an individual or family follows another family member to the same location. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was Germans and Irish, soon followed by waves of Dutch, Scandinavian, and Finnish settlers. Immigration from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire, most notably Czechs, surged again in the late nineteenth century. The timing of each group’s arrival often coincided with various opportunities for low-skilled work. For the Irish of the 1840s and 1850s, it was canal and railroad construction. The Danes of the late 1860s also worked on the railroads, while the Finns and Scandinavians who arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often found employment in logging in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
The farm settlements and agricultural practices of the Old Country were not forgotten in America, but there was widespread adaptation to local market pressures and opportunities, just as there had been for native-born settlers. Many immigrants were astounded by the scale of American farms, the new crops, and the new and different landscape, not to mention the importance of hired labor and mechanization. The land that many of them left was characterized by small farms, with little reliance on hired labor and machines, and intensive farming practices prevailing over extensive ones. Still, immigrants rapidly took to cash crops such as wheat and feed crops such as corn, adopting what had been either marginal or non-existent crops in their homelands. In the first few years of settlement, many immigrants out-Yankeed their native-born counterparts by dedicating even more land to cash crops such as wheat due to the frequent high returns on the crop. Soon, though, they tended to diversify even more than native-born farmers, farming more as they had in the Old Country. Practices that had been abandoned in the farm-making years actually reappeared, representing a sort of cultural rebound in which these farmers brought crops such as rye and flax back into their operations (Baltensperger 1980; Gjerde 1985; Ostergren 1988).
For many of these ethnic communities, religious faith and patriarchy served as a bulwark against the worldliness of both secular culture and the culture of those from other denominations. This was the case in Block, Kansas, where German Lutherans maintained a distinct community through intermarriage, schools, and the church (Coburn 1992). Dutch Reformed communities near Holland, Michigan, and in Pella and Orange City, Iowa, were also able to preserve distinctive communities centered on faith, with strict controls on behavior beyond the church walls. The persistence of European language over several generations was a hallmark of the region. People in ethnic communities everywhere in America continued to speak and write in their traditional language, but in the Midwest the opening of land for settlement coincided with waves of immigration and allowed these cultural islands the space and time to develop and persist. Robert Ostergren’s (1988) and Jon Gjerde’s (1985) studies of Scandinavian immigrants demonstrated the continuity of church membership and language over multiple generations in the Midwest.
Patrimony, the practice of handing down the family farm, was a big part of the success of rural ethnic groups in maintaining community discipline and continuity. Many immigrants from northern Europe and their descendants practiced primogeniture, passing down the farm intact to the oldest son. Keeping the farm intact meant material and social security for parents. The intact farm meant that the oldest male could marry and carry on important cultural traditions. Parents often remained with the children in their retirement, comfortable and secure. This stood in contrast to the practices of native-born Americans, often referred to as Yankees by members of these ethnic communities. Yankees practiced partible inheritance, in which the estates were divided equally among the children. This often meant breaking up the farm if the descendants could not agree on buying out a sibling or if parents did not have enough other property to provide for the other children. As a practical matter, partible inheritance was more likely to result in farms changing hands and more geographic mobility, which made it difficult to sustain traditional cultural practices. Immigrant farmers, however, continued to practice primogeniture over multiple generations, ensuring the maintenance of communities that were closer knit with kinship ties than those of native-born families (Pederson 1992; Salamon 1992).
Despite the successes in providing a patrimony, it was more difficult to sustain insular faith communities. School reform and consolidation was a major cultural conflict in the rural Midwest. Progressive Era reformers believed that farmers were not sophisticated enough to meet America’s growing demands for food and fiber. They wanted educational reform in the form of vocational agriculture and home economics courses and graded schools and consolidated high schools to teach those subjects. The old one-room school had been fine for many people who were going to be farmers in previous generations, but promoters of new scientific agriculture wanted more training for rural youth. But those reformers ran headlong into the opposition of many ethnic communities, often Catholic. For them, education beyond what we would consider eighth grade was superfluous. Consolidation of school districts and the creation of graded schools meant a loss of family authority for many first- and second-generation immigrants (Reynolds 1999).
World War I brought nativist backlash against German-Americans as well as other Euro-American hyphenated identities. In many places it meant the end for the foreign language in the press and from the pulpit. Most famously, Iowa Governor Clyde Herring issued the Babel Proclamation in May 1918, requiring English only in all schools and churches, not to mention all public conversation on the streets, in trains, and on telephones. Local Councils of National Defense questioned the loyalty of first- and second-generation German immigrants, often resulting in intimidation to purchase war bonds, threats, and violence. Most notoriously, in Luverne, Minnesota, farmer John Meintz was accused of disloyalty, beaten, threatened with death, and tarred and feathered.
Nativism, school consolidation, and growing consumer culture and the worldliness of automobiles, cigarettes, and Hollywood contributed to the breakdown of rural immigrant communities. The Ku Klux Klan and “100 percent Americanism” brought further challenges. Even so, however, in some rural midwestern neighborhoods German was spoken into the 1930s. World War II delivered the final blow. In Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, and in Block, Kansas, rural ethnic communities disintegrated with the geographic dislocations of military service and work in defense industries as well as the rise of mass consumer culture and media, and intermarriage outside the community (Coburn 1992; Pederson 1992).
Even communities that were settled and dominated by Anglo-Americans were in decline. The lure of cities for employment and the attractions of anonymity mattered to the descendants of these pioneers, too. In southern Illinois’s Union County, an area profoundly influenced by southern culture, markets for locally produced commodities, such as eggs, dairy, and truck crops, faded, with Union County farmers not able to match those areas with larger scale and better access to transportation. In Union County, farm income fell in relation to that from other sources, not least of which was the government (Adams 1994).
Between the pull factors drawing people from farm communities and the push factors driving them off, neighborhoods were redefined. Small town business that had sold farmers groceries, machinery parts, and other goods and services collapsed or centralized. Farm and small town families traveled to the nearest Walmart, Tractor Supply, or implement dealer at the county seat town (Davies 1998; Flora and Flora 2014). Cold War defense spending, wartime revolutions in food processing, and the growth of the white-collar sector meant that more jobs required a college degree. Improved access to post-secondary education, due in large part to the GI Bill, resulted in the departure of sons and daughters for the region’s colleges and universities and, for many, a life off the farm or away from the hometown.
Decline was also a theme for the region’s African American farm communities. As early as 1900, African American settlements were struggling. The descendants of the settler generation confronted rapidly rising land prices, making it difficult to expand operations or to break into farming. Like many rural Americans, those in Indiana’s Beech and Roberts settlements saw more opportunity in cities than on the farm (Vincent 1999). Black farmers who remained on the land found new obstacles to success. While legally color blind, the US Department of Agriculture was plagued by systemic racism that either shortchanged black farmers or left them out of commodity and conservation programs, crop insurance, loans and other services that supported income and farm survival (Reid 2014). As the rural cultural landscape flattened, so, too, did the
