The Man With The Hoe
By Edwin Markham
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Written after seeing Millet's World-Famous Painting
God made man in His own image,
in the image of God made He him. --Genesis.
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And pillared the blue firmament with light?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More fraught with menace to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The White Man's Burden
By Jim Zwick
In January and February of 1899, two poems were published in the United States that became flashpoints for debate about American society and the country's role in the world. Edwin Markham's "The Man with the Hoe" was published in William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner on January 15, and Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" was published in McClure's Magazine the following month. Kipling's poem was an intentional intervention into the heated debate about imperialism provoked by the Spanish-American War and the annexation of Spain's former colonies at its close. Markham did not expect his poem to generate debate but, like Kipling's, it touched upon issues that were at the forefront of people's consciousness at the end of the nineteenth century. "The Man with the Hoe" became a focal point for debate about the dignity of labor, poverty, oppression of women, urbanization, concentration of wealth, the creation of trusts, the influence of "money interests" upon government,
the necessity of reform, and the threat of revolution.
To appreciate how Markham's reflections on Jean-François Millet's painting of a down-trodden French peasant, L'homme à la houe, could raise so many issues for Americans, it is necessary to realize that the 1890s was a decade of rapid change for the country as a whole and of tremendous hardship for many. Although it had more symbolic meaning than anything else, a great deal of attention was paid to the Census Bureau's statement that the 1890 national census showed that the frontier was closed. There was still plenty of unused land available throughout the country, but many saw a shortage of available land on the horizon and raised concerns about large tracts of land that were held out of use. Three years later, in a widely discussed essay on "The Frontier in American History," Frederick Jackson Turner raised uncomfortable questions about what the closing of the frontier meant for American democracy. He argued that the frontier had been responsible for the renewal of democracy as
successive waves of westward migration had alleviated urban crowding and resolved new issues of governance on the frontier that kept the nation vibrant. What would happen now that the frontier was closed?
In the era of J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and other forms of inequality were reaching new heights. In 1893, the stock market crashed and the most severe economic depression the country had yet experienced began. Long before the creation of unemployment insurance and social security, millions were left with no means of support. Desperate workers traveled from city to city in search of work, only to find that thousands of local workers were likewise unemployed and living on the streets. Many women were working outside the home in the 1890s, often for very long hours at low pay while also carrying the entire burden of domestic work and child-rearing. Although the organized women's movement was making progress, women were still decades away from obtaining the right to vote in national elections. Race relations were at their historical low point. The Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892 with a new provision
that required every Chinese person in the United States to be photographed and to carry a copy of the photograph with them at all times for identification purposes. Jim Crow segregation laws were established, African Americans were being disfranchised in the South, and lynchings and other forms of racial violence were becoming more common throughout the country.
What Republican Militarism Means
Economic recovery was quickly followed by the Spanish-American War. It bolstered national pride but raised additional issues about the country's future. When the first republic formed in a revolution against an empire acquired its own overseas empire, anti-imperialists protested the betrayal of American political traditions and warned of its consequences in speeches and essays with titles such as "Republic or Empire," "Liberty or Despotism" and "Democracy or Militarism." They looked at the European empires and warned that the United States would follow in their paths. "I don't want to see the day when the American citizen will be like his fellows in Europe," Carl Schurz stated in 1900, "every man as he goes to work carrying one soldier on his back." Captioned "What Republican Militarism Means," the illustration accompanying his statement showed a man with a hoe with a soldier strapped to his back as he worked. "The White Man's Burden" was similarly portrayed in a cartoon by Frank
Beard (above) published in The Ram's Horn in 1899. Militarism rides on the back of Industry as he works a field with his hoe.
The 1890s was a decade of crises and uncertainties, but the severity of conditions also led to rapid growth in reform activities. Local reform clubs were created in cities across the country and a national network of reformers developed through which local successes could be spread across the country. Founded in Chicago in 1889, Hull House was the country's first urban settlement house. By 1900 there were more than one hundred settlement houses in cities from coast to coast. The 1890s also saw the formation of the Indian Rights Association, the national Single Tax and Social Gospel movements, the American Anti-Lynching League, the Anti-Imperialist League, the American Anti-Trust League and numerous other reform organizations. Agrarian populism reached national proportions with the formation of the People's Party in 1892 and Democrat William Jennings Bryan's advocacy of Free Silver during the 1896 presidential campaign. Labor unions grew in strength and some of the most famous labor
struggles in American history occurred, including the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the Pullman Strike of 1894. For many reformers, the range and the nature of the conflicts in American society appeared to make change both necessary and inevitable, but would change occur through reform or revolution? Whether they were struggling for change or against it, many Americans were already asking the questions raised in the last stanza of Markham's poem:
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?
When "The Man with the Hoe" was published in 1899, Edwin Markham was a school teacher living in the hills above Oakland, California. He had been publishing poems in both Western and Eastern literary magazines for decades, but most were on conventional topics and nothing he published before 1899 generated sustained attention. Although he did not often publish on reform topics before 1899, he was steeped in the new social Christianity that emerged in the early 1890s as the Social Gospel movement. Led by progressive clergy like George D. Herron and Walter Rauschenbusch and reformers including Ernest Crosby and W. D. P. Bliss, the Social Gospel movement combined Christian ethics and radical social philosophies with the goal of developing "the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth" -- a society where solidarity and social justice would prevail in the here and now instead of the "sweet by and by." Providing an underlying social philosophy that could unify middle class reformers working on a diverse
range of issues, from domestic poverty and civil rights to international arbitration, the Social Gospel movement was very influential within American reform movements from the 1890s to World War I. One of the most notable results of the publication of "The Man with the Hoe" was the elevation of its author from relative obscurity to a leadership position within that movement.
In 1899, Markham moved from Oakland to New York in order to take advantage of the new opportunities available to him as a rising star in national literary and reform circles. Variously hailed as the "poet of democracy," "laureate of labor," "laureate of the new socialism," or simply as the "best poet" of the day, he became a genuine celebrity. He was sought after for newspaper and magazine interviews and repeatedly answered reporters' questions about how and why he wrote the poem, its meaning, and what should be done to address the issues it raised. In May, Doubleday & McClure published his first book, The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems, and his lecture on "The Man with the Hoe: The Poem and the Problem" was given top billing in advertisements for the S. S. McClure Lecture Bureau during the 1899-1900 season. At a time when educational lectures were a popular form of middle class entertainment, participation in such lecture bureaus was a lucrative occupation. Along with lecturing,
he quickly established contacts with progressive reformers and literary figures, including Samuel "Golden Rule" Jones, the mayor of Toledo, Ohio, William Dean Howells, a Christian socialist and the country's most influential literary critic, and B. O. Flower, editor of The Arena. In 1901, with Ernest Crosby, W. D. P. Bliss, Heber Newton, and Henry George, Jr., Markham co-founded the Civic Council of New York, an ambitious attempt to coordinate the work of one hundred of the city's reform organizations.
Although Markham became a general spokesman for reform in 1899, his first and only direct involvement with reform efforts came in 1906-1907 when he worked with the National Child Labor Committee. He observed and recorded the conditions of child labor in factories for the organization and drew upon his initial claim to fame to write a related series of articles on "The Hoe-Man in the Making" for Cosmopolitan Magazine. In his history of the National Child Labor Committee, Crusade for the Children, Walter L. Trattner wrote that "the poet-prophet of democracy, Edwin Markham, created a sensation with his emotional indictment of child labor." Like the San Francisco Examiner, in which "The Man with the Hoe" was first published, Cosmopolitan was owned by William Randolph Hearst. He used the success of Markham's series to launch a Child Labor Federation sponsored by Cosmopolitan. Supplemented with essays by Benjamin B. Lindsey and George Creel, the series was also later published as a book
entitled Children in Bondage (New York: Hearst's International Library, 1914).
Both the debate about "The Man with the Hoe" and Markham's primarily hands-off role as a spokesman for reform efforts highlights one of the limits of Progressive Era reform. Markham's poem did not call for revolution from below but for reforms from above that would prevent it. Because of that, "The Man with the Hoe" was not as well received among farm and industrial workers as it was among intellectuals. Labor leaders appreciated the poem as a protest against exploitation of workers but they were not willing to adopt Markham's image of the dehumanized worker, "stolid and stunned," as representing organized labor. When he responded to the poem in verse, George E. McNeill, an older labor leader known as the "father of the eight-hour movement," adopted some of the imagery of Markham's poem and included a warning of "Labor's uprising, peaceful or in terror," but portrayed workers as rising above
The monstrous thing, distorted and soul-quenched,
Of which the poet sang his prophecy,
through their own organization:
Onward and forward marched gaunt bands of labor,
Fruits, flowers, and Plenty sprang beneath their feet.
Onward we march! -- by this sign we conquer!
The contrast between Markham's and McNeill's portrayals of workers does not undermine the value of Markham's protest but it highlights a fundamental difference in strategies for bringing about change in workers' condition. Intellectual reformers of the Progressive Era were often uncomfortable with the idea of change from below and, like Markham, their first impulse was to warn against it.
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