Rural America Beyond the Caricature

Transcript

[Sandro Galea]
Welcome to Ideas Matter, a podcast hosted by WashU. I’m Sandro Galea. Barbara Kingsolver wrote, “If I can tell you one thing about the Appalachians, let it be this: we are people made of community.” This runs counter to how rural Americans can be depicted as somehow lacking agency, living on the social and economic edge. A people made of community are a people rooted in the bonds that strengthen and support, that give life meaning in its fullest sense.

I serve as dean of the Bursky School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis is a city in a largely rural state. Urban-rural divides are at the heart of our engagement with health in the region. Today, I am speaking with someone whose work helps capture the reality of life for rural Americans. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and Professor of Public Policy at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on culture, class, economic geography, and regional development. Her most recent book is The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country. I am delighted to be speaking with her today. Elizabeth, welcome.

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
Thank you very much for having me, Sandro.

[Sandro Galea]
So let’s start by asking about you. Tell us how you came to be doing the work you are doing.

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
Well, you know, like all of my work, I often have a personal interest in it to begin with, and then that’s not enough, obviously, as a social scientist. So you start doing your homework. I was born in West Virginia. My parents are Irish and came to the United States for economic opportunity, and they landed in West Virginia. And I lived there for a little bit, and then we went to Pittsburgh for my mom to finish her residency. But then, when she was finished with her residency, she got two offers. One was at a teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard, and the other was at a big hospital in a really small town in Pennsylvania. And you know, my parents had three young children and lots of graduate school debt, and they looked at the numbers and they just said we can’t make it work in Cambridge. We’re going to need to go to Pennsylvania. So that’s where they moved to for my mom to be a physician in this small town with about 4,000 people.

And so I lived and breathed small town America for 18 years. And what inspired me to write this book was that I had, you know, after Trump was voted in the first time, there was a lot of conversation about how angry rural Americans were and how they were really just trying to stick it to the coastal elites, and that’s why Trump was president. And that just did not square with my understanding of my rural American friends, with the town I grew up, and I knew that Danville, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, was, you know, it wasn’t necessarily emblematic of everywhere, but it did get me thinking that this was something to think about and understand what was really going on in this country.

[Sandro Galea]
When Americans talk about rural America, what do they often get wrong?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
I mean, a lot actually. The what I really think they get wrong is that rural Americans are really angry, that rural Americans are not socially progressive, that they are all in poverty. That they don’t have jobs. I mean, this is the story, right, of America. I mean, it was interesting that you quoted Barbara Kingsolver because I do think she has a really good eye on a part of rural America that is really struggling. But the thing is, that’s not the whole story of rural America. Rural America is actually really thriving if you look at a lot of different data on home ownership and employment, median income; and my experience in terms of interviewing folks, not just from where I grew up, but across the country, rural Americans are tolerant. They’re open-minded. In fact, I would argue at times far more so than their coastal counterparts, and so I think this story of rural America being an angry place that resents the country is just wrong.

[Sandro Galea]
Well, it’s interesting. I mean, this actually was going to be my next question. Tell us a little bit about how we flatten rural communities by saying “rural” as though all rural communities were the same. How do differences within rural communities complicate this idea that there’s a single rural working class?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
So I think that’s a great question because we actually do this disservice to urban America too, like the idea that you would compare Akron, Ohio, to Manhattan. And say, well, they’re both urban environments; like they couldn’t be more different. And I think the same is true of rural America: that you have all sorts of different socioeconomic, demographic, industry variables that create very different places. So, for example, like if you, you know, grow up in small-time Idaho or Iowa, your life looks really different than if you grew up in Barbara Kingsolver’s Appalachia. And if you grew up in my small town in Pennsylvania, it looks a lot different than if you grew up in rural Arkansas. And there’s really obvious, kind of in the same way that social scientists and demographers look at any question, there’s a lot of socioeconomic demographic variables that are upholding that. So, if you have a primarily educated rural population, cause or effect: Are they educated? Do they move into the into this town because there was a big industry like a hospital, like my mom did, or are you seeing industries move into small towns because there’s already an educated population. Well, education changes everything because people tend to have higher income levels if they’re educated. So you might have higher home ownership. You also might have higher amounts of amenities.

I mean, there’s certain parts of rural America in Vermont and Colorado and New York where it’s really beautiful, and there’s lots of different restaurants and amenities and all sorts of things that make it really a different experience than when you are in maybe a very impoverished or lower educated population. And so I think that problem with the flattening is, you know, so first of all, that’s just doing a disservice to our understanding of place as a scholar of economic development, which is what I primarily trained in outside of urban planning, it also creates policy problems because if you have this kind of general one-size-fits-all solution for rural America, you’re going to do a great disservice to both the places that are really prosperous and the places that really need help. So, like I, you know, if I could wave my magic wand, I wouldn’t be intervening on the lives of folks in Iowa, but I would be really trying to get money into parts of the Deep South where you know schools aren’t great and folks need jobs. So you know we’ve got to have a more nuanced understanding of place because they they’re very very different from one another.

[Sandro Galea]
You’re doing a terrific job of anticipating my questions because I was going to ask about education when you answer that. But let me ask you. Let me pick up on the last thing you said, which is about economic opportunity. So, how are rural communities experiencing forms of economic inequality that are distinct than economic inequality we see in cities and suburbs?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
Oh, that’s a great question. Let me have a think here. I think in some ways, our small towns tend to be robbed of certain jobs more quickly than our cities, and they can have less of those opportunities for mobility. So, so for example, one of the classic arguments in my field, and I think that this is, this has been a narrative in planning and economic geography and sociology, is that the rise of high level producer services, right? So, finance and accounting, law in major cities where you have this intense need to be around each other and these high-paying jobs that essentially run the global economy. Okay, so this narrative has been around forever. You can replace some of those jobs with tech, but it’s this idea that it’s all in cities. I think there’s some, some real truth that those opportunities are more in cities than in small towns, so I think that’s a that’s a big thing. It’s not entirely true. I mean, from the work I’ve done, I’ve seen concentrations of some of these jobs actually in small towns, not just in cities. So the narrative that they’re all in cities is wrong. Now, the other thing that’s going on is that cities have multitudes of economic diversity, like for example, Silicon Valley. The whole joke was like you could change jobs without changing a parking lot. That is less the case in small town America. You just simply have less opportunity because of the just the sheer fewer people and fewer industries that are in them. So I think that that’s a real difference.

The other one, you know, you had mentioned education. I do think that that is an opportunity that is less prevalent in small town America. You know, I live in a bubble. I live in Los Angeles, in a kind of upper middle class neighborhood, and there’s just this expectation that these kids are going to go to these great universities. Not just a university, they’re going to go to a great university, and they’re going to be doing all of these things. They’re going to play perfect piano and lacrosse and soccer and all the things. And there is an expectation. Some of that, I think, is unfair. It’s a lot of pressure on these kids, but there is an implicit belief that these kids have horizons of endless economic and social mobility, and they sort of do. Whereas I think in small town America, some of that college knowledge is missing, and some of that assumption that the kids are going to immediately go to college, and that they’re going to go to a top 50 college, and that they’re going to go to law school or med school. That’s less expected, and I think I think expected is not fair to anyone. But I think the idea that that opportunity isn’t necessarily prevalent is a problem. So I think that is an inequality issue between small town and city kids.

[Sandro Galea]
You know, when we talk about rural in rural America, we are using a geographic term, right? Rural is about geography, but to an extent, is this construct of rural actually about the economy, about economic differences, and perhaps economic and social differences, rather than about Geographic differences?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
So that’s a great question. I’ve thought about this. So I think yes and no. Some of the industries that we see in rural America are distinct to rural America, right? So a lot of agriculture, mining to a certain extent, but these are very much rural industries, whereas like film and entertainment is very much an urban industry, okay. Huge parts of media are an urban industry, but I actually think that it gets a little cloudy after those kind of big obvious ones because of the nature of remote work, because of technology. You actually see a surprising number of those jobs popping up, like knowledge jobs popping up in rural America. What I do think is different, and this was the heart of my book, is I think that there is a meaningful cultural difference. For me when I really looked at it. So I studied like income levels and whether people owned homes, whether people had jobs.

One of the big kind of quantitative things that was different was education level. There’s no question. People in cities tend to be, on average, more educated than than small town America. But what really was different was their cultural capital. Not even by the way their value system. So I mean, if you talk to someone in rural America, there would be times when I would interview someone. I would assume they were Republican. They were Democrat. I assume they were Democrat. They were Republican. Like there’s so much more blurriness than the media allows for. Like, people have very nuanced views on things, and they’re not so strictly on what we believe are party lines, right? But I do think what people really use to identify themselves is really different. So I, I think in rural America, for example, religion is a huge part of their cultural capital, and it’s a huge part of their social capital and their community. Whereas, from my experience and folks I interviewed in urban America, that’s less the case. It’s not entirely non-existence, but it’s a very different kind of signifier to the world. A sense of like who you are and what you want to show to the world is different.

[Sandro Galea]
One of the things that you’ve mentioned, I just want to pick up on, is this notion that there are many parts of rural America with more limited economic opportunities. What do we misunderstand about why people choose to stay in places with limited economic opportunities?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
Oh my goodness, that’s such a great question, and it doesn’t just pertain to rural America. I teach a class called the Urban Context for Policy and Planning. It’s an undergrad class at USC. It’s so much fun to teach, and the students are great. But I teach these two texts and documentaries. So one of them is the Pruitt-Igoe myth, which is actually about the housing project in St. Louis from way back when.

[Sandro Galea]
Yes, that’s an interesting story.

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
It’s an amazing story, and the other book I have lectured on, and actually I used to show the documentary to the students was Sudhir Venkatesh’s Dislocation, which is about the Robert Taylor homes in Chicago. And the reason I bring this up is because it’s the same theme that you find in rural America that, despite sometimes socioeconomic conditions that you would want to leave, that the social capital is so strong and these communities are so strong, that people stay anyway. Now, I don’t think that’s the case, obviously, in a prosperous town in Iowa or Pennsylvania, like people are staying because it’s a nice place to live. But your point about the stickiness of place, despite harsh economic and social realities. I think that that is a throughline with a lot of communities because we get very attached to the people in them, and that, rational or not, makes us not want to go.

[Sandro Galea]
So, how have remote work, migration, the pandemic changed the social and economic landscape of rural America?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
So I think the jury is sort of still out because there has obviously been this mandate for people to go back home. So you know all these folks who are like living their lovely bucolic life are now being told to report to the office. So it will be interesting to see how long this lasts. I do think it did give people the, well, two things. First is I think it gave people the belief and recognition of the capability of not having to be in an office to do their job, right? So technology has really made that possible. The second thing though that has happened, and I’m actually working on this a little bit on my next book is it’s actually made people liberated to not do jobs like that or to not live in cities like that they just don’t want to do that. I mean, this is this whole concept of quietly quitting that they’ve been talking. I don’t know if you’ve been reading about this, but people are just deciding that their work life maybe isn’t as important as their life, you know.

[Sandro Galea]
Yeah, you know there are quite a few. Certainly, in the past couple of years, as interest has grown in rural America for a number of political and social reasons, number of surveys capturing rural attitudes, rural behaviors. From your perspective, what do the surveys miss about the real story of rural America?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
I think that they miss that rural Americans are just regular human beings, just like everyone else who doesn’t live in rural America. There’s such a desire to paint this portrait of rural America being different or divided, you know. I remember this quote, and I’m going to paraphrase it. It’s not perfect, but Barack Obama was in conversation with Marilyn Robinson, who, of course, is one of America’s great writers, and he was joking. He’s like, “It’s just not an interesting story to talk about a bunch of people in the Midwest who figured out a way to get along. So the news media is not interested.” But like the point is, that’s actually kind of what’s going on in huge parts of America, is people are just getting on with their lives. They don’t even have strong opinions about politics. We know this from research too, and so some of what is being reported, I think, is quite misleading about what’s really going on in these places.

[Sandro Galea]
Okay, I really love that comment because I feel that way often. I feel, you know, the national conversation is about division on X axes, X or Y, and in my assessment, it’s missing the much more typical story of people getting along on all sorts of axes, which I think you’ve captured well. But let me ask you about a related but slightly different point, which is this notion. You know, we know that in the current moment, the Republican president got more votes in rural communities than in non-rural communities. We know proportionately, we know that. But I think there’s a tendency in the social sciences to characterize this rural conservatism as a symptom of socioeconomic decline, and and sort of with this assumption that if rural Americans were less sick or better educated, they would not vote for Republicans. What do you think the average rural conservative would say to this?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
I think they would say, “You really don’t understand.” Gosh, I mean, I am a LA-based Democrat card-carrying, I interned for Senator Hillary Clinton when she was in New York, so I feel like in some ways this actually, because I am so understanding of where rural Americans are, I feel like it kind of gives my perspective some legitimacy. But I also have real concern with how the Democrats have related to rural America. So, like, so here’s here’s where I am with things. Like, I I didn’t personally vote for President Trump, but I don’t disrespect people in any way who did. I think if you have a problem as a party, as in the Democrats or coastal elites, with how rural Americans voted, maybe you should try to find out why they didn’t vote for your person. Rather than having a problem or thinking they did it because they’re angry, why don’t we find out what’s going on here, and and my perspective from what what I’ve heard from from people in rural America is that yes, rural Americans are inherently more conservative about all sorts of things. That’s true, not all of them, but I think that’s a reasonable generalization. But what really I think was going on is they did not feel understood or valued by the Democratic Party, and sort of ridiculed by you know Hollywood and the media. And I think that no one wants to be a part of a club where they’re not accepted for who they are. And that that to me was what was going on. So I think if you, you talk to rural America. Americans who voted Republican, I don’t think they would have a strident view. I just think they would say this party recognized me more, and that’s, you know, that’s not for me and my New York Times reading colleagues to judge, you know?

[Sandro Galea]
You know, it’s interesting how this conversation is centering so much about the perceptions of rural America and how they differ from the reality of rural America. I practiced medicine in rural communities for several years, and I have often been struck by the caricature of rurality that is different than the day-to-day reality. Let me ask a different question about this caricature: How might policymakers better understand rural aspirations rather than focusing on rural decline?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
Oh, that’s a good question. I’m not sure I can answer that in a hot minute, but I will try. I think the first thing to really think about is, what do rural Americans value, and how can we uphold it rather than take it away? For example, I think that for a lot of, so, I think in terms of like occupations. So we’ve got to find out like, you know trade craft, for example, is very important. It’s more prominent in rural communities. How does some of the trade craft that we see in smaller communities? How could that connect to a larger economic system? Right. I mean, there are carpenters and people who work with textiles and artists who are undiscovered, basically, for lack of a better word, that could be a part of something bigger. The other thing that I feel passionately about is I suspect there’s plenty of young people in rural America who would love to go to some of our nation’s elite universities and would be really, really good at it if they could go, but they don’t have the system to get there. They don’t have college counselors who are connected. They don’t understand the X, Y, and Z extracurriculars. Their parents are blown away by the cost. How do we make that system less opaque?

So, if we want to relate to rural Americans, I think we need to relate to yes, their aspirations, and also understand the kind of roadblocks that have been created, you know, structurally. I also think I really believe this. That I think some of you know our kind of super secular coastal elite culture is very alienating, and it. I don’t think it means that like people who live in Los Angeles have to be more religious than they want to be. That’s not what I’m saying, but I think that a certain level of respect for people’s beliefs is really important because for a lot of people in rural America, religion is huge. To feel that that belief is sort of ridiculed by science and secular views of the world is, I think, very alienating. You know, and actually on that, and I think you, I’d be really interested in your view on this because you worked as a physician in rural America. That you know, there is a fear of medicine and medical professionals, and you know, for someone like me, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I think from their perspective, it does make sense. I mean, the way we handled the pandemic was, you know, it was a little chaotic for people, and so I think there’s a lot of examples where we could do a better job of translating knowledge about medicine and good health.

I did a great paper with two of my colleagues, Bryan Singer and Jack Chapel, who are at the Schaeffer Center, and we looked at life expectancy and quality of life for rural Americans. And there’s a huge gap between rural Americans and urban Americans. And so we looked at sort of what drives those gaps. So the biggest thing that drives this gap is education. So how is it that education explains health outcomes? You’d think there’d be all sorts of other things. Like we created a model where a simulation model. Like if you reduce people’s smoking, what would that do? If you reduce people’s BMI, what would that do? So all sorts of. But the thing that really was, if you could even out education, you would see better outcomes. My colleagues and I really thought, well, what’s going on here? Well, what’s going on here is a receptivity to knowledge and to public health information, and that people who are more educated are more used to being given information and doing something with it, right? And people who are less educated are intimidated by or may not know how to navigate that knowledge. So, how do we translate that in a way that’s less intimidating?

[Sandro Galea]
Yeah, this is actually so interesting. To clarify, I was a doctor in rural Canada, not rural America. I have a bit of a checkered migratory past, but you know, despite what one hears in the news these days, there isn’t much difference just because that was across the parallel, but I really take your points about the sort of differences in values and beliefs that represent ultimately a patchwork of identities, beliefs within a country. And there is no reason, to my mind, why that cannot become the quilt that one would want to have in a country, rather than seeing it as a source of division. Let me ask you about division, since we’re talking about division. You know, we talk about division, divides, and lives. Rural, urban Americans’ perception of each other. Let’s talk about commonalities. So, how are rural Americans and urban Americans alike. What do we have in common?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
I think one thing, and it’s funny. My husband’s English, and my parents are Irish, so we end up going to that part of the world not infrequently, and so it does allow me this juxtaposition between America and other places. One thing I love about Americans is their just complete open-mindedness about just who you are, where you came from, and I think that that is uniform across urban and rural America-a kind of open-mindedness.

I think individualism is something. This idea, not, and it sounds like I’m juxtaposing individualism with community, and I actually think there are two different things going on. But this idea of one’s sense of self and sense of opinions about the world. I feel like people feel, you know, the self-possession to express themselves. That was certainly something I got from talking to people. I also think, and this will be surprising to the media who write otherwise, but rural Americans, you know, they really are against racism and supportive of equal rights for everyone. They are largely very supportive of the gay population and love who you love, and they really care about their family, and they care about Christmas, and you know today’s obviously tonight’s Rosh Hashanah, and they care about you know the holidays we celebrate with friends, and I think that’s actually something that makes America America, the United States the United States, you know, and I really think that that crosses geography.

[Sandro Galea]
If you had a magic wand and you could change one thing about the current caricature of rural America, what would it be?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
That they are racist, prejudiced, homophobic people who voted for Donald Trump because they’re angry and bigoted. None of that is true.

[Sandro Galea]
May may the world listen to that. May we change that narrative. Last question, Elizabeth. What gives you hope in the moment?

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
People, because when you talk to another person, just like we’re talking today, you realize they’re reasonable and they’re open-minded, and we can find connection with anyone if we’re just willing to. And we just need more people to do that. And that sounds so cheesy, but I really mean it. Every time I ever talk to someone in rural America, I am filled with the belief in humanity. I’m never thrown with some idea that they’re awful people or that they’re different from me in the same way that I’m not thrown when I talk to folks in urban America. Like we’re just people.

[Sandro Galea]
I’m Sandro Galea. I have been talking with Elizabeth Currid-Halkett about rural America beyond the caricature. Elizabeth, thank you for this most interesting conversation.

[Elizabeth Currid-Halkett]
It was my pleasure. Thank you for wonderful questions and conversation.

[Sandro Galea]
Thank you to everybody who joined us for this ideas matter. I look forward to continuing the conversation.