In 1890 the Census Bureau had found the American West so densely populated that the frontier effectively vanished. No more was there a place so far removed from civilization as to be untamed wilderness.
America, the Census Bureau declared, was settled.
The historian Frederick Jackson Turner lamented this development three years later in his famous Frontier Thesis. “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier,” he wrote. “This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating the American character.”
More than 130 years later, it is hard to argue with Turner. Looking back on 250 years of American history, rurality has defined the American character. Our political movements, our religious traditions, our art, our literature, and our music – practically everything that defines American culture has roots in or owes much to rural communities.
Simply put, there would be no America without the contributions of rural Americans.
Rurality has defined our national identity from the beginning. I’m not just talking about the boys who marched out of New England fishing villages and Virginia valleys to fight in the Revolution. The Founders and Framers – chiefly, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton – sparred over the rural-urban divide just as we debate it today.
The Seed of the Divide
Writing to John Jay in 1785, Jefferson argued that “cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”
Herein lie the seeds of our own national divide. Jefferson was arguing, as many on the populist right argue today, that the “real America” was found not in the cities of the eastern seaboard (where Hamilton’s primary constituency and concerns lay) but in the yeoman farmers of the south and west. It is a mantle taken up by Andrew Jackson’s populist movement in the 1830s, William Jennings Bryan’s prairie populists of the 1890s, and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement today.
Regardless of where you fall politically, there is no denying this divide defines our politics even today. That isn’t to say everyone in rural America is of one mind – there are people who opposed Jackson and the prairie populists and the MAGA movement in rural America just as there are people who supported these movements in the cities – but the framing is what matters. The framing is – rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse – what defines us.
Give the prairie populists their due. In the 1892 Omaha Platform of the Populist Party, which drew together the agrarian Farmers’ Alliance with the urban Knights of Labor, many of the structural reforms demanded by the “plain people” would become the crown jewels of Progressive Era reforms. From a reduction of the working day to the direct election of Senators to assistance for farmers, we take for granted much of what our rural ancestors fought hard to win.
Indeed, labor activism has never been the sole purview of urban organizers. Mother Jones, the famed labor organizer of the late 19th and early 20th century, did some of her most important work at Matewan during the West Virginia Mine Wars of the 1920s. Thirty years prior, miners at Coal Creek, Tennessee, took up arms against the state over its use of convict labor to displace hired workers.
You can’t write the history of the New Deal without writing about the rural, impoverished Southern Democrats and Dust Bowl migrants who delivered Franklin Roosevelt his unprecedented four presidential victories.
We should celebrate these achievements and appreciate the contribution our rural forebearers made to the advancement of freedom in America. Perhaps nowhere is that more crucial than in dealing with the rural resistance to some of the nation’s most oppressive policies and darkest moments.
Roots of the Resistance
The roots of resistance are planted in rural America, much of it conquered through bloodshed. The Trail of Tears saw the displacement of indigenous southeastern tribes, but it also saw the Eastern Band of the Cherokee defiantly remain in the North Carolina mountains, where they reside to this day. From the Little Bighorn to Wounded Knee, the High Plains saw Native freedom fighters resist imperial expansion in a valiant, if unsuccessful, attempt to preserve their homelands.
Today, these tribes – displaced and corralled on reservations – are integral to rural Montana, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, and other Western states. Debates about sovereignty – from the rights of buffalo to roam on public lands to the tenacious fight against the Keystone XL Pipeline – continue to inform and define our national conversations on environmentalism and conservation.
Modern social justice movements also would not exist if it were not for rural America. Nat Turner’s rebellion in the Virginia tidewater was a watershed in the fight for Black emancipation, and Harriet Tubman’s courage was born on a Maryland plantation. Quakers in the Pennsylvania countryside helped usher escaped slaves north to freedom, while John Brown led violent resistance to slavery from the prairies of Kansas to the hills of Harper’s Ferry.
Martin Luther King, Jr. may have hailed from Atlanta, but the Civil Rights Movement was fought and won in the rural South. From Money, Mississippi – where Emmett Till was lynched, galvanizing a people into action – to Clarendon County, South Carolina (one of the school desegregation lawsuits consolidated into what became known as Brown v. Board of Education) to Selma, Alabama, it was the courage and tenacity of rural activists which forced America to not just look at its reflection, but to change its perception of who and what it is and ought to be.
The Wild West
Indeed, America’s self-perception has always been defined by its relationship with rurality. Turner’s Frontier Thesis proposed that it was this very relationship with untamed wilderness and western expansion that made us who we are. It is hard to argue with this.
Consider the cowboy, the closest thing to a national hero – the American version of the knight in shining armor – that we have. The Wild West is where we find our national mythology. Figures like Billy the Kid and events like the showdown at the O.K. Corral live on our collective memory with an outsized importance that tells us more about ourselves than about the people involved.
From the Wild West shows of the vaudeville era to the Westerns of midcentury cinema to the popularity of shows like Yellowstone and films like Brokeback Mountain and books like Lonesome Dove today, the rural West is where America looks to make sense of itself.
Defined by independence and a determined rugged individualism, the West has become synonymous with freedom in the American imagination. Perhaps that is why the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard galvanized the gay rights movement.
A tow-haired young man, beaten and left to die tied to a fence on the Wyoming prairie, forced America to reckon with its own hypocrisy in a way a similar crime in a big city would like never do, precisely because it happened where it happened. The West is where Americans have turned for freedom, to live in accordance with their beliefs. From the Hutterites of Montana to the eclectic religious mix of Crestone, Colorado, to the Latter Day Saints who crossed a continent for religious liberty, the West has been a sanctuary for Americans ostracized by the mainstream.
Shepard’s murder punctured the illusion of the West-as-refuge. In doing so, it forced America to examine its own conscience the same way Till’s lynching had nearly half a century before.
Crucible of the Art
Rural pain and tragedy became the nexus of a national reckoning. They have also been the impetus for much of the art, literature, and music we cherish today. There is no denying cities have played a key role in the development of American cultural expression; from the Harlem Renaissance to Motown to New Orleans jazz to Hollywood itself, urban America has changed and indeed defined not just American, but global art and entertainment.
The roots, once again, are planted in our rural communities. Perhaps no man is more responsible for our national self-image than Mark Twain. His characters, like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, tell us something about who we are – and it is not always a flattering tale. It is in the depiction of the “half-breed” villain Injun Joe and the escaped slave Jim, who at times reads like a minstrel act, that we find the truest reflections of our complicated and sometimes ugly racial hierarchies and stereotypes.
Jim, especially, is meant to be a sympathetic character. Yet Twain was indisputably a product of his time, and the stereotypical way in which the character is written tells us as much about the difficulties and complications of interracial rurality as any academic study ever could.
On the other side, authors like Zora Neale Hurston preserved a rural reality that history too often forgets. Writing in African American Vernacular English yet telling compelling stories of fully realized Black protagonists at a time when such writing was ignored or forgotten by mainstream, read white, audiences, her works like Their Eyes Were Watching God remain indelible touchstones of the Black American experience, regardless of urbanity or rurality.
Perhaps more than anything else, though, our music – the soundtrack of our national story – is inseparable from its rural origins. The big bang of country music occurred in the legendary Bristol Sessions of 1927. In a tiny Appalachian town high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers first recorded “hillbilly music,” ballads, and hymns they grew up with in the mountains of Virginia and the backwoods of Mississippi. Every artist from Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift owes them a debt of gratitude.
The same can be said for the blues, which, if not born, was certainly incubated in the Mississippi Delta. Artists like B.B. King and Muddy Waters took the sounds of the Deep South into America’s cities and, later, its popular consciousness. In doing so, they changed the sound of not only our country but also of our world. There would be no Aretha Franklin, no Michael Jackson, no Beyoncé without them.
Given how central rural artists are to the history of American music, it should come as no surprise that rurality defines our patriotic hymnal. Consider the lyrics of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which never once references a skyscraper or a busy street but instead asks God to bless us “from the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam.” Or Katherine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful,” in which she extols the splendor of our spacious skies and fruited plains, amber waves of grain, and purple mountain majesties.
Deep Wells of Patriotism
Patriotism runs deep in the rural soul.
This is not to disparage urban America, which itself is every bit as patriotic and whose sons and daughters have sacrificed much for our Republic. Rather, it is to point to the indisputable fact that throughout this nation’s history, rural Americans have proportionally shed more blood than any other demographic.
In doing so, we have produced some of the nation’s most storied and decorated heroes. Consider Alvin York, a rural Tennessean whose bravery during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in World War I earned him not just the Medal of Honor, but Hollywood immortality. Or Audie Murphy, another Medal of Honor winner. Born to sharecroppers in Texas, Murphy singlehandedly fought off a company of German soldiers in France near the end of World War II, leading a counterattack while wounded. He went on to be a movie star.
Let us not forget the sacrifices made by the Code Talkers, most famously from the Navajo nation, but other tribes as well. Or of rural women like Lori Piestewa, a Hopi woman who became the first Native American woman killed in the line of duty when she heroically tried to evade Iraqi fire in 2003. She was taken prisoner and died of her injuries, but her comrades survived in part because of her bravery.
The American martial tradition owes much to rural communities. Their sons and daughters, marksmen from the backwoods and prairies, carried a sense of honor and loyalty along with practical skills born of life on the land, which made, and continue to make them invaluable to our nation’s defense.
It was and remains rural Americans who largely fought for her independence and then defended it in subsequent wars. The very character that makes up our nation is so largely defined by the countryside. There would be no America without its small towns and rural backroads.
When Frederick Jackson Turner mourned the closing of the frontier, he wasn’t just mourning a demographic designation or the end of an era. He was mourning the loss of an indelible part of the American character, of what makes us who we are.
His eulogy was premature, though. The frontier may have closed, but the frontier spirit lives on in the American psyche. The rural experience continues to define who we are and how we see ourselves. It continues to shape our politics, our religion, our art, and our culture.
For two and a half centuries now, rural America has fought for, bled for, sang for, and died for the freedom – and freedoms – of this Republic. As we look back on our history, it is right that we honor these sacrifices and contributions. America’s cities may be grand and pulsating with the power and commerce that give life to our country.
It is in the country, though, where we find the beating heart of America.
Skylar Baker-Jordan is the editor of the Glasgow Courier in Glasgow, Montana.
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