Selling American Farming
Scholar Andy Piasecki explains the massive PR campaign launched by the railroads in the late 19th Century, attracting Europeans to the Midwest with an idealized vision of American farming – one that rarely jibed with the reality.
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**This transcript comes from an early broadcast of this show. There may be small differences between the audio above and the text.**
BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Peter Onuf.
PETER: Hey, Brian.
BRIAN: And Ed Ayers is with us.
ED: Hello, Brian.
BRIAN: In the middle of the 19th century, big railroad companies in the US faced a bit of a problem. Congress had recently granted them millions of acres of public lands in the newly acquired Western territories. But all that land didn’t amount to much for the railroads without products to carry on their trains.
PETER: They needed people. They needed towns. They needed goods to transport and farmers to grow those products. They realized that they were going to have to import a brand-new population, and so in the 1870s, they turned to Europeans– ideal candidates for relocation. European farmers and peasants were struggling at that very time under various forms of persecution, famine, and crushing rents.
ANDREW PIASECKI: And you’re moving from that to somewhere where there suddenly is real hope and purposefulness.
BRIAN: This is Andy Piasecki. A student of public relations, he argues that the campaign to track European settlers to America was one of the earliest examples of the kind of sophisticated corporate marketing efforts that we’d recognize today. Railroad companies established offices and vast networks of travel agents across Europe. They conducted a sort of market research to find out which groups would be the most likely to make the move. And, Piasecki says, the entire campaign was rooted in one basic message.
ANDREW PIASECKI: If you move out to the West, you become free and independent.
BRIAN: Across the European continent, railroad men visited agricultural fairs to distribute maps and pamphlets. Hired men masquerading as professors touted the idea that America was a farmer’s paradise. Some of these so-called professors said a farmer could grow crops nine months out of a year in America, or that Nebraska only had one month of winter. One even claimed that the speed of the railroads produced a magnetic affect that increased rainfall.
ANDREW PIASECKI: Nobody told them about the harshness of the climate. Nobody told them about the tornadoes. Nobody told them about the brutally tough winters. Nobody told them that in some parts of the prairie, the grass is so high that your children could actually get lost in the grass.
ED: Now, it’s not that the railroad companies were promising a walk in the park in the American West. In fact, some of them actually appealed to the Protestant work ethic of the northern Europeans. And Piasecki found a great example of this in a publication that came from the Santa Fe Railroad.
PAST’S If hard work doesn’t agree with you or you can’t get on without luxuries, stay where you are. If you are susceptible to homesickness, if you do not have pluck and perseverance, stay where you are. Wealth here is won only by work.
ED: In other words, it wasn’t going to be easy.
ANDREW PIASECKI: But behind the message from the railroad companies– we’re there to help you. We’re there to help you in every way, if you are made of the right stuff.
PETER: In the end, the PR campaigns were a stunning success. During the 1870s and 1880s, nearly four and a half million immigrants came to the Midwest. New settlers established almost two million farms.
BRIAN: As for what they found when they got here– that whole independence thing– well, for many, it didn’t pan out. The farmers found they were dependent on the very companies that had promised them independence in the first place. A lot of the farmers had taken loans from railroad companies to acquire their land, and those same companies were controlling the costs of moving produce to markets. No matter how hard a farmer worked, he couldn’t seem to ever catch up with the debt that he was saddled with.
ANDREW PIASECKI: Many people ended up mortgaging their houses to the railroads. About 25% of all those people who settled out in the West became tenant farmers by 1880s. 25%– one quarter. The irony that what you’re trying to escape from is what you end up going back to.