The Wrong Image

I talk about Sarah Taber a lot on here. A recent article in the New Yorker called Beyond the Myth of Rural America is a good companion piece to her work on the reality of farming and the rural U.S.

The subhead of the article is "Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts." It's full of pithy insights like these:

One irony is that — after Indigenous towns — it’s the havens of the East Coast élite, such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, which have the deepest roots. Most bastions of “real America” are, by contrast, relatively new.

And

The small farmer, standing on his property with a pitchfork, has been an endangered species for a century. Today, a leaf blower would be a better symbol for those who tend the land.

And

A laid-off veteran buying Rice-A-Roni at Dollar General isn’t our favored image of rural life. But it’s more accurate than the farmhouse tableau of “American Gothic.”

The classic image of white America farmers created by Grant Wood in 1930 — "American Gothic" — was already outdated by the time he painted it. And the people he used as models were his sister and his dentist, dressed up in decades-old costumes. (The part about the sister and dentist was news to me.) 

The house in the background was 50 years old. It had been lost to overdue taxes, turned into a candy store, and then changed hands many times. It wasn't a farmhouse (if it ever was) when it was used as a backdrop in the painting: it's within the boundaries of a town called Eldon.

Grant Wood's sister Nan Wood Graham was 31 when she served as a model for American Gothic in 1930. This is what she looked like at the time. I don't know how old the dentist, Byron McKeeby, was then, but Wood intended the pair to be interpreted as father and daughter.

Rural America is not where farming — at least as Wood and popular imagination would have it — happens. Instead, our non-urban areas are the site of "military bases, discount retail chains, extractive industries, manufacturing plants [including meatpacking and slaughterhouses], and real-estate developments."

I come from one of those kinds of places. There were still farmers there when I was a kid. There are some farmers now, though many fewer. One has become a retail/entertainment farmer with a corn maze and a one-farmer farmers market along a county highway. I'm not sure many of the former dairy farms still exist. More likely what remains are some scrappy organic farmers, because the rocky hill-and-valley land there is bad for commodity growing, and isn't great for scaling up to feed lots either.

But the area also has its share of discount retail chains and if not military bases, defense contractors. And then there's really not much else except rural poverty.