About Bailey

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Any attempt at a sketch of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s life will turn up incomplete. The following very short biographical sketch is adapted from text written by John Linstrom for an older version of the website of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum & Gardens. The original can be accessed via the Wayback Machine here.

Childhood

Image: Liberty Hyde Bailey as a boy, cased ambrotype, ca. 1862. Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21-2-3342. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Also available online here.

The youngest of three, Liberty Jr. inherited that name and grew up on the first commercial fruit orchard in a community now famous for its peaches, blueberries, and apples. He was deeply influenced by these early years; as an older man, on a visit to his hometown for a lecture and poetry reading, he said that all of his poetry “came from South Haven.” He grew up working on the farm, playing in the woods and along the creek that ran through the property, and trapping passenger pigeons with his Potawatomi neighbors. No one knew then that young “Lib,” who was mainly known in South Haven as the best apple grafter in town, would leave the farm to become a world-renowned scientist, philosopher, and visionary leader.

Horticulture

Image: Liberty Hyde Bailey as a young man, cabinet card photograph, ca. 1880. Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21-2-3342. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Also available online here.

After graduating and completing a brief stint working in the herbarium of preeminent botanist Asa Gray at Harvard University, Bailey returned to his alma mater to chair the nation’s first Department of Horticulture and Landscape Gardening. He designed the first academic hall in the country devoted to horticulture, and delivered a provocative address titled “The Garden Fence,” in which he argued that it was time for botanists to “jump the garden fence” and bring the science of botany into what was then considered the art of horticulture. This flew in the face of his former mentor at Harvard, who considered himself a true botanist, but Bailey stuck to his belief that the plants in the garden and in the farmer’s field, more than any other, were necessary for humankind to understand precisely because those plants are the ones with which human civilization has the most contact. In this way, and through the subsequent publications of countless articles and many, many books, Liberty Hyde Bailey began to cement his reputation as the Father of Modern Horticulture.

Educational Philosophies

Image: Liberty Hyde Bailey, dean of the New York State College of Agriculture, examines a sandwich at the first Tompkins County School Picnic, May 26, 1905 (with Anna Comstock), photograph, 29 May 1905. Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21-2-3342. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Also available online here.

He remembered “instruction” that consisted of children standing in the front of a small schoolhouse reciting from books and from memory, and he knew there were more engaging ways to educate. He had in fact tried such a different approach in his first teaching job, as a teacher in the small rural school called Carl School while he was a college student. He took his pupils outside and began to develop a learner-centered method of instruction that began with the curiosity of the child and emphasized the study of the child’s everyday world. He emphasized the study of the squirrels and dandelions in the schoolyard which the children see everyday, rather than recitations on rainforests and deserts which the children may never see. There are enough wonders in the everyday environment, Bailey argued, to keep anyone interested for a lifetime, and this process of “nature-study,” when added to the teacher’s pedagogical toolkit, would foster a love of those everyday wonders. “Little children love the dandelions,” Bailey famously wrote; “why may not we?” And most importantly, hands-on learning engaged a greater diversity of children than other modes of teaching, since it involved all five senses and fostered curiosity and discovery.

Due to these developing interests, Bailey became a leader in the nature-study movement, and at Cornell he founded an entire department devoted to nature-study, hiring the university’s first women instructors (including nature-study champion Anna Botsford Comstock) to begin leading the department. Beyond teaching nature-study methods to future educators, the department at Cornell also became active in the publication of the Nature-Study Leaflets, which were mailed out to hundreds of teachers and students all across the state of New York. That publication continued long after Bailey’s time at Cornell and represented a major effort toward educational reform in the country. It became one of the university’s efforts in “extension,” which is the mandate that all land-grant universities have to extend their educational efforts beyond the university walls for the wellbeing of the state. It was an idea put into legislation by the Morrill Act, which established the land-grant system to provide colleges devoted to the “practical arts” as well as the liberal arts in every state, and Bailey considered it to be one of the most significant contributions to American democracy.

At the same time, Bailey became deeply involved in extension work with New York’s farmers. He served as director of the New York State Experiment Station at Cornell, which did experimental work applied to the practical issues relevant to the state’s farmers. He was well-known during this time for his persistent outreach to farms all around the state. A farmer would write in to the extension office with a problem related to soil or crops or livestock, and in some cases the next day they would see the tall figure of Dr. Bailey striding down the road toward their farm, offering what advice he had.  It wasn’t long before Bailey became Dean of the College of Agriculture, which he proceeded to transform and vastly enlarge. Perhaps Bailey’s most important legacy in this area was his insistence that the farmer represented a partner—a colleague—more than a student or pupil of the university. Farmers often knew what they needed, Bailey asserted, and did not need a professor to tell them that; his job was to listen and offer what he could. He often learned as much from them as they did from him.

Relevant books are Bailey’s 1903 classic The Nature-Study Idea and his 1909 treatise The State and the Farmer.

Country Life Movement

Image: Director Bailey guiding the plow when ground was broken for the Agricultural Buildings, 1 May 1905. Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21-2-3342. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Also available online here.

President Theodore Roosevelt was in attendance that day, and after the speech he approached Bailey and commended him on his efforts.  Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt answered Bailey’s call for what the president named a national Commission on Country Life, and he appointed Bailey to be its chairman alongside such notable commissioners as Kenyon Butterfield, Gifford Pinchot, and “Uncle Henry” Wallace. The Commission surveyed thousands of rural people all across the country, traveled through every state of the union holding listening sessions with country folks, and finally compiled their many notes into a report in 1909, which Bailey largely penned with input from the full commission. And Bailey led all of this as a volunteer while simultaneously maintaining his position as Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell. The direct results of the commission are still debated today, but many of the report’s major recommendations eventually came to pass, even though the Taft administration largely scuttled the commission’s work. The report’s recommendations that were later adopted include the development of rural electrification, the parcel post, and the modern highway system.

In addition to the official Report of the Commission on Country Life, Bailey also wrote a personal estimate of the movement, The Country-Life Movement in the United States.

“Retirement”

Image: George Silk, Liberty Hyde Bailey and his books, 1951. Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21-2-3342. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Also available online here.

At this point in his life, Bailey was a bestselling author. He wrote on many topics, but especially popular were his books on gardening and farming, which incorporated the latest academic research into language that was easily accessible to the common farmer, gardener, and horticulturist, always featuring Bailey’s trademark poetic sensibility and wit. He had entered into an agreement with Macmillan, one of the preeminent publishers of the time, stating that, as soon as he had a book project far enough developed for a title and a table of contents, Macmillan would send him a contract to publish the book. Among his edited works were the massive Cyclopedia of American Horticulture and the Cyclopedia of American Agriculture, and he was already working on what would become Hortus, the first ever dictionary of horticulture. Now he was economically stable enough to retire and continue to support his family and his research through writing.

With retirement came the freedom Bailey desired to focus on the projects he most wanted to pursue. One of his first ventures after retiring was a trip to New Zealand to deliver a series of lectures there on agricultural topics. On the long sea voyage, Bailey became inspired by the influence of the oceans and the vastness of the planet, and he began writing a new book manuscript on the backs of napkins, scraps of paper, and whatever came to his hand. That manuscript would evolve into The Holy Earth, a work of environmental philosophy that would influence countless writers and thinkers after him, including Aldo Leopold, Pearl Buck, Wendell Berry, and Wes Jackson. It was also the first of a series of philosophical texts, The Background Books, that dipped into the areas of political theory, rural sociology, poetry, and even fiction.

Bailey also became renowned for his often adventurous botanical explorations. He was developing a vast herbarium (a collection of dried and pressed plant specimens used for taxonomic reference) which he called the “Hortorium,” being the first primarily horticultural herbarium. The collection led him to many botanical publications and taxonomical studies. He became a major authority on many groups of plants, including Carex (sedges), Brassica (many of the important leafy greens, such as cabbage, broccoli, spinach, etc.), Rubus (raspberries and blackberries), Cucurbita (cucumbers, squash, and gourds), and many others. When he realized how little was known about the palms, which he believed held great horticultural potential in the tropics, that became his primary obsession, and his palm explorations took him into the far reaches of Central and South America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. As he grew into his seventies, eighties, and even his nineties, his solo plant expeditions began attracting public attention as everyone wondered where old Bailey would go next. But for him, it was all about the plants.

Bailey was planning his first solo palm-collecting expedition to the Congo at the age of 92 when he was caught in a revolving door in Ithaca and broke his femur. From the hospital, he reported that the voyage was still on, but his health began to decline, and eventually he became homebound. Bailey lived four more years, and he passed away in his home on Christmas Day, 1954, leaving a vast legacy of influence on American farming, education, conservation, and letters. His legacy lives on at the small museum in Michigan that bears his name.

Relevant works include The Outlook to Nature (1905), The Holy Earth (1915), Universal Service (1918), What is Democracy? (1918), The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil (1927), and How Plants Get their Names (1933).