Liberty Hyde Bailey (March 15, 1858 – December 25, 1954) was an American horticulturist and reformer of rural life. He was cofounder of the American Society for Horticultural Science.Makers of American Botany, Harry Baker Humphrey, Ronald Press Company, Library of Congress Card Number 61-18435 As an energetic reformer during the Progressive Era, he was instrumental in starting agricultural extension services, the

4-H 4-H is a U.S.-based network of youth organizations whose mission is "engaging youth to reach their fullest potential while advancing the field of youth development". Its name is a reference to the occurrence of the initial letter H four times i ...

movement, the

nature study The nature study movement (alternatively, Nature Study or nature-study) was a popular education movement that originated in the United States and spread throughout the English-speaking world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nature study ...

movement, parcel post and rural electrification. He was considered the father of rural sociology and rural journalism.

Biography

Born in South Haven, Michigan, as the third son of farmers Liberty Hyde Bailey Sr. and Sarah Harrison Bailey. In 1876 Bailey met Lucy Millington who encouraged his interest in botany and mentored him. Bailey entered the Michigan Agricultural College (MAC, now

Michigan State University Michigan State University (Michigan State, MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the fi ...

) in 1877 and graduated in 1882 (he had taken a year off from study for health reasons). The next year, he became assistant to the renowned botanist

Asa Gray Asa Gray (November 18, 1810 – January 30, 1888) is considered the most important American botanist of the 19th century. His ''Darwiniana'' was considered an important explanation of how religion and science were not necessarily mutually excl ...

, of Harvard University. This was arranged by a professor at MAC, William James Beal. Bailey spent two years with Gray as his herbarium assistant. The same year, he married Annette Smith, the daughter of a Michigan cattle breeder, whom he met at the Michigan Agricultural College. They had two daughters, Sara May, born in 1887, and Ethel Zoe, born in 1889. In 1884 Bailey returned to MAC to become professor and chair of the Horticulture and Landscape Gardening Department, establishing the first horticulture department in the country. In 1888, he moved to

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to ...

in Ithaca, New York, where he assumed the chair of Practical and Experimental Horticulture. He was elected an Associate Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, ...

in 1900. He founded the College of Agriculture, and in 1904 he was able to secure public funding. He was dean of what was then known as New York State College of Agriculture from 1903 to 1913. In 1908, he was appointed Chairman of The National Commission on Country Life by president Theodore Roosevelt. Its 1909 Report called for rebuilding a great agricultural civilization in America. In 1913, he retired to become a private scholar and devote more time to social and political issues. In 1917 he was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He edited ''The Cyclopedia of American Agriculture'' (1907–09), the ''Cyclopedia of American Horticulture'' (1900–02) (continued as the ''Standard Cyclopedia Of Horticulture'' (1916–1919)) and the ''Rural Science, Rural Textbook, Gardencraft,'' and ''Young Folks Library'' series of manuals. He was the founding editor of the journals ''Country Life in America'' and the ''Cornell Countryman.'' He dominated the field of horticultural literature, writing some sixty-five books, which together sold more than a million copies, including scientific works, efforts to explain botany to laypeople, a collection of poetry; edited more than a hundred books by other authors and published at least 1,300 articles and over 100 papers in pure taxonomy. He also coined the words " cultivar", " cultigen", and " indigen". His most significant and lasting contributions were in the botanical study of cultivated plants. Bailey's publisher was

George Platt Brett, Sr. George Platt Brett Sr. (8 December 1858 – 18 September 1936) was a British-born chairman and publisher of the American division of Macmillan Publishing. He was best known for serving as publisher, friend, and mentor of American author Jack Lo ...

Macmillan Publishers (United States) Macmillan Inc. is a defunct American book publishing company. Originally established as the American division of the British Macmillan Publishers, the two were later separated and acquired by other companies, with the remnants of the original Am ...

Death

Bailey and his family are interred in a grand Egyptian Revival styled mausoleum of his own design at Lake View Cemetery in Ithaca, New York.

Rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work

Bailey was one of the first to recognize the overall importance of Gregor Mendel's work. He cited Mendel's 1865 and 1869 papers in the bibliography that accompanied his 1892 paper, "Cross Breeding and Hybridizing". Mendel is mentioned again in the 1895 edition of Bailey's "Plant Breeding".

Agrarian ideology

Bailey represented an

agrarianism Agrarianism is a political and social philosophy that has promoted subsistence agriculture, smallholdings, and egalitarianism, with agrarian political parties normally supporting the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants ...

that stood in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. He had a vision of suffusing all higher education, including horticulture, with a spirit of public work and integrating "expert knowledge" into a broader context of democratic community action. As a leader of the Country Life Movement, he strove to preserve the American rural civilization, which he thought was a vital and wholesome alternative to the impersonal and corrupting city life. In contrast to other

progressive Progressive may refer to: Politics * Progressivism, a political philosophy in support of social reform ** Progressivism in the United States, the political philosophy in the American context * Progressive realism, an American foreign policy par ...

thinkers at the time, he endorsed the family, which, he recognized, played a unique role in socialization. Especially the

family farm A family farm is generally understood to be a farm owned and/or operated by a family; it is sometimes considered to be an Estate (land), estate passed down by inheritance. Although a recurring conceptual model, conceptual and archetype, archet ...

had a benign influence as a natural cooperative unit where everybody had real duties and responsibilities. The independence it fostered made farmers "a natural correction against organization men, habitual reformers, and extremists". It was necessary to uphold fertility in order to maintain the welfare of future generations.Allan C Carlson
''The New Agrarian Mind''
Chapter 1 "Toward a New Rural Civilization: Liberty Hyde Bailey" According to Bailey, the American rural population, however, was backward, ignorant and saddled with inadequate institutions. The key to his reform program was guidance by an educated elite toward a new social order. The Extension System was partly pioneered by Bailey. The grander design of a new rural social structure needed a philosophical vision that could inspire and motivate. Bailey proposed a Society of the Holy Earth in his book, ''The Holy Earth'' (1915). He envisioned farmers and others rising to the task of stewardship of the land, forests, oceans and all creation. ''The Holy Earth'' has been recognized as an early text of ecological theology. Bailey's real legacy was, according to Allan C. Carlson, the themes and direction that he gave the new agrarian movement, ideas very different from previous agrarian thought. He saw technological innovation as friendly to the family farm and inevitably resulting in decentralization. He was scornful of the actual forms of peasant life and wanted to transform it by cutting the farmers loose from "the slavery of old restraints". Parochial and communal social groups should be broken down and replaced by "inter–neighborhood" and "inter–community" groups, while new leaders would be called in "who will promote inclusive rather than exclusive sociability." Bailey and his followers held a quasi–religious faith in education by enlightened experts, which meant suppression of inherited ways and substitution by progressive ways. It was accompanied by a corresponding hostility to traditional religion. Bailey's simultaneous embrace of the rural civilization and of technological progress had been based on a denial of the possibility of overproduction of farm products. When that became a reality in the 1920s, he turned to a "new economics" that would give farmers special treatment. Finally, after desperately toying with

Communism Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society ...

, he had to choose between fewer farmers and farm families and restraint on technology or production. He chose to preserve technology rather than the family farms. After this, he retreated from the Country Life movement into scientific study. Bailey's influence on modern American Agrarianism remains determinative. The inherent contradictions of his ideas have been equally persistent: the tension between real farmers and rural people and the Country Life campaign; difficulties to understand the operative economic forces; the reliance on state schools to safeguard family farms; and hostility to traditional Christian faith.

Palm studies

Bailey made significant contributions to the taxonomic study of palms. His interest in the plants reportedly stemmed from his inability to answer his wife's questions about the plants during a family trip to Jamaica in 1910. After retiring as dean of the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in 1913, he devoted the better part of three decades to finding, collecting, and writing about palms. He developed a detailed method of collecting palm specimens that included photographing the tree in its entirety, preserving flowers and fruits in alcohol, pressing flower clusters, and carefully folding sections of the leaves to fit

herbarium A herbarium (plural: herbaria) is a collection of preserved plant specimens and associated data used for scientific study. The specimens may be whole plants or plant parts; these will usually be in dried form mounted on a sheet of paper (called ...

sheets. Bailey traveled extensively in search of palms and other plants. In the 1920s, he was often accompanied by his daughter and scientific collaborator,

Ethel Zoe Bailey Ethel Zoe Bailey (1889-1983) was a U.S. botanist and the first curator of the Bailey Hortorium at Cornell University from 1935 to 1957. She created the Ethel Z. Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection and in 1912 was the first woman in Ithaca, ...

. Already in his fifties when he began studying palms, Bailey continued to collect into his 90s. He was frequently abroad on his birthday, March 15. Thus, he could recall spending his 79th in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his 82nd in Oaxaca, Mexico, his 88th in Trinidad, his 90th in

Grenada Grenada ( ; Grenadian Creole French: ) is an island country in the West Indies in the Caribbean Sea at the southern end of the Grenadines island chain. Grenada consists of the island of Grenada itself, two smaller islands, Carriacou and Pe ...

, and his 91st at sea on a small sailboat between

Sint Eustatius Sint Eustatius (, ), also known locally as Statia (), is an island in the Caribbean. It is a special municipality (officially " public body") of the Netherlands. The island lies in the northern Leeward Islands portion of the West Indies, so ...

and Saint Kitts. Friends and colleagues at Cornell hoped to hold a 90th birthday celebration for Bailey, and they did, but only after their guest of honor returned to Ithaca in May. When Bailey began studying palms, about 700 species had been identified. The number reached thousand by 1946, the rise due in large part to his intensive study of the family. Ill health finally forced Bailey to discontinue collecting abroad in 1949, at the age of 91. He continued to study, compare, and write about his palm specimens. His ultimate goal was to produce an authoritative guide to all palms, titled '' Genera Palmarum''. When he died, he left behind a manuscript of the first page of the introduction. ''Genera Palmarum'' was ultimately published by Drs. Natalie Uhl and John Dransfield in 1987. A second, expanded, edition was released in 2008.

Legacy

Bailey was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1897. Bailey-hall-cornell

Cornell has memorialized Bailey by dedicating Bailey Hall in his honor. Since 1958 the American Horticultural Society has issued the annual Liberty Hyde Bailey Award. A residence hall in Brody Complex at

, and an elementary school in East Lansing, Michigan, were also named after him. In 1928, a tree ('' Sterculia foetida'') dedicated to Bailey was planted at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Campus Arboretum, and is now listed there as an Exceptional Tree. About 140 years after his birth, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Scholars Program was created at

, the institution of higher learning where Bailey was both educated and began his career. The Bailey Scholars Program incorporates L.H. Bailey's love of learning and expressive learning styles to provide a space for students to become educated in fields that interest them.

Selected works

Books
Talks Afield About Plants and the Science of Plants
(1885) * Field Notes on Apple Culture (1886) * The Survival of the Unlike (1896)
The Forcing-Book
(1897) * The Principles of Fruit-Growing (1897) * The Nursery Book (1897) * Plant-Breeding (1897) * The Pruning Manual (1898) * Sketch of the Evolution of our Native Fruits (1898) * Principles of Agriculture (1898) * *
First Edition, 1900
** ''subsequently "rewritten, enlarged and reset" in 1914 as:'' ** **
Second Edition, 1914, reprinted 1917
* The Principles of Vegetable Gardening (1901) * The Nature-Study Idea (1903)
The Outlook to Nature
(1905) * The State and the Farmer (1908) * The Training of Farmers (1909)
Animal biology; Human biology. Parts II & III of First course in biology
with W.M. Coleman (1910)
Manual of Gardening
(1910) * * The Country Life Movement (1911) * The Practical Garden Book (1913)
The Holy Earth
(1915)
Wind and Weather (Poetry)
(1916) * Universal Service (1918) * What is Democracy? (1918) * The Seven Stars (1923) * The Harvest: Of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil (1927) * The Garden Lover (1928)
The Horticulturist's Rule-Book

Farm and garden Rule-Book

How plants get their names
* Manual of Cultivated Plants. (1st ed. 1924, Revised ed. 1949) New York: Macmillan Articles * Bailey, L.H. - Canna ''x generalis''. Hortus, 118 (1930); cf. Standley & Steyerm. in Fieldiana, Bot., xxiv. III.204 (1952). * Bailey, L.H. - Canna ''x orchiodes''. Gentes Herb. (Ithaca), 1 (3): 120 (1923).

References

Bibliography

* Bailey, Liberty Hyde. ''The country-life movement in the United States'' (Macmillan, 1915). * Bailey, Liberty Hyde. ''Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings'' (Cornell University Press, 2011) * * Bogue, Margaret Beattie. "Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr. and the Bailey Family Farm." ''Agricultural history'' 63.1 (1989): 26-48
online
* Connors, James J. "Liberty Hyde Bailey: agricultural educator and philosopher." ''NACTA Journal'' 56.4 (2012): 44-51
online
* Kates, James. "Liberty Hyde Bailey, Agricultural Journalism, and the Making of the Moral Landscape." ''Journalism History'' 36.4 (2011): 207-217
online
* Minteer, Ben A. "Biocentric Farming?: Liberty Hyde Bailey and Environmental Ethics." ''Environmental Ethics'' 30.4 (2008): 341-359. * Morgan, Paul A., and Scott J. Peters. "The foundations of planetary agrarianism. Thomas Berry and Liberty Hyde Bailey." ''Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics'' 19.5 (2006): 443-468
online
* Peters, Scott J. " 'Every Farmer Should Be Awakened]: Liberty Hyde Bailey's Vision of Agricultural Extension Work." ''Agricultural History'' (2006): 190-219
online
* * Rodgers, A.D. 1949. ''Liberty Hyde Bailey: A Story of American Plant Sciences'', Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. * Zirkle, Conway. "The role of Liberty Hyde Bailey and Hugo de Vries in the rediscovery of Mendelism." ''Journal of the History of Biology'' 1.2 (1968): 205-218.

External links

Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum, South Haven, Michigan

A Man for All Seasons: Liberty Hyde Bailey. Cornell University Library Online Exhibition
* * *

Introduction to Bailey's volume of poetry, WIND AND WEATHER
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bailey, Liberty Hyde Pteridologists 1858 births 1954 deaths American botanical writers American garden writers American science writers American agrarianists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Veitch Memorial Medal recipients Cornell University faculty Michigan State University alumni Michigan State University faculty Scientists from Ithaca, New York People from South Haven, Michigan 19th-century American male writers 19th-century American botanists 20th-century American botanists 19th-century American writers 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American male writers American male non-fiction writers