When I was young, a woman that I dated, who had a good job working for a large bank, said, “Someday I’d like to have a farm in Maine.” Now, I know nothing about farming, except what people have told me, and what most people have told me is that farming is hard work. At the time, I had read several books by John Kenneth Galbraith, and he said that the one good thing about growing up on a farm was that after that, nothing else ever seemed like work. At a more personal level, I knew a guy who was also raised on a farm, and he said the work was so hard that he decided to become a welder instead. Welding sounded like a pretty hard job to me all by itself, so that really made an impression.
In other words, I had heard of people growing up on a farm and moving to the city to find work, but this was the first time I had heard of someone who grew up in the city wanting to work on a farm, especially someone who had a good-paying, indoor job, sitting down, no heavy lifting. I figured that the only people who worked on a farm were raised on a farm and were simply used to it. As a result, when this woman I was dating said she would like to have a farm in Maine, I was appalled.
“What!” I said. “You mean you want to get out there and slop the hogs and then wring a chicken’s neck for supper, while your husband plows the north forty?” I never got a straight answer from her on that, but years later I read that the same aforementioned Galbraith had a farm in Newfane, Vermont, which was sometimes referred to as an “unfarmed farm.” In other words, this was a prestigious residence where he and his wife could spend the summer. It was probably stocked with equally prestigious cattle that were tended by hired hands. And that was when I understood what the dream of a farm in Maine was all about.
I had pretty much forgotten about all that when the other night Out of Africa (1985) happened to be on TCM, and so I decided to watch it. It was hard to watch a movie with such an unsympathetic protagonist. Meryl Streep plays Karen, a woman who tries to sleep her way into being a baroness. But once the baron has his way with her for a while, he tires of her and reneges on his promise to marry her. So, she turns to his brother Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who she knows does not love her, and offers him a deal: if he marries her, she gets to be a baroness, and he gets access to her money. He accepts, and they leave Denmark to go to Africa and start a farm in the year of 1913. Since she already had enough money to attract and support a baron, I figured this must be another one of those prestige deals.
Having made her Faustian bargain, she starts right off being a sourpuss about the whole thing. You know, acting as if her husband was neglecting her, as if he didn’t really love her, especially when he feels free to do as he pleases. As he explains to her, she may have bought the title, but she did not buy him. Now, he is a bit of a jerk, but isn’t that what you would expect from a man who would marry a woman for her money? After a while, we start to like her, but every time something bad happens, as when Bror gives her syphilis, we think, “Well, that’s what you get for marrying a man who doesn’t love you.” She gets the Salvarsan cure, but there is no indication that Bror is treated for the disease, and we have to wonder if she continues to have sex with him, especially since she becomes upset by his continued infidelities. Fed up with him, she tells him to move out of the house and get a place in town. But she does not want a divorce, because then she wouldn’t have anybody. Huh?
She eventually starts having an affair with Denys (Robert Redford), who is a big game hunter. Denys is a believer in free love, figuring he can continue to come and go as he pleases, which hurts her feelings, because she has fallen in love with him and wants him to spend more time with her. He is surprised and dismayed by her attitude. I don’t know why, because I could have told him that would happen. Exasperated, she tells him that everything has a price. Well, she ought to know. Denys is not willing to pay the price of being domesticated, so they split up, and he eventually dies in an airplane crash.
As for that all that money she had, between the cost of supporting her husband and of trying to grow coffee in Africa, she ends up so broke she has to mortgage the farm. Then, right after the crop is harvested, it is destroyed in a fire. When asked if she had insurance, she responds, “That’s for pessimists.” As I said, it is hard to have sympathy for her. So, she loses the farm and has to go back and live with her family, which she admits she has nearly bankrupted. She removes the white gloves from a servant’s hands, saying that was a mistake, and in saying goodbye to another servant, asks him to call her by her first name. I guess that means she finally realizes that being a baroness was just so much vanity. A lot of people like this movie, presumably because Africa is filmed so beautifully, and because her lover Denys is filmed so beautifully too. But if she had stayed in Denmark and not wasted her money buying a farm and a title, she could have led a financially secure life and possibly found a man without a title who loved her and wanted to marry her.
By sheer coincidence, shortly thereafter The Southerner (1945) was shown on TCM too, and I ended up watching it as well. This movie is about a man (Zachary Scott) who makes decent money picking crops in the summer and operating a bulldozer in the winter, but who decides he wants to get his own farm. Three different people, in three different ways, tell him it is a mistake, that there is a good living and security in working for wages, and too much risk and privation in trying to start a farm. But he won’t listen, because he simply wants to own his own farm. One of those three people who try to warn him is a farmer himself, played by J. Carol Naish. When Scott talks about the big crop that he just might be able to grow, Naish is disgusted, saying that farmers are just gamblers, always dreaming of making it big. Sure enough, everything goes wrong. He and his family (wife, two children, and grandmother) almost freeze, almost starve, and a child almost dies of pellagra. He prays to God, asking him to tell him what to do. As far as I’m concerned, God already tried to tell him what to do through those three people who warned him, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He sticks it out, and when the cotton is finally ready for harvest, it is completely ruined by a rain storm. Disgusted, he says he is through, and he is going to get a job at a factory. And just for a moment, I thought, “Good. He has finally come to his senses.” Of course I knew better. No movie could ever end like that, even though it should. Instead, faith and optimism and pluck take over, and he is going to stick it out. Uplifting music. Credits. The end.
In talking about his farm in Vermont, Galbraith tells a story about an inn. Unfortunately, I no longer have the book where he tells this story, so I have to go on memory. Basically, the idea is that the inn was started by a married couple who had worked for years in the city and saved their money to finance their dream of owning an inn. Galbraith said the inn was a nice place to have dinner. Two years later, the couple had to declare bankruptcy. They moved back to the city and got jobs again. By the next year, though, another couple bought the inn, refurbished it, making the place even nicer, and the food served even better. Now it was a really nice place to have dinner for people like the Galbraiths. Sometime later, they too went broke, and back to the city they went. According to Galbraith, this kept happening. Couples with a dream, who had saved their money, would buy the inn and try to make a go of it. And with each purchase, the inn got nicer and more enjoyable. And the excellent food and good service were supplied to the customers at below cost. That is, if the food and service provided had not been below cost, the owners would have made a profit and not gone bankrupt. People from the city were subsidizing the people of Newfane, Vermont by using their savings to provide them with an inn at below cost until their savings were used up, after which they would be replaced by another couple that would subsidize the dining residents of Newfane once more.
By the same token, Karen in Out of Africa must have really benefitted the Kenyan economy by squandering her family’s fortune there, and the coffee she grew was probably enjoyed, at below cost, by people all over the world. As for The Southerner, if the farmer played by Scott ever did manage to make a go of it, it is clear that he would be supplying cotton to people through his and his family’s subsistence labor, netting less money than he could have made by working for wages. In much the same manner, I knew a woman who owned a restaurant. She worked seven days a week, about twelve hours a day. She said that the income she netted for herself, averaged out over all the hours worked in a typical week, was less than the minimum wage.
I have read that three out of every five people who go into business for themselves are no longer in business five years later. And most of those two out of five who do survive effectively work long, hard hours at below minimum wage. Of course, there are farmers who are millionaires, and there are entrepreneurs who succeed fantastically, even becoming billionaires. And just as people who play the lottery focus on the hundreds of millions they could win while ignoring the odds that they won’t, many people become entrepreneurs and farmers mesmerized by what might happen rather than cautioned by what probably will happen. In fact, does not the very word “entrepreneur” connote success? Many a man or woman may go out of business, but somehow there is no such thing as an entrepreneur who is a failure.
There is more to it than money, of course. There is a kind of glory associated with being an entrepreneur or a farmer. Politicians will talk about making life better for the wage earner, and will even praise him, but the highest encomia are reserved for the farmer and small businessman, the ideal forms of the work-ethic ideology. That is why The Southerner could not end with Scott going to work in a factory. He would have been much better off, but having him do so would have been regarded as an unhappy ending, notwithstanding the comfort and economic security he could have provided his family. To have a happy ending, the movie had to leave him on the farm, determined to try again.
So much the better for us. Let us continue to praise the farmer and the small businessman, encouraging them to provide goods and services for us at below cost, to provide us with their subsistence labor. Let us continue to dangle the dream of success before them, while speaking not at all of the hard work that will likely end in failure. It really costs us nothing to do so, and the benefit to us is considerable.