Loving Nature, Fearing The State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan by Brian Allen Drake

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 It draws from an expansive range of sources: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, magazine articles, cookbooks, school curricula, and more. The bibliography includes over 750 references and there are over 60 pages of notes. The book is both entertaining and scholarly. Pumpkin adds to a literature of food that perhapsstartedwiththeaforementionedpotato andnowincludesbananas(Bananas:AnAmericanHistorybyVirginiaScottJenkins ,Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), apples (The Apple: A History of Canada’s Perfect Fruit by Carol Martin, McArthur & Co., 2007), dates (Dates: A Global History by Nawal Nasrallah, Reaktion Books,2011),andmanyothers.Wemayseeaday when all foods have books about them. Ott reexamines American history through the lens of the pumpkin. It is an undertaking that is both intellectual and fun. She traces the pumpkin’s trajectory, by describing its presence in the food and spiritual culture of Native Americans and its later adoption by European colonists. The pumpkin appears in Europe based on “overseas encounters” and quickly moves to the symbolic as demonstrated by its use as a common motif in sixteenth century art: buxom women surrounded by a bountiful harvest including overflowing baskets of pumpkins“in an exuberance of natural abundance ” (pp. 21, 27). The trajectory continues with the pumpkin’s transformation to its current emblematic role. From livestock feed to canned product to jack-o-lantern, to roadside stands and community festivals, Ott demonstrates how the pumpkin became entwined in the American agrarian myth. “The pumpkin fulfills many Americans’ desire to maintain connection to the mythical family farm of lore.” (p. 195). Twentieth century small-scale farmers took advantage of this rural nostalgia to support their farms. In the same vein, Ott observes this nostalgia can be a symbol of resistance to the loss of rural community identity. As a resident of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, describes their pumpkin festival:“We’re maintaining our small-town identity. We have Starbucks and a Gap has come in. We need something to hold onto” (p. 166). The pumpkin is present in American social changefromanti-slaverysentimentof thenineteenth century to misguided anti-gay pushback by people reacting to rainbow flags innocently flown over a pumpkin patch in Virginia. The book also includes revelations (and dinner party trivia) that pumpkins were not present at the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621 and that microfilm linking Alger Hiss to Soviet espionage was hidden in a hollowed out pumpkin. The book sets the record straight about many things related to pumpkins with one exception:what it is.Pumpkins are in the genus cucurbita — the cucumber family — a family that includes watermelon,melons and gourds. Botanically, it is a fruit but is often treated like a vegetable. Ott embraces pumpkins as vegetables ; a teachable is moment lost. The book ends with a curious photograph taken in 1978 by Joel Sternfeld. The photo is of McLean’s Farm Market inVirginia.In the background , a farmhouse is on fire and firefighters are battling the flames (a training exercise).Yet, in the foreground at the farm stand is a lone firefighter — in full fire fighting gear — selecting pumpkins, illustrating our preoccupation. Garry Stephenson Oregon State University Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics before Reagan by Brian Allen Drake University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2013. Bibliography, notes, index. 292 pages. $34.95 paper. In July 1940, Barry Goldwater became the seventy -third person to float the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The trip stayed  Reviews with him through later years, in memory and emotion, perhaps partly because he was already a recognized and published photographer of Arizona and the American West’s natural scenic wonders. But that memory did not stop him from voting to authorize construction of the Glen Canyon Dam in 1956. Reclamation was foremost in his mind then, and the Colorado River represented power and irrigation to fuel Arizona’s economic development. The controversy over damming the Snake River in Idaho’s Hells Canyon developed at the same time, and Goldwater vigorously supported the private-power initiative for three low dams on the Snake rather than the single government-owned high dam favored by federal planners. For Goldwater, the high dam would be a “gross violation of free enterprise” (p. 38). Yet twenty years later, Goldwater told the Senate...