Rural past-in-present: postwar U.S

To better understand the historical persistence of a view of rurality in the U.S., and particularly what is considered to be a lower-class rurality, as a past-in-present that is spatially, temporally and culturally regressed in comparison to “modern” progress, it is useful to turn to Johannes Fabian’s classic discussion of time and space in society and culture.

Fabian’s anthropological perspective is largely concerned with how conceptions of time are used to centralize dominant subject positions and marginalize those who appear to deviate. Fabian finds that “typological time” is used by anthropologists and laypeople

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alike (30) to conceptually place cultural others in a separate and contained past: “As distancing devises, categorizations of this kind are used, for instance, when we are told that certain elements in our culture are ‘neolithic’ or ‘archaic’; […]; or when certain styles of thought are identified as ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’” (30). This helps explain the representation of WWCPC rurality in the postwar as a past-in-present, inherently existing in a spatiotemporally regressed state: the use of time becomes a “distancing device” that sets apart those “elements in our culture” or “styles of thought” that are considered irrelevant to “our” present situation (hence “they” are archaic or savage), thereby reinforcing the devalued location of WWCPC rurality. For the mainstream, rural locations are perceived as lacking markers of progress and thus as untouched by the sub/urban processes that define the present. In this conception of time, geography and temporality are intertwined: rurality is a space, but it is also a time. The interrelation of geography and time has implications for those inhabiting rural spaces: just as rural locales are seen as stuck in the past, their culture is seen as irrelevant to “our” modern lives.

This assumption that rurality is a container for all that is regressed in society and the use of “typological time” to naturalize such an assumption permeates postwar culture and can be seen in mainstream publications as well as scholarship in the social sciences.

Familiarly, the hillbilly is frequently used throughout the postwar to represent WWCPC rurality as seen, for example, in American Mercury (McAdoo [1955]; J. Hines [1952]), Saturday Evening Post (Rockwell [1946]) and Newsweek (“Dogpatch” [1954]; “A

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Man’s” [1962]). Such representations of the hillbilly, whether devalued or idealized, are co-extensive with the way in which rural spaces and people were portrayed throughout the postwar period. At times it seems that rurality can be portrayed idealistically and be devalued in the same month, year, publication, and even the same article. In both manifestations, rurality becomes a cultural position associated with people situated outside of postwar society, regressed relics of some imagined past.

Such use of “typological time” in the postwar underlies the distinction between a mainstream “present” and a rural “past-in-present” that informs the dominant discourse on WWCPC rurality in both the social sciences and journalistic reportage. One telling example of this dominant discourse in The American Journal of Sociology can be found in Julie Meyer’s 1951 article “The Stranger and the City,” where rurality is marked by an orientation towards “place” in contrast to the urban’s orientation towards “time.” For Meyer, the place-oriented rural is a static entity: “Time plays a part only in so far as it is

‘inclosed’ in place as the periods in which its established values and ways have been formed. Time is connected to place by the past, and this connection serves as yardstick for the present and future” (480). On the other hand, in the city, place is “subordinated”

to time; the urbanite is one whose “experiences” are in the present and future: “They are nevertheless his and thus constantly enlarge and transform his very substance of life”

(480). It is because of the urban subject’s orientation towards time, not place, that they become the “bearers of things to come, more advanced than the outsiders [not urban] and knowing more than they” (480). For Meyer, the urbanite is an evolved being who spurs

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social changes, and there is inevitable tension and conflict between the urban, seen as aligned with the “modern” and the rural associated with the “backwoods” (481).

Meyer’s formulation — that rurality is a pre-modern, regressed space without consciousness whereas the urban is an emblem of modernity, change and humanity — reflects the larger underlying dominant assumptions of the postwar period. However, not all social scientists in the postwar subscribed to the idea that the rural and urban were inherently separated. From both sides of the Atlantic, studies in geography (see Jackson’s

“’The Need of Being Versed in Country Things’” [1951]), rural sociology (Pahl’s “The Rural-Urban Continuum” [1966]) and urban sociology (Benet’s “Sociology Uncertain”

[1963]) show that while the social sciences may have internalized the unsaid assumptions surrounding geography within American culture, there were also others who were critical of such attitudes. However, while these criticisms existed, they did not dispel the larger notion that geographic space was a determinate of culture. I turn now to the

representations of this prevailing idea in postwar mainstream media, in particular, the notion that rurality is an inherently regressed location, a past-in-present existing separately from modern mainstream society.

The effects of this spatial past-in-present on both cultural and individual levels are positively and negatively viewed in the postwar and can be seen in early postwar debates on the initial suburban migration that was occurring. This debate may take on a light-hearted tone, as we see in the New York Times’ 1947 compilation of quotes defending the superiority of town or country (Rodman, “Town vs. Country”), but it may also be

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illustrated in stereotypical imagery of city versus rural and stock portrayals of those who choose one or the other. Thus is the case in Life’s 1947 “pictorial debate” between a city writer (Charles Jackson) and a small-town writer (Granville Hicks) (“City vs. Country”).

In the pictures and captions of the city, Jackson is associated with sophistication and glamour; Hicks, on the other hand, is photographed within a winter pastoral³⁰ and a community of old men in a country store³¹. The connotations of city and country are clear: the glamorous city is associated with intellect and culture, while the country is the province of the simple life fading into oblivion (the rural community is represented by the elderly). While no explicit judgment is passed in this article, Life here still evokes and reinforces the cultural conceptions of rurality as the past, urbanity as the future.

Regardless of whether particular articles or publications view rural locations in a positive or negative light, rurality in this period is generally tied to the contained “place”

of Meyer’s sociological formulation, a past-in-present marking a foreign land within the borders of the U.S. This foreign land may be portrayed idealistically, as a space of

security existing outside modern urban society. One such example is the 1945 SEP article

“My Town” by T.E. Murphy, in which Murphy’s neighbors are said to be still “tilling the

30 Following Seguin, the pastoral can be seen as a “bourgeois daydream” where rurality is preserved outside the rapid changes associated with modernity and the resulting pressures put upon the modern subject (25-26).

31In contrast to the stereotypes presented in Life, Hicks defends his rural town in a 1946 American Mercury article. Hicks’ example of his “tolerant community” depicts social progress of a sort (158).

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same soil their forefathers tilled” in 1776 (14). Liberal publications like the New York Times also documented rural space as an idealized foreign land existing within the U.S.

The very title of C.B. Palmer’s 1954 pictorial essay “Remembrance of Things Present”

suggests that rurality belongs in the past as a contained “remembrance” separate from the urban readership addressed.

As rural space was perceived as a perpetual past-in-present, so were the subjects who inhabited it. Seen as existing outside modern time, they are imagined as devolved

characters in contrast to the perpetually evolving sub/urbanites. In idealistic portrayals of rurality, rural people are equated to children, thus creating a safe place for the nostalgia of a mainstream reader who has moved on. For example, in SEP’s “They Escaped from Civilization” [1954] we are introduced to a California river community an hour and a half from San Francisco yet completely removed from its modernity. Regardless of the

supposed thousands of tourists who arrive every year, the place is represented as in the grips of a perpetual Peter Pan childhood, in “a never-never land where thousands have learned to laugh at clocks, jobs and security” (Berrigan 24). The nostalgic associations of rurality with innocence and child-like freedom reinforce the dominant subject position of the implicitly evolved middle-classless sub/urban reader. Such double-edged nostalgia can be found in publications like the New Yorker and the Times, whether a writer merely evokes the “familiarity” and “sense of belonging” in pastoral rural Maine for a Christmas Eve edition (see E.B. White's New Yorker’s column “Letter From the East” [1955]), or recalls his own childhood past in rural America (Wright Morris in the Times). Both

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writers evoke a rural space from which they also distance themselves. In White's case, it is clear that he is merely a participant observer transplanted from the metropolitan, writing for the metropolitan — at one point he compares watching deer hunting to a Harvard/Yale game (62) — as is also reinforced by the advertisements for NYC

restaurants and shops accompanying his text. In Morris' case, the small town is portrayed as an idealized location that formed the bedrock of modern society, yet it is a place that those of us in the present have necessarily evolved beyond. For Morris, this unreachable past is a source of ambivalence: on one hand, there is the desire to return to the

familiarity of childhood yet, as we see in his pictorial essays “American Scene” [1948]

and “Home Town Revisited” [1949], it is a past better left behind for greater, more modern things.

Particularly in “Home Town Revisited,” Morris equates “progress” with the evolution beyond the small town; as he states, “If there is any truth in this notion — we’re all small-town boys at heart — it may help to explain why some of these towns have never grown up. We’re from there, but we do our living somewhere else. This is known as Progress. Most of us are familiar with it.” Small towns may breed great people, Morris suggests, but great people do not make small towns: great people outgrow these places (literally, as symbolized in Morris’ picture of grass growing around sidewalk), leaving behind a population in perpetual childhood. Morris’ reference to out-migration (“most of us are familiar” with moving) distinguishes between those who had evolved out of the small town and those who remain physically and culturally behind (for an example from

98 the late 1960s, see D. Williamson in SR).

Personal recollections help reinforce such a vision of rural locations, including small towns, as past-in-present places that remain embalmed for “modern” America to

remember and compare itself against. Given his own evolution from rural to urban subject, Morris is seen (and sees himself) as an expert on these rural past-in-present places, and his portrayal of them further confirms their function as a limit case for

modern society. This point is also reflected in other types of mainstream reportage rooted in autobiography as seen, for example, in a reminiscence of leaving an Amish

background (C. Kaufman, “My World” 74), and in the expert opinion of social scientists.

An article from a 1963 issue of Newsweek quotes sociologist Phillip Hauser to make the point that the decimation of one Iowan small town is reflective of the inevitable, and indeed welcome, fate of rural America: “what the small town may have contributed in the past is one side of the coin; the other side is urbanism and the greatest opportunity in the history of man for him to reach his full potential…If the small town is passing, we can’t bemoan it” (Hanscom, “Smalltown U.S.A.”, 20). In this view, the declining small town has deservedly become a thing of the past, destined to fade into a place beyond cultural memory. By the end of the postwar, even this nostalgia starts to disappear; in 1970 Time can claim that “Few modern Americans feel much nostalgia for the farm or small town”

(“American Notes”).

The notion of “rurality” as a spatiotemporal past-in-present can be seen across diverse discursive forms: news reports, literary representations, autobiographical writings and

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scholarship in the social sciences. Some of these articles tie this spatiotemporal past-in-present to an inherent cultural regression, believing that rurality, in contrast to

sub/urbanity, cannot provide the necessary conditions for an evolved state (for one example, see Lardner [1956]). Rurality, in these cases, becomes a place to which the middle-classless can return through memory/nostalgia, thus eliding the existence of actual rural locations and in the process figuring their inhabitants as eternally naïve, childlike, animalistic, etc. This conception of a rural past-in-present also underlies more specific topoi that arise in a postwar period marked by rapid social and cultural change:

geographic shifts (suburbia; mobility), the consolidation of consumer culture, and the emergence of a late-1960’s counterculture.