Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930 (Studies in Rural Culture) [Paperback]

Hal S. Barron (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0807846597 | ISBN-13: 978-0807846599

Mixed Harvest explores rural responses to the transformation of the northern United States from an agricultural society into an urban and industrial one. According to Hal S. Barron, country people from New England to North Dakota negotiated the rise of large-scale organizational society and consumer culture in ways marked by both resistance and accommodation, change and continuity.

Between 1870 and 1930, communities in the rural North faced a number of challenges. Reformers and professionals sought to centralize authority and diminish local control over such important aspects of rural society as schools and roads; large-scale business corporations wielded increasing market power, to the detriment of independent family farmers; and an encroaching urban-based consumer culture threatened rural beliefs in the primacy of their local communities and the superiority of country life. But, Barron argues, by reconfiguring traditional rural values of localism, independence, republicanism, and agrarian fundamentalism, country people successfully created a distinct rural subculture. Consequently, agrarian society continued to provide a counterpoint to the dominant trends in American society well into the twentieth century.

Editorial Reviews

Review

[E]xcellent survey of the complexities of rural life in the Northern United States in the period from 1870 to 1930.

Technology and Culture

Ambitious and masterful, an exceptional addition to the new rural history.

Reviews in American History

[An] excellent study.

Agricultural History

Barron succeeds in skillfully connecting patterns of change in rural America to their better-studied counterparts in urban America.

Wisconsin Magazine of History

[A] worthwhile journey that will be anything but a mixed harvest for those who make it.

American Historical Review

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (October 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807846597
• ISBN-13: 978-0807846599
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,082,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars See The Exotic Farmer In His Native Environment, October 31, 2004

By 

Laura Shumar (Lafayette, IN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930 (Studies in Rural Culture) (Paperback)

Reading Barron's study of rural life makes one sympathetic to the animals on a safari tour, overhearing a guide's explanation of the savage beasts' interaction with their native environment. A fascinating and well-documented history, it is nonetheless an outsider's view; the perspective of a man who considered himself a coastal resident even while attending Oberlin College. (Or so Barron's class reunion report on Oberlin's webpage suggests.)

Barron's society, even while in transformation, is sharply delineated between farm, village, and city populations, each with its own set of needs and unique social values. In spite of the collection of case histories, the individual is entirely absent from Barron's work, as people in his history act exclusively as representatives of their communities.

In Barron's safari tour, rural people are prey, and the predators are much sexier. Every new institution, from the graded school to the farmers' grain cooperative, is either forced from the outside or a response to threats. The farmers, he constantly suggests, are only interested in preserving the values and lifestyle of the past, even begrudging students the new-fangled invention of clean toilets. When farmers do accept modern convenience it is because they are lured by shiny things - mantle clocks or free movie tickets - rather than because they believe in the need for change. Although agricultural cooperatives, good roads, and consolidated schools improved the quality of rural life, Barron never suggests that improvement was desired or planned by those involved.

Ironically, the transformed society is now traditional. Barron's book, in a sense, is a collection of "just-so" stories, explaining the origins of the Farm Bureau or the small-town social gathering. The "cruising" teenagers of Vincennes, Indiana may be alien to Barron, but they have their roots in the great transformation of the 1920s. And here is its appeal in the Midwest: it's the opportunity for the lion to step out of the safari park and say, "oh, that's what's going on!"

But Barron is writing about people, not lions, and yet his people behave more instinctively than rationally. He constantly refers to "unadorned, agrarian virtues," without ever explaining the virtues, or how they guide decisions. Fear of change seems to be the farmer's only motivation. The outsiders are either benevolent experts or fierce competitors, but only they display the capacity for rational planning rather than response. A Midwestern reader, or one from the rural north, may read Barron's work and enjoy the history, but I fear that readers from larger cities will be left looking on farmlands and their residents as exotic, backward, marginalized, and very, very, different.