Dissertation

Views from the Midwest

Rural Communities, Law, and Nation in the Twentieth Century

The dissertation explores how rural communities articulated rural identity through their use of law, and how the law worked to constitute the rural. It does this in the context of a twentieth century historiography that focuses on urbanization and suburbanization and a focus in legal scholarship on federal and state government. It asks, what is rural in an urban America?

Working Chapter Abstracts

Modern Pioneers in Oneida County:
Rural Zoning in the Midwest, 1933-1953

Twentieth century history is dominated by urban and suburbanization narratives, and as part of a larger project challenging that traditional narrative, this chapter sets out to use rural zoning as a way to investigate local governance in the rural Midwest. It uses rural Oneida County, Wisconsin, to trace the development of rural zoning between 1933 and 1953 from the perspectives of outside elites and local community members alike.

Rural zoning ordinances were largely formulated by experts at the University of Wisconsin as a way to address rural tax delinquency and restore Wisconsin’s cutover area to protected and productive forests during the Depression. Local communities were initially receptive to proponents of rural zoning for two reasons. First, the depression had increased the perceived, if not also the real, number of transplants to the communities of the rural cut-over, increasing demands on local relief resources. Second, soon after rural zoning was passed, federal agencies targeted already zoned communities for investment. Those who zoned were made eligible for grants to move isolated settlers and buy out sub-marginal land.

In the years that followed the initial passage of rural zoning ordinances across Wisconsin, local communities often forgot that they existed or purposefully ignored their enforcement. That narrative reveals three things: First and foremost, the process illustrates ways in which rural communities pushed and pulled on outside efforts to define and regulate rural communities. Second, the debates and “talk” around rural zoning illuminate the different ways distinct groups conceptualized what it meant to be rural or live in a rural community. And third, the chapter argues that the Wisconsin example helps to explain why rural zoning did not prevent suburban sprawl in the postwar period by moving past other scholarship that overlooks local efforts by focusing on state and federal governments.

Tilting at Windmills:
Rural Schools in a Modern America

This chapter examines conflict over school consolidation legislation in rural Minnesota from 1967-1972. It does this as part of a larger project challenging the focus on urbanization and suburbanization in twentieth century historiography. Two basic claims undergird this chapter: first, the use, manipulation, acceptance, resistance, and outright rejection of legal tools and mandates in rural communities can be read as an expression of rural identity, and second, school consolidation and reorganization was, and is, a method of drawing community boundaries, both physically and socially. Thus, school consolidation as mandated by state legislation provides another site to explore how community identity and boundaries are shaped through law in rural places. Minnesota during this time is a particularly useful case study in part because of its non-remarkableness: this narrative of school consolidation appears and reappears in the Midwest throughout the twentieth century. The choice of date, however, is deliberate. It highlights the persistence of narratives of rural decline and backwardness late into the twentieth century, and it also provides an opportunity to explore how the gendered debate and women’s activism around school consolidation fit into our understanding of second wave feminism.

Accordingly, this chapter attempts to make three claims. First, the ways in which a local community reacts to, and makes use of, school consolidation as a legal mandate originating outside the community is distinctly determined by the governmental hierarchy. Unlike the ability to determine whether to enact a zoning ordinance, local communities were not able to reject consolidation all together. They could either proactively seek a consolidation favorable to them or challenge the state law in court. Second, consolidation is a perpetual concern and thus is similar to, and part of, the narrative of rural decline. Narratives about who rural people are and how they educate their children matter, and they help us to understand the ways in which school districting laws worked to physically and socially redefine rural communities. Third, the chapter argues for a gendered reading of school consolidation conflicts that also accounts for geography. I take Margery Burns as an example of Midwestern women’s political activism. She not only helps us to understand the gender and geography of the contest over rural school consolidation in the late 1960s, but also her style of advocacy helps us to understand a conservative women’s activism and politics as distinct and yet a part of larger gender change during the period.

Wisconsin Historical Society

From the Wisconsin Historical Society, I am examining several collections pertaining to rural life, zoning, and education. Especially fruitful collections include the papers of Isabel Baumann, the papers of Raymond J. Penn, the Rural Women's Oral History Project, Professor Wileden's records for his Rural Community Analysis Course, and public service commission records for telephone utility lines.

Kansas Historical Society

From the Kansas Historical Society, I am making use of the Country School Legacy Project. As communities throughout the Plains noticed that their (no-longer-operational) one-room schools had entered disrepair in the 1970s, a coalition of historical societies undertook a massive project to collect the histories of these rural schools. The materials from that effort have been archived at individual institutions, including the Kansas Historical Society.

Minnesota Historical Society

From the Minnesota Historical Society, I am working primarily with the collection of Margery Burns, a rural advocate, Republican, and Equal Rights Amendment supporter. A former rural teacher, she dedicated many years later in life to opposing rural school consolidation. She believed in the value of the small schools characteristic of rural education and was a serious advocate in opposing Minnesota legislation encouraging consolidation.