“Raise less corn and more hell,” Mary Lease, a member of the American Populist Party, told Kansas farmers in 1892. Back then, Kansas, indeed the whole American Great Plains region –the middle strip of states stretching from North Dakota to Texas–, was a hotbed of agrarian socialism. Squeezed by a deflationary crisis in the agricultural goods market, the Great Plains’ farmers were outraged at railroad companies and banks that were paying them ever lower prices for their goods, so they formed an agrarian alliance, later called the Populist Party. The movement failed, in part, because it was unable to win over urban workers and Southern farmers. Now without a political home, the Democratic and Republican Parties vied for these farmers’ votes, making these states a crucial swing region during the New Deal era. In the postwar period, these rural states consolidated around the GOP. Today, the Great Plains are one of the most consistently Republican regions of the United States. What explains this puzzling electoral transformation? How did the once-radical Great Plains, after a period of intense partisan competition, become a Republican stronghold?
This question is the subject of a well-known debate in American political science, stimulated by Thomas Frank’s "What’s the Matter with Kansas." My project builds on this debate by examining the historical role of rural elites in moving this region into the Republican fold. Through extensive archival research, this project will shed more light on the importance of local ‘opinion leaders’ in the rise and persistence of GOP dominance in the Plains. To do so, I will take a rural Kansas town as a representative case to study these local dynamics.
Meet the Grantees
Henry Fletcher
Graduate student
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Brown University
Henry Fletcher is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at Brown University. His research focuses broadly on the rural-urban divide, elites, and rural political behavior in the United States. The central question guiding his research is: How do rural political identities emerge, and how do they persist over time? Henry is specifically interested in how local elites -business owners, town council members, and community organization leaders- shape their communities' partisan attachments. He completed his B.A. in Sociology and Environmental Studies at McGill University in 2024.
