On the decline and early death of the white "middle-aged" "middle class" in "middle America"

The Washington Post reports today from Tecumseh, Oklahoma, population 6,457, under the headline, "We Don't Know Why It Came to This."  In the story, Eli Saslow tells of the life and death of Anna Marrie Jones, a 54-year-old working-class grunt that some academic analysts have chosen to refer to as "middle class," though she had only a high school diploma  (Read more here).

The feature's sub-head explains more:  "As white women between 25 and 55 die at spiking rates, a close look at one tragedy."  Here's a paragraph from early in the story that begins to hint at the "rural" dimension of this phenomenon (reported here and here, among other places, and illustrated here).

Fifty-four years old. Raised on three rural acres. High school-educated. A mother of three. Loyal employee of Kmart, Walls Bargain Center and Dollar Store. These were the facts of her life as printed in the funeral program, and now they had also become clues in an American crisis with implications far beyond the burnt grass and red dirt of central Oklahoma.

This early death trend among poorly educated whites, as well as its possible causes, are commented on elsewhere in the article:

“It’s a loss of hope, a loss of expectations of progress from one generation to the next,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who had studied the data. 

“What we’re seeing is the strain of inequality on the middle class,” President Obama said. 

“Erosion of the safety net,” Hillary Clinton said. “Depression caused by the state of our country,” Donald Trump said. “Isolated rural communities,” Bernie Sanders said. “Addictive pain pills and narcotics,” Marco Rubio said.

And here are some more mentions of "rural" in the story.  

According to recent studies of death certificates, the trend is worse for women in the center of the United States, worse still in rural areas, and worst of all for those in the lower middle class. Drug and alcohol overdose rates for working-age white women have quadrupled. Suicides are up by as much as 50 percent.

And, regarding Anna Marrie Jones's friend (and rural mail carrier), Candy Payne, who led Jones's memorial service:

There were days when the vast emptiness of rural Oklahoma could make someone feel alone — when the only sound was wind, and the prairie looked small beneath the sky, and the one car bouncing along the rutted gravel roads was Candy Payne’s mail truck, circling its way from one house to the next. 

It had been four days since she presided over her friend’s funeral, and now she was back on her usual U.S. Postal route: 404 mailboxes in 126 square miles of Pottawatomie County. The roads were in fact dirt trails, the houses were mostly farmsteads equipped with well water and what she called the “traffic considerations” were turkey, deer and coyotes that darted across her route.

So, to what extent is the demise of the white working class a "rural" story?  Or is "rurality" a scape-goat for the media to focus on when what is really causing this crisis is socioeconomic disadvantage?  Or is the situation among poor whites exacerbated in rural places because of the relative lack of services there?  Or, do we just collapse white socioeconomic disadvantage into rurality in our national imaginary, making Anna Marrie Jones a good candidate to illustrate this phenomenon to the coastal elites who read the Washington Post? 

Two more vignettes of the drug scourge in rural America

This is not a new story (read more here, here and here, as well as at "drug abuse" label on this blog), but I'm going to highlight some recent media coverage of the problem.  Melissa Block reported for NPR from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, population 5,012, last month.  The headline was "A Small Town Wonders What to Do When Heroin Is 'Everywhere.'"    Here's an excerpt:

I went to rural Berks County in southeast Pennsylvania to hear what the opioid epidemic means in a small town, a place where everyone knows everyone and the ripples of addiction spread wide. 

Really, I could have gone just about anywhere. No community is immune. 

The landscape in Berks County is bucolic: rolling farmland studded with silos and 19th-century stone barns. But that peaceful landscape belies a serious problem. Opioid addiction is deeply embedded in these small towns. 

"It's become a crisis," says Phil Salamone, a paramedic in Kutztown, Pa.
He points out that heroin is both cheap and readily available from nearby cities such as Reading and Philadelphia. Salamone says, "There is no exclusive demographic that's using it. It's everybody. It's kids, adults, low income, high income. It's everywhere."

The paramedics note that they are using naloxone (Narcan) effectively to save lives--and that they are using enough of it that they don't worry about expiration dates.  The two area high schools have lost six students to heroin overdoses in the past two years.  (It is odd that the reporter calls Berks County "rural" because it is metropolitan, with a population of more than 415,000; or maybe Block meant she went to the "rural" part of Berks County).

Another more recent NPR story is out of Austin, Indiana, population 4,295, in the Southern part of the state, in Scott County, population 23,744, very close to the Kentucky state line.  "Inside a Small Brick House, at the Heart of Indiana's Opioid Crisis" is the headline, and it recalls that just a year ago,  this town became "home to one of the biggest HIV outbreaks in decades, with more than 140 diagnosed cases."  The story features several local vignettes, including this extremely sobering one that makes clear the link between :

When news of the HIV infections broke, Kevin Polly was one of the few people in Austin willing to go on the record and say he was using Opana. Polly had contracted HIV, and at the time told a CBS reporter he had no plans to quit injecting the drug. 

Clyde Polly, Kevin's 73-year-old father, says his son went to a rehab facility and isn't living in Clyde's one-story brick house anymore. Even though Kevin is gone, Clyde says some of his son's friends who do drugs are still there. Not all of them are HIV positive, and not everyone is from Austin — but most of them are using Opana. 

"Everyone that's in there right now has probably done it," he says. "There's about a half-dozen in there. Some of them give me a little money for staying here, help me get by."

The other vignettes from this NPR feature include a nurse who has become addicted and William Cooke, previously the only physician in town.  About the latter, the story reports:

Cooke's staff goes door-to-door to make sure people are keeping their appointments. "When somebody walks in my door with HIV, I hug them, " he says.

More on Life and Law in Rural America (Part III): Violence and Resistance in Rural Communities

Here is an excerpt from the Legal History Blog's coverage, a post written by Smita Ghosh, which briefly describes each of the panelists' presentations, as well as Professor Beth Lew-Williams' commentary on them:

The panel began with Mia Brett (History, Stony Brook University)’s history of vigilantes in postbellum Montana. Vigilantism was an important component of Montana territory, even as formal legal institutions appeared in the area.  In the 1860s, small towns were governed by local sheriffs, many of whom had criminal connections themselves.  Unsatisfied with the formal criminal justice system, prominent business-owners, lawyers and community leaders joined vigilance committees. ... The vigilantes connected their barbarism to American identity, drawing on a regional history of warfare with Native Americans.

* * *  

Jillian Jacklin (History, University of Wisconsin)’s “A Family Affair” is a study of labor activism among Wisconsin’s dairy farmers. Thrust into a particularly volatile market during the depression, the state’s dairy farmers organized in a “milk pool” and refused to sell their products to larger dairy companies. Resistance, like dairy farming itself, was truly a “family affair.” The women whose labor had sustained the industry worked organized working families at barn dances and picnics.

* * * 

Tyler Davis (Religion, Baylor University) presented “Life Beyond Lynch Law: Imagining the Human and Utopia in Rural Texas,” his analysis of Sutton Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio in the context of the national non-response to lynching. Like his contemporary Ida B. Wells, Davis argued, Griggs recognized the collusion of the state in extralegal violence.  

 * * * 

Heath Pearson (Anthropology, Princeton University) presented his paper “The Carceral Outside: Living & Laboring in a NJ Prison Town,” with a narrative dynamism that, I’ve since learned, is typical of anthropologists. He related his ethnographic study of a New Jersey town (he calls it “Dayton”) that his home to one state and one federal prison facility.  * * *  In Heath’s assessment, the town’s elite made Dayton into a prison town, soliciting prison investment when the town’s factories closed.

And from Lew-Williams' commentary: 

[T]he four papers illustrated the state’s relationship with even extra-legal violence. Lew-Williams introduced a question that would be reiterated: what is the role of the rural? How do historical phenomena--progressivism, law-and-order, black resistance, the prison industrial complex--change in rural settings?

Rurality and recent political attention to the white working class (Part II: White trash)

In Part I of this series, I summarized some recent political attention to poor and working class whites and observed how some of that attention suggests a conflation between this demographic and rural Americans.  I now plan to roll out still more evidence that we are conflating this group with rural Americans.  Exhibit A for this post comes from historian Nancy Isenberg's forthcoming book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America (Viking, June, 2016).  WNYC interviewed Isenberg last month for a story titled "America's Long (Unaddressed) History of Class."    Implicit in that headline is "whiteness" because what Isenberg is really writing about (as a historian) is what I've been writing about for the last few years (as a law professor and critical race scholar):  that which is at the particular intersection of whiteness (implicit--perhaps foremost--in that:  white skin privilege) and low socioeconomic status (what the headline refers to simply as "class").  Whatever you call "it," it is highly unpalatable.  

Here is an excerpt from the WYNC interview with Isenberg:  

NANCY ISENBERG:  But one of the things that I think most people would find really surprising is that the Southern planter elite, before the Civil War, valued their slaves more than they valued white trash because slaves were at least productive. 

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And actually, the phrase “white trash” emerges around the time of the Civil War, right? 

NANCY ISENBERG: Yes, because it's part of the language that is adopted by the Republican Party when they critique the South and the slave economy. This is when they begin to see the poor white trash as this dangerous offshoot. They see their children as old before their time, shriveled. They are described as a curious species.
And they ask this question, are these really Americans, how could America have produced such people? They are seen as dangerous, a group that, by the eugenics period, it’s not enough to just assume that we can dump them somewhere. Now you have to make sure that they can't reproduce. 

BROOKE GLADSTONE: There is one point in our history, you note, when there was active intervention to actually improve the lives of the poor. You had FDR's New Deal, though it was largely aimed at the white population. 

NANCY ISENBERG: Suddenly, 20 percent of the population is out of work. You can't just blame one group for being an inferior breeder, you can't just blame them for somehow being lazy and idle, because now a large portion of the population find themselves short of their ability to be productive members of society. Suddenly people are willing to listen and think about the poor and look at them in a very different way. And this is one of the things that, you know, James Agee captured so beautifully, when he argued that to understand the poor we have to understand that we, the middle of the elite class who shame them, have contributed to the problems that they face.

On that final point, I do wonder if that is precisely what the "middle of the elite class" were (are) trying to do:  deny they have any part in the struggles of the white poor.  One way to divert attention from the animosity of elite whites toward poor whites is to attribute the lion's share of social problems, of  income and wealth inequality, for example to racism.  Isn't it easier for whites to blame these problem on racism than to acknowledge the toxic intra-race animus at the heart of "white trash"?

Also, I am not sure I agree with Isenberg that the discovery that a fifth of the population might be "white trash" necessarily caused a re-thinking of the term.  Indeed, I fear that the more whites become poor, the more elite whites become comfortable with expanding the definition of the term to include all "other" whites.

The story/transcript is well worth a read in its entirety, but here's the part that most squarely supports my assertion that "white trash" is a primarily rural phenomenon--at least historically, and perhaps still in our national imaginary.  

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even if squatters weren't particularly respected or trusted, they had to be pandered to every few years, in order to get people elected. And you mention the story of the Arkansas traveler from 1840. 

NANCY ISENBERG: Yeah, the Arkansas traveler tells the story of a rich politician canvassing in the backcountry, and he asks a squatter for some refreshment. The squatter is seated on a whiskey barrel and he ignores him. And the politician is obliged, in order to get his refreshment, in order to get his vote, to, you know, jump off his horse, grab the squatter’s fiddle and show that he can play his kind of music. 

And that, I think, eerily is a, a recurrent problem with our American democracy. What we really have is a democracy of manners, not a real democracy. And what I mean by that is that we accept huge disparities in wealth but we demand that our politicians sound like us or dress like us.

And that, I suppose, brings us to this, with still more "rural" illustrations to explain the rise of Trump.

More Life and Law in Rural America: Rural Labor and Immigration (Part II)

Here's an excerpt from the Legal History Blog post of Jillian Jacklin, a PhD student in History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, about one of the panels at Life and Law in Rural America:  Cows, Cars and Criminals.  The American Studies Graduate Student Conference was held March 25-26 at Princeton University; an earlier post about the event is here:

An interdisciplinary dream, the Princeton University conference on rural America this past weekend was one of my most memorable moments as an academic to date. An array of fledgling scholars discussed their own research, compassionately and judiciously commented on each other’s work, and grappled with divergent and competing meanings of “rurality.” Gracing all of us with her wisdom on the subject and personal experience growing up in the Arkansas Ozarks, UC-Davis “ruralist” and Professor of Law, Lisa Pruitt, provided a compelling case for producing scholarship on the intersection between law and rural life. Arguably more importantly for a group of graduate students in the humanities, her talk urged us all to care about rural people; and she demonstrated a need for social justice beyond the borders of U.S. cities. Overall, our projects contributed to a lively symposium that the American Studies Program hosted, and my time at Princeton was insightful and inspiring. 

Although not all of the participants would have referred to themselves as legal scholars upon initially attending, the conference certainly revealed the importance of law in U.S. history. One panel that I absolutely appreciated, titled “Rural Labor and Immigration,” focused on the juncture between rural work and matters of legality (and in interesting ways, law enforcement or lack their of) in the history of rural America.

* * *

Postdoctoral Research Associate in African American Studies at Princeton, Jarvis McInnis, offered important feedback for each of the panel participants. And he spent considerable time providing thoughtful theoretical and content-specific questions and suggestions. But what I found to be most interesting and useful for an American Studies gathering was his emphasis on the interdisciplinary nature of the conference. Focusing on what he believed to be the greatest contributions of each paper, he simultaneously critiqued them through his own disciplinary lenses. As a scholar of African American & African Diasporic literature and culture (as his Princeton University bio states), Jarvis also demonstrated his knowledge of a vast collection of fields. He made sure to contextualize the literary, historical, anthropological, and cultural studies suggestions that he gave to each graduate student by explaining that he was recommending certain titles and bodies of scholarship based on his research and training.

Both humble and smart in his comments, Jarvis captured the meanings and complexity of “Life and Law in Rural America” as a conference. He encouraged each of us to avoid complacency or becoming overly rooted in any academic field, and by way of his thoughtful commentary, he inspired us to become more communicative and collective as scholars. Legal historians can learn from exploring rural spaces for sure; but as Jarvis suggested, we need to move beyond the silos created by our specific disciplines as well.

The full post, which describes papers by Smita Ghosh, Vanessa Guzman, Tyler Gray Greene, and Daniel Platt, is here.

Legal History Blog on Cows, Cars Criminals at Princeton: Space Along the Rural-Urban Continuum (Part I)

I gave the keynote address last Friday at the Princeton University American Studies Conference, Life and Law in Rural America:  Cows, Cars and Criminals.  The title of my talk was "Why Rural?  (or, On Being a Ruralist)."

One of the organizers of the conference was Emily Prifogle, a PhD student in history at Princeton, and a UC Berkeley law graduate.  Several other presenters are also working on their PhDs in history, at the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Pennsylvania.  They are writing installments over at the Legal History blog on the various panels.  The first is by Emily Prifogle, and her concluding paragraph from that post about the Rural-Urban Continuum is here:

The most important comment Devienne [the commentator/discussant for the panel] made, in my opinion, was her inquiry whether any of these contributions or claims are inherent or unique to studies of rurality. Indeed, she noted, as an urban historian, much of this seems akin to studying places like New York or Los Angeles. For me, this might be a key for future studies of legal ruralism. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and other researchers focusing on rural places and people are not just studying dying parts of the country. Research on small places, I believe, is important in its own right, but it also contributes to what we know about urban communities and mainstream culture. Like other studies of place, studies of small and rural communities make use of many of the same methodologies as urban and legal historians. Importantly, what they add, however, is a reminder that the law does not operate equally and in the same way everywhere. Space and place matters, and can complicate how intersections of race, gender, class, and disability affect individuals and communities. By focusing on rural communities, “ruralists” do much more than contribute to a growing body of literature on rural places, they also illuminate how scholarship on everything from the administrative state to capitalism operates differently when viewed from new locations.

It's an important observation and one that I made in my keynote, too:  one reason to study the rural is what it reveals about the (implicit) urban norm--the center, if you will.

Rurality and the recent political attention to the white poor and white working class ...

The media have been flush in recent weeks with commentary on the role of the white working class, along with poor whites, in this Presidential campaign cycle.  One strand of the commentary is about how the Republican establishment has turned on those who had (apparently) become their base:  poor and working class whites who are now supporting Donald Trump.  I want to talk about how rurality is implicated in all of this, a topic (sadly) similar to my 2011 law review article, The Geography of the Class Culture Wars, about the 2008 campaign season.  I guess we can think of this blog post (the first in a short series) as Part II of that law review article.

Let me start with Thomas Edsall's piece in today's New York Times because he summarizes some territory that has been covered in recent weeks--well, territory that "began" with a couple of pieces in the National Review, the unapologetically conservative publication.   Edsall's piece is titled, "Who are the Angriest Republicans?"  He leads with these sentences:

Conservatives who once derided upscale liberals as latte-sipping losers now burst with contempt for the lower-income followers of Donald J. Trump. 

These blue-collar white Republicans, a mainstay of the conservative coalition for decades, are now vilified by their former right-wing allies as a “non-Christian” force “in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture,” corrupted by the same “sense of entitlement” that Democratic minorities were formerly accused of. 

Kevin Williamson, a columnist for National Review, initiated the most recent escalation of this particular Republican-against-Republican power struggle.

Edsall goes on to quote some of Williamson's more incendiary comments:

They [the poor whites] failed themselves. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog— you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be.

(emphasis added).  Note the mention of various rural places ... places that are mostly white.  (See more below)  And then there was this, to drive home the domestic v. foreign, rural v. urban distinction:

There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.

 * * * 

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.

Pretty harsh stuff, but it doesn't stop there.  There is also this quote from David French, also of the National Review, being an apologist for Williamson a week or so after Williamson's column appeared:

I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.

(For more on the drug issue, see this and this).

I could just stop at this point and again observe the focus on places like Tennessee and Kentucky and West Texas and upstate New York as proving my point that the white underclass has come to be associated with rural America.  But wait, there's more.  One of the examples that Williamson used in his initial column is from a specific rural place--indeed, a "hamlet"--called Garbutt, New York.  Here's the quote:

There was no Garbutt, N.Y., until 1804, when Zachariah Garbutt and his son John settled there. They built a grist mill, and, in the course of digging its foundations, they discovered a rich vein of gypsum, at that time used as a fertilizer. A gypsum industry sprang up and ran its course. Then Garbutt died. “As the years passed away, a change came over the spirit of their dream,” wrote local historian George E. Slocum. “Their church was demolished and its timber put to an ignoble use; their schools were reduced to one, and that a primary; their hotels were converted into dwelling houses; their workshops, one by one, slowly and silently sank from sight until there was but little left to the burg except its name.”

Here's the wikipedia entry on Garbutt, New York, the dying, rural place Williamson focuses on in his sad tale of population loss, of a rural place drying up and blowing away, so to speak, because its only economic engine eventually petered out.  To this, no talk from the right-wing about "just transitions" for these communities.  No, from Williamson, just this prescription:

They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

In other words, move to the city.  Indeed, that refrain is echoed by French's follow up piece:  

Kevin is right. If getting a job means renting a U-Haul, rent the U-Haul. You have nothing to lose but your government check.

If only it were all as simple as moving to town ...

There is more still to say about this conflation of poor and working class whites with rurality, including scholarly work that challenges us to probe the depths of what became known as white trash.  More on that in a subsequent post.

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.  

China looking at implications for children of rural-urban migration

Emily Feng reports today for Sinosphere in the New York Times:

The Chinese government plans to conduct the country’s first comprehensive survey of rural children left behind by parents who have migrated to cities in search of work, the China Youth Daily has reported. 

The move comes after a series of reports on the plight of “left-behind” children, who are often put in the care of older relatives or are sometimes abandoned. Researchers say that many of these children have anxiety and depression, and that they exhibit high rates of juvenile delinquency and poor school performance.

Other posts about rural-urban migration in China--its causes, consequences, and the state's responses to it--are here, here, here, and here.

Today and Tomorrow at Princeton University, Life and Law in Rural America: Cows, Cars and Criminals

I'll be giving a keynote this afternoon, "Why Rural? (or, On Being a Ruralist)."  Among the scholars participating are historians, anthropologists, sociologists, criminologists, scholars of American studies and religion ...

  Find more details here.  Follow on Twitter at #cowscarscriminals

Some mention of distance, though not rural women, in NYT coverage of Texas abortion clinic closure

Abby Goodnough reported in the NYTimes yesterday under the headline, "Texas Abortion Law Has Women Waiting Longer, Paying More," in a story that features more metro centric coverage of the current state of abortion availability in Texas following the implementation of Texas H.B. 2.  (Read more here and here.)  The piece focuses on the availability of abortion in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan area, featuring the story of a woman who lives in that conurbation.  The story includes barely a mention of rural women, who are even more disserved by the law, though it does talk about the great distances that some women are traveling--say from El Paso into New Mexico--to procure an abortion.

The Texas law, passed in 2013, has closed so many clinics that the remaining abortion providers now have long waiting lists for women seeking the procedure.  What gets little mention in this story or in the recent oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt is that the women who live farthest from the handful of providers able to remain open--all in east and north Texas, along the I-35 and I-45 corridors--not only face those same long waits, they must traverse great distances, sometimes multiple times, to reach the clinics.  Here's the little bit that Goodnough did include about women living outside major metropolitan areas:

Other patients at the [Fort Worth] clinic that weekend had driven from Lubbock, about 300 miles away, and Odessa, 320 miles away.

Odessa, with a population of just 100,000, is in west Texas, and Lubbock is somewhat north of there, with a population of about 250,000.  Lubbock previously had an abortion provider, and there was also a provider much closer to Odessa, in Midland, before the first phase of Texas H.B. 2 went into effect a few years ago.

Goodnough also illustrates the distance challenge--but again in relation to a metropolitan woman--with a young woman who had traveled from El Paso to Albuquerque (about four hours) to get an abortion.  Although an abortion clinic in El Paso remains open for now (it will close if the Supreme Court upholds the Fifth Circuit's determination of H.B. 2's constitutionality), the El Paso woman was not able to have an abortion there because her pregnancy was at 16 weeks by the time she could get an appointment, and that necessitated a trip to a clinic that performs abortions in the second trimester.  For the woman in El Paso, that meant either Albuquerque or San Antonio, and the former was closer.

Meanwhile, over at Slate.com, Laura Moser reports under the headline, "Long Road Ahead" in a story that, as the headline suggests, attends somewhat more to the distance/transportation issue, but again from a metropolitan perspective.  Here is an excerpt with some cold hard facts about the consequences of H.B.2:

For women whose nearest clinic closed (38%), the mean one-way distance traveled was 85 miles, compared with 22 miles for women whose nearest clinic remained open. … [M]ore women whose nearest clinic closed traveled more than 50 miles (44% vs 10%), had out-of-pocket expenses greater than $100 (32% vs 20%), had a frustrated demand for medication abortion (37% vs 22%), and reported that it was somewhat or very hard to get to the clinic.  

The focus of the Moser story is an organization, Clinic Access Support Network, that provides transport to get women to and from abortion clinics, primarily in greater Houston.

Angie Hayes, who started the organization in August 2013, was volunteering as a clinic escort when she noticed a number of women showing up and leaving in cabs (since, of course, you cannot drive yourself home from an abortion). ... She started organizing an informal network of volunteer drivers, and it snowballed from there: CASN now has about 36 volunteers and drives about 150 Houston-area women per year.

* * *

CASN isn’t getting calls from the abortion desert that is the Rio Grande Valley yet, but women are requesting rides from Texas A&M, 100 miles away (the abortion clinic in Bryan, a town 10 minutes from A&M, closed in 2013), from 85 miles away in Beaumont (its only abortion clinic closed in 2014), and 75 miles away in Brenham. But most calls come from inside Houston, a city so sprawling that 25 Manhattans could fit inside it.

Cross-posted to Feminist Legal Theory.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em (in rural America, that is)

Maybe that's what Washington Post journalist Christopher Ingraham decided.  NPR reports today that he is moving to Red Lake County, Minnesota, population 4,303.   The irony in this move is that last fall, Ingraham wrote in the Post that "Red Lake county" is the "absolute worst place to live in America" based on a USDA natural amenities index.  In that story, Ingraham mapped each county based on the index, devised in the late 1990s, which combined "six measures of climate, topography, and water area that reflect environmental qualities most people prefer." Those qualities include mild, sunny winters, temperate summers, low humidity, topographic variation, and access to a body of water.  (In case you're wondering, the most desirable place to live in America, according to the index, was Ventura County, California).  

After that story ran, Ingraham wrote a second story about Red Lake County, this one headlined, "Thick Coats, Thin Skins:  Why Minnesotans Were Outraged by a Recent Washington Post Report."  It led with the line, "Hell hath no fury like a Minnesotan scorned."  In short, Minnesotans took to Twitter to defend their state's honor.

Soon, the denizens of self-proclaimed "Indignant Minnesota Twitter" started sending photos and testimonials to refute the notion that Minnesota is somehow lacking in beauty of natural amenities.

* * * 

Some started a hashtag, #ShowMeYourUglyCounties, to showcase Minnesota's beauty.

Well worth popping over to Twitter just to look at those photos!

Shortly thereafter, Ingraham visited Red Lake County, about which he writes:

The visit was a shot of pure country. A newborn calf suckled my thumb as the brothers told me about life on the farm. The earthy smells of a dairy operation — manure and hay and sawdust and dirt — hung thick in the air. It sure didn't seem like the worst place in America — or one particularly lacking in natural amenities, or natural beauty, either. 

* * *  

[W]hat I found most striking is how friendly everyone I'd met had been. They were fiercely proud of their community in a way I'd never seen before — not even during my childhood in small-town upstate New York. 'We don't welcome people like this when they come to D.C.,' I kept saying to people, dumbfounded."

Then, a few weeks ago, Ingraham announced he's moving to Red Lake County, confirming on Twitter that it's "no joke."

I kind of fell in love with Red Lake County when I visited last year and we've always wanted to raise the boys in the country.  

* * *  

The cows were lovely.  Hopefully, we can move next to the cows."

So there you have it:  if you can't beat 'em (the rural folks that is), you can do what Ingraham is doing--you can join 'em!  Though I admit this story is making me wonder:  Is the Washington Post going to let Ingraham telecommute?  If not, what's he going to do for a living in Red Lake County?

P.S.  There is one other thing ruralites/scholars of the rural/rural aficionados will want to note about Ingraham's initial post, and it regards rural population loss:

[I]t turns out that this [USDA] index correlates well with a lot of human behaviors that researchers and politicians are constantly trying to understand better. For instance, the USDA's original report on the natural amenities index found that these measures "drive rural population change." The USDA found that rural areas with a lot of natural amenities saw the greatest population change between 1970 and 1996. 

"The relationship is quite strong," the study found. "Counties with extremely low scores on the scale tended to lose population over the 1970-96 period, while counties with extremely high scores tended to double their populations over the period."

Here's a piece from the Carsey Institute a few years ago on "the four rural Americas."  Note the amenity-rich category, without the (USDA) skewing toward warm climates.