The Polk Progress was a Nebraska treasure that ceased publication in late 1989 after 82 years as a weekly newspaper. From 1955 until its last issue, the editor and publisher was the late Norris Alfred. In its last few months, the Progress had 900 subscribers in 45 states. Alfred was a remarkable Nebraskan with an uncanny eye for connecting the present with the future. Prairie Fire has collaborated with the Alfred family, the University of Nebraska School of Journalism and the Nebraska State Historical Society to locate and archive many of Norris's writings. We are capitalizing on our good fortune to present many of the Norris Alfred writings to our readership. We believe that his observations are as fresh and relevant to today's world as they were when originally written.

January 26, 1989
“Small Rural Communities Will Survive”

What has been concerning us lately is the viability of small, rural communities in these days of increasingly industrialized agriculture that eliminates farms and farm families. This decline in farming population is reflected in decreasing commercial activity in villages the size of Polk and larger. Where once were numerous Main Street businesses, few survive.

When we made the mistake of purchasing the Progress business in 1955, Polk was at the peak of post-World War II prosperity with Main Street accommodating three grocery stores; two were selling fresh meat while the third offered a processing service from live critter to packaged frozen meat, plus a frozen locker business. The third one is the only one left. Two implement businesses, John Deere and International Harvester (both gone). Three stores sold clothing and shoes (gone); two taverns (one left); three restaurants (two left); Chevrolet garage and dealership (gone); three cream stations (gone); three gas stations (two left); blacksmith shop; movie theater (gone); hotel with residents (gone); barber shop (one day a week); hardware store; drug and sundries store (gone); radio repair shop (gone); two grain elevators (one left); bank; and more.

That much of this business activity would disappear within a quarter century was not considered possible at the time. There would always be farmers and the need for villages would continue. About 20 years ago, we began wondering what came first, big farms or big farm machinery. The wonderment was caused by watching small farm operations disappearing into larger spreads. That was settled for us by a new retired farmer who sold his horses and bought his first tractor. “I felt I could farm all of Polk County,” he declared. The tractor he had bought was a John Deere B.

The mechanization of farming caused the industrialization and specialization of agriculture and de-emphasized its human attributes. During the height of the 1970s land boom, a farmer told us: “I don’t need Polk.” This farmer has been a lifelong resident of the Polk community. He has children, grandchildren and great grandchildren living in Polk and vicinity and he considers the community home. What he was saying: “I don’t need home.” He was also stating: “I don’t need the fellowship of church, lodge, club, tavern, school.” He was saying, “I can go it alone.”

No man is an island unto himself. That’s a garbled quote of a poet. A farmer riding a big tractor, pulling huge implements, undoubtedly gains a sense of power and that sense de-humanizes him. He gains a warped sense of proportions. Actually, he loses his sense of reality. He loses concern for land. There’s a decline in neighborliness. The importance of community lessens. He depends on power, not people. This is the crux. This is the division between power and people. When we no longer depend on one another, confident we can do it alone, then we are retrogressing to the age of barbarians.

A club and clothing of animal skin are not necessary to define a barbarian. The low-brow activities of unrestrained military power, as encouraged and demonstrated during the 1980s, is sufficient evidence of our willingness to return to barbaric behavior. An MX missile is the modern equivalent of a barbarian’s club. Until we regard people as persons, not victims, we can never regain our humanity, if we ever had it.

People make an economy healthy, not machines. Machines are producers, not consumers. People are producers and consumers. In the New Yorker for Jan. 23, 1989, Robert Heilbroner in “Reflection (Capitalism)” tells “… the apocryphal story of Henry Ford II walking through a newly automated engine factory with Walter Reuther, the legendary organizing figure of the United Auto Workers, and asking, ‘Walter, how are you going to organize these machines?”—to which Reuther is supposed to have answered, ‘Henry, how are you going to sell them cars?’”

Machines produce but do not consume. In the era of many farmers and few machines much of what was produced on farms was consumed by farmers. Now there are many row-crop farmers who only produce. They do not have an animal on the farmstead, nor a fowl. With machinery they only produce and what they have been producing is surplus grain for federal subsidized storage.

What we are attempting to refute here is the rationalization that rural villages are not economically viable. We believe those arguing for the doom of places like Polk have it backwards. An economy doesn’t produce people; people produce an economy. People produce machines and it is people who will control them. There are limits. When continuing overproduction and underconsumption reaches limits, adjustments will force many to fall back on their own resources, and this is likely to be of less impact in rural than in urban areas.
Another distortion, perhaps fatal to a well-regulated economy that balances consumption and production, is the military. It consumes without producing. Machines produce: military consumes, is an economic equation guaranteeing social disaster for any nation.

We toss out these ideas while arguing with ourself. For our entire adult life has been involved in dramatic change, just as was that of our parents. Mother Alfred was born in the horse-and-buggy era and lived to see an astronaut walk on the moon. The rapidity of change allows little or no time for reflection or contemplation. We concentrate our attention on the smooth highway’s pinpoint horizon; driving at speeds that deny us even a passing glance at the bird in the roadside bush.

Machines are distorting our sense of reality and home. Mechanization is not he goal of living - compassion is. To live a life of loving care demonstrates the integrity of our humanity and the realization that our chance birth did not add to the inhumanity of men and their machines. The great grandfather who claimed he did not need Polk obviously had no idea what he was proposing. We need one another. The relationship is more congenial on a one-one basis than one in a mass. On that individual basis we think Polk will survive.