Henry and the Great Society is definitely not the feel-good story that Heiland is. If you’ve ever felt like you were caught in the rat race, caught on a treadmill, too busy, unfulfilled, overworked, or a slave to your job or your debts, you should read this book. If you’ve ever been on a camping trip to “get away from it all”, or visited a rural countryside, a scenic mountain range, or lush wilderness, and said “Now this is God’s country”, you should read this book. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Some people will read it and have no idea what its about. Others will read it and get angry or exasperated. But for a few of you, this book will touch your heart and wrench your gut at the same time. While it may depress you just a little, the next feeling that you might have is a compelling desire to buy the book in bulk to distribute to everyone you know.
My question for everyone that empathizes with Henry is – what should he have done? And further, what should we do to avoid his fate? One of the differences I see in Henry and Heiland is that Heiland built family and community, and Henry lost those things because he didn’t value them highly enough, he didn’t understand them or what was required to nourish them, and he never weighed his decisions in terms of what it would really cost his family and community. For instance, $1,000 to Henry seemed like a reasonable price to purchase a used car – but as the book unfolds we see what it costs Henry. His wife can now attend PTA meetings and Canasta games, leaving Henry and kids to heat up microwave dinners for supper. The children no longer knew their land or neighbors, as they now only traveled through their community at 60mph with their heads buried in comic books or magazines. The maintenance on the car required more trips to town, more phone calls, and more debt to manage. The ease of traveling to town translated into more and more trips to town, and less and less time together at home. Property taxes went up because of the costs of paving and maintaining the road, and Henry had to sell parts of his homestead to stay (temporarily) afloat.
The author of Henry and the Great Society does a masterful job of showing how “the good things in life” end up killing us. What he doesn’t do is show us what to do about it, and so we’re left wondering what Henry should have done, and how far we need to go to get our freedom back. What makes it worse is that most of us that read the book have started out in a much worse position than Henry did. Part of what makes Henry’s story so sad is the great amount that he lost, but some of us had nothing much to start with, being second or third generation wage/rent/mortgage/property tax/zoning/technology slaves. Sometimes it seems that the only solution is to run even faster on the treadmill, so that we can produce incrementally more than necessary in order to purchase our freedom, so to speak. It seems to me that Henry can’t win without first winning back the hearts of his family, and then the hearts of his community, and that there are things that must be done which are far beyond the scope of the individual. Part of the detrimental effects of modern industrial society is the loss of real community, and part of the antithesis must be to build it within the context of God’s laws which offer protection and objective standards for dealing with societal problems. The simple, contented life is impossible in isolation, our future requires community cooperation. God’s laws provide a sure foundation for us to build upon, and modern society will crumble precisely because it is not built upon God’s laws, but on sinking sand.
If you’ve read the book, feel free to discuss it here and share your thoughts on it below.
“Henry” changed my life. It taught me to love freedom and be content.
One of the things from the book that really hit me was the feeling that Henry had of everything slipping out of control. I think it s a feeling that most American fathers can relate to, as if you just have too many balls in the air. It is very easy to slip into depression or denial when you feel like you aren’t equipped to handle everything.
Another aspect of the book that I identified with was the “maintenance” of all the great products of industrialism. Now, whenever anything breaks around my house or my father’s, we kind of look at each other and mutter “henry…”
One last thing, I thought the part where his wife buys the sewing machine, only to go out and buy curtains was particularly funny, but realistic. I had to be real careful pointing that one out to my wife!
I was struck by the incremental nature of ‘progress’. This was so well illustrated by Rousch. I think I’ve always been aware of this, as a vague dis-ease in my gut, and yet I’ve never seen it so clearly articulated before now. It’s amazing how Henry never quite learns how to count the whole cost of all these ‘good things’ coming into his life – just like the rest of us.
Of course the most difficult costs to quantify are the relationship costs, and these are also the hardest to live with once they’re incurred. The sons who are displaced by a tractor and as a result, no longer want to farm, for example. What price do you put on this estrangement of father and son, this horrible loss of heritage and continuity with our forefathers? The wife is soon displaced by kitchen gadgets and fills her days with gossipy meetings and card games. As a result, she can no longer find time to cook a meal from scratch. Thus the honored role, the many faceted glory of housekeeper, helpmeet, wife and mother is gutted. She is eventually reduced to clipping coupons. Oh, and spending money just as fast or faster then they can earn it. The Saturday trip to town that everyone looked forward to, not only to conduct business, but socialize with neighbors becomes either a quick expedition to acquire needed supplies, or a materialistic hunt for the next bargain. Their many trips in the car only serve to insulate them from each other, their neighbors, and the land itself, while making it entirely too easy to spend money they hadn’t yet earned. The story of modernity and progress, it seems to me, is the story of displacement. People and relationships are replaced by machines, with their siren song of personal ease, autonomy, convenience, pleasure and leisure.
It’s a convincing and all too familiar story. Unfortunately, it’s my story — but I’m not dead yet. Do you think Rousch is right? Does 1 Timothy 6 really mean we are never to seek material abundance beyond food, clothing and shelter? Is that why we are so discontented, so lonely, so spiritually needy — even in the midst of such unprecedented wealth?
David, I’m happy to hear that you benefited so much from the book. Its not surprising to me at all that it could have that effect on a lot of people.
Christopher, I think you’re right that fathers will identify with Henry more strongly than women and young men. But still, my wife can relate to it as well, and further she can really understand my feelings toward “progress” and “the good things in life” and the tension that fathers have in leading their families and protecting them from the dangers inherent in industrialised society.
That’s true also about Henry illustrating and magnifying the struggles that all fathers have, whether they are aware of it or not. I think it is part of the reason that there are so many effeminate men and leaderless households – many men have simply thrown in the towel and have already taken the pills and driven off the road. They’re still alive physically but all real hope and life has left them. The futility is good breeding ground for a number of other plagues – pessimistic and escapist eschatology, substance abuse (or soma, as Brave New World called it), and capitulation to feminism, humanism, egalitarianism, etc.
I think the way you worded the feeling is telling: “like you’re not equipped to handle everything.” Well, in many ways this is true. Because we decided we could order society in our own image, we have broken down the godly social order that equips men and women to be leaders of their homes, churches, and communities. This is what industrialism is all about – it reallocates the resources of society in the most efficient way to produce “the good things in life”. But in the end, we realize that we paid a price that was far more than we could afford. Industrialism split up communities and families, and now we are simply a mass of disconnected individuals working to pay off our debt and trying to finance a retirement through the magic of compound usury and socialist pyramid schemes.
Its funny about you and your dad muttering “Henry.” I find myself doing the same thing. Sometimes when my wife and I are talking about buying something, she’ll ask me if I “feel like Henry”, and I’ll say that I just want my family “to have all the good things in life”, and we’ll laugh about it.
Yeah, that part about the sewing machine and draperies is priceless. So true! There are so many examples like that.
Upon further reflection, I have a few criticisms of ‘Henry’.
- The author is guilty of painting farm life with an idealistic brush. It’s a lot more hard work then what is presented. The blessings of farm life are accentuated at the expense of very real liabilities. The vagaries of weather, fractious livestock, grueling work that has to be done on a shedule or there will be no harvest, all of these are down-played. Yes, Henry was ‘free’ in a significant sense, in that he was not in debt. But he still needed to work hard at certain times of the year, or there would be no harvest. This fact is significantly down-played.
- The author states in the conclusion: ‘the system killed Henry..’ Wrong. Henry’s inability to say no killed him. Granted, the system places pressure on everyone to buy, buy, buy, and borrow, borrow, borrow. But there is no law mandating this. Henry should have drawn a line somewhere, and he never did.
- The author has a vested eschatological interest in painting the system as evil. He sees it as the beast of revelation, a questionable interpretation at best. The premillenial, rapture fever errors of the author have tainted the book, and for me, made it somewhat less credible.
- I’m also not sure of the author’s literal interpretation of 1Timothy 6. And I would really like to discuss it in more depth, and invite all who liked the book to respond. Specifically: Does this passage mean that pursuing material abundance beyond food & shelter is sinful? If so, what are we doing typing these messages on electronic boxes?
Randy,
Thanks for the reality check! As for the echatalogical view of Roush, I almost recommend that people stop reading the book after the story is over, but I still think it is an effective story.
As for the 1 Timothy passage and the application of it to the story, will you please refresh my memory as to what Roush was advocating? I don’t have my book any longer, so I can’t really add much. I do think that scripture is teaching that we are to be content with what God has blessed us with, rather than teaching that material abundance is sinful. The Bible does have much stronger warnings for those with much though.
I just read an essay in “I’ll Take My Stand” entitled The Hind Tit that is very related to the story of Henry. Here is a long quote from the essay that I think you will see a striking similarity in:
Sorry it’s so long, but I think it’s worth it. Keep in mind that this was written in 1930.
Randy,
I agree with almost everything you’ve written in your comments. I agree that the Anabaptist presuppositions make the book less credible. Yet most men seem to find the picture of Henry’s life to be quite painfully accurate as a representation of themsleves and their own struggles in life.
When I read the book, I was quite upset at the ending. I wanted to re-write the story right then and there, to take out all that silly Anabaptist nonsense and the pessimillennial fear-mongering. In my story of Henry, he would not be killed, but would conquer. This is what I’m most interested in discussing – how we can re-write the stories of our own lives so that we are overcomers rather than the overcome.
Another fault of the book, from my perspective, was the individualism. It was Henry against the great society. In such a case, Henry would have lost no matter what. Even if he had managed to resist modernity and hold his family together, the effects of modernity on the world around him would have still destroyed them. The mere progression of property taxes and assessments would have forced him to take the same course eventually by getting a job and parceling off the homestead. And his sons faced the same dilemma. Thus – I want to see us re-writing the story as something like “The Covenant Community and The Great Society.” We have to help each other, and consider together the effects of our decisions, and think less as individuals and more as a body. I want to re-write the story so that men discuss the changes, and encourage one another, and help each other out of the traps.
Its true that Roush idealizes farm life. He paints a very beautiful picture of it, in fact. Its true that there is more to the picture, but the thought did cross my mind that the difficulties of agrarian life are difficulties that come from God as a result of our sin, and designed by him to force us to rely on him, and in our weakness seek him in faith. The difficulties of modernity are man-created ones, and I think if we are honest we will see that they are really the result of trying to get away from all of God’s appointed hardships. We mechanize, oppress, and distract ourselves to avoid hard labor. We come up with insurance and entertainment and new technologies, all which serve to limit our exposure to God’s judgments, and to avoid facing the still small voice of our conscience. In doing so, we create other effects which rob us of blessings. Think about the joy that the Amish experience when they gather together for a barn-raising to replace a burned barn. We moderns will never experience that joy, because it will be covered by insurance, because we have no idea even how to build barns, and because we have no community that does such things when needed (too busy, too poor from making payments, and too distracted by entertainment).
I’m not sure exactly what Roush meant by the comments on 1 Timothy 6, but they struck me as being overly-simplistic. Seemed to be just a bit gnostic, in fact. But while saying that, I think that most of us tend to the other extreme and could stand to think a bit about what being content should actually look like in our lives.
Christo – that’s a great quote from Lytle’s essay. Thanks for posting the link, and I hope everyone will get a copy of I’ll Take My Stand. Its great reading.
Christo,
I’ll leave you with a quote from page 113 of ‘Henry’.
“Perfect contentment, freedom from the enslaving power of this system, is found in the pursuit of ONLY food, clothing and shelter. The pursuit of anything beyond this will only bring sorrow and destroy our contentment in life.”
I emphasized the word ‘only’; I think that’s what makes this opinion a bit unbalanced, though perhaps somewhat true. I have noticed that the more I have, the more complicated and vexing my life becomes. But, I still think balance and self-control is the key, not some legalistic formula that confines economic life to food and shelter only. As an example, where would a fine violin fit into such a standard? Or the knowledge and skills needed to play it?
Thanks for the quote. ‘I’ll take my Stand’ is going to be the next book I buy. Even though it’s not ‘food’ and not ‘shelter’.
Thanks Chad, for your observations, though I didn’t expect to speak with you here for awhile. I imagine you’re still busy enjoying that new daughter? Congratulations way late. Give her a big smooch and inhale that new baby smell for me. Ah, now that’s living, and it has nothing to do with food or shelter! I am so encouraged by you and Harry and the Terrys and I’m sure there are many others who love to welcome children into their homes. We’re gonna win this culture war; we’ll breed ‘em into submission!
I’ve been thinking a lot about an over-all strategy for beating the bankers and revenooers at their own game. It might seem a bit extreme, but why not just cash out by selling everything, paying all debts, and using what’s left to buy a double-wide? In a few years, a guy could have enough saved to buy a few acres, sink a well, and then move the mobile onto the land free and clear. Salatin advises similar strategies in his book ‘family friendly farming’. If you go visit his farm, be sure to report back. Virginia is just too far for me, but I’d love to check it out.
“Henry and the Great Society” is a real eye-opener, and a must-read. It will deeply impact your life.
You can buy “Henry and the Great Society” at a decent price here:
http://www.vision-harvest.com/products/books/?id=BK001PWP
Here is the review of “Henry and the Great Society” that I posted on Biblicalagrarianism.com:
http://michaelbunker.com/b2evolution/index.php?title=book_review_henry_and_the_great_society&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
Have any of y’all read the “good life” series or other writings by the Nearings? It’s a more modern and informed take on this theme, I believe.