The age-herald., 1899-07-23
THE MAN WITH A HOE"
The Author of This Popular Poem Tells
 How He Came to Write It

In an interview for the Oakland (Cal)
 Tribune, Edwin Markham the author of
 this poem, which has attracted more atten-
 tion than any other written in twenty-five
 years, thus tells how he came to write it,
 and the immediate occasion:
 T was born man with a hoe I am
 child of the furrow. All my youth was
 passed on farm and cattle range, among
 the hard, severe conditions that go with
 that life. Of course, I do not mean to say
 that there are not happy phases of farm
 hte l enjoyed, as a boy, the horseback
 rides on the long ranges of hills; the smell
 of the furrow was pleasant to me; 1 knew
 and loved animals, the horses and cattle;
 but with all this l felt, too, the privations
 and scraping poverty that are the frequent
 accompaniment of the farm boys life. So,
 when l write of the man with @ hoe, I
 write to some extent, out of my own
 perience. In the second place, man has al-
 ways interested me l always had a sym
 pathy with men and women who are doing
 the hard work of the world I have always
 wondered whether the wisdom of the wise would not some day find a way for giving the workers a greater equality of oppor- tunity in their struggle with the world It always seemed to me that the strong and the wise should not use their God-given powers to exploit or oppress their weaker brethren. This is to me what religion means. This is the principle of a true and practical fraternity, and fraternity is to me the holiest of all words, being at once the essence of all gospels and the fulfillment of all revelations All religion and all culture should be an effort to bring men into an ever-enlarging realization of the principle of fraternity.'
 What was the immediate occasion of | your writing the poem?"
 Tt was a visit I made to a loan exhibi- tiOn in San Francisco some ten wears ago. | where saw for the first time Millet's great | painting, The Man With the Hoe, per- l haps the most impressive product of any l painters genius in modern times. I sat 1 for hour before the painting, and all tho | time the tenor and power of the picture | was growing upon me l saw that the | creation of the painter was no mere peas l ant, no chance man of the fields, but he was rather a type, a symbol of the toiler, l brutalized through long ages of industrial l oppression. l saw in this peasant the slow | but awful degradation of man through end- l less, hopeless, and joyless labor. l saw In | this peasant betrayed humanity, for, Cain | to the contrary notwithstanding, we arc l all, more or less, our brothers keeper. This l picture stuck in my memory for ten years, l until my Christmas vacation came, and 1 wrote out the impression of 1t that had
 been springing up through my soul all
 these years 1 wished it to be part of my | volume of poems that I expect to have l published in the east this summer or fall. | l was present at a literary event in San | Francisco a few weeks ago. l had just re- l ceived the poem from my typewriter and l on being pressed to read 1t to help out the evening, I did so. A proposal to publish l the poem in San Francisco was shortly l afterward made to me, which I accepted,
 as l was glad of the opportunity to make l the truth that l stand for better known to l nay own people,"