Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:55:37.706Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

American Rural Planning, Development Policy and the Centrality of the Federal State: An Interpretative History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Mark B. Lapping
Mark B. Lapping
Affiliation:
Faculty of Planning, The State University of New Jersey, Rutgers, New Brunswick, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In just over two hundred years, the United States has been transformed from a very largely rural and wilderness nation into an urban one. Rural Americans have gone from being the first majority to the last minority, to paraphrase historian John Shover (Shover,1976). All through this time policies directly and indirectly oriented to rural areas and rural people have been enunciated by the federal government. Rarely was the coordination of policy sought or achieved, however. Also, for generations the easy assumption was made that agricultural policy constituted rural policy. Further, a form of rural fundamentalism, closely related to a neo-Jeffersonian social outlook, reinforced a false sense of ‘rugged individualism’ as the essence of personal and collective success. Such gross oversimplifications have tended to mask some of the truly substantive problems of poor housing, race and gender inequities, unemployment, illiteracy, poor health, and malnutrition faced by rural and small town populations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , October 1992 , pp. 219 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bailey, J. 1945. Seaman A. Knapp, Schoolmaster of American Agriculture (New York, New York).Google Scholar
Baldwin, S. 1968. Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill, North Carolina).Google Scholar
Braden, J. and Uchtmann, D.. ‘Soil Conservation Amidst Faltering Environmental Commitments and the New Federalism’, Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 10 (1982–1983), 639–96.Google Scholar
Carney, M. 1912. Country Life and Country Schools (Chicago, Illinois).Google Scholar
Carter Administration. 1980. Small Community and Rural Development Policy (Washington, D.C.).Google Scholar
Clavel, P. 1983. Opposition Planning in Wales and Appalachia (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).Google Scholar
Clawson, M. 1981. New Deal Planning: The Natural Resources Planning Board (Baltimore, Maryland).Google Scholar
Cochrane, W. 1979. The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis (Minneapolis, Minnesota).Google Scholar
Creese, W. 1990. TVA's Public Planning: The Vision, The Reality (Knoxville, Tennessee).Google Scholar
Danbom, D. 1979. The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames, Iowa).Google Scholar
Daniels, T. 1988. ‘The Conservation Reserve Program: Another Farm Subsidy’, Journal of Rural Studies 43:1, 405–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doherty, J. 1976. ‘Rural Development and the Federal Bureaucracy’, American Land Forum Magazine (Fall), 44–51.Google Scholar
Ebling, W. 1979. The Fruited Plain: The Story of American Agriculture (Berkeley, California).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fite, G. 1966. The Farmer's Frontier, 1865–1900 (New York, New York).Google Scholar
Fleming, A. 1984. ‘Perspectives on Eisenhower's Values’ in Thompson, K., ed., The Eisenhower Presidency (Lanham, Maryland).Google Scholar
Friedmann, J. and Weaver, C.. 1979. Territory and Function: The Evolution of Regional Planning (Berkeley, California).Google Scholar
Gates, F. 1912. ‘The Country School of Tomorrow’, World's Work 24:4, 464.Google Scholar
Gilbert, J. and Howe, C.. 1991. ‘Beyond “State vs. Society”: Theories of the State and New Deal Agricultural Policies’, American Sociological Review, 56, 204–220.Google Scholar
Goodwyn, L. 1978. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Protest in America (New York, New York).Google Scholar
Hargrove, E. and Conkin, P.. 1983. TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-roots Bureaucracy (Urbana, Illinois).Google Scholar
Holmes, R. 1912. ‘The Passing of the Farmer’, Atlantic Monthly 110:4, 523.Google Scholar
Holly, D. 1975. Uncle Sam's Farmers: New Deal Communities in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Urbana, Illinois).Google Scholar
Howe, C. 1986. ‘Farmers’ Movements and the Changing Structure of Agriculture', in Havens, A. et al. , eds., Studies in the Transformation of U.S Agriculture (Boulder, Colorado).Google Scholar
Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, 1988. ‘A Conservation Assessment of the 1985 Farm Security Act’, 8–88.Google Scholar
Lapping, M. 1982. ‘Toward a Working Rural Landscape’, in Reidel, C., ed., New England Prospects: Critical Choices (Hanover, New Hampshire).Google Scholar
Lapping, M. 1984. ‘The Country Life Movement: Toward an Understanding of the Roots of North American Rural Policy’ Comparative Rural and Regional Studies, Fall, 25–32.Google Scholar
Lapping, M. and Leutwiler, N.. 1987. ‘Agriculture in Conflict: Right-to-Farm Laws in the Peri-urban Milieu for Agriculture’, in Lockeretz, W., ed., Sustaining Agriculture Near Cities (Ankeny, Iowa), 209–218.Google Scholar
Lapping, M., Daniels, T., and Keller, J.. 1989. Rural Planning and Development in the United States (New York, New York).Google Scholar
Leuchtenburg, W. 1963. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York, New York).Google Scholar
McNall, S. 1988. The Road to Rebellion: Class Formation and Kansas Populism, 1865–1900 (Chicago, Illinois).Google Scholar
Mertz, P. 1978. New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Policy (Baton Rouge, Louisiana).Google Scholar
Nachtigal, P. 1982. Rural Education: In Search of a Better Way (Boulder, Colorado).Google Scholar
Norden, D. 1974. Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867–1900 (Jackson, Mississippi).Google Scholar
Osbourn, S. 1988a. Rural Policy in the United States: A History (Washington, D.C.).Google Scholar
Osbourn, S. 1988b. Rural Policy in an Era of Change and Diversit (Washington, D.C.)Google Scholar
Pollack, N. 1962. The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Political Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts).Google Scholar
Popper, F. and Popper, D.. 1987. ‘The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust’, Planning 53:12, 12–18.Google Scholar
Rasmussen, W. 1979. ‘90 Years of Rural Development Programs’, Rural Development Perspectives. October, 2–9.Google Scholar
Rasmussen, W. 1982. ‘History of Soil Conservation, Institutions, and Incentives’, in Halcrow, H., Heady, E., and Cortner, M., eds. Soil Conservation: Policies, Institutions, and Incentives (Ankeny, Iowa).Google Scholar
Rasmussen, W. 1989. Taking the University to the People: Seventy five Years of Cooperative Extension (Ames, Iowa).Google Scholar
Reisner, M. 1986. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York, New York).Google Scholar
Robbins, Roy. 1942. Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776–1936 (Princeton, New Jersey).Google Scholar
Rogers, A. 1949. Liberty Hyde Bailey: A Story of American Plant Science (Princeton, New Jersey).Google Scholar
Roosevelt, T. 1914. ‘The Farmer, the Cornerstone of Civilization’, North Dakota Farmer, 13.Google Scholar
Rothblatt, D. 1971. Regional Planning: The Appalachian Experience (Lexington, Massachusetts).Google Scholar
Shannon, F. 1945. The Farmer's Last Frontier: American Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York, New York).Google Scholar
Sher, J. and Tompkins, R.. 1976. Economy, Efficiency and Equality: Myths of Rural School and District Consolidation (Washington, D.C.).Google Scholar
Shover, J. 1976. First Majority–Last Minority: The Transformation of Rural America (DeKalb, Illinois).Google Scholar
Statistical Abstract of the United States. 1987. (Washington, D.C.).Google Scholar
Steiner, F. 1988. ‘The Evolution of Federal Agricultural Land Policy in the United States’, Journal of Rural Studies 4:4, 349–63.Google Scholar
Sussman, C., ed. 1976. Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America (Cambridge, Massachusetts).Google Scholar
Tweeten, L. 1979. Foundations of Farm Policy (Lincoln, Nebraska).Google Scholar
United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1, 68, 1936.Google Scholar
Webb, W. 1936. The Great Plains. (New York, New York).Google Scholar
Widner, R. 1990. ‘Appalachian Development After 25 Years: An Assessment’, Economic Development Quarterly 4:4, 291–312.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, K., Hobbs, D., and Christenson, J.. 1983. ‘An Analysis of the National Rural Development Strategy’, The Rural Sociologist 3:6, 385–91.Google Scholar