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lies of the land: seeing rural america for what it is -- and isn't" professor steven conn, "the lies of the land, seeking rural america for what it is and isn't," is your book. the opening line in that book is "a book about rural america is preposterous on its face." what you mean by that? >> well i think what i mean is that um-- in fact, we use rural to describe vastly different parts of this country. we, we-- there is no really good definition of it. and rural america when you drill down, turns out to be a remarkably diverse label to

cover all kinds of areas of the country. we are talking about the greenbelt in the great plains, but we are talking about timber areas in northern maine. we are talking about parts of appalachia which were once upon a time coal country. we are talking about vast swaths of the american southwest. all of these things get labeled rural, but of course they are dramatically different in all kinds of ways. >> for the purposes of your book how do you define it? >> i very studiously avoid it [ laughter ] trying to define it, because one of the things i found interesting when i jumped into this project was that lots of people have been, lots of people smarter than me, have been trying to define this term for a long time, and nobody has come up with a real answer to it. i feel at the end of the day we know where rural place when we are in one. when we experience it. and that is part of the almost obsessed emotional or affective sense i wanted to trade on, was that we see rural in this country as quiet, as largely

empty, as slower paced, and so wherever you find yourself feeling that way, you would probably label that, i am in the countryside now, i am in a rural area. >> "no word has been more used consistently to describe rural america than crisis." is that affair were to use? >> well, that's where i started this project, because that's what i was reading in the newspapers really starting from about 2015. there would be periodic stories about rural america in crisis. at that point what people were largely talking about was opioids. before that it was methamphetamines, and then you know, kind of healthcare issues altogether. when i began to do the

research, and as a historian, the first thing you do is go backwards rather than forwards, and when i did that, what i discovered is that a variation of that word, crisis, decline, whatever you want-- has been used to talk about rural america since the middle of the 19th century, and virtually in every decade between then and now. which then led me to wonder why this was useful language at all, if we are always talking about crisis, or decline, or being left behind, oregon, variations of those phrases. is this really useful language at all? because, when therefore was rural america somehow good mark when were we not talking about it in these terms? turns out we never really were. >> so chronic might be a better word? >> that's what i think. i think that what we have here if you think about a crisis what it implies is something that is abnormal, out of the ordinary, and which somehow resolves itself and it gets better or we come to some sort of a new normal. in that sense i think the

chronic condition people have been complaining about again since probably the third quarter of the 19th century really forced me to think about a different way of trying to describe the dynamics in rural places around the country. it didn't seem to me that doing another rehash of "oh, gee, we are in crisis." that hasn't gotten as far. >> you talk about country life commission, what was that in 1908? >> 1908, it's a wonderful it's footnote in the progressive era. the first major agricultural crisis that became a national topic of discussion was the so- called the original populist movement of the 1880s and '90s. farmers were feeling squeezed one way and another, and this erupted into a political

movement that reached a crescendo in 1896. with that in mind, when he became president, teddy roosevelt decided to create this commission, presidential commission, to study and offer recommendations for what's going on in mostly farm areas, mostly agricultural areas, that's what they focused on, and they issued this report. the report is filled with descriptions of what's happening in rural america, but what is complacent is america isn't keeping up with rural america. here are a variety of recommendations so country life will be just as good and rewarding as city life is. what we can deduce from that is there was already perception in the early 20th century, that somehow urban life was

accelerating, rural america was struggling to catch up. that's a nice moment in this discussion of rural america being left behind. >> some of the supporting evidence you use in the 1930s it was reported over 2200 iowa towns had been found abandoned, it was a 50% drop in farms in the number of farms between 1950-1970. >> yeah, again when you start to scratch the surface of all this what you discover is there are these measurable indices of decline and change that go way back. people were shocked when the census data of 1910 revealed that lots and lots of rural counties, in that agricultural midsection of the country were losing appellation. during world war i you know

there was a famous i guess we would call pop song of what are you going to do to keep them down on the farm once they have seen gay paris? there was a sense once these boys got a taste of city life they weren't coming back. but, people were already leaving. roll through places like kansas and missouri, the dakotas, and you can discover some of these towns hit the peak of their population in the census of 1910, 1920, and they've been on a slow, steady decline since. lots of reasons for that. one of the major reasons is what is happening simultaneously is that agriculture in this country is industrializing furiously. i think that's another one of the misconceptions we carry with us is that somehow agriculture is an older, more simple form of economic life and

industry manufacturing. that's simply not the case in this country. agriculture began to industrialize and all kinds of ways in the late 19th century. as it did so you can achieve economies of scale he required fewer people to do the same amount of work, and that meant surplus labor which left the red river valley in minnesota and wound up going to the twin cities. and again it begins very early in the 20th century. people begin to notice these patterns. >> steven conn, what is your area of academics at the university of miami, in ohio? >> so i teach all kinds of american history courses. um-- i sort of considered myself the utility infielder of our undergraduate curriculum, whatever needs to get taught i often teach. but, as a specialist um-- one of my fields of interest is

urban history. as an urban historian i end up writing this book on rural america sounds perverse, but it comes out of might work as an urban historian, to put on those lenses, to now look at areas beyond american cities and see what we can see using that framework. >> here are some statistics from the u.s. department of agriculture, and the u.s. census bureau about rural america today. 97% of the u.s. is rural land. the population is about 46 million, which is 14% of the u.s. total. there is about 1.89 million farms in the u.s., the median worth of those farms is $1.4 million. food and agriculture contribute about $1.4 trillion to the gross domestic product. one of the outstanding figures

there for me, professor steven conn, was 97% of the u.s. is considered rural ? >> yeah, so-- this has to do with the way the census and other government agencies county opposite of rural, which is to say first the census bureau counted urban. and in the 1940s and 50s it began to develop this notion of the metropolitan statistical area. i think that first appeared in 1949. it's been revised a bunch of times. the point of that though is anything that isn't defined as metropolitan statistical area is ipso facto classed as rural. and in that sense what-- put two of those statistics you just um-- um-- counted together, and i think you get a really interesting picture of the country right now.

97% of the area is classed as rural, only 14% of the people who live there, which means if i'm doing my math correctly, 85% live in 3% of the landmass of the united states. what we have seen-- and this does begin almost from the very beginning of the united states, is a steady concentration of population. when the first census is counted, about 5% of americans lived in an area classed as urban, and now by 2024, we are at 85%, give or take of people living in these metropolitan statistical areas. that's an enormous concentration of population, it's into relatively small areas. >> i want to talk about some of the issues that have historically faced rural americans, and contemporary rural americans. let's begin with politics. populism, wasn't there a movement at some point in the

early 20th century called the grange? >> oh, sure. that actually goes back to the 1870s. when the middle of the country opens up after the civil war, and the homestead act, and the um-- in the military campaigns against native peoples kind of clear out that space, and people established their homestead farms, people are out there thinking of themselves as staking their claim to an atomic future. what they discovered, however, acting individually they are struggling pretty mildly. so a number of these kinds of collective organizations begin to form to try and face the issues farmers face as a group rather than individuals. the grange begins in the 1870s. there are versions of this, you can still drive through the midwest and to see grange fall in some of these small towns.

that then developed into a much larger political movement, which then treated what was called the people's party, or the populists. and, they first ran for a candidate for president in 1992 and were very successful at electing local officials, congress people, a couple of senators, and so forth, out of this revolt of farmers at their struggling atomic economic suspected that populism leads to uprisings on farms? >> no, i don't think it led to that sort of violence. what i would say, however, is that the demands that the populists made in their party platform in the 1890s although the movement itself kind of evaporated, many of those

demands wound up becoming national policy for example they were the first political party to call for the delectable direct election of senators. they are the party that first man's end income tax on wealthy industrialists, and fast forward we get an income. quite dramatic influence even though the political movement itself had evaporated and kind of died away. >> in your review are rural areas of america overrepresented in politics? >> i don't think that's my view, i think that is a fairly wide consensus at this point. the well-- the rural or what i might also call anti-urban bias in american life is baked into our political system, most

obviously through the senate, and the way the electoral college works. the way i talk about this with my students is to talk about what i call the tyranny of wyoming. wyoming has fewer than-- 700,000 people living in it. it gets two u.s. senators. the state of california has 38.5 million people living in it, it gets two senators. your vote in a very rural place like wyoming simply counts for more than it does, and your 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 biases at the state level as well, and this has a lot to do with the way districts get drawn and have always been drawn, and so the kind of rural um--

advantage in statehouses has also been very, very significant over the years. but again, i think political scientists-- have done a much more thorough job of just counting all that up than i have. i think that is a generally accepted fact of american political life. >> as we continue to look at some of the issues in rural america, some of the things you bring up in the lies of the land include economic inefficiencies and lack of basic services. >> 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 maybe as a sliding scale where you have san francisco at one end, and you have wyoming at the other end. because one of the things you notice on the sliding scale is

the more dense your population is the more efficient certain kinds of things become. certainly economically, but also in terms of public services, healthcare services, and so on and so forth. the problem for rural americans, many people in rural america right now, is that the population densities are low enough that they can't support the basic things the rest of us all take for granted. you can drive through large parts of the midwest, and what you discover is that the school systems have been consolidated into larger and larger areas, because there aren't enough kids to support a school more locally. so kids are driving 45-90 minutes each way in a bus to get to school. that's monstrously inefficient.

you could look at the same thing in terms of hospital access, supermarket access, all these things are a function of density. if we talked about it in those terms we might want to sort of tally up what are the costs and benefits of low density living. clearly if you want to have a healthcare system where rural people have had the same kind of access as you do in a much more dense area that's going to have to be subsidized some way or another. the market system we have now is not going to do that, so we have to go ask the question is the sort of thing worth subsidizing? if it is we should subsidize it. if it is not it is too inefficient, then we should be honest about that, too. >> there is a sense of depopulation, isolation, being left behind, as you say. >> yeah, well as i said i think um-- it's not that necessarily the people have been left behind in the economy altogether, it's that when you choose to live in a-- lightly

populated area, that comes with certain, almost unavoidable costs. and as i said, the hospital is going to be a long way away, because the hospital needs a sort of population catchment in order to function. so, that's, you know, people are in various ways you know struggling economically and also not struggling economically. even those doing well economically in rural places are still kind of paying an extra ice for choosing to live in these low density environments. >> would you consider oxford, ohio, where miami is located, a rural area? >> yeah, it is um-- it's sort of on the edge of the cincinnati, the greater cincinnati area, but it's a town of about 12 or 15,000

people. it's a university town, and all you have to do is be dry three minutes from the center of campus, maybe five minutes from the center of campus, and you will find yourself either in a corn or soybean field, because that's ohio, and that's pretty much all we grow. so yeah, it is a rural place. >> why are some of the most red areas the most rural areas? hypothesis? >> well so yeah, there is the million dollar question. i think that um-- -- and i'm no expert here, so, i'm a historian. i have a hard enough time dealing with the past. so i will say that as a caveat. i think that there are probably a couple things that are going on. in a place like ohio, those rural areas have by and large always voted publican, and as a

consequence it's almost a habit. it's what my parents and grandparents did. the republican party itself has become more and more extreme as it has floated off into it's sort of right-wing world. but, these people are going to vote republican regardless of the particular ideologies of the republican candidate. i think there's 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 discussing. when you think about the myth of the rural america it's all you know, it's real america after all. that's what sarah palin told us. it's home on the range were the skies are not cloudy all day, and it's supposed to be the virtuous, good american life. that's the mythology that we've had since thomas jefferson.

but, these people are living lives in which their employment opportunities are pretty restrictive. the hospital is 45 minutes or an hour away. there's not a decent supermarket anywhere nearby, so they are doing grocery shopping at dollar general. and i think this crash between the mythology of what rural life is supposed to be, and the reality that people are experiencing has caused a fair bit of this anger. >> we discovered your book in the new yorker in a book review in the new yorker, which focused on grant wood's american gothic. how does that play a role in your book? >> yes well-- i wished i had been able to put it on the cover of my book. so i was very happy that "the new yorker writer" was able to do that for me. what he does wonderfully in that book is making maybe the most iconic painting of the

20th century in america and really doing an anatomy of it to reveal that what you think you are seeing here isn't what you are really seeing here. this is not a farmer and his wife, it is a dentist and somebody else, this house itself was built from a sears catalog from chicago. the house by this point had been abandoned-- i mean, it's a wonderful job he does in dissecting this mythology that we associate with that past rural life, which goes way back into the 19th century. it continues to this day one of ththings i was talking about in a talk i gave, i didn't include it in the book was the phenomenon of "little house on the prairie." the books were published in the 1930s. the television show was a riproaring success in the 1970s.

and in both cases what they do is perpetuate this mythology of the self-sufficient, independent farm family making it out on the frontier. none of which was not true, not of the ingalls family themselves, it's this mythology we hang on to. and when people have to live these lives, or choose to live these lives in rural places it turns out, it's not little house on the prairie. it's-- it's a lot different than that. and as i said, i think the contrast between the myth and the reality creates a lot of friction. >> from your book, "in essence what many aggrieved would 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 america their yearning for tightknit community, for self-reliance and independence, neighborliness, and simpler,

slower living, but that fantasy cannot accommodate the realities of life in many parts of rural america." "nor does it take into account the thorough extent to which the military, industry, corporations, and suburbs have shaped into rural space." >> that's not bad. [ laughter ] yeah, that's a nice summation of what i was getting at. that, in fact, contrary to the mythology of the past we have, rural people, rural places, have always been in these larger forces shaping what we would call modern american life, starting with the military. one of the things that i would put to you just as a way to

even thinking about this is that before we could even have rural in this country we had what at least white settlers saw as a wilderness and the transformation of wilderness into rural, you know, sort of wild, dangerous place into something domesticated and charming, that's accomplished by the american military between 1790-1890, there are by anybody's best count there were over 1600 military clashes between federal or state national guard troops and indigenous peoples. so, it was not an empty space, right? that was all cleared out, and it was all done by the military. i read a chapter on the army corps of engineers, on rural landscapes, and the way in which those dredging projects, canal projects, dam projects,

flood projects, made it possible to farm in those areas in the first place, those large- scale irrigation projects. so, the military, yes, large corporations, yes um-- from the 1930s onwards, congress, the presidency, um-- is working pretty hard and consistently to try and industrialize country areas, because that's a way to create jobs for people who are no longer needed on the farm, because as we discussed a moment ago you don't need that farm labor anymore, it has been industrialized. what if we moved car factories or steel plants or whatever happens to be out of chicago, out of detroit, and we move them to the countryside? one of the things i discovered to my surprise is that a great deal of american automobile manufacturing now takes place

in what we would call rural areas. especially the japanese companies, toyota, and honda, who built these plants in the '70s and '80s not inside urban areas, but out in the cornfields. and that, so, so rural people are not farmers, statistically speaking, much at all, they are factory workers, they are long- haul truck drivers. they are doing all these things that are connected to our industrial society. so yeah, i wanted to look at rural america through those lenses to see what it looked like. >> and those four lenses that steven conn uses in the lives of the land, militarization of rural america, industrialization, corporatization, and suburban. let's start with the militarization. this is from your, professor conn. " using the power of congress

and the courts, the military displaced thousands of rural people in order to empty the space necessary to train troops, test weapons, and otherwise practice for war-- the military transformation of rural space entailed radical changes to the social and economic ecology of those places and equally dramatic changes to the land, water, and the rest of the natural ecosystem." you use texas as an example. expect bell county, texas um-- became in about 1940, i could have that off a little bit, the home of camp hood and then fort hood, and this is now, i think, the u.s. army's single-largest base by number of people, it might be for bragg. they go back and forth. this was set up to prepare troops to fight in world war ii and to use artillery and tanks during world war ii.

it sort of sits right on the edge of where cotton and grain are grown, then you get into texas ranching country, it's right on that ecological line. um-- several hundred farm families are uprooted to create this space. and it exists to this day, what it looks like now of course is an army town, where there is a steady population, but a constantly rotating publishing of mostly young men who now support a host of used car dealerships pizza bars, strip clubs, and all the rest. so, what was once a very quiet and small-scale farming area in this little pocket of texas has become, you know, this sprawling operation, whose economic life is entirely dependent on the base.

one of the things that i wanted to do was come in the book, is to do a compare-contrast to a place like fort hood, which is still in operation, with a base which wound up closed in the 1990s when we did those, it was called-- the process where bases consolidated, post-cold war effort, so i compared fort hood, texas, with the air force base on the upper peninsula of michigan. and in some ways the same thing happens. the base comes in, it's an economic boom. it's feeding tax revenues into the local disabilities supporting the school systems etc. etc., but it's one of those bases that gets closed. when it does get closed the area on the upper peninsula

just implodes economically. it had become a one company town. that underscores to me the extent at which rural communities are dependent, i say in the book i'm almost addicted, to military spending. and without it, they have no economic viability at all. >> you quote william faulkner as saying "our economy is no longer agricultural. our economy is the federal government. >> yup, and that is a great quote from william faulkner who was no fan of the federal government but saw this clearly it is the case when we are talking about the military that a disproportionate number of these bases wound up in the american south. there are all kinds of reasons for that, but essentially this begins right before the first world war and is accelerated during the second world war when the air force begins to establish its own bases and

missile installations, that's more broadly, happens more broadly across the map. but those army bases and marine bases are disproportionately located in the south. and it's not just the bases themselves, it's everything the base generates economically. maybe it is suppliers, defense contractors, all the things that particular military installations are going to need, so large portions of the american south are dependent on the federal government. many would resent the statement i just made. >> steven conn, did you grow up in a rural area? >> i did not, i grew up in philadelphia, i am a city kid, but i find myself now living in a very small town in the middle of rural ohio, and i teach in a slightly larger town also in southwest ohio, and, so

part of this book is an attempt for me to understand my own surroundings better. um-- and i think it did that, but it does reflect an outsider's view maybe of what this is all about. >> what did you think of jd vance, now senator vance's book about rural ohio? >> yeah, well, it, for me, and i read it with a group of first- year students at miami university, i think it is problematic in all kinds of ways. and i think one of the things that um-- we might accuse jd vance of is a certain kind of um-- misrepresentation. i think what he describes as his own family background does tell an important story, that is to say the migration of people out of very rural park

it's pockets appalachia into his case a small city middletown ohio looking for industrial work. that certainly did and does happen from the 1950s and '60s, onward. um-- the lessons he draws from all of that i think kind of-- it's a campaign promo more than a kind of honest reckoning with the issues at stake. >> i want to show some video of a recent book that came out called the "overlooked americans," by elizabeth who appeared on our network. >> i don't think they ever judged us in the first place. i don't think they ever did. you get, send my email to these

folks introducing my self, they see my signature, i am professor at los angeles, he will be back anyway, and i would like to believe i would do the same, but i wonder, you know what i immediately have my backup, i would feel extremely changed by the work i did, but i think that is the thing we lose sight, that they are the folks i interviewed from rural america weren't judgmental from the get go. >> any comment about what elizabeth currid-halkett had to say about overlooked americans? >> yeah, oh dear-- i'm afraid at an individual level that might well be true. 10 years ago i actually did an entire book, which i'm afraid [ laughter ] um-- would contradict her statement there. in fact, it has always been the case that um-- urban america

has been on the receiving end of all kinds of nasty judgments, again, starting with jefferson, who compared cities to cancers on the body, to henry david thoreau, and on and on it goes. so let's return a moment to jd vance. during the senate campaign of 2022 he sent out a tweet, he was on his way to new york for a fundraiser. he was going to meet with millionaires, though he didn't put that in the tweet, and he said, everybody, i'm going to new york, i hear it is violent and disgusting, and he did, any advice? and there isn't a comparable discourse as i'm afraid she seems to think there is. it's simply unacceptable to talk about rural americans in the same derogatory, insulting way that politicians routinely

describe american cities. and, we have seen that just supercharged in the last couple of years. look at the way people talk about san francisco and new york, and chicago. and that is simply not a comparable discourse, not now, and not across 250 years of a mark in history. so i'm afraid she just has it wrong. i know that book, she found some nice people and made some conclusions that just don't stand up. >> industrialization has infected rural america "industry has always been part of the american pastoral even if we have chosen not to see it. what do you mean? industries, smelting, iron, papermaking, or all located outside the city. they were located near the resources you needed to do them.

what happens in the 19th century , especially late 19th century, industry centralizes into big cities like cleveland and chicago and detroit. but then almost immediately, there is a drive to try to decentralize that. again, because of the antiurban impulse that is so strong in our american culture. people start to talk about this in the 1920's and then the federal government under roosevelt's new deal tried to accelerate this process of moving factories and manufacturing jobs out of central cities and into the countryside where people need jobs and so rather than have them move to chicago, let's move the factory to someplace in downstate illinois. one way the federal government facilitates this is through the

big projects of rural electrification. at the start of the new deal, fewer than 10% of american households had electricity. that is another one of the differences between urban life and rural life at that point. in 1960, it is not true anymore, almost all rural places had electricity thanks to the rural electrification problem and all the rest but the real point was not just simply to deliver electricity to your house, it was to make cheap electricity available to attract industrial production. so that is part of why industry begins to move into the tennessee valley area, because now you have sheep hydropower being generated and now -- cheap hydropower being generated and we can open our factory there now. it was not a partisan issue.

franklin roosevelt started it, eisenhower accelerated it, lyndon johnson was on board and so was richard nixon. there was a bipartisan sense we should industrialize the countryside, at the expense of places like detroit and cleveland who are seeing the manufacturing operations leave in those same years. peter: you use a couple of examples. the gm plant in ohio and also the honda plant which has been very successful in marysville, ohio. steven: yep. let's back up for the viewers. honda opened its first manufacturing plant in central ohio in what was a tiny place called marysville in the late 1970's. then they moved into automobiles. they started with cycles.

then honda created satellite supplier factories that feed into the central assembling plant in marysville. all of those places around ohio are also in tiny locations. honda keeps ohio as the second most important state in auto manufacturing but it is not an urban phenomenon anymore, it is a phenomenon of the countryside. one thing i discovered doing the book was that honda's engine plant is in a town called anna -- ana, ohio. there were more people who work at that plant on any given shift then actually live in the town. so they are coming from a rural area and they work in this rural

engine plant and then they go home again. that is indicative of the way our manufacturing has been decentralized, moved out to the country. peter: lordstown has not been so successful for gm. steven: right. the lawrence town story hit the national press in 2020 when gm announced it was going to close the plant and then it became a political football. i was interested in the origins of this which go back to the 1950's. it is one of the first experiments that gm does in moving manufacturing operations out of the detroit area and into essentially a big cornfield. that is what was there when gm moved in. so that plant ran for about 50 years, 50 plus years, before gm

decided it was no longer economically viable or efficient. for me, it is a symbol of this postwar move of manufacturing out of urban areas and into rural areas. peter: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and, corporations control the seed that goes into the ground, the chemicals that saturate the soil, the appointment used two plants, spray, harvest, the trucks that haul the product away, and the processing operations that turn the raw material into something profitable. what is the impact of corporatization on rural america? steven: i think there were a couple of things at work, the first of which, and this speaks to the agricultural economy. we have this notion of a farmer. let's go back to grant wood for a moment, he has his pitchfork

and bib overalls, the american farmer. but in fact, the american farmer is and always has been deeply tangled up with large-scale corporations which make his or her livelihood possible in the first place. mccormick, the first big manufacturing of farm machines in a big plant in chicago, and after world war ii increasingly the chemical companies using the byproducts of petrochemicals for fertilizers and pesticides. so everything about a farming operation is connected to, or squeezed by, the profit-seeking large-scale corporations like monsanto, although that does not exist anymore. and the large-scale seed companies and so forth.

so just remember that farming is not quite, charming and the way we kind of want to think it is. -- in the way we kind of want to think it is, it is absolutely a product of large-scale corporations. peter: would you say corporate farming is more efficient? steven: this is a great question, because this is certainly what the nixon administration felt when it broke the big farm bill in the early 1970's. the secretary of agriculture at the time was famous for saying to farmers, get big or get out. he certainly believed and the nixon administration believed that the way forward for american agriculture was bigger, more efficient, larger equipment producing more yield per acre.

and that has worked wonderfully. no question that has been a success. the flip of that, it seems, is to ask the question that many of people now have been doing, what does this mean about our american food system? what exactly are we producing? it is largely carbohydrates in the form of grain and corn and soybean, a form of protein but soybeans get used for a lot of other things too. plenty of people have really important critiques to make about a corn and soy dependent agricultural system. and that is before you even get to the environmental consequences of roundup and all sorts of things that get poured into the soil. so it is efficient in doing the things it is efficient at doing, producing -- but is it efficient at producing food that is

nutritious? not so much. it is not efficient at actually feeding people in rural america. to some of the worst food deserts in this country are plate says -- some of the worst food deserts in the country are the places surrounded by cornfields. there is not food you can eat in any accessible way in the middle of farm country. it so it is not very good at doing that. peter: in your section on corporatization you talk about sears, walmart. what impact have a bit they had -- what impact have they had on rural america? steven: sometimes we draw a line between main street and wall street. they were always the same. let's use woolworths, which i wrote about in the book a little bit. it became staples of american

small towns. before woolworths ever opened a store in the city, he built his empire by opening five and dimes in market towns come in the towns which served to the outlying farm population. the products people were buying in a small town in nebraska in a world worth, for example, the products you would buy are being made in chicago, philadelphia, they are being ordered from london. and woolworths of course becomes an enormous corporation and at one point the werewolf tower was -- woolworths tower was the tallest building in new york. that is what walmart is as well

nowadays. the sun on the woolworths empire but when you go into walmart you are probably in a rural place, there is probably not another shopping opportunity for miles in any direction. but the stock comes from china, and good --, vietnam, and so on -- china, bangladesh, vietnam, and so on. peter: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and the fourth pillar that you write about is suburbanization. suburban development is built on the basic irony, suburbanites left the city drawn by the promise of more space, less traffic, fewer people, lower

crime rate, and all the rest, many seem resentful as the suburbs filled with more and more development. steven: there is a bumper sticker i sort of quote in the book that says, asphalt, the final front. i think it summarizes nicely what happens, it is the last step in our process of what has happened to american agriculture , by and large, i would say come overwhelmingly suburban development as you see it is built on what was once agricultural land and to take the kind of iconic symbol of it, the towns built in neyo and philadelphia are all on farm fields and that is the model of suburban development. so it mends farmers have -- it meant farmers sold out to a suburban developer and cashed

out and suburban development happens. i was struck by the way in which, on one hand, this is economic prosperity. the farmer gets rich selling his lands, the little town that was struggling is blooming again because of the new residents are moving into the developments, but people are grumbling about it at the same time. i have examples that i dug up in my research. it isn't what it used to be, we do not like these new people, they are the newcomers, they just don't understand. you see this all the time. i lived in a place called naperville, illinois, which is emblematic of this. there is this irony at the center of our suburban aspirations that inevitably, if a suburban is successful, it just gets more crowded, which create more of the things we thought we were escaping in the

first place. suburbia has always promised connection to the good parts of urban life but with the values of a rural life and when you discover that you cannot actually have it both ways, it helps explain i think white suburban -- i think it explains why suburban areas move out because we are chasing a green we could never catch. peter: was there a urban exodus to the suburbs or a rural exodus to the suburbs? steven: thanks for asking that. you talk about white flight. you can look at the collapsing population of big industrial centers. new york loses one million people in the 1970's, they moved to the suburbs. that is true but when you look deeper, you discover the numbers

do not add up. suburban growth is happening far faster than can be explained simply by the movement of people out of the central city. i discovered that a lot of the growth is driven by rural people leaving the areas that are no longer economically viable. they are not moving to the city, anymore, they are moving to the suburbs outside the city so they can get a job in a metro area but they are not actually a city dweller. and i think this drives a lot of suburban growth, especially in places like chicago, the twin cities which i looked out a little bit, and places like that. -- looked at little bit. and places like that. peter: what is the premise of your book in what are the conclusions you have drawn about rural america? steven: the premise is that

rural americans have not been left behind. they have not been overlooked. when we look at this historically, what we see is that rural americans have been at the front of the national parade as often as not. they are absolutely connected in the way that all of us are to the big forces of american modernity, large-scale corporations and industrialization and all the rest. what i hope people take away from my book is that we may want to figure out if we have cast urban and rural in a kind of political struggle and maybe there is a different way to conceive of our shared common ground and may be looking at it that way, we can begin to develop some ideas that might get us past when i see as a logjam in the way we discuss all of this in the first place. peter: is this a book written by academics?

it's published by the university of chicago press. steven: it is thurlow -- it is thoroughly enriched in footnotes but i have had my children read this book and they are not academics and i thought it was a pretty nice read. i work hard to make my work accessible to an interested reader, whether or not they have expertise or an academic background, so i hope readers will find it accessible and in some places, really enjoyable. there are parts of the book that i think will cause people to chuckle. peter: we will close with the book. i have come to believe rural america really does reflect with what the nation has become, just not of the ways we want to acknowledge, much less celebrate at the state fair. look past narcotic nostalgia and political rhetoric, and it is easy enough to see that rural spaces reflect the work of most of the major forces that have

shaped 20th-century america. steven conn of the university of miami, ohio, author of this book , "the lies of the land: seeing rural america for what it is -- and isn't" we appreciate your time here on c-span. steven: absolutely. thank you so much for having me. this was great. >> all q&a programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our c-span now app.