Dec 2009
misleading binaries
12/30/09 14:55
Because, let’s be real. The City of Dreadful Night is more interesting as an artifact than as a poem. James Thomson’s life interests me, as does his vision of a nightmarish, dystopian London in the 1870s. But that does not in any way make me want to read the poem.
Does this make me a lowbrow, literalist, anti-intellectual materialist? Maybe, from a certain point of view. There’s a silk smoking-jacketed, punting-on-the-Cam, NPR-in-the-background perspective that likes its historical explanations laced with allusions to canonical literature. But that sort of thing leaves me wondering, was this really in the minds of the people in the story? Or is it just a shorthand way to tell the story to a particular type of audience? And, if it’s shorthand, what is it missing? That’s one thing Williams seems to have been keenly aware of: the tendency to reduce complexity and smear out ongoing evolution in an idea like “city” or “country” until it’s a handy, but misleading, archetype.
Individual/collective, rural/urban, all these binaries we use to understand the world. Joan Scott says “meanings are constructed through exclusions.” Any definition, she says, “rest[s] always...on the negation or repression of something represented as antithetical to it.” Why repression? Because identity is all about reducing a universe of words describing a thing to the two or three “important” ones that define it. But important to whom? When? Why?
Scott says “oppositions repress the internal ambiguities of either category.” (all this is in Gender and the Politics of History, p. 7) I’d say this binary view is particularly interesting when you’re looking at something like male/female or rural/urban. But it’s a simplification of the actual processes of identity formation and grouping. Identity is about taking adjectives and making them nouns. Grouping is about drawing boundaries between items that include these reified qualities and other items that do not.
So maybe I'll actually be spending my time thinking about how the "city" and the "country" interact. How country people go to the city. How doctors train in cities and then go work in the country. And then of course how resources flow. It's probably time to start reading Nature's Metropolis closely...
Field Reading List
12/21/09 16:18
I've added a new page called "Field Reading List," on which I'll list and say something about the books I'm reading for a "Field" in Rural History. This means that I'll be answering a question on Rural History during my comprehensive exam next fall.
Seems to me, we PhD students (not only at UMass, but everywhere) spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Figuring out what to read for fields is one of those areas. I'd love to see what other people are reading, and what they think about what they're reading. So, I'm putting my titles and thoughts out there...
Seems to me, we PhD students (not only at UMass, but everywhere) spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Figuring out what to read for fields is one of those areas. I'd love to see what other people are reading, and what they think about what they're reading. So, I'm putting my titles and thoughts out there...
The Rural Life Problem, 1908
12/13/09 11:54
Plunkett was an Irish aristocrat (born at Dunsany Castle, 3rd son of the 16th baron -- the author of The King of Elfland's Daughter was the 18th baron) who became a leading figure in home rule and developed the idea of Irish rural cooperatives. Interesting guy, might warrant a closer look.
Plunkett’s thesis in this book, which seems to have influenced a lot of American sociologists and County Lifers, is that “the city has developed to the neglect of the country,” and that of Roosevelt’s three pillars of Country Life, “better farming, better business, better living,” the business problems of farmers should be addressed first. (3, 12-13) Plunkett refers briefly to his experience in rural Ireland, and also to Denmark, which has come up so many times in these primary texts that it probably demands some attention.
Being an aristocrat, Plunkett has access to American leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and James Jerome Hill. He portrays these men as being genuinely concerned with “The Future of the United States” (title of a 1906 Hill speech I need to find a copy of), and especially with soil conservation. Plunkett argues for a strong connection between what he sees as the two key elements of Roosevelt’s administration, conservation and rural life improvement.
During the first phase of the industrial revolution, Plunkett says “economic science stepped in, and, scrupulously obeying its own law of demand and supply, told the then predominant middle classes just what they wished to be told.” (37) “Social and political science,” he says, “rose up in protest against both the economists and the manufacturers,” which, if true, might be an interesting way to look at the development of these disciplines. (39)
Interestingly for an analysis written a hundred years ago, Plunkett introduces the idea of a “world-market,” (40) and says rural neglect is caused in part by the fact that “reciprocity” between city and country “has not ceased; it has actually increased...But it has become national, and even international, rather than local.” (41) “Forty-two per cent of materials used in manufacture in the United States are from the farm, which also contributes seventy per cent of the country’s exports.” (41-2) But the complexity of new trade patterns and supply chains has hidden the mutual dependence of city and country. Plunkett concludes “until...the obligations of a common citizenship are realized by the town, we cannot hope for any lasting National progress.” (42)
If there is specific blame to be laid, Plunkett directs it not at the system as a whole, but at profiteers. “Excessive middle profits between producer and consumer may largely account for the very serious rise in the price of staple articles of food,” he says. But even though urban middlemen are to blame and the problem impoverishes rural people at the same time it aggravates poor city people, “the remedy...lies with the farmer” rather than with legislative action or government reform. (43)
Although he doesn’t explain how the system has managed to marginalize them, Plunkett suggests that excluding rural people from the political sphere has damaged democracy. Farmers’ experience of the cycles of nature, which Plunkett pictures as slower and less mutable than the commercial and industrial processes city people live with, give them a more balanced political sense. City dwellers’ “one-sided experience” may account for “that disregard of inconvenient facts, and that impatience of the limits of practicability, which many observers note as a characteristic defect of popular government.” (49) Plunkett also suspects farmers might be less amenable to “the cruder forms of Socialism...perhaps because in the country the question of the divorce of the worker from his raw material by capitalism does not arise.” (50-1) American farmers are not alienated from their means of production because most of them are proprietors (had this been a problem in tenant-farmer dominated Great Britain?). So even if they aren’t fully capitalists in the sense that urban industrialists are, Plunkett seems to say, at least they aren’t victims of capitalism in the same way urban wage-earners are. (Plunkett avoids any reference to the ethnic immigrant contribution to American life, with the exception of a subtle nod to the success his countrymen have had infiltrating urban politics)
Plunkett tries to call for “a moral corrective to a too rapidly growing material prosperity,” but he fails to identify the motivation for the “reckless sacrifice of agricultural interests by the legislators of the towns.” (54) The issue he avoids confronting directly seems to be the increasing unevenness of the prosperity he cites. Even in rural areas, the rewards are going disproportionately to the few. And in most cases, profits are captured by the middlemen, at the expense of both rural producers and urban consumers.
Suggesting that even though they have no public voice, farmers “keep a full stock of grievances in their mental stores,” Plunkett warns of “serious unrest in every part of the United States, even in the most prosperous regions.” (61-2) Compared to urban people, their “material wealth is unnaturally and unnecessarily restricted; their social life is barren; their political influence is relatively small. American farmers have been used by politicians, but have still to learn how to use them,” he says. (63) This is at least partly due, Plunkett believes, to the way the west was settled.
Based on his personal observations of the Middle West in the 1880s, Plunkett says “settlers, knowing that the land must rise rapidly in value, almost invariably purchased much larger farms than they could handle...they invented a system of farming unprecedented in its wastefulness. The farm was treated as a mine,” and soil fertility was turned into corn crops year after year, without fertilizer or rotation. (67) Though averse to blaming government, Plunkett does recognize the “opening up of the vast new territory by the provision of local traffic for transcontinental lines was an object of national urgency and importance...the policy of rewarding railroad enterprises with unconditional grants of vast areas of agricultural land,” he concludes, is “one of the evidences of urban domination over rural affairs.” (69-70)
“Under modern economic conditions, things must be done in a large way if they are to be done profitably,” Plunkett says, “and this necessitates a resort to combination.” (89) Combined effort has three benefits: economies of scale, elimination of “great middlemen who control exchange and distribution,” and political power. (90) For better or worse, he says, “towns have flourished at the expense of the country by the use of these methods, and the countryman must adopt them if he is to get his own again.” (91) But farmers, Plunkett admits, being “the most conservative and individualistic of human beings,” are unlikely to organize themselves in joint stock companies and hand over control to others. (94)
Plunkett’s solution, the farmers’ cooperative, acknowledges the fact that “when farmers combine, it is a combination not of money only, but of personal effort in relation to the entire business.” (96) While this description is not exactly accurate (farmers produce a standardized product, but there are limits to centralization and scale economies relative to say, steel production, so the economic comparison with industry is complicated), Plunkett is trying to emphasize that the “distinction between the capitalistic basis of joint stock organization and the more human character of cooperative system is fundamentally important.” (97) Compared to Ireland, where Plunkett had been instrumental in developing rural coops, “as things are, the [American] farming interest is at a fatal disadvantage in the purchase of agricultural requirements, in the sale of agricultural produce, and in obtaining proper credit facilities.” (114) Cooperatives could address each of those needs.
The long-term result of “better business,” Plunkett says, are “Better Farming and Better Living.” Cooperatives would begin a process of renewing rural social bonds, leading to a new neighborhood culture. Rather than trying to “bring the advantages of the city” to the country, rural communities would “develop in the country the things of the country, the very existence of which seems to have been forgotten.” “After all,” he says, “it is the world within us rather than the world without us that matters in the making of society,” once the physical necessities like clean water, medicine, and electricity have been made available by attending to “better business.” (127)
Plunkett is well aware that his “subject is rural, my audience urban.” (143) This may explain why his final chapter de-emphasizes the establishment of business-oriented cooperatives, and focuses instead on education and socialization. One point he does make is that existing rural organizations, the Grange, and the Farmers’ Union could all be enlisted into the cause of helping establish and support rural coops. It would be interesting to read further, and see if the Country Life Movement ignored this advice, and stuck with a top-down approach; and if this limited its reach and efficacy.
Countryside and Nation, 1916
12/11/09 17:07
Another of Danbom's primary sources. Vincent begins, “The world-war forces upon us the idea, if not the ideal, of nationality.” (1) This is indeed one of the ideas the war highlighted -- although in retrospect, perhaps not completely in the “heroic” and “strenuous” way Vincent meant. But for Vincent and his audience, individualism is the enemy of “community spirit.” “Can the farming population be counted upon to contribute to state and federal policies more than a local or class point of view?” he asks. “What can the governments of state and nation do to increase the efficiency of the rural population in its service to the United States?”
Vincent acknowledges there are “persons who feel the missionary spirit” who “may resent the idea that rural folk are to be exploited for national welfare. [Danbom quotes this, but without the next, qualifying, sentences] The reply is obvious. It is open to the countryside to raise similar questions about urban populations, and about all the organizations of the national life. The national point of view spares no individual, class, or function. Of each it asks: Is the work of the nation being done well or ill?” (3)
This is an interesting point. Relating it to Conkin’s criticism of Danbom, it does seem as if the point is not so much the Country Life Movement’s sinister plan to do this to country people, as Progressive statist technocracy’s plan to do this to EVERYONE. I’m amazed at how relevant some of the libertarian stuff sounds, in this context. This is what they're fighting. The “Organization” of American life cuts across rural/urban -- but maybe it’s not for nothing that pretty-much 100% of rural folks are classed with the urban underclass as “those against whom social control is directed.” They're the cogs in the machine.
Interestingly, Vincent goes on to ask, how can people be incented to do what the nation needs? Let’s make their lives better he says, so they’ll want to stay on their farms. “It is absurd to describe the rural population as...in any way degenerate or...a pathological problem. Talk of uplifting the countryside by sending out urban missionaries is at once pharisaical and irritating.” He even seems to appreciate the irony of his own position: “An omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent despot could reorganize the nation promptly, put each of us in his proper place, assign tasks, appeal to the requisite motives, and make our common life a marvel of team-play. No wonder that we sometimes long for Plato’s philosophers to come and take charge of us.” The interesting point here, is that Vincent seems to harbor no illusions of the “Invisible Hand” being able to achieve this. Does intelligence and sophistication excuse his choice of technocratic social control? Or has Danbom portrayed him a little too harshly? Vincent seems milder than I expected. “A social job does not get well and persistently done unless it insures these things,” he says: “a satisfying economic reward, a sense of mastery over a technique, an occupational pride, congenial comradeship, social esteem and recognition.” (4) The problem with country life, he says, is that rural people aren’t getting these things.
Vincent is another of the primary sources Danbom uses to suggest the Country Life Movement was a more-or-less sinister plot of urban technocrats to increase agricultural productions for the benefit of industry. But Vincent’s 1916 ASS speech seems more complicated than Danbom’s portrayal. In the conclusion of his talk, Vincent describes three possible futures of farming. In the first, tenants work land owned by absentee landlords. In the second, agriculture is industrialized. Vincent paints a vivid picture of “an agricultural corporation village...[where] every mechanical appliance is available. Overhead trolleys and grain chutes center in the barns and elevators...Every efficiency device is employed.” The result, Vincent says, is “the creation of a class of farm wage-earners...a heavy price to pay.” (8) Instead, Vincent hopes farmers will develop cooperative structures like those in Denmark, and farm intensively and scientifically to improve both their yields and their own value in the production process. This is precisely the concern with farmers’ wellbeing that Danbom accuses Vincent and other reformers of ignoring.
The situation was obviously more complicated and multidimensional than Resisted Revolution suggests. Does that more faceted view show us something important for the present moment? Is this a story that should be retold, once more with feeling and depth?
Country vs. City, 1916
12/10/09 21:43
Warren H. Wilson, “Country Versus City,” Papers and Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society, 1916
(Wilson was head of the Department of Country Church Work of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions)
This is one of the primary sources Danbom uses in Resisted Revolution. Wilson begins his remarks by saying “in 1910, 53 per cent of the people of the United States lived in communities of 2,500 or less.” (12) This population cutoff, still in use today, is important because “the rural population are predominantly of the older colonial stock; among them are few of the immigrants of recent years. Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants used to go to the country, but Poles, Lithuanians, Slavs, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Syrians, and Jews do not go to farms,” Wilson says. Thus the cities reflect their character, the country does not.
Wilson says Wilbert L. Anderson “has described the severe conformity of country people to one type as a result of the removal of those who have characters of greater variation to the cities.” (14) So, in addition to not being changed by exotic immigration, the country is homogenized by the loss of its own eccentrics. Farmers are so individualistic, Wilson suggests, (in spite of being completely homogenous) that according to Englishman Sir Horace Plunkett, they can only be organized in loose cooperatives based on “the natural partnership of the country neighborhood.” (14)
The divergence between country and city over “the general attitude of either population toward life as a whole” is based on the belief by both groups that city people are primarily consumers and country people are primarily producers. The rural “mental posture--what Professor Carver calls his ‘make-believe’--is that of a self-sufficing social life.” (15) Wilson argues that the two areas are dynamically interrelated, and that sociology needs to study and understand this relationship. He cites recent books (Warren’s Farm Management, Powell’s Cooperation in Agriculture and Weld’s Marketing of Farm Products) which he says are “a beginning of great promise.” (17)
Although he touches briefly on religion and public health, Wilson expends his greatest effort reviewing the classics (from the Bible to Cato) to illustrate that farmers work “in obedience to the demands of organized society.” (18) Not only that, he says, but urban markets “organize” otherwise chaotic rural life. Dairymen milk at 4 AM and 4 PM in response to urban demand. The influence of cities can be seen in the “higher proportion of industrious persons in the country populations of states like New York,” versus the “hours of idleness which prevail...in rural Arkansas.” (20) Nowhere does Wilson consider, however, the alienation of economic power that enables the city to control the country. His lack of interest in the lives of actual country people parallels his blindness to questions regarding the justice of the shift in economic and social control from the country to the city. Apparently, if the classics and the Bible supported domination of farmers by city elites, it was a good enough plan for America!
(Wilson was head of the Department of Country Church Work of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions)
This is one of the primary sources Danbom uses in Resisted Revolution. Wilson begins his remarks by saying “in 1910, 53 per cent of the people of the United States lived in communities of 2,500 or less.” (12) This population cutoff, still in use today, is important because “the rural population are predominantly of the older colonial stock; among them are few of the immigrants of recent years. Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants used to go to the country, but Poles, Lithuanians, Slavs, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Syrians, and Jews do not go to farms,” Wilson says. Thus the cities reflect their character, the country does not.
Wilson says Wilbert L. Anderson “has described the severe conformity of country people to one type as a result of the removal of those who have characters of greater variation to the cities.” (14) So, in addition to not being changed by exotic immigration, the country is homogenized by the loss of its own eccentrics. Farmers are so individualistic, Wilson suggests, (in spite of being completely homogenous) that according to Englishman Sir Horace Plunkett, they can only be organized in loose cooperatives based on “the natural partnership of the country neighborhood.” (14)
The divergence between country and city over “the general attitude of either population toward life as a whole” is based on the belief by both groups that city people are primarily consumers and country people are primarily producers. The rural “mental posture--what Professor Carver calls his ‘make-believe’--is that of a self-sufficing social life.” (15) Wilson argues that the two areas are dynamically interrelated, and that sociology needs to study and understand this relationship. He cites recent books (Warren’s Farm Management, Powell’s Cooperation in Agriculture and Weld’s Marketing of Farm Products) which he says are “a beginning of great promise.” (17)
Although he touches briefly on religion and public health, Wilson expends his greatest effort reviewing the classics (from the Bible to Cato) to illustrate that farmers work “in obedience to the demands of organized society.” (18) Not only that, he says, but urban markets “organize” otherwise chaotic rural life. Dairymen milk at 4 AM and 4 PM in response to urban demand. The influence of cities can be seen in the “higher proportion of industrious persons in the country populations of states like New York,” versus the “hours of idleness which prevail...in rural Arkansas.” (20) Nowhere does Wilson consider, however, the alienation of economic power that enables the city to control the country. His lack of interest in the lives of actual country people parallels his blindness to questions regarding the justice of the shift in economic and social control from the country to the city. Apparently, if the classics and the Bible supported domination of farmers by city elites, it was a good enough plan for America!
Back to the Land movement (1905-7)
12/09/09 08:04
Note to self: Check out Bolton Hall, Three Acres and Liberty. The quote in Danbom (p. 37) is interesting, because it points to a contested nature of suburbs.
“It is not the growth of the cities we want to check, but the needless want and misery in the cities, and this can be done by restoring the natural condition of living, and among other things, by showing that it is easier to live in comfort on the outskirts of the city as producers, than in the slums as paupers.”
Reminds me of growing up on much less than an acre in Attleboro, but eating fresh vegetables all summer and frozen garden produce and pickles during the winter. The suburbs were certainly different for my parents than the sterile wastelands many environmental historians make them out to be. And even where they are, maybe they didn’t have to be...
Another map from Daily Yonder
12/07/09 20:57
But if these are U.S. Department of Labor data, then they include only those people who are “currently” unemployed, right? The numbers don’t include people who have been out of work for so long that they’ve exceeded their benefits and fallen off the government’s radar.
So my question is, is this number roughly the same from city to county? Or are there more “invisible” unemployed people in one place or the other? Or in one region or another? It would seem like places that have been depressed for longer (say, the rust belt or the coal belt) might have more people who are missed in these unemployment numbers. It might also be true that a region with less of a boom & bust cycle might seem to have a lower unemployment rate than the people in that region feel they’re living with, because they haven’t just lost a pile of jobs with the onset of the most recent recession. So, these numbers are just a starting point...
Maps!
12/04/09 22:36
Maps, maps, maps. I love ‘em! Always have, since I was a kid -- A.E. Van Vogt notwithstanding (couldn't help the geeky reference to “Null-A” novels that stress the general semantics notion that “the map is not the territory”).
The various measuring authorities in the government (USDA’s ERS, the Census Bureau, the Statistical Abstract, etc.) have been working the last few years to redefine urban and rural. More on that later, but for the time being, the point is that they’ve introduced these things called “core-based” units. All the good measurements are done on a county-by-county basis, so the units are counties where there’s a “metropolitan” core population of at least 50,000. Or a “micropolitan” core of 10,000. From that, they create “combined statistical areas” that consist of a “core” and its feeder areas, tied to it by easy commuting routes to work, markets, etc. The result is a map that looks like this:
The purples are the combined statistical areas (CSAs). These are the cities and large towns it’s easy to call urban, and the surrounding counties that may look rural, but are economically tied to these centers. There are also cities and towns outside the CSAs. In Minnesota, for example, Duluth and Mankato (pop.s around 85,000 and 45,000, respectively) are not parts of CSAs. So it’s going to take some thinking to sort this all out.
But in the meantime, there are more colorful maps to look at! The fact that some of them contradict each other only adds to the fun!
This one, produced by the University of Illinois Regional Economics and Public Policy Group (REAP), suggests that over 300 rural counties are “more prosperous” than the national average. That’s interesting, and warrants a close look at the article backing up the map.
This next one, from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, claims “Rural areas across the country generally have seen more growth in employment than have cities.” But the map tells a different story. The “Growth” they’re talking about is actually a slightly smaller DECLINE in rural employment relative to urban employment in some areas. Hardly the happy news advertised in the headline. Especially since there are FEWER JOBS in rural areas, so you’d expect less decline. Or am I missing something?
And here’s one last map for today, to dispel any lingering doubts about how peachy the economy looks in the country. The New York Times built this map showing the increase in people receiving Food Stamps in each U.S. county. 14.6% of rural residents use Food Stamps (vs. 10.8% of urban folks). From 2007 to 2009, the number of people using Food Stamps rose by about 30%, although in many places, only half of those who qualify are actually getting Food Stamps. The cool thing about the NYT map is that you can drag your cursor over it, and the statistics for each county will pop up. It’s SCARY. Good job, NYT.
The various measuring authorities in the government (USDA’s ERS, the Census Bureau, the Statistical Abstract, etc.) have been working the last few years to redefine urban and rural. More on that later, but for the time being, the point is that they’ve introduced these things called “core-based” units. All the good measurements are done on a county-by-county basis, so the units are counties where there’s a “metropolitan” core population of at least 50,000. Or a “micropolitan” core of 10,000. From that, they create “combined statistical areas” that consist of a “core” and its feeder areas, tied to it by easy commuting routes to work, markets, etc. The result is a map that looks like this:
But in the meantime, there are more colorful maps to look at! The fact that some of them contradict each other only adds to the fun!
What do regular people think?
12/03/09 14:39
So I’m looking at the first couple of pages of Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America. Yeah, I know I should really be reading student papers or writing one of my two final papers for this semester. But I was curious. This is one of the books everyone in Environmental History mentions, like Raymond Williams The Country and the City (which I also bought this semester, and haven’t read yet).
In any case, Berry starts strong, claiming “as a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.” Berry compares the conquistadors’ conquest of America with America’s conquest of the moon; both filled with fantasy and avarice he says. But clearly there’s a difference.
An imperial technocratic bureaucracy sent two men to the surface of the moon in 1969. Although I remember the excitement and sheer adventure of this event, and myself sitting in front of a black-and-white TV explaining the technical details to my grandmother, that’s what it was. But not so much, the missions to the New World in the seventeenth century.
It took a lot of people to sail ships and establish colonies in the Americas. Doesn’t seem as easy, to say they all shared the motivations of the leaders. And even the leaders – what were their actual motivations? Even Cortes and Pizarro settled down, and became mayors of the towns they established. Cortes burned his ships; a pretty definite statement for a twenty-something young man to make about the old world and home.
In the north, where people came to start commercial agricultural colonies (Virginia) or religious communities (Massachusetts, Maryland), I have to wonder about the goals of the majority. Even for the Puritans, were they perhaps motivated just a little by the fact that there were limited opportunities back home? Even if we believe they were completely open about their own motives, are we to take the professed goals of colonist leaders as the reason everybody came to America?
If not, how do we get at the motivations and thoughts of the majority? The folks who in large numbers became the same rural people whose wishes and needs go largely ignored in the agri-business dominated countryside Berry is going to talk about throughout the book? Yesterday I was reading the beginning chapters of David Danbom’s Resisted Revolution. He was talking about the same thing: an “urban agrarian” agenda that motivated the Progressives’ Country Life Movement. So, it looks like this question of “what do rural people really think?” is going to be a recurring one.
Also this week, we talked about Rachel Carson in Environmental History. And again, on the drive home, I found myself wondering, how did actual farmers and country people react to this? Was it just a suburban-ecologists vs. urban-agrocorporate chemists type of thing?
In any case, Berry starts strong, claiming “as a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.” Berry compares the conquistadors’ conquest of America with America’s conquest of the moon; both filled with fantasy and avarice he says. But clearly there’s a difference.
An imperial technocratic bureaucracy sent two men to the surface of the moon in 1969. Although I remember the excitement and sheer adventure of this event, and myself sitting in front of a black-and-white TV explaining the technical details to my grandmother, that’s what it was. But not so much, the missions to the New World in the seventeenth century.
It took a lot of people to sail ships and establish colonies in the Americas. Doesn’t seem as easy, to say they all shared the motivations of the leaders. And even the leaders – what were their actual motivations? Even Cortes and Pizarro settled down, and became mayors of the towns they established. Cortes burned his ships; a pretty definite statement for a twenty-something young man to make about the old world and home.
In the north, where people came to start commercial agricultural colonies (Virginia) or religious communities (Massachusetts, Maryland), I have to wonder about the goals of the majority. Even for the Puritans, were they perhaps motivated just a little by the fact that there were limited opportunities back home? Even if we believe they were completely open about their own motives, are we to take the professed goals of colonist leaders as the reason everybody came to America?
If not, how do we get at the motivations and thoughts of the majority? The folks who in large numbers became the same rural people whose wishes and needs go largely ignored in the agri-business dominated countryside Berry is going to talk about throughout the book? Yesterday I was reading the beginning chapters of David Danbom’s Resisted Revolution. He was talking about the same thing: an “urban agrarian” agenda that motivated the Progressives’ Country Life Movement. So, it looks like this question of “what do rural people really think?” is going to be a recurring one.
Also this week, we talked about Rachel Carson in Environmental History. And again, on the drive home, I found myself wondering, how did actual farmers and country people react to this? Was it just a suburban-ecologists vs. urban-agrocorporate chemists type of thing?
