I just finished reading Henry and the Great Society. Shame on me for taking this long to get my hands on a copy. As I began write a summary, a further look uncovered a more thoughtful and helpful examination in the Cumberland Books catalog. I’ve copied the summation below and hope you find it beneficial. Afterward, I included a few notes of my own.

Briefly, Henry and the Great Society is the story of Henry, a man living in a cultural cul-de-sac, who was pursuing a way of life that was perhaps a hundred years behind the times, when modern living suddenly becomes a possibility. Henry himself is not much attracted to modern living, but his wife and children are, and he naturally wants them to have the best—the “good things in life,” as he puts it. A series of seemingly inconsequential decisions, each one apparently beneficial in itself, inexorably destroys the self-sufficient, productive, peaceful, and satisfied Henry, transforming him into a thoroughly modern man—dependent, debt-ridden, unhealthy, overworked, worried. Henry’s family is destroyed as his wife and children find lives to live outside the home.

Because H.L. Roush barely fleshes out the characters of Henry, his wife Esther, and his children, it is that much easier for the reader to project himself into the story. Every time Henry takes another step away from agrarianism and towards The Great Society, your heart sinks and you want to shout out a warning—Don’t do it, Henry! Don’t you see what a high price you’ll pay for such a trivial gain?

But all the while you know that you were just as prone to Henry to have chosen the same path. In fact, you’re much further down that path, due to your own choices and the choices of those that went before you. You are fully immersed in the life of dependence and specialization and wage-slavery that Henry is steadily inching towards, and so you know exactly how much Henry is throwing away, exactly what sort of bondage he is selling himself into.

We recommend that you stop reading the book at the end of Henry’s story (p. 86). You won’t want to, because the ending is very bleak and you will be looking for some respite from the story, something to encourage you. Unfortunately, the final part of the book consists of H.L. Roush’s theological reflections
on the story, and they aren’t especially edifying. Best to think through the story yourself, perhaps even read it to your children, and together as a family consider what went wrong for Henry, how he might have avoided the downward spiral, and what lessons can be applied to your own circumstances.

Since our friend Chad Degenhart first introduced us to this book, we thought it would be fitting to include a review that Chad once posted on his fine weblog, House of Degenhart [Edit: Date-Dabitur is his new site].

Henry and the Great Society is definitely not the feel-good story that Heiland is. If you’ve ever felt like you were caught in the rat race, caught on a treadmill, too busy, unfulfilled, overworked, or a slave to your job or your debts, you should read this book. If you’ve ever been on a camping trip to “get away from it all”, or visited a rural countryside, a scenic mountain range, or lush wilderness, and said “Now this is God’s country”, you should read this book. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Some people will read it and have no idea what its about. Others will read it and get angry or exasperated. But for a few of you, this book will touch your heart and wrench your gut at the same time. While it may depress you just a little, the next feeling that you might have is a compelling desire to buy the book in bulk to distribute to everyone you know.

My question for everyone that empathizes with Henry is: what should he have done? And further, what should we do to avoid his fate? One of the differences I see in Henry and Heiland is that Heiland built family and community, and Henry lost those things because he didn’t value them highly enough, he didn’t understand them or what was required to nourish them, and he never weighed his decisions in terms of what it would really cost his family and community. For instance, $1,000 to Henry seemed like a reasonable price to purchase a used car—but as the book unfolds we see what it costs Henry. His wife can now attend PTA meetings and Canasta games, leaving Henry and kids to heat up microwave dinners for supper. The children no longer knew their land or neighbors, as they now only traveled through their community at 60mph with their heads buried in comic books or magazines. The maintenance on the car required more trips to town, more phone calls, and more debt to manage. The ease of traveling to town translated into more and more trips to town, and less and less time together at home. Property taxes went up because of the costs of paving and maintaining the road, and Henry had to sell parts of his homestead to stay (temporarily) afloat.

The author of Henry and the Great Society does a masterful job of showing how “the good things in life” end up killing us. What he doesn’t do is show us what to do about it, and so we’re left wondering what Henry should have done, and how far we need to go to get our freedom back. What makes it worse is that most of us that read the book have started out in a much worse position than Henry did. Part of what makes Henry’s story so sad is the great amount that he lost, but some of us had nothing much to start with, being second or third generation wage/rent/mortgage/property tax/zoning/technology slaves. Sometimes it seems that the only solution is to run even faster on the treadmill, so that we can produce incrementally more than necessary in order to purchase our freedom, so to speak. It seems to me that Henry can’t win without first winning back the hearts of his family, and then the hearts of his community, and that there are things that must be done which are far beyond the scope of the individual. Part of the detrimental effects of modern industrial society is the loss of real community, and part of the antithesis must be to build it within the context of God’s laws which offer protection and objective standards for dealing with societal problems. The simple, contented life is impossible in isolation, our future requires community cooperation. God’s laws provide a sure foundation for us to build upon, and modern society will crumble precisely because it is not built upon God’s laws, but on sinking sand.

Rick mentions the shallowness of the characters, and I couldn’t tell if this was purposeful or not. Nevertheless, while the device enables the reader to substitute his/her own circumstances, what it doesn’t do is give a lot of credibility to the initial chapters. The author paints a glorious picture of agrarian living and minimalizes the hardships by conveniently leaving them out. A better approach (in order to appeal to the cynics, I suppose) would’ve been to point out that the benefits far outweigh the inconveniences instead of just pretending that the hardships aren’t there. I thought this was a weakness in the book, but maybe there was something profound there that I missed.

This book is important because it details a journey that we’d like to do in reverse. Careful thought and planning are going into how to make this happen. How do we launch our children into the world, avoiding the consumerism and discontentment that ultimately killed Henry and is killing us? How do we take steps now to start walking the other direction? The author writes on the subject of our children’s inheritance which we are taking steps to build now, “We are concerned about their education, and the material fortune we can leave them; but what about the legacy of a way of life? We do not seem to remember that as we walk our feet are creating upon the impressionable earth a path that, although we are long gone, our children will continue to follow without a thought or reason in regard to the rightness of it.” (p. 92)

In order to jump out of the rat race, you must first realize that you’re in it. This book will open your eyes to that if you aren’t already convinced of it. While I feel glad to know that I’m a rat and only 30, how much better would it have been if I’d known sooner? Henry was content with food, clothing, shelter, and an honest day’s work. The theme of contentment is implicit throughout the book and always a good thing to discuss, whether or not you are convinced that an agrarian model is best way to achieve it.