April/May 1997
The Promise of Life on
the North American Plains
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Prairie Grains is the
official publication of
the Minnesota
Association of
Wheat Growers,
North Dakota Grain
Growers Association,
South Dakota Wheat,
Inc., and the
Minnesota Barley
Growers Association.
By Tom Isern, Professor of History at North Dakota State University. Isern specializes in the history and folklore of the Great Plains. His particular interest is the story of farming, ranching, and rural life on the plains, which he writes about in a weekly column carried in many newspapers, called "Plains Folk." He has authored and co-authored five books including,"Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs: Harvesting and Threshing on the North American Plains."
Sometime when you're passing through Carrington, ND, go into the Foster County Courthouse and look at the county centennial murals-four of them, each by a different artist, representing Foster County in the years 1883-1915, 1915-40, 1940-65, and 1965-83. The murals seem to reflect the transition of many small towns in the Great Plains during the last century.
The first one shows a woman doing wash in front of a tarpaper shack, the Kirkwood Hotel being built, homesteads being taken - a country in the making.
The second mural mixes progress and problems. It has a big threshing rig, a sulky plow, a buggy giving way to an auto. However, a soldier is taking fond leave of his family, and facsimiles of grain and livestock receipts reveal economic depression. The community is being tested.
In the third mural the community is triumphant. Soldiers go off and defeat the Axis. New homes and machine sheds rise, along with a hospital, a radio station, a high school, and churches. People are engaging in commerce and also enjoying a new swimming pool, a golf course, and local lakes. This is a busy painting.
The first mural has 16 people in it, the second has around 20 or so. The third has 41, and I think the painting reflects what we in the Great Plains were thinking in the post-World War II years. We saw a future here for our children.
What a contrast then, with the fourth and final painting. It is a landscape, the dominant figure in which is a Steiger tractor. The only human visible is the driver, in the cab. I see wheat, cattle, sunflowers, combines at work, and a Harvestore blue jug. But I don't see people.
Some parts of the plains have half as many farms as they did; some parts have a quarter as many. In the towns, retail trade stagnated, then died, with many towns losing all sense of community and becoming mere dispensers of inputs and shippers of produce. Rural church congregations dwindled and no longer could keep their own pastors. Local schools consolidated and consolidated again. When you watch the ND Class B sports on a Friday night during the school year, notice how many of the schools have one, two, even three hyphens in their names.
When you graph these developments, you get a line with a consistently negative slope. It looks like the line is going to disappear via the lower right-hand corner. Visiting experts from New Jersey open their briefcases, display these graphs, and advise us to give the country back to the buffalo.
There is a theoretical basis, grounded in social science, for an alternative vision-one where the line does not trail off the corner of the graph, but firms up as sustainable patterns take shape on the landscape. I have hinted, and I think others who know the region well will see similar indications, that people in some localities are finding ways to realize the vision.
Suppose that we would like to see this happen. Suppose that there are those among us who define quality of life as what we find in good communities on the plains. What should we be thinking and doing now?
We have to raise the possibility of a greater Great Plains, so that at least hope, and after that confidence, can breathe. There is work here for everyone. I contend that there is a particular mission in this regard for the land-grant universities of the plains. Although I am not sanguine about the capacity of those institutions to articulate a vision, I think there are individuals in those universities who can do so.
This will encourage people to invest in their communities. There are indeed communities (like Carrington) investing in infrastructure and in people, making their communities into entrepots attractive to business and living places attractive to residents. Community leadership in this regard is uneven. It is better, however, than state leadership, legislative or executive. I am not speaking of a particular state, but I find state-level leaders in the plains region sorely lacking in the savvy or the commitment to seize the opportunities of the moment. They are still hunkering down and hiding in the weeds of spurious issues when they should be building for posterity.
Deliberately, we should lessen our reliance on the federal government. Federal programs foster dependency and worse, stasis. Federal programs, designed as devices of transition, have fossilized. I used to think that when the federal farm program went away, the world would end. Ten years ago, though, the government of New Zealand, which had created one of the most subsidized agricultural systems in the world, eliminated its farm program and sold its department of agriculture. Today, New Zealand enjoys an agricultural prosperity unprecedented in its history.
We need to be open and inclusive of all sorts of people in the new civilization of the plains. We can expect two new sorts of people to enter the region.
The first class comprises entrepreneurs and managers coming to operate businesses and industries that add value to our products. These folk have expectations about quality of life. If we can refrain from ticking them off, they will be a great force for good, because they will compel us to live well.
The second class comprises laborers of diverse cultures, largely immigrant. Many will speak a language other than English; hardly any of them will be Lutherans. Let me say this plainly: If you expect to build a sustainable regional economy with industries that process and refine agricultural products, you will have cultural diversity. If you don't like this, then go back into the weeds and hunker down.
And finally, we need to take individual responsibility for the effects of our actions on our communities. Organized religion has failed to provide us with good, applied guidance in matters of regional and community ethics. It has been common, for instance, for leaders in Fargo to undercut efforts of people in the balance of the state to improve their economic basis. Small-town business people often have turned against farmers in economic trouble. Descendants of Norwegian pioneers dishonor their grandparents by calling in to hate-radio talk shows and disparaging the new generation of immigrants.
Every year, too, well-to-do farmers snowbird off to Arizona, taking precious capital with them, consuming resources needed to perpetuate the family farm, leaving churches and communities without the benefit of elders, making it difficult for young farmers to get started or, lacking the support of extended family, keep livestock. Perhaps our preachers need tenure, so they would speak more directly to these things.