Dan's Rural History Blog

Railroad Land Grants

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-07-14T22:23:59-04:00

Click the map for a bigger view

Robert S. Henry
“The Railroad Land Grant Legend in American History Texts”
1946

Henry said the public (especially students reading high school and college texts) has been misled by accounts of “huge,” “breath-taking” tracts of land given to railroad companies out of the public domain. The truth, he says, is that much less land was actually given (only about 9.5% of the continental U.S.), the government ultimately got a good return on it (in the form of increased value of the rest of the land due to railroads going through, and also in special government freight rates), and the social/political/military benefits of national unity outweigh any costs, anyway. The old maps, he says, mislead the public by drawing broad swaths across the west, when actually the railroads were only granted half the area drawn (in alternate sections, like a checkerboard), and in any case many of the grants were forfeited because no one built railroads to qualify for them. In all, only about 131 million acres had been given to the railroads, according to Henry. Since the 1884 presidential election, he said, “when the Democratic party issued a campaign poster featuring what purported to be a map of lands granted to railroads,” the issue had been a political football and the facts had given way to legend.

Henry’s article appeared in the 1945 Mississippi Valley Historical Review, and set off a storm of protests (many of them carried by the same journal, and reprinted in Carstensen, The Public Lands). David Maldwin Ellis suggested that 49 million acres of land grants by the states were relevant in the discussion. (145) And, even if granted lands had been forfeited or released, they still counted as grants (and they had still made those lands unavailable to settlers for many years - in some cases well into the 20th century). The real extent of the land granted was slightly over 223 million acres (or nearly 17% of America, 146). Ellis pointed out that “The General Land Office withdrew from public appropriation not only the primary limits [of the land grants] as required by law, but also the lands within the indemnity limits...The railroads sometimes tried to oust genuine homesteaders who had made their selections before the location of the railway route.” (146-7)

Fred A. Shannon called Henry’s article “a piece of special pleading for the current lobby of railroad interests to secure the repeal of clauses in the land-grant acts...for rate concessions on carrying government traffic.” (Henry was assistant to the president of the Association of American Railroads when he wrote his article, 157) The big black swaths across the map, Shannon said, should be widened “by 50 per cent so as to show the indemnity zones.” “It must not be forgotten,” Shannon said, “that until 1887 settlement was excluded from government sections...and from 50 per cent of their width clear beyond the zones proper.” “The railroads got just about one-tenth of the United States and for years restricted settlement in three-tenths of the United States,” Shannon concluded. “This ratio is much higher in the West, where most of the grants lay.” (158)

I think this series of articles says some interesting things about how history is sometimes done, and about what we need to be wary of when reading. In the first place, even taking Henry’s numbers, railroad land grants were breath-taking. Nearly ten percent of the land area of the nation? More, in unsettled areas, where pioneers were competing for farmlands. And an area at least double that (or nearly 1/5 of the American land mass) held back from sale? That’s pretty extreme. Second, whether the government got it’s money back is not the question. Everyone seems to have lost sight of the fact that private, corporate, for-profit railroad development with government handouts wasn’t the only way transportation, or the American West, could have been developed. And it’s not like there weren’t people saying this at the time (A.M. Todd, for example). We just don’t remember them. What does that say about the textbooks that are being written and read for high-schoolers now?

The Pioneer Experience

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-07-05T16:06:36-04:00

Spent the 4th of July with the whole family, as usual. But to change things up a little, we all spent the weekend in a log cabin in upstate New York, living as if it was 1802 (or so) on the Pioneer Farm at the Genesee Country Village and Museum.

We all lived in a single room that probably measured no more than 14x20 feet. We slept in beds we’d roped ourselves, on mattresses we’d stuffed with straw in the barn. We cooked on an open hearth, thankfully with the help of Aunt Marie, the Director of the Pioneer Farmstead.

The Museum was open over the Fourth weekend, of course. So technically, we were one of the exhibits. And this place gets a LOT of traffic (a regular patron told me he’d recently been to Williamsburg, and was disappointed because Genesee had set his expectations so high. I’ve never been to Williamsburg, but I can believe it -- Genesee is that good). But before opening at 10:00 AM and after closing at 5:00, we had the Village to ourselves. We fetched our own water, fed the animals, read (and wrote with quills and ink) by candle and firelight, learned how to shoot a 1793 “Brown Bess” flintlock, and even made a few nails at the village blacksmith shop. But that's just the tip of the iceberg (ice would have been nice...did I mention it was HOT!!)

The place is fantastic, but it’s the people that really make it great. The clothes were REALLY HOT!! I’ll be writing more about the whole experience, and setting up a permanent page with slide-shows and videos. That may take a few days, as we sort through the thousand-plus pics and videos we took...but in the meantime, here were our thoughts as we were leaving, before we even changed out of our HOT period costumes:

Summer Vacationing

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-06-28T11:47:24-04:00

Not working, the last week or so. Will resume in another week or so.

Reading lots of books...

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-06-05T15:17:44-04:00

So I’ve been thinking. Being an old guy, I hate wasting time, doing things that don’t support my own agenda. I’ve already had a career full of doing that. This one’s for me. So I’m thinking about how to make this field reading as useful as possible for my program, which is establishing rural history as a field that addresses the issues I think are central to it. The best way to do this is probably to write a textbook that hits all these areas. I got the idea from Clark and Kulikoff, I suppose. The comprehensive exam should be a relatively minor thing, if I can integrate everything I read in the next year into a book...

To keep track of what I’ve read, what I need to read, and how these things are all connected, I’m using a single Tinderbox map as a master list. I was making individual maps of the lineages of particular books, which I still think is interesting. But I think I need to be able to see the whole thing at once. After a first pass, it looks like this (click on it to see a big view):

The horizontal color bars are thematic: green is agriculture, red is the capitalist transition, tan is business history, etc. The vertical bars are decades. There’s a historiographical (what stories did historians prefer?) element to this as well as a historical (what happened?) element. Zooming in, I can see the books (blue) and articles (gray) that I’ve read (light) and still need to read (dark). The links are mostly just citations at this point. I got most of these titles by mining the bibliographies of about a dozen core books. As I find more titles, I can add them; and I can always delete ones that turn out to be less useful than I’d hoped. After time, the links will be more about influence, agreement, argument, themes, etc.

The point of all this is to help me understand the history and the historiography, and to form an outline from which I can easily assemble arguments and narrative. Each entry, after I read the book, has my notes and responses, as well as the link information describing where the book or article fits into the big picture. In the next week or so, I’m going to be finished reading about the “market revolution.” At that point, I’ll be able to test out the system, and see if I can assemble a “chapter” from these notes and this map.

New Reading List

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-05-28T23:45:01-04:00

Comprehensive Exams in less than 12 months. So, it's time to be serious about the reading. More or less.

I put up a new (tentative) list, covering all my North American reading. I think I'll keep the British reading separate, on the Radicals site. The titles on this list will actually be split across two official "fields," but they really go toward the same basic goal. So they're together on this list, at least for now.

Going to New Harmony!

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-05-21T07:51:35-04:00

The Communal Studies Association is having their 2010 Conference at the site of Robert Owen's New Harmony community in Indiana. I’ve been invited to give a paper there, about utopian communities at home. I’ll have to double-check the exact wording of my proposal, to see what the scope of this will be; but as I remember it I said I wanted to talk about Charles Knowlton and his friends, who started a Free Enquirers’ Society in Greenfield. My interest was in people who felt themselves to be outside of the mainstream, who had assimilated some of the ideas people like Owens implemented at places like New Harmony, but who stayed home.

Knowlton was a friend of Robert Dale Owen, and probably knew Frances Wright (Nashoba). As a freethinker and a doctor, he had a strange status in Franklin County society. He and his Free Enquirer Society friends (men and women, because the Society considered women full members with all the rights of their male counterparts) were clearly interested in utopian ideas well outside the mainstream of their Western Massachusetts communities. But what did they do about it? Did the fact that they stayed home give them any influence on their home communities? Politics? Culture? I’m looking forward to talking about this, and to hearing what other people have been thinking about intentional communities this fall.

Pioneer House

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-05-15T19:53:17-04:00

So the family is going to spend a long weekend this summer in upstate NY in about 1805. We’re going to the Genesee Country Village and Museum. Staying in the Pioneer (log) House. Living like people in 1805. Steph applied a month or so ago and we sort-of forgot about it until she got a call today. They normally don't let families with little kids go -- but what they heck! They raised kids in this house. We have to send them our measurements for period clothing. During business hours, we're one of the museum exhibits. Should be an interesting weekend!

Local Money

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-05-05T07:47:53-04:00

Just when I was beginning to lose interest in Adbusters, I was flipping through a backissue and came across a little article about a local currency project happening in western Massachusetts called Berkshares. This is interesting to me, because I’m doing a lot of research right now into the period (between the Jacksonian Era and the Civil War) when local currency abounded.

The rural merchants that I’m studying spent a lot of their time getting credit notes on inventories, drafts on consignments to urban merchants, etc. And then converting these instruments to forms of currency they could use to pay local farmers, that the farmers could in turn use to buy stuff from them, other merchants, and each other. They worked with a dozen banks throughout their region, as well as many of the local rich men who had money laying around or were willing to endorse their notes. Later in their careers, a couple of them even started their own banks.

I think these guys really created a cash economy in their region. But, contrary to some of the histories I’ve been reading about the “transition to capitalism,” I don’t see them as outsiders, imposing some alien, urban (and corrupt, or corrupting, many of the histories imply) economic system on these poor, unwary rural folk. In the first place, these merchants are rural folk. And not only that; they’re popular. People like them. Sure, they get into occasional beefs with their neighbors -- but that doesn’t seem to be that rare, and it doesn’t seem to alienate them from their society. I’m going to keep digging at this, and see what more I find to back up my observations so far.

So, anyway, there’s this group of people in this region of the Berkshires around Great Barrington and Lee, who have decided to print and circulate their own banknotes. They’ve put about $2,500,000 into circulation, according to the E.F. Schumacher Society. They redeem them at 95% of the value of a U.S. Dollar, which they promote as meaning Berkshares users get a 5% discount on everything they buy with Berkshares (since retailers only list prices in US$, and take Berkshares at face value). The bargain for the retail merchants is that Berkshares are local currency, so their users are making a commitment to buy locally.

According to another little article in the same Adbuster issue, 68% of money spent in locally owned retailers stays local (mostly in the form of payrolls and taxes), versus 43% of the money spent at box stores or big chains. The effect is obviously enhanced if you can also buy stuff that is produced locally (and not surprisingly, local producers, artisans and service people are big supporters of Berkshares), but even if you buy a mass produced product at a local shop, you can do it with Berkshares. They look nice, too. And I’ve gotta believe they feel like money, since for generations Dalton Massachusetts has been the source of the paper used in US$ greenbacks.

So what is this capitalism, anyway?

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-05-03T21:21:59-04:00

Merrill, M. (1995). "Putting "Capitalism" in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature." The William and Mary Quarterly 52(2): 315-326.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2946977

Merrill begins with Hartz, Hofstadter, and Schlesinger Jr., revisionists who he says “rejected the Progressive emphasis on the important role a transition to capitalism played in American history.” (315) For these revisionists, he says, the American colonists arrived as full-fledged capitalists, ready to participate in the market economy.

The error in this thinking, Merrill says, is in equating the market economy with capitalism, and people’s willingness (or eagerness) to participate in it with an embrace of capitalism. This is an error in definition, he suggests, that has been continued by historians like Appleby and Kulikoff (interestingly, from opposite political directions). When James Henretta describes “a sophisticated, indigenous capital market distinguished by the number and complexity of financial instruments in circulation,” Merrill doesn’t disagree that’s what was happening. But he suggests it might be something other than what we normally define as capitalism. (319)

Why does the definition matter? And why is it important for me?

Well, Kulikoff, for example, builds his story around a group of immigrants who “migrated to North America in an attempt to stay a step ahead of what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation,’ or the appropriation by capitalists of the ‘means of production’ (especially land) of small producers--in effect, to escape capitalism.” (322) These immigrants became yeoman farmers, but they were still “embedded in capitalist world markets,” so the result was inevitable.

Another problem is that equating capitalism with markets creates periodization: we “see the prosperity that followed the Revolution as a sign of an emergent, radically new, capitalist order rather than as the expansion of a dynamic, profoundly anticapitalist, and democratic older order” which Merrill believes it to be. (323) This is important for me, because the guys I’m researching seem to have a foot in both camps. They’re merchants, but they’re not necessarily the protocapitalists they ought to be if the distinction between capitalism and non- or anti-capitalism is viewed through the regular lens.

Merrill doesn’t propose an exact definition to replace the broad, sloppy one he opposes. But it clearly has a political element. People “did not ask whether there should be a market; they asked who would control it and which social class would reap the lion’s share of its benefits.” (324) Of course, this is what they’re still asking; that’s the point. “To equate capitalism with any market economy,” Merrill says, discredits opposition. Any critique is “fundamentally wrongheaded and says, in effect, that...the only acceptable alternative to capitalism is a society without markets.” (325)

So it seems like it would be a good idea, rather than doing a history that says “these guys were sort-of precapitalist, and these other guys were sort-of capitalist,” to try to describe what they actually did and said, and see if they felt they were allies or adversaries. There are still fights and lawsuits -- tons of them, in fact. But the players didn’t seem to be fitting into their roles the way they were supposed to. Maybe the way to go about this is to try to figure out what groups these people thought they fit into, and why.

see also

Henretta 1998: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124895

1994 Panel Discussion: http://www.jstor.org/stable/494769

Speculators or developers?

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-05-03T21:16:32-04:00

Wyckoff, W. (1988). The developer's frontier : the making of the western New York landscape. New Haven, Yale University Press.

Historical Geographers are another group fascinated by Turner’s frontier thesis. Wyckoff focuses on land developers and resident land agents. Their activities, he says, “directly effected the frontier settlement pattern,” and “became an enduring legacy on the landscape, especially in the form of surviving survey lines, village locations, and road networks. That palpable imprint on the land is largely unrecognized and uncelebrated,” and Wyckoff believes “existing theories of frontier settlement...do little to interpret in any penetrating way the impact of these promoters, investors, and developers on the making of the American landscape or on the evolution of American culture.” (4)

Wyckoff acknowledges challenges made to the standard Turnerian model of frontier evolution (the one that recapitulates the evolution of western civilization), especially those of Paul Wallace Gates and A.M. Sakolski, “who began his work The Great American Land Bubble with the dramatic words, “America, from its inception, was a speculation.’” (7) But the derogatory tone surrounding their treatment of speculators is misplaced, he says. Because it links the frontier with eastern (and even international) investors and capital markets, “the presence of the land speculator complicates and to some extent contradicts aspects of the classic Turnerian model.” But Wyckoff insists “the speculator’s frontier is just as sharply distinguished from the developer’s frontier, in which land agents were committed not only to promoting and selling land but also to reshaping and transforming the landscape in a manner that would attract settlers and would endure on the visible scene for decades.” (8)

Wyckoff also suggests, citing Douglass C. North, R.D. Mitchell, and others, that the development he is going to describe is tightly bound to commerce with urban centers, in a way that seems to anticipate central place theory -- or to imply that developers, if not immigrants, had a similar idea in mind. Wyckoff tries to bridge a gap between theory and observation and answer an important question, by suggesting that the agents of this change were the developers whose “decisions shaped the course of settlement and the subsequent look of the land.”

William Cooper’s Guide to the Wilderness is probably worth a look, as well as William Cooper’s Town.

Cool Tools

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-04-24T14:23:58-04:00

Okay, I admit to still being impressed by technology. While I don’t think tools are more important than work, I think a good set of tools makes the work easier, better, and more enjoyable.

I’ve just started using Tinderbox. For a long time, I was trying to convince myself that Endnote was really all I needed (yeah, I know. Need is a relative term. I do have a pencil and a pile of 3x5 cards, so I really don’t need any of this). Endnote, after all, is a killer reference app. You can import from just about everyplace, you can sort in complicated ways and save the searches. Attached to a Word outline, you can sort-of represent the way books and ideas network through, say, a historiography.

But not really.

I resisted Tinderbox for quite a while. The learning curve is very steep, I’ve read. There’s a problem with images in the present version on the Mac. It isn’t clear to me how to create a page that incorporates a timeline with a sort-of “internet-cloud-diagram” that will allow me to fly through my data, turn on the types of links I want to look at (responses, disagreements, lineages of ideas, etc.)...I’m not saying Tinderbox doesn’t do this. Actually, I suspect it does; but that it will take some time to get there.

In the meantime, I’m really happy with what I have figured out how to do, so far. I can map the bibliographies (or the parts I’m interested in) of the books I read. I can group the books by topic and put them on a timeline (I hadn’t noticed, from looking at the biblio in the book, for instance, how many of Patricia Limerick’s secondary sources were published in the ‘70s). I can easily find the books that keep popping up on everybody’s biblio, and promote them to my own field reading list.

I'm really impressed so far. I'm thinking of each of my maps of individual books is like one 2D layer -- when they all get slapped together, I'll have a 3D historiography.

And this is just day three, and the comps reading. The primary material...it’s going to be insane.

No England trip this year

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-04-10T17:28:46-04:00

It turns out I won’t be going to England for the first European Rural History conference in September.

They ran out of space, and had to uninvite one or more of the people whose papers they’d previously accepted. Really.

So I won’t have a chance to go to the Bishopsgate Institute and look at the Bradlaugh files this fall. Well, maybe the following fall, after I’ve sold that project. I can write a proposal without the Bishopsgate material, after all.

As far as Rural History 2010 goes, it looks like there won’t be much North American representation there. I was hoping to get a better idea about how Europeans and members of the British Commonwealth do rural history. But based on the conference schedule, it looks like they do a lot of stuff that isn’t really that good a fit with what I’m interested in doing. So I can see why they thought my paper might be one they could afford to lose.

Life goes on. The change of plans will give me a chance to get to the Pacific Northwest and finish my research for this Dissertation/book project. Probably a better idea at this point, anyway.

The good news is that the family will be represented in England anyway this fall. Steph's hat has been selected to be in a fashion show and on display at the British hat museum! Story here.

Making Money

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-03-24T20:29:23-04:00

Illustration of a Canal Boat, ca. 1845, from the preprinted bill of lading form used by an Erie Canal shipping company.

It struck me on the drive down to campus today that one of the big social "value-adds" of the people I was researching last week (who, among other things, were millers and storekeepers) is that they spent an inordinate amount of time and energy getting their hands on money. Not in the sense that they were greedy; but in the sense that there just wasn’t a lot of cash around, and in order to run a couple of mills and a country store, you need cash.

I recall that Cronon sort-of races by the country storekeepers, as does Margaret Walsh in her book on meat-packing. Storekeepers were really only of interest because some of them went into pork packing as a full-time specialty in Walsh. And in Cronon, they’re mentioned primarily as retailers to hinterland consumers, who are ultimately pushed out of business by rural free delivery and Montgomery Ward.

Based on the letters I’m still sorting through, it seems my subjects (two brothers raised by a storekeeper, who beginning in their teen years partnered in operating two stores and three mills, as well as several other businesses) spent a lot of time writing notes and letters of credit on inventories and receivables, and managing widespread credit relationships linking farmers, urban grain brokers, and suppliers. Because during this period (after the end of the Second U.S. Bank in 1836 and before Demand Notes and Greenbacks in 1861 and 1862) there wasn’t a national currency, the supply of money in this rural area seems pretty limited. As a result, these storekeepers had to maintain relationships with a large number of local, state-chartered banks. A couple of these banks went under -- one in the 1839 panic, one later through embezzlement. Ultimately, each of the brothers ended up owning his own bank. In a sense, they were making money: creating currency and bringing their region into the cash economy.

Got some advice on a couple of books and articles to look at, to try to get a grip on how historians think about these storekeepers. Christopher Clark (The Roots of Rural Capitalism and Social Change in America), Martin Bruegel (Farm, Shop, Landing), and a bunch of articles by Daniel Vickers. From there, I may be able to decide if I’ve come across something new and interesting, or just a complicated and well documented instance of something already well understood. Another question will be, do regular people understand this or even know anything about it? And, does it illuminate the present in any interesting ways that might make it worth bringing to public attention?

Starch is the enemy?

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-03-21T08:36:11-04:00

The Daily Yonder posted an article by a Doctor Fine, who's calling for people to drop starches from their diets. He makes an interesting, thought-provoking and generally plausible argument. He says that over the years changes in the USDA's food recommendations have been based more on the needs of agribusiness than American nutritional concerns. Of course, just because some agribusiness oligarchs were pushing processed starches, doesn't mean we should react by eliminating all starchy foods from our diets. The appropriate response might be eliminating highly processed foods, fast foods and junk foods, as one of the commenters says.

Personally, I like the occasional potato with my occasional steak. So I try to get organic, locally grown foods, and cook them myself. I also like potatoes in my curry. I like baking bread. And I like some pasta under my homemade red sauce.

The year-round availability of fresh fruits and veggies has environmental costs as well, as we're all aware. Seems like a self-sufficient family farm (if that's the goal, or even just the ideal) might include some potatoes in the root cellar, even if it doesn't go all the way to growing its own grain for bread-making.

Spring Break

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-03-19T15:22:30-04:00

Went on a spring break research trip. Took me, among other places, to Cornell. Decades since I’d been there. Things looked familiar, but there was a lot more to the campus than last time I was there.

More on the research in the not-too-distant future.

Hill Towns of Northern New England

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-03-08T09:27:45-05:00

Started Harold Fisher Wilson’s The Hill Country of Northern New England. It’s beginning as expected, with a description of Thomas Nixon Carver’s five stages of New England agriculture. Wilson uses a seasonal metaphor for his narrative, beginning with Summer, 1790-1830. This is the age of self-sufficiency, which is followed by a fall attributed to the railroads and “external causes of unrest.” It’s interesting that in 1936, Wilson seems to be turning a corner from a Progressive/New Deal sort of optimistic elitism to a new social history concern with “those who stayed at home.” (4)

This will probably be fairly interesting, since Wilson is supposed to be a lifelong New Englander with deep knowledge of the place and people. The early pages reiterate a lot of the standard structure. The soil is thin and rocky, so “tillage is not profitable under modern conditions.” (5) But does this mean farmers were actually trying to compete head-on with western staples? Why do we generally assume they weren’t astute enough to recognize their disadvantages and choose to do something they were more competitive at? The later chapters seem to talk a lot about sheep and dairying -- we’ll see if the farmers get to be agents of this change, or if it’s just something that happens to them.

Wilson introduces the population question by remarking on the beginning of a trend in population loss as early as the decade from 1790 to 1800 (first two census decades), but accelerating in the 1820s-30s. My question, after looking at the Ashfield census is, did these towns have a loss in households? Or just in total population? Once these townships were fully occupied (all the viable farmland divided and distributed), it seems almost inevitable that a homestead farming community was going to produce too many sons within a generation or so. At that point, net outmigration is virtually guaranteed, until the “pioneer generation” stops having kids. Wilson mentions that although people in the 1790s believed many farms had been abandoned, they were in fact “unoccupied,” they “continued to be held by actual owners who paid taxes on them.” (9) Does this imply a different attitude toward these properties on the part of their owners, from the declension story we see?

First glance at the data

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-03-06T16:27:23-05:00

First thoughts about the census numbers I've been staring at:

I looked at a New England hilltown between the years 1790 and 1840. The town was established in the 1760s, and mostly settled in the late 1760s and 1770s, after the danger of Indian raids diminished. By the first national census in 1790, there were 257 people counted as heads of household. The town was nearly full, and the family* count ranged from 274 to 298 throughout the rest of this half-century.

First pass at the data, it looks like there aren’t many people present at the end, who were there at the beginning. We start with 257 families, and end up with 289. As you’d expect, although many of the same extended families are represented (the Williamses, the Smiths, the Phillipses, etc.), only 15 actual heads of households make it across the decades from the first census to the last. In 1840, there were 274 new families who hadn’t been there fifty years earlier, and nearly all of the original families were gone.

Of course, you say. The old guys died, and their sons took over. This fits right into the mainstream interpretation of rural America. And you’d be right, but only to a point. 132 of the old guys did in fact die. And 181 of the people living in this town over these years are sons who stayed in town. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

A first-to-last comparison that looks at only the 1790 and 1840 names, misses all the action in between. You think, okay, there was an almost complete turnover in families, but what the heck? It was fifty years, and anyway about half those new people are sons. But when you look at all the census years, it turns out there were people coming and going all the time. The first-to-last comparison only sees the net change, not the total change.

This is where it gets interesting. The standard story of New England towns says that after the construction of the Erie Canal, hardscrabble hilltown farms could no longer compete with western commercial agriculture. And the soils were exhausted, and young people wanted to live in cities or run bigger farms. So you’d expect a big exodus around the late 1820s and 1830s. That’s where you’d begin to be surprised.

Between the 1790 census and the 1800, 117 families disappear from the original 257 households and 142 new ones arrive in town. From 1800 to 1810, it happens again. 140 families move out, and are replaced by 157 new families. Every ten years, roughly half the residents of this town leave, to be replaced by new faces.

In all, between 1790 and 1840, 644 families leave the town and 678 move in. Twice as many people leave as ever live there at one time, and an even larger number arrive from somewhere else, each bringing their own unique heritage, family loyalties, religious and political affiliations, etc. The quiet, isolated, inwardly focused community of the traditional history turns out to be a lot more dynamic than expected.

And this is only half the story. 181 sons carry on their extended family presence in town between 1790 and 1840, some of them replacing the 132 old patriarchs who died. But there are 800 sons recorded in the Vital Records. What happens to the rest?

Actually, there are more than 800, but exactly 800 live to majority (there are as many girls, but once again, they’re invisible in the data). 181 settle in town between 1790 and 1840, and either die or are still there at the end of my study. That leaves 619 sons who usually marry a local girl but then go somewhere else to start their families. Add these to the families who disappear from the census data, and you have over 1,200 families leaving a town that never had more than 300.

I think this is pretty dramatic, and I don’t think it’s impossible for a historian to appreciate the significance of these data presented by themselves, when it comes to questions about the relative openness and dynamism in rural towns. But I can’t imagine putting this into a popular history, without faces to give the numbers life. So, back to the question of how to weave between the real stories of interesting people and the interesting world I want to show? Well...they lived it, didn’t they? There must be ways this environment they found themselves in had an impact on their lives, right? Otherwise, it’s just something I found in data, and it really doesn’t matter. So I have to find ways to think about the contingency and craziness of these lives in the context of this world. Okay...I can do that...

A note about the data: the only thing recorded on the early census sheets was the name of a “household head.” No ages, occupations, incomes, origins. Worse still, no women, unless they were widows or spinsters (three in the fifty-year range I looked at), and definitely no children. That info has to come from somewhere else. Thankfully, there are Vital Records books for most Massachusetts towns. I’m going to call them families, because in nearly all cases they are. You can count on one hand the number of single men whose names made it into this town's census data. So, when I say “289 families,” think “husband, wife, and six kids,” because that’s really what the counts represent.

Rural myths begin to crumble

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-03-04T09:04:59-05:00

So I’ve had my head in this census project for a couple of weeks now. I’ve found out that, to whatever degree the town I’ve been looking at is representative, many of the things we believe about early American towns are wrong. I’m happy about this, because it gives me something to talk about, and because I’ve been hoping to do some myth busting in this project.

One of the persistent myths about early American towns is that they were inherently stable, inward-looking communities; in contrast with cities which are thought of as the scene of rapid, disruptive changes leading to modernity. Cities are imagined as filled with new people and ideas, and focused on trade, progress, and material success. Towns, on the other hand, are pictured as being filled with families and focused on “good, old-fashioned” values. In contrast with the city’s commerce and profit-motivation, the farmers, artisans and small merchants of these exceptional New England communities are supposed to work for a competence or sufficiency. Rather than upward mobility, town and country folk are believed to appreciate staying put. Democratic town meetings and the Congregational assembly are seen as institutions that focus social life and best represent the character of rural people.

I’ll have to marshall my sources when I argue this point in the dissertation, but even off the top of my head, a number of core texts that present this view come to mind. Even the classic history of those who stayed behind, after admitting that people left a small New England town, argued that then it acquired all these characteristics. The problem is not so much that any of these preconceptions about towns is dead wrong, but that they’re not really drawn from evidence. Rural life has been defined in contrast to urban life in most American histories, so historians and their readers have expected to find the opposite end of the spectrum from the cities. When they find these traits, they make a big deal about the difference between urbanity and rurality -- possibly a bigger deal than the actual people made at the time.

The census, I’m finding, can be a black hole that sucks you in and never releases you. There’s always more to find, always one more way to verify that the person you’re looking at on the 1810 page for Lysander NY is actually the guy who was in my town in 1800. This involves at least eliminating all the other guys with the same name, by figuring out where they were. Much of the time it’s impossible, especially when the guy has a common name. It helps that there were so many fewer people in the first few census years!

I have to remember HCR’s advice: if you’re only going to spend 10 pages talking about this point in the book, don’t research 100 pages. On that basis, I’ve already spent too much time on this. My excuse is that, this first time, I want to see how far this can be pushed. Prove my claim that online census, vital records, and town histories (thanks to ancestry.com and google books!) have changed the game for historians. I think there’s a paper in this -- at least a point to be made in my talk in England this fall.

So what have I found in the census so far? The most striking thing is, the majority of people who live in this particular New England hilltown between 1790 and 1840 don’t stay. Many go to neighboring towns farther up in the Berkshire foothills, and a surprising number go to upstate New York. I expected there to be a big exodus around the 1830s, but there’s actually a steady flow of people, from the very first years of settlement.

Another surprise is that, when the town’s political/religious crisis happened in the 1830s (which in itself is a huge counterstory, but more on that later), the richest family in town (based on the 1830 tax book) pulled up their stakes and moved out. Constant mobility, continued connection with extended family in the west, and willingness to abandon social and financial roots seem to be the themes of this story; not some set of unique rural values creating static New England exceptionalism.

Census stuff

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-02-27T17:04:12-05:00

Seems like anyone that claims to be even a little bit U.S. social history oriented, needs to deal with the fact that demographic data is now available in ways it never was before. When I was trying to track down how many people had been named after Erasmus Darwin prior to 1850 in Massachusetts, I found over a hundred volumes of town Vital Records online through google books and the internet archive. The good news, of course, isn’t just that they’re available, which is good enough. But they’re full-text searchable! That means, I didn’t have to read every page of a hundred books. Which I’ll have to do with the other hundred or so I haven’t looked at yet. Which is why the project stalled -- I’m waiting for the rest of the books to be scanned!

Similarly, ancestry.com has all the U.S. census forms, and they have a search engine. This is cool, because you can track a person from census to census, and see where he (yes, for most of the census years, they only took down head-of-household names, which were 99% male) lived at least every ten years. The transcription seems relatively good, but it isn’t perfect. So it pays to be a little creative with spellings, if you don’t find your person right away. And look at the original form, because you might see something the transcriber didn't, if you know what you're looking for.

And if your person has a common name and you find too many, there are tricks to narrowing down your candidates. Some of these are other sources (lots of county and town histories are also available on ancestry and google), some take advantage of the fact you can compare census data from a series of years side by side. I use this feature to try to eliminate people. If I’m looking for John Doe who lived in Springfield in 1800, and there are five John Does in the 1810 census, I can see whether some of the others lived in the same places in 1800 and 1810, and eliminate those candidates. I can also compare family sizes, since the census data (on the original forms, which can be viewed) includes counts of males and females, bracketed by age. A little quick math, and you’ve got another clue. Neither of these is foolproof, of course -- a lot can happen in ten years. But they can point you in the right direction.

So, back to my original point. All this info is available now. Seems like it’s going to be very difficult from now on, to make vague, generalized points about persistence, migration, and a whole bunch of social changes related to demographics; when you can check the numbers and say something precise. So I’m checking the numbers and names in all the places I’ll be writing about. Not because I want to do a “migration history,” but because I just can’t imagine what type of excuse I’d use to get around knowing what happened with the people, in these places I’m studying.

I think what I’m going to find is that people were a whole lot more mobile than we think they were. I’m only halfway through my first town dataset right now (the earliest one, covering 1790-1840), and it seems like as many people leave the town as die in it. This type of thing has been done on a limited basis (when it was paper-based, and MUCH harder) for a few cities (cf. Thernstron & Knights on Boston), but I don’t think a close study has been done for a rural town. So maybe there will be some surprises. A quick glance at the 1850 census of one of the towns in Upstate NY I haven’t really started on yet, showed that over 200 people were born outside the U.S. I’m not sure of the total population yet, but that’s probably between 10% and 20%. Most of these people were young and from the U.K. (Irish slightly outnumbering English & Scottish). There were also a lot of Canadians, about a dozen Germans, a handful of French and Dutch, and one Swiss. Don’t know what this means yet -- the town isn’t right on the Erie Canal, and it’s a full generation after its construction. So these aren’t all trench diggers who decided to hang around. Maybe there are stories that no one has found because they were buried in such a huge mountain of data. Stay tuned...

Who was there and for how long?

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-02-24T19:40:33-05:00

Today I’m reading census data from 1790 to 1840. Putting together a big spreadsheet that lists everybody, so I can see who came and who left the town I’m writing about. Ran into some interesting problems along the way.

The 1810 census was a mess! I’m still not sure I got it all -- I’m going to have to search on all the missing names, to make sure they really are missing from the town. Three different census recorders took parts of the town I’m looking at, so my data is appended to the forms for three towns surrounding my target. And the machine transcription on these forms was less than perfect, so it’s a good thing I’m familiar with the family names in this town, or I’d be hopelessly lost.

I don’t want to do JUST a population study of any of these places, but with the info readily available these days, I don't see how you can avoid knowing what happened with the people, as part of the due diligence. Persistence, turnover, where people went, who came to replace them...all go to establishing the character of the place.

NEWS FLASH!

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-02-23T11:58:16-05:00

Well, the news is my paper proposal was accepted for the first annual Rural History conference in Brighton, England this fall! This is huge. Like becoming a charter member of a really cool new club. Rural History on the ground floor.

And while I’m there, I’ll have a chance to get to London and see the Bishopsgate archives of the Bradlaugh Papers. And run around East London; see how long it takes to walk to the City from Warner Place. Maybe I’ll make a sidetrip to Northampton and have a pint with my facebook buddy Norman.

Lots to do, lots to plan. Bottom line, Rural History is on, and so is the Bradlaugh bio. The details of getting a PhD while I’m doing all this will just have to work themselves out...

Ice Harvest

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-02-15T15:17:44-05:00

So it was ice harvesting day at the local farm education place, and I volunteered. They had a little museum display in the interpretive center, and we cut, hauled, and weighed ice with the old tools on the pond.

Cutting ice with a heavy steel saw is hard work. Spotting a fourth grader involves holding the kid with one hand, and sawing with the other. The ice was about a foot deep, so even though we were only cutting little wedges, we were still cutting through a foot of ice each time. Our biggest chunk weighed 29 pounds.

Before cheap refrigeration became available in the late 1940s, people did this as a part-time "moonlight" job, after their regular daily work was done. At night, in the winter, on the local ponds and lakes. Dang!

Maybe I'll look for more opportunities to do old-time farm work. It would be like a nineteenth-century version of Dirty Jobs.

Writing probably makes you a more forgiving reader

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-02-12T09:24:43-05:00

So I’m working on a book outline, for my dissertation. Per HCR’s suggestion, I’m laying it out as a book, so I won’t have to go back and redo it afterwards. One of the things that has struck me about many of the “New Social Histories” I’ve read recently, is that they have a wealth of detail about material conditions, setting, sometimes even ecology, and how these things evolve. But they lack people.

As I’m outlining what I want to say about the first place, in the first chapter, I realize that I’m falling into this trap. My outline starts with physical setting, and talks about communication and transportation, politics, rural economics (the competency vs. commerce question), on the way to the story I want to tell about the people I’m looking into. Bad.

I need to start with the people, and insert these other things into their story. This will help make the (obvious, but sometimes overlooked) point that their experiences, options, attitudes, etc. are influenced by the place and people around them. And it will bring these details of setting, and the story of how the place changes over time, to life. I wouldn’t want to read forty pages of scene-setting before the story began -- so I’d better not write it that way!

Another map on my desktop

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-02-09T17:21:28-05:00

Those maps again

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-01-30T09:58:04-05:00

Just some food for thought -- I've been thinking about this after scanning HCR's West from Appomattox. Why are the red counties red? What myths, and what political and social realities, made them think Republicans would better support their interests in Washington? And, how long has it been this way? Does this change owe more to political action, or political rhetoric? To deeds, or myths?

Agrarian Crusade

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-01-17T09:23:17-05:00

“A Typical Cartoon of the Agrarian Crusade, redrawn by Charles Lennox Wright from a lithograph issues by The Prairie Farmer, Chicago, at the time of the Farmers’ movement,” according to the caption in Solon Buck’s 1921 book The Agrarian Crusade: A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics.

Don't call them categories!

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-01-15T12:54:34-05:00

I’ve just started reading Barron’s Those Who Stayed Behind. It’s about rural Chelsea, Vermont, 1784-1900. As I settled into my reading chair and started the introduction, it occurred to me there are several distinct types of rural areas in these books I’m reading. There’s the colonial agrarian rurality of pre-industrial and supposedly pre-commercial New England. Cronon challenges that last notion, but it’s still fair to say that people lived a largely self-sufficient lifestyle that in some way resembles the Jeffersonian ideal.

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?

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-01-09T10:01:36-05:00

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!

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-01-07T22:34:02-05:00

Thinking about Nature's Metropolis, looking at where the railroads were in 1856. And, where people already were. What did they go for? What were they planning and expecting? How was that different from the people who came in the wake of the railroads?

Rural history questions

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-01-06T09:00:23-05:00

So, among my questions for Rural History (after reading Cronon's Nature's Metropolis) are:

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

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2010-01-01T12:35:23-05:00

The Rural Populist paraphrased Michael Pollan a while ago:

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.

misleading binaries

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-12-30T14:55:21-05:00

Okay, I only read parts of Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City. I got a few points out of it, that I think are significant. Are these really the result of the argument of the book? Or are they just Williams-isms? But, if the argument of the book is just a way to objectify (demonstrate, celebrate) the train of thought and feeling that led him to those particular Williams-isms, then cool: I got the point without having to read all the second-rate poetry along the way.

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...

Bad for farmers in the long run...

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-12-23T11:22:31-05:00

Nuff said (for now...)

Field Reading List

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-12-21T16:18:30-05:00

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...

The Rural Life Problem, 1908

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-12-13T11:54:40-05:00

Sir Horace Plunkett, The Rural Life Problem of the United States, 1919 (originally published as a series of articles in Outlook, 1908-9)

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

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-12-11T17:07:16-05:00

George E. Vincent (President University of Minnesota, President American Sociological Society), “Countryside and Nation,” Papers and Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society, 1916

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

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-12-10T21:43:44-05:00

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!

Back to the Land movement (1905-7)

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-12-09T08:04:30-05:00

photo is Monadnock from the blueberry farm in Troy, 2009

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

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-12-07T20:57:53-05:00

This one deals with unemployment (Click here or on the map to go to the Daily Yonder story). The headline is “Rural Unemployment Lower than City Rates,” although the article is quick to point out that the urban numbers are skewed by a few really hard-hit cities. “But in 30 states, urban rates are lower than unemployment rates in rural counties.”

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!

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-12-04T22:36:23-05:00

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.

What do regular people think?

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-12-03T14:39:55-05:00

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?

Rural Primary Sources

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-11-27T13:12:36-05:00

There seems to be no shortage of books available on Google dealing with rural America in the early years of the 20th century. It’ll be interesting to dig into these, and see what academics and “experts” thought about the issues facing rural people. The illustration comes from Rural Life and Education: A study of the rural-school problem as a phase of the rural-life problem, originally 1914, revised in 1921 by Ellwood P. Cubberley, a professor of education at Stanford. So apparently there was a perceived “rural education problem,” at least in the minds of Progressive Era educators. Several other illustrations show Polish announcements for the program at Mass Agricultural College, the development of an Italian immigrant farm into an “American” farm, etc. It’ll be especially interesting, comparing these “expert” opinions with more local, first-person accounts by the Poles, Italians, and other rural Americans. Not to mention the rural folks who weren’t farmers...

Red Earth

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-11-19T18:37:43-05:00

Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, Red Earth, 2004

Oklahoma is most frequently thought of by the public and portrayed by environmental historians as the site of the 1930s Dust Bowl of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Donald Worster wrote his classic tale of ecological mismanagement in the same year that Paul Bonnifield wrote a story of the triumph of Oklahoman spirit in the face of natural disaster (1979, Dust Bowl and The Dust Bowl, respectively). William Cronon used the 180 degree disparity between these histories to comment on the incredibly subjective nature of (even environmental) history, finally threading a way (after four rewrites, he says) through post-modern concerns regarding narrative and cognition, to an embrace of history as a more-or-less moral fiction, aiming at (but never quite reaching) truth (“A Place for Stories,” JAH March 1992).

In contrast to these tales of declension and progress, Lynn-Sherow writes about the settlement of Oklahoma a generation earlier, and wonders what might have been. “Of all the ways in which history can be written and remembered,” she says, “human based environmental change is often a ‘winner’s’ history told by the people who remain” (145). Through a variety of influences including chance, culture (including racism), and environment, “in less than one generation, the collective farming practices of the Kiowas [tribe] and the mixed-use practices of African American settlers were swept aside” (147). In their place, “an elite group of native-born white farmers were eventually triumphant” and a “highly diverse ecology of native plants, animals, and people” became “a more simplified ecology centered on a scientifically approved list of domesticated crops and animals.”

Her conclusion, that “white farmers’ acceptance and enthusiasm for mechanized agriculture…initiated and sustained the simplification of the territory” is a declension, in the sense Cronon said Worster’s book was. Or is it? A more simplified ecological system is usually more fragile and subject to disturbances (like drought). So she’s using Cronon’s "second set of narrative constraints" (making "ecological sense") to get past the subjectivity of her judgment that monoracial commercialized monoculture is bad. Cool.

Roots of Rural Capitalism

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-11-24T18:28:32-05:00

Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 Ithaca: Cornell Press, 1990.

“Between the 1780s and the 1860s the New England countryside underwent a profound social and economic transformation. From an economy dominated by independent farmers, it became part of a broader national market and an outpost of industrial capitalism.” (8)

But what does independence mean? Is it subsistence farming, with the goal of 100% self-sufficiency? Trade with locals, based on negotiated values rather than “market” prices corresponding to those in faraway cities? A sense of not being “dependent” on wage-based employment, afforded by land-ownership and local reciprocity? When “the distribution of wealth and the social patterns of access to the instruments of capitalistic economic power became increasingly unequal,” (17) what was happening? Were the “river gods” making themselves aristocrats, keeping the money and power in the family? Were the Boston Associates coming into the Valley, creating a mill city at Holyoke? Were these developments inevitable, and did they have to proceed to the specific ends they arrived at? Lots of questions remain unanswered.

If “Farmers traveled more to exchange produce” and “Prices...increasingly converged with each other and with those in distant markets,” (59) why were the farmers looking outside and producing for the cash market? Too many sons and not enough land? Taxes from Boston (which led to debt, foreclosures, Shays’ Rebellion)? And what about the Workingmen’s movement? Rev. Samuel C. Allen ran for governor in the 1830s, partly on a platform opposing agricultural mortgages held by corporations, “bringing the yeomanry...into a state of dependency and peril.” (205) This probably warrants a closer look...

Small Community Economics, 1943

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-11-25T18:18:58-05:00

Arthur E. Morgan, Small Community Economics. Yellow Springs, OH: Community Services, Inc. 1943

(Arthur E. Morgan 1878-1975, born in Cincinnati, grew up in St. Cloud, MN. Engineer, Unitarian, President of Antioch College. 1st head of TVA in 1933, removed in 1938 for criticizing TVA’s direction. Utopian. Wrote bio of Edward Bellamy. Founded Community Service, Inc. in 1940.)

Morgan begins with foreword titled “What Is Rural Life?” He says that according to the USDA, there are “about 22,000,000 persons living on American farms.” (5) This is about 17 percent of the 1943 population, and Morgan goes on to say that the “better half of the farms” produce “90 per cent of all marketed farm produce.” If those farms would “increase their production by only 10 per cent, which seems entirely feasible, the rest could go out of business without reducing the total of American agricultural produce.”

Morgan disagrees with sociologists like T. Lynn Smith (President of the Rural Sociological Society and author of The Sociology of Rural Life) who claim “farmer and countryman are almost synonymous terms.” (6) “Even in agricultural communities,” Morgan says, “the population of towns which directly serve surrounding farm areas is from a quarter to a half as great...Most of these village residents also are rural people. Then there are fishing towns, mining towns, railroad towns, summer resort towns, quarry towns, lumbering towns, hydro-electric power plant communities, textile mill towns, and oil well towns, all with their non-farm, rural populations. At the present moment probably about half of the rural population of America is non-farm population.”

In view of this “strikingly new picture of rural life,” Morgan calls for a balanced approach to rural community planning. The “dominant economic activity” should not be the area’s only economic activity, he says. (8) Rather, “Variety and range of economic activity” are keys to developing communities that can satisfy “the normal range of human needs.” (9) Although a “rural community is wise to produce a major part of its own food supply,” Morgan believes “producing crops for the general public seldom is profitable to the amateur.” (10) He concludes that “few American communities are more than fifty per cent self-sufficient by local production,” and urges rural communities to think about what they can produce for the outside market.

While parts of Morgan’s booklet seem to betray a slightly “New Deal” technocratic orientation, his suggestions generally make sense. And they’re directed at rural people, not at bureaucrats -- possibly a result of Morgan’s falling-out with TVA and its techno-bureaucracy. The guy makes sense, and he’s probably worth looking into a little more deeply, when I get around to writing about rural reformers and radicals.

[cross-posted to danallosso.com]

Under construction....

dan@ruralhistory.net — 2009-11-25T17:39:53-05:00