Maker

Living the Good Life

What we can learn from a Depression-era homesteading couple. By Matthew Bachler

In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, also by — a staunchly capitalist status quo. Over Helen and Scott Nearing packed up their life in the previous three decades, government and busi-New York City and settled on a 65-acre farm in ness forces had responded with intimidation and the Green Mountains hamlet of Winhall, Vt., where violence against a burgeoning labor and Socialist they set out to establish a “self-sufficient household movement. The Nearings found themselves unable economy.” Over the course of the subsequent 20 to teach or publish. This was the era of Emma years, the Nearings converted a deteriorating farm Goldman, Eugene Debs, and the Wobblies; at no into a materially productive and spiritually reward- other time in American history had capitalism been ing homestead, a story encapsulated in their now so pushed back on its heels. classic 1954 work, Living the Good Life. In establishing their homestead, the Nearings had

It seems historically appropriate to be discussing three main goals: to remain solvent and as indepen-the Nearings’ story once again, on the precipice dent as possible from the larger economy; to cultivate of an economic downturn that may very well rival and adhere to those values they saw as being healthy the severity of the Great Depression, one impetus and essential to the good life, namely simplicity, of the Nearings’ urban emigration. Along with the freedom from anxiety, harmony, and purposefulness; protracted depression, the Nearings’ outspoken and to schedule leisure time into every day so as to socialist politics resulted in their rejection of — and encourage social and personal improvement.

Photography from the Scott and Helen Nearing Papers at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods

30 Make: Volume 18