The Rural Rebound

For most of the 20th century, the story of rural America was an epic of decline. American agriculture prospered, but mechanization and the changing economics of farming drove millions from the land. In the smaller towns and cities, economic opportunity dried up. The rural exodus was a dominant theme in American life and culture, distilled in images of the Okies' flight from the heartland during the 1930s and the great postwar African-American migration from the rural South to Chicago, Detroit, New York, and other northern cities, as well as in novels and films such as The Grapes of Wrath and The Last Picture Show. In a sense, the roots of the decline go even deeper than the current century. In this land that long proudly called itself a nation of farmers, the rate of urban population growth actually began outstripping that in the countryside during the 1820s, the decade when John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson occupied the White House.

Now all of this may be about to change. A variety of powerful social and economic forces appears to be reversing patterns that have prevailed in the United States for a century or longer. They are pushing and pulling significant numbers of Americans into the areas beyond the metropolitan fringes. The first signs of rural turnaround came in the 1970s, when population in the nation's sparsely populated regions suddenly jumped 14 percent, lifted by an unprecedented influx of newcomers and returnees from metropolitan areas. While the news media were quick to herald this "return to the land," some scholars, skeptical that such long-standing trends could be so suddenly altered, dismissed the 1970s experience as a fluke. Then the devastating farm crisis of 1980-86, along with a wave of deindustrialization that hurt textiles and other rural industries, put a stop to in-migration. The rural population still managed to grow slightly, but only because rural women bore enough babies to offset out-migration and deaths. In rural America, the 1980s looked a lot like the earlier part of the 20th century: more people moved out than moved in.

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