There is a story that overhangs the history of recent times. It says that societies pass through stages from hunting to herding to farming to the buying and selling of commodities, including land and labor. The story holds that every stage supplants the one before it. Yet while political economists defined subsistence food production as belonging to a savage past, they also knew that it continued within the circulation of capital. Adam Smith described a class of “out-servants of the landlords,” who “receive from their masters … a house, a small garden for pot herbs, as much grass as will feed a cow, and, perhaps, an acre or two of bad arable land.” British capitalists did not eliminate self-provisioning when they extinguished the rights of peasants to the common lands but absorbed it–in a sense, “captured” it–reassigning the garden and livestock from their longstanding role as the stronghold of the household to the reproduction of industrial labor.Footnote ¹

In the United States after the Civil War the last communities of subsistence hunters and farmers lost the wherewithal to endure, including Cheyenne and Sioux forced onto reservations, African-Americans forced out of the Georgia woods by fence laws, and southern whites forced to flee barren hillsides for the company towns operated by coal mining corporations. Yet they did not survive on wages exclusively. When mining companies recognized that household gardens served their interests, they declared them acceptable, even necessary.Footnote ²

This article considers the capture of the subsistence garden in two forms—capital accumulation and public relief. Both appeared in West Virginia between the 1880s and the 1930s. The same gardens that once produced beans and squashes as part of a hierarchy of mountain land use arrived in colliery villages after corporations gained title to hollows. Later, the United States attempted to resettle unemployed coal miners in industrial villages, as part of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads. My purpose is to explore the political ecology of the household garden at the moment when it changed locations from the commons to the company, from the ridge above the mine to the yard next to the shanty. Yet the political ecology of the captured garden also includes resistance to its logic. All over the Atlantic World provision grounds became contested ground between the poor and the powerful over who would control food and the terms of labor.

Political ecology is the study of power relations as expressed in conflict over landscapes and land use. It regards every environmental change as the outcome of contending political interests. Scholars whose writing considers common resources and enclosure in the United States include Steven Hahn, Karl Jacoby, Louis Warren, Mark David Spence, and Sara Gregg. While the commons figures in the story I tell here, its destruction (by way of logging) prefigures the capture of the garden. The fight for the commons continued for decades and plays a part in the transition to wage labor that I will discuss, but my interest is with the dislocation of subsistence into a regime of wage work.Footnote ³

Historians of capitalism have been writing about how casual work outside of wages helped early industrial working-class households to survive and how women, in particular, did everything from peddling to gardening. As Jeanne Boydston explains, “Within the household, wives' labor produced as much as half of the family subsistence. Beyond the household, the value of housework accrued to the owners of mills and factories and shops, who were able to pay ‘Subsistence’ wages at levels which in fact represented only a fraction of the real price of workers' survival.” Yet this literature considers unpaid labor without the control of the landscape that preceded the scramble for subsistence, and it adds gardening to a list of casual occupations rather than treat it directly, as a specific form that became a location of struggle. This article, and the book of which it will form a part, would have been impossible without the works of environmental historians, historical geographers, economic anthropologists, and historians of Appalachia, including Don Mitchell, Wilma Dunaway, Michael Dove, Ronald Eller, Mart A. Stewart. Mark A. Lause, Paul Salstrom, Mike Davis, and Nick Cullather.Footnote ⁴

Coal companies did not invent the captured garden, the British aristocracy did. Landlords realized that they could ensure adequate nutrition for their workers and reduce the sums they paid in wages by shifting the burden of survival onto laboring households. Although the cottar had existed for centuries and continued under capitalist social relations, most political economists—who took it upon themselves to describe and justify capitalism—ignored the arrangement, preferring a simplified social physics based on the behavior of individuals. Lords knew better, however, that production and consumption remained collective activities for workers only recently dispossessed of the common lands, and they literally capitalized on the longstanding skills and desires of former peasants.

A household consists of any group of related people who live together, pool their resources, and eat from the same pot. Life under the roof and around the table is a cooperative venture and a struggle for power that has as its singular goal the survival of its members. This logic of survival leads agrarian households to self-exploit, meaning that they invest any and all labor necessary to feed and reproduce themselves, regardless of whether or not the monetary value of their crops or animals justifies the expenditure. In other words, the “product” of the peasant household is the peasant household.

This drive to survive as a collective did not diminish in those instances where households lost access to land and became an asset to those who employed them. Writes Hans Medick, “Family economic production became effective above all because of the inclination of the poor, landless producers to fall back on ‘self-exploitation.’” When wives, sisters, young sons, and grandparents pulled weeds and thinned potato stems, they made up the difference between an inadequate wage distributed over all the members of the family and the hunger in their stomachs. By expending their own labor-power to reproduce the labor-power of the male wage earner they became—in effect—co-earners of the wage. Employers accumulated additional capital as though by magic—without paying more workers, extending the working day, or purchasing additional tools. In this way, gardens increased exploitation, defined as the value workers received in wages as a portion of the total surplus value they created.Footnote ⁵

The earliest example of this self-exploitation for capital was the cottar: one who paid rent (often deducted from wages) on a small house and garden located on an estate. John Sinclair represented the interests of enclosing lords when he suggested that the cottar, “raise, by his own labour, some of the most material articles of subsistence for himself and his family.” Cottar households could even sell some of what they raised in local markets, but not enough to make them independent. Instead, they would continue to “assist the neighboring farmers, at all seasons, almost equally as well as if they had no land in their occupation.” Sinclair figured it all out: Hired hands needed only three acres and eighty days a year to raise all or most of their food. The work would take up “bye hours” and Sundays, leaving 285 days for “ordinary hand labour.” One source from 1808, cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to cottages as a form of “bondage.”Footnote ⁶

But nowhere did the cottar achieve greater popularity among British capitalists than in Ireland. In the 1840s dislodged Irish peasants composed an indigent labor force, obtainable, wrote Sir Robert Kane, “on lower terms than almost any other in Europe.” There was only one problem: Starving people can't work. “Supplied only with the lowest descriptions of food,” in Kane's icy assessment, “they have not the physical ability.” The solution: Let them feed themselves. Landowners substituted cheap soil nutrients for expensive wages, allowing them to invest their money elsewhere and still purchase a higher standard of work. Cottars would improve their diets and gain a sense of proprietorship that might keep them from rising up (as Irish workers did time and again during the nineteenth century). In one example, households received ten roods of land, each, or about one and a half acres. Lords allowed them to grow only potatoes, which the laborer (and his family) could cultivate “without interfering with any regular daily employment he may have, and thus without diminishing his regular weekly earnings.” Add a pig and the garden became a tiny improved farm. The pig could be fed from peelings and potatoes too small to cook; its dung returned nutrients to the soil; and once fattened it wound up on the table.Footnote ⁷

Yet this capitalist-dominated, working-class garden also had a public or benevolent identity. Rather than feed households in the midst of a wage, it fed them in unemployment. Here reforms took the lead and introduced various schemes meant to defeat the malevolent Thomas Robert Malthus. Parson Malthus argued that machines generated redundant humans, burdening almshouses, churches, and the state. Malthus never bothered to consider the social causes of poverty; instead, he took industrial capitalism as a stage of social evolution and regarded all those displaced by it the drag and dregs of society and better off dead. Socialists hated Malthus (none more so than Karl Marx) and came up with every imaginable workaround to his horrifying math. In the 1840s, Robert Owen came up with one of the first plans to employ paupers: They would plant gardens.Footnote ⁸

Owen had a grandiose notion of what he and others called “spade husbandry,” to distinguish it from horse husbandry. The spade would replace the plow in most fieldwork, freeing land from supporting animals and making it available for the support of humans. Eight humans could live on the area needed to feed one horse, as Owen figured it, resulting in a nearly one-to-one ratio of sixty million British poor to sixty million British acres. The redundant would escape their oblivion by becoming the very beasts of burden that the rich always assumed them to be, but Owen refused that comparison. Instead, he told his readers that the spade garden represented progress not backwardness, improvement not stagnation.

When Owen's critics claimed that “to exchange the plough for the spade, would be to turn back in the road of improvement,” he countered that methods closer to the hand resulted in finer crops and a richer countryside. “Little do they imagine that … the change from the plough to the spade will prove to be a far more extensive and beneficial innovation than that which the invention of the spinning-machine has occasioned.” He announced it as, “an advance in civilization.” The gardens would be at the center of cooperative villages, redirecting those in flight from the sooty cities into productive rural work. Nothing about the spade husbandry expressed radicalism or autonomy, but rather its opposite. As another reformer put it, child paupers would be trained “in habits of subordination and industry.”

Although the public form did not necessary result in accumulated wealth, it attended the enclosure of the commons. In this sense, plots for the poor maintained a healthy and available labor supply. No less an advocate of enclosure than Arthur Young suggested internal colonies, in which sixteen million people would support themselves and pay £2 million in taxes annually, “a much greater addition to our wealth, income, population, and strength, than we now receive from our brilliant oriental dominations of Bengal, Bahar, and Orixa.” Young imagined fields and fields of cottars whose taxation amounted to rent paid to Parliament, an arrangement that would have benefited lords by externalizing the cost of maintaining the dispossessed.Footnote ⁹

This description of the garden under capitalism, however, hides the conflict over subsistence that land in the hands of the working class always provoked. No sooner had cottars, indentured servants, slaves, and tenants appeared in land-abundant North America than they revolted against the legal regimes that bound them to the creation of value. In the 1840s renters in Hudson River Valley organized to destroy a system of feudal leases dating to the first Dutch grants, eventually joining with the National Reform Association. Founded in 1844 by three printers (one of them, Thomas Ainge Devyr, a former British Chartist), the NRA asserted a radical agrarian platform dedicated to settling the landless on the public domain and a limit on the acres any individual could own. It was a working-class movement for land reform that tied liberation from wage slavery to ownership of the means of subsistence. The simple point: agrarian practices within capitalist social relations were much less controversial than the assertion of those practices for the purposes of creating autonomy from capital.Footnote ¹⁰

Both British versions of the captured garden appeared in West Virginia. Extractive industry made cottars of their employees; later, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt reinvented Owens's spade husbandry as Arthurdale, a community founded as a project of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads. Yet we first turn to miners and their families, who used gardens to maintain a modicum of the autonomy they lost when companies logged the free-range forest. During the first decades of coal mining, managers and workers locked arms in a struggle for power mediated through the control of land, labor, and food.

In West Virginia during the 1880s, a grinding, structural conflict began, in which coal companies wielded subsistence as a weapon, while miners continually tried to it take it away from them. But before capitalists could capture the garden, the ecology that had long harbored a self-provisioning mountain culture had to be shocked and transformed.

The relocation of subsistence practices from hollows and ridges to company-owned camps followed the destruction of smallholder environments in the Southern Mountains after the Civil War. Capital came to Appalachia after the Revolution when absentee investors engrossed tens of thousands of acres, much of it the best quality bottom lands. Some of the uplands also entered private ownership, but no speculator or planter who owned real estate on an incline had any plans for it in the 1790s. Instead, the uplands belonged to white families who had fled the rising cost of land on the Atlantic plain to make a life in thousands of tiny valleys called hollows or coves. The second wave of capital arrived in the 1880s, in which joint-stock companies secured title to the uplands in order to extract coal, iron, and millions of trees.Footnote ¹¹

We can only appreciate the capitalist takeover of West Virginia by knowing something about the agrarian world that it supplanted. Up to the 1880s in some counties, later in others, highlanders practiced a spectrum of land use that began with the forest. Cattle grazed in openings and pigs snouted around for nuts and roots. People took food from the forest directly by hunting in all seasons and foraging for spring plants, like ramps (an onion), that held them over until garden greens matured. The forest asked for no money and little labor, yet it gave commodities for exchange. In other words, the forest generated money without costing money, and this made it crucial to the economy of the mountains. Fields came next, where corn (or rye) made feed for livestock in winter, starchy staples for people, and added to the cash balance by providing the raw material for whiskey.

Next to the homeplace itself stood the garden, a space of about two acres. Beans and squash formed the mainstay—greasy beans and cut shorts, half-runners, Kentucky wonders, Logan giants, and peanut beans—prepared by boiling with cured pork. Mountain beans reflected local tastes and hybrids in many shapes and textures—mottled, spotted, shriveled at the ends, and fat. The people also harvested cushaw, a smooth winter squash that can grow to thirty inches and twenty pounds, using it for soups and breads. A professor of geology wrote in 1876 of these “men without means,” who preferred hunting to farming yet planted gardens as their mainstay. This “pioneer,” made a clearing next to the cabin that “served to support his family along with a hog or two, and possibly a horse and a cow, with fowls, and the abundant game in the forests around.” West Virginians, like other self-provisioning peoples in North America, regarded their gardens as an expression of household identity, where favorite foods and cooperative labor represented the culture of the family.Footnote ¹²

It was a landscape they possessed tenuously. Adverse possession and unrecorded deeds sometimes made their titles vulnerable to outside challenges. Once metropolitan capitalists realized the potential value of the lumber and minerals underneath cabins and gardens, they set out to gain hold of land through legal and extralegal means. One method was to secure rights to timber. Clear cutting the forest destroyed the ecological and economic anchor of mountain autonomy. Of the 10 million acres that had never been cut in 1870, only one and a half million remained in 1910. In the seven years between 1907 and 1914, one thousand mills turned out at least one billion board feet of lumber. By 1920, logging had removed the original blanketing woods of the Southern Mountains and turned it into 30.4 billion board feet, leaving only small pockets of trees. Desperate to replace the cash that the forest had once provided, households in freefall turned against the forest itself. One resident lamented that the need for money, “has led our people along all the streams which can float a raft, to denude the forests of the magnificent timber which they afford, often sacrificing it in the most prodigal manner,” forcing them to scavenge for tanning bark once the large trees were gone. The blight that killed the American chestnut—crucial for its finely workable wood and calorie-dense nuts—accelerated the fall into poverty.Footnote ¹³

Like the enclosure of any commons, the assault against the highland forest threw people into wage work in order to make up the difference between their household needs and the few and declining resources they still controlled. It yielded labor in addition to lumber. A writer for the West Virginia geological survey lamented, “During a comparatively few years nearly the whole population which originally earned its living from the ground has been pushed out from places of seclusion into a whirl of modern industry … Thousands of young men were induced to enter mines, factories and logging camps.” The writer further noted that extractive industry turned entire regions, “which abounded in beautiful forest scenery into unattractive and ugly wastes of land … beyond all hope of repair.” A publicist for the coal industry had seen land companies acquire property and lease it back to the head of household who had once owned it, “thus leaving a friendly guardian to keep … their titles clear.” This is how households accepted wage work. They entered a feedback loop set off by population increase and accelerated by forest destruction. As their old economy became more risky they participated increasingly in its destruction.Footnote ¹⁴

When households threw themselves on wages, their gardens moved with them. But the relationship between subsistence practices and industrial wages did not begin in the coal camps but in the hills, where families maintained plots as security against seasonal unemployment and for retrenchment during strikes. James Still describes this precarious condition through his depiction of the Baldridge family in River of Earth (1940). Poised between their cabin on the cutover and the shanty in the squalid camp near the Blackjack mine, the family clung to “the scrap of land our house stood upon, a garden patch, and the black birch that was the only tree on all the barren slope above Blackjack.” Picking wild hay after a rain, Mother tells Father that she dreams of having livestock again. The conversation escalates into a debate over the fate of the family:

Mother wants constancy and continuity; she wants wages as a choice, not a compulsion. Father wants to move the family without giving up the growing victuals that insure them against arbitrary unemployment. They both know that betting everything on Blackjack, without a garden beyond the reach of company managers, would lead to misery.Footnote ¹⁵

Like the Baldridges, households that sent men to the mines did not move to camps right away, and those that did often maintained plantings high and away or ate the beans cultivated by family members who remained in the hollows. Mountain gardens did not subsidize wages but the other way around—wages supplemented subsistence food production. We know how well this arrangement worked. Workers with a secure and remote source of food carried themselves like free people and vexed labor managers. It is why Justus Collins, vice-president of the Louisville Coal and Coke Company, operating at Flat Top Mountain, West Virginia, despised local-born miners. In 1905 Collins introduced larger coal cars in an attempt to manipulate workers into longer hours for the same pay (per car). The men refused. They slowed their shovels or dropped them altogether, disappearing for days at a time. In response, managers turned away anyone with an alternative means of support or who wanted to use wages to attain freedom from wages. Manager Bert Wright of the Pocahontas Coal Company made this entry in his journal in August of 1898: “Attempted contract with B. P. Good called off. His intentions are to make enough cash to pay for some stock and land.” Wright complained every day of a lack of disciplined workers.Footnote ¹⁶

By around 1900, if not before, managers attempted to create dependent populations of miners—people from other counties or other countries with no kin in the hills and no idea where they were—a labor army that would overwhelm the situational advantages that provided mountain-born miners with retrenchment. Justus Collins referred to them as “Hungarians,” regardless of where they came from, as in, “I would suggest that we get a carload of Hungarians … The miners we have, as you know, will not work but three or four hours a day.” Testimony given to Congress in 1888 revealed how mining corporations succeeded in keeping “thousands of surplus laborers on hand to underbid each other for employment … hold them purposely ignorant when the mines are to be worked and when closed, so that they cannot seek employment elsewhere.”Footnote ¹⁷

This is how families identical to the Baldridges ended up in villages identical to Blackjack. Once Hungarian or Irish or African-Americans arrived in the coalfields, they became artillery for breaking the defiant highlanders. Two days after the miners at Louisville Coal and Coke refused to fill the larger cars, Collins evicted all those who lived in the camp. A week later the first train of “Hungarians” arrived. A sociologist who knew the game called the immigrant inflow “a godsend” to employers: “Foreign labor was introduced into an industry not from lack of hands but in order to replace the too-demanding natives.” The strategy of retreating to the hollows would never work the same way again. All of the sudden, survival required local men to adhere to industrial discipline.Footnote ¹⁸

Once households entered coal camps, they became renters and debtors under the constant threat of eviction. In 1924 James Watt Raine, professor of English at Berea College in Kentucky, described mountain people leaving their depleted hollows to enter the camps. The mountain man who became a miner, said Raine, “moves his family and a few household goods from the picturesque cabin in the cove or on the ridge to a desolate shack in the sordid village that has sprung up around the mine. He had not realized that he would have to buy all his food … There is no acorn or hickory mast for his hog, so he puts it in a pen and tries to feed it on table scraps … He has to pay even for water to drink.” Raine reported that rent on their shanties ran against miners all the time, even when the mines were closed, a policy meant to “bind them as tenants by compulsion … under leases by which they can be turned out with their wives and children on the mountainside in midwinter if they strike.” One journalist called it “persuasion by starvation,” and pointed out that if a miner held an owner's family hostage to starve them, “you would be unable to express your horror.” But “the mine owner who starves the miner's wife by refusing credit acts within the limit of the law.” This is evidence for the key part subsistence played in the class war between workers and capital.Footnote ¹⁹

Subsistence food production existed within the economics of coal mining, but in order to fully understand it, we need to see it along with the tactic companies used to avoid paying wages. Scrip is any substitute for legal currency. Coal companies issued scrip (in the form of a coin or coupon) redeemable for goods in a store owned by the company or aligned with it (sometimes referred to as “pluck-me” stores). The practice favored the company by obscuring the dollar amount of the wage. Scrip looked like an I-owe-you, but it flipped that relationship by putting the worker into a circuit of debt: Employers paid out less than miners needed to live, advanced them necessities against future labor, and charged them interest on the unpaid balance. Managers probably would have agreed with Karl Marx that wages represented a sliver of the value workers created, which workers then handed back in exchange for food in order to “reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence.”Footnote ²⁰

The garden solved a problem for the coal operators. Scrip still required company stores to purchase food, usually from outside the region. But currency was scarce in Appalachia as late as the 1940s, and companies had begun to make purchases by check, transferring money directly to eastern banks, which compounded the scarcity of circulating currency. This motivated managers to link surplus family labor with surplus land above the mines.

A patch of vegetables (often combined with a pig to eat table scraps, or a cow, and often chickens for meat and eggs) reproduced the household with household labor during household time without competing with wage-earning work. It fed workers almost equally as well as if they had no land in their occupation. Companies profited from the greater health and capacity of workers without investing in machinery or extending the working day, and this is why they either made gardens compulsory (except for single men) or encouraged them by providing seed and fertilizer and by offering prizes, like two or three months rent or a gold coin for the largest, most productive, or most beautiful garden. Managers took advantage of the psychological uplift that corn tassels and squash flowers lent to the bareness of the camps, and company publications are replete with references to gardens as emblems of patriotism and beauty. United States Coal and Coke, operating at Gary, West Virginia, convened a committee of agronomists that estimated the average annual yield at $100 and the total value of gardens in the village at between $15,000 and $20,000. Historian David Corbin estimates that vegetables provided between 10 and 20 percent of household income in the years before and during the First World War.Footnote ²¹

Migrating workers, including Irish, Italian, and Eastern European men, brought the very same skills as the mountain-born. They had also been recently uprooted by enclosure, famine, or debt. Coal Age gave dispossession a cheerful spin:

The same could have been said of African-Americans, whether former slaves or those fleeing tenancy. No matter where they came from, miners must have experienced a green and thriving domestic space as a powerful symbol of permanence and sufficiency; their gardens must have given them satisfaction, dietary diversity, and even a sense of ownership.Footnote ²²

The pleasures of the garden, however, did not change its exploitative purpose. As Marx put it, “The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary aspect of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats.” These pleasant domestic spaces made life worse, not better, for miners everywhere, and some observers at the time understood this. A former secretary of the United Mine Workers reported from West Virginia in 1896, where he noticed gardens all along the Kanawha River near Charleston. He commented to his guide that the people must be very industrious. “They are,” responded the guide, “a darn'd sight too industrious; they are so industrious that they can dig coal for almost nothing.” The union secretary reflected, “His answer set me thinking. If the land in West Virginia was used as an adjunct to the pluck store in the production of coal, how were our miners in other parts of the country to meet this kind of competition?” Gardens were impoverishing, in the sense that they lowered the wages of other miners.Footnote ²³

Yet this is only one side of the political ecology. Subsistence became a battleground over provision grounds, with companies restricting access to food on the vine during labor actions. The key example is the Paint Creek Strike of 1912, also in Kanawha County. The strike began in April, and between May and July management sent out notices of eviction—after gardens had been planted. The activist Mary Harris “Mother” Jones arrived in the county, and miners attacked facilities at Mucklow, burning coal tipples. In September thousands more joined the original strikers, and the governor escalated the situation by declaring martial law, commandeering company guards and subjecting all the accused to military courts.

Cut off from their homes and supplies, and with no money, the strikers began to starve. Guards fought strikers during July and August, and one of their tactics was to prevent anyone from returning to their homes for food. Guards caught one miner who was “ordered to leave the creek or they would kill him.” Driven by hunger, the man found a way back to his shanty and managed to get away with his own cow in tow. Guards floated the household goods of another miner, Frank Rosse, down the river, leaving his livestock behind, then “threatened to kill Rosse if he attempted to go after them.” A week later a reporter described the inhabitants of Paint Creek as having “lapsed into a state of primitive savagery, spurred on by the depredations of the private guards … The miners are desperate, and their attack centered on the company's stores.” By linking home and subsistence on property that they owned and could legally control, the coal operators could deprive striking miners of both at the same time.Footnote ²⁴

Household food production sometimes served the needs of miners as a means of resistance and rebellion. One wrote to John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, in the midst of the 1919 strike in Coral, Pennsylvania: “We're not worrying about strike benefits … because we are killing hogs and gathering corn and other crops and squirrel hunting.” But it is difficult to determine if the statement refers to plantings inside or outside company property. There is no evidence to suggest that the gardens located inside coal camps served as a weapon that miners used against the companies or that they resulted in anything other than a cottar-landlord relationship. Changing that required unionization and walkouts. Gardens did indeed have political implications, but these almost always worked to the advantage of the companies.Footnote ²⁵

Subsistence food production served the ends of capital accumulation by subsidizing wages, transferring an older peasant ethic of self-exploitation and collective survival to a different economic regime. Yet in spite of the coercion and control that it enabled among managers and the desperate objective it became for miners during strikes, the gardens behind industrial shanties looked benign, even benevolent to reformers during the 1930s. After the beginning of the Great Depression, West Virginia coal miners truly became pauperized—without an income or access to land. That is when reformers discovered the other version of the captured garden, the one Robert Owen advocated a century earlier. They sought a way to move the unemployed to safety while giving them the burden of their own relief, and the garden offered a way.

In 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt came to Scotts Run, a long hollow near Morgantown, West Virginia, which had become among the most destitute places in the United States. Thousands had converged there before and during the First World War to take the relatively high wages companies paid. “For a distance of several miles,” stated a government report, “the banks of this stream were lined with houses.” Then the war ended. Only a paycheck separates a working-class enclave from a slum, and Scotts Run quickly became an influenza-ridden slum. Families starved within sight of stuck and silent coal tipples, rusting in the damp atmosphere after decades of loading railroad cars and river barges. One journalist found a family of thirteen huddled over a gasping fire, “with the children packed like sacks on the floor and one wakeful adult prodding the coals alive in order that they all might not freeze to death.”

The only people willing to offer aid were Quakers, having just returned from feeding orphaned children in Germany and Eastern Europe. When the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) moved some of the unemployed to small farms, President Herbert Hoover took notice. The Roosevelts befriended the AFSC's director, Clarence Picket, and once in office they wrote the details of the Quaker program into the National Industrial Recovery Act, establishing an agency within the Department of the Interior with a budget of $25 million. They called it the Division of Subsistence Homesteads. Its most visible project was the community of Arthurdale, West Virginia, located fifteen miles southeast of Scotts Run.Footnote ²⁶

As he cooperated with industry using his right hand, Franklin Roosevelt organized Plan-B alternatives with his left. Thirty percent of working-age Americans eating in soup kitchens and sleeping in public parks emboldened critics of capitalism who argued that it had failed to deliver the most basic human needs. The Division became home to antimodern social engineers, some of the same people who supported back-to-the-land experiments and endorsed David Collier's promotion of American Indian communities as representing universal human ideals. Stated one report by the Division, “In the pinch of distress, we lose faith in the bright new world that only recently promised blessings once undreamed of … and so we seek to escape our ills by a return to the land, to ‘nature,’ or to an older tradition.” A typescript report prepared for a small circle around the president announced, “A Partial Pattern for the New American Way of Life … from which dozens of similar communities may be founded.” For a moment, the President of the United States contemplated the garden as a viable mode of production, using it as a hedge against the factory and upholding it as the central practice in a new (and old) way of life.Footnote ²⁷

The Division of Subsistence Homesteads, however, was among the most controversial relief programs of the New Deal, not so much because of the limited extent of land given to resettled workers but because of what gardens for the poor said about capitalism, industrialism, and the idea of progress. Would homesteads liberate settlers from wages and taxes or would they be combined with wages? Would they mirror the provision grounds in the mountains or the patch in the mining camp?

Henry Ford enthusiastically endorsed the cottar model, and he was not alone among American industrialists. In 1931 Ford made vegetable gardens compulsory for all employees at Iron Mountain, Michigan, where workers assembled the wooden portions of Ford automobiles. Ford threatened to fire any head of household who failed or refused to plant an area “of sufficient size to supply his family with at least part of its winter vegetables,” prompting the Washington News to deride these patches as “shotgun gardens.” Ford (among many others) loved the fusion of farm and factory for the many ways it concealed uncompensated labor. Henry I. Harriman, a utility executive and president of the United States Chamber of Commerce chirped that, “The majority of these industrial workers live where they have enough ground to raise a large portion of their food supply for the summer and to put by a certain amount for winter consumption. Their shelter cost is much less. The accessibility of wood supply makes fuel costs for heating and cooking almost negligible.” With these examples in mind, wrote socialists Harold Ware and Webster Powell, “the most hard-boiled of business men need not look upon subsistence homesteading as merely another experimental effusion of impractical theorists. The experimental stage is over.”Footnote ²⁸

The Roosevelts and the coterie of social engineers who designed the National Recovery Act argued and lobbied the issue from both sides, finally drawing up a policy that looked like an awkward hybrid between the two versions of the captured garden. In one sense their solution looked nearly identical to that advocated by Owen and other reforms who despaired of Malthusian malevolence. There is something of a response to Malthus in Section 208 of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which allocated the initial funds, “To provide for aiding the redistribution of the overbalance of population in industrial centers,” toward the resettlement of “stranded” industrial workers. “There is a pessimism,” wrote a Wisconsin economist in 1933, fearing redundancy, “that millions of the unemployed of our cities cannot hope for jobs for years to come.” The chief economist of the homestead project, Milburn Wilson, confronted the same criticism Owen did a century before—that Arthurdale represented “a retreat from the age of machinery.” Instead, Wilson conceived of it “as a part of a new high standard of living.” The Division expressed an antimodernist moment.Footnote ²⁹

In the conception that went forward, however, residents assembled vacuum cleaners for the Electric Vacuum Cleaning Company, a subsidiary of General Electric. Wages became integral to the homestead communities, with some planners insisting that “private profit will endure just as long as that which produces profit contributes to social progress,” though they knew that subsistence served the interests of manufacturing, not the other way around. Eleanor tried to sell the ungainly thing to the public. “The idea is that families engaged in subsistence farming consume their own garden products … [and] shall be situated near enough to an industry for one member of the family to be employed in a factory a sufficient number of days in the year to bring in the amount of money needed to pay for the things which the families must have and cannot produce for themselves.”Footnote ³⁰

Arthurdale opened in 1934 after taking shape hurriedly. The math never worked in favor of the homesteaders, who were required to pay for the construction of the factory out of their wages. This is the essence of the contradiction at the core of the project: The settlers bore the cost of the factory while offsetting their wages with maize and melons, an arrangement that put unbearable pressure on the gardens to compensate for every deficiency in the plan. When General Electric backed out, it started a revolving door of manufacturers. In the end the Roosevelts proposed government-owned factories, including one that would make equipment for the Post Office. Congress killed the idea, however, with some members calling it socialist.Footnote ³¹

The conflict over unemployed miners growing vegetables next to little houses in industrial villages had to do with who owned the labor of the working class and what economy would prevail over the landscape. The Roosevelts and their social engineers saw Arthurdale as a compromise between agrarian autonomy and an endorsement of capitalism, but any sense of compromise was lost on commentators to the left and right of the New Deal. They saw manipulation or abdication, fascism or a retreat from modernity.

Writing in Harper's Magazine, socialists Ware and Powell condemned homesteads as social control intended to isolate potentially rebellious workers and harness them to factories, creating a class of industrial serfs. The authors compared Arthurdale to similar settlements maintained by Adolph Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. Hitler seems to have inherited a preexisting project of the German state to settle the unemployed in cottages. Ware and Powell reported that “Hitler hopes to increase his food supply, reduce unemployment, and keep satisfied (and ready for war) what otherwise might become a restless part of the population.” This is the same motive they pinned on the Roosevelts, calling it the “transmutation of discontent.” They also accused the administration of “planning for permanent poverty” or of collecting the unemployed in “self-liquidating” communities, in which the indigent provided their own relief while suppressing wages for other workers. Instead, the authors wanted “agricultural land … organized on a co-operative basis,” or socialist communities, and they didn't mince words about the political economy they saw in the government's version: “Chattel slavery was abolished by the Federal Government in 1863. In 1935 the Federal Government has established what is in effect a state of serfdom.” Ware and Powell attacked both the capitalist and benevolent forms of the captured garden, arguing for a genuine redistribution of land.Footnote ³²

Business advocates and others to the right of the Roosevelts also responded to homesteads with revulsion. They declared schemes intended to grubstake the unemployed a species of defeat, and even the end of the nation-state. The Austrian-born business consultant Peter F. Drucker condemned self-provisioning in 1939: “Subsistence farming represents by definition a regression from market economy and from the division of labor on which the economic achievements of our society are based.” Drucker considered it a necessary but “temporary remedy to tide the displaced farmers over until a permanent solution has been found.” Drucker said that growing one's own food, “would amount to social disenfranchisement, as the subsistence farmer is practically cut off from the main stream of social life and pushed into an isolated position outside of modern society.” Philip La Follette, former governor of Wisconsin, returned from a tour of Germany, circa 1933, and despaired of the families he had seen “digging their living out of the soil in the primitive fashion of our ancestors centuries ago.” La Follette believed that such people opted out of the social division of labor. “What have they left behind them?” he pleaded, “the taxes, the rent, the mortgages, stores, factories and farms … they are leaving behind them the economic system.”

A representative of the American Engineering Council worried that society would collapse if people grew their own food for their own needs, writing, “Subsistence farming is not possible unless we are willing to destroy practically everything that we now call desirable in our present civilization … Farmers must be able to pay taxes and to purchase clothing and other necessary manufactured products which they are not now capable of producing.” With his misplaced fears the writer somehow overlooked capitalism as the cause of the most destructive social calamity to afflict the United States in the twentieth century.Footnote ³³

Comment from the right expressed a fear of household food production that goes back to the seventeenth century: People who consume their own product do not contribute to the growth and expansion of capital, of employment, of social wealth; they do not exchange in markets or participate in the state. In their eyes, the Division of Subsistence Homesteads amounted to a kind of Division of the Rejection of Capitalism or the Division of Economic Primitivism. That the United States would deploy labor and land in any other way than to generate private wealth struck them as regressive.Footnote ³⁴

Arthurdale freighted more anticipation and heavier ideals than it could carry. Caught in a no-mans-land between competing ideologies, subsistence homesteads maintained their settler populations in the short term but failed to survive the Great Depression. The garden as publicly funded relief in the United States vanished with it.Footnote ³⁵

In 1913 Rosa Luxemburg wrote, “Capitalism depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata and social organizations existing side by side with it.” A century later anthropologists and historians are just beginning to explore the simultaneous existence of capitalist and noncapitalist modes of production, as well as their sometimes codependant, sometimes mutually beneficial relationships. The captured garden is one such relationship. It refers to the relocation of household subsistence practices from hollows to coal camps or from agrarian autonomy to industrial dependency. Its British origins during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggest that it took two main forms—cottars on estates owned by capitalists and allotments given to the unemployed. Both forms institutionalized subsistence as part of the process of recreating a labor force, shifting part of the burden of survival from wages to the workers themselves.Footnote ³⁶

Beans tasted the same on the ridge as they did in the Pocahontas coalfields and at Arthurdale, but beans in such differing circumstances transmitted different social relations. Before the enclosure and clear cutting of the forest, beans on the ridge complemented a complex land use that included grazing cattle, planting rye, distilling whiskey, collecting tanning bark, and gathering chestnuts. Beans in the coal camps served the interests of capital over those of households. All their garden products must have given workers and families a sense of place and sufficiency, yet the ultimate economic advantage from these plantings belonged to the companies.

The captured garden was also a pitched battle and a controversy. During strikes miners and their families fought company managers over the control of food and, thus, for the capacity to continue in the resistance to company domination over their lives. During the Great Depression the United States experimented with subsistence homesteads by attaching garden and factory. The goal was not merely to provide settlers with cash but to find a middle way between an antimodernist philosophy and a procapitalist one. Both forms of the captured garden illustrate the paradox of subsistence production under capitalism: A practice that for centuries created no surplus value could be made to do just that; an institution once the stronghold of the household could represent dependency and immiseration.Footnote ³⁷