Cultivating a new world: Agrarian internationalism in the Upper Midwest, 1919-1950

This dissertation explains the apparent transformation of people who only two decades before were considered the most isolated and isolationist in the United States into volunteer diplomats and Cold War specialists. It begins with a question of place: how did people who seemed physically and culturally separated from the world and much of their own country come to see themselves as central actors in forging a postwar international order? The answer to how this change occurred is found by looking at farmers in the Upper Midwest. They are this dissertation's protagonists because food and agriculture were fundamental to constructing the postwar international world that led to the Cold War. These farmers also offer a compelling narrative because the international character of their postwar lives seemed to be such a stark departure from their prewar isolationism.;Unlike contemporaries who argued that isolationists across the United States experienced an internationalist conversion when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, this dissertation argues that the world shifted around upper midwestern farmers and made international relationships essential to sustaining everyday life in a modern agricultural economy. Crucial to understanding this transformation is recognizing that international connections have long played a role in upper midwestern life. Rather than a rupture with the past, therefore, there was a continuity of international cooperation stretching back even before the earliest European settlement in the Upper Midwest. International networks built around family, faith, economics, and the natural environment stretched around the world and uniquely persisted among farmers. While the agricultural depression following World War I sparked regionalism and nationalism that peaked during the Great Depression, World War II broke down these barriers to the outside world. The unprecedented demands that war placed on US agriculture turned farmers toward new opportunities overseas that would help them preserve home and encourage them to fulfill the global responsibility they felt that had inherited from their agricultural heritage and natural abundance.;Agriculture and its practitioners are the focus of this dissertation because of their global significance. Food was central to sparking and waging the war, accounting for as many deaths as combat. During the Cold War, the United States used food as well as agricultural science and technology to build up defenses against Communism around the world. Food and agricultural science also played special roles in international relations because their universality helped them forge global cooperation where little else could. The significance of agriculture is also found in US politics and society. Agriculture continued to exercise disproportionate political power in the mid-twentieth century, ensuring that any diplomatic program serving farmers' needs would be long-lived. Even with most of the country's population living in cities, agriculture and rural life remained culturally important in the United States. Jefferson's yeoman farmer continued to symbolize the ideal citizen, and popular culture was suffused with characters from the countryside. The countryside remained a powerful enough symbol that postwar refugees were shown images of an Iowa farmstead to prepare them for the good life that awaited them in the United States.;As agricultural work eroded the structural barriers between the countryside and the broader world, upper midwesterners reimagined their region as a global heartland. Coupled with overseas consumers and foreign workers were new spatial conceptualizations that reconsidered these far-flung people as global neighbors to whom upper midwestern farmers had become responsible. This re-imagination was also a reflection of technology, such as atomic energy and jet-powered air travel that seemed to reduce previously insurmountable barriers and distances. It produced fear that the unprecedented ability to destroy the earth needed to be limited as well as optimism that the global amity necessary to do this had become possible.;What began as a humanitarian endeavor reinforced by economic prosperity, however, rapidly became a Cold War weapon for the US government. Beginning with the Truman Doctrine's supply of food to Turkey and Greece in 1947, policies tying US agriculture to global consumption and development served the country's diplomatic and domestic interests. As progressively fewer farmers protested the punitive use of their production and knowledge, Cold War agriculture became the norm in the United States. Agriculturists' international worldview persisted, but not with the initial spirit of cooperation or global amity. With US food serving diplomatic interests, no farmer selling food on the market could avoid their part in international agriculture.