Green Acres: A History of Farmers in America [rebroadcast]

BackStory

Education, History

4.5 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2015

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the fall harvest comes in, BackStory takes a look at how farmers came to wield so much influence in American politics and life. In the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson viewed farmers as ideal citizens,their agricultural lifestyle providing the foundation for a virtuous republic. Just two percent of Americans live on farms today, but farmers still occupy a special place in the national identity. In this episode, BackStory considers why the ideal of the self-sufficient, independent American farmer is still so powerful (even as the reality has largely disappeared) and who has invoked that ideal over time. From railroad companies to anti-imperialists, the image of the “yeoman farmer” has served many different ends and anchored one of the most successful government lobbies in history.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is backstory. I'm Peter Onof.
0:04.0	It's harvest season for American farmers and grocery stores are filled with freshly picked apples and beets, potatoes and pumpkins.
0:11.0	Now farmers have always been a big part of the American identity.
0:15.0	But in the early 20th century, farmers became something else, a powerful political lobby.
0:21.0	What happened in the 1920s is the representation of farmers as an interest group came to Washington.
0:28.0	Today on backstory, we'll explore the political cloud of farmers in their special place in the American psyche.
0:34.0	We'll ask why the image of the family farmers been so enduring.
0:38.0	We'll also hear how an Iowa farmer got the attention of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and his entourage at the height of the Cold War.
0:47.0	I'll drive up in my car and I'll open a passenger door. Roswell basically kidnapped him from underneath the nose of Iowa State.
0:55.0	The history of American farmers today on backstory.
1:00.0	Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
1:12.0	From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys.
1:23.0	Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Vallow and I'm here with Peter Ones.
1:27.0	Hey Brian.
1:28.0	And Ed Ayers is with us. Hello Brian.
1:31.0	In the middle of the 19th century, big railroad companies in the US faced a bit of a problem.
1:37.0	Congress had recently granted the millions of acres of public lands in the newly acquired Western Territories.
1:43.0	But all that land didn't amount to much for the railroads without products to carry on their trains.
1:50.0	They needed people. They needed towns. They needed goods to transport and farmers to grow those products.
1:57.0	They realized that they were going to have to import a brand new population.
2:01.0	And so in the 1870s, they turned to Europeans.
2:05.0	Ideal candidates for relocation. European farmers and peasants were struggling at that very time under various forms of persecution, famine and crushing rents.
	...

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