Seven reflections on rural life and freedom
Rural life in America has long played a role in our nation’s understanding of freedom. It’s not because small towns or open country are inherently more virtuous, but they do help reveal traits essential to liberty. Some of those traits are simply the wide open spaces or perceived independence of open land. Sometimes, when I am out in the rural American West, the landscape itself seems to testify to freedom. Frederick Jackson Turner’s argued in his “Frontier Thesis” that the settlement of America’s rugged untamed land was foundational in its exceptionalism and democratic character.
These quotations offer a reminder that self-government is not only a constitutional principle. Rural America has often helped preserve and illuminate the habits needed for self-government, reminding us that America’s enduring contribution to the world is not merely a form of government, but a conviction that human beings are meant to live in freedom.
Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it. Without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it has not got the spirit of liberty.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Tocqueville understood that freedom is not sustained by constitutions alone. It has to be practiced. Local institutions teach citizens how to govern what is near enough for them to invest in and comprehend. That lesson is especially important for rural communities, where policy made from far away are easily disconnected from the reality on the ground.
There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
—Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Cather’s prairie is not yet fully formed into a civic order. It is open and unfinished. That makes her words a useful reminder that nations are not built from abstractions. They are built from particular places, settled by people who must turn land into home, home into community, and community into a political order.
When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person.
— Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
Again, Jewett reminds us places are not abstractions. A village has memory, relationships, and a way of being known over time. Self-government depends and can thrive on that knowledge.
This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.
— Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain
Austin’s line reminds us that freedom is so often found in the wide open spaces.
I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
— Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Twain’s raft serves as one of literature’s memorable images of freedom. For Huck and Jim, the river offers breathing room away from feud, confinement, and social pressure. Rural and remote places often offer us space enough to live differently and imaginatively.
It was a fine, healthy life, too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision.
— Theodore Roosevelt, on cattle-ranch life
Roosevelt says that certain ways of life can form habits of independence and responsibility that are essential to self-government.
Through every middle sex village in town / for the country folk to be up and to arm.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Paul Revere’s Ride
This is one of my favorite poems of all time and Longfellow places rural people inside the drama of American liberty during the “shot heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord. The line is useful because it does not romanticize rural life outside of the need for sacrifice. It paints a vivid picture of towns and villages rising up in the defense and preservation of freedom.
These are the gardens of the Desert, these / The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, / For which the speech of England has no name— / The Prairies. I behold them for the first, / And my heart swells, while the dilated sight/ Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch, / In airy undulations, far away…
— William Cullen Bryant, The Prairies
Bryant’s prairie is vast and open. Rural America often reminds us that a large country cannot be governed well by imagination alone. Its different regions, landscapes, and communities require self-government.
