that's going to ignite these folks. >> a reminder -- this program and all of c-span's

lies of the land: seeing rural america for what it is -- and isn't" is your book. the opening line in the book is the lies about rural america is preposterous on its face. what you mean by that? steven: i mean that we use rural to describe vastly different parts of the country. there is no really good definition of it. rural america turns out to be a remarkably diverse label to cover all kinds of different areas of the country. the greenbelt in the great plains, areas of northern maine,

parts of appalachia which were once cold country, we are talking about vast parts of the american southwest, they all get labeled rural but they are dramatically different in all kinds of ways. >> how do you define it for the purpose of your book? steven: i very studiously avoid trying to define it. [laughter] one of the things i found interesting when i jumped into the project was that lots of people have been trying to define the term for a long time and no one has come up with a real answer. i think at the end of the day, we know a rural place when we are in one, when we experience it. that is part of the sense i wanted to trade on, we see rural in the country as quiet, largely empty, slower paced.

so wherever you find yourself feeling that way, you would probably label that, i am in the countryside, i am in a rural area. peter: no word has been used more consistently to describe rural america than crisis. is that a fair word to use? steven: that is why i started the project. that is what i was reading in the newspapers starting in 2015, there would be periodic stories about rural america in crisis and at that point when people -- people were largely talking about opioids, methamphetamines, health care issues altogether. when i began researching, and as a historian the first thing you do is go backwards, not forwards, when i did that what i discovered was a variation of the word crisis has been used to

talk about rural america since the middle of the 19th century and in virtually every decade between then and now. that led me to wonder if it was useful language at all, always talking about crisis or decline or being left behind or variations, is it really useful language at all? because therefore, when was rural america somehow good and we were talking about it not in these terms, and we never were. peter: so chronic might be a better word? steven: that is what i think. crisis implies something out of the ordinary. and which somehow resolves itself, it gets better or we come to a new normal. in that sense, i think the chronic condition people have been complaining about since the

third quarter of the 19th century forced me to think about a different way of trying to describe the dynamics in rural places around the country. it did not seem to me that doing another rehash of ok, we are in crisis, would get us far because clearly it has not gotten as far for 150 years. peter: in your book you talk about theodore roosevelt's country life in 1908. steven: a lovely footnote in the progressive era. the first major agricultural crisis that became a national topic of discussion was the original populist movement where farmers were feeling squeezed and it erupted into a political movement that reached a crescendo in 1896.

with that in mind, when he became president, teddy roosevelt decided to create a commission from a commission, to study and offer recommendations of what is going on in rural, mostly agricultural areas, is what they focused on. they issued a report. it is filled with descriptions of what is happening in rural america, but what is implicit underneath this is that rural america is not keeping up with urban america. so here are a variety of recommendations so that country life will be just as good and rewarding as city life is. what we can deduce from that is that there was already a perception in the early 20th century that somehow urban life was accelerating faster, rural life was struggling to catch up. so it is a nice little moment in

this ongoing discussion of somehow rural america being left behind. peter: in some supporting evidence you use in the 1930's it was reported that over to -- 2200 iowa towns had been found abandoned and there was a 50% drop in the number of farms between 1950 and 1970. steven: yes. again, when you scratch the surface of this, you discover there are measurable indices of decline and change that go way back. people were shocked when census data of 1910 revealed that lots of rural counties, especially in that agricultural midsection of the country, were losing population. during world war i, there was a famous song, what are you going

to do to keep them down on the farm once they have seen gay perry -- paris, there was this sense that the boys would not come back. but people were already leaving. you roll through places like kansas, missouri, the dakotas, you discover that some of the towns at the peak of their population in the census of 1910, 1920, they have been on a slow and steady decline since. lots of reasons for that. one major reason is what is happening simultaneously is agriculture in this country is industrializing furiously. i think that is another misconception we carry with us, is that somehow agriculture is an older, simpler form of economic life and industry manufacturing in factories are

somehow modern life but that is simply not the case in the country. agriculture began to industrialize and all kinds of ways in late 19 73 -- 19th century and as he did so, you could achieve economy of scale, you required fewer people to do the same amount of work and that meant surplus labor, which meant the -- which means leaving the red river valley in minnesota and going to the twin cities. it began early in the 20th century, people began to notice that patterns. peter: what is your area of academics at the university of miami in ohio? steven: i teach all sorts of american history courses. i consider myself that utility infielder of our undergrad curriculum, but as a specialist, one of my fields of interest is urban history. i know it is almost perverse

that as an urban historian i wrote this book on rural america, but it comes out of my work as an urban historian to put on those lenses and look at the areas beyond american cities and see what we can see using that framework. peter: here are some statistics from the usda and census bureau about rural america today. 97% of the u.s. is rural land. the population is about 46 million, 14% of the u.s. total. 1.9 million farms in the u.s.. the median worth of the farms is one point $4 million. food and agriculture contribute about $1.4 trillion to the gross domestic product. one of the outstanding figures for me is 90 7% of the u.s. is

considered rural -- 97% of the u.s. is considered rural? steven: yes. it has to do with the way the census and other government agencies count the opposite of rural, which is to say, first the census bureau counted urban. in the 1940's and 1950's is began to develop a notion of a metro area and it first appeared in 1949 and has been resolved -- revised. anything that isn't defined as a metropolitan statistical area is classed as rural. in that sense, two of the statistics you just counted, if you put them together you get a really interesting picture of the country right now. 97% of the area is classed as

rural but only 14% of the people live there, which means 85% live in 3% of the u.s. land mass. what we have seen, and this is from almost the beginning of the u.s., we see a steady concentration of population. when the first census is counted, five percent of americans lived in an area classed as urban. by 2024, 80 5%, give or take, of people living in the metro areas. that is an enormous concentration of population into a relatively small area. peter: i want to talk about some of the issues that have historically faced rural americans and contemporary rural americans. let's begin with politics, populism, wasn't there a movement at some point in the early 20th century called the grange? steven: sure.

he goes back to the 1870's. what -- that goes back to the 1870's. after the civil war and homestead act and the military campaigns against native people clear ou that space and people establish homestead farms, people are out therehinkg of themselves as staking their claim to an economic future. what they discover is that acting individually, they are struggling mightily. that so a number of these kinds of collective organizations begin to form to try to address the issues that face farmers as a group, rather than inviduals. the range begins in the 1870's. there are versions of this. you can still drive through the midwest and see grange hall in some of these small towns. that developed into a much larger political movement which

then created what was called the people's party, or the populists , and they first ran to a candidate for president in 1892 and were very successful at collectively -- at electing local officials, congresspeople, a couple of senators and so forth out of this revolt of farmers at -- and the struggling economic conditions in that culminated in 1896 and then the movement collapsed. peter: did populism lead to labor violence, uprisings on farms? steven: i do not think it led to that sort of violence. i would say the demands the populists made in the party platform in the 1890's, though the movement itself kind of evaporated, many of those demands wound up becoming

national policy. they were the first political party to call for the direct election of senators. fast forward 20 years and we got the direct election of senators. they are the party that first demanded income tax on wealthy industries. fast forward, we get an income tax. so there is i think and influence the populists had, dramatic influence, even though the political movement itself evaporated and died away. peter: our rural areas of america overrepresented in politics in your view? steven: i think it is a fairly wide consensus at this point. the rural or anti-urban bias in american life is baked into our political system, most obviously through the senate and then the

electoral college and the way it works. the way i talk about this with my students is to talk about what i call the tyranny of wyoming. wyoming has 700,000 people in it. he gets two u.s. senators. california gets 38.5 million people. it also gets to senators. so your vote in wyoming counts for more. and you are representation in the senate is in some ways more direct than it is in a place with 38.5 million people. we can also see similar bias at the state level. this has a lot to do with the way districts are drawn and have always been drawn and so the kind of rural advantage in a state houses has been very significant over the years. but i think political scientists

have done a much more thorough job of counting all of that up that i have. it is a generally accepted fact of american political life. peter: looking at issues in rural america, some of the things you bring up in your book are economic inefficiencies and lack of basic services. steven: yes. so rather than thinking about urban versus rural, and this is something i came to as i was working on this project, maybe it would make more sense, especially at the level of policy, if we began to think about this in terms of population density and think about it almost as a sliding scale where you have san francisco on one end and wyoming at another because one of the things you notice on this scale is that the more dense your population, the more efficient

certain kinds of things become. certainly economically but also in terms of health care services, public services, and so forth. the problem for many in rural america right now is the population densities are low enough that they cannot support the basic things the rest of us all take for granted. if you drive through large parts of the midwest, you discover that the school systems have been consolidated into larger and larger areas because there are a not -- there are not enough kids to support and educate locally. so kids are driving 90 minutes on the bus to get to school. that is inefficient. the same thing with hospital access, supermarket access, they are a function of density.

if we talk about it in those terms meet we might want to tally the costs and benefits of low density living. clearly if you want a health care system where rural people have the same kind of access as those in a denser area, that has to be subsidized in some way. the market system we have now will not do that. so then we have to ask the question, is this worth subsidizing and if it is, we should subsidize it. if it isn't, if it is too inefficient, we should be honest about that. peter: there is a sense of depopulation, isolation, being left behind, as you say. steven: i think it is not necessarily that people have been left behind in the economy altogether, it is that when you choose to live in a lightly

populated area, it comes with certain almost unavoidable costs. the hospital will be a long way away because the hospital needs a certain number of people to function. so people are struggling economically but also not struggling economically but even those who are doing well economically in rural places still pay a kind of extra price for living in low density environments. peter: would you consider oxford, ohio a area steven: it is. it is sort of edge of the cincinnati, greater cincinnati area, but it is a town of about 50,000 people. it is just 15,000 people. it is a university town.

you drive five minutes from the center of campus and you will find yourself in a field because it is ohio and we grow corn and soybeans. so it is a rural place. peter: why are some of the reddist areas the most rural? steven: that is the million-dollar question. i am no expert, i am a historian and have a hard enough time dealing with the past. i am using that as a caveat. there are probably a couple of things going on. in a place like ohio, the rural areas have by and large always voted republican. as a consequence, they almost, it is habit. it is what my parents and

grandparents did. the republican party itself has become more and more extreme as it has floated off into a right wing world, but these people are going to vote republican regardless of the particular ideologies of the republican candidate. i think there is a level of grievance or anger that you find in at least some pockets of rural america that has to do with some of what we were just discussing. when you think about the myth of the rural america, it is reelamerica, after all. that is what sarah palin told us, it is home on the range where the skies are not cloudy all day and it is supposed to be the virtuous, good american life. that is the mythology we have had since thomas jefferson. but people are living lives in which there are restricted

employment opportunities. the closest hospital is one hour away. there is not a decent supermarket anywhere nearby so they do grocery shopping at dollar general. i think the crash between the mythology of what rural life is supposed to be and the reality people experience has caused anger. peter: we discovered your book in a book review in the new yorker which focused on grant woods american profit. how does that play a role in your book? steven: i wish i had been able to put it on the cover of my book so i was very happy that the writer of the new yorker did that for me. what he does wondrously in that book is take may be the country in america and do an anatomy of

it to reveal that what you think you are seeing here is not really what you are seeing. this is not really a farmer and his wife, it is a dentist on someone else. this house was built from a sears catalog from chicago. the house at that point had been abandoned. he does a wonderful job dissecting this mythology that we associate with the pastoral life, which again, goes back deep into the 19th century, jefferson's human farmers, -- yale men -- yeoman farmers. one thing i did not include in the book was the phenomenon of little house on theie, which are books that were published in the 1930's. the tv show was a success in the 1970's. what they do is perpetuate this

mythology of the self-sufficient, independent farm family making it out on the frontier, none of which was actually ever true, not for laura ingalls or her family, it is a mythology we hang onto. when people have to live in rural places, or they choose to, it turns out it is not little house on the prairie. it is a lot different than that. and i think that contrast beeen myth and reality creates a lot of friction. peter: from your book, in essence, what many agree rural peop seem to wantre the benefits of urban society without the density and diversity of urban living. many america still project onto rural t yrning for tightknit community, selfelnce, independence, neighborne, and simpler, slower living. but that fantasy cannot

accommodate the realities of life in many parts of rural america, nor does it te into account a thorough -- the thorough extent to which the military industry, corporations, and suburbs have shaped rural space. steven: that's not bad! [laughter] that is a nice summation of what i was getting at. that in fact, the currier and ives mythology we have of the pastoral countryside, rural places come up rural people, have always been enmeshed in much larger forces shaping modern american life, starting with the military. one thing i will put to you just as a way of thinking about all of this is that before we could even have a rural in the

country, we had what white settlers saw as a wilderness and the transformation from wilderness into rural, that wild dangerous place changed into something domesticated and charming, is accomplished first and foremost by the american military. 1790 through 1890, there were more than 1600 military clashes between federal and state national guard troops and indigenous people. so it was not an empty space, it was all cleared out and it was all done by the military. i did a chapter as well on some of the effects of the army corps of engineers on rural landscapes on the way in which the canal projects in the 19th century and flood control projects in the

20th century made it possible to farm in those areas in the first place. the large-scale irrigation projects. so military, large corporations, from the 1930's onward congress, the presidency, is working pretty hard and consistently to try to industrialize country areas because it is a way to create jobs for people who are no longer needed on the farm because, as we discussed, you do not need the farm labor anymore, it has been industrialized. so what if we move steel plants or car factories out of detroit and chicago and into the countryside? one of the things i discovered to my surprise was that a great deal of american auto manufacturing takes place in what we would call rural areas, especially japanese companies honda and toyota who built

plants in the 1970's and 1980's not in urban areas, but out in the cornfields. so rural people are not farmers much at all, they are factory workers. they are long-haul truck drivers. they are doing all of these things that are connected to our industrial society. so i wanted to kind of look at rural america through that lens to see what it looks like. peter: and the lenses you use, militarization of rural america, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. let's spend a little time with each one. let's start with the militarization. this is from your book. using the power of congress on the courts the military displaced thousands of rural people in order to empty the space necessary to trai troops,

test weapons, and otherwise practice for war. thmilitary transformation of rural space and tailgate radical changes to the social and economic ecology of these places and equally dramatic changes to the land, water, and rest of the natural ecosystem. use bell county texas as an example. steven: yes. bell county, texas became in 1940 the home of camp hood and then fort hood. it is now i think the u.s. army's single largest base by number of people, it might be fort bragg, they go back and forth. it was set up to prepare troops to fight in world war ii and to use artillery and tanks especially in one or two. it sits right on the edge of

where cotton and grain are grown and then when you get into texas ranching country, it's right on that ecological line. several hundred farm families are uprooted to create this space. and it exists to this day. what it looks like now is an army town where there is a steady population but it constantly rotate. mostly young men. who now support a host of used car dealerships and bars and strip clubs and the rest of this. so what was once a very quiet small-scale farming area in this little part of texas has become a sperling operation whose economic -- sprawling operation

whose economic life is entirely dependent on the base. i wanted to compare and contrast a place like fort hood, which is still up and operating come up with a base that ended up closing in the 1990's when bases were either closed or consolidated in post-cold war efforts. so i compared fort hood, texas with camp sawyer air force base in the upper peninsula of michigan. it is always the same thing happens. the base comes in, economic boom, it sees tax revenue and feeds it into the local area to support the schools but then it gets closed and when the base closes, it implodes economically.

it had become a one company town. it underscores how many rural companies are dependent, almost addicted, to military spending and without it they have no economic viability at all. peter: you quote william faulkner is saying our economy is no longer agricultural, it is the federal government. steven: yes. it is a great quote from william faulkner, who was no fan of the federal government but at least saw this clearly. it is certainly the case where we are talking about the military that a disproportionate number of the large bases wound up in the american south. there are all kinds of reasons for that but essentially this is something that begins right before the first world war and then is accelerated during the second world war when the air force begins to establish its own bases and then missile installation it happens more

broadly across the map but the army bases and marine bases are disproportionately located in the south. and it is not just the bases, it is everything the base generates economically. suppliers, defense contractors, all the things a particular military installation will need. large portions of the american south are dependent on the general government. and many of them would resent the statement i just made. peter: did you grow up in a rural area? steven: i did not. i am a city kid from philadelphia. i find myself now living in a very small town in the middle of rural ohio and i teach in a slightly larger town, also in southwest ohio, and so part of this book is an attempt for me to understand my own surroundings better.

and i think it did that. it reflects an outsider's view of what this is all about. peter: what did you think of senator vance's book about rural ohio? steven: i read it with a group of first-year students at miami university. i think it is problematic in all kinds of ways. and i think one of the things that we might accuse j.d. vance of is a certain kind of misrepresentation. i think what he describes as his own family background does tell an important story. that is to say the migration of people out of very rural pockets of appalachia and into, in his

case, a small city, middle, ohio, looking for industrial work. that certainly did and does happen from the 1950's and 1960's onward. the lessons he draws from all of that i think this a great deal, let's just put it that way. it is a campaign promo more than an honest reckoning with the issues at stake. peter: i want to show some video. a recent book that came out was called to be overlooked americans, the author appeared on our book tv network. >> i do not think they ever judged us in the first place. [laughter] i don't think they ever did. i send my email out to these

folks, i'm doing this book, they see that i am a professor in los angeles, they wrote me back anyway. i would like to believe i would do the same but i wonder. what i immediately have my backup? now i wouldn't, i feel extremely changed by the work i did. but i think that is you cite, the folks i interviewed from rural america were not judgmental from the get-go. peter: any comment about what she had to say about the overlooked american? steven: yeah. oh, dear. i am afraid that at an individual level, that might well be true. 10 years ago i did a book, which i am afraid would contradict her statement. [laughter] in fact, it has always been the case that urban america has been on the receiving end of all kinds of nasty judgments, again,

starting with jefferson who compared cities to cancers on the body, to henry david thoreau and anna goes. so let's -- and on it go. let's turn to j.d. vance. during the campaign in 22, he was on his way to new york for a fund raiser and he was meeting a bunch of millionaires, he did not put that in his tweet. he said, i am going to new york, i hear it is violent and disgusting. any advice? that is typical of the anti-urban discourse that has been central to american politics since 1790 and there is not a comparable discourse, as i am afraid she seems to think there is. it is simply unacceptable to talk about rural americans in the same derogatory insulting way that politicians routinely describe american cities. and we have seen that

supercharged in the last couple of years. look at the way people talk about san francisco and new york and chicago. there is simply not a comparable discourse. not now, not across 250 years of american history. so i am afraid she just has it wrong. i know that book. she talked with some nice people and made some conclusions that historically just do not stand up. peter: along with militarization, you say industrialization has affected rural america. industry has always been part of the american pastoral, even if we have chosen not to see it. what do you mean by that? steven: the first american industries, now we are going way back to the 18th century. the first american industries, smelting, iron, papermaking, or all located outside the city. they were located near the

resources you needed to do them. what happens in the 19th century , especially late 19th century, industry centralizes into big cities like cleveland and chicago and detroit. but then almost immediately, there is a drive to try to decentralize that. again, because of the antiurban impulse that is so strong in our american culture. people start to talk about this in the 1920's and then the federal government under roosevelt's new deal tried to accelerate this process of moving factories and manufacturing jobs out of central cities and into the countryside where people need jobs and so rather than have them move to chicago, let's move the factory to someplace in

downstate illinois. one way the federal government facilitates this is through the big projects of rural electrification. at the start of the new deal, fewer than 10% of american households had electricity. that is another one of the differences between urban life and rural life at that point. in 1960, it is not true anymore, almost all rural places had electricity thanks to the rural electrification problem and all the rest but the real point was not just simply to deliver electricity to your house, it was to make cheap electricity available to attract industrial production. so that is part of why industry begins to move into the tennessee valley area, because now you have sheep hydropower being generated and now -- cheap hydropower being generated and

we can open our factory there now. it was not a partisan issue. franklin roosevelt started it, eisenhower accelerated it, lyndon johnson was on board and so was richard nixon. there was a bipartisan sense we should industrialize the countryside, at the expense of places like detroit and cleveland who are seeing the manufacturing operations leave in those same years. peter: you use a couple of examples. the gm plant in ohio and also the honda plant which has been very successful in marysville, ohio. steven: yep. let's back up for the viewers. honda opened its first cturing plant in central ohio in what was a tiny place called marysville in the late

1970's. then they moved into automobiles. they started with cycles. then honda created satellite supplier factories that feed into the central assembling plant in marysville. all of those places around ohio are also in tiny locations. honda keeps ohio as the second most important state in auto manufacturing but it is not an urban phenomenon anymore, it is a phenomenon of the countryside. one thing i discovered doing the book was that honda's engine plant is in a town called anna -- ana, ohio. there were more people who work at that plant on any given shift then actually live in the town. so they are coming from a rural

area and they work in this rural engine plant and then they go home again. that is indicative of the way our manufacturing has been decentralized, moved out to the country. peter: lordstown has not been so successful for gm. steven: right. the lawrence town story hit the national press in 2020 when gm announced it was going to close the plant and then it became a political football. i was interested in the origins of this which go back to the 1950's. it is one of the first experiments that gm does in moving manufacturing operations out of the detroit area and into essentially a big cornfield. that is what was there when gm moved in. so that plant ran for about 50

years, 50 plus years, before gm decided it was no longer economically viable or efficient. for me, it is a symbol of this postwar move of manufacturing out of urban areas and into rural areas. peter: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and, rporations control the seed that goes into the ground, the chemicals that saturate the soil, the appointment used two plants, spray, harvest, the trucks that haul the product away, and the processing operations that turn the raw material into something profitable. what is the impact of corporatization on rural america? steven: i think there were a couple of things at work, the first of which, and this speaks to the agricultural economy. we have this notion of a farmer.

let's go back to grant wood for a moment, he has his pitchfork and bib overalls, the american farmer. but in fact, the american farmer is and always has been deeply tangled up with large-scale corporations which make his or her livelihood possible in the first place. mccormick, the first big manufacturing of farm machines in a big plant in chicago, and after world war ii increasingly the chemical companies using the byproducts of petrochemicals for fertilizers and pesticides. so everything about a farming operation is connected to, or squeezed by, the profit-seeking large-scale corporations like monsanto, although that does not

exist anymore. and the large-scale seed companies and so forth. so just remember that farming is not quite, charming and the way we kind of want to think it is. -- in the way we kind of want to think it is, it is absolutely a product of large-scale corporations. peter: would you say corporate farming is more efficient? steven: this is a great question, because this is certainly what the nixon administration felt when it broke the big farm bill in the early 1970's. the secretary of agriculture at the time was famous for saying to farmers, get big or get out. he certainly believed and the nixon administration believed that the way forward for american agriculture was bigger,

more efficient, larger equipment producing more yield per acre. and that has worked wonderfully. no question that has been a success. the flip of that, it seems, is to ask the question that many of people now have been doing, what does this mean about our american food system? what exactly are we producing? it is largely carbohydrates in the form of grain and corn and soybean, a form of protein but soybeans get used for a lot of other things too. plenty of people have really important critiques to make about a corn and soy dependent agricultural system. and that is before you even get to the environmental consequences of roundup and all sorts of things that get poured into the soil. so it is efficient in doing the things it is efficient at doing,

producing -- but is it efficient at producing food that is nutritious? not so much. it is not efficient at actually feeding people in rural america. to some of the worst food deserts in this country are plate says -- some of the worst food deserts in the country are the places surrounded by cornfields. there is not food you can eat in any accessible way in the middle of farm country. it so it is not very good at doing that. peter: in your section on corporatization you talk about sears, walmart. what impact have a bit they had -- what impact have they had on rural america? steven: sometimes we draw a line between main street and wall street. they were always the same. let's use woolworths, which i

wrote about in the book a little bit. it became staples of american small towns. before woolworths eveoped a store in the city, he built his empire by opening five and in market towns come in the towns which served to the outlying farm population. the products people were buying in a small town in nebraska in a world worth, for example, the products you would buy are being made in chicago, philadelphia, they are being ordered from london. and woolworths of course becomes an enormous corporation and at one point the werewolf tower was -- woolworths tower was the tallest building in new york.

that is what walmart is as well nowadays. the sun on the woolworths empire but when you go into walmart you are probably in a rural place, there is probably not another shopping opportunity for miles in any direction. but the stock comes from china, and good --, vietnam, and so on -- china, bangladesh, vietnam, and so on. peter: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and the fourth pillar that you write about is suburbanization. suburban development is built on thbasic irony, suburbanites left the city aw by the

promise of more space, less traffic, fewer people, lower crime rate, and all the rest, many seem resentful as the suburbs filled with more and more development. steven: there is a bumper sticker i sort of quote in the book that says, asphalt, the final front. i think it summarizes nicely what happens, it is the last step in our process of what has happened to american agriculture , by and large, i would say come overwhelmingly suburban development as you see it is built on what was once agricultural land and to take the nd of iconic symbol of it, philadelphia are all on farmand fields and that is the model of suburban development. so it mends farmers have -- it

meant farmers sold out to a suburban developer and cashed out and suburban development happens. i was struck by the way in which, on one hand, this is economic prosperity. the farmer gets rich selling his lands, the little town that was struggling is blooming again because of the new residents are moving into the developments, but people are grumbling about it at the same time. i have examples that i dug up in my research. it isn't what it used to be, we do not like these new people, they are the newcomers, they just don't understand. you see this all the time. i lived in a place called naperville, illinois, which is emblematic of this. there is this irony at the center of our suburban aspirations that inevitably, if a suburban is successful, it

just gets more crowded, which create more of the things we thought we were escaping in the first place. suburbia has always promised connection to the good parts of urban life but with the values of a rural life and when you discover that you cannot actually have it both ways, it helps explain i think white suburban -- i think it explains why suburban areas move out because we are chasing a green we could never catch. peter: was there a urban exodus to the suburbs or a rural exodus to the suburbs? steven: thanks for asking that. you talk about white flight. you can look at the collapsing population of big industrial centers. new york loses one million people in the 1970's, they moved to the suburbs.

that is true but when you look deeper, you discover the numbers do not add up. suburban growth is happening far faster than can be explained simply by the movement of people out of the central city. i discovered that a lot of the growth is driven by rural people leaving the areas that are no longer economically viable. they are not moving to the city, anymore, they are moving to the suburbs outside the city so they can get a job in a metro area but they are not actually a city dweller. and i think this drives a lot of suburban growth, especially in places like chicago, the twin cities which i looked out a little bit, and places like that. -- looked at little bit. and places like that. peter: what is the premise of your book in what are the

conclusions you have drawn about rural america? steven: the premise is that rural americans have not been left behind. they have not been overlooked. when we look at this historically, what we see is that rural americans have been at the front of the national parade as often as not. they are absolutely connected in the way that all of us are to the big forces of american modernity, large-scale corporations and industrialization and all the rest. what i hope people take away from my book is that we may want to figure out if we have cast urban and rural in a kind of political struggle and maybe there is a different way to conceive of our shared common ground and may be looking at it that way, we can begin to develop some ideas that might get us past when i see as a logjam in the way we discuss all

of this in the first place. peter: is this a book written by academics? it's published by the university of chicago press. steven: it is thurlow -- it is thoroughly enriched in footnotes but i have had my children read this book and they are not academics and i thought it was a pretty nice read. i work hard to make my work accessible to an interested reader, whether or not they have expertise or an academic background, so i hope readers will find it accessible and in some places, really enjoyable. there arets of the book that i think will cause people to chuckle. peter: we will close with the book. i have come to beliral america really does reflect with what the nation has become, jt not of the ways we want to acknowledg much less celebrate at the state fr. look pt narcotic nostalgia and

litical rhetoric, and it is ea eugh to see that rural spaces reflect the work of most of the major forces that have shaped 20th-century america. steven conn of the university of miami, ohio, author of this book , "the lies of the land: seeing rural america for what it is -- and isn't" we appreciate your time here on c-span. steven: absolutely. thank you so much for having me. this was great. >> all q&a programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our c-span now app. >> nonfiction book lovers, c-span has a number of podcasts for you.

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