Those maps again
Agrarian Crusade
Don't call them categories!
Then there’s the example of Onondaga County, where Syracuse grew at the meeting of the Erie and Oswego Canals. This area was settled previous to the transportation revolution and changed because of it. But it was always commercial, because the economy was always dominated by the salt-works (a point Balstad slides by too easily). And then there are the towns in Margaret Walsh’s study of pork packing. Many of these became big before the railroads, and then declined in Chicago’s shadow (leading to Cronon again and Nature’s Metropolis). But it seems fair, in the middle west, to ask what the immigrants were expecting when they went there? There are several different groups to consider. First, there are foreigners. Then, among natives and foreigners, there are those who settled places before and after the arrival of railroads. And (maybe) people who settled places where rails weren’t going. People who went to farm, and people who didn’t. And, were wage laborers picky about whether they did farm work or industrial? Did Thernstrom & Knights’ mobile proletarians sweep through the countryside as well as the cities? What ideas did they carry with them?
I suppose, in the longer run, these are the beginnings of chapters. I hesitate to say categories, but I guess I can think of them as informal groups. We’ll see how many more jump out at me this semester as I read...
1900: Where were the Immigrants?
This is another Henry Gannett map from the Rumsey website. The legend reads: "Proportion of Whites of Foreign Parentage to Total Population." In other words, where were the immigrants in 1900?
The darker shading indicates more immigrant families. The orange "V" areas have 50% to 75% "Foreign Parentage" populations. The darkest, "VI" areas have greater than 75%.
Since immigrants and their children all have "foreign parents," I think these numbers can be taken to mean first and second generation people. So we're easily reaching back a generation, and looking at a more-or-less total pattern, rather than an immigration and settlement total for a single year or decade. This means, among other things, that there would be "Forty-eighters" among the Germans, famine survivors among the Irish, etc. So these dark areas may be places to look for Europe-inspired radicalism...
Old Maps are the BEST!
Rural history questions
- Do rural and urban places in a particular system develop symbiotically, sequentially, or in some other way? What is their relationship as they’re developing, and how does that affect their later relationship, and their ultimate character?
- What happens when a previous linkage is broken by a change in the fortunes of the city, loss of markets, etc.? When the country develops symbiotically with the city, it may tend to be more dependent on a staple crop or commercial product. The city is well diversified, because it’s the center of innumerable networks (one for each product, really), but the countryside or village might be connected to just one of them. What happens, if its city loses (or abandons) that market?
- Does the cultural construction of ideas about rurality and urbanity influence the way country and city interact, rather than actual experience? How is actual history remembered or forgotten, vs. stories from other places/times, myths, or downright fictions? Which ones influence opinion and inform politics, and how?
- Changing technology fosters different degrees of centralization (railroad/telegraph economies vs. highway/internet, for example). How do the roles of city and country change with technology? How does built-up capital slow or resist this change? (has anybody studied the effect of accumulated capital in mitigating change?)
from the Rural Populist
There is a real issue of perception of elitism, and it is one of ironies of our society that junk food being sold by multinational corporations like McDonalds and Kraft appears to be populist, and food grown by struggling, scrupulous farmers is regarded as elitist. And I think there is something wrong with this picture, that those agribusiness companies have seized the populist high ground. When you look at how that supposedly cheap, populist food is produced, it’s dependent on government handouts, it’s dependent on the brutalizing of workers and brutalizing of animals, and it suddenly appears in a very, very different light.
I was struck last semester, reading about the Country Life Movement and New Deal farm policy in the first decades of the 20th century, how there’s this idea that “farmers learned how to play the game, and became beneficiaries of government programs.” The idea is that these farmers, who had previously been populists (and self-reliant) all of a sudden shifted direction and became masters at “gaming” the system.
My suspicion (and I’ll probably do some research on this in the next year or so) is that there are two distinct groups of farmers. Between 1920 and 1930, America lost hundreds of thousands of medium sized farms, but gained thousands of really large farms. I think it was these early agribusinesses that learned to grab government money, and changed the rural game in ways we’re only now recognizing.
