The Rural Ideal

Looking across holiday postcard images from the early 20th century, one sees almost nothing but rural landscapes, idyllic villages and hamlets, vibrant fields, and picture-perfect farmhouses. Such idealism and nostalgia had been around for decades (in Currier and Ives prints for example), and continues to resonate even today. However, in the years of postcards' peak between 1907 and 1909/10 these images had a new context. A progressive reform wave called the Country Life Movement had swept across the country, with President Roosevelt creating a special Commission in 1907 that would release a much-discussed report in 1909, detailing all the ills, failings, and problems of rural, small town America. Those that have studied the movement have suggested it brought "unprecedented attention to rural developments and problems."1 Is it just historical coincidence that an unprecedented focus on rural life and an unprecedented outpouring of images depicting the rural ideal occurred during the exact same years?

The Evidence of a Rural Phenomenon

Several postcard scholars (including Robert Bogdan and Susan Brown Nicholson) have already noted another coincidence of timing--the link between the establishment of the Rural Free Delivery (RFD) and the postcard craze.2 But a peek into the Post Office Department's official documents shows an even stronger connection. In fact, the Postmaster in charge of the RFD specifically suggested in 1909 that it was postcards that had increased the flow of mail going through the system. While it might to tempting to assume that people from urban centers were sending postcards to their isolated country cousins and kin, Post Office reports show the exact opposite. Between 1905 and 1909 there was a 410% increase of postcards delivered to rural routes. But there was an 846% increase in the number of cards collected along those same routes...more than double the increase of delivered! Of the six categories of mail, it was the only one that showed a larger jump in collected than delivered.3

In the research conducted into holiday postcard audiences, 69% of the recipients were living in rural, small town communities of less than 10,000 people. Although not a huge statistical variance from the population as a whole--which stood at 64% in communities of that size--it does cast light on the fad as a possible rural phenomenon, if for no other reason than America was still majority non-urban. However, Post Office documents suggest even stronger connections. New Hampshire’s rural routes saw a 236% jump in postcards delivered through the RFD between 1905 and 1909. Postcards collected along those routes jumped 265%. Connecticut saw a 247% increase in deliveries, but a 307% increase in collections. Even Alabama, whose anemic use of postcards generated even wider percentage swings between 1905 and 1909, saw a jump of 875% in delivered versus 1,955% in collected.4 What are we to make of the postcard dealer writing in the pages of an industry trade magazine, "“We have tried for a long time to drum it into the heads of the producers of post cards that a majority of the business is done in country towns…”5

And then there is this: As postcards' popularity was waning, a theme developed in several articles of the period, all suggesting that telephone use was replacing postcard use. It is an interesting observation from the times because it hints that postcard audiences might have been the same as early telephone audiences. And when we turn to Claude Fischer, the foremost expert on telephone history, we discover that telephone use got its start among rural, Northern women living primarily in New England and the Midwest--the exact same audiences that emerged from the research into postcard audiences.6

Putting The Rural Ideal in Context

Let us return to the Country Life Movement. Historian David Danbom suggests: "The County Life Movement was most significant for what its existence indicated about the evolving position of rural America in the nation…Now farmers had become peculiar. They were objects of concern...Whatever its intentions and accomplishments, the Country Life Movement represented the diminished status and growing peripheralization of rural America."7 Which circles us to the original question: Is the timing of the postcard phenomenon and the timing of the Country Life Commission's creation, discussion, and conclusions just a coincidence? Is it just a fluke that both occurred over the years between 1907 and 1909? I would suggest no.

Now farmers had become peculiar. They were objects of concern...

The reason we see thousands upon thousands of different postcard fronts all depicting the rural ideal is because these images were doing specific cultural work unique to the times. In that moment, they created a massive tapestry that refuted all the claims being made against rural Americans by the reform movement. There was no worn out soil...the fields and meadows were never more beautiful and productive. There were no rundown farmhouses...they were never more spacious and handsomely decorated. There was no under-production...pumpkins, turkeys, wheat, corn were all bountiful and even gigantic in their exaggerated forms. There were no broken, tired farmers...they were never more robust and hardy.

Rural Americans were using postcards as a counter-narrative--an image-based counter-narrative--to all the things being said in this unprecedented attention brought upon them. And in doing so, they helped drive postcards to epic proportions, to one of the greatest outpourings of images in the 20th century. In fact, future scholarship might wish to re-examine the centrality of the souvenir view card to postcard history. If rural Americans, handing off millions of postcards to their Rural Free Delivery mailmen, helped drive the fad to its mammoth proportions, it is worth asking what kinds of cards they were using. We may discover greeting cards, and holiday cards in particular, were more central to this use than previous realized.

At the very least, it helps put holiday postcards in context. Even if such images were popular before postcards, and continued in popularity afterwards, the reasons behind that popularity shift in the course of history. Seeing the circumstances specific to the years of the fad helps us see how and why the rural ideal dominates the postcard holiday landscape.

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