Food, Energy and Society

the United States, might fuss because these birds are featured under California, and a Chester County Pennsyl vanian may be upset with a lack of homage for his delectable mushrooms.However, such inconsistancies or slights can be forgiven when the enormous cyclorama of American agriculture presented is viewed with objectivity.An Easterner does feel somewhat lost when left stranded in California on the final page and wishes for a final chapter which would tie things together and forcast the future of American farmers.Nonetheless, one cannot help but applaud this ambitious attempt to systemize the diverse elements which contribute to fruitfulness provided by American farms and farmers.There is, however, a spoiled apple hidden in the book's otherwise fruitfulness.Chapter 4, devoted to southern agriculture, contains selections on the role of Afro-Americans which should have been discreetly and sensitively pruned or edited, but were not.The consistant usage of the lower case "black" and the largely passe "Negro" instead of more modern cognates causes one to question the objectivity of the author and his editor.There are a number of indicative racial statements, such as: "By 1900 three-fourths of the Negro farmers were still sharecroppers or tenants.Allhough by 1925 they comprised a third of the southern population, they owned only one-seventh of the farms and the land they owned was less desirable."(underscores by reviewer) Such "word play" clearly suggests that Ebeling believes Afro-American farmers are lazy, inferior, or somehow at fault when clearly the Black farmers were the victims of slavery and other institutions and, in reality, white institutions were at fault.George Washington Carver appears to have been selected for a special reprimand because his "teaching at Tuskegee was disappointing" and "his publications" contained little that was new.Certainly Carver was an outstanding extension agriculturalist and made other contributions to agriculture and to the Black cause.The fact that "his birthplace became a national monument, an honor previously granted only to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln," and that a "New York Times article erroneously gave Carver credit for originating dehydrated foods" are petty and malicious distractions that have no bearing and are raised simply because Carver was black.Ebeling further suggests that "although the Second Morrill Act of 1890 authorized the establishment of separate land grant colleges, none offered college level courses until 1916."Although one has no means of judging what Ebeling considers "college level," more than 50 public and private controlled Black-oriented institutions of higher education existed before 1900, i.e., Alabama A University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (1873); North Carolina A Delaware State College (891); and Lincoln University (866) are all land grant institutions with good reputations and their founding dates compare favorably with the University of California, Los Angeles (919), Ebeling's home base.The most remarkable bit of demagoguery is a 'quote' from DuBois."Most historians, including even the noted black schqlar W. E. B. DuBois (1866), would agree that the malerialliving conditions of slaves in the South compared well with those of lower echelons of laborers elsewhere and were not as bad a they were sometimes made out to be by contemporary abolitionist crusaders or by modern 'neoabolitionists.'"Considering that