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 communities
respond 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 interpreting material and technological revolutions that
occurred during the early twentieth century throughout the rural countryside.
1
Lewis Atherton. Main Street on the Middle Border. (Bloomington: Indian University
Press, 1954), 355.
2
Atherton, 185.
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 a
3
Atherton, 238.
more 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.
4
Hal S. Baron. Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North,
1870-1930. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)
5
Baron, 194.
6
Baron, 195.
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 This innovation 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
7
Ronald Kline. Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural
America: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 2000).
8
Kline, 86.
9
Kline, 112.
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, that World 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
10
Deborah Fitzgerald. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American
Agriculture. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 4.
11
Fitzgerald, 12.
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 largescale 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
12
Fitzgerald, 78.
Fitzgerald, 183.
14
Fitzgerald, 188.
15
Mary Neth. Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of
Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
1995).
16
Neth 39.
13
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
17
Neth, 104.
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 statebacked 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, 1890-1990
argues 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
18
Neth, 113.
Jane Adams. The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990. (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
19
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.
Most scholars who have examined family, women and technology in rural
communities agree that government policy and mechanization undermined the public,
productive role of women in rural labor. However, none of these studies have examined
the way in which women resisted this process of forced domesticity. Historian Katherine
Jellison examines three periods of government intervention in the rural home in her study
Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology: the Commission on Country Life, the
Extension Service, and the Farm Bureau.21 Unlike Neth, who argued that women’s labor
did not necessarily offer power in the world of patriarchal farms, Jellsion suggests the
opposite. Women found significant leverage when negotiating the gendered world of
farm production as a result of their labor in the fields. When the Commission on Country
20
Adams, 60.
Katherine Jellison. Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963.
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)
21
Life recommended that farm women adopt “modern domestic and communication
equipment” they set in motion of series of Progressive intrusions into rural communities
that undermined the public role of women as laborers and mothers.22 Women protested
these changes through rejections of technology and resistance to the “home extensions”
program that brought government agents directly into farm homes to education women in
the uses of domestic technology.23 Jellison is quick to point out that this resistance to
domesticity did not stem from a feminist challenge to patriarchy but rather a sense of
economic necessity, practicality, and fear of confinement- values previous scholars have
identified as driving forces behind much of the rural resistance to technological intrusions
into their lives. For poor women who became the targets of Country Life and Extension
reform, technology acted as a tool of confinement that undermined their traditional roles.
Jellison’s findings present an interesting contrast to Neth’s that likely reflects their focus
on women in distinctly different economic strata in rural communities. As Atherton,
Baron and Fitzgerald have noted, economically well-off farm families tended to embrace
consumer technology rather than resist it.
Previous studies of labor, family, and the changes of the early twentieth century
have mostly neglected the role of children as active laborers on the farm. Historian
Pamela Riney-Kenrberg argues in her monograph, Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play,
and Coming of Age in the Midwest, that child labor was essential to the survival of farm
families adapting to the increasingly capital intensive demands of commercial
22
23
Jellison, 3.
Jellison, 23.
agriculture.24 Outside labor was often expensive for most families, so as a result “they
raised and trained their own workers.”25 As mechanization transformed farm labor, ideals
of masculinity and the transition from boyhood to manhood became increasingly
associated with technology. Boys idealized the use of new, heavy farm equipment as a
rite of passage that both signified their ascendency to full laborer but also as a sign of
their control over the farm.26 Girls held more ambiguous positions in the scheme of farm
labor during this period as mothers were pressed into the confines of domesticity, girls
were not. They, like boys, acted as farm helpers and often helped with field labor and
harvesting. Unlike boys, however, they would be denied any meaningful amount of
control of participation in labor as adults. Furthermore, both agricultural child labor law
reformers ignored these children, even going so far as to exclude them from many state
laws against child labor. Riney-Kernberg argues that farm children coming of age in the
1920s found far fewer opportunities in rural communities as their parents farms went
under. This process of displacement, similar to those of rural women, led to young adults
to utilize the transportation innovations to find opportunities away from the farm.
Many of the scholars discussed so far acknowledge the role of agricultural reform
during the Progressive and New Deal era as ensuring the prosperity of large-scale
commercial farming at the expanse of family farms, few extend this examination to the
displaced youths who remained in the countryside. Shame Hamilton argues in his study,
Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy, that rural-developed
trucking businesses emerged as some of the most viable opportunities remaining for
24
Riney-Kernberg. Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the
Midwest. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005).
25
Riney-Kernberg, 48.
26
Riney, 42.
displaced youths during the Depression.27 Poor farmers recognized the unfair alignment
of state power in backing commercial agriculture of family farms and traditional rural
communities. The “emotionally tinged” agrarian rhetoric of farm-friendly politicians also
enabled modifications to New Deal economic policy such as the 1935 Motor-Carrier act
which deregulated agricultural trucking in an effort to support the small farmers of the
American heartland.28 Interstate trucking developed out of this combination of
infrastructure investment and political sympathies for small-scale farmers and acted as an
outlet for disenfranchised farmers to reclaim their independence. Ironically, trucking
emerged as one of the few occupations that enabled youths to remain in the countryside
while prospering. Government efforts to undermine farm-based rural communities
resulted in the growing resistance to state intervention. Here, Hamilton disagrees with the
findings of Adams, who suggested that poor farmers and wealthy farmers alike embraced
state support. Hamilton sees this as state imposition and displacement of traditional rural
communities, not necessarily and effort to stabilize them.
The history of rural communities and their strategies for navigating the dynamic
changes in consumption and technology in the first thirty years of the twentieth century is
nuanced and complex. The literature examined in this essay primarily focuses on the
Midwest and inland Northwest. Furthermore, these scholars reveal the complex strategies
that rural communities, beginning with the family farm, employed to both adapt and
create technologies to meet the demands of agricultural labor. For wealthier farmers, state
backed reform empowered them to expand commercial opportunities while
Shane Hamilton. Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.)
28
Hamilton, 7.
27
simultaneously transforming the domestic sphere within rural homes. Women had
complex reactions to this process. One the one hand, they found unique uses for new
technologies that allowed them to free up time and increase their productivity. This
process empowered some women to pursue independent commercial enterprises to
support the pressures for increased consumption. Poor women, however, resisted the state
imposition of domestic values and technology as unnecessary and impractical to their
farm work. Prior to these changes women enjoyed more mutual relationships with
patriarchal farm work. Children remained absent from the Progressive reforms of rural
homes and mechanized farm tools became rights of passages for boys while
simultaneously diminishing the need for their labor and eventually displacing poorer
young adults. These displaced youth took to the roads as independent truckers by the late1920s and early-1930s with a deep resentment for government interference in rural
communities that reflected an astute understanding of the role played by the state, reform,
and technology in stratifying rural communities.
Bibliography

Adams, Jane. The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Atherton, Lewis Eldon. Main Street on the Middle Border. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1954.

Barron, Hal S. Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural
North, 1870-1930. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Fitzgerald, Deborah Kay. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in
American Agriculture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Hamilton, Shane. Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Jellison, Katherine. Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Kline, Ronald. Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in
Rural America: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Neth, Mary. Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the
Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940. Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Riney-Kernberg. Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the
Midwest. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005.