Co-sponsored by The Newberry Library, The University of Chicago, and Trinity Christian College
Screening the Rural:
The American Countryside in Silent Film
Hal S. Barron, Harvey Mudd College and The Claremont Graduate University
Comment: Lynne Heasley, Western Michigan University
Saturday, October 14, 2006, 11:00 am–3:00 pm
The rise of motion pictures during the 1910s and 1920s was a critical component of an emerging consumer culture in the United States that coincided with its broader transformation from a rural to an urban society. Because of this conjuncture, silent movies depicting agrarian life were instrumental in establishing new understandings of the countryside for a modern, urban nation. They resonated with city audiences, particularly those who had been raised on the farm, as well as with rural and small-town moviegoers, and they performed important cultural work by helping to reconcile both groups to vexing social changes. Besides providing comfort in a time of transition, however, rural films also helped facilitate the new order by subverting traditional understandings of agrarian life and distancing it from its previous position at the core of American culture.
This paper provides a critical analysis of American silent films that depict rural life in order to understand their role in the creation of new conceptions of the countryside during the first third of the twentieth century. In addition to discussing the work of key directors such as D. W. Griffith, Henry King, and F. W. Murnau, this paper also deals with more ordinary films and places them in the broader context of other popular cultural treatments of similar themes. It also analyzes marketing strategies and audience responses to these films in order to gauge their cultural import.
Transformations in Nineteenth Century Rural America
Saturday, February 24, 2007, 11:00 am–3:00 pm
Patterns of Violence in Union County, South Carolina
Elaine Parsons, Duquesne University
The reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan took on vastly different characteristics in different regions. While the Klan movement spanned most of the former confederacy and came to represent a unified rejection of the federal reconstruction government, individual Klan groups largely were local in structure and orientation, fighting over local resources and continuing local feuds and patterns of violence. This paper experimentally considers one of the most deadly Klan organizations, that in Union County, South Carolina, primarily as a chapter in a longstanding tradition of rural violence and feuding in the county rather than as part of a national political movement. By exploring the many ways in which Klan victims and suspected Klan perpetrators appeared in Union County’s criminal indictments and peace warrants in several years before and after Union County’s Klan terror of 1870-1871, as operators of illegal taverns, gambling slaves, suspected fencers of goods stolen by slaves, participants in fistfights, defenders of female relations, fathers of bastards, sureties for friends and family members, and witnesses to crimes, this paper places Union County’s Klan violence in a rich local context.
Agricultural Capitalism and Economic Development in Appalachian Virginia, 1800–1830
Elizabeth Oliver Lee, West Virginia University
Appalachian backcountry Virginia is traditionally viewed as dwelling outside the capitalist system in the antebellum nineteenth century, but parts of agricultural western Virginia had a strong market orientation. After the American Revolution, several families from the South Branch Valley sponsored explorations and settlement of the west, taking their agricultural capitalism with them to Ohio and Kentucky. All the while, they maintained their links to family in western Virginia and to markets in Winchester, Baltimore, and New York City. The commercial orientation of these families made the South Branch Valley one of the central places of the early American cattle industry.
Sick and Poor in Cedar County: Local Government and the Poorhouse, 1857–1890
Marilyn Olson, University of Iowa
Before the federal programs of the New Deal in the 1930s, local government was entirely responsible for the care of the poor. Using the Poorhouse Register, local records and census data, my paper explores the process by which local government in a rural Iowa county provided poor relief. In this rural community, government officials had to balance their economic responsibility to the taxpayers with the opinions of a community in which everyone knew their neighbors. Officials made decisions concerning both indoor and outdoor relief based on their knowledge of each individual and the circumstances surrounding his or her poverty.
Rural Culture During and After the Second World War
Saturday, April 21, 2007, 11:00 am–3:00 pm
“Dirt Farmer” vs. “Soil Scientist”: Representative Tensions in the Constructed Identities of Farmer-Writers Walter Thomas Jack and Edward H. Faulkner
This extended case study of Edward Hubert Faulkner, one-time extension agent turned overnight agricultural sensation, and Walter Thomas Jack, a former Quaker schoolteacher and self-professed Iowa “dirt-farmer,” and their respective, point/counterpoint soil conservation classics, Plowman’s Folly (1943) and The Furrow and Us (1946), illuminates key tensions within the fields of rural sociology and agricultural history: namely subject versus object, inside versus outside, and “peasant” versus “professional” practice as they were played out in the American popular and agricultural press from 1943 to 1948. While it is true that Plowman’s Folly, as its title implies, goads the American farmer for his close-minded traditionalism, and the Furrow and Us largely defends the “peasant” class, the reality is more complicated, as the self- and media-constructed identities of Faulkner and Jack forever altered their respective historical legacies: Faulkner was not a pure academic, as Walter Jack made him out to be, and Jack was not, as he presented himself, a simple Iowa dirt-farmer “putting experience against titles.” Such rurally-inscribed tensions, examined in light of the Faulkner-Jack no-till debate that Time magazine called in 1944 the “hottest farming argument since the tractor first challenged the horse,” occupied the nation during wartime and exposed many of the dichotomies, false and real, between “professor” and “plowman,” between agricultural “faddists” and agricultural “scientists.” Though their differences were exaggerated, Faulkner and Jack both offer what Oregon State University’s B.P. Warkentin labels “subjective” portrayals of the soil and soil-derived sociology. Such subjective yet scientifically-informed accounts, often drawing their legitimacy from rural cultures subscribing to implicit notions of agrarian superiority and the artificiality of urban life, frequently problematize “outside” (academic and popular press) examination, as the case of Faulkner and Jack makes clear.
Remapping the Borders of Agricultural France: Land Redistribution, the S.A.F.E.R., and the Modernisation of French Agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s
Venus Bivar, University of Chicago
In the postwar period, France was able to become the world's second largest exporter of agricultural goods while simultaneously cultivating and maintaining a reputation as a purveyor of all things gastronomically refined. This reputation, bound up with an emphasis on local and small-scale agricultural production, is in part a continuation of the myth that France somehow excused itself from the development of capitalism. I argue, however, that France has been a frontrunner in the race to transform agricultural production into a viable capitalist enterprise. An examination of the S.A.F.E.R., an institution created by the state in 1960 and designed to redistribute farmland in order to consolidate smaller holdings, will allow me to get at the core of this tension between economic development and cultural mythology. This paper is my dissertation proposal, to be defended at the University of Chicago on April 18th.
The World Comes to the Countryside: Internationalism and World War II in the American Midwest
Peter Simons, University of Chicago
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