Broken Heartland

by Osha Gray Davidson

Looks at the disintegration of rural communities, argues that the farm crisis is part of a larger economic battle, and suggests reforms

Genres: History, Nonfiction

219 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Osha Gray Davidson is a writer who focuses on energy, the environment and other social and human rights issues. He was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and grew up in Iowa, studying at the University of Iowa.

Osha Gray Davidson is an award-winning author of six books of non-fiction and more than a hundred articles on a range of topics. He covered the environment for Rolling Stone magazine and blogged on renewable energy at Forbes.com. His freelance work has also appeared in InsideClimate News, Grist, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon, Mother Jones and other publications. Davidson co-wrote the screenplay for the IMAX documentary Coral Reef Adventure and his photographs have appeared in Rolling Stone, InsideClimate News, Forbes.com, and elsewhere.

His Rolling Stone article about Lori Piestewa, the first Native American woman to die in combat fighting for the United States, was nominated for a National Magazine Award for feature writing. He was a finalist for both the Natural World Book Award (UK) and the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Coral Reef Adventure was the highest grossing documentary film of 2003 and was voted Best Picture of 2003 by the Giant Screen Theatre Association. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and a Fellow at the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights.

Davidson lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he publishes the blog The Phoenix Sun, about renewable energy.

[Source: Wikipedia]

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Being from rural Iowa, I had high hopes that this book would help me understand some of the larger social and political factors shaping rural America. But it just seems out of date and in need of revising (it was written in 1996). I thought the chapter on hate groups was out of place and based on very shaky evidence. I think if the book were updated and focused on the impact of the farm bill, big agribusiness, and recent immigration, it could be a great book.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

While this book is circa 1996, it's a very good portrait of all the factors influencing the rural parts of the United States. Gray Davidson combines facts and research with anecdotes of daily life in Iowa. It combines the overarching economic realities of growing factory farming and the Walmart effect with social components including the rise of the posse comitatus, to prompt you to ask tough questions about our rural economic development agenda. So many of the trends exposed in this book were true of my upbringing, and my parents told stories of how hard it was to stay afloat in the 80s, when rural Kansas was drought-stricken and the government was buying herds of cattle to destroy. I wish Broken Heartland was updated for 2013, but it's a good foundation for understanding the state of rural America.

[Susanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enlightening analysis of the factors contributing to the decline of the economic health of rural America. This book debunks misinformation with facts. The examples given to illustrate the themes are heart-wrenching. Even though the book is 20+ years old, it's still current. I am now curious whether Nick Kristoff referred to this book when preparing to write his Tightrope book. I'll have to look at it again.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might as well have been written this year.

It gets really into the 1980's farm crisis and it's roots, as well as how hate groups found fertile organizing ground among ex-farmers.

I tagged it for PA because, even though it doesn't make a mention, it might was well be here.

[Sara Hardman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about the demise of the Midwest farmlands and how it has affected the environment, the people and the economy, very moving and at times brought tears to my eyes...very sad what has happened and most likely continuing to this day. A must read.

[Marvin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Davidson relentlessly hammers away at all of the depressing characteristics of contemporary rural life.

[Diane Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enlightening in many ways, despite being 30 years old, and also has a water-is-wet feeling to it as well. Policies designed to help the struggling farmer benefit wealthy landowners and speculators and food production companies far more. States and municipalities race to the bottom in an effort to draw business, which then pays less than subsistence wages for dangerous work.

The authors assertion in the prologue that the nature of his book precluded any discussion about native populations, because it would have made the book too long also left me cold. It’s interesting how easily a whole swath of stakeholders get simply erased out of the picture and are given no voice.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dang I wish this book was written in the past few years as it is so dead on about so much going on in rural communities.

I disagree with the general mood of farmers as victims and the "heartland" as the "true" America, but there's just so much that the author gets right that I would require this as a reading for at least two of my classes of updated.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm of an age to remember when the whole Farm Aid movement started, although I was too young to understand the reasons behind it. Osha Gray Davidson's book, Broken Heartland, provides some of that insight. The death of the family farm led to poverty and hardship in an area of the country we traditionally associate with a simple, down-to-earth prosperity and solid values.

As other reviewers have pointed out, the content is now dated. It would certainly be interesting to revisit some of the locations mentioned in the book and see what has changed, for better or for worse, and what new problems have arisen (Ottumwa, Iowa, the famed birthplace of M*A*S*H's Radar O'Reilly, is awash in meth, for example). Unless Davidson puts out a new edition, this one will make the transition from indictment of a current problem to a history book. Still, history is valuable and any economy with a heavy stake in agriculture would do well to examine what went wrong here and learn from it.

If you want a quick "Where are they now?" fix, though, you can get on Google Maps like I did and check out some of the places. I found the Colony Village restaurant mentioned in the chapter on hate groups. It seems to have closed within the last year or so, and according to online reviews, it was a terrible place to eat. I wonder what led to its demise. I wonder how long it kept hosting anti-gov't meetings in its basement.

I also took a virtual drive down Mechanicsville's business district and found the hardware store that figures in the first chapter. It's long closed, of course, and so is the furniture store across the street. I couldn't find the remains of the Village Inn cafe, and it's anyone's guess which of the many white clapboard houses in town may have belonged to Everett Ferguson. Things seemed to have declined further since 1996, yet Mechanicsville continues on.

[Rae · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent account of the Midwest farm crisis of the 1980s. The biggest drawback to the book is its age. It is outdated now and other issues have come to the forefront. But for background reading it was quite good. The chapter on the rise of hate groups seemed a little over the top and without much merit today.

[Elizabeth Christensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really I only read this because grad school asked me to.