Remembering Ram's "Farmer"

Viewers across the world remark that the Super Bowl, which is "so uniquely American," provides a rare window into American culture by combining the drama of sports, the universal appeal of music, and a healthy dose of patriotism. This blog recently featured another post focusing on American nationalism, as reflected in Super Bowl rhetoric.

Many people watch the game anxiously awaiting to see which team is named National Football League (NFL) Champion (note: I generally watch for the ads and half-time show). While the Super Bowl is known as the ultimate competition for American sports, the American Marketing Association describes the Super Bowl as "the ultimate competition for marketers."

When watching the Super Bowl this year as a law student studying rural people and places, I could not help but reminisce about Ram Trucks' famous 2013 Super Bowl ad, titled "Farmer."  The ad, which aired on February 3, 2013 during Super Bowl XLVII, featured a recording of Paul Harvey's speech "So God Made a Farmer."

Harvey worked as a American radio broadcaster for ABC Radio Networks for 51 years, and he was known for his segment "The Rest of the Story." Harvey, who was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was often referred to as "the voice of Middle America" and "the voice of the Silent Majority" by the media for his "flag-waving conservatism." According to Bruce DuMont, president of the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Harvey turned down multiple offers to broadcast on the East Coast so he could “stay in touch with his listeners and the American people.”

Harvey delivered his speech at a 1978 Future Farmers of America (FFA) convention. The speech acts as an extension of the Genesis creation narrative, referring to God's actions on the 8th day of creation.  In his speech, Harvey described the characteristics of a farmer in each phrase, ending them with the recurring "So God Made a Farmer." See Harvey's entire speech here.

The Ram commercial began with a stark photograph of a single cow in front of a snowy field and Harvey’s voice saying, “And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker. So God made a farmer.” The ad depicted a simple slideshow of rural photographs, featuring imagery including a black and white chapel in an empty field, aged and rugged farmers with split fingernails and tired faces, rustic farm houses with American flags, farmers working the land, livestock, views of virtually endless crop fields, generations of rural people, and a family praying around the dinner table.

One of the photographers that contributed to the images featured in the add, Andy Anderson, reflected on his involvement:

A transcendent project unlike any that I have worked on. 10 photographers capturing on there own terms the life of a farmer and rancher. All of us searching for meaningful images. Not any one photo rising above any others, but collectively voicing a message for folks and a vocation we have all really taken for granted. The last truly archetypical American worker. And who better else to match the images with than Paul Harvey…America’s grandfather.

The ad debuted during the 2013 Super Bowl in conjunction with Ram's "Year of the Farmer," which focused on praising the hardworking men and women who feed and clothe the nation and world.

According to NPR, the ad was part of Ram's partnership with the National FFA Organization (formerly the Future Farmers of America) aimed at "highlighting and underscoring the importance of farmers in America." Ram announced that it would donate $1 million to the National FFA Organization if it received 10 million views of the commercial on its website. The ad surpassed 10 million views in less than a week, and Ram presented the $1 million donation to Clay Sapp, the then National FAA president.

While the ad was praised as one of 2013's best Super Bowl ads for its gorgeous still images and focus on the consumer over the product, the ad was not without criticism. One critic, Rachel Lauden, stated:

The last farmer in the video is driving what appears to be a 9R John Deere tractor. That comes in at about $250,000-380,000. If his land is good quality. . . it’s likely to be about $5000 an acre. If he has a dairy, the family has been using artificial insemination for at least fifty years. . . . He uses computer software to manage the farm. He has a global positioning system to help him manage crops. . . . He’s a business man. He has to stay on top of the market. . . .  if we continue to accept the kind of images promoted by this ad, images of the farmer as a good hearted chap, working with the technology of the late 1930s, and thus not frightfully smart, how are we ever going to get a sensible grip on agriculture?

This criticism implies that the ad portrays farmers in a way compatible with the stereotypes of rural America and farmers, without giving credit to technological advances and modern realities in the agriculture business. Other negative feedback focused on the fact that the video featured predominately white farmers, thus failing to paint an accurate picture of the diversity of famers in America.

While Ram's visual portrayal of the farmer may not constitute a completely accurate depiction of rural America, the ad successfully brought attention to a large population of Americans on a national stage.

Selling trucks, shortchanging reality

Chrysler’s ad for the new Dodge Ram was arresting from the first moment. The crackle of an old radio marked a departure from the Super Bowl’s diet of anthropomorphic, snack-food loving animals and club scenes touting Budweiser’s latest iteration. The commercial’s aged patina and no-nonsense narration evoked a pared-down, no-nonsense America.

The ad featured late radio broadcaster Paul Harvey delivering his 1978 homage to the American farmer over a slideshow of classic farm scenes. “And on the eighth day,” Harvey declared, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God made a farmer.” The slideshow is unabashed Americana: pickups and barns, prairie churches and weathered farmers.

Chrysler’s play at returning us to our rural roots was heralded as a marketing triumph by most in the industry. Heartland politicos were understandably tickled: even Iowa’s Governor Terry Brandstad joined the media chorus, quipping that he “thought it was one of the best ads that aired during the Super Bowl.”

Once our plucked heartstrings settled, however, some began to see something subversive. The ad painted a portrait of American farm life that is racially homogeneous and dominated by the family farm. The brief flash of a darker-skinned family in the middle of the ad only made the discrepancy starker.

Agricultural America isn’t all white – fully half of farmworkers are Hispanic – and the family farm hasn’t dominated rural economies for quite some time. Taken as homage to those producing our food, this commercial clearly comes up short. The Atlantic broke from the general gushing, deriding Chrysler’s trumpeting of outdated rural tropes as 'whitewashing':

Now, did God make Mexican farmworkers or only white farmers? Is the strength and toughness that comes from hard work God's gift to white people only? [...] the way this ad whitewashed American farming leaves Mexican farmworkers and their children "excluded from the process of patriotism[.]"

Other criticisms were more tempered. Here's what NPR had to say:

Despite these objections, one thing is for sure: For two captivating minutes Sunday night, the values and future of American farming left the sidelines of the popular conversation to dominate a very, very large stage.

I felt quite the opposite. While I enjoyed the commercial and Paul Harvey’s rousing speech, the commercial did little to shed light on the issues facing rural America. By valorizing a narrow slice of rural America, I think Chrysler actually contributed to a broader cognitive dissonance between the myth and reality of rural America. I think waving images of Grant Wood's rural America to sell trucks is harmful because it inoculates us against a full discussion of the issues. This ad belongs in the canon of cultural references to the half-truths of the rural myth discussed on this blog.

Assuaged by the myth of Paul Harvey’s Heartland, we seem largely content to put rural immigration issues and poverty aside. The close association between white farmers and agrarian values only stokes the passions of those who believe these values are under siege by the latest tide of immigrant farmworkers. Public perception of agriculture also certainly contributes to the untouchable nature of the farm bill. The American food production system is often inhumane, irresponsible, and inefficient, yet metro-centric media continues to fetishize a rural reality that simply isn’t.

Chrysler is pledging up to one million dollars derived from ad views to FFA, an organization dedicated to agricultural education and the original audience of Paul Harvey’s speech. They’re a fine organization, albeit not one terribly inclusive of minorities, but I’m left wishing Chrysler did more. Between this commercial and their paeans to Detroit from Super Bowls past (we’ll ignore their military exploitation misstep), Chrysler has proven masterful at spinning narratives that insert itself in the fabric of our dearest American myths. I wish they’d go a step further and shed some of that storytelling power on American reality.

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.