Middle of the Country

Abstract

The article discusses how rural America plunged into hard times by midcentury, after being politically dominant until the early 1900s. Sociologists and others predicted that many areas would be depopulated and that, with improving communication and transport, urban values would overwhelm small-town civic spirit. Studies underwritten by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the early 1940s reinforced the notion. The agency focused on six representative communities, which all revealed a pattern of decline, depopulation and instability reflecting the effect of urban industrial expansion and the Great Depression. Even those communities thought to be the most stable -- E1 Cerrito, N.M., and the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pa. -- were threatened, with the former losing almost its entire population. The USDA sponsored a reexamination of these six communities in the 1990s. Surprisingly, the agency found that social organization and civic spirit in all six had remained intact in the face of traumatic economic developments. In Harmony, for example, a concerned citizens group formed in order to address tax inequality. In Irwin, people banded together to help neighbors devastated by fire. These six communities and others fared well in part by finding alternatives to farming. Whereas rural America still provides most of the nation's food and fiber, as the map illustrates, it is now home to other activities. Today farming constitutes only 6 percent of rural America's jobs; 16 percent comes from manufacturing and 53 percent from services, such as retail trade, recreation facilities, education, and health care.