ABSTRACT
The dehumanizing animus of the machine, the perversions of urban industrial life; and haunting religious themes animated the fiction of the Ohio agrarian writer, Louis Bromfield. Bromfield's vision was almost as grand in the scope of needed social engineering. In the agricultural future, he said, "there will be no more floods to destroy the things that man has worked to create", "the abomination of great industrial cities" would be ended, and men and women "and above all, the children" would live in decentralized communities of "health and decency and human dignity". This "tremendous job of reconstruction and restoration", he said, would be "infinitely more complicated than the job of subduing the wilderness by the first settlers". The chapter discusses the Colonel's Jeffersonian dream of a landscape of independent, self-sufficient farms; and Bentham's Hamiltonian quest for a commercial republic, a land of trade and industrial production.
