A Producers' Republic: Rural Zoning, Land Use, and Citizenship in the Great Lakes Cutover, 1920-1940

THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 40:1 (Spring 2014): 1-26© 2014 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved A Producers’ Republic: Rural Zoning, Land Use, and Citizenship in the Great Lakes Cutover, 1920-1940 by Joshua Nygren On September 4, 1933, well-known agricultural economist George S. Wehrwein hit the AM airwaves out of Madison, Wisconsin, to demonstrate the common-sense virtues of a new movement in land-use planning: rural zoning. In an effort to illustrate the concept to his audience, Wehrwein used the following “homely illustration”: In winter, pa likes to grease the harness in the house where it is warm. But ma says, ‘All right, pa, you can grease the harness in the house but you must do it in the kitchen.’ And when she can make that stick, she has zoned the house! And we will all agree that when there is a place for everything, and everything is done in its proper place, we will have efficient political economy as well as efficient domestic economy.1 Rural zoning in the Great Lakes countryside applied principles similar to urban zoning by creating districts dedicated solely to agriculture, forestry, recreation, and tourism. As was the case for the once forested cutover lands in Michigan and Minnesota, Wehrwein’s northern Wisconsin had experienced a host of problems since World War I: a depressed agricultural market, widespread tax delinquency, and rising per-capita costs for public schools and roads. Trained experts of Wehrwein’s ilk thought these problems were rooted in a socially backward rural populace and an equally outdated system of land use. In between the two world wars, prevailing ideals of citizenship in the Great Lakes cutover seemed increasingly defunct. The area had 1 George S. Wehrwein, “Why Do We Need to Zone Land?” Transcript of radio program, September 4, 1933, Box 18, Folder 3, George Simon Wehrwein Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society [hereafter Wehrwein Papers]. Wehrwein’s emphasis. 2 The Michigan Historical Review witnessed vast deforestation during the second half of the nineteenth century, and as lumber companies vacated the region they left in their wake millions of acres of stump-riddled lands. Few in fin de siècle America questioned that this region should be put to farming and populated by the paragons of nineteenth-century rural citizenship—yeoman farmers. According to Jeffersonian tradition and mythology, these farmers represented the backbone of the republic, as their individualism and independence from outside forces guarded against corruption and ensured a well-functioning democracy. 2 In the twentieth-century Great Lakes cutover, however, many yeoman farms yielded meager harvests and faced major hardships, leading to farm failures and isolated settlements where many farmers had hoped thriving communities would develop.3 Families remaining in the cutover still required costly services, such as public schooling and road maintenance, and with dwindling population and income these could not be fully subsidized. As a result, county and state budgets became burdened by farm abandonment and tax delinquency. Agricultural economists and other experts who surveyed the situation blamed unwise land use for generating these conditions—especially the sorts of unplanned, “haphazard” land use they considered typical of the individualistic yeoman farmer. Once a strength, the “rugged individualism” of the frontier had apparently 2 In the past two decades, the study of citizenship has become an integral component of US social history. For example, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and “In Pursuit of Economic Citizenship,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 10 (Summer 2003): 157-175; Kim Cary Warren, The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 3 The classic treatments of nineteenth-century deforestation in the Great Lakes region are Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially 193-237 and William Cronon...