“Pull Up the Corn” in a Tractor: Subtly and Language in Rural America

At beginning of every election season, a stack of politicians’ books steadily grows on my bedside table. It’s become something of a ritual for me. I read books by politicians I like and those I dislike, by folks with whom I agree and with whom I disagree, and by candidates receiving a lot of attention and those with a lower profile.

This weekend Pete Buttigieg’s book rose to the top of the stack and facing a recall notice from another patron of the Dallas Public Library system, I diligently dove into Mayor Pete’s world. Setting aside policies, experiences, and any number of political considerations, there’s one moment in the book that stood out to me, particularly in light of my research on and background in rural America.

In one brief passage, Buttigieg describes his experiences running for state treasurer in Indiana and particularly his time on the campaign trail in rural parts of the state during the fall corn harvest. As he recounts his conversations with a farmer at harvest, he uses phrases like “pull up the corn,” describes his experiences riding in a “tractor” to harvest the crop, and employs several other small descriptors of his harvest experience.

A totally normal way to describe the corn harvest, right?

Based on a quarter century of corn harvests in the rural Midwest, not quite.

For one, tractors aren’t used to harvest corn. Combines are. I’ve also never heard the phrase “pull up the corn,” and I’m quite certain most farmers in my hometown would have no idea what such a phrase meant. We harvest or combine the crop. Even at the end of the season, you don’t pull the corn stalks out of the ground. You might till the old plants under after the harvest, take the no-till approach, or let your cattle graze in the field.

Of course, Buttigieg never claimed to be a rural or agricultural person, but what struck me about these small turns of phrase is how quickly they communicated to me—as a native of a rural farming community—that he was an outsider. And, conversely, how quickly I presume non-farming folk could pass over those same passages. My experience with this brief anecdote reminded me of how clearly and subtly insider dynamics can be communicated, especially in rural America.

For the purposes of this blog, I want to focus on how this dynamic also appears in my historical work. As I’ve completed my research, I feel I’ve gotten to know a community well. I learned how they think, speak, and position themselves in the world. There’s an insider vocabulary to the community that helps me as a historian not only understand how these men and women thought of themselves but also how those conceptions connect to their experiences.

In some cases, I encounter this in small ways. For instance, many of the Dutch-speaking men and women who I study made similar grammatical errors. Most commonly, they use “ij” instead of a “y” when spelling certain English words. July might become “Julij.” For a Dutch speaker, this misspelling makes sense due to the phonetic similarities between the Dutch “ij” and the English “y.” For a historian, it also helps to identify men and women who are native Dutch speakers. Small things, like this common misspelling, reveal who is most likely an immigrant or a part of an immigrant household, and who is not. When this misspelling pops up in letters, diaries, or church records, it identifies certain people as both outside of the U.S. mainstream linguistically and also as a central tether holding their community to its roots abroad. At the same time, the slow disappearance of this spelling error offers an opportunity to track an immigrant’s mastery of a new language and a new culture.

Other differences in language and description help to communicate details about how men and women viewed their worlds in ways that reflected their own backgrounds. I first discovered this when reading through early accounts of life on the Iowa prairies in the mid-1800s. The memoirs of Methodist itinerants and their wives told horror stories. Life on the Iowa prairies meant fires, blizzards, impassible terrain, and tremendous social isolation. These men and women frequently crossed the prairies in all seasons, and they spoke about their lives and the climate in a way that reflected their constant efforts to traverse dangerous terrain by themselves.

At the same time, a group of Dutch immigrants put down roots nearby. Reading their descriptions of the land, however, would suggest they settled in a totally different world. They raved about the fertile soil, the ample space for farms, and their freedom to build their own churches and schools. Complaints about a literal plague of locusts and a lack of transportation popped up from time to time but they were an anomaly. Unlike the itinerant Methodists trekking hundreds of miles across the prairies, the Dutch could overlook such obstacles because they thought they had discovered their own promised land.

A close reading of the language used by these two communities to describe their views of life on the prairie reveals a great deal about not only their ideas but also their own experiences. Enthusiastic praise for Iowa’s prairies probably suggested that the writer didn’t have to cross those prairies with much regularity. Similarly, bleak assessments of life riding preaching circuits certainly did not sound like a pioneer who was putting down roots in a new settlement and hoping to entice family and friends make a similar transatlantic journey.

These two communities existed side by side; however, they spoke in distinct ways that reflected how they conceived of their worlds differently and how experiences informed the ideas and worldviews they adopted. More broadly, to someone familiar with these communities, the particular language and descriptions used by a writer could easily identify him or her as an insider within one of these two communities and an outsider to the other.

Buttigieg’s book now sits on my entryway table, ready to be returned on my next trip to my branch of the Dallas Public Library, and another candidate’s book has ascended the heap. This occasional ritual often provides much to ponder as elections creep ever closer, but in this case, it’s also provided an opportunity for me to reflect on the subtle and important ways that the language used by our historical subjects reveals much about their own backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences.

A native English speaker would never spell July with an “ij,” but a Dutch-speaker would. A Methodist itinerant would not describe fire-prone prairies as a new Garden of Eden, but a new immigrant probably would. A corn farmer would never describe harvest as pulling up the corn in her tractor, but the mayor of a small city would. Whether in the archive or the public library book on our nightstands, the ways that men and women communicate, even down to the precise words and spellings they use, can offer an opportunity to understand their ideas, experiences, and worlds more richly, completely, and carefully.