Review of: Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest. Rugh, Susan Sessions

Blanke, David

English

Dada/Surrealism

Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest

The Annals of Iowa

Iowa Research Online

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 61 Number 2 (Spring 2002) pps. 204-206 
Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in 
the Nineteenth-Century Midwest 
David Blanke 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2002 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Blanke, David. "Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the 
Nineteenth-Century Midwest." The Annals of Iowa 61 (2002), 204-206. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.10574 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
204 THE ANNALS OF IOWA
The final secfion of the book focuses on religion and polifics. The
scope of Swedish-American religious choices and acfivifies is surpris-
ing and encompasses most Protestant churches. The issue of teaching
evolufion has long been a topic of lively discussion and more. In that
context, the life of Minnesota educator, philosopher, and polifician
David Swenson will interest—and perhaps inspire—scienfists as well
as polifical scientists. The elecfions represented include that of 1918,
marked by the challenge of disloyalty, as well as the struggle between
the Democrafic-Farmer-Labor Party and the Republican Party in 1970.
My favorite work from the Minnesota Historical Society continues
to be They Chose Minnesota (1981), a major reference work that includes
all inunigrant groups. However, Swedes in the Twin Cities offers a great
deal more than the fitle suggests to those interested in the history of the
Midwest or in immigrant history in general. The book may not serve
as a text for courses other than those on Swedish-American immigrant
history, but it will be interesting to any student or scholar of ethnic and
imnügrant history. Most of the essays are well written and quite read-
able. It has been simultaneously published in Sweden, another posi-
five suggesfion for historians who focus on other immigrant groups.
Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the
Nineteenth-Century Midwest, by Susan Sessions Rugh. Midwestem His-
tory and Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2001. xxi, 285 pp. Illustrafions, tables, notes, appendixes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $45.00 cloth.
Reviewer David Blanke, assistant professor of history at Texas A & M Univer-
sity-Corpus Christi, studies rural history and popular culture. He is the author
of Sowing the American Dream: How Consumer Cutture Took Root in the Rural
Midwest (2000) and The 1910s (2002).
Susan Sessions Rugh examines the evolufion of family farming and
the rural conununity in Hancock County, Illinois, from the first per-
manent Anglo settlements of the 1820s to the end of the nineteenth
century. In eight carefully crafted and excepfionally well-written chap-
ters, Rugh lays bare the tensions between the acfions of these typical
midwestemers and the social, economic, and polifical forces that nour-
ished around them. Three broad concepts direct her analysis: the con-
sequences of cultviral conflict between settlers from differing regions,
the significance of the expanding marketplace on this populafion, and
the corresponding responses by farming families. Producfive in vari-
ous ways, the text is parficularly successful in its treatment of gender,
religion, and the regional ethnic conflicts that she contends "amalga-
Book Reviews and Notices 205
mated into a homogeneous farm cultiue" by 1900 (xix). Rugh's reli-
ance on local newspaper accounts proves problematic at times, but her
use of other primary sources, such as wills, census rolls, and store and
county court records, is both creative and precise.
Regional ethrücity is an important component in imderstanding
the development of tiie Midwest, according to Rugh. Tracing famuy
migration pattems from the upper South, Yankee North, and middle
states, she skillfully shows how conflicting cultural values were largely
responsihle for the initial settiement pattems seen in Fountain Green,
the epicenter of Hancock Coimty and Rugh's narrative. Her lucid writ-
ing makes it possible to follow the complex histories of the Lincoln (dis-
tant kin to the future president), Perkirvs, Beebe, and Geddes families.
According to Rugh, colony "clustering reflects not only familiar strate-
gies of land settlement hut also a deliberate distancing from strangers
of a different regional culture" (14). As the population swelled, this
"deliberate distancing" assumed the form of cultural conflict. Citizens
grappled for control and influence over the region's key institutions.
Rugh convincingly argues that the relative success of distinct family
units is strongly linked to their ability to extend kir\ship networks
throughout the farming community, not least because of the labor
provided by such associations. New England families tended to take
up town residency, and the influx of southerners slowed in the 1840s.
Both groups suffered as pools of like-minded farm families dwindled.
By contrast, Scots-Irish migrants from Pennsylvania pursued strate-
gies that increased their families' odds of persisting. Aided by the suc-
cess of their Presbyterian churches, by 1860 two of flve farm head-of-
households originated in the middle states (88).
Rugh's description of gender and religion in the countryside is
equally balanced and enlightening. Farm women, she claims, made
conscious and calculated decisions within the limits imposed by their
regional, religious, and familial roots. Women often fovmd their per-
sonal ambitions at odds with the patriarchal practices that were so
central to the persistence of famñy farms. Rugh concludes, "For many,
what was at stake in expanding women's rights was the unsexing of
women, which would topple the structures of gender that bound wom-
en to a tightly circumscribed social place" (144). Particularly moving is
Rugh's treatment of the rising divorce rate. Through powerful per-
sonal narratives that typify her approach generally, Rugh demon-
strates the convoluted and often self-defeating options open to many
married women. Siniilarly, Rugh shows how religious institutions pre-
cipitated a sense of belonging or ostracization. The proximity of the
large Mormon population in the 1840s provided regional farmers a
206 THE ANNALS OF IOWA
mirror whereby they could examine their shared values. Finding the
Mormon worldview at odds with their own, opponents organized to
drive the infidels out. Near the close of her book, Rugh introduces the
appeal of evangelicalism in much the same way, concluding, "people
who felt uneasy about the social dislocations of prosperity and out-
migration sought security in the institutional safety of a church" (166).
Rugh's ordinarily deft focus on historical contingency, conflict,
and continuity seems to fail, however, when she addresses the concept
of rural repulblicanism in larger ir\stitutions. Defined here loosely as
independent farm ownership and economic agency, the ideology ap-
pears in the text as a means to explain why fanners acted as they did
when forming ir\stitutions or when participating in politics (although
it is also used to explain other qualities as weU). Although her treat-
ment of republicanism is well justified, given the ample historiography,
there is rarely a sense of how Hancock County farmers defined the
concept on their own terms. Rather, economic confUct appears in a
stark, menacingly deterministic fashion, with industrial "culprits" and
"village leaders valiantly attempt[ing]" to prevent change to a com-
mvmity that was merely "a sinidng ship" (160). External institutions
are used to support this dichotomy. The Grange appears here as an
elite rural organization intending to bring about railroad and granary
reforms (the Granger Laws). The complexity of the Granger movement
is lost in Rugh's efforts to identify the shifting ideologies of Hancock
County farmers. She does not need to interject such a cursory analysis
of rural republicanism to show, as I believe this book does, that "people
are not the victims or objects of larger structural changes" (185).
These individual criticisms should not detract, however, from
what is an excellent book, finely written, and a sigruficant contribution
to our understanding of rural populafions. Through the stories of
Fountain Green's farm fanüHes, Our Common Country shows how the
Midwest was bom.
Sowing the American Dream: How Consumer Culture Took Root in the Ru-
ral Midwest, by David Blanke. Athens: Ohio Uruversity Press, 2000. xiii,
282 pp. Notes, tables, appendixes, index. $59.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.
Reviewer David B. Danbom is professor of history at North Dakota State Uni-
versity. He is the author of Bom in the Country: A History cf Rural America (1995).
In Soxving the American Dream, David Blanke analyzes the "consumer
culture" that developed in the runeteenth century among farmers in
the Midwest, defined as Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and
Wisconsin. In keeping with the conclusions of all but a handful of ro-



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Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest

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