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BEAUTY IN THE SERVICE OF A POLITICAL AGENDA
By Dr. Ruth Schwartz Cowan
 Thus,
as they watch Power in the Land my students tend
to transplant all their assumptions about the present into
their understanding of the past. As a consequence, they
almost always miss the subtle ways in which Power in
the Land exaggerates or ignores the realities of farm
life in the 1930s in order to make both electrification
and modernization attractive. They never notice the tractor—or
wonder how it came to be that at the beginning of the film,
Bill Parkinson and his sons go out to the fields in a wagon
drawn by horses, but by the end of the film the wagon and
the horses have been replaced by a tractor. They never think
of the expense—or ask how the Parkinsons managed to
purchase a whole suite of kitchen appliances, as well as
a milk cooling system, a radio, a water pump, water heater,
sink, toilet and shower, not to speak of indoor and outdoor
lighting systems--all in the course of one season. And they
never comment on Hazel Parkinson’s enigmatic expression--or
wonder why she isn’t smiling broadly as she lifts
the roast that she has just cooked in an electric oven and
looks across the kitchen table at her husband.
Recent scholarship in the history of technology,
the history of gender roles, the history of agriculture
and the history of housework can provide the complex background
information needed to understand what led the directors
to create a documentary which doesn’t quite reflect
reality but which has, nonetheless, enormous persuasive
power.
Historians of technology have told us, for
example, that horses, as draft animals, began disappearing
from America’s roads several decades before they began
disappearing from America’s farms; in Iowa, for example,
in 1930, 90% of farm households owned automobiles but only
30% owned tractors.[
i ] A large
part of the reason for this, of course, is that automobiles
were considerably cheaper than tractors. By the late 1930s,
as the country was slowly pulling out of the Depression, the
question of whether to purchase a tractor and retire the draft
animals was a live one for many American farmers; it was also
a crucial one for New Deal bureaucrats, who were trying, in
any way that the could, to stimulate the consumption of manufactured
goods. Thus, the shift that occurs between horse and tractor
in Power in the Land would have been symbolically
meaningful to rural audiences: in one brief image it conveyed
the notion that electrification leads to prosperity and prosperity
leads to tractors and tractors—of course—will
make life easier for farmers.
[ i ]
These figures come from Fifteenth Census of the United
States 1930 as reported in Katherine Jellison, Entitled
to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (Chapel
Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993) p.54.
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