[Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and
industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.]
[[link removed]]

BEYOND THE MYTH OF RURAL AMERICA  
[[link removed]]


 

Daniel Immerwahr
October 16, 2023
The New Yorker
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial
capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts. _

Grant Wood’s sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Byron
McKeeby, stand by the painting for which they had posed, “American
Gothic.”, Photograph courtesy Figge Art Museum, City of Davenport
Art Collection, Grant Wood Archive, SB-4

 

Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an
unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some
of us can’t help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood
[[link removed]],
it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house
in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were
impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who “would fit into
such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and
costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, “American
Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most
famous art work ever produced in the United States.

The painting was also decidedly enigmatic. Was it biting satire? Grim
realism? Proud patriotism? In the words of the late Thomas Hoving, a
longtime director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the image served
as a “Rorschach test for the character of the nation.”

For Wood, however, the meaning was clear. Although he faced “a storm
of protest from Iowa farm wives”—one threatened to “smash my
head,” he recalled—he had painted “American Gothic” with
sympathy. Cities dominated culture, he wrote, yet they were “far
less typically American” than the rural places “whose power they
usurped.” In 1935, Wood, who was born on an Iowa farm forty-four
years earlier, published the manifesto “Revolt Against the City.”

In decrying urban dominance, Wood had a point. The 1920 census marked
the first time that urbanites made up a majority of the nation’s
population, and city dwellers weren’t humble about their ascendance.
New magazines like H. L. Mencken’s _The American
Mercury_ (founded in 1924) and, indeed, this one (founded in 1925)
touted metropolitan virtues with more than a touch of snobbery.
“Main Street
[[link removed]],”
Sinclair Lewis’s best-selling novel from 1920, captured the tone.
“There was no dignity” in small-town life, its protagonist
reflects, only “a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and
sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly
with inane decorations.”

At first, Wood had nodded along. He’d devoured Mencken, adored
“Main Street,” and tried to stir up Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with a
“bohemian” art colony. He visited France and returned with a
Parisian beard, a form of preening for which his Iowa neighbors had
little patience. Yet his outlook changed—and so did his beard. The
financial collapse of 1929 robbed the “Eastern capitals of finance
and politics” of their magic, he wrote. He named Mencken and “Main
Street” as part of the problem. It would be better, he thought, to
take cues from the “extraordinary independence” of farmers and the
sturdy, homegrown cultures of the provinces. A bohemian no longer,
Wood shaved his face and put on overalls.

It was, in general, an overalls era. Many enduring images of rural
America are from the nineteen-thirties—Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
“Little House on the Prairie
[[link removed]],”
Dorothea Lange’s classic photograph “Migrant Mother,” Margaret
Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind
[[link removed]],”
Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God
[[link removed]],”
Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town
[[link removed]],”
and John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath
[[link removed]].”
The run culminated in the “Wizard of Oz” film, in which Dorothy
spurns an Emerald City for a Kansas farm, declaring, “There’s no
place like home.”

All that was generations ago, yet the obsession with rural
authenticity sounds all too familiar. In 2008, the Republican
Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin insisted that small towns were
the “real America,” where hardworking, patriotic people lived.
That sentiment has only gained political potency since. Underlying the
country’s red state–blue state polarization is a more profound,
and widening, rural-urban split. Donald Trump’s election was,
Politico declared, the “revenge of the rural voter.”

Scholars who have spoken with those voters, such as Katherine Cramer,
in “The Politics of Resentment
[[link removed]]”
(2016), and Robert Wuthnow, in “The Left Behind
[[link removed]]”
(2018), report a sense of deep alienation. Rural people feel—in
terms much like those Grant Wood laid out in 1935—that their
authentic, independent way of life is under threat from an
out-of-touch urban élite.

But is that picture accurate? A piercing, unsentimental new book,
“The Lies of the Land
[[link removed]]”
(Chicago), by the historian Steven Conn, takes the long view. Wistful
talk of “real America” aside, Conn, who teaches at Miami
University, in Oxford, Ohio, argues that the rural United States is,
in fact, highly artificial. Its inhabitants are as much creatures of
state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling
counterparts. But we rarely acknowledge this, Conn writes, because
many of us—urban and rural, on the left and the right—“don’t
quite want it to be true.”

The category “rural” spans a vast range, including small towns,
reservations, timberlands, and ranches. One thing that unites such
places, however, is that they’re rarely thought of as particularly
modern. In the “natural order of things,” Adam Smith wrote in
“The Wealth of Nations
[[link removed]],”
agrarian life precedes urbanization: history starts with people
working the land, and only after they succeed are cities possible. In
this account, rural people are, like horseshoe crabs,
holdovers—living representatives of a distant past. Hence the
frequent judgment that life beyond cities is more “rooted” or,
less sympathetically, “backward.”

Events unfolded differently in the United States, though.
There _were_ long-standing rural communities that sought to pass
their ways and lands down through history—but they faced a
devastating invasion from across the Atlantic. There are still places
where people have lived continuously for centuries, such as the
millennium-old Acoma Pueblo, in New Mexico. But the rural Americans
with the deepest roots, the Native ones, were very often violently
dispossessed.

The people who replaced them, meanwhile, were transplants, less sprung
from the soil than laid like sod over Indigenous lands. Settlers liked
to imagine that their takeover was swift and natural, that Native
Americans were already en route to extinction. This was a consoling
myth. The process of uprooting one rural people and implanting another
took time, and heavy state intervention. By the official count,
Indigenous people fought 1,642 military engagements against the United
States. The ensuing treaties, the historian Robert Lee calculates,
cost the U.S. government billions of dollars.

Settlers styled themselves as pioneers who had won their land with
their bare hands. This is how it went in “Little House on the
Prairie,” with the frontier family racing ahead of the law to seize
Indian property. (“Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished
Reserve” would have been a more accurate title, the literary scholar
Frances W. Kaye has archly suggested.) Yet in the end land ownership
came, directly or indirectly, from the state. The Homestead Act of
1862, along with its successors, gridded up and gave away an area the
size of Pakistan. And although homesteading sounds like a relic from
the sepia-toned past, its most active period came, the historian Sara
Gregg has pointed out, in the twentieth century. The final homesteader
got his land in 1988.

One irony is that—after Indigenous towns—it’s the havens of the
East Coast élite, such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, which
have the deepest roots. Most bastions of “real America” are, by
contrast, relatively new. Wasilla, Alaska, where Sarah Palin served as
mayor, really is a small town in a farming area. But most of its farms
were created by a New Deal campaign to relocate struggling farmers
from the Upper Midwest. (Hence Palin’s “you betcha” accent,
similar to the Minnesota ones in the film “Fargo.”) Palin’s
proud patch of “real America,” in other words, was courtesy of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The historically recent arrival of settlements like Palin’s Wasilla
or the “American Gothic” town of Eldon gives them a copy-paste
quality. The striking outfits of Grant Wood’s models weren’t
homespun; he’d ordered them from Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Chicago.
And the Gothic window that had grabbed his attention? It wasn’t the
product of a distinctive local culture, either. Eldon had existed for
barely a decade when that window was installed. It, too, had been
mail-ordered from Sears.

Wherever the clothes were from, the image of a stalwart couple humbly
working their own land came to represent rural America. Wood described
the pair as “tintypes from my own family album,” and, indeed, his
parents had tilled a plot in Iowa. Yet that sort of farming marked
only a brief moment in Wood’s family history. His maternal
grandparents were innkeepers, not farmers, and his paternal ones had
been Virginia slaveholders. When Wood was ten, his family left the
farm for the city of Cedar Rapids, where Wood set out to be a
jeweller.

The Woods weren’t unusual. One of Steven Conn’s great themes is
the evanescence of those “American Gothic”-style farms. Although
“we tend to equate _rural_ with _farm_,” he writes, small,
general farms “disappeared more than half a century ago, at
least.” Agriculture has become a capital-intensive, high-tech
pursuit, belying the “left behind” story of rural life. Fields
resemble factories, where automation reigns and more than two-thirds
of the hired workforce is foreign-born. “To call 1,500 acres of
corn, genetically modified to withstand harsh chemical pesticides and
intended for a high-fructose corn syrup factory, a ‘farm’ is a bit
like calling a highly automated GM factory a ‘workshop,’ ” Conn
remarks.

Corporate dominance is hidden in agriculture: Apple products are sold
by a high-profile, publicly traded multinational, but actual apples
come from private companies that few people have ever heard of, like
Gebbers Farms or Zirkle Fruit. The government classifies most as
“family farms,” but this doesn’t mean they’re diminutive.
“Family corporations” is what Conn calls the agribusiness
operations that maintained family ownership for legal reasons. In
agricultural processing and retailing, the mom-and-pop pretense
quickly drops. The country’s largest food company is PepsiCo; it
owns Rice-A-Roni, Sabra, Rold Gold, Doritos, Gatorade, and Quaker
Oats.

You might think that this is how things work under capitalism, but
U.S. agriculture is far from capitalist. Since the Depression, the
government has aggressively managed the farming economy, variously
limiting supply, ginning up demand, and stabilizing prices. “When it
comes to agriculture, there is no such thing as the free market,”
the head of the food-processing-and-procuring conglomerate Archer
Daniels Midland explained in 1995. Certainly, the over-all effect of
government policy was to favor large firms like his.

As conglomerates grew, most farmers and farmworkers were edged out. In
the years since “American Gothic,” more than two-thirds of the
country’s farms have disappeared, and tens of millions of people
left for cities. Black farms were hit especially hard. In 1920, there
were nearly a million of them; now there aren’t even thirty-five
thousand.

The small farmers who stayed faced their own hardships. Performing at
a Live Aid concert to benefit Ethiopian famine victims in 1985, Bob
Dylan
[[link removed]] wondered
if some of the money could be spared to support debt-ridden small
farmers in his own country. It couldn’t, but Willie Nelson and
others started an annual benefit concert, Farm Aid, treating farmers
as charity cases. Farm Aid started during a downturn called the farm
crisis, and it’s still going nearly forty years later. Small farmers
have been in crisis so long, Conn observes, that the word
“crisis”—which suggests a deviation from the norm—has lost its
meaning.

In truth, the ostensible norm, household farming, was a transitional
phase—surprisingly brief, in many places—between Indigenous and
industrial. Even in the heyday of pastoral mythmaking, when Wood froze
the farming couple in time as the essence of rural America, that image
was badly outdated. The Eldon house that Wood depicted, built in 1881,
wasn’t the ancestral home of sturdy agrarians. The first owner lost
it because of overdue taxes, the next tried unsuccessfully to turn it
into a candy-and-novelty store, and the property changed hands many
more times before Wood’s 1930 visit. By then, Eldon’s population
decline had started. It had some eighteen hundred residents; it has
less than half that now.

The small farmer, standing on his property with a pitchfork, has been
an endangered species for a century. Today, a leaf blower would be a
better symbol for those who tend the land. As the economist Brad
DeLong notes, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts more landscapers
and groundskeepers than people working on farms.

If small, rugged farms have not filled the countryside, what has? This
is Conn’s second great theme. For the past century, rural spaces
have been preferred destinations for military bases, discount retail
chains, extractive industries, manufacturing plants, and real-estate
developments.

Consider Appalachia’s legendary southern mountains. These are the
supposedly independent, isolated, and tradition-steeped hollows (or
“hollers”) where moonshine was made, Hatfield-and-McCoy feuds once
raged, and Dolly Parton’s Tennessee mountain home still stands. The
venture capitalist J. D. Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir,
“Hillbilly Elegy
[[link removed]],”
is another unavoidable reference. Vance was born and raised in urban
Ohio, but he grounded his identity in the “beloved holler” in
eastern Kentucky where his grandparents had lived until they were
teen-agers. (“As Mamaw used to say, you can take the boy out of
Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy.”)

Conn rolls his eyes at much of this. The southern mountains aren’t
exactly isolated, he says. Rather, since the Civil War they’ve been
at the forefront of lumbering and coal mining; corporations have
felled the forests, fouled the land, and then, for the most part,
left. “Never mind the sentimental invocations of ‘hollers’ and
moonshine and kinfolk,” Conn writes; a lot of Appalachian coal
country is a “postindustrial moonscape of slag heaps, eroded
hillsides, toxic retention pools, and abandoned towns.”

Other features of the southern mountains reward a second look. The
bloody Hatfield-and-McCoy fight, which killed a dozen people between
1878 and 1890, is remembered as the eruption of an ancient honor
culture. Yet the conflict, in which some McCoys took the Hatfield side
and vice versa, is better understood as a logging-rights dispute
prompted by deforestation and the arrival of the railroad. The
Prohibition-era moonshine stills, similarly, can be seen as a
desperate strategy—manufacturing and trafficking a controlled
substance—by dispossessed people who had lost surer means of getting
by.

If railroads allowed corporations to reach into Appalachia’s
hollows, cars and trucks let them go everywhere. They could shift
operations to the countryside, toward cheap land with few neighbors.
Relocating also let employers outrun unions; when workers organized
urban factories, firms opened rural branches.

This is the story of slaughterhouses. The perishability of meat used
to mean that slaughterhouses had to be placed in population centers,
near consumers; that’s why many cities have former meatpacking
districts. Urban slaughterhouses were noxious environments, as Upton
Sinclair’s Chicago-set novel, “The Jungle
[[link removed]]”
(1906), described in excruciating detail. Understandably, workers
sought strong unions. After decades of trying, they prevailed in
Chicago, in 1943.

Their victory was short-lived. Refrigerated trucking gave stockyard
owners the flexibility to move wherever business conditions suited,
which frequently meant anonymous, horizontal structures in the
countryside. Someone writing “The Jungle” today, Conn speculates,
would probably set it in Gainesville, Georgia, the self-described
“Poultry Capital of the World.” Gainesville’s immense
chicken-processing plants are heavily staffed by low-paid immigrants,
non-unionized and often undocumented.

The story of how cities such as Chicago lost industrial jobs is well
known; the story of how small towns gained them isn’t. Still, the
“rural industrial boom” that started in earnest in the
nineteen-sixties was, the historian Keith Orejel writes, “the
defining economic process within the American heartland” in the
latter part of the twentieth century. Faced with unrecoverable job
losses in agriculture, small-town leaders courted manufacturers with
subsidies, obliging regulations, and a cheap, non-unionized workforce.

Manufacturers, accepting this invitation, industrialized the rural
landscape. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, also seeking cheap land,
militarized it. The U.S. now contains more than four thousand military
bases, with a combined acreage the size of Kentucky. Conn observes how
this has fused rural people to the armed forces. By early 2007, nearly
half the U.S. service members killed in Iraq had come from towns
smaller than twenty-five thousand. A fifth were from towns smaller
than five thousand.

For Eldon, jobs came from meatpacking, based in the nearby coal-mining
town of Ottumwa. The “American Gothic” house looked onto an area
called Pole Tail, where cattle were fed, herded with poles onto
railroad cars, and sent to the slaughter.

Live by the meat hook, die by the meat hook. The financier Eli Black
bought the Ottumwa meat plant in the late nineteen-sixties; before
long he merged it with United Fruit and started trimming costs with
layoffs. Then Ottumwa’s meatpackers pushed back, and in 1973 Black
shuttered the plant. Production was shifted to South Dakota, where he
had found a more compliant labor culture. The blow hit Eldon and its
environs hard. Trucking firms, utilities, local schools, and sports
leagues all “went bye-bye,” one employee recalled.

As the region staggered, the “American Gothic” house fell into
disrepair, with its windows broken and its white paint fading to gray.
By 1977, it had acquired a bullet hole—in a bedroom wall. In the
eighties, a family of four rented the house. The father had been a
factory worker but was now unemployed; a newspaper described him as a
“weed cutter.” He and his wife had chosen the house because it was
cheap, “on account of tourists sometimes nosing around.” Even so,
the couple’s parents had to pay the rent.

This is how it goes, Conn argues. With so few income sources
available, rural people depend heavily on each employer. The opening
of a mine, a factory, or a military base might bring flush times, but
their closure spells ruin. While cities are, by their diversity,
hedged against economic fluctuations, small towns lie dangerously
exposed. That’s why they were so devastated by the trade
liberalization of the nineteen-nineties and, particularly, China’s
entry into the World Trade Organization, in 2001. Jobs that had once
left the city for the countryside moved abroad, causing a rural
manufacturing collapse that rivals the urban one of the
nineteen-seventies. Rural deindustrialization has received less
notice, but it’s been potentially “more painful,” Conn observes,
given workers’ lack of other options. Where metropolitan employment
bounced back from the recession of 2007-08 in five years, rural
employment still hasn’t recovered.

As jobs rush out, discount retail chains swoop in—notably Dollar
General, which has more than four times as many stores in the U.S. as
Walmart. Although its former chief executive, Cal Turner, Jr., has
written a book about Dollar General’s “small-town values,” the
corporation essentially preys on distressed rural communities
[[link removed]].
It pursues profits by minimizing staff and pay, and by shutting its
stores whenever they stop making money.

You can find a Dollar General half a mile from the “American
Gothic” house; the store is now one of only two places in Eldon to
buy groceries. But there is no guarantee it will stay. “We’re kind
of gypsies,” Turner has bragged of his company. “We can close a
store and be gone in 24 hours.”

Alaid-off veteran buying Rice-A-Roni at Dollar General isn’t our
favored image of rural life. But it’s more accurate than the
farmhouse tableau of “American Gothic.” And it’s an image
especially worth contemplating today, as rural discontent increasingly
drives politics.

Although politics has always had an urban-rural fissure, in the past
decade it has become a clean break. Democrats dominate in high-density
places. Not one of the ten largest cities chose a Republican mayor in
its most recent elections, and only two of the top thirty did.
Republicans, meanwhile, reign in low-density places, with the notable
exceptions of Native American reservations and the Black Belt, in the
South.

It’s now possible to interpret elections in geographical terms:
Democrats win cities, Republicans win rural areas, and the main
question is which way the suburbs will break. Although we normally
think of suburbs as outgrowths of cities, Conn notes that they sit on
formerly rural land and are often filled with formerly rural people.
They are as much “post-rural” as “sub-urban,” and their
politics show it.

For city dwellers, this geographical line-drawing is ominous. Rural
people are a fifth of the population yet punch well above their weight
in elections. The constitutional allocation of two senators for every
state gives low-density states outsized representation. This is why,
in the past six senatorial elections, Democrats received thirty-four
million more votes over all and yet had an outright majority of
senators only once. Since a state is allocated two Presidential
electors for its two senators, the rural advantage skews Presidential
elections, too; in the past six, Democrats won the popular vote five
times but the Presidency only three. “Why Cities Lose
[[link removed]],”
a clarifying book by the political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden,
explains how similar mechanisms, operating in district-based
elections, give Republicans an edge in the House of Representatives
and state legislatures.

Still, it’s not as if rural people—who die younger and are far
more likely to take their own lives—are winning in a larger sense.
The surprise hit song of the summer, topping the _Billboard_ charts,
was “Rich Men North of Richmond,” by Oliver Anthony, a onetime
factory worker from the former coal-mining town of Farmville,
Virginia. The song is a furious protest aimed at a distant élite. One
might regard Anthony’s anger, which includes a dig at welfare
recipients, as misdirected. But half the households in Farmville make
less than thirty-seven thousand dollars. Can anyone really say that
his rage is baseless?

In the past decade, rural voters have transformed the Republican
Party, pushing aside élite-favored politicians like Jeb Bush in favor
of ones like Trump. Although some of Trump’s
hobbyhorses—windmills, low-flush toilets—are idiosyncratic, his
talk of “disastrous trade deals” and shuttered factories is not.
Trump took rural deindustrialization seriously and, astonishingly,
turned the market-friendly G.O.P. against globalization. The
high-profile “hillbilly” J. D. Vance is now a Republican senator
of the _maga_ persuasion.

In 2020, Trump lost the national popular vote by four points but won
the Iowa county containing Eldon by twenty-four. The “revolt against
the city” of Grant Wood’s day has become something like a war.
Understanding it will require setting myths aside and grappling with
what the rich and the powerful have done to rural spaces and people.
Such demystification, Conn rightly insists, is long overdue. Because,
when you look at “American Gothic” today, it isn’t the
architecture that catches your eye. It’s the pitchfork. ♦

 

_Published in the print edition of the October 23, 2023
[[link removed]], issue of The New
Yorker, with the headline “The Pitchfork of History.”_

_DANIEL IMMERWAHR
[[link removed]] teaches
history at Northwestern University and is the author of “How to Hide
an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
[[link removed]].”_

_Since its founding, in 1925, THE NEW YORKER has evolved from a
Manhattan-centric “fifteen-cent comic paper”—as its first
editor, Harold Ross, put it—to a multi-platform publication known
worldwide for its in-depth reporting, political and cultural
commentary, fiction, poetry, and humor. The weekly magazine is
complemented by newyorker.com [[link removed]], a daily
source of news and cultural coverage, plus an expansive audio
division, an award-winning film-and-television arm, and a range of
live events featuring people of note. Today, The New
Yorker continues to stand apart for its rigor, fairness, and
excellence, and for its singular mix of stories that surprise,
delight, and inform._

_The weekly magazine is available in print, at newsstands, and
by subscription [[link removed]]. Digital
subscribers have access to our complete archive, which includes a
digital replica of every issue of the print magazine, from 1925 to
today._

* Rural America
[[link removed]]
* urban
[[link removed]]
* Native Americans
[[link removed]]
* settlers
[[link removed]]
* farming
[[link removed]]
* Corporate Agriculture
[[link removed]]
* Rural deindustrialization
[[link removed]]
* elections
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]