So begins Edwin Markham’s lionized poem “The Man with the Hoe.” At the tail end of the Gilded Age and the dawn of the Progressive Era, Markham’s incisive critique of the gaping wealth inequality that came to define this period in American history was lauded as “the battle-cry of the next thousand years” and “the supreme poem of the century.” The poem contributed to a vigorous national dialogue — immortalized in the opinion and letter sections of newspapers across the country — on labor’s role in society and the potential for a socialist future.
Much like debates across social media today, however, not all the commentary was celebratory. Tensions between classes had reached such a zenith that they also provoked responses like this: “As a tiller of the soil, I resent personally every word of the ungrateful writer who smites in the face of the man who feeds him.”
The poem was inspired by a Jean-François Millet painting, L’homme à la houe (The Man with a Hoe), from which it takes its name. Its opening stanza describes the farmer’s stooped posture and vacant gaze as he takes a moment’s respite over a half-emptied clearing. The painting’s intimate and unembellished portrait of a man brutalized by life as a rural laborer — a life Millet knew firsthand, having worked on his father’s farm in Normandy — clashed with the artistic sensibilities of the era.
The bucolic works it debuted alongside at the Paris Salon in 1863 instead idealized rural life with manicured portrayals of its subjects. Adolphe Pierre Leleux’s A Breton Wedding and Jules Breton’s The Turkey Tender depicted rural workers as saintlike figures carrying out God’s will, a will that assumed the eternality of their place in society.
Decades after the French Revolution, the painting provoked revulsion, contempt,…
Auteur: Ashley Bishop
