Archival Summer, Week 5: Vocational passions, the “amateur,” and an unknown Bailey lecture
It’s funny how the best documents appear on accident at the end of the day. You’re tired, you’ve been sifting through a marginally or only potentially interesting stack of correspondence for much of the afternoon, and then, with half an hour until the reading room closes, you request that wild card box. This was what happened several years ago when I requested Box 18, one of the three I had reserved ahead of time purely because of its absence from the finding aid, and in it I found a grail — not one, but two full-length unpublished book manuscripts that had been waiting for who-knows-how-long to be found, read, and added to the finding aid so that later scholars could locate them. (Up until that point, no unpublished book manuscripts were listed in the finding aid, and I do not believe that more than these two exist. One is in four drafts.)
Well, it happened again with Box 18 at about 3:30 last Friday. That box is an old friend now; I have made my own reproductions of both unpublished manuscripts and have read them, and a friend and I hope in the near future to begin working on getting one of them into print for the first time. But on Friday, I was looking for something else: the correspondence between Liberty Hyde Bailey and “One Hundred and Twenty-Nine Farmers,” excerpts of whose letters provide the bulk of the concluding chapter of that name in Bailey’s best under-appreciated book, The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil (1927). He writes that he sent out a letter to that many farmers around the country in 1926, performing a sort of reprise to the half a million circulars that the Commission on Country Life had distributed fifteen years before, but this time asking the question in the excerpt below:
I wanted to find those letters. It turns out that if you do a Ctrl-F search for “1926” in the Bailey Papers finding aid, you won’t come up with much — a folder of correspondence here or there, a snatch of essays published that year. But then there’s Box 18, where there are several packs of note cards corresponding to speeches dated 1926. In past visits I had flipped through a couple of these dozen or so packs of note cards, ranging from the 1910s-40s, but hadn’t had time to justify going through them in more depth than that. My time on Friday in the 1926 correspondence hadn’t turned up anything relevant, so, thinking he might have at least mentioned this project in one of his speeches that year, I requested good old Box 18 with just twenty minutes before closing. (Those Cornell archivists are true saints.)
I was most intrigued by a packet with no explanatory information. “Notes for an unidentified lecture,” the envelope read in some past archivist’s jagged cursive, “n.d. (1926?).” And after removing the faded pink ribbon that held the pack together, I began to read, and then I began to pour through furiously, one eye on the clock (fifteen minutes), spellbound, knowing I’d have to wait until the following week to get those cards photographed.
This week I started poking around the first volume of Isabelle Stengers’s monumental work on Cosmopolitics. I’m only a little way in, but one of the interesting moves that Stengers makes, as a philosopher and historian of science, is to interrogate and make visible “the passionate vocation of the physicist,” of “the ‘living’ physicist,” as against (or alongside; she doesn’t deny it) the counternarrative that considers science primarily as increasingly co-opted by capitalist models insistent on the churning out of data to justify the patronage of those ever-mysterious sources of grant funding (8, 10). That counternarrative is also true, of course, but she writes that “it is the anxiety that continues to occupy the physicist at CERN that I want to confirm and celebrate, and not the likelihood of the cynical laugh that ushers in the abandonment of the dream and the redefinition of the physicist as a cog in some more or less extravagant large-scale undertaking” (10). This “passionate vocation,” for many physicists, if I understand Stengers so far, emerges in part from a deep-seated cosmological faith that a unifying theory of everything can even be got at — a faith that has been problematized by other physicists at least since Ernst Mach’s controversial arguments in the first decade of the twentieth century that scientific laws have more to do with how we perceive the universe than with how it actually exists beyond our perception (6). Stengers’s aim is not to undermine physics here by problematizing some physicists’ assumptions, but to illustrate honestly the passions motivating the practice of physics, and at the heart of that passion is a powerful cosmological assumption. (To clarify, cosmology just means a way of knowing [-ology] about the cosmos or universe [cosmo-]. We all make cosmological assumptions on a regular basis.)
Leaving the debate over the nature of physics aside, I find this interrogation of the passions of the academic to be refreshing and vital. While I do think that plenty of academics get caught up in the institutionalism of the ivory tower, becoming something of a cog with largely market-driven motivations, it also seems that many (if not most) of the successful academics I know are in it to satisfy a less “practical” passion. Those passions are personal as well as cultural, and their sustainability relies on certain assumptions which, when revealed, are likely as profound as those undergirding Stengers’s physicists. I have already written about the unlikely path that brought me to Ithaca this summer to delve into Liberty Hyde Bailey’s papers (first here, most recently here). Much of my current drive comes from my own desire to understand Bailey’s cosmological assumptions, the passions that drove him to become one of the most prolific of the horticultural authors and agrarian philosophers of his age. And my attraction to Bailey, as well as my theories about him, are also keenly personal.
I met John Stempien, eighth-grade teacher at Lowell Middle School in Lowell, Michigan and then-Director of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum in South Haven, Michigan, because I was curious to hear a little about how an author from my hometown had made sense of his relationship with the more-than-human world a hundred years ago, because my dad mentioned Bailey and the museum in a chance phone call during my senior year in college (I had previously no idea that such a museum existed), and because my mom had a cool idea for an outdoor learning center at her elementary school that might be able to draw from Bailey’s ideas (and which has since become a major success story). It was my relationship with John that really changed my life, though, and reoriented my research toward Bailey’s massive and, today, massively underappreciated corpus. When I started working with John at the museum, I didn’t want to stop, because John is the kind of leader who recognizes passion and encourages it. Not all academic administrators can claim as much, as so many educators know (from elementary through the collegiate level). John has himself continued to study Bailey’s writings, as demonstrated in this most recent video in the series he has been publishing on YouTube this summer, and tomorrow he is making the drive to Ithaca to join me for a weekend “In Search of Liberty Hyde Bailey” — if you have five extra minutes, I’d encourage you to watch this, because it does a better job than I can do here of expressing the human sentiment lying at back of the best research, and it also happens to illustrate our friendship a bit:
While he is an excellent and beloved history teacher, John would not describe himself as a professional researcher in the way that a Bailey scholar like Scott Peters or Ben Minteer might. In that sense, he is an amateur, a word that Liberty Hyde Bailey used positively in the sense of its Latin root amator, meaning lover, insisting that “the amateur is the ultimate conservator of horticulture” and that “[o]n him rests the maintenance of the ideals” (The Garden Lover, 8). The best academics, I think, ought to strive to keep alive the passions of the amateur as well. If the Father of Modern Horticulture can claim, at the age of 69, that he himself cultivates the spirit of the amateur horticulturist and does so more importantly than he does the spirit of the expert, we ought to be able to manage a similar humility. I can think of no better professional aspiration than to remain a passionate amateur until the day I die.
There are a number of reasons why the undated, untitled stack of notes in Box 18 caused me to freak out on Friday. The notes hold together thematically, fragmentary as they are, and seem to be an address to a class of students, possibly a graduating class at Cornell or elsewhere. Some cards have simple statements of advice: regarding the “Diction of the type-writer machine,” he simply has written, “Write as you talk” (Bailey insisted his whole life to write longhand rather than by “machine”); elsewhere he advises that his listeners “Purchase + read 2 good books each year,” and on the next card to “Familiarize yourselves with [“one” is scratched out] 6 good poems every year.” The cards are heavy on quotations from both scientists (including Tyndall, Newton, Humboldt, Darwin, and Einstein) and poets (from Milton to Rupert Brooke). They seem related to another set of cards in Box 18 for a speech titled “The Scientist’s Vocation,” also dated 1926. As Stengers does in Cosmopolitics, Bailey argues in these speeches that the scientist pursues her field of study not out of some quiet rational motivation, but out of an energizing passion that speaks to something bigger than or beyond the science itself. At one point, Bailey writes on a card:
Be students still, after college.
• scientific attitude of looking direct from cause to effect
• beware that statistics are not measures of life
• make up the opinion from the evidence.
On the next card:
Open your minds to the artistic expression of life.
Sc[ience] begets a knowledge of
•objects + phenomena
• simple and true in its mental processes.
• fitness
• an appreciation for everything that exists
And then, on the following card, four words:
Always remain an amateur
And on the card after that, simply:
Artistic Expression of life
I wrote back in June and again a couple weeks ago about this last phrase in Bailey’s work, which as far as I know originates in his book The Seven Stars (1923), from his Background Books series. To see it paired with the idea of the amateur, which I associate with his final Background Book The Garden Lover (1928), shows just how immersed he was in his philosophical ideas at this time. The Background Books started, though, with The Holy Earth in 1915, and that work can be seen as really forming the backdrop for the six books that would follow in the series — and, significantly, it also emerges in this fascinating stack of note cards, near the conclusion, where the particular cosmology undergirding Bailey’s vocational perspective seems to emerge with the most force. The fragmented phrases on their own cards are sometimes the most beautiful — we get one card here that just reads “Beauty / Infinity of beauty,” followed by the more argumentative “Religion — when we outgrow the notion that religion is necessarily concerned with theories of creation (traditional method),” and then on a card by itself, “The earth is holy.” He seems to describe a future time when religion transcends its concerns with “theories of creation” and divinity is found instead “in the plan + process” of things as they present themselves to the human mind, presumably to the “scientific” mind, which we know from his earlier statements is “simple and true in its mental processes,” “looking direct from cause to effect.” It is easy, given the traditional language Bailey uses, to lose sight of the somewhat radical nature of his spiritual/cosmological vision here, and how much it straddles the worlds of science and spirituality, seeking to transcend their differences.
And although I found no reference to Bailey’s 129 farmers to whom he wrote that year, asking them about why they farmed and whether they still found joy in the work, what I did find was Bailey thinking through essentially the same kind of question with these graduating students — why should we be doing this work? What are the real rewards of the open mind, of the quest to do good work and to do it well? How can we retain the enthusiasms of the amateur even as we devote our lives to these pursuits? Whether a farmer, a botanist, or a poet, Bailey seems to argue, we all need to keep the fire of that amateur’s love alive. We need a cosmology, a way of situating ourselves in a much larger world, that reminds us always of how small we are and that, given our inability to solve everything, we ought to at least hold onto the possibility to express our lives, regardless of how we earn our bread, artistically.
The last card asks, “Is sc[ience] to be the final state of man’s conquest?” and then centered in the middle of the card Bailey simply writes “Nay.” Following that we find two pages, cut out and folded into thirds, from a copy of Bailey’s second Background Book, the poetry collection Wind and Weather (1916), containing his poem “Nay,” which the card clearly refers to. We can imagine that Bailey might have concluded his speech with these words.
NAY
“And finally we have come to the last days, when mankind will be governed by science.”
Nay! There is no finality,
No dictum to obey;
Nature is one vast infinity,
And the mind a small timidity
Feeling the way.We make the quest
The day is gone
We do our best
To found our action firm thereon,
And this is well.
The magic spell
Of high discovery,
The emprise of the licensed mind
That leaves tradition far behind
For one more fact secure to bind
And one more fortress to unbond —
This is indeed great mastery.
But other reaches stretch beyond:
And at the last and at the last
When the early quest is past
And the mind is fuller grown
We shall project the vast unknown
Direct from prospects of the soul
From the free outreaching soul,
Intuitive the truth make whole.When the last proud fact is said
And the knowledge hath been read
And the sum of science heard
Shall the poet say the word
The last great word, —
He the last to strike the stringèd lyre
The last to lift the pharos-fire.
Works Cited
Bailey, L[iberty]. H[yde]. The Garden Lover. New York: Macmillan, 1928. Print. The Background Books: The Philosophy of the Holy Earth 7.
— . The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil. New York: Macmillan, 1927. Print. The Background Books: The Philosophy of the Holy Earth 6.
— . The Holy Earth. 1915. Centennial ed. Ed. John Linstrom. Introd. Wendell Berry. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015. Print. Orig. The Background Books: The Philosophy of the Holy Earth 1.
— . Lecture notes. Ca. 1926? Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21–2–3342, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. 18.3. MS.
— . The Seven Stars. New York: Macmillan, 1923. Print. The Background Books: The Philosophy of the Holy Earth 5.
— . Wind and Weather. 1916. Ithaca: self-published, 1919. Print. The Background Books: The Philosophy of the Holy Earth 2.
Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. 1997. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.
For some context, see my intro post. To get in touch, use my website.
See the full list of entries in my Archival Summer blog series, in reverse chronological order, on my Medium profile.
Insights and all archival quotations gleaned from Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21–2–3342, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
