Fitzgerald’s monograph, The Business of Breeding (1990) emphasizes the importance of Illinois institutions and people in the story of hybrid corn, arguing that the commercial seed companies were in an ideal position to translate public science into commercial goods. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode address agricultural science on the farm in Creating Abundance (2008). Decades earlier, two scientists published a significant work on the development of corn in the region: see Edgar Anderson and William L. Brown, “The History of the Common Maize Varieties of the United States Corn Belt” (1952). Two other studies—Norman L. Crockett’s Woolen Industry of the Midwest (1970) and Margaret Walsh’s The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry (1982)—are still valuable. For work on the canning industry see Derek Oden, “From Cob to Can” (2004) and Marcia Goldberg, “The Atlantic Canning Season of 1902” (1995). John Ashton’s A History of Jack Stock and Mules in Missouri (1924) provided an examination of an important but frequently overlooked part of regional agriculture.
The roles of minority groups in the region have been addressed by multiple scholars over the years. Dennis Valdéz’s account, Al Norte (1991) traces the story of Mexican workers in sugar beet production. More recently, Jim Norris explained the changing profile and fortunes of Hispanic workers in the region in his essay “Hispanics in the Midwest since World War II” (2014). Debra Reid’s “‘The Whitest of Occupations’?: African Americans in the Rural Midwest, 1940–2010” (2014) uncovers previously neglected stories of black farmers and the ongoing importance of land ownership and independence in the African American experience.
Community studies of the Midwest have flourished and have advanced our understanding not only of the region but of American society. One of the earliest of these was Merle Curti’s Making of an American Community (1959). Conceived as a test of Turner’s frontier thesis, Curti and his research team determined that the study area of Wisconsin’s Trempealeau County was a place of opportunity and a training ground for democracy as Turner had suggested.
While Curti’s exhaustive study was a landmark achievement, most scholars who engaged in community studies were less concerned about Turner and adopted different approaches. One of the influential of these was John Mack Faragher’s Sugar Creek (1986). Faragher demonstrated the potential of midwestern community studies to reflect social, economic, political, agricultural, and gender relations of the countryside in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Other notable studies of this sort include Susan Gray’s The Yankee West (1996), Susan Sessions Rugh’s Our Common Country (2001), and Richard Nation’s At Home in the Hoosier Hills (2005). All of these studies highlighted the importance of the cultural background of the settlers in shaping production for household and the market. They all focused on the mid-nineteenth century and, like Faragher, cited the importance the Civil War as a watershed in terms of agricultural production. Stephen Vincent’s study of African American communities in Indiana, Southern Seed, Northern Soil (1999), was also focused primarily on the nineteenth century, describing the rise and slow demise of these communities. Finally, anthropologist Jane Adams addressed a much longer temporal scope in her study of southern Illinois, The Transformation of Rural Life (1994), picking up in the late nineteenth century.
There have been numerous studies of ethnicity and ethnic identity and communities in the region. The starting point is Jon Gjerde, Minds of the West (1997). Gjerde explained the importance of the Midwest for immigrants as a place to recreate both real and imagined communities free from interference by the state. Gjerde’s earlier work in From Peasants to Farmers (1985) and Robert C. Ostergren’s A Community Transplanted (1988) detail the continuity and change from Scandinavian communities to the Midwest. Jane Pederson’s Between Memory and Reality (1992) explicitly engaged Curti’s Making of an American Community, documenting ethnic communities in Wisconsin’s Trempealeau County in the period after Curti’s study and challenging Curti’s assumptions. Other important studies include Carol Coburn’s Life at Four Corners (1992) and Bradley Baltensperger’s essay documenting two counties in eastern Nebraska, “Agricultural Change Among Nebraska Immigrants, 1880–1900” (1980). Sonya Salamon’s Prairie Patrimony (1992) is a fascinating study of farm inheritance in Illinois that reveals the persistence of immigrant culture into the late twentieth century.
The role of small towns and institutions in the region has been addressed by several scholars. Richard Davies in Main Street Blues (1998) depicted a story of decline in Camden, Ohio, as small towns were undermined by automobile culture, discount stores, and the outmigration of young people. Cornelia Flora and Jan Flora, in “Midwestern Rural Communities in the Postwar Era to 2010” (2014) demonstrated that while decline was part of the story, there was also innovation and, in some cases, even growth. David Reynolds examined the fights over school consolidation in the early twentieth century in There Goes the Neighborhood (1999), highlighting the importance of ethnicity and local autonomy in Progressive reform of the countryside.
Numerous scholars have addressed the economic structure of farming in the Midwest, but much of that work is dated. Margaret Bogue described changes in farm tenancy and ownership in Patterns from the Sod (1959), not to mention trends in cattle raising and cash grain farming. Paul Gates offered assessments of landholding and other topics in Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier: Studies in American Land Policy (1973). Donald Winters authored a broad account of economic structure and change in his essay “The Economics of Midwestern Agriculture” (1990). Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman’s To Their Own Soil (1987) deals with tenancy, mechanization, and a host of other issues, drawing on census data from across the northern states, including multiple counties from the Midwest. Both Seddie Cogswell and Donald Winters examined tenancy in the nineteenth century in their respective works Tenure, Age, and Nativity as Factors in Iowa Agriculture (1975) and Farmers without Farms (1978).
The role of land policy and speculation, once a popular area of inquiry, has faded in recent years. Standard accounts include Malcolm Rohrbough’s Land Office Business (1968) and Allan Bogue’s Money at Interest (1955). Robert Swierenga’s Pioneers and Profits (1968) echoed Bogue’s mostly positive interpretation of the role of speculators and speculation, contending that speculators wanted to be repaid rather than pursue foreclosure when borrowers fell into arrears.
Chapter 6
THE GREAT PLAINS
Thomas D. Isern
Two landmark works in the agricultural history of the Great Plains appeared in the same year, 1931: The Populist Revolt by John D. Hicks and The Great Plains by Walter Prescott Webb (Hicks 1931; Webb 1931). These are books so significant—not that they are considered current, but that they are touchstones and foils—they may be deemed (along with their immediate predecessor, Ernest Staples Osgood’s The Day of the Cattleman) headwater-works for the field (Osgood 1929). Written by aspirational academics grounded in the region, they sowed the seeds and, as Webb liked to say, cared not for the birds. Several generations of scholars have worked this ground since the days of the Osgood–Hicks–Webb trinity, while public memory, as expressed by county histories, community monuments, and rural rituals continues to confirm the centrality of agriculture, even as the number of farmers dwindles. The Homestead National Monument, created during the Dust Bowl era, at the site of Daniel Freeman’s 1862 homestead near Beatrice, Nebraska, cinched a federal buckle on the farm belt of the plains.
In both popular conceptions and scholarly treatments, however, the Great Plains lurk as a challenging, even hostile environment for agriculture. Film clips from The Plow that Broke the Plains are as pervasive in historical documentaries as was the phrase Great American Desert in nineteenth-century geographies. The environmental dominance of historical narratives, whether triumphalist or declensionist, suppresses deeper discussions of regional agricultural history. Moreover, scholarly treatments and public discourse treat prairie agriculture as a
