Book Review: Debunking the Inevitability of Rural Decline
Book Review and Commentary by Amanda McMillan Lequieu.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu (Drexel University) shares this review of Ann M. Eisenberg’s Reviving Rural America: Toward Policies for Resilience (Cambridge UP, 2024)
For too long, the story of rural America has seemed inevitable: mines closed; farming became unprofitable; rural post offices and train stations shuttered. When read in the passive voice, the declines of rural places and their people just…happened. But considering that the overwhelming majority of the American landscape is rural, how has so much of the country come to be thus marginalized? And if we care about rural communities—and about the cities and suburbs that ostensibly rely on their resources, no matter how invisible that relationship may be today—how can we work towards revitalization?
Over eight chapters, legal scholar and practitioner Ann M. Eisenberg summarizes and systematically dismantles the passive voice at the core of myths about rural decline, dependency, and potential renewal. With the carefulness of a detective, Eisenberg argues that rural decline is neither inevitable nor natural. She untangles the regulatory legacies, cultural misunderstandings, and historical forgetfulness that created the fundamental challenges facing rural people and places. Each chapter debunks a common myth about the rural people and places of the US by tracing how and why generations of market-driven decisions that have increasingly permeated national policymaking have in turn deprioritized rural well-being in favor of questionable collective gains. The book concludes with a powerful call for laws and policies that reinvest in a resilient rural America as a common and collective resource for the whole of the country.
I am a professor trained in rural sociology but now teaching in an urban university. Eisenberg’s book was a breath of fresh air—a remarkable blend of the easy readability of a dinner-table conversation and thorough legal analysis that I have been eager to get into the hands of my Philadelphian students and have integrated in my ongoing research on rural America. Two themes that link the whole book together have stayed with me—one speaking to a mundane but chronic problem, the other addressing the cyclical crises of politics and government.
First, nearly every chapter in Eisenberg's book talks about infrastructures—their histories, their roles, and the legal and political raison d’etre for their steady disappearance from rural life. Infrastructures are mundane things, connective tissues between places and meant to be taken for granted. When they break—or are systematically removed—the real crisis begins. I was particularly gripped by Eisenberg’s explanation about the deregulation of rail in her chapter on rural decline. In my own research in Midwestern postindustrial communities, I found that long-term residents kept talking about disappeared rail systems. Several dozen retirees in Iron County, Wisconsin—population 6,000—spoke at length about the halcyon days of industrial and passenger rail linking their remote community near Lake Superior to big cities through the 1970s.
These stories were not nostalgic one-offs; rather, my interviewees used narratives of the dismantling of a formerly integrated infrastructure system to point out the planned nature of structural disinvestment. Eisenberg unpacks the legal history of rail declines as part of a broader pattern of privatization of public utilities in the 1970s and 80s. With both the precision of a legal scholar and the clarity of a teacher, Eisenberg explains how and why the federal government permitted the deregulation of rail which, in turn, allowed rail companies to withdraw services from economically unprofitable stops and stations across rural America. Without trains, railroad companies and local governments stopped maintaining rural lines, often literally pulling up railroad tracks to reuse elsewhere and relinquishing rights-of-way back to government or private owners. This process immediately disconnected thousands of communities and effectively blocked any future rebuilding of rural rail.
Today, the ineffectiveness of U.S. rail is taken for granted. My students have been shocked to learn how industrial and passenger railway linked remote parts of the United States to central hubs throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century. This infrastructural integration both symbolically signaled and pragmatically enabled the importance of rural America. Inversely, my rural interviewees’ experiences—fleshed out by Eisenberg’s detailed regulatory history—shows how the recent and intentional removal of these connective links reveals a fundamental shift in national priorities. No longer did capital and the state view farming communities, mining villages, or remote outposts as culturally or economically part of a functional whole. Eisenberg’s analysis of infrastructural deregulation shows how, even if the entropy of rural isolation and economic decline unspools gradually and seemingly inevitably, the genesis of rural decline was never death by natural causes. In short, through policy decisions, rural America has been poisoned.
The second theme that gripped me was Eisenberg’s discussion of the breakdown between rural publics and their government officials. In the past two decades, much has been made about the recent declines in rural residents’ belief in the legitimacy of the government. In Chapter 6, the “Myth of Rural Radicalism,” Eisenberg offers insights into the reasons underlying the fractured relationship many rural places have with their top-down leadership.
In particular, I was gripped by her analysis of the ways that the government actually interacts with residents, countering the presupposition that federal agencies or local representatives of those agencies actually listen to their constituents. Eisenberg draws on several ethnographic studies of the bureaucratic logics—and illogics—facing rural communities mired in conflict over some environmental or economic problem. She shows how, so often, state and federal agencies supposed to help keep rural lands or bodies safe end up threatening livelihoods or providing inadequate protection for residents. As a result, sentiments so worrisome to outside observers—feelings of resentment, of anger, of mistrust—are symptoms of how local representations of government institutions actually function.
In the final chapter of the book, Eisenberg makes one of her most compelling points: good infrastructures and good government benefit everyone. Infrastructural connection is one of those few, true “commons” resources—cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society without overwhelmingly depleting any single community. Policymakers can guide private capital towards reinvesting in physical transportation networks, communication systems, or electrical grids across and for rural America—which, in turn, will benefit everyone. And local government intervention can take seriously their role in representing their residents’ interests, rather than parroting top-down concerns. But here’s the sticking point: fundamentally, it takes cold hard cash and powerful leadership from both state and capital to pursue the mundane processes of combating entropy and rebuilding a regulatory and political system that actually values rural America. Moving from myth-busting to getting the job done in Washington D.C. is the next—hard!—step for those of us listening carefully to Eisenberg’s call to action.
