Rural America at the Crossroads : Jobs Leave, Children Often Follow, but Some Areas Resist the Decline

As unobtrusive as a church bell, as final as a funeral notice, the passing away of so much of rural America began with a going-out-of-business sign.

Perhaps it appeared in a shoe store window, or the florist’s shop where every bride of the last 50 years ordered her bouquet. It happened because the railroad died, the hotel closed, jobs dried up, folks moved on.

The vast stretch of America, beyond the nighttime glow of cities, where stars and a few street lights mean rural life, has been shrinking and struggling for decades.

As the nation faces the 1990s, farmers and small-town citizens no longer live in the countryside found in a Willa Cather novel or on a Norman Rockwell canvas. Today there are two rural Americas: one dying, the other surviving, often by its wits.

Isolated, one-industry towns and back-road hamlets that once defined “country” are fading into history. At the same time modern little communities with diverse economic foundations and fortuitous locations are going strong.

Few Prospects

“The remote rural areas that are falling further and further behind have little prospect for attracting industry,” said Cynthia Duncan, associate director of the Rural Economic Policy Program of the Aspen Institute, a think tank that does social and economic research. “Rural areas that are closer to cities . . . are more resilient and are going to recover faster.”

The dying rural America is evident in the country school, its once-white clapboards peeling gray in the unrelenting wind of the Nebraska prairie, and in the dilapidated homesteads of North Dakota where roof-high lilac bushes grow untended.

A way of life is disappearing when, in Montana, a homemakers’ group cancels its annual Mother’s Day tea because so few members remain.

But the other rural America, the one that will survive, has its symbols too.

Aggressive communities in Missouri and other states entice business with free land and other incentives. In Iowa, little towns struggling to pay for police protection or individual schools are banding together in “clusters” that share the costs. In Texas, the county with the largest quail population started organizing hunts that now attract hunters from 26 states.

“If they can do it, you can do it all over,” said David Guarino of the Texas Department of Agriculture, which helped with a grant.

For almost two centuries, the historical and emotional pull of rural and small-town life put the heartbeat in the heartland. The idealized myth of a homogeneous rural America, where a family lived off a bountiful land, shopped in a small town free of crime and perpetuated itself in prosperity and harmony through grit, hard work and lofty moral principles goes back to the day the Pilgrims landed.

Jeffersonian Ideal

Thomas Jefferson articulated the ideal, holding that land ownership must be broad-based, that democracy must be rooted in the individual efforts of small farmers and merchants.

And yet, except for a brief “rural renaissance” in the 1970s, when 4.5 million people fled the cities to earn livings in the country as coal and farming boomed, much of rural life has been on a long decline.

“In the ‘80s,” said Calvin Beale, chief Agriculture Department demographer, “we simply do not see many of the back-to-the-landers, homesteaders or urban refugees who go out to Upper Michigan, Upper Minnesota, the Ozarks, northeastern New England to make their living in a small-town community because they prefer to do it.”

The ‘80s added new crises to old challenges: tumbling land values, farm foreclosures, two droughts, school consolidation, falling commodity and petroleum prices, deregulation and declining services, a brain drain and a loss of jobs caused by mechanization, factory closings and increased use of cheap Third World labor.

The result has been an exodus to urban centers and dire predictions for the future.

“Unless action is taken, virtually every citizen of the country will be forced to live in a metropolitan area,” said Rep. Glenn English (D-Okla.), whose House agriculture subcommittee opens hearings Monday on rural development. The first hearing is in Clarksdale, Miss. Future hearings will be in Amarillo, Tex.; Marshalltown, Iowa, and Blackfoot, Ida.

Nearly 1 million people left rural America in 1986-87. “That scenario is good for no one,” English said. “It would overburden our cities and suburbs as much as it would devastate our rural communities.”

Through the ‘80s, rural America has witnessed a decline in services and jobs and a rise in poverty.

“You can draw a lot of parallels between remote rural areas and the inner city,” said the Aspen Institute’s Duncan. “In both cases, people with education and skills left. You end up without a middle class, without role models. They don’t have the economic security and economic opportunity. They can’t invest in the schools and good government at the local level.”

Television’s Influence

Television has let the rural poor “know how different their lives are from the rest of the world,” said David Lollis, director of the Federation of Appalachian Housing Enterprises in Kentucky.

Propping up many dying small towns is the elderly retired population, which lives off transfer payments such as pensions, medical and disability insurance and income-maintenance programs. In nearly half of Kansas’ counties in 1985, 44% of income came from transfer payments or property income.

“The world has changed and our population has aged,” said Mary Schissel, city clerk in Dougherty, Iowa, a town of 128. “A lot of our leaders want to take a break. They’re in their mid- to late-60s. They say it’s time for someone else to do this.”

But who? Not young people. Of the hundreds of thousands leaving rural places in 1986-87, one-third were 18 to 24 years old. More than half had at least one year of college.

“The brain drain in rural areas is enormous,” said Bob Bergland, agriculture secretary under President Jimmy Carter and now head of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Assn. “The kids who stay are the ones who fail to graduate. You can’t get an employer who requires a high level of skill to come into a place with crummy schools.”

And without jobs, people leave.

“If you’ve got a college degree, about the only thing you can do is become a teacher or a nurse, and there are dozens of applicants for every job,” said Anne Smith of Bainville, Mont., who spends her work week 100 miles from her husband so her teacher’s salary can help pay for their ranch.

Hard times on ranches and farms in the early ‘80s also pushed many people off the land.

“Our biggest worry right now is that we’ve lost an entire generation of farmers,” said Heather Ball, an economist with the Texas Department of Agriculture. “You don’t go out to rural Texas and find young farmers anymore. The whole future has packed up and moved away.”

New Chapter, Old Story

It’s a new chapter in an old story. Farm population has been dropping since 1916 and small towns have been struggling for more than a century, said Beale, the Agriculture Department demographer. He cites a book titled “Dead Towns of Georgia”--published in 1874.

New figures do provide a bit of good news for farmers who toughed out the ‘80s. For 1988, Agriculture Department studies said net farm income was at a record high of $57.7 billion--though some experts caution that a small percentage of large-scale farmers accounts for a huge chunk of that.

Also last year, loan delinquencies reported by the Farm Credit System dropped $2 billion to half the level of two years ago. Two thousand farmers filed Chapter 12 bankruptcies, but that was less than a third of 1987’s filings.

There is prosperity in some rural areas--often in towns with a unifying core such as a county courthouse or a medical center, usually near a major highway.

‘Forget It’

“If your town isn’t on an interstate, forget it,” said James R. Shortridge, a cultural biographer at the University of Kansas.

“Development comes more quickly within 100 miles of a major trading center or a city,” Bergland said.

For many small towns, survival is assured with the arrival of a major merchandising center with an anchor store, usually a Wal-Mart.

And yet this regional draw for one town often takes customers away from the Main Street retailers of surrounding communities.

Rex Campbell, a University of Missouri rural sociologist, considers the spread of chain stores a major reason for the shifting rural landscape.

“Wal-Mart is the innovator, they know how to target growth and they’re expert marketers and mass merchandisers. They were able to go into smaller markets than K mart or other competitors, and now they’re replacing several mom-and-pop businesses, which formerly sold hardware, dry goods, clothes, shoes, and such.”

After Wal-Mart and some other discounters moved into Mason City, Iowa, people in outlying towns noticed their business dropping off.

Town ‘Commonwealth’

Gene Persons, who has a grocery in Sheffield, 16 miles away, acknowledged, “We sit here and try to do what we can to stop them. There’s only so many dollars to go around.” He and others have formed a “commonwealth” of neighboring small towns that pool resources to promote themselves.

For other pragmatic rural residents, adapting means working in the city in order to live in the countryside.

Some Missourians, for example, drive 150 miles each way to the Chrysler Corp. plant in the St. Louis suburb of Fenton to earn $15 an hour, Campbell said. “For every $1 of hourly wage, they’ll commute an average of 10 miles each way.”

Ultimately, authorities say, these approaches will not be enough to ensure the survival of many little towns. They must rebuild their economies locally--get access to investment money, telecommunications, transportation and educational opportunities. Perhaps most important, they must diversify.

“How does rural America participate in the growth of a service-oriented economy? That’s the basic underlying question,” Beale said. “It can’t come out of agriculture. It has to come of the industries driving the national economy.”

Rural residents must even look beyond that, to the global economy. Whereas corporations in the ‘50s and ‘60s moved to rural America for cheaper labor, now the Third World market is even more enticing.

“What it means for people is the same--someone is out of a job, a small town is dying,” said Ann Tickamyer, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky. “Unless major efforts are taken to reevaluate what we want in a rural economy, the prognosis is fairly grim.”

A few residents, perhaps, will stay on in small towns that don’t rethink and adjust, that don’t go looking for employers to diversify a one-industry, boom-and-bust economy.

“Those little places are never going to die--there will always be a housing unit or so--but they’ll deteriorate,” Campbell said. “What has been lost is the heart, and what you’re left with is the shell.”

RURAL AMERICA BY NUMBERS Here are some facts about rural America, provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Census Bureau, the American Hospital Assn. and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research organization.

Population

Nearly 64 million people live in rural America--more than a quarter of the U.S. population. In 1950, rural residents made up more than a third of all Americans.

In 1985-86, 632,000 people moved out of non-metro areas, the government says. In 1986-87, those leaving increased to 952,000.

Farming

Farming reached an apex in 1916 and the population has been falling since. In the early and mid-1980s, rising interest rates and declining land values contributed to an exodus that saw more than 1 million people leave the land and 273,000 farms go out of business from 1980 to 1988.

Unemployment

The fading small-town economy, the early ‘80s recession, the movement of factory jobs to the Third World and increasing mechanization in coal mining, agriculture, timber and paper mills have shrunk employment opportunities.

From 1979 to 1986, rural areas lost 733,000 manufacturing, mining and farm jobs, the government reports.

Unemployment in non-metro areas averaged 6.9% for 1988 compared to 5.1% in metro areas. In 1979, the metro jobless rate was higher.

Another major shift in rural America has been the dramatic rise of farm women in the labor force in the last two decades. According to 1980 census figures, more than half of all farm women worked outside the home; 78% in a University of Nebraska seven-state study said economic reasons drove them into their new jobs. In 1940, 12.1% of farm women were in the labor force; in 1960, it was 22.9%.

Poverty

More than 9 million of American’s poor live outside metro areas, according to a 1989 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington group that researches issues relating to the poor. The rate of non-metro residents living in poverty increased from 13.7% to 16.9% from 1977 to ‘87, the report said.

For blacks, poverty is more common in non-metro areas than in central cities, it said. More than half of all non-metro poor live in the South and less than 10% of the rural poor live on farms.

Services

Deregulation led to cutbacks in air and bus service, leaving many small towns more isolated than ever. From 1982 to 1986, 4,514 places lost bus service, according to the Interstate Commerce Commission. From 1980 to 1988, 208 rural hospitals closed, the American Hospital Assn. said.

Medicare payments to rural hospitals are smaller than to urban ones, based on the premise that services cost less. One result is that many small facilities have drastically cut the level of care or not bought sophisticated equipment.

Source: Associated Press