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

By Ronald R. Kline. Revisiting Rural America. (Baltimore, Md., and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 2000. Pp. xii, 372. $39.95, ISBN 0-8018-6248-5.)

In Consumers in the Country author Ronald Kline, an associate professor in the history of technology at Cornell, studies the use of automobiles, telephones, and electrical appliances in rural homes from 1900 to 1960. He is not as concerned with the impact of these technologies, however, as he is "to understand the reciprocal relations between technology and social change" (p. 280). He wishes to "illuminate the contested processes that transformed the family farm in the twentieth century" (p. 10). In other words, the promoters of these services--corporations, government agencies, the press, and other ideologists--were eager for farmers to use new products and thereby replicate urban lifestyles, but instead they resisted and established their own culture. The author's intention here is confusing: Kline shows the ways that rural inhabitants resisted "urbanizing technologies" (p. 2) in spite of the exhortations of manufacturers and U.S. Department of Agriculture idealists, but there is little attempt to define or explain the "new rural cultures" (p. 8) that he says were created, other than examples of reactions by individuals to new services.

Rural use of automobiles, telephones, and electrical appliances followed a general pattern of resistance and then acceptance. Consumerism became entrenched in rural America by the mid-1950s, but it did not replace or overpower "existing cultural patterns" (p. 6); instead, rural inhabitants incorporated new technology into their lives without sacrificing their own culture. But although technology was not a pervasive force at the local level, it was a force in another sense: many rural inhabitants left the soil for cities during the same period covered in this study, and they often complained about the lack of amenities on the farm as they loaded their belongings.

More attention should have been devoted to the impact of the new technologies because they had a great impact on rural public health: infant mortality fell, infectious diseases and illnesses caused by poor sanitation had a radical drop, and diet-related diseases and musculoskeletal defects greatly declined. Rural inhabitants saw the health benefits of running water, refrigeration, and indoor bathrooms and added them as income allowed--a point that Kline recognizes, but he does not fully explain how these developments affected rural culture.

The book is well researched and features excellent documentation. It relies heavily on primary sources and records of government agencies and private companies. Of particular value is the inclusion of new literature beating on the lives of women on farms. Kline presents a great deal of evidence about the expectations of the proponents of services and also about the patterns of resistance and acceptance of new technologies by rural citizens. His work definitely adds significantly to the literature on U.S. rural history.

D. CLAYTON BROWN
Texas Christian University