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

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.