Carl Albert always fretted; But in 1968 the chronic worrywart had every reason for concern. A 22-year veteran of Congress, Albert represented Oklahoma’s rural third district. Nestled in the state’s southeast corner perpendicular to Arkansas and parallel to Texas, “Little Dixie,” as it was called, was restless. Vietnam, inflation, crime, and riots had riled voters. And Albert was not only a Democrat, he was the very liberal House Majority Leader responsible for the Great Society and Civil Rights.
In truth, Albert was really the junior Speaker of the House. The septuagenarian speaker, John McCormack, kept banker’s hours. That left Albert to pull double duty. Throughout the 1960s, he had little time to visit Oklahoma and reconnect with voters. The double workload eventually caused a major heart attack that kept him convalescing in Washington for most of 1967. In 1968, Albert looked to his reelection race with dread. So, he did something wholly unfamiliar to 2024 Americans: He listened.
Contemporary Americans are a lonely, isolated bunch. A decade ago, Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychologist, noticed this in his students. Alarmed, he studied the phenomenon and discovered a causal link between social media, smart phones, and spiraling rates of adolescent depression and anxiety. But Haidt’s conclusions are not limited to teens and twentysomethings.
Social media and smart phones have catalyzed a pre-existing condition afflicting nearly every American. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, the sociologist Robert Putnam observed that Americans fraternized much less than in the past. The internet, social media, and smart phones have amplified this phenomenon leading to what the writer Derek Thompson calls a “crisis of social fitness,” which has spawned a “friendship recession.”
Over the past two decades, real-life socializing for American men has fallen by 30-percent. Single Americans have experienced a more precipitous drop. Today, 33-percent of Americans claim they have “no close friends.” Staring into your smart phone affixed to social media has replaced books clubs, bowling leagues, and the dinner party. And we are glued to a social media, as Haidt and others have shown, that depict a world in “permanent conflict” making us fretful and downcast. We stare out onto the world peeking through our veritable blinds, isolated and afraid.
This is what makes Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman’s new book, White Rural Rage so predictable—and maddening. Rather than listen and understand complicated, three-dimensional rural Americans, they stereotype. Their analysis is an amalgam of our collective ills. Unwilling to reach across the divide, Schaller and Waldman gorge themselves on the negative and nihilistic. Then they regurgitate every rural, red America stereotype imaginable.
Treated as a favored “essential minority,” the authors claim “rural white rage” emanates from an inability to make good use of their disproportionate electoral power. In their view, rural whites vote Republican, only to see their economic straits devolve. Angered at this turnabout, they flocked to Donald Trump. To Schaller and Waldman, it is the rural white vote that is solely responsible for Trumpism. Due to their lockstep support for Trump, these voters pose an existential threat to American democracy. Kirkus Reviews neatly summarizes their argument, “A view of rural America as a font of white privilege—and of resentment that the privileges aren’t greater.”
It is true that 65% of rural Americans voted Trump in 2020. It is also true that the Electoral College and US Senate give rural Americans outsized political power. But fewer than 1-in-5 Americans live in rural environs. The vast majority of Trump’s 74 million votes in 2020 came from suburban and urban voters. But Schaller and Waldman are wholly uninterested in these facts. Their argument is little more than a redux of Frank Rich’s 2017 New York Magazine hit piece, “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly.”
Bill Hogseth, chair of the Dunn County Democratic Party in Wisconsin, begs to differ. The Democratic leader of a rural county understands his neighbor’s challenges start with the economy. In 2020, Trump won 2,547 counties. Collectively they account for a dismal 29% of America’s GDP. Biden’s 509 counties generate 71% of the nation’s GDP. This economic divide cascades across every facet of rural American life. Today, rural Americans trail their urban counterparts in every meaningful metric except stress-related deaths. In 2018 Hillary Clinton bragged that she won the counties responsible for two-thirds of the nation’s GDP. Instead of boasting, she should have been ashamed that the Democratic Party performed so poorly in the places the American economy was leaving behind.
Hogseth believes his friends and neighbors vote Trump because “rural people do not feel it is taken seriously by the Democratic Party.” I have written scads of articles and a book on liberalism’s relationship with working class and rural Americans. I am midway through a biography on Speaker Carl Albert. Hogseth could not be more correct. Democrats all but booted rural whites from the party. Rather than learn the history of this political malpractice, Schaller and Waldman castigate rural voters.
Yes, Trump is a demagogue and a charlatan. It is true that right wing media spreads conspiracy theories and lies. But rural Americans are not budding authoritarians who represent the enemy within. They vote GOP because Democrats have ignored them for a generation. Hogseth is correct in thinking “Democrats can win rural Wisconsin again, but they’ll need to try.” They need look no further than Carl Albert’s example.
In April 1968, Albert rightly feared for his political future. Inflation was high. Vietnam was hot. Riots raged. Voters were upset. And a 1966 court ruling had almost doubled Albert’s third district. Overnight, the Congressman had 170,000 new constituents across nine rural counties. The Majority Leader didn’t plaster the airwaves with ads. Instead, the nation’s second most powerful Democrat got into a car and road tripped across rural Oklahoma. Without any staff or much preparation, he spent five-days visiting 27 rural towns and tiny communities to meet his voters.
In these towns, Albert would amble into gas stations and grocery stores to introduce himself to anyone and everyone. Taking copious notes, he found “there was plenty of grumbling about the riots,” but over five-days he encountered only one “real redneck on the race question.” Arriving in McCurtain, Oklahoma, at 7 p.m., the local gas station, which doubled as the town grocery, was the only open business. Albert introduced himself to the owner, which resulted in a phone call to the mayor that led to an impromptu community meeting at a closed department store that lasted until 10 p.m.
Stops at local newspapers and banks resulted in earfuls about “the riots.” But Albert knew it was better to have constituents vent their spleen than ruminate in silence. Spontaneous visits to a store led to spur-of-the-moment invites to Rotary Clubs that resulted in unplanned radio interviews which spawned unexpected offers to speak at school assemblies. Word spread. Rural Oklahomans liked that their congressman shook their hand and asked their thoughts. Five days after the road trip commenced, Albert, the world class worrywart, concluded, “I feel we will have no trouble in these communities.”
Throughout the summer Albert traversed his district. He mended fences. He established new friendships. The liberal won reelection with 68% of the vote.
Mr. Schaller and Waldman, rural whites aren’t a threat to American democracy. A rural-urban economic divide, cable news, doom scrolling, and “Bowling Alone” endanger it. Ultimately, our “crisis of social fitness” is the problem. And Carl Albert shows us the way to repair it.
Jeffery H. Bloodworth is a professor of political history at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the forthcoming book Heartland Liberal: The Life & Times of Speaker Carl Albert.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
