Page 58 - Spring2008

All Thumbs Book Reviews

Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: power giving to a few a very visible one, no great
War Stories from the Local Food Front manufactures employing thousands, no great
By Joel Salatin refinements of luxury. . . . We are a people of

Polyface Publications, 2007 cultivators scattered over an immense terrain. . .
united by the silken bands of a mild government,
“The instant I enter on my own land, the all respecting the laws without dreading their
bright ideas of property, of exclusive right, of power because they are equitable. . . . We have
independence, exalt my mind. Precious soil, I no princes for whom we toil, starve and bleed;
say to myself, by what singular custom of law we are the most perfect society now existing in
is it that thou wast made to constitute the riches the world.”
of the freeholder? What should we American Crèvecoeur spent several peaceful and
farmers be without the distinct possession of that prosperous years on his farm in New York, liv-
soil? It feeds, it clothes us; from it we draw even ing the ideal shared by Thomas Jefferson and
a great exuberancy, our best meat, our richest others who believed that a truly self-governing,
drink; the very honey of our bees comes from democratic society must be composed largely
this privileged spot. No wonder we should thus of small, independent farmers. In fact, Jeffer-
cherish its possession. . . it has established all our son, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, also
rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our published in 1782, insisted that agriculture, not
power as citizens, our importance as individuals manufacturing, should form the economic basis
of such a district. These images, I must confess, of the new nation (although, prophetically for the
I always behold with pleasure and extend them nation, he was to change his mind after the War
as far as my imagination can reach; for this is of 1812). Working directly with nature, “looking
what may be called the true and only philosophy up to heaven and [down] to their own soil and
of an American farmer.” industry,” instilled in these citizen-farmers the
Jefferson, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a natural- very qualities of independence, equity and justice

in his Notes ized American citizen of French heritage wrote for which the new republic ideally aimed.
this rhapsodic hymn of the early American
These shining principles, of course, never
on the State freeholder that became part of his Letters from quite became reality, and Crèvecoeur’s Letters
of Virginia, an American Farmer, published in London in describe not only the noble visionary model for

also published 1782. The book immediately became the fi rst a new society free from institutional oppression,
American literary success in Europe, and was but also the very real destruction caused by the
in 1782, translated into several languages; its author be- immorality of slavery, the bloody skirmishes

insisted that came a celebrated figure. Old Europe was keenly between colonists and native residents, and the
agriculture, curious about the new American experiment in nightmarish turmoil of the Revolutionary War,
which equal opportunity and self-determination which was not universally embraced by all the
not were the guiding lights of the new nation’s social colonists and led to neighbors murdering neigh-
manufacturing structure, along with its utter rejection of the bors. Crèvecoeur (whose name means “heart-
should form feudal tyranny of monarchist regimes. break” in French) watched his own American
“It is not composed, as in Europe, of experience end in tragedy. At the time of the

the economic great lords who possess everything, and of a Revolutionary War he was unable to take sides,
basis of the herd of people who have nothing. Here are no and while called away to France by his dying
new nation. aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no father, his farm was burned to the ground,
bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible his wife murdered and his children scattered.
58 Wise Traditions SPRING 2008