Open-space protest partly expressed anxiety over vanishing agrarian culture

Evidence

Because the archetypical postwar subdivision was built on farmland, open-space advocates often argued that the nation was risking the loss of a vital productive resource. In California, especially, the growth of suburbs destroyed thousands of acres of unmatched productivity. To be sure, as a number of analysts argued, the acreage lost was only a small fraction of the nation’s total agricultural land base, but the doubts about the wisdom of building houses on prime farmland persisted. For the doubters, the issue usually was a matter of culture, not just agricultural production. In the 1950s, more than 10 million people left farms, and the outcry against the suburbanization of the countryside was partly a way to express anxiety about the social consequences of a profound demographic change – if the city continued to swallow up the country, would Americans forget the “agrarian” virtues which had made the nation great? — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 509

Categorization

• CANDY: More than 10 million people left farms in the 1950s — a compact, striking datum about a demographic rupture.
• XREF: Agrarian-values anxiety as a driver of environmental concern connects to the book’s conservation-history thread and the course’s themes of land and place. — connects to: Fundamentalist movements recruit where land pressure and urban media dismantle peasant life — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 268

Broader Connections

• Fundamentalist movements recruit where land pressure and urban media dismantle peasant life #expands (0.72) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 268