Letter to the Editor/Brooke Allen replies

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2009 by Berry, Wendell

Dear Editor:

Brooke Allen's essay, "Shrewd Old Abe," in your Spring issue (Volume LXII, No. 1), contains two sentences that are questionable, and I would like to respond.

The first sentence is this one: "A situation like that in which Robert E. Lee, anti-secessionist and anti-slavery, could refuse Lincoln's offer of the command of the Union armies because he felt himself to be more a Virginian than an American is unthinkable nowadays."

To me - and I am obliged here to speak personally - this is simply not true. I live in a now much-diminished small community that has been home to my family for several generations. Over the last forty or so years I have taken public stands that I knew some of my relatives, friends, and neighbors here did not agree with. This is thinkable, though hardly painless. But if I were, instead of a pacifist, an army officer, and if I were asked to go to war on the side of the nation against my community, I would find that unthinkable, and I suppose I would fight for my community, just as Lee did. I don't believe I am alone in this. I have used myself as an example, because I have perfect authority to do so, but I am sure I know a number of people, longtime members of communities in other parts of this country, who like me would refuse to take up arms, for any conceivable cause, against their homes, families, and neighbors. There is no happiness in this thought, but it is still thinkable, and I am glad of it. It comes of a fundamental decency. A further decency is that one's love for one's own community would lead one to imagine and respect other people's love for their communities-and so, I suppose, one is drawn toward pacifism.

In the second sentence, my objection is aimed less at Brooke Allen than at George McGovern, the author of the interpolated quotation: "Three landmark acts [of Lincoln's presidency] - the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, and the creation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture - 'formed a tripod on which much of America's great agricultural success has rested from that day until the present.'"

The problem here is with the "externalized" costs of America's agricultural success, particularly since the end of World War II. Among those costs are toxic pollution, the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, soil erosion far in excess of the rate of replacement, genetic impoverishment of crops and animals, destruction of rural communities and local cultures, reduction of the farm population almost to nonexistence, and the consequent absolute dependence on yet another racially designated and exploited class of menial laborers.

The success of any enterprise is computed by subtracting costs from gains. At some point in the evolution of American expertise, the gene for subtraction seems to have been lost.

Port Royal, Kentucky Wendell Berry

Brooke Allen replies:

I feel honored to have received such a close reading from Mr. Berry, whom I have always admired. Regarding his first point, I am intrigued by his theory but not entirely persuaded that it is correct. I will certainly admit that I can remember people in my own family who, like Lee, defined themselves more as Virginians than as Americans, but I am tempted to think that this outlook is peculiarly common in Virginia, perhaps the most self-regarding state in the Union. The Civil War and World Wars I and II did a great deal to create the sort of strong American national identity that did not really exist during the early years of the Republic. So did the ever-expanding role of the Federal government at the expense of the states, a process Lincoln himself accelerated. The jingoistic patriotism, ubiquitous flags and "Proud to Be an American" signs that proliferated after 9/11 would probably have surprised Americans of the early Republic, for whom local loyalties overrode a rather feeble national identity.

It also seems to me that these local loyalties have been dramatically weakened since the Second World War, a result of the fact that Americans are more peripatetic than ever before, often moving several times over the course of a lifetime, living hundreds of miles from their parents and grandparents, and marrying someone from a different geographical region. People like Mr. Berry, who live in communities that have been home to their families for several generations, have become the exception rather than the rule.

As for Mr. Berry's second point, I am one hundred percent in agreement with him.

WENDELL BERRY has received the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Excellence in Southern Letters. Counterpoint will soon publish a collection of his writings on farming and food: Bringing It to the Table.