Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 160

The organic profit is not just the story of Jerome Rodale (‘apostle of nonconformity’ as Carlton Jackson termed him in his 1974 biography), but of the Rodale commercial brand: established by Jerome and maintained by his son Robert. And because the book is a study of ‘marketplace environmentalism’, Andrew N. Case has chosen a punning title, to indicate the ambivalence at the heart of the Rodales’ achievement. Jerome Rodale had no doubts about his own central significance for the American organic movement. In 1964, he wrote: ‘The whole organic farming and gardening movement in the United States owes its existence to me. I am its acknowledged leader’. Rodale was asserting himself against the impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Twenty years earlier he had launched the journal Organic Farming and Gardening, and was evidently piqued that Carson made no reference to his early warnings about the dangers posed by industrial-chemical farming methods. Case demonstrates that Rodale was justified in considering himself a prime mover in the creation of US organicism.

Given the anti-semitism displayed by certain sections of the early organic movement in the UK, it is somewhat ironic that the movement’s chief American spokesman was Jewish. Rodale was born Jerome Irving Cohen in 1898, anglicizing his surname in 1921 in order to improve his career prospects. A man richly endowed with the entrepreneurial spirit, he was variously an accountant, a businessman running an electrical manufacturing company, the publisher of diverse magazines, a playwright, and, most importantly for the purposes of this review, a gardener and farmer passionately interested in nutrition and health. His 1945 book Pay Dirt is a major text of the American organic canon.

Although city-bred, Rodale seems always to have wanted affiliation with the land, and in 1930 seized an opportunity to move his business to Emmaus in Pennsylvania. A keen gardener, he had also developed a concern for personal health, and responded enthusiastically to an article he chanced upon written by Sir Albert Howard. He wrote to Howard and their correspondence led him to buy a farm in order to practise the Englishman’s ‘Indore’ method of soil enrichment. Case sets Rodale in the context of US agricultural developments of the 1930s and ‘40s: the Dust Bowl, the rapidly increasing influence of industrial-chemical farming methods, and the articulation of an alternative approach, based on return of biological wastes to the soil. Another of Howard’s American disciples was the novelist Louis Bromfield, whose Malabar Farm in Ohio was a factor in persuading Rodale to take up farming. Other influences included Edward Faulkner’s Plowman’s Folly (1943) and the homesteader Ralph Borsodi.

When in 1942 Rodale founded Organic Farming and Gardening, it was gardeners rather than farmers who proved receptive to his message. Within a few years he was claiming 50,000 readers, and they provided him with a body of evidence and experience outside the conventional pathways of science. This openness of approach helped to create a sense of community and provide a means of gathering information. But, as Case points out, ‘While [the readers] were building a method, they were also helping Rodale build a market’ (p. 39). The organic movement has always been about fostering health, and Rodale’s first article about agriculture, in 1942, was titled ‘Are Food Crops Fit for Human Consumption?’ The answer was of course that those produced with chemical inputs and pesticides were not, and his gardener-readers provided much information about how their change to eating organically-produced food helped improve their health.

To protect them against other hazards, Rodale in 1950 founded the magazine Prevention, challenging the food industry, doctors and nutritionists with a natural health philosophy. Prevention’s pages were increasingly full of advertisements for ‘natural’ goods such as vitamin supplements, and Rodale ‘tested the boundary between selling advice and selling products’ (p. 75). He became a figurehead for the environmental movement, challenging powerful commercial forces in the food and farming industries; but he was also an entrepreneur who knew how to make money and embodied a very American spirit of self-promoting capitalism.

I have concentrated on Rodale’s links with the organic movement, but Case’s book is an exercise in wider social history. It analyses the way in which ‘marketplace environmentalism’ reflected changes in American cultural life and shopping habits, with the term ‘organic’ coming to represent a ‘personal style of living that reflected and enacted environmental values’ (p. 149): a form of consumerism arguably incompatible with the organic movement’s original radicalism. Anyone who visits the Daylesford Organic farm shop in Oxfordshire can observe the same process at work in England, turbo-charged.

Was Jerome Rodale someone who saw a bandwagon on which he could make a name for himself? Case is scrupulously fair-minded in his assessment of the Rodales’ achievements and motives. There is no reason to doubt the genuine commitment of Jerome and Robert to the principles and practice of organic farming, but Robert was less combative than his father and helped detach ‘organic living’ from the counterculture and situate it within a more conventional lifestyle. In Case’s view, this development has resulted in organic food becoming a niche brand which makes its consumers feel better about themselves, but has a minimal impact on America’s food production methods. Ultimately, market forces cannot be relied on to protect the environment and provide people with healthy food; which implies that the Rodales’ strategy may in fact have been misconceived.