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An Update--Hoeing the Rows

5/19/2016

[Update available here: The Row Verdict.]

Well, with much delay and ado, the garden is finally all planted. Over the course of planting, we discovered that somewhere along the way the 20' by 20' square we had tried to stake out had turned into an 18' by 22.5' subtle rhombus, but we were able to improvise. Around the space carved out for the Victory Garden proper, we filled in with corn, potatoes, broccoli, and a few peppers -- all plants left out of the Victory Garden plan we chose, but that appear in others.

Taken from the North side, looking Southward on the garden.

Without exception, every Victory Garden pamphlet suggests straight rows -- often even emphasizing that they should run lengthwise, rather than across the short side -- so rows it was. The primary reason for running rows lengthwise is that when using animals or machinery, as in large-scale agricultural operations, longer rows means fewer turns at the end of every row.

A particularly fortuitous feature of our garden plot is that running our rows lengthwise also meant running the rows North-South. This maximizes sunlight for growing plants, who then have equal access to Southern sun exposure. [If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, the directions that receive the most sunlight to least sunlight, in order, are: South, West, East, North.] Accordingly, we also oriented our plan so that the tallest plants (tomatoes) are to the East of the other rows, to keep them from shading out smaller neighbors like spinach or radishes.

"Plant the garden in long straight rows far enough apart to cultivate with a team and a field cultivator. [...] A garden like this will give the largest returns with the smallest amount of hand labor."
-L.A. Hawkins, Make the Garden Pay (International Harvester Company, 1946).

Confession: I've never actually planted a garden in rows before. Yes, all the seed packets give directions for how many inches apart in a row seeds should be, and how far apart the rows, but I had always gardened in rectangular beds and patches before, rather than in single rows. Thus far, I have several concerns. I'm trying my hardest to be open minded and there's a chance I will be swayed over the course of this growing season, but here they are:

The rows situation has already made accessing all the vegetables to plant seeds very difficult, since the plans from 1942 do not include room for footpaths (which would be ridiculously space inefficient). As it stands, we've been treading pretty close to our plant seeds, and likely compacting the soil much more than ideal pretty close to their roots.
When you plant only in a single row, you aren't planting as space-efficiently as you could be. {See picture to side.} This already profoundly bugs me, especially given the extreme rhetoric about the overarching importance of maximizing production.
Weed control. When you plant in a bed style, the plants are close enough to provide a more or less complete canopy of leads above the soil. The labor of weeding comes down to almost zero once the plants start adding on leaves. With rows, there will always be expanses of space between the rows, just waiting for weeds to sprout up. This task has already begun, and is the largest time-suck in this period where all the rows are planted, but not all the plants need harvesting, suckering, or other tending yet.

Speaking of weed control ... the great unending task begins. Personally, I find weeding strangely satisfying and therapeutic. Next to actually eating the produce the garden, my favorite task is killing the myriad plants that pop up. And efficiency is my last concern. Standard garden advice is to simply use a hand cultivator (illustrated instructions here, courtesy midwestgardeningtips.com). However, I get really into the visceral pleasure of yanking plants by hand, individually and painstakingly. While using a hand-cultivator would take a mere fraction of the time, I almost always opt for hand-weeding ... and then spend an hour longer in the garden than I had planned on. (#worstvictorygardenerever.) Am I the only one who feels this way?

In closing, I just have to brag about the back bed off our porch. It's an additional project, where we'll be putting mostly sprawling squash vines. (I have yet to see such space-intensive plants recommended for World War II gardeners.) The bed was almost pure grass and weeds until my amazing partner put in many hours breaking it up while I was out of town last weekend. I can't wait to post an 'after' picture at the end of the summer...

Names in Politics--From Schicklgruber to Drumpf

5/9/2016

Allow me to introduce you to Adolf Schicklgruber:

Courtesy NY Historical Society's Pinterest.

Adolf may look familiar. During World War II, rather than refer to him exclusively as Herr Hitler, American often chose to refer to der Fuhrer as Adolf Schicklgruber.

The origins of the popular practice went back to the interwar period in Europe, during Hitler's rise to prominence. Anti-Nazi Hungarian newspaperman Hans Habe first claimed that Hitler's real family name was Schicklgruber in 1935. Hitler was so concerned about this, as well as other myths stating that he might have Jewish ancestry, that he commissioned a formal investigation of his genealogy by Rudolf Koppensteiner, which became the 1937 book Die Ahnentafel des Fuehrers ("The Pedigree of the Leader").

In the U.S. in 1952, the less biased and less afraid-for-his-life scholar Alan Bullock laid out Hitler's family story, debunking the claims that Hitler had actually been born Schicklegruber. There was a significant grain of truth in the popular myth: Adolf Hitler's father was born out of wedlock to a Maria Schicklgruber; her son (and Adolf's father) Alois bore the Schicklgruber name until the death of his purported father, Johann Hiedler. Midway through life, Alois changed his name legally to Hitler, the name he then passed on to his son.

Google ngram is one tool available to give historical researchers one idea of the popularity of phrases, ideas, and terms; Google will search their entire archive of digitized historical materials, including books, newspapers, magazines, and other media, and track occurrences of any word, words, or phrases of your choice. As we can see below, the Schicklgruber story clearly starts around 1935; one early peak seems to be near the US entry into the war, with another in 1944. Interest in name-calling the German Furher then drops off until the myth is debunked in 1952, drawing it into the public eye briefly once more:

Word frequency of "Schicklegruber"

Donald Drumpf

In case you somehow missed it, John Oliver launched an attack on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in late March very much in the Schicklgruber vein. Turns out, Donald Trump's family name was originally Drumpf, and was changed to Trump sometime during the American naturalization process. (Trump's ancestors were not only Drumpfs, but also immigrants!)

But really, if you haven't watched the segment yet, you should. Here's the whole bit, but the Drumpf name comes up starting around 18:40. Alternatively, you can just read the excerpt below:

If you are thinking of voting for Donald Trump, the charismatic guy promising to ‘Make America Great Again,’ stop and take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you just met a guy named Donald Drumpf: a litigious, serial liar with a string of broken business ventures and the support of a former Klan leader who he can’t decide whether or not to condemn. Would you think he would make a good president, or is the spell now somewhat broken?

John Oliver gets at the big questions here in his closing speech: why does a name matter? Is the importance of personal brand so much more important than substance that the most effective way to critique a political figure is to attack that brand?

What's In a Name?

courtesy www.donaldjdrumpf.com

Anyone who has read much American political history -- or even just skimmed the Lincoln-Douglas debates -- knows that political slurs are nothing new. [Lincoln called Douglas' argument "thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death" during the Sixth Joint Debate.]

But it seems like there is something different about the use of family names, rather than descriptive labels and critiques, to smear political figures. On some level, we must not really believe that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," if we repeatedly hope that simply calling Hitler 'Schicklgruber' or Trump 'Drumpf' can break the spell. It seems like if only the enemy can be properly named, the truth can be revealed and their power can be dissolved.

The more apt literary reference would be the Brothers Grim fairytale, Rumplestiltskin. In the tale, the title character is a magical little man who helps a country girl achieve all her dreams, but at an increasingly high price. Finally, he takes away her child and refuses to return it unless the now-queen discovers his true name. With the help of a spy, she discovers his name and correctly pronounces it:

"The devil told you that! The devil told you that!" shouted the little man, and with anger he stomped his right foot so hard into the ground that he fell in up to his waist. Then with both hands he took hold of his left foot and ripped himself up the middle in two.

The Historian in the Garden - An Explanation.

5/5/2016

'The Historian in the Garden' might seem a simple, self-evident title for this blog-venture -- and hopefully it is! I garden, I go out into my garden frequently, and I am a historian. I even occasionally write outside near my garden! However, I also chose it with a few other layers of meaning packed in, like I'd like to unpack here.

The Book

The book title I am playfully riffing on is that of Leo Marx's 1964 masterpiece, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. [Pagination is from my copy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.]

Leo Marx was an early scholar in American studies -- working from the basis of U.S. exceptionalism and looking to explain unique traits of the American experience and national character. This book was based on his 1950 dissertation in the History of American Civilization, completed at Harvard.

His source base is limited primarily to the literature produced by 'great' (read: white, male) authors of the American cannon. Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow, The Tempest ('Shakespeare's American Fable'), the agrarian writings of Thomas Jefferson, the technological visions of Tench Cox, and bits of Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Hawthorne, Melville, and many more appear.

Through these disparate authors, Marx identifies a unique and persistent trope: these authors, in grappling with the onset of American industrial power, locate a tension between nature and culture in the form of, well, a machine in the garden. In his own words:

[Throughout the American cannon,] the machine is made to appear with startling suddenness. [...] The ominous sounds of of machines, like the sound of the steamboat bearing down on the raft or of the train breaking in on the idyll at Walden, reverberate endlessly in our literature. (15-16)

It is the intrusiveness of the new technology that is key for Marx. The most common machine intruding throughout American literature is a train -- hence the book cover image above. The train has long been recognized in its time and our own for breaking down and reorganizing traditional ideas about space and time. The train network is often famously credited with creating standardized time; Backstory Radio has an excellent podcast covering the completion of the trans-continental railroad as the first time Americans tried to experience an event simultaneously. While we thus often eulogize train network expansion as a unifying force in American history, Marx points out that such technological networks broke down old distinctions that helped us make sense of the world--especially the line between the city and the county.

The distinctive attribute of the new order is its technological power, a power that does not remain confined to the traditional boundaries of the city. It is the centrifugal force that threatens to break down, one and for all, the conventional contrast between these two styles of life [pastoral and urban]. (32)

George Inness, 'Lackawanna Valley,' 1856, National Gallery of Art.

Marx ultimately concludes that the intrusion of the machine into the garden exposes the inadequacies of our traditional imagery to understand the modern American relationship between nature and culture. Why are American literary heroes always left broken by the intrusion of the machine in the garden? Is there truly a pastoral paradise left to intrude upon? Or has the train been there as long as we have?

These works manage to qualify, or call into question, or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture. (25) [...] To change the situation we require new symbols of possibility, and although the creation of those symbols is in some measure the responsibility of the artists, it is in greater measure the responsibility of society. (365)

The Garden

As I write my dissertation, I am working to figure out a few basic questions: what IS a garden? How can we define it? My brilliant advisor asked me this very question during my doctoral oral exams, and then as well as later, I have come to a list of ways that you cannot define a garden:

Detail, Jane Peterson, 'Turkish Fountain with Garden,' ca. 1910, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Location -- It is tempting to state that a garden constitutes plants that are grown at or near the home, while agriculture is out in fields. How then, however, to explain public gardens? Botanical gardens? Community gardens? While certainly gardening and domesticity are entwined in certain times and places of American history, the connection is not definitive.
Function -- Gardens can be healing, as seen in the growing gardens for veterans movement, hospital gardens, and the growing field of horticultural therapy. Gardens can also be aesthetic and artistic places, as the American Impressionist painters conveyed in oils -- see The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts online exhibit, The Artists' Garden. Gardens can be public and educational, as the mission statement of the famed St. Louis Botanical Garden illustrates. Or they can be privately cultivated in food deserts where that may be the best way to ensure nutritional, fresh, meals for your family; such gardens grow social justice as well as vegetables. Some gardens, like Victory Gardens, are highly political and patriotic. However, there are no strict rules: gardens can serve multiple of these functions or other ones entirely.
Relationship to the market -- When thinking specifically about how to differentiate gardens from agriculture, an easy answer might seem to be that agriculture is done for a living, to produce commodities that sell on the market for profit, while gardens remain outside the commercial sphere. However, this doesn't hold either. What about public gardens who charge for admission? Or what about truck/market gardens? How about the ways that gardens play into domestic economy by saving money on food? They may not enter the marketplace, but they are still shaped in relation to it.

Here is where Marx proves helpful. I assert that the garden is ultimately a construction--not only literary, but also social, cultural, and political. I think the reason I can find no strict definitions of what constitutes a garden, is that the social meaning of gardens and gardening is constantly changing, representing a unfixed middle ground between "wilderness" (whatever that means) and "civilization," nature and culture -- an Arcadia we constantly seek. In this, I agree with Marx that symbols are important to our political and social self-fashioning. However, while I am thoroughly ready to abandon the trope of the machine in the garden, I remain convinced that the garden remains ever more relevant to the twenty-first century.

As much as the garden is a construction, it is also, undeniably, a place. Gardens are material and real. They have plants, with roots in the soil and leaves angling for sunlight. One can sit there and think, and write. This summer, that is what I intend to do: a historian in her garden.

An Update--Hoeing the Rows

[Update available here: The Row Verdict.]

Names in Politics--From Schicklgruber to Drumpf

Allow me to introduce you to Adolf Schicklgruber:

Donald Drumpf

What's In a Name?

The Historian in the Garden - An Explanation.

The Book

The Garden

Author

Archives

Categories

An Update--Hoeing the Rows

[Update available here: The Row Verdict.]

Names in Politics--From Schicklgruber to Drumpf

​Allow me to introduce you to Adolf Schicklgruber:

Donald Drumpf

What's In a Name?

The Historian in the Garden - An Explanation.

The Book

The Garden

Author

Archives

Categories

Allow me to introduce you to Adolf Schicklgruber: