THE EARTH FOR JEFFERSON AND ADAMS

The United States is a democracy; it does not accomplish its ends by handing down decrees from above, but by the initiative and the consent of the citizens, who must first know what they want and how to achieve it.

— SOILS AND MEN, THE 1938 YEARBOOK OF THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

WHEN I WAS A BOY, it seemed like new things were being discovered every day. On the air force base where we lived, for example, there were wedge-shaped planes that made sounds never before heard on Earth. For years, I proudly kept a slender roll of paper given me by a pilot, on which a stylus had traced the sound of his sonic boom. In the history of sonic booms, the one that I possessed was certainly among the first one hundred. How many tens of thousands of those noises have disturbed the sky in the forty years since? And to what little purpose?

The sonic boom gives a good picture of the wave of technological innovation that swept the world right after World War Two. It was sudden, fast, very loud, and in large measure, served to dirty the atmosphere and to stir fear in the mind. And it was really exciting.

But the heat of the affair is over. I can’t remember why I was so moved by it. Of course, the scientists are still there, spending ever larger amounts of money to bang out ever smaller and more ephemeral particles, while ignoring the simple anomalies of quantum mechanics, which make irrelevant gibberish of their costly speculations. Some journalist has the temerity to compare the vastly expensive and useless supercollider to the modest organ on which Bach composed, when a more appropriate comparison might be to the impregnable fortresses, which were to become mass graves, built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in a disastrous effort to extend his frontier with Persia.

Even those who have a vision tend to look among the usual suspects. If one branch of science is moribund, then look to the progress in computers and video. Imagine an interactive future—quantum mechanics writ large—in which perceiver and perceived continually co-create each other.

But above all, do not look behind you. A wall seems to separate us from the aspirations of our forefathers. It is a wall made of garbage, in which the history of the world and of our republic mixes with reruns, suburban streets, the fishlike bodies of detergent bottles, the compacted wads of a million diapers, the mangled tapestry of disused tricycles. All around the cities and their suburbs are rings of trash that cut us off from the garden as effectively as any angel with a flaming sword.

We live in the garbage heaps of culture. But we have drawn the wrong conclusions from this fact. Dump heaps have not properly been regarded as very savory things by us. We have hidden them in the back-woods and sought to cover them over with enough earth that they resemble little hillocks. Yet, rightly treated, the dump heap becomes the compost pile. Ideas buried there devour each other, and get hot with the heat of metabolism. Out of the transformed heap spring healthy new plants from seeds that we had long since forgotten.

I propose that we compost Jefferson and Adams, and plant our own meditations in their fertile earth.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third Presidents of the United States, died within an hour of each other. Adams’s last words were “Jefferson lives.” The death of the pair was the culminating event of one of the great friendships in modern history and the final stop to five decades of correspondence that constitutes a great work of American literature.

Jefferson and Adams were for each other what neither could be for himself. The tall angular nervous Jefferson and the squat pugnacious Adams are archetypal poles in American leadership, but in their correspondence, the two men composted their differences. Like the soil, they transformed the two detrital realms of their lesser selves into a more fertile whole. Real friendship is a body in nature, invisible to the eyes maybe, but with a power to renew even the commonest idea.

Jefferson is known as the Agrarian, the man who recommended a dispersed population and a healthy yeomanry as the foundation of the republic. As many mistaken ideas have been drawn from Jefferson’s agrarianism as have misguided notions been derived from Darwin’s principles of natural selection. Every plaid-shirted back-to-the-lander cites him as a forebear, but the truth is that Jefferson’s farms of several hundred acres were not well managed, because Jefferson himself was so seldom upon them and his overseers did not serve him well.

His enthusiasms for experimenting with new useful plants were many, but largely unsuccessful. He tried olives and Egyptian rice, mulberries and silkworms, sugar maples, grapevines, and oranges. Not a single one flourished. A young granddaughter wrote with amusement of the Seville orange trees they’d planted at Monticello: “Your orange trees come on very well as to their looks,” she wrote to her grandfather in Washington, “but I never saw such short little things in my life. They are near eighteen months old and they are not as high (any of them) as my hand is long.”

Like the Romantic poet Byron, Jefferson longed for a Mediterranean kind of plenty and was unwilling to admit that his climate might deny it to him. Jefferson’s Garden Book, compiled from notebooks and correspondence by Morris K. Betts, is a rhythmic and seasonal poem of excitements and frosts: “May 5—A frost which destroyed almost everything, it killed the wheat, rye, corn, many tobacco plants, and even large saplings ... all the shoots of the vines . . . Oct 12—A frost of four or five weeks’ duration, the earth being frozen like a rock the whole time. This killed all the olives. . . . April 17—The forest totally blasted, every leaf being killed on the hardiest trees. . . . Nov. 28—It is so cold that the freezing of the ink on the point of my pen renders it difficult to write. . . .” For all that the New World seemed lush, it was resistant to Jefferson’s agricultural dreaming.

But his willingness to experiment was his strength, too. Jefferson was little concerned whether or not he was regarded as a fool. He was at his best and his worst at Monticello. Jefferson was among the first in the United States to recommend full crop rotations, with periods of planting in legumes and periods of grazing, to renew the soil. He created an elaborate scheme to accomplish this, field by field. He opposed as destructive the practice of bare fallowing, which left the land open to erosion, and he was an early advocate of contour plowing, working across the slope so that the furrows would hold water, not channel it into runnels. His recommendations were virtually the same as those adopted by the Soil Conservation Service 150 years later.

But Jefferson’s agrarian vision was not robust enough. His system of rotation never was put into practice, because the economy defeated it. Always cash-poor, Jefferson depended on his small manufactures and service businesses, like his naillery and his mill, to provide the where-withal for his large farm. When these failed, as they all did eventually, he was hard put to make up the loss.

He turned to wheat and to tobacco, the single most soil-exhausting crop known to the farming of his day. To a friend he confessed, “The high price of tobacco, which is likely to continue for some short time, has tempted me to go entirely into that culture, and in the meantime, my farming schemes are in abeyance.” He was unequal to the interface of money with his farm, so he was unable to prevent, even on his own ground, what he complained of in Virginia at large: “We would sooner buy a new acre of land, than manure an old one.”

In this respect, he was the opposite of his friend and political rival, John Adams. For all the history books tell, one would expect that Adams, the Yankee and a leader of the Federalists, would be a friend of urban manufacturers and an enemy of the agrarian vision. But Adams was in fact a fine and successful farmer, at a scale appropriate to his means.

What is more, he understood the importance of a robust farming community to the health of the nation’s cities. It was he, not Jefferson, who pushed through the Continental Congress of 1774 a resolution to establish in all the colonies Societies for the Promotion of Agriculture. He was so proud of this achievement that he noted the event in his journal, specifically claiming authorship of the idea.

His motive was both to make the colonies self-sufficient with respect to food and clothing and to increase the wealth of the incipient nation. He envisioned a healthy and local relationship between farms and factories. He was the first of the friends to suggest the wisdom of importing Merino sheep and improving the breed for domestic woolens. If one looks for the father of the county fair in America—and of all local initiatives to advance farming on an appropriate scale-—one must look as much to Adams as to Jefferson.

Adams also understood the soil, viscerally and emotionally, as his friend did not. The son of a farmer and inheritor of forty acres of Massachusetts soil, the New Englander was ever proud of his manure heaps. To Charles Francis Adams, the cultured scion who as his ancestor’s editor also excised the references to lovely women, this was de trop. So we have inherited a lawyerly idea of the second President and have entirely missed the hearty life of him.

Jefferson, the “agrarian,” was an inventor and a dilettante. Adams, the “federalist,” was a farmer and a compost man. Go figure. Each man contained the other’s shadow. Jefferson had a heart that rose into his mind; Adams’s heart sank deep into his instinctive life.

As I write, I am looking out the window at two old peach trees whose fruit has turned overnight from yellow-green to orange-red. This is only a rented country house, and I am only a harried writer. The farmers are long gone from this place, but the soil is faithful. Five or six peaches are already lying on the ground, sinking into the tufted grass.

What if I bothered to learn from the past? What if I regarded it as significant that this pair of friends died on the same day, July 4, 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of the republic they founded? What if I composted the differences between Jefferson and Adams, and sought in their union and transformation some clue to a right relationship to the land and to the stuff of my own life?