Mixed Harvest explores rural responses to the transformation
of the northern United States from an agricultural society into an
urban and industrial one. According to Hal S. Barron, country
people from New England to North Dakota negotiated the rise of
large-scale organizational society and consumer culture in ways
marked by both resistance and accommodation, change and continuity.
Between 1870 and 1930, communities in the rural North faced a
number of challenges. Reformers and professionals sought to
centralize authority and diminish local control over such important
aspects of rural society as schools and roads; large-scale business
corporations wielded increasing market power, to the detriment of
independent family farmers; and an encroaching urban-based consumer
culture threatened rural beliefs in the primacy of their local
communities and the superiority of country life. But, Barron
argues, by reconfiguring traditional rural values of localism,
independence, republicanism, and agrarian fundamentalism, country
people successfully created a distinct rural subculture.
Consequently, agrarian society continued to provide a counterpoint
to the dominant trends in American society well into the twentieth
century.