Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s

Remaking the Heartland

Middle America since the 1950s

Robert Wuthnow

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wuthnow, Robert.

    Remaking the heartland : Middle America since the 1950s / Robert Wuthnow.

        p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-691-14611-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Middle West—Economic conditions. 2. Middle West—Social conditions. 3. Agriculture—Middle West. 4. Social change—Middle West. 5. Community development—Middle West. 6. Agriculture—Economic aspects—Middle West. I. Title.

    HC107.A14W88 2011

    330.977—dc22

2010021518

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in ITC Century Std

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Tables

Preface

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Here in the Middle

CHAPTER TWO

Recovering from the Great Depression

CHAPTER THREE

Reinventing the Rustic Life

CHAPTER FOUR

Education in Middle America

CHAPTER FIVE

The Decline of Small Communities

CHAPTER SIX

The Changing Face of Agribusiness

CHAPTER SEVEN

From Towns to Sprawling Suburbs

Afterword

Appendix

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Tables

1.   Population and Gross Domestic Product per Capita Relative to United States

2.   Annual Change in U.S. Farm Population

3.   Mean Number of Children Born by State, Year, and Farm Status

4.   Sources of Decline in Agricultural Labor Force per County,1950 to 1960

5.   Sources of Decline in Farms per County, 1950 to 1960

6.   Educational Attainment in Middle Western States

7.   Literacy and Schooling in Six Middle Western States in 1870

8.   Factors Predicting School Enrollment in the Middle West in 1870

9.   Sources of County Variation in Secondary School Enrollment

10.   Size of Middle Western Towns

11.   Average Town Size in Nine Middle Western States, 1910 to 2005

12.   Population Decline by Town Size in 1910 and 1950

13.   Population Decline, 1980 to 2005

14.   Factors Associated with Towns' Population Decline

15.   Population Trends by Towns' Characteristics

16.   Community Associations by Town Size and State

17.   Value of Food Products

18.   Meat Products Manufacturing Establishments

19.   Employment and Wages in Meat Industry Occupations

20.   Comparison of Meat Workers and Construction Workers with Farm Workers

21.   Characteristics of Edge and Core Cities

22.   Employment of Edge-and Core-City Residents

23.   Effects of Distance and Land Area on Edge Cities' Population

Preface

It may have been that cold windy morning in central Nebraska when I pulled off the highway to watch the sun rise, golden red, across the open fields. That may have been the day I decided to write this book. Or it may have been another day, when I was driving through small towns in eastern Iowa. That moment, perhaps, when a highway marker reminded me of my childhood home. Or it may have been only the slow realization that something there in the nation's heartland was calling me to write about it. Who knows?

What I do recall as vividly as if it were yesterday is listening to a public lecture by a visiting speaker at my university, my mind wandering as it often does, and realizing that I had it all wrong. Well into the research at that point, I was working on the assumption that the heartland was a place of withering decline, like the soil itself gradually eroding away. I thought that was the story that needed to be told. It made sense of small towns with empty storefronts. Large fields with no farmsteads. Reports of joblessness. But it did not square with other evidence. New technology. A surprisingly robust economy. Strong schools. An upbeat feeling among residents about the future. Clearly I needed to think harder about what was happening. By the time I finished with the research, I had a much different story in mind than when I started.

My central claim is that the American Middle West has undergone a strong, positive transformation since the 1950s. The reshaping that occurred in this period is striking because the region was worse off in the years immediately following World War II than has commonly been assumed. The transformation is surprising because it took place in the nation's heartland. Most accounts of dramatic social change have focused on other parts of the country—especially the Sunbelt and coastal cities—not on the Middle West, a region of small towns and farms, wheat fields and prairies. The transformation that occurred here was largely beneficial, notwithstanding the fact that millions of people were displaced from their communities, because this displacement resulted in new opportunities for employment and a healthier relationship between the region and the rest of the nation. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Middle West was a more vibrant contributor to the national economy than it had been a half century earlier.

This argument, I confess, is counterintuitive. The typical approach is to regard the American Middle West as a kind of throwback to earlier times, a vast museum of dwindling farms and small towns to be visited by folks who live elsewhere and would not want to stay for very long. The view that things were better in the past fits neatly with a nostalgic image of an America that was in fact rural and less complicated than it is today. A related view popularized in news magazines and schoolbooks showed a heartland in the 1950s prospering from good crops, with happy housewives preparing luscious meals on modern kitchen appliances for grateful husbands and children—a time followed by disappointment and decline. That image of the 1950s may have been true for the few but not for the many. A better sense of how the Middle West has changed over the past five or six decades is gained by thinking of the 1950s as a time when many families were still recovering from the Great Depression. Farmers were again suffering from dust storms, uncertain crops, and wildly fluctuating prices. Farm communities often lacked paved roads, electricity, or dependable telephone service. Millions of people were leaving the farms and rural communities in search of meager employment opportunities elsewhere.

It is also counterintuitive to argue that the Middle West is vibrant economically and culturally. Most depictions of the region's recent history view it as a sad tale of rural people clinging to outmoded lives, of dying communities, and of old- fashioned values tinged with bigotry and ignorance. When writers who pass briefly through the region find other stories to tell, the stories are usually about food the writers romantically wished was still grown in the family garden, smelly feedlots, or undocumented workers being exploited by rich agribusiness owners who reap unjustified millions in government subsidies. But these accounts miss the fact that the region has upgraded itself even as it has downsized. The technology, the new industries, and the cultural diversity of the heartland could hardly have been imagined a half century ago.

The transformation that has occurred in the American Middle West cannot be attributed to any single cause, tempting as it may be to seek answers in the magic of, say, rugged individualism. I break the narrative into several parts. The first is about the struggles of Middle Western farmers in the 1950s. Difficult as those struggles were, they enabled farming to become more efficient and capital intensive. The second is a saga of cultural redefinition. As the Middle West modernized, it rediscovered its legends of hardy pioneers, adventuresome cowboys, and Dust Bowl survivors. It reshaped these legends into a less spatially confined image of congeniality and can- do inventiveness. These new understandings improved the region's self- image and contributed to its ability to transform itself. A third story is about public education. The region invested heavily in schools, administered them well, and encouraged children to regard school achievement as their best hope for occupational success. Higher education became the source of both upward and outward mobility. A fourth story tells of small communities that are dying by the hundreds and yet are not doing so very quickly or completely. Community downsizing has been a matter of great concern to the residents of these communities, but it has worked remarkably well for the region as a whole. Small communities remain attractive for low-income families needing inexpensive housing. Many of these communities are within commuting distance of larger towns where work can be found in construction, manufacturing, and human services. High fuel prices are making it harder for these commuters, but electronic technology and decentralization are opening new opportunities. A fifth story examines the growth of large- scale agribusiness and its effects on the ethnic composition of the region. Contrary to tales about extreme ethnic conflicts, the picture that comes into focus from closer inspection is one of greater diversity over a longer period, continuing difficulties for immigrants and undocumented workers, and yet shows a striking degree of communitywide accommodation to new realities. A final story is about the phenomenon least expected in this part of the county—rapidly expanding edge cities. The growth of these communities has been nothing short of spectacular. And yet the sources of this growth lie in more than simply the availability of land and the decline of smaller towns.

My approach treads the line between history and social science. Change in the heartland is a big topic that can only be grasped by delving deeply into the lives of particular communities, looking at their past, learning from their current residents, and situating these communities in wider comparisons. Much of the change resides in small details that can only be seen in the trajectories of children leaving, stores closing, citizens remembering dust storms and taking pride in their ancestors, neighbors watching out for one another, schools consolidating, residents looking for new jobs, and planners planning. The Middle West is enormously diverse in both its geography and its people. The diversity makes for interesting comparisons. Missouri and Arkansas developed schools quite differently than Iowa and Minnesota. Farming diverged sharply between the grasslands of western Nebraska and the wheat fields of western Kansas. The evidence for these comparisons comes from data on population, crops, schools, and economic conditions; information about the growth and decline of towns and about their business conditions; records of town meetings and planning boards; diaries and newspaper stories; and interviews with more than two hundred residents about farming, school administration, town and county government, agribusiness, and regional planning.

Although no single factor can explain the region's transformation, several preconditions for the social change that has taken place loom large. One is the fact that the region largely comprised rich land with vast potential for crops and livestock and often mineral wealth as well. The region was essentially taken from its native inhabitants and used by the United States for colonization by white settlers, who in turn raised crops and livestock, created a demand for towns and railroads, and for years existed as debtors to eastern banks. During the last half of the twentieth century, the land continued to be a crucial aspect of the region's social life, shaping the location and livelihood of towns, influencing the establishment of agribusiness, providing funds for public schools, and encouraging the development of military and transportation industries. Another precondition may have been less obvious. That was the extensive geographic mobility of the region's first several generations of white settlers. Settlement implied people coming to stay, and those who did were often hailed as community founders. But they were the exception rather than the rule. Settlers were people who had lived elsewhere before, often in several places, and although they may have wished to stay in one place, they moved on in hopes of something better. They seldom objected when their children packed up to attend college or to marry and find jobs in other towns or states. That adaptability made it possible for the region's population to disperse as economic conditions warranted. A third precondition was the institution building carried out by the region's first century of settlers. They came as merchants and schoolteachers, with skills in business and law and with knowledge of shops and offices. The region benefited from carefully crafted laws, town and county governments, school districts, and state constitutions that had been worked out previously in other parts of the country. The smallest towns soon had churches, Masonic lodges, opera houses, and schools. Despite an ethic of self- sufficiency, residents worked out programs to care for the needy and established asylums for the blind and the insane. All of these institutional precedents served as resources when the time came to consider new schools, new jobs, and new programs of government assistance.

For anyone interested, an afterword tells of my own connections with the Middle West. The danger in writing about a place in which one lived as a child is the possibility of either romanticizing it or viewing it too harshly. To guard against these tendencies, I tried to employ the same mind- set an academic writer would adopt for any other topic. I read countless memoirs to see how other writers have dealt with the issue. Unlike some, I am not so glad to have escaped the Middle West that I hold it in disdain; and unlike others, I have never been much tempted by pangs of regret. As the research progressed, I was surprised to find myself telling an upbeat story. That focus, however, in no way diminishes the difficulties communities face when their populations decline.

Acknowledgments to the many people whose ideas, information, and publications proved useful are amply given in notes, references, and the appendix. My appreciation to the hundreds of people who spent time being interviewed runs especially deep. They gave me a rich sense of the Middle West that I could have acquired in no other way. I was able to do the research, to travel, to hire assistants, and to spend time writing through the generous support of Princeton University. I am extraordinarily grateful to the many librarians and archivists there and around the country who assisted me in locating information about the small details of community life. My greatest debt is to my wife and children.

Introduction

During the half century that began in the 1950s, the American Middle West—Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Arkansas, and Oklahoma—underwent a dramatic social transformation. The region's population grew at only half the national rate. More than three thousand towns declined. Agriculture suffered from adverse weather and wild market fluctuations in the 1950s, experienced worse conditions in the 1980s, and became far less significant to the region's economy. At the start of the period, analysts wondered if the Middle West would ever fully recover from the devastation of the Dust Bowl era. Large numbers of rural families lived in houses without electricity, telephone service, or indoor plumbing. By the early 1960s, the number of farm youth going to college was startlingly low. Social scientists administered IQ tests to determine if these youngsters were intellectually inferior. Journalists wrote of country hicks lacking refinement. Big-city newspaper editors complained that many of these yokels were on the government dole. The region, analysts wrote, was a huge scar on the national psyche that needed somehow to be fixed—or turned back to grassland and buffalo.

But the heartland was far different in the early twenty-first century than predictions of its demise had suggested. The region's economy fared surprisingly well. While its population declined relative to the nation, its economic productivity grew as rapidly as the rest of the nation, and its contribution to the nation's economic strength remained undiminished. Agribusiness was flourishing. Stereotypes of a benighted hinterland had been replaced by images of hospitality and ingenuity. The region's elementary and secondary schools were among the best in the nation. Its commitment to public higher education consistently ranked high. Without any of the nation's largest cities, the region was known for innovative medical research and bioscience technology. It hosted some of the nation's largest businesses and had become a magnet for sprawling exurban commercial districts and housing developments.

A transformation of such magnitude is not without costs. Millions of Americans were displaced. They lost the farms their parents and grandparents had worked hard to create and maintain. They said goodbye to neighbors who moved on and to children who left, never to pursue the lifestyles their parents anticipated. Country schools closed by the thousands and were replaced by large consolidated districts with fleets of yellow school buses. Retailers in small towns lost business to franchise outlets in regional centers. People who moved to cities in other states where employment opportunities were better experienced in—between lives still tethered in their home communities. Those who stayed sensed acutely that much of the action was elsewhere and composed accounts of why staying was a sensible choice. The region was not devoid of tensions roiling into political, moral, and religious conflicts.

The Middle West nevertheless remade itself without the extreme ill effects that often accompany such economic restructurings. Hardly any strikes, work stoppages, or protests took place. Families who found it necessary to move on did so. They did not hunker down and opt for poverty but sought opportunities wherever they could be found. Unemployment and the numbers of people receiving public assistance remained markedly low. People may have regretted school closings, but they seldom resisted. They found ways to improve the weakest schools and equalize educational opportunities. Racial divisions gradually eroded. The influx of new immigrants that came with agribusiness expansion resulted in fewer conflicts than might have been anticipated.

How did communities adapt to—and indeed facilitate—the kind of transition that middle America experienced during the last half of the twentieth century? Adaptation depends on the resources at communities' disposal and the habits residents have developed for making use of these resources. For the Middle West, land was a key resource. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory that became America's heartland for its water, chiefly the port of New Orleans and access to the Mississippi River, and for security against invasion from the rear that these assets provided. But it was the land that proved far more valuable to the nation's development. Public land, purchased from the French and taken from the native peoples who occupied it, became a vast resource affecting nearly everything the nation did in the nineteenth century. Public land paid for the founding of the Middle West's common schools and subsidized its colleges and universities. It served as an inducement for Northern farmers to join the Union army during the Civil War, it persuaded native peoples to relocate farther west, and it provided the incentive to railroad companies that brought transportation to every corner of the Middle West. Nothing about it was left to chance. Surveyors laid out section boundaries and townships prior to settlers arriving. The Middle West was a planned community if ever there was one.

Land remained the region's principal resource in the second half of the twentieth century. Its productivity increased even as mechanization required fewer people to labor on it. Transporting goods from it and across it kept the region's rail and trucking industry strong. Property taxes ensured revenue for schools and local government services even when the population dwindled. The land—what crops the soil would sustain, how the terrain was configured, where streams and rivers were located, and who would prosper from railways and roads—dictated the spatial dispersion of communities from the start and continued to shape their dispersal as inhabitants moved away.

Habits refect the surroundings in which they emerge. Settlers in the Middle West learned quickly that the land necessitated both persistence and flexibility. One year's bounty was followed by next year's drought, and a good harvest could be destroyed in an instant by hail or grasshoppers. Midwesterners took pride in staying through hard times, but they also knew when they were licked. For all the talk about farms having been in the family for generations, residents of the Middle West were an itinerant people. One reason they moved so readily during the second half of the twentieth century was that they had done it before. To have descended from settlers was to have hailed from migrants. Communities forged bonds among neighbors and kin, but those bonds could be broken and routinely were.

The 1950s is the decade for which it has been easiest to miss the extent of upheaval in America's heartland. In standard accounts, migration peaked in the 1930s as Okies fled the Dust Bowl and then movement temporarily surged again in World War II, after which families settled into sanguine rural and small-town prosperity during the fifties. But understanding how the region changed requires taking a closer look. The farms, towns, technological developments, and home improvements achieved across the Middle West during the first quarter of the twentieth century were seriously disrupted by the Great Depression and the war. Things did not return to normal simply with rising grain prices and better cattle markets. People struggled to rebuild sagging infrastructure and to adapt to changing economic circumstances. Part of why the region prospered later was that marginal farmers who had hung on during the 1930s and 1940s lost out completely during the 1950s. Government subsidies helped some of these families, but large numbers gave up. They took blue-collar jobs in towns and cities, moved to other states, retired, or died.

If habits are shaped by conditions, the people who display these habits play an active role in determining what they mean. Students of social life who seek to objectify the people they observe are constantly reminded of this fact. Heartland residents may have paused rarely to contemplate what writers or filmmakers thought about them, but they were keenly interested in crafting their own interpretations of what it meant to live in middle America. There were myths galore: The heartland was rural America, inhabited by rustics who knew little about city life and rarely traveled or read great literature. Its residents spoke with peculiar regional accents and had little appreciation of fine art. That was one image, and it was sometimes comforting for heartlanders simply to embrace the idea that they were simple, unpretentious, plainspoken people. But that view squared poorly with aspirations to be equal with the rest of America and with the fact that farms and small towns were indeed modernizing and connecting increasingly with the wider world through television and motion pictures. Other available myths needed to be recast. The heartland was—but not quite—Buffalo Bill's Wild West, Laura Ingalls Wilder's pioneer home on the prairie, and Dorothy's Kansas in the Wizard of Oz. For the heartland to remake itself, it had first to redefine itself, and this act of self-redefinition occurred mostly in the 1950s and 1960s. The heartland came to be a region defined less by geography alone and more by attributes associated with and transcending a particular place. To be a heartlander, it was no longer necessary to farm or live in a small town but rather to appreciate those who did and even more so to enjoy the landscape's natural beauty, to pride oneself on commonsense ingenuity, to cherish family and friends, and with Dorothy to utter simply, There's no place like home.

The stuff of movies and television helped Middle Westerners reinvent themselves, and yet their own futures and the region's required practical knowledge. Here were people who had grown up on farms and in small towns far from the great centers of learning. How could a region long dominated by one-room country schools and so recently afflicted by the Depression possibly compete? The truth was that Middle Western states had taken education so seriously from the beginning that by the early twentieth century, the region was often referred to as the nation's education belt. In 1950 the top four states nationally in percentage of adults having completed high school were Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Minnesota. An extensive system of well—financed and well-supervised public elementary and secondary schools gave the region an enormous advantage as it sought to advance economically and culturally. Over the half century that followed, the proportion of adults with high school degrees steadily increased, exceeding the national average, and rising numbers went on to college. As the population became better educated, the region nevertheless faced a new challenge. Could it make appropriate employment opportunities available? Or was it destined to experience a massive brain drain as its best-trained young people took jobs in other regions? One thing was certain: higher education had become a major dislocating force. Young people in their twenties left in massive numbers to attend college and to seek jobs upon graduation. The region's policymakers increasingly wondered how to lure them back and how to attract newcomers.

That worry was compounded by the fact that towns were dying. Or so it seemed. The Middle West had been settled by farmers who needed towns and by entrepreneurs who eagerly catered to their needs. As farms became larger and transportation improved, the dynamics changed. By 1920 many towns were losing population. The baby boom of the 1950s reversed the trend in some communities, but it continued in others. By 1980 the nine Middle Western states ranked first through ninth in having the highest proportion of towns with fewer than fifteen hundred people. And during the quarter century after 1980, nearly two-thirds of the region's towns declined, and few of the others kept pace with population growth in the rest of the nation. Shifting agricultural patterns, uncertainties in oil and gas production, and military base closings all contributed to the decline. Yet the region's established towns proved resilient. The ones that declined most were already quite small. Other communities held steady, experiencing what demographers of the 1970s touted as ideal zero population growth, or declined gradually enough to avoid major increases in unemployment and poverty. Quality-of-life rankings confirmed what residents argued: that their communities were good places to live, make friends, and raise families.

The few rural towns that grew dramatically did so because they became heavily implicated in agribusiness—especially the region's increasing role in packaged-meat processing for fast-food distribution and consumption. The key example of this transition was Garden City, Kansas, which became one of the fastest-growing communities in the 1980s and the home of the world's largest meat-processing facility. With a flood of new immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia, Garden City became the new face that scholars projected onto the region. Surely the region was remaking itself, they argued, by importing cheap labor to work in conditions reminiscent of The Jungle and with ethnic tensions as the expected result. But the restructuring of agribusiness proved to be a more complicated story. It required looking to the first half of the twentieth century to understand the social infrastructure that made agribusiness possible. It also necessitated looking at the complex multinational conglomerates in which meat processing became involved.

With so many farms and small communities losing population, the remaining question was whether enough people would stay to keep the region in business, and if so, what business that would be and where they would live. Edge cities were not expected to emerge in the Middle West to the extent they did in the Sunbelt and on both coasts, but they did appear and increasingly became symbolic of the Middle West's new role in the national economy. By 2005 there were ninety-five independently incorporated edge cities with at least ten thousand residents within twenty miles of the region's eight largest cities. More people lived in these suburbs than in those large cities combined. Logic held that people were attracted by capacious homes with ample yards near shopping malls and interstate highways. But the reality was again more complex. Much of the growth could be traced to World War II, when defense industries expanded onto open land adjacent to the region's cities, and to the manufacturing firms that grew out of these defense industries. At first, commuting to center cities increased, but it later decreased as more employers located in the suburbs. Those employers were the principal architects of the region's new emphasis on avionics, fiber-optic communications, finance, medical technology, and bioscience.

The remaking of a region is a large story that can be told only by combining evidence of the big picture with details about individuals and their communities. The big picture comes from hundreds of datafiles constructed by the U.S. Census Bureau and other government agencies about topics as diverse as the populations of towns and counties, the education levels of residents, the locations and output of meat-processing plants, and the crop yields of wheat farmers and beet growers. This material covers the past half century, and for some topics, it was necessary to examine a much longer period. The fine-grained details resulted from delving into the business records and community histories of selected illustrative towns, from reading back issues of their newspapers, from searching through oral histories and minutes of town meetings, and from conducting scores of interviews with ordinary residents and community leaders.

If there is a single lesson to be learned about how communities remake themselves, it is this: the capacity to change depends on the institutional arrangements that precede it. America's heartland was never as down and out as its detractors in the big cities and elite universities believed. But its transition from the Dust Bowl era to the twenty-first century was not simply a matter of shucking bad habits and rewarding innovators either. Much of its success was attributable to the fact that the U.S. government decided early on to fill it with settlers and to the institutions these settlers created for themselves, including the market towns, the farmsteads, the one-room schools, the townships, the rural cooperatives, and the manufacturing centers that gave the region its identity. These institutions had to adapt as economic and demographic conditions changed, but they had been established as adaptable social forms in the first place, and they served well to provide the incentives, legal frameworks, and support networks needed to make new arrangements possible. What later would sometimes appear to be entirely new was seldom quite as novel as it seemed.

The story of the heartland's transition is, for me, a matter not only of academic interest but also of personal exploration. It is about the road not taken, the region I left behind many decades ago and have always wondered about, always loved, often visited, and never before taken the opportunity to look at through the eyes of an outsider or tried to write about with the heart of a person still there.

ONE

Here in the Middle

Here in Smith County, at the exact geographic middle of the United States, there is a sense of timeless tranquility that can be deceptively seductive. Above the small stone monument that local citizens erected on April 25, 1941, to mark the site, an American flag waves serenely in the Kansas breeze. At one side, a few trees planted on that occasion shade a picnic table and a small white prayer chapel. Several tall pines and a row of overgrown junipers make a home for native jays. The grass has recently been cut, and the litter barrel is nearly empty. A few yards away is a low bluish-gray building that once served as an eight-room motel. Its doors and windows are now covered with plywood. A dirt road extends up over the hill and into the distance. Except for the rustle of wind, the day is palpably quiet.

The location provides a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. To the north and west, a field of rich loam lies ready to be planted with sorghum. Down the hill to the east, an access road dips through a pasture in which a herd of Black Angus while away the warm spring days. To the south as far as the eye can see, across the gently rolling terrain, fallow land and sparse shelterbelts intersperse with fields of undulating wheat. In a few weeks, the fields will turn golden brown in anticipation of the harvest. Several miles in the distance is the small hamlet of Lebanon, its grain elevator and water tower rising tall against the cloudless sky. To the southwest, a grain elevator is barely visible on the horizon, and beyond that lies the town of Smith Center, the county seat. This is the heart of America's heartland.

Visitors travel to this spot to gauge the enduring values that define America. They come from Philadelphia and Chicago, from New York and Los Angeles, from bustling cities overrun with change and uncertainty, and increasingly from other countries. The sojourners detour up from Interstate 70 to break the long haul between Kansas City and Denver. They include hunters who come each fall in search of deer and pheasants. Some are writers sent by newspapers and television stations to record their observations for distant audiences. They are looking to plumb the nation's soul. Perhaps there is wisdom here, extracted from the soil by these folks who still live so close to it, that can inspire people elsewhere whose lifestyles are profoundly different.

A writer in the early 1990s found the local residents compellingly honest, hardworking, sheltered, and a bit disappointed that progress had passed them by. A tourist from Minnesota came about the same time and stood at the grave of her great-grandmother, a rugged pioneer who struggled to establish a life on the open frontier. We belong to each other, she wept. A few years later, a reporter from Australia stopped on a cross-country tour with his eleven-year-old daughter to see if there was a connection between the landscape and the nation's psyche. Truly this was God's country, he concluded, observing the tiny prayer chapel and the church steeples and cemeteries. But it was an idealized past, he thought, a place with an uncertain future. At the turn of the millennium, a writer for the Washington Post spent the day in Lebanon, absorbed by its silence and overwhelmed by its emptiness. Main Street stays so vacant, he wrote, that a dog could lie down in it for a long nap in no fear of being awakened, much less run over. Standing amidst the crumbling storefronts, he was gripped by the melancholy of what had been lost. Yet he was equally impressed by the stubborn endurance of the people who remained. It's something you feel if you stop the car, he mused, get out, stand hip-deep and soaking in the pond of stillness that spreads without a ripple, mile on mile on mile.¹

It is hard not to conclude that America's geographic center has seen better days. In 1870, three years before Lebanon became a town, only sixty-six settlers lived in all of Smith County. We earnestly invite emigrants from the Eastern States, one of the residents wrote in 1877, energetic men and women who are not afraid to do or dare, ornaments to society and occupying useful positions in life.² By 1880, the population swelled to 13,883, of whom 1,673 were living in Oak Township where Lebanon was located. Seven years later, when the Rock Island Railroad came through, the citizens moved their town two and a half miles northeast to be on the rail line and started in earnest to create something worthy of their dreams. The place bids fair to become a town of considerable importance, a visitor wrote a few months later. It is located in the center of a fertile section, has an immense scope of country to draw trade from, and is already populated by a pushing, go-ahead class of business men.³ Indeed the town did prosper. By 1910, it had 731 residents—more than twice as many as several nearby towns with rail service. Photos from the era show large, well-kept two-story houses with barns, gardens, and orchards in the rear. Along Main Street and Kansas Avenue, more than forty businesses had been established, including two pool halls and a motion-picture theater, and by the depot stood three grain elevators, a mill, coal sheds, and a stock yard. In 1920, the population reached 822, but it has fallen ever since. By 1980, it had tumbled to 440. Twenty-five years later, it was down to 278.⁴

A slump of such magnitude takes a heavy toll on any community. The boarded-up motel adjacent to the center monument is symbolic of Lebanon's decline. Built in 1956 by an entrepreneur with high hopes of attracting tourists, it closed in 1970. Local schools shut down in the 1980s when consolidation forced the few remaining children to transfer to Smith Center. Along Main Street, the post office, a bank, a small grocery store, and the grain elevator remain, but they are sandwiched between vacant buildings with fading signs reminiscent of earlier times. Adams Clothing, Hobbs Variety, Chadbourne's Shoe Shop, Lammey's Café, and the Ford dealership are all gone. Of the two hundred houses in the community, 30 percent are vacant. Many are in sorry states of disrepair. The talk at the grain elevator is of rising fuel costs and uncertain hog prices. It's a battle to keep afloat, the farmers agree. Volunteers at the Legion Hall wonder if sausage and pancake fundraisers will keep the building open much longer. The churches are struggling. We're down to fifteen members, a sixth-generation resident says of hers. And we're all related.⁵ At the grocery store, retirees quietly lament a teenager killed recently in an automobile accident and confess to strangers that times used to be better. After a morning spent listening to aging residents' tales of decline, a writer observed ruefully, Life is slowly bleeding from America's heartland, leaving an increasingly empty landscape full of graceful widows.⁶

Even its status as geographic center has been emblematic of the town's steady displacement. Located by engineers for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1898, the site is often described metaphorically as the location at which a map of the forty-eight contiguous states would balance if attached to a plane of uniform thickness. In fact, this is exactly how it was chosen. Pasting a map onto a piece of cardboard, the engineers moved it around until it balanced. Fortunately for Lebanon, the method proved surprisingly accurate, and the location (latitude 39'50 and longitude 98'35) has not changed with more sophisticated measuring devices. However, the monument itself does not stand at this location, which is more than a third of a mile to the northwest. Over the years, further ambiguities have arisen about the meaning of center. The geodetic center, which takes account of the earth's curvature and is better for scientific surveys, is in a pasture in Osborne County to the south of Lebanon. With the addition of Alaska, the geographic center of the continental United States shifted to a location in North Dakota. And the geographic center of U.S. population has variously been located in Illinois and Missouri. Lebanon's claim has long been relegated to that of historic geographic center of the United States.⁷

That America's heartland is a thing of the past is a long-standing refrain in treatments of the region. The reigning motif is nostalgia for a pastoral village-based America—a longing that grew among people who had never lived there, or had lived there only as children, and who viewed it from the standpoint of cities and suburbs that were constantly in flux. The image in this rearview mirror is of simpler times, of hayrides and strolls down country lanes, fading into the distance as life speeds ahead. Regret hangs heavy over the scene. The heartland retains only vestiges of that slow-paced time when people were less materialistic than they are now, less worried about crime, better equipped to instill values in their children, and more supportive of and supported by their neighbors. Life then was a Lake Wobegon existence, recognizable as myth and yet held fondly in memory.⁸

The other common perspective on middle America sees the region as a social problem. The government props up the heartland, journalist Timothy Egan declared after visiting in 2003. The only growth industries now are pigs and prisons.⁹ Entire communities were dead or dying. This, too, is a view that has been around for a long time. Observers came increasingly to regard the region as a vast catastrophe during the Great Depression. As dust storms rolled across the plains, the dimensions of the problem became evident in falling incomes, rising foreclosures, and deteriorating health and housing. Farmers themselves were partly to blame, analysts concluded. Too few were using efficient scientific farming methods; too many were plowing fields that should have remained untilled. They had no idea how to keep track of expenses let alone find ways of reducing them. Many naively engaged in land speculation and too readily turned to the government to bail them out. They worked hard when work was to be done, but otherwise spent their time at the pool hall and exhibited no talent for leadership.¹⁰ Recent studies are generally more charitable but depict a heartland with a feeble pulse. Hardworking farmers are being driven off their land by agribusiness conglomerates, analysts say. Those who remain are destitute, aging, and badly in need of social services that cannot be found in rural communities. Young people leave as soon as they can or have to stay behind because of poor training at lackluster schools. And if that is not enough, the land itself is being destroyed by fertilizer and pesticides.¹¹

The idea of an American heartland now beset with problems intertwines easily with nostalgic visions of a better past. Both perceptions play well to the insiders who live in declining rural communities and to audiences who have long since pursued more glamorous lifestyles elsewhere. A man who farms the land adjacent to the geographic-center monument near Lebanon nicely illustrates the point. In an interview for the New York Times, he complained that corporate farmers are taking over and that he does not understand the complexities of international trade agreements. He works from sunrise until past midnight but fears he is falling behind. His wife thinks maybe they should throw in the towel. He worries that his son is going to leave for college and never return. He muses that they have had a good life on the farm but wonders if it is all coming to an end. The interviewer lets the farmer's words speak for themselves. Surely an era is passing from American life. A moment of remembrance is in order.¹²

However, neither nostalgia nor an emphasis on social problems adequately captures the complexity of the social forces transforming America's heartland. Declining population in rural communities, vacant storefronts, children growing up and moving away, and farmers fearing that their way of life is ending are significant parts of this complexity. And if this were all that was happening, it would make sense to predict, as a writer in California did, that American agriculture would simply be replaced by imported food from other countries. It would be reasonable to argue, as an editorial in the New York Times did, that the heartland should be turned into a vast national park of prairie grass and buffalo.¹³ But these notions miss the integral relations between aspects of middle America that are declining and others that are emerging or remain strong. They ignore the fact that stillness in places like Lebanon, Kansas, masks enormous change and massive adaptation. Agriculture has for many decades been only a part of the region's economy, and the growth or decline of communities has been as much shaped by merchants, investors, speculators, and government officials as by farmers and ranchers. Agriculture, too, has proven remarkably responsive to new technologies, changing patterns of ownership and organization, and shifting farm security policies.

The familiarity with change and the necessity to adapt can be heard when observers listen for sounds other than the stillness of the rustling wind. In 1852, two decades before white settlers arrived, a French trapper camping near the future site of Lebanon observed a three-day battle involving more than 16,000 Pawnee, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Arapaho tribesmen. They were battling each other for rights to diminishing hunting lands.¹⁴ In 1859, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley passed through the area by stage coach and recorded seeing large herds of buffalo. There certainly were not less than 10,000 of them, he wrote, I believe there were many more.¹⁵ Less than two decades later, the buffalo were gone. In 1878, Riley A. Holmes homesteaded the site that became known as Old Lebanon after the town moved in 1887. Far from federal marshals, the homestead became a hiding place for two of Holmes's former neighbors from Missouri, Jesse James and Cole Younger.¹⁶ The area acquired a different reputation in 1896 when D. H. Hyde, a devout Free Methodist, built a grain elevator along the railroad tracks and embellished it with Bible verses in large print. Where will you spend Eternity? Decide Now. Jesus invites you, rail passengers read, surely impressed as later visitors would be that they were somehow in God's country.¹⁷

Communities adapt by taking advantage of the resources at their disposal. At times, those are people organizing in search of political redress. In the 1890s, Lebanon residents overwhelmingly voted Populist and participated in large rallies demanding regulation of eastern business monopolies and reductions of exorbitant freight rates. At other times, adaptation takes different forms. In the 1930s, residents hung sheets across windows to keep out the howling dust storms, planted gardens that withered in the drought, quit eating meat because there was none, and sent hungry children to live with relatives. A few years later they anticipated better times. When the Hub Club of Lebanon erected the center monument in 1941, tourism was being promoted along nearby U.S. Highway 36 as the great central scenic highway from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast. In 1952, troubled once again by drought and serious soil erosion, the same Hub Club organized a workday involving fifty bulldozers and earthmovers to demonstrate the advantages of terracing and better land management. Consolidating school districts in the late 1950s and again in the 1980s so that children could receive better training in Smith Center was another response to changing conditions.¹⁸

In recent decades, seemingly moribund communities like Lebanon have continued to adapt. Consider the following. The farmer in the New York Times story about children leaving and corporations taking over was himself the holder of a 100 percent interest in a corporate farm. He ranked twentieth among the more than 1,500 farmers in Smith County receiving crop-subsidy payments. In good years, his total income was approximately four times that of the median household in Lebanon; in bad years, he barely made the payments on his machinery. Times may have been hard and his way of life may have been uncertain, but he was adapting to the current economic environment. Two of his neighbors were also responding. One was honored in the 1980s by the Kansas Bankers Association for an innovative terracing system and later by the Kansas State University Research and Extension service for the use of new corn, soybean, and white wheat technologies and for computerized monitoring of soil fertility. The other, a corporate farmer who owned properties in four counties, played a pivotal role in bringing no-till technology to the area, which reduced equipment and operating costs and increased per-acre profits. All three experimented with crops they would not have considered a few years ago and derive an increasing share of their income from contract farming. They and many of their neighbors farm three to five times as much land as farmers near Lebanon did a generation ago. They own combines that cost a quarter of a million dollars. With high-tech tractors, they apply fertilizer using a GPS tracking system to guide the equipment and adjust application levels to soil conditions.¹⁹

The point is not that farmers were doing better than unsuspecting journalists may have