It was a radical step, one that would be as radical today as it was when Helen and Scott Nearing made it nearly 90 years ago.
Disgusted by what they saw as an immoral society based on war, greed and unearned income, the Nearings decided to leave that world behind. They declared they would create their own world here in Vermont, one based on the freedom of the subsistence farmer, cooperation with neighbors and bartered transactions instead of financial ones whenever possible.
Their Vermont experiment would last for two decades before they would pick up stakes and move to Maine and continue the project for another three decades. Their successes would inspire a new generation to attempt to leave aspects of the larger world behind by moving back to the land.
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The Nearings were unlikely radicals. Both were born into money. Scott grew up as one of the few privileged people in the company town of Morris Run, Pennsylvania. His grandfather ran the company that owned the local coal mines and forests, as well as the stores, churches and the schools. Nearing remembered that when he was about 5 years old he watched a worker pick up a 20-foot length of half-inch chain and carry it slowly toward a car he was loading. “Why don’t the guy do that faster?” he thought. “Why don’t he hurry?”
When he tried to lift the chain himself, Nearing understood. “That was one of my first lessons,” he told historian Studs Terkel. “The people who work have to move chains and split wood and do all the other things that require energy, determination, and a whole lot of juice. The other people lie in hammocks.”
The sense of class consciousness that awakened that day stayed with Nearing for the remaining 95 years of his life. He would turn his back on the system that had enriched his family. Nearing studied economics and then taught it at the University of Pennsylvania, where he attacked the capitalist system as unfair and immoral. When in 1915 he promoted a bill in the state legislature banning child labor, an influential textile mill owner threatened to use his connections to cut the school’s state funding unless Nearing was sacked. The administration knuckled under and fired him.
Two years later, Nearing was in trouble again, this time with the federal government for writing a tract opposing the First World War, which was then raging. Nearing lost on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and had to pay $3,000 for airing his views. “It was a vocal country,” Nearing told Terkel. “The First World War ended it.”
Helen Knothe also grew up in comfort, but her childhood home was freer than Scott’s. Helen’s mother was a Dutch artist who encouraged her daughter to travel widely and explore life. As a young woman, Helen responded by following Krishnamurti, the Indian spiritual leader who counseled self-awareness.
Helen was only 24 years old when she met Scott Nearing, who was 45 and separated from his first wife. The two hit it off. Soon, Helen wanted to live with Scott, but he suggested she take a sort of test to see if she was ready to surrender her privileged life. First, Helen took a job at a candy factory in Brooklyn and lived in a nearby slum. When she asked for a raise, she was fired. Then she traveled to Europe in luxury, to see if she missed the trappings of wealth.
When she decided she didn’t, Helen sailed back to the United States and set up house with Scott in a cold-water flat in New York City. There, they forsook their families’ wealth and lived on what money they earned.
In 1932, with the nation in the midst of the Great Depression, the Nearings decided to move to New England, where they thought they could be more independent. They picked Vermont because they “liked the thickly forested hills which formed the Green Mountains. The valleys were cosy, the people unpretentious.”
The Nearings put $300 down on a rundown farm that included land in the towns of Stratton, Winhall and Jamaica. They created a garden, which grew about 80% of the food they needed. As vegetarians, they raised no animals. They cut their own wood and constructed buildings out of stones they pulled from the land. They used pretty much everything they produced. Their only cash crop was maple syrup and sugar, which they traded with friends down south for citrus fruit and other goods they couldn’t produce themselves.
As much as they could, they avoided participating in the money economy. Their main need for cash was to pay their property taxes. “We were poor in the country, but it was better than being poor in the city,” Helen told Terkel. “Instead of eating out of garbage cans, we ate out of our own garden. It was quite novel for me. My family had a garden and a gardener.”
Scott spoke of Vermont, and later of Maine, as the couple’s “cyclone cellar in New England,” which provided shelter from what in their view was the immoral world beyond. But, he insisted, they were not escapists: “(W)e were not shirking obligations, but looking for an opportunity to take on more worthwhile experiences.”
Since the Nearings’ never sought to make a profit, they worked only as hard as they had to on the farm. Typically, they divided their days into three four-hour chunks. They spent one of the blocks performing “bread labor,” the work necessary to provide their food, shelter, clothing, etc. They devoted another block to personal pursuits – writing, playing music, skiing. The other block was left for civic work, which entailed doing something of value for the community, such as helping a neighbor or entertaining visitors. As the Nearings’ fame grew, so did the number of visitors. Eventually, the couple posted a sign at the end of their driveway informing would-be guests that they only welcomed folks during certain hours or if they called ahead.
What drew people to their farm was that the Nearings had shown they could live by their own labor, almost entirely outside the capitalist system. They wanted to exemplify the type of independent life that was possible, if one had the courage to leave mainstream life behind. Beginning in the 1960s, they served as role models for back-to-the-landers who sought a simpler, better life in Vermont.
But they wouldn’t be here to witness it. They had a loftier goal than just self-sufficiency when they moved north. They wanted to show the benefits of cooperation. Occasionally, a neighbor or two might work with them during maple sugaring season or some idealistic city dwellers might work with them for a while, but the Nearings’ vision of a dynamic communal life never materialized.
In dissecting the failure of that vision in their now famous book, “Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World,” they wrote, “In one sense Vermont offered less rather than more opportunity for collective experiments than most other parts of rural America. Vermonters were strong individualists … and all the major Vermont traditions emphasized the individualism of the Green Mountain folk.”
Vermonters, the Nearings believed, worked together better as families than communities.
Their neighbors were organized into “autonomous households,” they wrote. In fact, “‘Autonomous’ is hardly the word,” they continued. “‘Sovereign’ would be a more exact descriptive term.”
The Nearings abandoned their idea of a more communal life in Vermont and moved to Maine in 1952. By then, the couple’s Vermont farm had grown to 750 acres. With the development of a ski area at nearby Stratton Mountain, the land’s value had skyrocketed from about $2.75 an acre to $8,000. Land they had purchased for about $2,000 was now worth $6 million on the market. But they couldn’t accept the fortune they would have made by selling it. “We had done nothing to justify the increase,” Scott explained. So they decided to donate the land to the town for a municipal forest.
It was then, perhaps, that the Nearings understood the extent of the distrust their radical ideas had engendered in town. When residents considered whether to accept this gift at the next town meeting, one third of them voted “no.”
“The Korean War was on at the time,” Scott said. “Those opposed to acceptance called us Communists. They thought we were trying to bribe the town in some way.”
Despite the suspicions people harbored about them, the Nearings made it clear that it was more the arrival of skiers, the leisure class, that drove them away. “We wanted to live with people who earned their living by ordinary means instead of artificialities,” Scott said. “We liked the farmers better.”
