Lies of the land seeing Rural America for what it is and isnt is your book. The opening line in the book is the lies about Rural America is preposterous on its face. What you mean by that . Steven i mean that we use rural to describe vastly different parts of the country. There is no really good definition of it. Rural america turns out to be a remarkably diverse label to cover all kinds of different areas of the country. The greenbelt in the great plains, areas of northern maine, parts of appalachia which were once cold country, we are talking about vast parts of the American Southwest, they all get labeled rural but they are dramatically different in all kinds of ways. How do you define it for the purpose of your book . Steven i very studiously avoid trying to define it. [laughter] one of the things i found interesting when i jumped into the project was that lots of people have been trying to define the term for a long time and no one has come up with a real answer. I think at the end of the day, we know a rural place when we are in one, when we experience it. That is part of the sense i wanted to trade on, we see rural in the country as quiet, largely empty, slower paced. So wherever you find yourself feeling that way, you would probably label that, i am in the countryside, i am in a rural area. Peter no word has been used more consistently to describe Rural America than crisis. Is that a fair word to use . Steven that is why i started the project. That is what i was reading in the newspapers starting in 2015, there would be periodic stories about Rural America in crisis and at that point when people people were largely talking about opioids, methamphetamines, Health Care Issues altogether. When i began researching, and as a historian the first thing you do is go backwards, not forwards, when i did that what i discovered was a variation of the word crisis has been used to talk about Rural America since the middle of the 19th century and in virtually every decade between then and now. That led me to wonder if it was useful language at all, always talking about crisis or decline or being left behind or variations, is it really useful language at all . Because therefore, when was Rural America somehow good and we were talking about it not in these terms, and we never were. Peter so chronic might be a better word . Steven that is what i think. Crisis implies something out of the ordinary. And which somehow resolves itself, it gets better or we come to a new normal. In that sense, i think the chronic condition people have been complaining about since the Third Quarter of the 19th century forced me to think about a different way of trying to describe the dynamics in rural places around the country. It did not seem to me that doing another rehash of ok, we are in crisis, would get us far because clearly it has not gotten as far for 150 years. Peter in your book you talk about Theodore Roosevelts country life in 1908. Steven a lovely footnote in the progressive era. The first major agricultural crisis that became a national topic of discussion was the original populist movement where farmers were feeling squeezed and it erupted into a Political Movement that reached a crescendo in 1896. With that in mind, when he became president , Teddy Roosevelt decided to create a commission from a commission, to study and offer recommendations of what is going on in rural, mostly agricultural areas, is what they focused on. They issued a report. It is filled with descriptions of what is happening in Rural America, but what is implicit underneath this is that Rural America is not keeping up with urban america. So here are a variety of recommendations so that country life will be just as good and rewarding as city life is. What we can deduce from that is that there was already a perception in the early 20th century that somehow urban life was accelerating faster, rural life was struggling to catch up. So it is a nice little moment in this ongoing discussion of somehow Rural America being left behind. Peter in some supporting evidence you use in the 1930s it was reported that over to 2200 iowa towns had been found abandoned and there was a 50 drop in the number of farms between 1950 and 1970. Steven yes. Again, when you scratch the surface of this, you discover there are measurable indices of decline and change that go way back. People were shocked when census data of 1910 revealed that lots of rural counties, especially in that agricultural midsection of the country, were losing population. During world war i, there was a famous song, what are you going to do to keep them down on the farm once they have seen gay perry paris, there was this sense that the boys would not come back. But people were already leaving. You roll through places like kansas, missouri, the dakotas, you discover that some of the towns at the peak of their population in the census of 1910, 1920, they have been on a slow and steady decline since. Lots of reasons for that. One major reason is what is happening simultaneously is agriculture in this country is industrializing furiously. I think that is another misconception we carry with us, is that somehow agriculture is an older, simpler form of Economic Life and Industry Manufacturing in factories are somehow modern life but that is simply not the case in the country. Agriculture began to industrialize and all kinds of ways in late 19 73 19th century and as he did so, you could achieve economy of scale, you required fewer people to do the same amount of work and that meant surplus labor, which meant the which means leaving the red river valley in minnesota and going to the twin cities. It began early in the 20th century, people began to notice that patterns. Peter what is your area of academics at the university of miami in ohio . Steven i teach all sorts of American History courses. I consider myself that utility infielder of our undergrad curriculum, but as a specialist, one of my fields of interest is urban history. I know it is almost perverse that as an urban historian i wrote this book on Rural America, but it comes out of my work as an urban historian to put on those lenses and look at the areas beyond American Cities and see what we can see using that framework. Peter here are some statistics from the usda and Census Bureau about Rural America today. 97 of the u. S. Is rural land. The population is about 46 million, 14 of the u. S. Total. 1. 9 million farms in the u. S. The median worth of the farms is one point 4 million. Food and agriculture contribute about 1. 4 trillion to the gross domestic product. One of the outstanding figures for me is 90 7 of the u. S. Is considered rural 97 of the u. S. Is considered rural . Steven yes. It has to do with the way the census and other Government Agencies count the opposite of rural, which is to say, first the Census Bureau counted urban. In the 1940s and 1950s is began to develop a notion of a metro area and it first appeared in 1949 and has been resolved revised. Anything that isnt defined as a metropolitan statistical area is classed as rural. In that sense, two of the statistics you just counted, if you put them together you get a really interesting picture of the country right now. 97 of the area is classed as rural but only 14 of the people live there, which means 85 live in 3 of the u. S. Land mass. What we have seen, and this is from almost the beginning of the u. S. , we see a steady concentration of population. When the first census is counted, five percent of americans lived in an area classed as urban. By 2024, 80 5 , give or take, of People Living in the metro areas. That is an enormous concentration of population into a relatively small area. Peter i want to talk about some of the issues that have historically faced Rural Americans and contemporary Rural Americans. Lets begin with politics, populism, wasnt there a movement at some point in the early 20th century called the grange . Steven sure. He goes back to the 1870s. What that goes back to the 1870s. After the civil war and homestead act and the military campaigns against native people clear out that space and people establish homestead farms, people are out there thinking of themselves as staking their claim to an economic future. What they discover is that acting individually, they are struggling mightily. That so a number of these kinds of collective organizations begin to form to try to address the issues that face farmers as a group, rather than individuals. The range begins in the 1870s. There are versions of this. You can still drive through the midwest and see grange hall in some of these small towns. That developed into a much larger Political Movement which then created what was called the peoples party, or the populists , and they first ran to a candidate for president in 1892 and were very successful at collectively at electing local officials, congresspeople, a couple of senators and so forth out of this revolt of farmers at and the struggling Economic Conditions in that culminated in 1896 and then the movement collapsed. Peter did populism lead to labor violence, uprisings on farms . Steven i do not think it led to that sort of violence. I would say the demands the populists made in the Party Platform in the 1890s, though the movement itself kind of evaporated, many of those demands wound up becoming national policy. They were the First Political party to call for the direct election of senators. Fast forward 20 years and we got the direct election of senators. They are the party that first demanded income tax on wealthy industries. Fast forward, we get an income tax. So there is i think and influence the populists had, dramatic influence, even though the Political Movement itself evaporated and died away. Peter our rural areas of america overrepresented in politics in your view . Steven i think it is a fairly wide consensus at this point. The rural or antiurban bias in American Life is baked into our political system, most obviously through the senate and then the Electoral College and the way it works. The way i talk about this with my students is to talk about what i call the tyranny of wyoming. Wyoming has 700,000 people in it. He gets two u. S. Senators. California gets 38. 5 Million People. It also gets to senators. So your vote in wyoming counts for more. And you are representation in the senate is in some ways more direct than it is in a place with 38. 5 Million People. We can also see similar bias at the state level. This has a lot to do with the way districts are drawn and have always been drawn and so the kind of rural advantage in a state houses has been very significant over the years. But i think political scientists have done a much more thorough job of counting all of that up that i have. It is a generally accepted fact of american political life. Peter looking at issues in Rural America, some of the things you bring up in your book are economic inefficiencies and lack of basic services. Steven yes. So rather than thinking about urban versus rural, and this is something i came to as i was working on this project, maybe it would make more sense, especially at the level of policy, if we began to think about this in terms of population density and think about it almost as a sliding scale where you have San Francisco on one end and wyoming at another because one of the things you notice on this scale is that the more dense your population, the more efficient certain kinds of things become. Certainly economically but also in terms of health care services, public services, and so forth. The problem for many in Rural America right now is the population densities are low enough that they cannot support the basic things the rest of us all take for granted. If you drive through large parts of the midwest, you discover that the School Systems have been consolidated into larger and larger areas because there are a not there are not enough kids to support and educate locally. So kids are driving 90 minutes on the bus to get to school. That is inefficient. The same thing with hospital access, supermarket access, they are a function of density. If we talk about it in those terms meet we might want to tally the costs and benefits of low density living. Clearly if you want a Health Care System where rural people have the same kind of access as those in a denser area, that has to be subsidized in some way. The market system we have now will not do that. So then we have to ask the question, is this worth subsidizing and if it is, we should subsidize it. If it isnt, if it is too inefficient, we should be honest about that. Peter there is a sense of depopulation, isolation, being left behind, as you say. Steven i think it is not necessarily that people have been left behind in the economy altogether, it is that when you choose to live in a lightly populated area, it comes with certain almost unavoidable costs. The hospital will be a long way away because the hospital needs a certain number of people to function. So people are struggling economically but also not struggling economically but even those who are doing well economically in rural places still pay a kind of extra price for living in low density environments. Peter would you consider oxford, ohio a rural area . Steven it is. It is sort of on the edge of the cincinnati, Greater Cincinnati area, but it is a town of about 50,000 people. It is just 15,000 people. It is a university town. You drive five minutes from the center of campus and you will find yourself in a field because it is ohio and we grow corn and soybeans. So it is a rural place. Peter why are some of the reddist areas the most rural . Steven that is the milliondollar question. I am no expert, i am a historian and have a hard enough time dealing with the past. I am using that as a caveat. There are probably a couple of things going on. In a place like ohio, the rural areas have by and large always voted republican. As a consequence, they almost, it is habit. It is what my parents and grandparents did. The Republican Party itself has become more and more extreme as it has floated off into a right wing world, but these people are going to vote republican regardless of the particular ideologies of the republican candidate. I think there is a level of grievance or anger that you find in at least some pockets of Rural America that has to do with some of what we were just discussing. When you think about the myth of the Rural America, it is reelamerica, after all. That is what sarah palin told us, it is home on the range where the skies are not cloudy all day and it is supposed to be the virtuous, good American Life. That is the mythology we have had since thomas jefferson. But people are living lives in which there are restricted employment opportunities. The closest hospital is one hour away. There is not a decent supermarket anywhere nearby so they do Grocery Shopping at dollar general. I think the crash between the mythology of what rural life is supposed to be and the reality people experience has caused anger. Peter we discovered your book in a book review in the new yorker which focused on grant woods american profit. How does that play a role in your book . Steven i wish i had been able to put it on the cover of my book so i was very happy that the writer of the new yorker did that for me. What he does wondrously in that book is take may be the country in america and do an anatomy of it to reveal that what you think you are seeing here is not really what you are seeing. This is not really a farmer and his wife, it is a dentist on someone else. This house was built from a Sears Catalog from chicago. The house at that point had been abandoned. He does a wonderful job dissecting this mythology that we associate with the pastoral life, which again, goes back deep into the 19th century, jeffersons human farmers, yale men yeoman farmers. One thing i did not include in the book was the phenomenon of little house on the prairie, which are books that were published in the 1930s. The tv show was a success in the 1970s. What they do is perpetuate this mythology of the selfsufficient, independent farm family making it out on the frontier, none of which was actually ever true, not for Laura Ingalls or her family, it is a mythology we hang onto. When people have to live in rural places, or they choose to, it turns out it is not little house on the prairie. It is a lot different than that. And i think that contrast between myth and reality creates a lot of friction. Peter from your book, in essence, what many agree rural people seem to want are the benefits of urban Society Without the density and diversity of urban living. Many Americans Still project onto rural the yearning for tightknit community, selfreliance, independence, neighborliness, and simpler, slower living. But that fantasy cannot accommodate the realities of life in many parts of <