Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. (Reviews).

Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. By Ronald R. Kline (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xii plus 299pp.).

In Consumers in the Country, Ronald R. Kline fills out the story of how American farmers adopted and adapted several key twentieth-century technologies, with his special contribution an account of rural electrification. Kline interprets the incorporation of telephones, automobiles, radios, and home appliances into farm life as a "process in which farm people resisted, modified, and selectively used these technologies to create new rural cultures, new forms of rural modernity" (p. 8). But this modernization was limited: The devices "did not transform rural life in a wholesale manner. Instead, farm people assimilated these technologies into existing social patterns, which expanded to some extent" (p. 269).

In the initial chapters, Kline reviews and adds interesting details to stories that have been told before: rural America's encounter from about 1890 through 1960 with telephones, "devil wagon" automobiles, radios, and housework devices, such as vacuums and washers, that were hailed as the saviors of overburdened farm wives. The basic accounts may be familiar to historians of technology, but still new to social historians. Even students of technology will learn from the original scholarship Kline reports. Analytically, Kline contends that the producers and vendors of the new devices tried to impress their modernist visions on rural consumers, but were forced to modify their products and compromise with farm culture. So, for example, automobile companies sold practical cars rather touring cars in rural areas, radio programmers dropped dully educational broadcasts for entertaining "hill-billy" shows, and manufacturers made combination electric and wood-burning stoves.

Most of the book and its novel material concern the encounter between rural electrifiers, especially the REA, and farmers. Inheriting the mantle of country life reformers, the REA agents sought to make farmers into suburban-like consumers. The modernizers found out that their "clients" were not as reformable as they had thought. Kline details, through use of internal documents, how frustrated agricultural agents became as they urged farmers to participate in electrification cooperatives and to burn enough electricity to make the lines pay. Kline recounts how the REA's "Utilization Division" pushed new and expanded uses of electricity onto a sometimes attentive but unaccommodating farm population. Many farmers had a more conservative vision of what electrification was good for. It was good for a few lights, a radio, an iron, perhaps, but not for a fully-industrialized home (vacuum cleaners, flush toilets, etc.) nor for farm operations (automatic milking and such). And farmers had other, better uses for their m oney--cars, for example.

Kline's account is valuable for its historical detail. But it also raises some conceptual issues worth mulling over. Kline draws often on the academically-popular concept of "resistance." At points, Kline uses it in a small-r sense: some farmers just refused to buy cars or refrigerators. But such resistence should not be exaggerated. Certainly, farmers who were encouraged to spend up to four dollars a month on electricity during the Great Depression might "resist" by turning off the lights. Yet in fact, farmers were, especially given their lack of cash, relatively eager consumers of telephones, automobiles, and other devices, Kline also uses the term, Resistance, in the big-R sense. Here, it alludes to an organized, defensive political and cultural movement. Rural Amercans resisted, in this sense, some aspects of modernization. They organized around issues of values and lifestyle, immigration, and science. But big-R Resistance does not really belong in the technology story. No matter how crabby and catankerou s some farmers seemed to REA bureaucrats, there was little organized opposition to the new technologies. (Kline describes the early years when some farmers tried to ban cars from rural roads, but that was only a passing moment in a longer and quite different story.)

More generally, Consumers in the Country joins in the social constructionist bludgeoning of old-fashioned technological determinism. Are we now beating a dead horse? Or, perhaps, there is some life in that horse, yet. At the end of the twentieth century, farmers--at least, the few who were left--were about as much a part of the cell-phoning, SUV-driving, Superbowl-watching, energy-guzzling society as the rest of us. How much did farmers, in the end, really shape the technology to their own ends? One such end that both farmers and reformers sought eagerly was keeping youth on the farm; at that they failed miserably.

Is, in fact, technological determinism incompatible with Kline's (and other technological historians') descriptions of the activist users who resist "each new technology and then weav[e] it into existing cultural patterns in their own way" (p. 6)? It may be true that "farm people were not passive consumers" (p. 276), that they selectively used these "technologies to change their environment, to create rural forms of modernity that differed from those envisioned by the modernizers" (p. 280) and yet also true that they used the devices "to create a material culture that resembled that of the urban and suburban areas" (p. 275), assimilating into the wider culture. Absent the technologies, could farmers have become so similar to suburbanites in habits and lifestyle? Could they go to movies, make rendezvous with friends at the mall, share in national political events? The technologies could have been necessary (maybe even, sufficient) causes of significant cultural change, even if the users strayed from the script s of the technologies' producers.

As we puzzle these issues out, we can add Kline's valuable study to two distinct shelves, one of the social history of technology and the other of the social history of American farmers.