All the highways of global capitalism found their way into the trackless vastness of rural America. Farmers there were not in dire straits because of their backwoods isolation. On the contrary, it was because they turned out to be living at ground zero of the capitalist economy, where the explosive energies of financial and commercial modernity detonated. A toxic combination of railroads, grain-elevator operators, farm-machinery manufacturers, commodity-exchange speculators, local merchants, and, above all, the banking establishment had farmers at their mercy. Their helplessness was only aggravated when the nineteenth-century version of globalization left their crops in desperate competition with those from the steppes of Canada and Russia as well as the outbacks of Australia and South America.

To survive this mercantile onslaught, farmers hooked themselves up to the long lines of credit that stretched back to the financial centers of the East. These lifelines allowed them to buy the seed, fertilizer, and machines they needed to farm; pay the storage and freight charges that went with selling their crops; and keep house and home together while the plants ripened and the hogs fattened. When market day finally arrived, the farmers found out just what all that backbreaking work was really worth. If the news was bad, then those credit lines were shut off and they found themselves dispossessed. The family farm and the network of small-town life that went with it were being swept into the rivers of capital that were heading for metropolitan America. [...]