TIED TO THEIR COUNTRY: AGRARIAN MOBILIZATION, RURAL POLITICS, AND THE FARM CRISIS OF 1977-1987
Embargo until
2022-12-01
Date
2018-10-26
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
For almost two centuries, white American farmers held a privileged status both as the power behind America’s growing economy and as a symbol of American virtue. In the late twentieth century, however, family farmers’ significance to the economy declined, their political influence waned, and farm bankruptcies rose to a nationwide average of over two hundred per week over the course of a decade. This dissertation examines agricultural mobilization from 1977-1987 to demonstrate the ways in which farmers mobilized and lobbied the federal government to adopt policies for their continued survival in the face of their growing irrelevance to the political economy. These activists had to reconcile a patriotic rhetorical commitment to free-market ideologies with the immediate necessity for government intervention to stop farm bankruptcies and growing rural displacement.
Tracing the creation of new loosely-structured forms of agrarian organization, the project demonstrates the pervasiveness of a distinct rural political culture that merges a strong commitment to traditionalism with economic pragmatism and heterodoxy. Farmers’ arguments initially stressed agriculture’s economic significance but after the failure of economic pressure and traditional lobbying to secure funding for bankrupt farmers, agrarian mobilization increasingly argued that the family farm model must be preserved due to its cultural and social significance rather than its economic utility. Women in the agricultural movement leveraged gendered traditionalism with modes of feminist advocacy, playing off contemporary insecurities about the decline of gender roles and family life to make the case for the continuation of farming as a “way of life.” The predominantly white agrarian organizations sought coalitions with groups they had previously dismissed, including labor unions, the movement to preserve black landholding and agriculture, and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. At the same time, many farm activists struggled to understand how and why farmers who had followed the practices and business models advocated by the United States Department of Agriculture and found answers in elaborately constructed and frequently racist conspiracy theories demonstrating why insidious forces were undermining an otherwise viable industry. Through examining these radical interpretations as well as the more mainstream protest movement, this research puts a human face on those left behind by processes of creative destruction as farmers struggled to understand and argue for their position in a political economy that had rendered them obsolete.
In redirecting examination of the Reagan years to focus on rural politics, the dissertation highlights fissures within the Reagan coalition. Farmers were among Reagan’s strongest demographics; in some states, support for Reagan among farmers ran even higher than his support among Republicans. The intensification of the farm crisis, however, forced both the administration and legislators to balance their commitment to free market approaches against their desire to preserve a lifestyle that they saw as deeply rooted in American tradition. By 1985, many farmers realized that neither Congress nor the administration was willing to sacrifice its economic ideology to preserve many farms. This realization alienated many farmers from political activism, facilitating a turn to soliciting financial assistance directly from the American people through charity drives and engendering a strong current of anti-federalism in modern political culture.
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Keywords
agriculture, history, farm crisis, popular culture, farm mobilization, activism