Financial History Issue 113 (Spring 2015) | Page 33
several “application stations” in different
points of the City, and if an applicant’s
credentials were satisfactory (e.g. he or she
was not a felon), the person would receive
a quarter acre plot that was accessible
from where he or she lived. If the man had
a large family, he was given half an acre.
The New York City variation of the
Pingree Plan was more successful than its
many sister programs throughout the rest
of the state. The AICP not only hired the
unemployed to garden at a respectable 7.5
cents an hour, but also, it gave three-cent
hourly raises to those who faithfully tilled
for more than a month. Additionally, after
that trial month, a worker could obtain a
share in the annual profits, earned by sales
of the food to New York City area charities at market rates. Because an employee
tilled the same garden consistently, the
program instilled a feeling of ownership
and pride. Also, New York City’s version
of the Pingree Plan allowed employees
to take foodstuffs directly to their home
tables as needed; this, in addition to wages
and profit-sharing, did a lot to alleviate the
worst effects of poverty.
Who was this man who motivated New
York and many other states and cities to
so quickly implement vacant lot gardening programs? Pingree may have been
inspired by his own childhood. He was
born near Denmark, Maine, on August 30,
1940, the son of an impoverished farmer.
At 14, like many others his age, he was
forced to leave school and work long and
dangerous hours in a cotton mill, and later
a leather factory.
According to Grant, when the Civil
War broke out, Pingree experienced the
horrors of the Second Battle of Bull Run,
as well as the Battle of North Anna River
in Virginia. He also spent five tortuous
months during 1864 in the infamous Confederate prison camp at Andersonville,
Georgia.
After the war, Pingree headed to Detroit
with just a few dollars. Within a few
years — like something out of a Horatio
Alger story — he became a successful boot
and shoe manufacturer. By 1888, he was
fairly wealthy. In 1889, he ran for mayor
of Detroit on the Republican ticket and
was overwhelmingly elected as a “good
government” politician with wide support
from the city’s business elite. But by the
time the Depression struck, Pingree had
formed a coalition of what his enemies
called “workers and ethnics” rather than
the “better people” and looked for ways
to fight for public interest as opposed to
business interests.
As for the community garden ideas that
Pingree espoused, he may have recalled
his own boyhood, when his family was
often short of cash, but long on foodstuffs
like potatoes and turnips. An associate of
the politician once remarked that the idea
“occurred to Mr. Pingree, while driving
along the Boulevard in Detroit, that could
but the poor and unemployed get a chance
to cultivate some of the vacant and idle
lands there [they could survive.]” Also, an
unpublished biography of Pingree written
in 1931 suggested that the project “originated in the gentle, anxious mind of Mrs.
Pingree,” who may have either seen or
heard of the English “allotment plans,”
where the poor, through a system of rents,
enjoyed access to garden plots.
The Pingree Plan and vacant lot programs in general were not flawless, and
they were not meant to be permanent
or whole measures of relief. The biggest
problem, of course, was that donated,
private land could at any time be bought
and sold, disrupting crop cycles. If the
land was city-owned, it was susceptible
to “greater good” use, such as becoming
a foundation for railroad tracks, paved
streets or housing.
Pests and weather could and did wipe
out swaths of crops. In some areas, families were so hungry that they ate their
food before it had a chance to mature — in
Kingston, New York, for example, the
“poor ate the seed potatoes, instead of
planting them.” There were also some
“victim of success” problems. For example, there was often no proper place available to store root vegetables before they
could be brought to market, and some
private farmers complained that the glut
of potatoes in the marketplace was driving everybody’s prices down. A Reading
grower moaned that Buffalo reversed the
natural order of things, and that “Thousands of bushels extra have been raised
by the poor… Hence, the large consumers of potatoes have had no reason to
buy any.” Positively, the biggest threat to
vacant lot gardens was, of course, when
the economic crisis started to subside in
late 1898.
On March 16, 1895, the New York World
printed a community farmer’s point-