Rio Hartwell
HST 532
November 23, 2011
Rural Communities and Technological Change
The story of rural decline has been the subject of debate amongst farmers, academics, and politicians for most of the twentieth century. Central to the study of rural communities during this period has been the question: how did rural communitiesrespond to the technological transformation of the American countryside. The earliest scholars who examined the decline of rural communities pointed to the technological and consumption revolutions emanating outwards from urban centers as the transformative force that fundamentally altered the makeup of the countryside. Later agricultural historians questioned the urban-rural paradigm by how modernity crept outwards from cities but was reconfigured in innovative and unexpected ways to fit the needs of farm families. These scholars largely focused on the relationship between communities and the market. Another group of scholars argued that the agricultural policy that emerged from the Commission on Country Life forced mechanization and consumption onto rural communities that were perceived as backwards and ignorant. A final group of scholars explored how these technological changes to labor and the home impacted families and contributed to the stratification of rural communities that enriched commercial farmers while displacing poorer farmers who found innovative uses of new technology to stay within their traditional communities. Taken together, these studies present families as the fundamental unit of rural communities that also bore the brunt of the technological transformation of rural America during the early twentieth century. Furthermore, they present an alternative narrative of modernity that begins in the countryside.
Traditional historical scholarship in the early twentieth century rarely considered the significance of change in rural communities outside of their role as sites of exodus for urban growth. If considered at all, rural communities took the shape of static, idyllic places of America’s pre-modern past whose demise was tragic but inevitable in the march towards urban modernity. Lewis Atherton’s seminal study, Main Street on the Middle Border (1954), argued that this “nostalgic memory” unfairly rendered these communities paralyzed despite being “buffeted by a revolutionary age” that brought widespread change and disruptions to rural societies.[1]Atherton began his study by tracing the outline of rural communities as places bound by idealism, financial practicality, and a sense of ”togetherness” fostered through neighborly proximity and mutual dependence.[2] Most rural towns settled during the nineteenth century dreamed of prosperity and focused on growth through the attainment of real estate and commerce. The predominance of business fostered a culture of “practical utilitarianism” that offered a path to stability and prosperity. By depicting the origins of rural communities as grounded in towns, business strategy, practicality, and thrift, Atherton challenged the prevalent myth of the Progressive era that “backwards” rural communities lacked proper business acumen, understanding of economics, and wasted their resources of frivolities. This important assertion offered new ground for interpretingmaterial and technological revolutions that occurred during the early twentieth century throughout the rural countryside.
Atherton suggested that rural communities embraced technological innovations for a variety of reasons aimed at improving local commerce, consumption, and real estate value. Public utilities integrated formerly isolated townships into connected transportation, electric, and hydration systems.The construction of paved roads, for example, provided an efficient means of accessing the commercial opportunities of urban markets. The increased ease of accessing urban markets “reduced the importance of country towns as assembly points for farm crops.”[3] Furthermore, infrastructure improvements made rural markets far more accessible to national retailers who opened large storefronts and launched mail-order catalogue campaigns in rural markets throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century. Atherton posits that rural communities weighed the risk of this increased competition between rural and urban commercial interests and deemed these as acceptable risks in the attainment of increased property value, services, and standards of living. In addition to disrupting the balance of commercial power in the countryside, this technological transformation “widened” the boundaries of communities to the point where they almost disappeared. Youths began to chase urban ideals and employment opportunities beyond township boundaries, and Main Street faced increasing challenges as the hub of social and cultural life in rural landscapes now intimately connected with urban markets. The realization that technological and material change lay at the heart of the transformation of rural communities marks one of Atherton’s most significant contributions to the early field of rural studies.
These conclusions marked a critical point in the development of rural community history of the early twentieth century. The myth of the decline-by-ineptitude fell flat to amore nuanced, complex elucidation of rural adaptations to technological change. Atherton’s conclusions, however, conflate the experiences of small towns in the countryside with those of family and commercial farms. This conflation coupled with his sources produced a perspective that was largely skewed towards elite, business owners and merchants located within small towns. The social dynamics between the small town and the farm in the wake of this technological transformation remain largely hidden as a result. His narrative offered the illusion of homogeneity within rural communities that willingly embraced modernity for commercial reasons.
By the nineteen-nineties a new group of scholars began to complicate Atherton’s narrative of modernity as an urban-centric process that simply happened to rural communities. Led by agricultural historians such as Hal Baron and Ronald Kline, these new studies explored the internal social tensions caused by technological change. Distinctions between the responses of farmers and village residents emerge as these studies explored the intersections of rural labor, consumption, and adaptive strategies to technological change. For the first time farmers become active agents who resist and transform technology to their own needs and force industrial producers to conform to rural demands. Furthermore, these studies undermine the paradigm of technological determinism emanating from the urban center. Farm families expanded the contours of their communities through the modification of automobile, telephone, home appliances, and the radio while undermining the merchants who advocated for localism within small towns. The automobile and electricity also radically altered farm labor as agricultural and domestic laborers found novel uses for technology.
Rural communities adapted and resisted the technological transformation of the countryside ultimately producing a “mixed harvest” that accommodated change on local rather than urban or national terms. Hal Baron argues in his study, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930, that these alternative paths of modernity developed out of a variety of local, non-uniform responses to the increasing connectedness of local and national markets.[4] In particular, Baron makes an astute distinction between rural communities that revolved around farm-based, family labor and the village, or small town, communities that developed around Main Streets and facilitating agricultural commerce. While the small towns of Atherton’s study often leapt at urban-centered aspects of modernity, farming communities often resisted them. For example, farm families initially resisted the adoption of automobiles or “devil wagons” for the disruption caused on farms, excessive costs, and urban orientation.[5] This resistance manifested in the form of excessive local ordinances and sometimes, violent reprisals against urban intrusions into farm country.[6] By the beginning of the 1920s, however, farmers had recognized the inherent value of personal transportation as a tool for accessing larger markets and circumventing the middlemen of small towns. Baron argues that the automobile and radios together enabled the farmers to forge trans-local networks that drew them out of their communities in search of more competitive market opportunities. The transportation and communications transformations discussed by Baron present a critical juncture for the relationship between farmers and small-town merchants that further disrupted the consumer transformation within rural communities.
Novel innovations in utilities, transportation, and communication not only closed the space between local communities but also radically altered rural homes and empowered consumers. Ronald R. Kline expands upon Baron’s findings in his study, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America,to show how this alternative path to modernity resulted from innovative adaptions of new technologies to meet particular needs and empower rural farmers in unforeseen ways.[7]For example, farmers transformed the first automobiles into a “general-purpose power source on the farm” that automated the washing of clothes, plowing crops, and hauling goods.[8] Thisinnovation in rural technology led directly to the development of other technologies such as the washing machine, tractor, and the pick-up truck. These adaptive strategies also took place within the home as women electrified appliances such as irons and vacuums. As a result, farm women “got more done and raised their standards of living” while rejecting the leisure and unproductivity they perceived in urban ideals of domesticity.[9] Furthermore, like the utilization of radio to forge translocal communities, Kline indicates that many of the first telephone networks were built, operated, and directed by local cooperatives serving particular needs. Kline also demonstrates how farm families acted as empowered agents in the process of technological modernity in the rural countryside.
These two studies reveal the active role of rural peoples in innovating, adapting, and inventing new technologies that empowered their lives in a novel of ways. No longer was technological consumption simply a process that spread from urban centers and blanked the countryside but rather a decentralized process that emerged from local, particular, and functional contexts of family labor as well. By focusing on the empowering role of technology, these studies limit their exploration of impact of technology and consumption on social relations within these communities. Furthermore, these studies represent technology as a product of markets and commerce without providing a close examination of agricultural policy and reform politics in the early twentieth century. Scholars such as Deborah Fitzgerald and Mary Neh seek to elucidate the relationship between state agricultural policy, technology, and rural communities during the early twentieth century.
These prior studies dealt with the mechanization of farms and households in patchwork ways that often focused on the social aspects of the process. Historian Deborah Fitzgerald suggests that historians have failed to “grasp the overarching logic of change” occurring nationally and locally during this period.[10] She argues in her study, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, thatWorld War I was pivotal on this transformation as demand soared as a massive shortage of labor spread throughout rural communities. This process precipitated a coalition of wealthy farmers and emerging agricultural professionals to forged an industrial ideal aimed at uniting decades of agricultural with technological innovations.[11] Mechanization emerged as a cash intensive means of reducing labor costs and increasing efficiency on the farm. These capital-intensive ventures brought regional bankers into these emerging coalitions that now explicitly aimed to “civilize… rural America.”[12] Fitzgerald argues that “momentum of the industrial” ideal is not entirely responsible for the rise of large-scale commercial farms however.[13] The farms created by agribusinesses like the Campbell Farming Corporation exemplified a larger political strategy adopted in an effort to cope with the increase in international competition.[14] Furthermore, farmers are active partners in this industrial crusade to impose scientific order on rural farming communities. But what relationship did poor farmers who did not have the resources to transition to large-scale agriculture have with the emergence of agricultural professionals and reform policy during this period?
The interdependence of poorer farming families had long bound rural communities together and provided a safety net for struggling communities. Mary Neth’s examination of poor, rural communities entitled, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940, demonstrates the role of Progressive agricultural policy in consolidating and modernizing rural economies while simultaneously undermining the bounds of rural families and neighborhoods.[15]Neth argues that women’s central role in pre-twentieth century farm labor promoted working relationships that “gave considerably more influence to woman and children.”[16] Furthermore, the farm family was the central unit of rural communities that lacked formal institutions of towns. Families developed systems of reciprocity through exchanged labor and services, shared resources, and favors. These informal interactions provided a communal interdependence that further empowered farmwomen who often maintained these pivotal neighborhood networks. Informal “neighboring” functioned to define the boundaries of rural communities as well, enabling localities to isolate poor farmers, outsiders, or ethnically different groups from socio-economic relationships. These class dynamics paved the way for further stratification as mechanization backed by government agricultural policies united behind wealthier farmers during the 1920s.
The country life movement emerged during the Progressive Era in response to the perceived backwardness of rural communities. Theodore Roosevelt appointed the Country Life Commission in 1908 to solve the “deficiencies” in rural life through he promotion of scientific farming methods, technological advancement, and consumption. The united interests of the elite, commercial farmers and the emerging agriculture professionals designed a coherent plan to empower a “middle class of farmers” in the hopes of unifying and depoliticizing the countryside.[17] To do this, they created coalitions of local leaders to train farm families in a variety of new, scientific methods that often centered on the consumption of new technologies. Unlike Kline who viewed the local development of domestic appliances as empowering, Neth interprets this as an effort by elites to push urban-centric domestic values on rural women and through the processing promoting a labor hierarchy that delegitimized the role of women in farm production. Furthermore, the advancement of mechanized tools for farming lessened the need to large labor pools that included wives and children.[18] By imposing mechanization and uniformity upon farm labor, agriculture began to consolidate around more commercially oriented practices that forced communities to abandoned yearly rituals such as threshing during the harvest. Threshing represented just one of what Baron dubbed and “informal institution” that bound spatially isolated rural communities. With its disappearance, and the disappearance of other informal institutions of communal labor, the displacement of rural communities heightened and more and more laborers sought out new avenues of work farm away form the fields.
Neth and Fitzgerald demonstrate how rural class dynamics impacted the state-backed push for mechanization and consumption as solutions to the “rural problem.” While these authors see families as central to rural communities, they are largely discussed in structural terms. Family farms acted as both business links as well as social units that bound communities that lacked formal institutions. A final group of scholars examines the internal dynamics of families themselves as technology revolutionized the home and undermined the traditional bounds of rural communities.
Jane Adam’s The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990argues that women found greater commercial independence through technological innovations on the farm and within the home.[19] Her study traces seven farm families as they navigated the consumption and technological changes of the early twentieth century. In particular, she shows how the central role of women in the informal structures of rural communities not only provided a more mutual share of responsibility for the wellbeing of community but also facilitated the transmission of new, independent commercial ventures. Adam’s points to the growing dependence on cash-based commercial farming as the reason women expanded small-scale dairying and lodging operations. Expanding upon Neth’s argument that agricultural policy targeted at promoting commercial agricultural undermined the ”balanced reciprocity” of traditional communities, Adam’s argues that this process led to family farms becoming addicted to government aid- a process that would only intensify during the Great Depression.[20] This process replaced the central role of women in maintaining the safety net of communities and subsequently diminished their public role. As a result, urban-based values of domesticity began to restructure rural values and pressured more and more women to focus their labor exclusively on the home.