America's Pernicious Rural Myth: An Interview with Steven Conn

A couple weeks ago, I seeded " Why are trucks so big? " We had a pretty good conversation, which bled over into a another interesting conversation about "rurality", a subject I've been thinking a lot about since Mark from Wyoming lit me up on the topic a year ago. I had thought the subject kinda silly. I was wrong. It's important.

So when this original article came across my screen, just when the "big pickups" conversation was petering out, I was quick to seed it! And that, apparently, broke the NewsTalkers! I wasn't able to seed anything at all for a week. TiG fixed whatever was wrong... so I'll try again... for the fourth time!

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

When you think of rural America, what comes to mind? In his new book, Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn't , historian Steven Conn contends that what we imagine as "rural" is shaped by myths going back to Thomas Jefferson. American literature, political rhetoric, and mythology all frequently portray the rural as a pastoral Eden, a place apart from the forces of modernity. The appeal of slogans like Make America Great Again owes, in part, to the imagery of an unchanging and pure American locale: the small-town Main Street, the steadfast family farm, the mom-and-pop general store. Imagined rural American landscapes are defined just as much by what they omit, namely Native communities and nonwhite Americans, whose presence and persistence in rural places is elided by lily-white renderings of the rural American Dream.

Conn, a professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, urges readers to jettison myths about rural America, which obscure more than they reveal. In fact, he suggests, rural America itself is a fictional whole that fails to synthesize its fractal parts. Conn's major insight, however, is to suggest that rather than places apart, rural American communities were reshaped by the central forces of 20th-century US history—militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization—and not always for the better. By holding on to ideas of rural America as a pastoral locale apart from time, we fail to reckon with how the rural was fundamentally reshaped over the last century. As Conn quips, "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.'" By holding onto mythic ideas of the rural farm, to take just once example, we blind ourselves from accurately assessing what rural America is today, or what it becomes tomorrow.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Jacob Bruggeman (JB): In Lies of the Land , you attempt to convince Americans that many popular ideas about rural America are nothing but myths. What are the most pervasive and pernicious myths we hold about rural America?

Steve Conn (SC): Rural America is not a place apart. And it never has been. And I think in some ways, that is the biggest myth that I was trying to swing at when I wrote this book. As a piece of the cultural imagination, we think of rural America as somehow profoundly different from the metropolitan lives that 80 percent of us now live. The rural becomes a blank screen for Americans to project any number of their fantasies about the land, about community, about moral virtues on. And I think Americans have been doing that continuously since about 1789. I don't think any of that was true back then, and it certainly isn't true now.

JB: What set you on the path of researching this myth?

SC: When I started to write this book, I was reading newspapers and magazines like The Atlantic , and narratives of rural "crisis," "decline," and "despair" were everywhere. I read all these stories and none of them quite satisfied me. I thought, Okay, I'm going to sit down and I'm gonna write a book that really will explain what this rural crisis is all about. As I began to dig into it, as historians do, what I discovered is that this is the way people have always talked about rural America, in episodes including the 1980s, the 1950s, the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1880s. I scratched my head and thought, If the idealized rural American never existed, then the way we talk about the rural as a decline from some sort of Edenic past is the wrong way to think about it altogether. I realized that narratives about rural crisis seem to trap American discourse in a cycle of crisis and myth.

JB: The rural American, especially the farmer, is something like a foundational idea in the DNA of American thought. Where did the idea of the citizen farmer come from, and when did it become a potent ideology in our body politic?

SC: In some ways, Jefferson's the easy target. Jefferson really does write about farmers in exactly the terms you used. Jefferson preferred to call farmers the cultivators of the land, producers who were the most virtuous citizens and most wedded to liberty. That is virtually an exact quote. Put aside the irony that Jefferson never picked up a plow himself—he had about 120 slaves to do that for him. This idea is rooted in 18th-century ideas left over from Europe. Land ownership was the key to your economic and therefore social freedom. This was the difference between a feudal arrangement and the nascent United States. Land ownership was the way you turned peasants into citizens. Jefferson was at the forefront of reimaging this idea on a large continent. And of course, he buys about a third of it in the Louisiana Purchase to ensure his vision. But Jefferson wasn't able to see the way in which the economic activity of the Western world was already shifting toward urban activities. The world was shifting from a sort of mercantile economy to an incipient capitalist economy, which very quickly becomes an industrial economy, which very quickly therefore becomes an urban economy. By about the 1890s, give or take, the value of manufactured goods in this country exceeded the value of agricultural products. This was a shock to people, because aren't we a nation of farmers? No. We had become a nation of factories. Even as the American farmer was established in the 18th century, it was already a backward-looking idea. The myth was almost immediately taken up, not by farmers themselves or actual yeoman, but by the middle-class, middle-brow writers, ministers, critics, philosophers, and others. These groups projected the myth in mediums ranging from sermons in the 19th century to syndicated television programs of the 20th century.

JB: This mythology ends up erasing the most interesting political and economic facts about places we see as rural. What does the myth of rural America prevent us from seeing?

SC: We think of the industrial development of this country as an urban phenomenon. You think about Carnegie Steel plants in Pittsburgh or the Henry Ford River Rouge plant in Detroit, but American agriculture itself was heavily industrializing at the same moment. So even there, the contrast between the industrial city and the pastoral farm is wrong.

The data point I use with my students is that in 1865, when the Civil War is over, it took 61 hours of labor to produce an acre of wheat. By the 1890s, that's been reduced to three hours. And that's all because of industrial technologies. Economies of scale and mechanical labor took hold while observers extolled the virtues of independent and foreigner farmers. They were industrialists in their own way.

JB: Industrialization is only one force of history that transforms rural America. Others include militarization, suburbanization. You argue that sites like Midwestern missile silos shatter the idea of the rural as a place apart. What other examples reframe what we see as rural?

SC: Let's start with the military. I've been thinking about the military industrial complex for a very long time. I spent a lot of time in Quaker meeting house basements as one kind of peacenik or another. And I cut my teeth in the '80s in the nuclear freeze movement, back when people cared about nuclear weapons. I combine my interest in the military with efforts to incorporate the story of Native America into the standard historical narrative. If you tell American history with an attention to the military and Native America, the idea of rural American gets very fuzzy. Rural is distinct from wilderness. It implies something that's been domesticated, it implies something that's pastoral, cultivated, and good. Whereas the wilderness, certainly through the 19th century, the wilderness is frightening. The wilderness is where you go to get eaten by bears. So how did the American wilderness get transformed into the American rural? Well, lo and behold, that's a military process. The cavalry fought a lot of battles against Indians—between 1790 and 1890, there were, at least by one historian's count, more than 1,600 military encounters between Native people and federal and/or state troops. This is a period of continuous military conflict. It's not just the trans-Mississippi West either. It is Ohio. It's the removal of the Shawnee and the Delaware and the Miami out of Ohio and Indiana in the 1830s and their relocation to Oklahoma. This was a military process.

JB: But the government actors in this story aren't just troops on the ground with guns, right?

SC: Absolutely not. For example, I thought briefly about whether I ought to write an entire book about the Army Corps of Engineers, which is like the biggest octopus in American life. It dates itself to 1775. It's very proud that it predates the nation itself. It's the reason West Point is founded. And what they do in a grossly oversimplified way is control the water. And in the 19th century, that meant plotting out canals and dredging and straightening rivers, all of which was designed to promote commerce, all those pigs from Cincinnati, all of that wheat from Chicago. We're gonna put it on water and make this possible. In the 20th century, it has meant dam-building projects: flood control, irrigation, and hydropower. I don't know that there is a major watershed in the continental United States that hasn't been reshaped by an Army Corps of Engineers project. The military origins of rural infrastructure seems to me to be hiding in plain sight. When you drive through farms filled with crops, you don't stop to think about where the water's coming from. But it's coming from a reservoir built by the Army Corps in 1910. When you see this, the notion of a rugged individualist farmer fades away.

The army and the Department of Defense also operate a variety of bases, camps, and installations. Many are located almost exclusively in rural areas, and the communities that host them become economically dependent. If you take the acreage of all of these installations in the lower 48, it comes up to a footprint the size of the state of Kentucky. The military transforms the area it occupies. It reshapes the social, economic, environmental ecology of these places profoundly. At one point in the book, I even argue that communities become addicted to military spending.

JB: What about suburbanization?

SC: One of the things that you notice when you drive through places like the Midwest, where you and I spend a lot of our time, is the rapid transformation of rural land by real estate developers who build suburban developments unattached from any urban area. Cookie cutter housing around cul-de-sacs are often just plunked down in the middle of nowhere in what used to be a cornfield. And the people who live in there presumably commute long distances to jobs someplace or another. The amount of land being gobbled up by real estate development has taken off since the 1980s. And I guess I wanted people to think about what happens when a place you thought of as rural suddenly becomes suburbanized. There are all kinds of legal, economic, and political implications.

JB: By mid-century, many of the intellectuals you examine come to the same conclusion: Rural spaces had become part of a global hinterland. Beyond forces like militarization or suburbanization, what metahistorical forces might also explain the shift? Are capitalism, globalization, and liberal cosmopolitanism—to the extent these are separate phenomenon—contenders?

SC: At one level, this is about capitalism. There's no question about that. What I would say is that many rural Americans embraced capitalist possibilities. This is a difference between what's going on in this country and what has happened in others. If you're a Marxist, you observe a definite acceleration in America. Here's an example. Philadelphia gets founded in 1682, and very quickly becomes the second-largest English-speaking city in the world. It's a distant second to London. But nonetheless, it eclipses Boston almost immediately and the city is bigger than New York. This is happening for two reasons. One is Penn's religious tolerance. So you get all of these religious refugees coming from Europe. But it's also the case that Philadelphia sits in this unbelievably productive agricultural region. Peasants in England could become wealthy farmers in the Philadelphia area. The land is so good, you can grow almost anything. But by the middle of the 18th century, the price of bread is dropping in London because of the importation of Pennsylvania wheat. It's been a consumer-driven world since the 18th century—the global economy just moved a lot slower on sailboats. All of which is to say that the American "rural" has been on the cutting edge of international trade and nascent capitalist developments from the very beginning.

One of the things that struck me years ago, when I read Eric Hobsbawm's history of the "short" 20th century, a period he calls the "age of extremes," is his claim that the single most consequential development globally in the 20th century is the disappearance of the peasantry. Of course he's right. The process of urbanization is a global phenomenon. And that may well get subsumed also under the label of capitalism, but I'm not sure it's totally the same thing. So even as Jefferson was extolling the virtue of independent yeoman farmers, Americans were moving to the city. The graph line that charts urban growth here is remarkable. It never changes direction. And this is true globally, and perhaps even more so in places like Mexico City and Lagos.

JB: The rural mythology we are discussing doesn't just erase important processes of modern American history—it eases people from the American story. What are the origins of the rural's racial coding, and how has it evolved over time?

SC: When you think about rural as that blank screen onto which we project a variety of fantasies now, the fantasies are essentially Midwestern and white. We think about the farmstead and Ma and Pa Kettle with the cows and the pigs and so on and so forth. But there are lots of different kinds of rural. What changes if we investigate Native America as rural? Today, probably a majority of people who are registered as Native live in urban areas, just like the rest of us. But the fact remains that reservation land is generally rural. What does it mean if we really start talking about the rural in Native terms? Likewise, how does our understanding of the modern South change if we look at how rural areas change as a consequence of the Great Migration and the consequent loss of Black populations from those areas? I think there are all kinds of research projects waiting to happen if we acknowledge the multiplicity of rural.

JB: We're discussing all the differences the rural myth disguises. But in showing how the rural has been a place apart in American history, do you run the risk of drawing too close a parallel with the urban?

SC: I don't want people to come away from this book thinking it's a call to an urban-rural Kumbaya. There are differences. One of the myths about rural is that it's the place that never changes. And in a rapidly changing society—owing to capitalism, globalization, secularization—it's a place people choose to go because they believe it hasn't changed. I think some rural people have kind of bought into this notion as well, so when things change in rural areas, they create a lot more backlash and anxiety. I was talking to the journalist Brian Alexander, who's written some really terrific stuff also about small-town Ohio, and he was telling me about his interview with a Trump voter in Lancaster, Ohio. He asked her why she was voting for Trump, and she said she wanted it to "be like it was." This is just one anecdote, but I think it's emblematic of toxic nostalgia. Nothing ever goes back to the way it was. And when you start building a worldview on that notion, I think things get nasty pretty quickly.

Rather than thinking about rural versus urban, we ought to think about dense versus less dense. One of the things we recognize now is that density brings more efficiencies. Population density is more efficient economically and in a host of other ways. So once upon a time in the 19th century, if you got cancer, you died. And it didn't matter whether you were in New York or Ottumwa, Iowa. Now, in the 21st century, if a New Yorker gets cancer, she'll probably survive. But if you get cancer in Eastern Kentucky, where health care provisons are worse, your chances are slimmer. Living in rural America today has become a much chancier proposition. Our expectations and standards of living have risen in ways that are simply too expensive to fund in rural areas.

The other thing that I do think shapes rural politics differently than metropolitan politics is Protestant Christianity. In many rural areas, the church is the only form of community gathering. There's no more train station. The Odd Fellows Hall has closed. Nobody's unionized anymore. Ethnic clubs are shuttered. So churches function as community centers. And in many of these churches a right-wing version of Protestantism is proliferating. When I drive through the town of Camden, Ohio—the birthplace of Sherwood Anderson—on my way to teach at Miami University, the newest, biggest building in town is a Southern Baptist Church. Southern-inflected Christianity is spreading across the rural North, and I think folks are being fed a very conservative political ideology. Does that mean that they swallow it hook, line, and sinker? Of course not. But I think religious politics are a dimension of difference between the rural and metropolitan life that hasn't been adequately explored.

JB: The rural American mythology has seemingly found new avatars in the vice presidential candidates for 2024, J. D. Vance and Tim Walz. At the very least, the parties think rural American credentials with a dose of populist appeal can swing the national electorate. What do these figures say about the rural myth's fate in the 21st century?

SC: I have lived in rural places. I have lived in urban places. And I've been dealt with by kind and generous people and nasty small-minded people in both places. I don't think there is any particular set of rural values distinct from the rest of the country. But the other dimension of the rural myth is the symbol of masculinity.

This election was a referendum on masculinity and gender roles. That's why Vance's comments about cat ladies weren't off message. That is the message. This is why candidates perform their masculinity. This is all tied up in the rural myth. You see this in that bullshit song, "Try That in a Small Town." I thought, oh, is this another sad song about drug use? Because you can get all the drugs you ever want in a small town now in America. But no, it's the same sort of nonsense about toughness and how we take care of our own and so on and so forth. The relationship between rural and toxic masculinity is very clear right now.

JB: Beyond tough-guy Midwestern dad politicians, what will reshape the future of rural America?

SC: We face a choice. If we want to somehow maintain the viability of rural life, low-density life, then we're going to have to subsidize the hell out of it. Maybe we decide that our national values and identity are such that it's important that people live out in the country, and the rest of us ought to make sure that they also have schools and health care and grocery stores. But we may decide that rural subsidies aren't a very good investment of our national resources, in which case we ought to be thinking about these questions in a different way.

Here's the analogy I'm going to throw at you. Take or leave it. American cities hit a kind of rock bottom in the 1980s. Crack and fiscal crises and everything else, you know that story. The 1980s, at least in the midsection of the country, is the decade of the farm crisis, right? Willie Nelson's farm aid project started in 1985 and farmers became charity cases. Okay, one response to the urban crisis was, well, let's summarize it as the Congress of New Urbanism founded in the early 1990s. The congress rethought how we do cities and pushed to undo some of the mistakes of the mid-20th century. For better or worse, it won the battle for how we think about cities. Nowadays it's bike lanes, farmers' markets, and mixed-use development as far as the eye can see.

In other words, many cities reinvented themselves, however unevenly, at the moment that they were in crisis. That didn't happen in rural places. Where is the Congress of New Ruralism? Where are the new ideas today? We can't just sit around saying, gee, let's just make it the way it used to be.

This article was commissioned by Charlotte E. Rosen .

Featured-image photograph by Jed Owen / Unsplash (CC0 1.0)