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Hays-Heighe House Digital Exhibits

Russell Lord and The Land

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Russell Lord at University of Bordeaux in Paris.
Courtesy of Henry Robbins Lord.

Russell Lord was an agricultural journalist for a half century before the emergence of what we generally think of as the environmental movement. He advocated for responsible land usage and wrote about ways to reverse soil degradation, erosion, and nutrient runoff. What he saw working for the federal government during the ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl cemented his commitment to combating these issues. It was his earlier travels, though, through formerly fertile lands in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Midwest that had been sacrificed to rapid wartime production of food and fuel that first caught his attention.

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Farm Security Administration photograph of gullied and eroded soil in Maryland, 1930s.
Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Lord’s conversations with farmers in regions across the country demonstrated to him the deep knowledge they had gained through long operation under local conditions. His efforts to reconcile the realities of farmers’ lived experience and the options available to them with solutions offered by federal and state organizations revealed to him a significant disconnect between them. The root lay in institutional assumptions underpinning early twentieth century extension work; particularly the directive to increase production in the face of counter falling prices. This led farmers to put less fertile fields to work, which wore down the soil more quickly and required more chemical inputs, and further depressed prices with even more supply. Only by getting bigger and leaning toward industrial agriculture could farmers generate the economies of scale that let them work under razor-thin profit margins, and some regions of the country were better suited to this kind of growth than others.

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Russell Lord (r) with brother Charles Goodspeed Lord.
Courtesy of Henry Robbins Lord.

Russell Lord was born in the Baltimore suburb of Roland Park to a comfortable middle class family. Drawn to romantic notions of simpler living and self-sufficiency, his father, a stock broker and realtor, moved further out into the countryside of Baltimore County. Lord attended the new Agricultural High School in Sparks and reported on local farm issues for the school paper. Attending Cornell University, he wrote for that school’s paper as well, working his way from contributor to Editor-in-Chief before leaving to enlist in the army during World War I. In the 1920s, Lord worked as an agricultural extension agent (a university employee teaching new scientific developments and techniques) in Ohio. His task was to encourage farmers to share their success stories more widely; particularly those that meshed well with institutional efforts.

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Disagreements over messaging—including those related to the Farm Bureau (a lobbying organization) and appliance and equipment manufacturers—frustrated Lord, and he left to write for Crowell Publishing Company, a major magazine publisher. He also freelanced for other periodicals: Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair, The Nation, and large newspapers like The Baltimore Sun and The New York Times. When Franklin Roosevelt was elected in the midst of the Great Depression, Lord headed to Washington to work for the US Department of Agriculture and to become a ghostwriter. His storytelling style and talent for translating complex topics kept him in demand as he wrote technical bulletins, speeches, and manuscripts.

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Friends of the Land at Malabar Farm.

In 1940, after several years of talking and planning, Lord came together with a number of like-minded individuals to found Friends of the Land. The group included Pulitzer Prize winners, folks from Roosevelt’s brain trust, scientists, journalists and writers, as well as regular farmers, bankers, and educators (including a half-dozen people from Harford County). The organization championed the land as a whole, including water and wildlife, and fish and forests. Members highlighted the interconnectedness of our environment and the disciplines that studied it, holding tours, conventions, and lectures, and publishing a quarterly journal.

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Kate Lord in the 1920s

From his home base in Harford County, Lord managed the journal, soliciting content and generating his own, publishing fifty issues before it folded in the mid-1950s. In its pages, the writings of Aldo Leopold, Gifford Pinchot, Rachel Carson, Paul Sears, and Edwin Hubble mingled with reports on local projects by farmers, and with fiction and poetry about the land. Graphic designer Kate Lord—Russell’s wife—created scratchboard illustrations and clip art for every issue.

Russell Lord and The Land