Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1991
Abstract
When Gladys Leffler Gist remarked in her reminiscences that she and her husband Ray had witnessed "considerable 'for better and for worse'" during their forty years together, she could just as well have been describing the "marriage" between farmers and the agricultural economy during the same period. Depression and drought, of course, challenged those people making their livings from the land and in many ways dominated their impressions of those years. Of more long-term importance, however, were the "vast and fundamental changes" that, according to Gilbert Fite, stemmed from the "application of new technology, chemistry, and plant and animal sciences" to agriculture. By the 1940s and 1950s, posits Fite, "the evolutionary changes of former years . . . became of such fundamental importance as to be called revolutionary." In a concurrent transformation, the Gists became members of a "new minority," as farm families declined from a quarter of the population in 1935 to just over 6 percent in 1965. 1
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 11:1 (Winter 1991). Copyright © 1991 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.