Was L.H. Bailey a Racist?

    In a recent January post on Thornapple CSA's blog, Paul B. Thompson, the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University, made the striking claim that Liberty Hyde Bailey was a racist: "But although Bailey is clearly a food ethics icon, he’s also problematic. He was a racist, for one thing, and his writings include occasional sentences and paragraphs that are shocking to modern readers." Despite not giving any specific support to his charge, let us take Professor Thompson's charge seriously. Unfortunately, comments to Professor Thompson's blog post are currently closed so I'll respond here.

To clear the playing field, let's list two important ideas that everyone should know about race:

• Race has no genetic basis.
• Race isn't biological, but racism is still real.

    With this in mind, here is what Bailey had to say in his background book, What is Democracy? published in 1918 after the wake of the Great War; "Racial independence and separateness is a doubtful apprenticeship to democracy. It tends to solidify the racial clan, making it a class enterprise in the world. Racial jealousies and hatreds have always stood in the way of democracy, and the modern process has been to break down these barriers...One reason why democracy has thriven in North America is because the population is not a race but a brotherhood."

    It is evident, that Bailey could not discard the idea and workings of racism. This doesn't make him a racist, however. In great contrast to a racist ideology, Bailey found the ideas of race antithetical to democracy. If he can be accused of anything is perhaps overt optimism that North America consisted as a brotherhood, while we still struggle with the inequalities of racism today.

    In his follow-up writing, Universal Service, the Hope for Humanity, Bailey viewed World War I as a "great collapse" in society where people of every race found it necessary to be prepared, "to destroy the citizen of any other race or people in order to protect itself." He further asserted, "If we make no fundamental change of direction in these moving forces at the conclusion of the present Lapse, then we must conclude that society does not have within its body the power of self-correction." Again, Bailey articulates the destructive properties in our belief in race.

    In all fairness, perhaps Professor Thompson quick accusation was directed at other aspects of Bailey, namely his science. But as for the man himself and his personal beliefs, we find a very articulate person, hoping for a better future, with a larger belief in humanity. That alone should give one enough restraint in connecting Liberty Hyde Bailey with the ugly stain of racism.

A Society of the Holy Earth

"I propose a Society of the Holy Earth. Chapters and branches it may have, but its purpose is not to be organization and its practice is not to be the operation of parliamentary machinery. It will have nothing to ask of anybody, not even of Congress. It will not be based on profit-and-loss. It will have no schemes to float, and no propaganda. It will have few officers and many leaders. It will be controlled by a motive rather than by a constitution. The associations will be fellowships of the spirit. Its principle of union will be the love of the Earth, treasured in the hearts of men and women. To every person who longs to walk on the bare ground, who stops in a busy day for the song of a bird, who hears the wind, who looks upward to the clouds, who would protect the land from waste and devastation realizing that we are transients and that multitudes must come after us, who would love the materials and yet not be materialistic, who would give of himself, who would escape self-centered, commercial and physical valuations of life, who would exercise a keepership over the planet,—to all these souls everywhere the call will come." L.H. Bailey, Universal Service (Image credit from chalk4peace.blogspot.com/)

Rediscovering Bailey's Background Books

Among the volumes of Liberty Hyde Bailey's work, the more personal and philosophical writings are found in the Background Books: The Philosophy of the Holy Earth. These seven books which he called his “budget of opinions,” were written, as Bailey explains, with only the authority of "a single and unattached citizen, looking on." Bailey explained that, "Out of an experience not inconsiderable grew the desire to attempt certain Background Books...the person who may have chanced to read one of the other books may understand that here is not a repetition of statements but a progression of ideas." Bailey holds true to this format where there is constant weaving of a tapestry which meditates on the sometimes forgotten panoramas of our life. Here they are for the offering, with links to the first four.

(1915)
Wind and Weather (1916)
Universal Service (1918)What is Democracy? (1918)
The Seven Stars (1923)
The Harvest: Of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil (1927)
The Garden Lover (1928)

The Holy Earth