Rural Life

Rural Life. No revolution has more profoundly changed America than the long transition from farm to city. This change was especially wrenching since the national mythology, dating to Thomas Jefferson's day, had long held that rural life defined what was best and most distinctive about America, and that farmers were uniquely virtuous, individualistic, and independent.

In 1790, fewer than one in thirty Americans lived in urban centers, and the United States remained predominantly rural until 1920, when for the first time the balance shifted toward the city. Between 1929 and 1965, 30 million people moved off farms, 8.5 million in the 1940s alone. By 1970, fewer than 5 percent of Americans were farmers. Changing agricultural technology and rising efficiency accelerated this exodus. In 1820, one farmworker could feed four people. By 1945, the ratio was 1:15, and by 1969, 1:45. To produce a bale of cotton in 1841 required about 148 hours of labor; by 1969, only 25 hours. With growing agricultural efficiency, more rural people deserted the countryside.

Government policies also hastened this displacement. Despite their legendary independence, farmers often turned to the government for assistance. The 1862 Homestead Act encouraged western settlement by offering free land. The land‐grant universities authorized by the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) helped farmers develop applied skills. The Hatch Act (1887) and Smith‐Lever Act (1914) established agricultural research and extension programs at land‐grant universities that enhanced agricultural productivity, reducing both commodity prices and labor demands. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration, established in 1933, paid owners to withdraw land from production, displacing millions of tenants and farm laborers.

Rural life evolved differently in different regions. The Northeast, ill‐suited to agriculture, industrialized and diversified its economy early. The South's rural economy persisted longer and was more diverse than most Americans realized. Although cotton monoculture dominated some sections, other subregions—Appalachia, the Kentucky Bluegrass, the Nashville Basin, the Pineywoods, the Ozarks—produced diversified crops and livestock and different patterns of rural life. In 1890, most rural Arkansas Ozarkers lived near a country store, which supplied clothing, tools, dry goods, some food items, and a venue for socializing. As the twentieth century wore on, railroads and mail‐order catalogs supplanted the country stores.

In the Corn Belt and Great Lakes region, the rich, glaciated forests and prairies produced timber, plentiful livestock, and abundant crops. The Great Plains, with rich soil but low rainfall, required irrigation to produce crops. Livestock flourished, however, as did wheat when sufficiently watered. In the Mountain states, with low rainfall and poor soil, rural life generally involved mining and raising livestock.

In the Far West, rural life centered on logging and forest products in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, while central and southern California boasted the nation's most prosperous agriculture; by the 1970s, California ranked near the top in cotton production, livestock, and citrus. Irrigation made agriculture California's largest enterprise, even though only 1 percent of the state's population was engaged in farming. As elsewhere in rural America, giant agribusinesses, often worked by migrant laborers, gradually replaced California's family farms.

As late nineteenth‐century farmers realized the gap between myth and reality, they protested their declining status and economic exploitation. Protests took political form: the Granger movement, the Greenback Labor party, the Farmers' Alliance movement, the Populist movement. Caught in a cycle of declining commodity prices, eroding rural institutions, and the lure of the city, farmers fought valiantly but often ineffectively to preserve their way of life.

In the early twentieth century, concern about the eclipse of an idealized farm life stimulated renewal efforts. The Rural Life movement proposed revitalization strategies. President Theodore Roosevelt convened a Country Life Commission, land‐grant universities launched programs to improve farm life, and the 4‐H Club movement (1914) targeted rural youth. Rural electrification, continued mechanization, and the spread of the telephone, automobile, radio, and television all diminished the hardships and isolation of rural life. Still, problems continued.

In the 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty. Its somber report, The People Left Behind (1967), revealed that only one in five rural dwellers actually worked on or owned a farm. Some 80 percent of rural people lived in small villages where they either worked or commuted to nearby cities. Some 14 million rural Americans lived in poverty, concentrated in four zones: Appalachia, the old cotton belt from South Carolina to east Texas, the Rio Grande Valley, and the southwestern Indian reservations. The rural poor endured the nation's highest rates of unemployment, malnutrition, disease, premature death, and infant mortality. Their education also lagged. Consolidated churches and schools improved efficiency but reduced the sense of community. Cycles of drought and overproduction hobbled rural economies, while technological changes and government programs perpetuated the long process of displacement. Rural life continued to be celebrated in country music and elsewhere in the culture, but by the twentieth century's end, the gap between the rural America idealized in folklore and the actual lives of hard‐pressed rural Americans (apart from a prospering minority engaged in agribusinesses) made a mockery of Jefferson's dream of America as an agrarian utopia.
See also Agricultural Education and Extension; Agricultural Experiment Stations; Agriculture; Automotive Industry; Cotton Industry; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Agriculture; Indian History and Culture; Livestock Industry; Lumbering; Migratory Agricultural Workers; Motor Vehicles; Music: Traditional Music; Populist Era; Populist Party; Regionalism; Sharecropping and Tenantry; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Samuel R. Ogden, ed., America the Vanishing: Rural Life and the Price of Progress, 1969.
John L. Shover , First Majority—Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America, 1976.
Gilbert C. Fite , Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980, 1984.
Stanford J. Layton , To No Privileged Class: The Rationalization of Homesteading and Rural Life in the Early Twentieth Century American West, 1988.
Sarah Burns , Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth‐Century American Art and Culture, 1989.
George E. Pozzetta , Immigrants on the Land: Agriculture, Rural Life and Small Towns, 1991.

Wayne Flynt