Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability

By Abby L. Goode

In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and the enduring partnership between racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises—elsewhere. Though seemingly progressive, these agrotopian visions depicted selective breeding and racial "improvement" as the path to environmental stability. In this fascinating study, Goode uncovers an early sustainability rhetoric interested in shaping, just as much as sustaining, the American population.

Showing how ideas about race and reproduction were central to early sustainability thinking, Goode unearths an alternative environmental archive that ranges from gothic novels to Black nationalist manifestos, from Waco, Texas, to the West Indies, from city tenements to White House kitchen gardens. Exposing the eugenic foundations of some of our most well-regarded environmental traditions, this book compels us to reexamine the benevolence of American environmental thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Aug 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469669830

Abby L. Goode

Abby L. Goode is assistant professor of English at Plymouth State University.

Book preview

Cover: Agrotopias, An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode

Agrotopias

ABBY L. GOODE

Agrotopias

An American Literary History of Sustainability

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2022 Abby L. Goode

All rights reserved

Set in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goode, Abby L., author.

Title: Agrotopias : an American literary history of sustainability / Abby L. Goode.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022015054 | ISBN 9781469669816 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469669823 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469669830 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Environmentalism in literature. | Agriculture in literature. | Eugenics in literature. | Racism in literature. | Sustainable agriculture—United States—History.

Classification: LCC PN56.E638 G66 2022

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015054

Cover illustration: Agrarian township image from Young America newspaper, mid-1840s. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

Chapter 1 was originally published in a different form as "No ‘Rural Bowl of Milk’: Demographic Agrarianism and Unsustainability in Pierre," Studies in American Fiction 44, no. 1 (2017): 27–52. A portion of chapter 2 was originally published in a different form as "Gothic Fertility in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History," Early American Literature 50, no. 2 (2015): 449–473. Several parts of chapter 4 were previously published in Whitman’s Eugenic Sustainability, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 65, no. 4 (2019): 692–734.

for my parents, with love

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

No Rural Bowl of Milk: Unsustainability and the Demographic Agrarian Ideal

CHAPTER TWO

Gothic Fertility and Other Tropical Nightmares: Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, Sansay

CHAPTER THREE

African Agrotopias: Sustaining Black Nationalism beyond U.S. Borders

CHAPTER FOUR

Sustainable Sprawl: Whitman’s Eugenic Agrarianism

CHAPTER FIVE

Asexual Sustainability in Herland

Epilogue: Agrotopian Legacies

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

3.1 Original title page of Imperium in Imperio (1899) 108

3.2 Emblem from the title page of Imperium in Imperio (1899) 109

Acknowledgments

It is fitting that this book is about sustainability, since it would not have been possible without the mentors, family members, and communities that have sustained me and my work over the years.

I am profoundly indebted to my undergraduate teachers and advisors, especially Valerie Rohy and Robyn Warhol. In their wonderfully different ways, they introduced me to critical theory, American literature, and the broader world of intellectual life. Under their guidance, I started to believe that I might have something to contribute to that world. I am grateful to Richard I. Sugarman for recruiting me into the University of Vermont’s Integrated Humanities Program (IHP), and R. Thomas Simone for inviting me to stay on as an IHP teaching assistant. Thanks for bringing the classroom to life for me.

I offer my deepest thanks to my mentor, Caroline Levander, who has patiently guided and encouraged me for over a decade now. Since I began my work as a Rice University graduate student, she has continually inspired my creativity, confidence, and commitment to intellectual life. Her one-of-a-kind feedback on this project helped bring it into being, and her wisdom has kept me focused even in the most tumultuous of times.

While at Rice University, I was surrounded by a vibrant, world-class community of thinkers and teachers, as well as an exceptional cohort of fellow graduate students. Judith Roof challenged me to write more assertively and elegantly; I am deeply grateful for her generosity, reliability, and professional guidance. I thank James Faubion for his kind support and dazzling knowledge of Foucault. In the third year of my PhD program, Helena Michie demystified many aspects of the profession, including publishing an article, drafting a clear conference abstract, and handling a scholarly question-and-answer session. This education continues to be helpful in my academic career (and while Secret History’s land crabs did not make it into this book, they were a key part of my journey). J. Dennis Huston is a legend and an inspiration. While serving as my teaching mentor, he took a keen interest in my work and saw great promise in my writing. I feel lucky to know him. I also heartily thank José Aranda, Joseph Campana, Melissa Gniadek, Randal Hall, Rosemary Hennessy, Betty Joseph, Timothy Morton, Elora Shehabuddin, and Cary Wolfe, who, in seminars, workshops, and one-on-one conversations, fundamentally shaped my scholarly development. I acknowledge the Rice University Department of English, the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, the dean of Humanities, the Humanities Research Center, and the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory for generous conference and research travel support.

Also at Rice, I joined a supportive community of friends and intellectual interlocutors; thank you to Alex Adkins, Rachel Bracken, Alanna Beroiza, Joseph Carson, Lindsey Chappell, AnaMaria Clawson, Anna Dodson, John Ellis-Etchison, Scott Gunther, Jennifer Hargrave, Sophia Hsu, Kristina McDonald, Karen Rosenthall, Derek Woods, and Meina Yates-Richard. Special thanks to Sophia Hsu, with whom I consumed many a late-night orange, morning cup of coffee, and lunch-time bowl of tortellini soup during our time in graduate school. I’m so grateful that we ended up living, working, and thinking together. AnaMaria Clawson is the best neighbor and collaborator I could ever ask for. She and her lovable pup Lulu brought joy, ease, and balance to those intense, final years of graduate school. I would also like to thank Derek Woods for believing in me, caring about my work, and motivating me to dream big scholarly ideas.

As a graduate student and junior scholar, I was fortunate to receive expert feedback on my work that helped me to contextualize my ideas within a meaningful scholarly conversation. Thank you to Hester Blum, Anna Brickhouse, Russ Castronovo, Susan Gillman, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Stephanie LeMenager, Donald E. Pease, Molly Robey, and John Carlos Rowe. A very special thanks to Elizabeth Fenton and Robert S. Levine, who thoughtfully and diligently engaged with the ideas that came to underpin this book. I cannot thank them enough for their time, honesty, and kind mentorship, all of which has made me a better writer and thinker.

At Plymouth State University, many fine colleagues cheered me on and celebrated my scholarly endeavors. I could not have asked for a better or fiercer department chair than Ann McClellan, who shepherded me through my early tenure-track years, urged me to write this book, and kept me energized through challenging times. Rebecca Noel contributed to this book’s completion by offering invaluable advice and commenting on fellowship and grant application drafts. I thank Lourdes Avilés, Robin DeRosa, Karolyn Kinane, and Cathie LeBlanc for taking this project seriously and encouraging me to finish it. As humane, steadfast, departmental leaders, Liz Ahl and Paul Rogalus enabled me to prioritize writing this book at critical moments. During my final revisions, Alice Pearman and Christin Wixson were both lifesavers. Through it all, I have drawn inspiration from the friends that I have made in New Hampshire, magical individuals all: Kim and Mike Brian, Ryan Donathan, Diana Jolles, Shaylah Kelly, Brigid O’Donnell, Sarah Parrish, Mary Beth Ray, Tommy Stoughton, and Katie Wolsiefer. Special thanks to Mary Beth Ray and Katie Wolsiefer, who together handcrafted me an award for completing the manuscript.

I am appreciative of the many students at Rice and Plymouth State University who creatively engaged with the ideas, questions, and texts related to Agrotopias. Thank you.

At the research stage, I was supported by a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). For their help, kindness, and collegiality at AAS, I thank James Arthur, Vincent Golden, Samantha Harvey, Reeve Huston, Peter Onuf, and Nan Wolverton. Fellowships and grants from the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and Plymouth State’s Faculty Research and Creativity Fund supported research and writing at various stages of this project. I am grateful to Sean X. Goudie and Priscilla Wald for inviting me to the First Book Institute at Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies. They facilitated a transformative and rigorous week that fueled my creativity and helped me find my scholarly voice. I also thank the institute organizers and participants for making that week an unforgettable experience.

I presented portions of this project at conferences hosted by the American Literature Association, C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Modern Language Association, National Women’s Studies Association, and the Society for Early Americanists. Special thanks to Paul Erickson, Greta LaFleur, Kyla Schuller, Laura Soderberg, and Timothy Sweet for inviting me to serve on these panels over the years. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared under the title "No ‘Rural Bowl of Milk’: Demographic Agrarianism and Unsustainability in Pierre" in Studies in American Fiction 44, no. 1 (2017): 27–52. Part of chapter 2 appeared under the title "Gothic Fertility in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History" in Early American Literature 50, no. 2 (2015): 449–473. Parts of chapter 4 appeared under the title Whitman’s Eugenic Sustainability in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 65, no. 4 (2019): 692–734. I gratefully acknowledge the publishers for permission to reprint these articles in modified form. I thank Duncan Faherty, Maria Farland, Sandra Gustafson, and Karen Kilcup for their supportive editorial leadership, as well as the anonymous readers for their expert reviews on these pieces.

At the University of North Carolina (UNC) Press, I thank my editor, Lucas Church, who patiently answered my many questions and gracefully guided this manuscript through the review and publication process. I also extend my thanks to William Gleason and one anonymous reader, whose brilliant feedback motivated me to sharpen my argument and nuance my readings. This book is far better because of your thoughtful and generous reviews. Thanks to the copyeditors, indexers, designers, marketers, and all of those who worked so diligently in the past year to bring this project to fruition.

As I wrote and revised this project, many caring, far-flung colleagues kept me motivated and on track. I thank Jessica Hurley, Joo Ok Kim, Sunny Yang, and the incomparable Meina Yates-Richard for their incisive questions and unwavering enthusiasm for this project. Melissa Gniadek and Tom Nurmi are wonderful people; they took time to read chapters and offer their wisdom throughout the process. Many thanks to Shelby Johnson, Ana Schwartz, Blevin Shelnutt, Evelyn Soto, and Jessica Taylor for their camaraderie-filled and rigorous workshopping of my work. Shelby Johnson kindly agreed to read and discuss my second chapter during a very hectic month. In the final stages of this project, I participated in the Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities, where I was immersed in the field’s vibrancy and creativity for one sublime week; I humbly thank the coordinators, seminar leaders, and workshop participants, particularly Bishnupriya Ghosh for her generous comments on the introduction. I am truly indebted to my fellow Transatlantic Writing Group members, Lindsey Chappell, AnaMaria Clawson, and Sophia Hsu, who read and commented on every single chapter—every single chapter—with care and precision. They talked through ideas on the phone, organized Zoom happy hours, and reminded me to celebrate the successes, all during a global pandemic. This book would not have been possible without them.

I am grateful to live and work in places that nourish my intellectual and personal well-being. While writing this book in rural Maine and New Hampshire, the sounds of chickadees, loons, chipmunks, and squirrels filled my ears, inspiring wonder, playfulness, and calm in equal measure.

Deepest gratitude is due to the dear friends and family who offered me grace and understanding as I worked on this book. Christine Axen is a remarkable human being; she kept me going by providing daily inspiration, accountability, and healthy perspective. As it turns out, my robot arms do reach all the way to New York City. Angie Roscher has always steered me on the right path. Bonnie, Jon, and Juliana Press have nourished me with their pride and acceptance; I thank them for their care and interest in my research. For being my champions over the years, and for understanding, in their own ways, my commitment to this book, I thank my sister-in-law and fellow runner and feminist, Amy Goode, and my caring and proud aunts, Janet and Joyce Goode. Thanks to my late grandparents, John Dyer, and Alden and Evelyn Goode, for loving and encouraging me when I was young. For accepting me exactly as I am, I thank my optimistic grandmother, Audrey Dyer, who sadly passed away as this book reached the final stages of production. As I was writing this book, my nephews, Felix and Max Goode, came into the world. They have brought boundless joy to my life. I cannot believe how lucky I am to have a brother like Adam Goode, who models for me what it means to live with courage and conviction. So supportive was he of my early academic career that he actually read my dissertation from cover to cover. And that is truly remarkable.

To my parents, Molly Mae and Alden Tapley Goode, who celebrated my (often quirky) writing from a young age, helped me find my voice, nourished me with books and music, and always cultivated a reading-friendly environment, thank you. It is because of you that I grew up believing that I had worthwhile things to say. This book is dedicated to you.

My warmest thanks go to Evan Press. Especially in the past year, he listened to me talk about Thomas Jefferson ad nauseum and repeatedly reminded me never to give up on myself (often by leaving Post-it notes around the house). As Stephen King puts it, Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. Thanks for making that difference.

Agrotopias

Introduction

We Can’t Solve the Climate Crisis Unless Black Lives Matter.¹ Climate Change Is Also a Racial Justice Problem.² These and many other 2020 headlines reflect the urgent calls of antiracist and environmental justice activists, highlighting the interrelated history of racial violence and environmental destruction in the United States.³ Responding to these calls, the environmental organization known as the Sierra Club publicly acknowledged its own racist, eugenicist, and xenophobic history, pledging to center voices of color in all of its future work.⁴ In a July 2020 announcement entitled Pulling Down Our Monuments, director Michael Brune proclaimed that as defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.⁵ Brune’s statement called attention to the racism of early Sierra Club leaders, including founder John Muir—a revelation that drew shock and indignation from many readers.⁶ Yet even as white U.S. environmentalists reckon with their racist and nativist legacies, critically reevaluating figures such as Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, the deeper, subtler, and lesser-known origins of this history remain largely unexamined, and in some cases, disturbingly intact.⁷

Agrotopias sheds light on these origins. The following pages tell an unfamiliar story about the development of American environmental thought, a literary history that extends back to Thomas Jefferson’s time and illuminates the lasting partnership between U.S. racial, reproductive, and agricultural ideas. For many Americans throughout the long nineteenth century, Jefferson’s vision of a small farming republic seemed increasingly threatened by urban population growth, racial heterogeneity, and reproductive chaos. As Agrotopias shows, U.S. writers attempted to rescue this ideal by deploying an early form of American sustainability rhetoric, promoting agrarian principles as antidotes to impending population disasters. In many ways, their arguments are not unlike neoagrarian strains of sustainability rhetoric today—writings that advocate for a return to rural living, local economies, and land stewardship.⁸ But rather than simply rehearse Jefferson’s argument that small farmers are loyal, productive citizens, the writings featured in Agrotopias adapt and reshape agrarianism to develop an early, eugenic conception of sustainability: the ability to feed and breed a racially homogeneous, American small farming population, even in extranational spaces. Agrotopias traces this notion of sustainability as it shifts, mutates, and gains traction across the long nineteenth century, in familial romances, gothic novels, Black nationalist tracts, globalist poetry, and ecofeminist utopias. From Herman Melville’s ghostwritten farming report to Martin Delany’s dream of African agricultural settlements, these texts together depict racial improvement and selective breeding as the solution to population crises and the path to agricultural and environmental plenty.

Examining this tendency, particularly in the period between Jefferson’s agrarianism and Roosevelt’s conservationism, Agrotopias reveals an early sustainability rhetoric interested in shaping just as much as sustaining the American population. This rhetoric quietly (and sometimes loudly) influenced and infiltrated U.S. environmental discourses focused on population control, natural resource conservation, wilderness preservation, local foods, and sustainable agriculture. Given its persistence and pervasiveness, it is perhaps no wonder that early Sierra Club members were also prominent eugenicists, or that today, the Sierra Club is working to pull down its monuments amid escalating environmental and racial justice crises.

In an era concerned with climate change, environmental racism, and a very threatened future, Agrotopias provides a much-needed challenge to the seemingly progressive history of American environmental writing. Contemporary sustainability advocates frequently refer to this history, alluding to figures such as Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Muir, and Roosevelt.⁹ They call upon these heavy hitters to bolster their environmentalist arguments, suggesting that we can all stand to learn from this well-established wisdom. But these rhetorical moves—and indeed, the American literary history that they invoke—perpetuate a false divide between environmental and racial thought, assuming an admirable protoecological tradition that is somehow isolated from the nation’s racist history. Showing how ideas about agriculture, race, and reproduction were central to the development of what we might now recognize as ecological awareness, Agrotopias unearths an alternative environmental archive that ranges from familiar to lesser-known narratives, from urban dystopias to phrenological museums, from Waco, Texas, to Cap Français, Saint Domingue. It places figures such as Leonora Sansay, Sutton Griggs, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside Whitman and Roosevelt as unlikely collaborators in the literary formation of American sustainability rhetoric. These works combine racial, eugenic, and agricultural discourses in ways that call us to reexamine the supposed benevolence of American environmental writing—a tradition commonly associated with romantic wilderness, the pastoral, and nature writers. Taken together, they provide a new perspective on long-nineteenth-century American literature, showing that the myth of an agrarian nation is not the stuff of a romantic past but rather the mainstay of a long-overlooked, racially charged sustainability rhetoric that still persists today.

As writers employed this rhetoric, they conceived of perfected, New World, sustainable societies—or what I call agrotopias—imagined solutions to the nation’s racial and agricultural crises. Agrotopias are seemingly ideal worlds of agrarian stability and productive labor, speculative visions that represent both eutopia (the good place) and utopia (no place). For many thinkers, they function as comforting alternatives to an increasingly unsustainable and reproductively chaotic world. Throughout the long nineteenth century, U.S. writers identified a range of demographic disasters that appeared to threaten the agrarian ideal. Defined by reproductive unruliness and agricultural decline, these crises included the Haitian Revolution, the oppression of tenant farmers in New York, the expansion of slavery, the failure of Reconstruction, and the so-called race suicide of white, native-born rural populations. Responding to these and other challenges, writers such as Griggs, Delany, and Gilman conceived of agrotopias as racially homogeneous remedies, adapting agrarian ideals to concepts of selective breeding and racial improvement. Agrotopias are thus characterized as much by racial purity and reproductive stability as they are by small farming and independent labor. Simply put, they are fantasies of future order, balance, and plenty in the face of looming unsustainability. The following chapters examine both agrotopian futures and their dystopian counterparts to show how agrarian and eugenic discourses developed a profoundly intimate partnership in American literature.

While the agrotopias featured in this book are geographically flexible, envisioned at different scales and locations, they all represent an attempt to escape or transcend their respective, unsustainable worlds, often in ways that reproduce expansionist, exclusionary, and settler-colonial ideologies. As fantasies of future stability, agrotopias exist elsewhere, beyond the threat of demographic or agricultural decline—in spaces such as the unsettled U.S. West, the Texas borderlands, or the heart of the Amazon. Agrotopias are just as variable as the definition of elsewhere itself; they can be hermetically sealed or carnivorously sprawling, nested within U.S. borders or as far away as possible. But broadly speaking, they all constitute attempts to revise and reclaim a long-lost agrarian ideal of New World abundance. In his time, Jefferson imagined the New World as the inverse of an overcrowded and aristocratic Old World, an exceptionally fecund landscape ready to feed a democratic farming population. Throughout the nineteenth century, as that ideal seemed to wither, writers—even Jefferson himself—sought to recover and reimagine it in seemingly vacant or inviting sites; they desired a tabula rasa ripe for agrarian perfection, removed from their increasingly unsustainable worlds. Responding to an array of racialized and sexualized population crises, writers merged agrarian and early eugenic thought to conceive of homogeneous, reproductively ordered, sustainable elsewheres. In so doing, they indulged in a fantasy of escaping or eliminating demographic threats and starting over in a new New World, a space unadulterated, already abundant, and protected from imagined, racialized pollutants. As writers entangled small farming discourse with eugenic principles, they imposed their own visions of agrarian order and purity onto spaces within and beyond U.S. borders. Rooted in the notion of an idealized elsewhere—a fresh start, a virgin land—these visions tended to imaginatively erase, overlook, or misrepresent Indigenous peoples and practices, clearing the ground, so to speak, for agrarian perfection to come.¹⁰ Agrotopias analyzes this long-running literary effort to reenvision and reproduce the agrarian ideal, highlighting the twinned expansionist and isolationist impulses of early sustainability rhetoric.¹¹

This literary history destabilizes the celebrated legacy of Jeffersonian agrarianism, and indeed, Jefferson himself—a legacy that exemplifies long-standing divisions between U.S. environmental and racial histories. By exploring a eugenic-agrarian partnership in American literature, Agrotopias provides an important corrective to scholarly and popular writing that admires Jefferson’s agricultural interests while ignoring his racial politics. Highlighting his agrarian ideals, scholars have identified Jefferson as a major figure in the history of American environmental thought, one who influenced the likes of Thoreau, Emerson, and Wendell Berry.¹² Meanwhile, popular writers such as Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver draw an all-too-neat line between Jefferson’s respect for the small farmer and today’s organic and local foods movements. Yet Jefferson’s role as a promoter of racial separation and selective breeding is conspicuously absent from these discussions of his eco-friendly legacy. This absence is particularly glaring, since there is no shortage of groundbreaking scholarship on Jefferson’s racial thought.¹³ In fact, I would argue that, broadly speaking, two eerily distinct versions of Jefferson have captivated our historical imagination: the founding farmer who dreamt of a sustainable nation, and the infamous slave owner, who fathered at least six children with formerly enslaved woman Sally Hemings, all while publicly opposing racial mixture of any kind.¹⁴ What would it mean to finally recognize that these Jeffersons were one and the same—that this founding farmer was the very slave owner paradoxically obsessed with racial purity? As Agrotopias illustrates, this dual commitment to small farming and racial separation was not Jefferson’s alone, and throughout the long nineteenth century, it became the conceptual backbone of American sustainability rhetoric.

Jefferson’s bifurcated legacy is symptomatic of a broader lacuna in literary and environmental studies, a tendency to engage with the nation’s eugenic and agrarian histories separately.¹⁵ Since the publication of Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), scholarship about nature and agriculture in American literature has paid a great deal of attention to the agrarian ideal, the myth of a New World yeoman republic. In their landmark studies, Smith, Leo Marx, and Annette Kolodny analyzed this ideal as a foundational feature of American literary history, each in their own ways.¹⁶ In more recent decades, scholars have reframed, nuanced, and critiqued this ideal, focusing largely on agrarianism’s colonial, environmental, and economic features rather than its reproductive implications.¹⁷ Agrotopias joins these efforts by showing how nineteenth-century racial and reproductive ideas fundamentally drove and shaped agrarian fantasies. But to be clear, this book is less about the agrarian ideal itself and more about the seeming threats to that ideal, the dangers that motivated writers to recover and reshape it. As the following chapters show, U.S. writers reacted to racialized and sexualized threats by imagining reproductively stable, agrarian futures. It is through this particular focus on threats—on teeming immigrant populations, dysgenic aristocrats, and starving mobs—that the eugenic subtext of agrarianism becomes visible; if agricultural decline involves racial intermingling and degeneracy, then agrarian stability supposedly involves racial purity and improvement. Agrotopias traces this symbiotic relationship between racial, eugenic, and agrarian ideas, demonstrating how early conceptions of population control dovetailed with ostensibly democratic ideals of independent landowning and farm labor. This long-overlooked history requires us to reevaluate mainstream forms of American sustainability rhetoric, especially those that look to agrarianism for answers.

Agrarianism, Eugenics, and Population Control: An Alternative History

Although Jeffersonian agrarianism has its critics, it has enjoyed a relatively privileged place within the American environmental canon, lauded for its celebration of rural simplicity and farm life. Jefferson himself is known for promoting an agricultural U.S. identity, emphasizing the dignity of farm labor, civic responsibility, and land stewardship. As he explained in a 1785 letter to John Jay, Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country … by the most lasting bonds.¹⁸ A literary companion piece to Jefferson’s philosophy, the first third of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) extols agrarian landowning as the foundation of New World opportunity and individual freedom: The instance I enter on my own land, the bright idea of property, of exclusive right, of independence, exalt my mind.… No wonder that so many Europeans, who have never been able to say that such portion of land was theirs, cross the Atlantic to realize that happiness!¹⁹ Jefferson’s and Crèvecoeur’s writings embrace small farming and landowning as defining features of an abundant America, where farmers feel responsible for keeping their surroundings peaceful and productive. For many scholars, these ideas formed fertile ground for mainstream environmental thought, touchstones in a multicentury greening of agrarianism, as Kimberly K. Smith calls it.²⁰ Literary anthologies and scholarly works alike have traced a now familiar intellectual lineage from Jefferson and Crèvecoeur to the romantic writing of Thoreau and Emerson to the anti-agribusiness arguments of Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and ultimately, Berry.²¹ Moreover, Jefferson’s and Crèvecoeur’s praise for the independent farmer has come to underwrite contemporary forms of American environmentalism, from sustainable agriculture advocacy to the 2008 Slow Food Nation movement.²²

But as Agrotopias reveals, U.S. agrarianism is not simply a benevolent, protoenvironmentalist discourse focused on local economies and living off the land. Though long associated with small farming, landowning, and stewardship, this social philosophy is also centrally concerned with American population dynamics and reproductive patterns. Indeed, throughout the long nineteenth century, agrarianism often functioned implicitly as an early population control discourse, one that encouraged a particular kind of population fertility through notions of selective breeding, nativism, and racial purity. Scholars tend to understand population control as a primarily twentieth- and twenty-first-century movement, a combination of global overpopulation anxieties, mainstream environmentalism, and modern adaptations of Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).²³ But as the following pages show, Jeffersonian agrarianism played a pivotal role in the early conception and promotion of so-called sustainable population growth. As writers invoked and adapted the agrarian ideal throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they tacitly promoted the fertility of independent, laboring bodies—those associated with a stable, democratic-agrarian nation—and discouraged the fertility of racialized, seemingly unruly bodies associated with densely packed cities, aristocratic estates, and slave-based plantations. Accordingly, the agrotopias featured in this book seem sustainable not simply because they are agriculturally productive societies located beyond the possibilities of starvation, pollution, and degeneration. For the writers imagining them, agrotopias are also sustainable because their inhabitants are supposedly fertile in the right ways, assuring a future of racially ascendant, selectively bred, independent farmers and laborers.

To read agrarianism as a population control discourse, then, is to uncover the racial and reproductive agendas that lurk within a seemingly benign philosophy of small farming. This population control discourse is not just about curtailing human fertility in order to respect the earth’s limits. While the texts in Agrotopias project an early concern about carrying capacity (the number of people that the earth can support), they are more concerned with growing and maintaining an independent farming population and limiting the fertility of those who appeared to threaten this endeavor. Thus, these long-nineteenth-century texts tend to endorse sexual and reproductive regulation, positive eugenics, or immigration restriction as the path to sustainability.

Even in its early American iterations, agrarianism was just as focused on population dynamics as independent labor and landowning. Eighteenth-century agrarian discourses developed a demographic ideal of an ever-expansive American population, evenly distributed across a productive, agricultural landscape. Crèvecoeur gestures toward this ideal in Letters: Many ages will not see the shores of our great lakes replenished with inland nations, nor … entirely peopled.… Who can tell the millions of men whom it will feed and contain? (L, 41). Sharing Crèvecoeur’s vision, demographic thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, Ezra Stiles, and later, Benjamin Rush and Jefferson, welcomed population fertility, believing that early America was exempt from overpopulation, at least for a very long time.²⁴ In their minds, the New World could sustain a burgeoning population with its vast expanse of arable land.²⁵ For instance, in an 1804 letter to French political economist Jean Baptiste Say, Jefferson declared that here the immense extent of uncultivated and fertile lands enables every one who will labor, to marry young, and to raise a family of any size (W, 1144). Unlike the perishing births of Europe, Jefferson suggested, Americans were blessed with a vast expanse of land and resources, all begging to be tilled, extracted, and populated. With these fertile lands, the United States could supposedly feed and contain their own expanding population as well as the supernumerary births of Europe (W, 1144; L, 41). Read as a demographic discourse, agrarianism idealizes not just the individual farmer’s dignity but also the nation’s exceptional sustainability—its ability to feed populations both at home and abroad.

Jefferson and Crèvecoeur defined this demographic agrarian ideal as morally stable and economically self-sufficient, in contrast to the Old World’s aristocratic excess and starving masses. Using denigrating phrases such as mobs of great cities, panders of vice, and foul stains of monarchy, they described the Old World as unsustainable and degenerate, its inhabitants tragically alienated from the land (W, 291, 818; L, 42). While traveling through France and Germany in 1785, Jefferson condemned aristocratic landowning practices, contending that whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right (W, 841–842). In his eyes, the small landholders constituted the most precious part of a state, while manufacturing, urban life, and aristocratic landowning bred enormous inequality, instability, and decadence (W, 842, 841). Writing to Rush in 1800, Jefferson described great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man (W, 1081). According to him, this pestilence was nowhere to be found in a population of small farmers: Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example (W, 190). Similarly, Crèvecoeur articulated his agrarian vision in contrast to a crouded society, where every place is over-stocked (L, 56). Praising the pleasing uniformity and egalitarianism of farm life, he celebrated that here are no aristocratical families … no great manufactures employing thousands.… We are all animated with the spirit of an industry … each person works for himself (L, 40–41). For both Jefferson and Crèvecoeur, a sustainable population was an agrarian one, characterized by moral temperance, farm labor, and landowning responsibilities, unlike the landless, impoverished crowds and indolent aristocrats of the Old World. In this context, controlling the population—maintaining a balance between people and resources—meant encouraging the proliferation of small, independent family farms.

At first glance, this agrarian vision might appear democratic and inclusive, promoting an egalitarian distribution of land and resources. Yet as Agrotopias reveals, this ideal of a small farming population is also a racial and reproductive one, foreshadowing twentieth- and twenty-first-century forms of eugenic conservationism, econativism, and environmental racism—discourses that link racial purity with ecological stability and agricultural abundance.²⁶ The demographic agrarian ideal was far from a reality in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, and writers worried about aristocratic excess and urban masses infecting their plentiful nation, rendering it unsustainable. More than just economic, agricultural, and political threats, these paradigms of Old World population decay formed the basis for an array of racialized and sexualized representations of demographic disaster: degenerate, slave-owning aristocracies, diseased, perverted politicians, and racially mixed, immigrant-filled orgies—menaces to the American population’s reproductive vigor and agricultural productivity. With these representations, U.S. writers associated overpopulation and dwindling agriculture with racial intermingling, moral degeneracy, and sexual licentiousness.

Throughout the long nineteenth century, as writers lamented population decline, the agrarian ideal loomed as an unrealized dream, a promise of reproductive reliability and sexual discipline, an antidote for urban crowding and other related population issues. In Democratic Vistas (1871), for instance, Whitman bemoaned the nation’s cities, crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, puny youth, and muddy complexions.²⁷ He wished instead for an agrarian future: Millions of sturdy farmers and general homesteads (CP, 953, 950). Decades later, Gilman depicted an even bleaker situation in her novel With Her in Ourland (1916). Hoping to see careful farmers on a well-cultivated ground, Gilman’s protagonist tours the globe only to witness tragic overpopulation.²⁸ Disapprovingly, she describes the United States as bloated and weak, with unnatural growth—stuffed … with the most unassimilable mass of human material (WO, 285). Articles in the popular New York–based reform newspaper Young America were even more explicit about the nation’s failure to realize its agrarian potential: Disregarding the warning voice of Jefferson, we have ‘become piled up in large cities as in Europe,’ and gone ‘to eating one another as they do there.’ ²⁹ In this eclectic mix of writings both well-known and obscure, the dream of New World demographic stability—of self-reliant farmers who can feed a family of any size—is tragically eclipsed by reproductive chaos, ugly heterogeneity, and the specter of starvation. Sometimes quietly, often indirectly, these writings suggested that agrarianism was the remedy for the nation’s reproductive problems—that American sustainability entailed the elimination of demographic threats and the propagation of a