Red-Blue Divide - 3 Quarks Daily

by Jerry Cayford

Design: New Jersey Turnpike Authority. This image: en:User:Mr. Matté, Public domain.

“America,” by Paul Simon, from Simon and Garfunkel’s 1968 album, Bookends, speaks to our moment. What it says to me is a bit different from what I am reading about it from other people, but I don’t think I’m idiosyncratic. The key, as I see it, is to realize that the song is about America, not about Paul and his girlfriend Kathy taking a bus trip. For those who don’t know this song or haven’t heard it in decades, here is the studio recording. Spend three worthwhile minutes.

“America” opens with deceptive gentleness:

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together.

The gentleness primes us for the impact of the song’s climax. But the opening is also odd, the phrasing archaic. Nobody says, “Let us be lovers.” The verb “marry” is intransitive now; we don’t even say, “We’ll marry our children together.” And we don’t speak of our “fortunes” except as money. Since the rest of the song is completely naturalistic—anachronism is not its style—the oddness makes the phrases memorable, and marks them for study.

We hear a pop song many times on the radio (or wherever), then buy it and listen to it repeatedly. Soon, we know the lyrics by heart. We force our parents to listen to it. The whole song is present to us as a single concept, more than as a narrative arc. In this way, a three-minute pop song is more like a three-second slogan than like a thirty-minute show or a short story. I see “America” as answering a slogan like “Make America Great Again.” If we think Make America Great Again is the wrong concept, but don’t know how to counter it, perhaps we didn’t listen well enough when Simon and Garfunkel sang of America fifty years before. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

At its founding, the United States was an overwhelmingly rural nation. The inaugural census of 1790 showed that 95% of all Americans either lived in isolated rural areas, on farms, or in tiny towns with fewer than 2,500 people. However, a steady national trend towards urbanization began immediately thereafter.

The rise of American cities during the 19^th century was spurred on by the Industrial Revolution, which created a high demand for labor. Cities became population magnets, drawing workers from around the country and eventually around the world. One generation after another, people left the American countryside behind and headed for the nation’s new and growing cities. The scales slowly but inexorably tipped in the opposite direction, and today's census numbers are practically reversed from those of 1790.

For most of American history though, rural populations did not falter. Rather, they continued to grow side by side with cities. While they were not able to keep pace with rapacious urban expansion, the sheer volume of rural America nonetheless rose at a substantial rate. Two factors largely explained the ongoing growth of rural populations despite the urban syphon: natural increase and immigration.

Agricultural families typically had a higher birth rate than urban families because children provided valuable labor on the farm from an early age. At the same time, rural America received its fair share of foreign immigrants. While stereotypes of 19^th and early 20^th century immigration often focus on Irish, Italians, and Jews making new homes in American cities, waves of Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs, British, and many others passed right through those cities and continued on to the heartland.

Tag: Red-Blue Divide

Let Us Be Lovers

Monday, April 11, 2011

America’s Shifting Tides