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The Lies of the Land

Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t

The Lies of the Land

Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t

A "piercing, unsentimental" (New Yorker) history that boldly challenges the idea of a rural American crisis.

It seems everyone has an opinion about rural America. Is it gripped in a tragic decline? Or is it on the cusp of a glorious revival? Is it the key to understanding America today? Steven Conn argues that we’re missing the real question: Is rural America even a thing? No, says Conn, who believes we see only what we want to see in the lands beyond the suburbs—fantasies about moral (or backward) communities, simpler (or repressive) living, and what it means to be authentically (or wrongheadedly) American. If we want to build a better future, Conn argues, we must accept that these visions don’t exist and never did.

In The Lies of the Land, Conn shows that rural America—so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind—has actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. Examining each of these forces in turn, Conn invites us to dispense with the lies and half-truths we’ve believed about rural America and to pursue better solutions to the very real challenges shared all across our nation.

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An audiobook version is available.

Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography

History: American History, Environmental History

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Reviews

“Underlying the country’s red state–blue state polarization is a more profound, and widening, rural-urban split . . . A piercing, unsentimental new book [argues that] understanding it will require setting myths aside and grappling with what the rich and the powerful have done to rural spaces and people. Such demystification, Conn rightly insists, is long overdue."

New Yorker

"A far better resource for thinking about the politics of rural America and the resentment that many liberals interpret as rage. [Conn's] main claim is that rural America is neither some strange landscape forever teetering on the precipice of crisis nor an agricultural Eden populated by authentic yeomen. . . . While there exist problems that often present as unique to rural America, these arise from historically developing economic and social relations that extend beyond it, and in fact often require rural spaces for their reproduction."

Brooklyn Rail

"An engaging, lively, comprehensive, and provocative study of ‘the Big Empty,’ the area between the Appalachians and the Sierras. Despite its bucolic look, ‘four powerful forces of American modernity’ permeate the Big Empty: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. The so-called ‘lies of the land’ are the easy-to-miss, pervasive effects of these forces—effects that show the existence of an idyllic, real-America America has always been a myth.”

Washington Independent Review of Books

"Conn takes our ideal small town where white Americans cherish hard work and independence from subsidies, along with religious and traditional family values, and shows it to be a nostalgic myth. The Land of Lies is a powerful book . . . but perhaps most importantly, his description of rural America as a hard place to make a living shows that it is a much more complex and interesting space than our myth ever allowed."

Newcity

“[Conn is a] sharp observer who know[s] how myths of apple-pie-baking folk stolidly occupying a quaint-but-enviable moral high ground have been twisted over decades, generations even, to set up all kinds of exploitative exploits by snake-oil salesmen.”

LEO Weekly

“Conn has written an astute, conceptually important, and well-argued study of the transformation of rural America . . . that rejects the stereotype of rural areas as farmland and small-town main street businesses for a realistic understanding of their transformation into a space where economic dependency, not independence, provide the parameters for daily life. This is an important book.”

Middle West Review

“A showcase of and argument for nuanced thinking . . . [in The Lies of the Land,] Conn corrects lies, turns tables, and unveils truths.”

Third Coast Review

"How does a land tell lies? Conn’s premise is that our enduring image of rural America is in large part illusory, also since most people in America, about 75%, now live in urban areas, he theorizes our perception of rural life gets distorted by idealistic visions which don’t correspond to reality."

Dayton Daily News

“Recent attention to rural America and its manifold ills is long overdue, but our understanding has been impeded by misleading generalizations and outright romanticization. The Lies of the Land cuts through such platitudes and describes our small towns and open spaces in all their complexity—showing us that rural America is inextricably bound to the rest of the country, rather than a realm apart."

Alec MacGillis, author of 'Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon'

“When many imagine the American countryside, they think of quiet porches far from the bustling cities. That is not the world you’ll find in this brilliant book. Here, missile silos, factories, and suburban developments are as much a part of the rural landscape as mountaintops, family farms, and dirt roads. For those who’ve lost sight of life beyond the city, Conn offers a fresh perspective on rural America that may help a divided nation find common connection.”

Bart Elmore, author of 'Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet'

“Conn documents rural America as a space that has been militarized, industrialized, corporatized, and suburbanized, sometimes by rural inhabitants themselves. Readers will savor Conn’s upending of so-called rural crises and rural myths.”

Dolores Hayden, author of 'Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000'

"Conn presents his case in a folksy, commonsense manner, broken into topical segments. . . . The book offers an interesting assessment amid a pleasurable read."

Choice

"Replete with striking evidence and fresh insights."

Pennsylvania Gazette

“Smart, original, and provocative . . . in a mere 257 pages of text, Conn at once makes a major contextualizing intervention in the ‘crisis’ narrative, sets forth a new way to conceptualize and position ‘rural’ in American life, and lays out an intriguing argument about the forces that have conditioned and shaped rural America over time.”

Reviews in American History

Table of Contents

Preface: That Empty Feeling
Introduction: Crisis and Myth

Part I: Militarized Space

Chapter 1: Engineering the Landscape
Chapter 2: From Rural Community to Army Town
Chapter 3: The Cold War Comes to the UP
Postscript: Addicted to the Military

Part II: Industrial Spaces

Chapter 4: Factories Instead of Farms
Chapter 5: Cars in the Cornfields

Part III. Rural Inc.

Chapter 6: Who’s Afraid of Big?
Chapter 7: Chains ’R’ Us

Part IV. The Suburbanization of Rural America

Chapter 8: Creating Post-rural Space
Chapter 9: The Politics of Post-rural Complaint

Conclusion: Places vs. Spaces

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Excerpt

A book about rural America is preposterous on its face.

There is no such thing as “rural America,” because there are many rural Americas, each with its own history, culture, and dynamics. There are “rurals” in every state and in every region of the country; rural Americans come, just like urban Americans, in every stripe and flavor politically, ethnically, religiously: Quebecois timber workers in northern Maine, shrimpers from Southeast Asia in coastal Louisiana, Central American slaughterhouse workers in rural Iowa and Kansas. And, of course, Native American reservation land remain overwhelmingly rural. We know from the novels of Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis, from the diary of Rachel Calof and other such sources that women have long experienced rural life differently than men and have often felt its hardships more acutely, and still do.

Economically, rural America relies on agriculture, and it relies on extractive and manufacturing industries; it also depends on tourism and recreation. Depending on where you look, rural America is either desperately poor or awash in money. Any list of the nation’s poorest counties includes mostly rural ones—places like Wheeler County, Georgia, and McCreary County, Kentucky. At the same time, Teton County, Wyoming, inhabited at a sparse five people per square mile, can stake a claim to being both the wealthiest in the country, home to some of America’s superrich, and the place with the nation’s most yawning wealth gap. No single book—no single word—could pretend to do justice to all that diversity of experience.

Likewise, there have been any number of attempts to define exactly what rural America is in the first place. Researchers at Ohio State University recently announced five different kinds of “rural” in Ohio alone! Once, rural people were classified on the basis of the work they did, the assumption being that those people made their living directly from the land in one way or another. That is certainly not true anymore, and it hasn’t been for some decades. Rural people drive long-haul trucks and they work for the state or county (though many might explain that this isn’t the same as working for “the government”), and some commute long distances for office or factory work in a metropolitan area.

In 1987, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation funded the National Rural Studies Committee, to promote the study of rural America. Yet even this group of scholars “struggled with the term ‘rural,’” and wound up using rural, nonmetropolitan, countryside, and hinterlands more or less synonymously. John Fraser Hart, a geographer who was on the committee, turned the definitional dilemma into something of an inadvertent koan: “The need to understand and define the concept of rural becomes all the more urgent as that concept becomes ever less clear.” At roughly the same time, the Bureau of the Census had more or less given up altogether, deciding that rural meant anything left over after counting urban and metropolitan regions. “The urban population consists of all persons living in urbanized areas and in places of 2,500 or more inhabitants,” the bureau announced in 1985; “all other population is classified as rural.” The welter of definitions and the very precision they struggle to achieve underscores their arbitrariness in the first place. I’ll say here that I have neither fixed on one definition nor attempted my own, though the bulk of this book focuses on the space between the Appalachians and the Sierras. This space includes much of what is commonly considered rural America, though certainly not all of it.

Still, most of us feel a rural place when we stand in one or when we drive through it. The spaces are bigger, the traffic is lighter, the houses fewer and farther between. We have the sensation—an illusion, really—of leaving all the artifice of the “urban” behind and entering something closer to nature. We can find ourselves alone, or nearly so. Indeed, that’s often the reason metropolitans go out to the country in the first place.