Once upon a time, many if not most people lived a predominantly agrarian lifestyle. You were born on a farm, you lived on a farm, you died on a farm, and while you were alive you ate the food you grew. Money for things you couldn’t grow came from selling the things that did. And then the Industrial Revolution happened, and cities boomed, and no matter how much presidential candidates like to say the opposite when they’re spending time in Iowa at the beginning of the campaign cycle, the era of the small family farm is effectively over and it’s never coming back. That’s not to say that no one in America lives on a family farm anymore, obviously, but the numbers are small and declining every year.
Besides Iowa, why is it that we romanticize those days so much? For my money, there’s a very profound appeal of a time when it seemed like life was so much simpler, when you worked with your hands to get what you needed. Especially in this day and age, where I’m sitting at a desk typing this into a computer, but the sentimental attachment to that time seems to have been around for quite a while, because when Pearl Buck won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth, the Dust Bowl hadn’t even happened yet…
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