JB: This mythology ends up erasing the most interesting political and economic facts about places we see as rural. What does the myth of rural America prevent us from seeing?
SC: We think of the industrial development of this country as an urban phenomenon. You think about Carnegie Steel plants in Pittsburgh or the Henry Ford River Rouge plant in Detroit, but American agriculture itself was heavily industrializing at the same moment. So even there, the contrast between the industrial city and the pastoral farm is wrong.
The data point I use with my students is that in 1865, when the Civil War is over, it took 61 hours of labor to produce an acre of wheat. By the 1890s, that’s been reduced to three hours. And that’s all because of industrial technologies. Economies of scale and mechanical labor took hold while observers extolled the virtues of independent and foreigner farmers. They were industrialists in their own way.
JB: Industrialization is only one force of history that transforms rural America. Others include militarization, suburbanization. You argue that sites like Midwestern missile silos shatter the idea of the rural as a place apart. What other examples reframe what we see as rural?
SC: Let’s start with the military. I’ve been thinking about the military industrial complex for a very long time. I spent a lot of time in Quaker meeting house basements as one kind of peacenik or another. And I cut my teeth in the ’80s in the nuclear freeze movement, back when people cared about nuclear weapons. I combine my interest in the military with efforts to incorporate the story of Native America into the standard historical narrative. If you tell American history with an attention to the military and Native America, the idea of rural American gets very fuzzy. Rural is distinct from wilderness. It implies something that’s been domesticated, it implies something that’s pastoral, cultivated, and good. Whereas the wilderness, certainly through the 19th century, the wilderness is frightening. The wilderness is where you go to get eaten by bears. So how did the American wilderness get transformed into the American rural? Well, lo and behold, that’s a military process. The cavalry fought a lot of battles against Indians—between 1790 and 1890, there were, at least by one historian’s count, more than 1,600 military encounters between Native people and federal and/or state troops. This is a period of continuous military conflict. It’s not just the trans–Mississippi West either. It is Ohio. It’s the removal of the Shawnee and the Delaware and the Miami out of Ohio and Indiana in the 1830s and their relocation to Oklahoma. This was a military process.