Big Business, Big Ag bashed small towns

 Bill Knight column for10-4, 5 or 6. 2021

 Sears’ corporate owner on Sept. 16 announced it’s closing its last store in Illinois, where it was founded in the 1890s. The Schaumburg location was one of 34 stores still open, down from about 700 in 2018, when the chain filed for bankruptcy and was bought by Transformco.

Sears is one of many retailers that left small towns when Big Business started bulldozing their economies.

Rural America’s struggling, from residents to farming neighbors. That’s not news, but maybe we ought to recognize the change.

There are fewer farmers than when I worked a summer for Jack, who had two 160-acre spreads raising corn and beans, a result of the mindset expressed by Trump administration Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, who told the 2019 World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wis., “The big get bigger, and the small go out.”

But that threat to manageable family farms created a ripple effect that overwhelmed small towns.

For decades, hogs were “mortgage makers”; producers could raise a few and cover payments on their farms. Now, many farmers are virtual serfs (or “tractor jockeys,” as some say).

“Wall Street couldn’t abide that the hog farmer was taking a profit that rightly belonged to the trade,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning newsman Art Cullen. “The suits figured out how to raise hogs (or heifers) indoors like chickens: Stuff them full of soy, corn and antibiotics, and don’t let them move for a fast rate of weight gain.”

Small businesses were replaced by dollar stores and Casey’s, and if they don’t have the clothes, fresh food or things you need, you drive miles to big-box stores in larger communities. Populations have shrunk and/or aged, so booming enterprises are senior housing, nursing homes, medical supply stores, and Emergency Medical Services.

“Residents have been left behind,” said Christin Ledbetter, a former Washington Post journalist who moved to Kinderhook, Ill., population about 250. “Farmers have lost their swagger; churches, their members. Businesses have departed; residents have fled for new opportunities.”

Where I grew up, a creek ran through town with crawfish and frogs, but little chemical runoff. Today, Midwest streams have phosphorous, nitrates and “earthier” discharges, all headed to the Gulf of Mexico.

My hometown’s typical. Changes haven’t been catastrophic, but they’re profound, like population dropping 30% in 50 years. It’s not hollowed out but different and not always better.

Gone are most gas stations (including two Standard Oil stations within a mile). There used to be multiple car dealers, TV/appliance stores, barber shops, clothing stores, implement dealers, drug stores, groceries, dentists, and doctors (who made house calls!).

Missing are a great tiny newsstand where you could grab one of several newspapers, many magazines and comic books, and a nickel Coke in glass bottles cooled in water in a red metal case, plus the small college, moviehouse, furniture store, dairy delivery, dry cleaners, meat market, sale barn, an office supply shop, jeweler, hatchery, and the hardware store,

A three-story grade school stands, abandoned.

Also absent are the meatpacking plant, a railroad station with a narrow-gauge “Doodlebug” train, a factory that employed some 1,700 workers at two area sites until corporate moved jobs to China and India.

And, of course, the Sears store.

“You wonder why [people] might be resentful,” Cullen said.

That resentment’s revealed in attitudes in the area of my youth, where only 41% are vaccinated and there have been uproars about safety measures, even in schools that for decades routinely mandated vaccinations for diphtheria, measles, mumps, polio, tetanus and other diseases; 73% voted for Trump and almost as many agreed with a 2020 advisory referendum to “secede” from Illinois – one of about 20 of 102 Illinois counties.

Fewer people read newspapers, relying on “free” social media or non-journalist cable-TV “personalities” telling viewers who to blame (rarely mentioning Big Business).

My hometown’s surviving institutions beyond most churches and taverns include banks and law firms, the Masonic Temple, real-estate and insurance agents, a florist and library, a scaled-back Ben Franklin that offers crafts instead of a candy counter, toys and box turtles on occasion, a K-12 school and athletic fields. a brick Post Office with a fine Depression-era mural, a weekly newspaper (now owned by an out-of-state publisher), a radio station revived by local supporters, a small hospital, cafes, stately homes, terrific parks with a swimming pool and golf course, and a splendid, classic courthouse.

New developments range from frozen-yogurt and fast-food joints (instead of Tastee-Freez) to appealing subdivisions, from the restored college theater to gift shops and salons, plus a local museum near where kids used to play baseball.

Was enriching already-profitable Big Business worth it?

I think novelist Thomas Wolfe was wrong when he wrote, “You can’t go home again,” but in some ways, it’s not there anymore.