ABSTRACT

Since the nation’s founding and well into the nineteenth century, farmers were revered as the wellspring from which everything virtuous about the young republic sprung. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” 1 The honest hard work and inherent autonomy of farm life, Jefferson believed, bred the most capable and incorruptible republican citizens. As long as America remained primarily rural the principles enshrined in the founding documents would never falter. Jefferson was wary of what urbanization would mean for the United States. “The mobs of great cities,” he warned, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” 2 Jefferson’s vision had great staying power, as later statesmen like Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln continued to invoke agrarian republicanism as a vital force in the preservation of the American experiment. By the late nineteenth century, however, the nation rapidly industrialized and grew increasingly more urban. From bustling cities, urban Americans began to articulate a new vision for the United States. From their perspective, rural people were no longer the virtuous arbiters of democracy; they were instead ignorant roadblocks to progress. In 1924, after the 1920 Census declared that America was now majority urban rather than rural, Baltimore journalist and perpetual critic of rural America, H. L. Mencken, signaled a clear departure from Jefferson with “Let the farmer, so far as I am concerned, be damned forever. To Hell with him, and bad luck to him. He is a tedious fraud and ignoramus, a cheap rogue and hypocrite, the eternal Jack of the human pack.” 3 Rural people’s position in the American psyche had clearly changed.