When Louis Bromfield was Pro-Organic: Newly Discovered Letters to J.I. Rodale
Ever since I first started studying Louis Bromfield in 2015, I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. What was Bromfield’s connection with J.I. Rodale? Did the two men ever meet in-person? Did Bromfield ever read Organic Gardening magazine? For many years, I couldn’t answer those questions—until Maria Rodale send me a copy of some very important letters from Louis Bromfield to J.I. Rodale. (Unfortunately, J.I. didn’t save his side of the correspondence).
The first letter, dated May 18, 1943, contains Bromfield’s first impression of Organic Gardening magazine. “I was much impressed by it and all the plans seems to agree very closely with a great many ideas I have held for a long time,” Bromfield said. He then invited J.I. to meet him at the Gotham Hotel in New York City on June 15 or 16, 1943.
They must have hit it off, because Bromfield wrote on April 2, 1944, “Of course I remember well our meeting in New York and I have been following fairly closely all the good work you have been doing. I hear of you almost everywhere I go in the country.” He mentioned that he received copies of Organic Gardening “fairly constantly through various friends.” He later asked for his own subscription. And then he said, “I agree with you completely in saying that the primary need of our agriculture is to restore organic matter to the soil.” In another, undated letter, he added, “I agree with every word of it and believe this is the perfect summation of the problem of soil maintenance and restoration.”
The next letter, dated October 3, 1944, was sent after J.I. asked Bromfield to review the manuscript of Pay Dirt. “I should be delighted to read the Mss as the subject is one of great interest to me and I am sure you have done a good job,” Bromfield told J.I. He also asked J.I. to send him four copies of Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament. “They are impossible to get at bookstores without sending to England,” he explained. “I have mentioned the book very favorably in ‘Pleasant Valley’ which will probably have a kick-back.”
On March 24, 1945, Bromfield said the Pay Dirt manuscript was “excellent and very important. I have no suggestions to make regarding revisions. It seems to me a thoroughly good job.” In return, J.I. liked Bromfield’s book Pleasant Valley so much that he ordered 500 copies. “The book is selling extremely well and is, I think, reaching a great number of people who otherwise would not read about the subjects which are so important to both of us,” Bromfield said.
And that’s it. That’s the last letter that Louis Bromfield wrote to J.I. Rodale about organic farming. A few years later, in his 1948 book Malabar Farm, Bromfield criticized the “purely organic school” and said it was impossible to restore soil quickly and economically without chemical fertilizers.
Why did Bromfield change his mind? We don’t know for sure. I give my best informed guess in my new book, The Cold War Against Organic: How Organic Farming Came to America and Grew—Despite Intense Opposition, which will be released by Acres U.S.A. very soon! But these letters prove that, up through March 1945, Bromfield was enthusiastic about both J.I. Rodale and organic farming. And that’s a fact that’s never been published—until now.
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