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What do our presidents think about agriculture and rural America? I was thinking about this on Presidents’ Day. It is not just an idle thought (though I have plenty of those). This goes to the fundamental question that I am currently pursuing in my writing: how do we truly build lasting prosperity for the future of rural communities, so that those communities and their people HAVE a future?

I’ve made no secret my disdain for the last several decades of political discourse in general, but especially as applies to rural America. At best, rural places and rural people are ignored. At worst, they are outright patronized or disdained (both treatments are equally bad and unhelpful). Should we be surprised, though? When a government spends almost 75 years prioritizing “cheap food” and telling its citizens to spend less money on food and more money on literally everything else, that government has only cheapened and dismissed the value of the people and places that grow the food.

In his 2019 book “The Art of Loading Brush,” Wendell Berry recounts his brother John’s futility as a delegate to the 1992 Democratic National Convention, where he tried to contribute a meaningful statement in the party platform that would support actual rural prosperity. He was blown off to the extent that he simply gave up. A quick scan of the most recent platform by both major parties shows references to rural America and agriculture, but a man need not be a political scientist to see the patronizing statements and the focus on bolting pre-existing party beliefs onto rural and agricultural voters.

Jimmy Carter was the only president in recent history to make his living as a farmer. Sure, others have had an affinity for rural life—think of Reagan’s horses, George W. Bush’s brush clearing, LBJ’s ranch on the Pedernales—but this was an a hobby afforded by success elsewhere in life.

Dwight D. Eisenhower uttered one of the most famous presidential lines about agriculture: “farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from a cornfield.” It is an accurate, admirable, and oft-repeated line for which he deserves credit. Yet, one wonders if it was a mere platitude and nothing more. After all, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson was the first American policymaker to utter the infamous and deeply harmful instruction to farmers to “get big or get out!”¹

Harry Truman grew up with farm roots but moved to what he saw as more prosperous career opportunities. Franklin D. Roosevelt heavily influenced American agricultural policy through aspects of the New Deal. He came from old New York City money and would never be called a “farmer,” but Roosevelt deeply loved growing and selling trees on his New York estate and longed to retire to that life after the presidency (a fact detailed at length in the great Douglas Brinkley conservation book, “Rightful Heritage”).² His cousin Theodore was similarly privileged, but TR reoriented much of his persona around the time he spent as a cowboy in the Dakota Territory.³

What about Thomas Jefferson? In a letter to George Washington, Jefferson famously wrote “agriculture is our wisest pursuit because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness.”

The first essay in this series quoted Jefferson on the peril of centralizing power, so Jefferson’s ideas play a pivotal role in my line of thought on this topic. Jefferson was one of America’s great experimental farmers, pioneering new crops and cultivation methods on his Monticello property. Of course, Jefferson was not doing the manual labor himself. He owned enslaved people and that cannot be separated from his story as a farmer.

Yet, despite his deep moral failings in his personal life, Jefferson held great and important ideals that are worth pursuing. I view Jefferson’s relationship with agriculture with the same eye that I view his relationship with the concept of liberty. His high-minded ideals were correct, even if he did not have the personal moral fortitude to act on them with his own time, talent, and treasure.

Next week, Jefferson’s yeoman farmer: 18th century relic or 21st century hope?

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.

1. "Get big or get out” is most popularly associated with Earl Butz, chief of the USDA under Nixon and Ford and no friend of this newsletter. Butz was loud and popularized the saying with his aggressive ways, but Butz was an assistant to Benson in the Eisenhower administration and according to wise scholars of the matter like Berry, the statement originated with Benson.

2. Brinkley shares that, even as President amidst the Great Depression and World War II, Roosevelt took great care to ensure that his tree farm remained successful. He even placed understated ads in the New York Times advertising Christmas trees for sale!

3. If you are relatively new to West of 98, I encourage you to read “American Idol,” my look at the origins of the cowboy mythos and TR’s outsized influence on its creation.