In 1899, Edwin Markham brought attention to Millet’s painting, Man with a Hoe of 1860-2 — a graphic representation of the effects of a lifetime of ceaseless labor by publishing a controversial poem of the same name San Francisco Examiner. In this poem, Markham had originally equated the French peasant with the American farm laborer in a plea for agrarian reform. Although Markham intended his poem solely as a commentary upon the hardships of farm life, it had an explosive affect upon its public. To many, the phrase "man with a hoe" assumed a much broader meaning, serving as a code for rural degradation and industrial unrest. Much discussion regarding the poem ensued in the popular press; the Oakland Tribune even sponsored a "Hoe-Man Symposium" that same year. Using the poem as a call for social reform, socialists, clerics, and teachers who participated in the symposium argued that the factory system, inequities in distribution and production, competition, and technology – the whole gamut of industrial woes – had created acclimate in which the "hoe-man" flourished.
In focusing upon Millet’s Man with a Hoe, Markham challenged the efficacy of republican agrarian myths -- often embodied in the image of the sturdy, independent, and proud yeoman farmer. In contrast, this painting presented a bent and broken peasant, wizened beyond his years, who toiled at the seemingly impossible task of cultivating a rocky wasteland stretching to the picture’s horizon. Markham wrote the opening stanza of the poem upon seeing Millet’s world-famous painting.
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon the hoe and gazes on the ground.
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Such powerful language angered those Americans who still believed in the nobility of rural work and the sacredness of the land. In response to those who resisted the call to agrarian reform, Markham adopted the view of social reformers, arguing that his poem not only embraced agrarian labor, but also indicted the evils of the industrial system. He wrote in 1900:
I soon realized that Millet puts before us no chance toiler, no mere man of the fields. No, this stunned and stolid peasant is the type of industrial oppression in all lands and in all labors. He might be a man with a needle in a New York sweat shop, a man with a pick in a West Virginia coal mine….
The hoeman is the symbol of betrayed humanity, the toiler ground down through ages of oppression, through ages of social injustice. He is the man pushed away from the land by those who fail to use the land, till at last he has become a serf, with no mind in his muscle, and no heart in his handiwork….
In the hoeman we see the slow, sure, awful degradation of man through endless, hopeless and joyless labor. Did I say labor? No—drudgery.
Indeed, this poem represented a form of literary dissent – a protest against the changing conditions of labor in rural and urban America. As demonstrated by the powerful public response to both Markham’s poem and Millet’s painting, the representation of the worker, both literary and visual, served as a lightening rod in the struggle over social change. By the 1880s, the worker had assumed a variety of social guises: serving the ends of reform as the hapless victim of industrial oppression and bolstering the forces of the status quo as the demonized agent of anarchy and violent change.