Books: Salvation & Solvency

OLD MCDONALD HAD A FARM—Angus McDonald— Houghton, Mifflin ($2.75).

This agrarian Life With Father (Literary guild selection for April) sells the program of the U.S. Soil Conservation in the person of an Oklahoma divine who was also a dirt farmer. It is written by his son Angus. Old McDonald was a man so canny and cantankerous that not only farmers but everybody else chuckle at his antics—the rather stirring antics of a tough old man practicing as well as preaching a primitive American philosophy: that use of the soil is a privilege, not a right, and that its misuse is a sin. The book also tells more about the fundamentals of farming than you can find in most back-to-the-land books.

One day when Old McDonald, then 18, was out plowing, he “received the call . . . to go out and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.” He had no trouble becoming a preacher, but he didn’t know anything. So he worked his way through school (meanwhile marrying and begetting two sons) and graduated, age 29; with highest honors. His wife graduated in the same class. Then Old McDonald set out to convert Oklahoma because “Oklahoma was bound for hell as straight and as fast as an Indian could shoot an arrow.” The McDonalds settled in Sallisaw, on the edge of the outlaw and moonshine belt. There, when one “man killed another no one bothered him because the community considered the killing was an execution and not a murder.”

For some 40 years Old McDonald preached hard work and hellfire every Sunday, with little visible effect on Oklahoma. Though he claimed to have built more churches “spiritually and physically” than any other man in the State, what he had to show for his pains was penury and insomnia. (“Your mother doesn’t care,” he would complain, “if I die for lack of sleep. There she lies night after night dead to the world while I am going crazy with sleeplessness.”)

Old McDonald had really always wanted to go back to farming. At 62 he made up his mind to do it. He hated towns. “Jefferson was right when he said that cities were evil [population of Sallisaw: 1,500].” But the two things that made Old McDonald maddest were the way Oklahoma farmers refused to plant anything but cotton, and the way they let their fields erode. He detested cotton worse than sin, and erosion more than murder. He said so in church and out. “All of this here,” he told one irate farmer, pointing to the 15-ft. gullies in his fields, “that is the work of the devil. It is a work against God. . . . God never intended that farmers should butcher up land. You and other farmers have ruined a good hill farm.” “Ignorant churn-headed fool!” he added, out of hearing. Old McDonald decided to spend the rest of his life reclaiming that ruined farm.

Everybody laughed when the old man bought the place, laughed louder when he began by building a two-story house. “A two-story house is liable to blow down,” they said. Said the old man: “I want my place to look up into the sky, not squat down like a hog.” The first high wind blew the house down. That enraged him. Old McDonald, who “was so tight he’d skin a flea for its hide and tallow,” told the contractor: “Mr. Alfred, I want you to build this house so strong no wind will ever blow it down. . . . Never mind the cost.”

Smiles grew broad when drought burned up his first year’s crops, broader still when a “gully-washer” washed out all the stone dams the old man had slave-driven himself and his sons to build across the erosion “gutters.” Some of the gulleys were twice as deep as the old man was tall, and he “stood head and shoulders above all other men.” Most of Old McDonald Had a Farm is the story of how the old man took those smiles off his neighbors’ faces by hard work, penny pinching, some shrewd horse trading, and a preConservation Service wisdom about soil and crop management. At last people had to admit that Old McDonald was the best farmer and had the best farm in the county.

With prosperity Old McDonald changed little, though he developed a passion for snapping up land bargains at tax sales. He still worked from dawn to dark, still wrote blistering sermons on Saturday night that he never looked at when he was in the pulpit, still found time for a little Republican baiting, and detected evidences of divine guidance in the Democratic Party.

“There’s two sides to everything, all right,” he would say, “a right side and a wrong, and I’m always on the right side and I’m going to stay that way.”

He liked to brag that he was “one of the plain people.” “I belong to the common herd,” he said. “I will never have so much money that I’ll be ashamed of my old daddy, who was so poor he couldn’t afford to build a privy. We always went to the woods when I was a boy.”

But thrift and hard work, the great enemies of professional plebeianism, got even Old McDonald in the end. “In spite of the old man’s feeling about the poor,” says Son Angus, “he came to be disliked because he was making money.” In his hatred of laziness and waste, in his passion for hard work and thrift, his reverence for the soil which made a living possible, Old McDonald was downright reactionary. So was his advice to his son. “There are two things,” Old Angus told Young Angus, “that we should all strive for—Salvation first and solvency next.”

The Author. After Old McDonald died, Young McDonald spent seven years wandering through 30 States and Mexico. He worked as a dishwasher, waiter, filling-station attendant, ditchdigger, meat packer, strawberry picker, joint finisher, farm hand, lather, truck dumper, cable splicer. He also sold perfume. Once he got so mad at being laid off that he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, came out with a master’s degree. Now he works for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service.