On the pick-up truck as rural relic

The Washington Post published a piece yesterday by Paul Waldman, headlined, "The evolving political symbolism of the pick-up truck."  Here's the excerpt most salient to rurality: 

That idea of the pickup as a tool for work — especially agricultural work — goes back to its beginnings. The first production pickup truck, the Ford Model TT, debuted in 1917 as a vehicle that would allow farmers who were already using their Model T’s for farm work to haul bigger loads. Its roots in rural American work remain central to its marketing, even if rural people are no longer the target customers. That imagery is meant to evoke a kind of manhood that embodies self-reliance, competence, mastery over the environment and a physicality most men have no need for in their day-to-day lives.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the symbolic place of pickups in the rural ethos. There are so many country songs about pickups — from “Truck Yeah” to “If My Truck Could Talk” — they constitute their own subgenre. Of course, like pickups, country music may be rooted in rural America and popular there, but it is consumed by people everywhere.

More recent truck marketing uses rural imagery to evoke masculine virtues that you can capture no matter who you are, where you live or what you do for a living. As Sawin told me, once the auto companies realized the rural market for pickups was saturated, “they still needed to sell more trucks. So they really start[ed] to turn to targeting the suburban White man.” Those may be primarily conservatives, but liberals could constitute a fruitful market as well. In one television ad, a diverse cast of people, including a young Black woman riding a subway, sings “Thank God I’m a country boy.”

All of this reminded me of Paul Harvey's "God Made a Farmer," which has been used by Dodge to advertise its pick-ups.  That is the subject of two prior blog posts.  

Post script:  These Washington Post stories about modern-day cowboys are at least marginally related, this one from September and this one from Nov. 6.  Both are by Jose Del Real and both are out of Wyoming.