The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century by Julianne Couch

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century by Julianne Couch Emily Prifogle Julianne Couch, The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 230 pp. $35.00. Since at least the early nineteenth century, travelers, politicians, and reformers, as well as urban and rural residents alike, have claimed that the small midwestern town was disappearing, for better or worse. The decline of small-town communities is discussed today most frequently in the context of the rural opioid crisis and the voting patterns of the 2016 presidential election. The message is clear: rural communities are struggling in terms of economics, health, and education. Yet, Julianne Couch's The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century examines small communities that are surviving, some even thriving, in the Great Plains region. [End Page 142] Her travelogue visits nine small-town communities to seek out "the qualities that make people stick to small, rural places" (3). Couch's nine chapters, each devoted to a particular community, take her reader on a journey from Wyoming, where she lived until recently, through Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and then finally to Iowa, where she now resides. Couch tends to use the term small town more than rural to describe the communities she visits, and she focuses on using population size and access to goods and services to define what counts as "small." Couch implicitly recognizes the diversity among small towns. She likewise recognizes that the nine communities in her book might not be representative of even the Great Plains region, let alone the census-designated midwestern states. But that seems to be—at least partially—the point. There is far more variation across, and less harmony within, heartland small communities than many might expect. Moreover, Couch approaches the towns and her writing as "an interested traveler." While her work is informed by social science research, she does not purport to engage in academic analysis (9). Indeed, those looking for a sharp-eyed account of the underbelly of midwestern small towns will not find it here. The reader encounters most frequently the successful town boosters that have managed to keep a small community afloat, and that is the book's strength. Couch takes residents and their communities on their own terms with a healthy dose of skepticism but without condescension. From this perspective, she reveals the hope and resilience that remains within small midwestern towns. The reader meanders through the towns with Couch, being passed from one store owner to another, or from the local historian to the director of the local development organization. As the reader meets the towns' boosters, many recurring issues will be familiar to those who have studied or lived in small towns: outmigration, conservative politics, local history and tourism, homogenizing pressures, infrastructure challenges, aging populations, lack of healthcare services, and the centrality of local schools. One of the most striking themes is the mobility of rural residents. We know that many rural people travel long distances to work in more densely populated hubs, but in Couch's travels, the reader finds a different type of mobility. Many, perhaps even most, of the civic leaders Couch interviews have not lived in the same small town for their entire lives. Some were born into a rural community but moved away for education or a career only to find that employment, family, or retirement brought them back to the same [End Page 143] or a similar small town. Still others have left their city life to "escape" to the country. Couch herself is one of the latter type of rural itinerants, many of whom (like Couch) are creative individuals who provide rural communities with art, music, and theater. These residents add dynamism to the communities chronicled here, and it is primarily through their eyes that Couch explores the qualities of small towns that draw people to them. This dynamism, however, is matched by a "social-norming machinery" in the communities that sanctions transgressive behavior, including holding liberal political views, living outside of a heterosexual nuclear family, not attending a Christian church, or even proposing too bold...