The Dirt Beneath the Grass: The Yard's Elite Roots Uncovered
Spring has sprung; the rites are upon us. The annual process of Making Sure the Lawn Looks Perfect for Commencement-- a process which, for many of us, is dialectically invested with both anticipation and dread--is once again underway. The squadron of landscape-artists has been unleashed; like Stravinsky, they aspire to create a magnum opus of the season's rituals. With ardor, with bags of dirt, they have already begun to transform the Yard from a relatively pleasant, serene meadow into a confusion of cordons, chemical grass simulacra and bare patches of earth hideous to behold. Harvard subsists on tradition: the Yard is made repellent each spring and this one is no different. Why bother, one is compelled to wonder. Why go to all the time and expense for a lawn destined for a life so nasty, brutish and short?
Pounds of fertilizer, small mountains of earth, gallons upon gallons of water and absurd quantities of labor are channelled into Yard lawncare throughout the semester. But to what end? Why does Harvard choose to spend unknown sums of money compromising aesthetics and limiting student A-to-B point options? Seemingly, they do so to create a billion-bladed carpet of velvety green stretching from Widener to Memorial Church and away on all sides, realized just in time to be crushed irreparably by the thousands of bodies standing, sitting or milling excitedly about on it during the Class Day ceremonies and the subsequent Commencement exercises.
Months of preparation, two days of use. A reasonable cost-benefit analysis demonstrates that the intensive annual Spring re-lawning probably costs more than it is worth. Marty might agree, and so should this year's Commencement speaker, Alan Greenspan. Unless, that is, this superficial cost-benefit analysis is wrong, and the grasseous benefits do outweigh the pain-in-the-asseous costs. Giving Harvard the benefit of the doubt, there must be some intangible attributes of the grass not captured in the it's-a-pain, what's-the-point model.
There are. A closer glance at the lawn reveals that the grass ritual is not borne of practical necessity, but that Harvard nonetheless has a vested interest in maintaining the perfect condition of the Yard.
It could be plain old vanity. But maybe, just maybe, it's something even more sinister. Maybe there's a deep dark secret hiding in the grass.
The culturally imperialist origins of the Yard
The lawn in the Yard is a deeply, powerfully invested symbolic vehicle of meaning. It represents Harvard's economic and cultural imperialism, its sexist and elitist tendencies and its dichotomous aspiration to identify with both the British Oxbridge educational model and the American Way of life. The small "green span" we constantly traverse wields at least as much power--albeit of a different sort--as the Fed Head himself. Who knew?
Lawns were not always the chosen landscape of the educational countryside; Oxford and Cambridge adapted and refined their expanses of herbiage to conform to fashion dictates. Oxbridge was the seat of elite male education in Britannia. In her 1994 work, "The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession," Virginia Scott Jenkins relates how the lawn concept emerged in the 18th century, when the gardens at Versailles were designed to include a small lawn, called the "tapis vert" and the popularity of Lancelot Brown's landscape stylings in Britain ("a new, elite style characterized by a mixture of meadows, water and trees, with grazing animals and graceful curves") meant that the lawn look ascended to primacy in the status hierarchy of the elite. A boom in the popularity of field-based sports such as tennis, cricket, lawn bowling and croquet abetted this rise. While lawn bowling and croquet proved faddish, quickly losing out to shuffleboard and flagpole-sitting amongst Oxbridge students, lawns were a bona fide trend--the wily grass endured.
Owning and cultivating a lawn became a fabulous new way for the social elite to compete in the conspicuous consumption of leisure. A great deal of money was required to buy the materials, hire a designer and planters, and have either gardeners or animals shave it down to its optimum length. When the upper echelons of colonial society returned from their European travels with news of the latest in fashion, food, and home decor, they brought the lawn with them--it came from Old to New England with all its attendant symbolism.
Suburbia co-opts the grass
Oxbridge's lawns were sites of power assertion; their ideological transfer here brings resonances of sexist structural inequality into our own Yard (see Lawn Lib). The grass has other implications as well, which manifest themselves most clearly when contrasted with the unique position the lawn has assumed within the American Dream.
Lawns lost their romantic associations with English manor living years ago. The concept of the lawn is now a thoroughly American one and one thoroughly devoid of romance. A mental image of suburbia literally couldn't exist without the lawn (and the fat balding man standing around in his boxers, watering it with a flaccid garden hose, but more on that later) --suburbs were in fact designed around lawns. Jenkins describes the flight to suburbia and the ascendancy of the single-family home with front yard as "the most characteristic single feature of European settlement in North America."
Suburban mania coincided with the swell in popularity of the game of golf--and what a swell game golf is! The development of golf and of the turf covering the courses where it is played (which the government has donated millions of dollars to help improve), go hand in hand. In 1897, a senior researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, linked closely with the U.S. Golf Association, wrote the following influential words: "Nothing is more beautiful than a well-kept lawn . . . Lawns are the most fascinating and delightful features in landscape gardening, and there is nothing which more strongly bespeakes the character of the owner than the treatment and adornment of the lawns upon his place." Indeed.
As keeping up with the Joneses became more important in the "Golden Era" of the 1950s and into the 1960s, spending more time and money on lawn maintenance (and on golf, if you had the credentials to get accepted by a club) became obligatory. [Ed. Note: For those currently striving to fit in, check out the Harvard-insignia golf balls currently democratically available at the COOP for a mere $XXX]. Lawncare became a major summertime preoccupation and a major moneymaking industry. Lawn culture is now the stuff of American iconic legend: through shows like "King of the Hill" and films such as "Edward Scissorhands" and "The Burbs" to ads pushing everything from barbecues to beer, the Man And His Lawn archetype has been canonized.
A defiantly American institution despite its many Oxbridge influences, Harvard is not only part of the lawn-lovin' American Dream, it helps shape it. Emerson's American Scholar address (given in the Yard, perhaps?) and his otheR writings helped define the Dream in its inception. Today, Bercovitch's course The Myth of America analyzes where the Dream went thereafter. The grass is in there somewhere (see Walt Whitman's book of poems,"Leaves of Grass").
Grass Stains
But what are the environmental impacts? How much money is spent on the labor, water, fertilizer, pesticide, grass seed and other materials involved in the annual lawn transformation? Clearly, as attested to by the vigor and duration of the landscape assault, the lawn is high priority, and big bucks are spent.
Harvard can afford it, of course--but where else could that money go instead, and would it be more productive elsewhere? The MAC is filled with rusty weight machines from before the crossing of the Mayflower, there is not a single library open for 24-hour study, boosts to financial aid could help right the rising racial imbalance of the student body and the forfeit of electric-teal chemicals could give the typically low-skilled landscapers and other Harvard employees a living wage. For starters.
Amazing, really, what a brief scrutiny of the grass replacement ritual reveals lurking just below the topsoil. The superficial concerns about our Yard are, of course, both abundant and well founded. Everyone can see that it's ugly. Some people have found that it smells bad. At 10 minutes past the hour, the impossibility of running in a straight line over it to Sever Hall is cursed by all and sundry. But now the inner as well as the outer blemishes on our lawns can be shown. Now the grass can be understood. We may still sigh in resignation when we see it, but now, at least, we can sigh more deeply.