Reviewed in Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society

Amid contemporary discussion of the transformative power of online commerce, e-business and the so-called “new economy,” David Blanke’s Sowing the American Dream does well to remind us that changes in marketing, distribution and purchasing of consumer goods has been an ongoing feature of American life, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the Midwestern states of the “Old Northwestern,” Blanke suggests that historians have generally stressed rural America’s production (primarily cultivation of agricultural goods) while virtually ignoring farmers’ consumption. In his introduction, Blanke wisely sets aside facile dichotomies of rural capitalism which characterize early Midwesterners as either naïve simpletons “ensnared” by luxuries of consumption or worse still, as calculating, austere, and isolated individuals who saw the farm as nothing more than a “balance sheet” of profit and loss (pp. 9-10). Blanke suggests that both observations overlook an essential sense of place and camaraderie that motivated farmer consumers.

Blanke’s discussion explores farmers’ feeling of attachment to the land and one another, a Jeffersonian-styled yeomen mentality which Blanke terms “the agrarian ideal.” A powerful, though often inconsistent, aspect of rural culture, “the agrarian ideal” was not mutually exclusive from consumerism; instead, newly arrived Midwesterners and their descendents developed a strong market orientation that soon “established itself as a distinguishing feature of the region’s culture” (p. 22). High start-up, supply, and equipment cost forced Midwesterners to be savvy consumers from the outset, a trend that only continued as the nineteenth century wore on, with the advent of agricultural mechanization and “scientific” farming. Blanke further illustrates this point by exploring the popularity of mail order catalogues, which provided a trove of products unavailable in local markets to eager farmers.

This investigation affords Blanke an invaluable opportunity to explore the daily activities of Midwestern families, notably women who were actively involved in shaping household finances and regulating consumer purchases. Yet Blanke shrewdly points out that such “domestic” consumption had important commercial and productive features as well, since women’s labor (and their access to ready-made household products and food) was essential to housing, feeding, and supplying not only the family’s everyday needs, but the bands of temporary laborers and “threshing crews” that swelled the household’s rank at key planting and harvest times. Women, like their male counterparts, looked to mechanization (particularly through the sewing machine) and mail order products (such as candles, soap, stoves, and medicines) to adopt a “scientific” approach to home and farm economies that hinged on purchasing consumer goods from distant retailers.

Blanke’s discussions of the gendered implications of rural consumerism (that highlight chapter two) is one of the strongest elements of this book. He continues with extensive treatment of the middleman, merchants, and “agents of the consumer economy” and then turns to the nineteenth-century Grange societies. Conceived as both a grassroots purchasing cooperatives and a “a new agrarian fraternity,” these organizations hoped to provide competitive prices for farmers while simultaneously working “to shore up rural’s America’s public virtue and republican heritage through open and democratic consumer institutions” (p. 95). Pairing consumer strategy with the ethos of republican yeomanry that constituted the “agrarian ideal” might seem paradoxical, but Blanke illustrates that these notions were self-reinforcing, suggesting that movements like the Grange demonstrated Midwesterners’ sense of fairness, communal fellowship and freedom in the Market place.

Blanke is well-read in the secondary literature on regional settlement, agricultural development, and the political aspirations of Midwesterners. And he enriches his account with appropriate references to letters, diaries, catalogs, rural newspapers and political proceedings. His most intriguing section uses a quantities analysis of Midwestern advertising to demonstrate both marketing and money spending strategy. (Which he supports with an extensive and detailed appendix) and the changing relationships between urban manufacturing centers (like Chicago and other cities) and rural communities. Blanke also opens each chapter with fascinating glimpses into the lives of individual farmers, housemakers, settlers, and middleman merchants, giving a crucial human side to his account of economic attitudes and commercial growth. Blanke has produced a book that is both exhaustively researched and genuinely accessible and enjoyable to read. His study should be welcomed by specialists and economic historians as well as more general readers of cultural history and the nineteenth century West.

Jnl of the Il. State Historical Society