The long, long history of America's urban rural divide
This article was originally published in the Berkshire Eagle on September 20, 2024
Maps of the states that are expected to decide the presidential election are stunning. The urban areas in these states are Democratic blue and more population dense. The rural areas are Republican red and geographically much larger. Even here in Massachusetts, which is usually solidly Democratic in presidential elections, rural parts of the state are almost all red. Why is this the case?
Urban-rural political divides are familiar the world over and through history. I’ve thought about this for a long time and often come back to a powerful anecdote. While I was doing economic consulting work in Sweden four decades ago, our family took a side trip to Gotland, a large Swedish island in the Baltic between Stockholm and Poland. Gotland’s most famous attraction is its 13th-century stone defensive wall encompassing its capital and chief port, Visby. The massive two-mile-long wall is 30 feet high, give or take a few feet, and remarkably intact. Built into the wall are 27 large towers (there were originally 29) and nine smaller ones sitting on top.
A historian from the local museum took us around. Visby is on a main water route across the Baltic that the Vikings took on their voyages of pillage and conquest down the Atlantic and North Sea coasts and into the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. It also was a wealthy trading town between Scandinavia and what are now Polish and north German cities.
I assumed that the wall was to keep the marauding Vikings out and said so to our guide. “No,” he said briskly, not the Vikings, “the farmers.” Indeed, in 1288 Gotland had a civil war between the farmers and the inhabitants of Visby, and tensions simmered for centuries before and after that war.
This history is relevant today. Urban-rural divides like the one the U.S. faces have existed since time immemorial. Sometimes they are subsumed, as during World War II when farmers and city dwellers served together to fight common enemies. Other times they are raw, as they seem to be in the U.S. today.
Explanations for urban-rural tensions are straightforward. Cities always have been where the money is, and hard-working rural people resent it. Urban centers are populated by better-educated merchants, bankers, landowners and their agents who collect rents. There also are a variety of craftsmen and businesses to whom rural people have to pay what they feel are monopoly prices. This was the case with Visby centuries ago, and rural people resented it as they do today.
City-dwellers also often are foreigners or minorities. In Asia, ethnic Chinese play outsized and sometimes dominant roles in commerce in five or six countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. In the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, for example, where I worked on rural development in the 1960s, locals who were ethnic Vietnamese and Cambodian simply assumed that any merchant was of Chinese descent.
Cities, of course, serve vital economic functions. The more commerce there is in an area, the better off rural people nearby are. Urbanites create markets for farm products; supply vital inputs like fertilizers, machinery and seed; and offer needed credit.
Urban merchants and middlemen get along with the local populations for long periods. They frequently change their names to blend in, but their differences and resentment of their wealth often is harnessed by ambitious leaders unleashing bitter and sometime bloody clashes.
Jews played the role of city-dwelling merchants in many European countries from before the Crusades up to modern times. For example, in what was then western Russia and is now Lithuania bordering on Poland and Germany, government maps based on pre-WWII census data show that all of the villages had a majority Jewish population. Most of the non-Jewish populations in these market towns were Poles and Germans, not ethnic Lithuanians or Russians. (The Jews in these Lithuanian towns were wiped out by the Nazis in the Holocaust in 1941 and 1942.)
In the U.S. in 2024, the urban-rural divide builds on a nearly universal historic foundation. American farmers in the 19th century were angry about high tariffs that raised prices for manufactured goods and favored urban manufacturing at the expense of the rural population. After the Civil War, American farmers favored plentiful paper money (Greenbacks) while their urban creditors favored gold and “hard” currency that made paying down debts harder for farmers.
Rural people in the U.S. are no longer primarily farmers. Rather, they are working people who drive utilitarian vans and pickup trucks to jobs in the suburbs or urban areas. They drive longer distances to work than urbanites, so they are more sensitive to gasoline prices. Higher grocery prices also hit their budgets, and there are fewer nearby stores competing and keeping prices down. They also sense that better educated urbanites look down on rural people — not an unreasonable observation.
The price surge in 2021 and 2022 rubbed salt into these old wounds. The surge was driven by COVID disruptions of the supply chain and Russia’s attack on Ukraine that led to price increases for energy and food. These in turn fed through into transportation and shipping costs of all kinds, grocery prices, home and industrial heating, wages, rents and housing costs.
Energy prices in 2024 have fallen back to pre-COVID levels and continue to soften, and prices of many other products have stopped rising. But the urban-rural divide in the 2024 election remains, and how to soften its hard edges remains a question.
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