The lasting imprint of Germans & Jefferson on July 4th

I thought last week, for the Fourth of July, I might write something at least mildly patriotic while watching those fireworks blooming on the ridge. But it took me a week to nail down the idea—in this political time, to write anything on large-scale “patriotic” themes seems likely to feel divisive to one faction or another. The important point though is not the national politics and government, disagreeable to all in one way or another, but the small-scale patriotism of the local society in which we live our day-to-day lives. A patriotism of being proud and appreciative of that social fabric of schoolteachers, librarians, letter carriers, volunteer first-responders and the other connections of the community fabric, which I think (I hope!) might be more universally appreciated: to focus not on the greater concept of the Country, but on literally the country (as in country-side) in which we live.

Thomas Jefferson had a lot to say about lofty national ideals, but when it came right down to it, one of his core visions was of a country whose social fabric would be comprised of farmers—independent, self-sufficient, self-governing homesteads reliant on neither government nor employer, and therefore truly free to vote and act towards the best interest of the nation. (Even though the only people eligible to vote in the first decades after independence were those who owned land—and who were white and male.) This agrarian vision of the American Family Farm remains rooted in our national consciousness, showing up in children's books, the famous Fisher Price Farm, and in grocery-store (and pickup-truck) advertising. But at exactly the same time as young Jefferson was developing his agrarian perspective on the colonial plantations of the Virginia Piedmont, German immigrants were moving down from Pennsylvania into the flat fertile farmland here where I live between the ridges west of Leesburg...and down into all the hills and valleys of Virginia west of the Piedmont, in the Shenandoah Valley. Jefferson's plantation culture of the day was indeed one of self-sufficiency, each plantation essentially an outpost for the purpose of exporting profit back to England, a company large enough for all work to be done in-house—and mostly with enslaved labor, while somehow claiming the virtues of an agrarian moral high-ground. With no need for outside help from independent tradesmen or merchants, there was little need for towns, or for that matter, roads. Social connections developed from status; government, the same. Perhaps Jefferson imagined the virtues of agriculture remaining the same at any scale, with a modest homestead maintaining an equally self-sufficient lifestyle, as if the goals of a multinational corporation could be in any way compared to those of a small business in town. The German agrarian society worked in just about the opposite way—there was no social hierarchy, no aspiration to wealth, and no sense of self-sufficiency, but rather, community resilience and a focus towards modest, stable, agricultural livelihood. No one family's enterprise was large enough to employ their own tradesmen, and so there had to be independent blacksmiths, wheel-wrights, transportation businesses, and every other ancillary function the community needed to get by. In this way the German society was a society of equals, who, through their livelihood, were drawn into contact with each other—in towns, and along roads, and in the daily course of business—and so developed strong social ties, and an understanding that the success of the community as a whole relied on the success of one's neighbors, each person's livelihood reliant on the others'.

The imprints of these two agricultural societies—one based on large-scale agrarian virtue, a nation made up of independent and self-reliant farmsteads; the other based on small-scale agrarian relationships, a local community made up of interconnected economic activity—are still visible today, faintly but indelibly marked in the generational echoes of our past. For one thing these cultural differences between the Virginians and the Pennsylvanians caused Clarke County to split from Frederick County, to the west of here. But more locally, the dividing line is just as clear. To the north of me, the Lovettsville area has had a concentration of small-scale farm enterprises and support businesses for nearly 300 years, persisting long after people stopped speaking German and new families moved into what had been “The German Settlement”—as in “Those Germans Over There, In That Settlement.” Even as the individuals changed, the values and social norms persisted and the Lovettsville area remained a place where people knew who had what skill to offer, and where people were inclined to help a neighbor out of a jam. To the south, where the plantation-centered society set the culture, and then dissolved, there is not the same unbroken thread. I don't believe it can be a coincidence that every single plumber, electrician, builder, welder, hay salesman, machine repairman, fellow farmer, and “old-timer” I know around here happens to live to the north of me. Not a single one of these people lives to the south across Rt 9, even though the main town of Purcellville is down that way. I just can't believe that's all by chance, and not by history.

It doesn't seem that Jefferson's agrarian vision, scaled down, looks like the independence and self-sufficiency he imagined. From where I can see, the country of small farmers is an interconnected, inter-reliant one, as people necessarily are brought together in the course of their day-to-day livelihood, and that those small-scale economic connections of daily necessity bring about a robust social fabric of neighborly, community-minded relations. It's that way among the people I know in the farm world, at least. Relationships are kept up as an inevitable result of calls to buy and sell vegetables, inquiries of who to call for a repair, stories told and news shared while waiting in line or during a practical visit to somebody not seen in a long time. Even at the farmers market, the purest exercise of supply & demand economics, the farmers are competitors in name only. When I first worked here, for a vegetable farm selling at a dozen markets a week, it was clear that we were not competitors with our compatriot farms—we knew many of them, wished them well, lent equipment or workers to help out when necessary—we knew that the farmers market only thrived (and brought customers to our own stand) if each other vendor saw success. And in that way, we became woven into that fabric of our agricultural community, neighbors to all and friends with some, all engaged in the mutually understood “group project” we each recognized in the others: that of the success of our small-scale farm world.