A Companion to American Agricultural History - Группа авторов

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in America continued to speak and write in their traditional language, but in the Midwest the opening of land for settlement coincided with waves of immigration and allowed these cultural islands the space and time to develop and persist. Robert Ostergren’s (1988) and Jon Gjerde’s (1985) studies of Scandinavian immigrants demonstrated the continuity of church membership and language over multiple generations in the Midwest.

      Patrimony, the practice of handing down the family farm, was a big part of the success of rural ethnic groups in maintaining community discipline and continuity. Many immigrants from northern Europe and their descendants practiced primogeniture, passing down the farm intact to the oldest son. Keeping the farm intact meant material and social security for parents. The intact farm meant that the oldest male could marry and carry on important cultural traditions. Parents often remained with the children in their retirement, comfortable and secure. This stood in contrast to the practices of native-born Americans, often referred to as Yankees by members of these ethnic communities. Yankees practiced partible inheritance, in which the estates were divided equally among the children. This often meant breaking up the farm if the descendants could not agree on buying out a sibling or if parents did not have enough other property to provide for the other children. As a practical matter, partible inheritance was more likely to result in farms changing hands and more geographic mobility, which made it difficult to sustain traditional cultural practices. Immigrant farmers, however, continued to practice primogeniture over multiple generations, ensuring the maintenance of communities that were closer knit with kinship ties than those of native-born families (Pederson 1992; Salamon 1992).

      Despite the successes in providing a patrimony, it was more difficult to sustain insular faith communities. School reform and consolidation was a major cultural conflict in the rural Midwest. Progressive Era reformers believed that farmers were not sophisticated enough to meet America’s growing demands for food and fiber. They wanted educational reform in the form of vocational agriculture and home economics courses and graded schools and consolidated high schools to teach those subjects. The old one-room school had been fine for many people who were going to be farmers in previous generations, but promoters of new scientific agriculture wanted more training for rural youth. But those reformers ran headlong into the opposition of many ethnic communities, often Catholic. For them, education beyond what we would consider eighth grade was superfluous. Consolidation of school districts and the creation of graded schools meant a loss of family authority for many first- and second-generation immigrants (Reynolds 1999).

      World War I brought nativist backlash against German-Americans as well as other Euro-American hyphenated identities. In many places it meant the end for the foreign language in the press and from the pulpit. Most famously, Iowa Governor Clyde Herring issued the Babel Proclamation in May 1918, requiring English only in all schools and churches, not to mention all public conversation on the streets, in trains, and on telephones. Local Councils of National Defense questioned the loyalty of first- and second-generation German immigrants, often resulting in intimidation to purchase war bonds, threats, and violence. Most notoriously, in Luverne, Minnesota, farmer John Meintz was accused of disloyalty, beaten, threatened with death, and tarred and feathered.

      Even communities that were settled and dominated by Anglo-Americans were in decline. The lure of cities for employment and the attractions of anonymity mattered to the descendants of these pioneers, too. In southern Illinois’s Union County, an area profoundly influenced by southern culture, markets for locally produced commodities, such as eggs, dairy, and truck crops, faded, with Union County farmers not able to match those areas with larger scale and better access to transportation. In Union County, farm income fell in relation to that from other sources, not least of which was the government (Adams 1994).

      Between the pull factors drawing people from farm communities and the push factors driving them off, neighborhoods were redefined. Small town business that had sold farmers groceries, machinery parts, and other goods and services collapsed or centralized. Farm and small town families traveled to the nearest Walmart, Tractor Supply, or implement dealer at the county seat town (Davies 1998; Flora and Flora 2014). Cold War defense spending, wartime revolutions in food processing, and the growth of the white-collar sector meant that more jobs required a college degree. Improved access to post-secondary education, due in large part to the GI Bill, resulted in the departure of sons and daughters for the region’s colleges and universities and, for many, a life off the farm or away from the hometown.

      Decline was also a theme for the region’s African American farm communities. As early as 1900, African American settlements were struggling. The descendants of the settler generation confronted rapidly rising land prices, making it difficult to expand operations or to break into farming. Like many rural Americans, those in Indiana’s Beech and Roberts settlements saw more opportunity in cities than on the farm (Vincent 1999). Black farmers who remained on the land found new obstacles to success. While legally color blind, the US Department of Agriculture was plagued by systemic racism that either shortchanged black farmers or left them out of commodity and conservation programs, crop insurance, loans and other services that supported income and farm survival (Reid 2014). As the rural cultural landscape flattened, so, too, did the commodity landscape.

      For most white settlers and their descendants, however, the region was one characterized by a modest degree of equality. The Midwest was free of sharecropping and the crop lien. In much of the nineteenth century, tenancy in the region often functioned as a ladder to farm ownership, with young farmers represented more frequently among tenants and older farmers more likely to own land (Cogswell 1975; Winters 1978; Winters 1990). Later, rising land values made it more difficult to break into farming, reinforcing the social and economic hierarchy.

      For the early settlers in the midcontinent, corn for cattle feeding for eastern markets was an early commodity wave that sustained both small and large farmers. The origins of these practices were found in several of the cultural hearths identified by John C. Hudson, with the addition of West-central Illinois. Smallholders could sell one or more animals to large-scale operators who opened large feedlots to put pounds on the animals. These cattle feeders planted large tracts of corn, typically in 10-acre fields. After shocking the corn in the fall, they turned in approximately 100 cattle per field, rotating animals through to fatten them to the desired weight before driving large herds to river cities such as St. Louis or along the National Road such as Indianapolis, Indiana, and Columbus, Ohio. In the decades before the Civil War, cattle drives from the midcontinent over the mountains were common, with ready markets in New York City and multiple points in Pennsylvania, including Erie, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia (Bogue 1959; Henlein 1959; Hudson 1994).

      This process of transforming golden corn into beef and pork laid the foundation for the post-Civil War wave of fattening Texas cattle. The cattle trails that led northward from Texas first passed through Missouri to Chicago, and later to famed cattle towns such as Abilene, Dodge City, and Ogallala. There, the cattle

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