Beclouded Beginnings and Suspicious Name Games
Little is known about the origins of the Farmer’s Wife. It might have begun publication in 1897, but more likely 1900, in Winona, Minnesota. Its first publisher was John Halvor Johnson, who went by “J.H.” just about everywhere except his gravestone. The son of Norwegian immigrants, Johnson was a traveling salesman turned investor: he began with buying-and-selling newspapers and ended with real estate. His first big investment was the Winona Daily Herald, which he purchased in 1890 and sold ten years later.1 He then began launching new publications under the names of recently-abandoned titles. For example, in 1892 Farm, Field and Stockman changed its name to Farm, Field and Fireside, and that same year Johnson began publishing a monthly under the title Farm, Field and Stockman, which he later sold to the Model Farmer Publishing Company of Chicago. Similarly, in 1900 the weekly American Stock Farm changed its name, shortly after which Johnson began a monthly using that title as well.2
Continue reading “The Story of the “Farmer’s Wife” (Part 1)”
Alan Burns came from one of those families where the children all seem to have been remarkable (in personality or intellect), consequential, and ideologically irreconcilable. The Last Imperialist by Bruce Gilley might have been a nuanced study of one such family (like those captivating Mitford biographies—I think there have been almost a dozen so far). Or it could have been about the devout Roman Catholic and Anglo West Indian, from birth an establishment outsider, who made it his life mission to defend the very establishment that had rejected him. Instead, Gilley chose to write an improbable apologia of the British Empire, and while he does fold some biography into the polemic, he’s so entirely united with Burns in admiration for colonialism that the book devolves into pure encomium somewhere around page three.