The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is - and Isn't - Hardcover

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Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of many books, most recently Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools.

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A book about rural America is preposterous on its face. 

There is no such thing as “rural America,” because there are many rural Americas, each with its own history, culture, and dynamics. There are “rurals” in every state and in every region of the country; rural Americans come, just like urban Americans, in every stripe and flavor politically, ethnically, religiously: Quebecois timber workers in northern Maine, shrimpers from Southeast Asia in coastal Louisiana, Central American slaughterhouse workers in rural Iowa and Kansas. And, of course, Native American reservation land remain overwhelmingly rural. We know from the novels of Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis, from the diary of Rachel Calof and other such sources that women have long experienced rural life differently than men and have often felt its hardships more acutely, and still do. 

Economically, rural America relies on agriculture, and it relies on extractive and manufacturing industries; it also depends on tourism and recreation. Depending on where you look, rural America is either desperately poor or awash in money. Any list of the nation’s poorest counties includes mostly rural ones—places like Wheeler County, Georgia, and McCreary County, Kentucky. At the same time, Teton County, Wyoming, inhabited at a sparse five people per square mile, can stake a claim to being both the wealthiest in the country, home to some of America’s superrich, and the place with the nation’s most yawning wealth gap. No single book—no single word—could pretend to do justice to all that diversity of experience.  

Likewise, there have been any number of attempts to define exactly what rural America is in the first place. Researchers at Ohio State University recently announced five different kinds of “rural” in Ohio alone! Once, rural people were classified on the basis of the work they did, the assumption being that those people made their living directly from the land in one way or another. That is certainly not true anymore, and it hasn’t been for some decades. Rural people drive long-haul trucks and they work for the state or county (though many might explain that this isn’t the same as working for “the government”), and some commute long distances for office or factory work in a metropolitan area. 

In 1987, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation funded the National Rural Studies Committee, to promote the study of rural America. Yet even this group of scholars “struggled with the term ‘rural,’” and wound up using rural, nonmetropolitan, countryside, and hinterlands more or less synonymously. John Fraser Hart, a geographer who was on the committee, turned the definitional dilemma into something of an inadvertent koan: “The need to understand and define the concept of rural becomes all the more urgent as that concept becomes ever less clear.” At roughly the same time, the Bureau of the Census had more or less given up altogether, deciding that rural meant anything left over after counting urban and metropolitan regions. “The urban population consists of all persons living in urbanized areas and in places of 2,500 or more inhabitants,” the bureau announced in 1985; “all other population is classified as rural.” The welter of definitions and the very precision they struggle to achieve underscores their arbitrariness in the first place. I’ll say here that I have neither fixed on one definition nor attempted my own, though the bulk of this book focuses on the space between the Appalachians and the Sierras. This space includes much of what is commonly considered rural America, though certainly not all of it. 

Still, most of us feel a rural place when we stand in one or when we drive through it. The spaces are bigger, the traffic is lighter, the houses fewer and farther between. We have the sensation—an illusion, really—of leaving all the artifice of the “urban” behind and entering something closer to nature. We can find ourselves alone, or nearly so. Indeed, that’s often the reason metropolitans go out to the country in the first place.