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BOB POTTER: Volume was the slowest on or rather the second slowest on Wall Street this year. As of 11:30 Central Time, the Dow Industrials have slipped below 2,700 to 2,699.10. That's down 8 and 1/2 points from yesterday's close. The transportation average is up 0.89, and the utilities are down point 0.4.

Quick reminder that support for Minnesota Public Radio's coverage of social issues is provided by the McKnight Foundation. And you're listening to Midday over Minnesota Public Radio. This is a member-supported broadcast service. This is KNOW, Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Mostly sunny skies. 46 degrees now in the Twin Cities, and expecting a high today around 50.

Minnesota Public Radio's programming is made possible in part with assistance from SysCom of Boulder, Colorado, developers of NewsPro software for broadcast newsrooms. Just a few minutes, rather, few seconds past 12 o'clock. We are going to be spending some time talking about the differences between life in urban and rural Minnesota today. We have to begin with the report by Main Street radio's John Biewen. And then after that, we'll be visiting with studio guests Paul Gruchow and rural sociologist George Donahue.

People in public life in particular have to deal regularly with questions of what to call different groups of people. In Minnesota, there's been a movement over the past several years to change the term for that area outside Minneapolis-Saint Paul from Outstate Minnesota to Greater Minnesota. Well, as Mainstreet Radio's John Biewen found out, "greater" seems to be winning. But there are some strong pockets of resistance.

JOHN BIEWEN: My efforts to track down the origin of Greater Minnesota ran into dead ends. Nobody seems willing to take credit or blame for having coined the term. What's clear is that somewhere around 1985 or '86, some state legislators and officials in the Perpich administration started saying that Outstate was out, and the vast area of Minnesota beyond the metro area would henceforth be referred to as Greater Minnesota. Steve Ronald is Deputy Managing Editor at The Star Tribune newspaper.

STEVE RONALD: We used it for a while. And as I have said, it crops up constantly in references, often from politicians from outside the metro area some of whom seem to the term. It doesn't appeal much to me because I think it's pompous and silly.

JOHN BIEWEN: Ronald says the Star Tribune doesn't use greater Minnesota except when quoting those who say it because it's ungrammatical and, as he puts it, not felicitous. But it's hard to find a politician or a state bureaucrat who hasn't adopted Greater Minnesota. And a statewide poll in the fall of '87 by the Minnesota Center for Survey Research found that a strong majority of Minnesotans, more than 2 to 1, prefer Greater Minnesota to Outstate.

DON NORLINDER: I think it's Greater Minnesota. OK. There's a lot of things out here that I think are a lot greater than fighting traffic every day.

JOHN BIEWEN: That's Freeborn County Sheriff Don Norlinder of Albert Lea. He doesn't like being called outstate. And neither does Pat Nussbaum, who is city clerk in the Southern Minnesota town of Elysian.

PAT NUSSBAUM: First few times I heard Outstate immediately made me think of out of the state of Minnesota. And I was always hearing this, and I thought, why are we discussing things out of the state of Minnesota? It's kind of like the place to be is in the Metropolitan area, but then outstate. It makes me think of the Outback of Australia, it's the outback. It's a lesser degree-- not quite as important or as needed.

JOHN BIEWEN: But some people in so-called Greater Minnesota are dismayed by the new term, like Al Zdon, Managing Editor of the Hibbing Tribune.

AL ZDON: Well, I think it's a darn shame. I guess some of us out in the Outstate area have been duped into believing that this is the way we should go.

JOHN BIEWEN: Zdon has written editorials in opposition to greater Minnesota. First of all, he says it's a misuse of the word greater.

AL ZDON: If you think of, say, Greater Chicago, what do you mean by that? You mean, Chicago and you mean all the suburbs and little cities that are around it. Following that logic, what does Greater Minnesota mean? Does that mean Minnesota plus Iowa and the Dakotas and Wisconsin and Ontario and Manitoba? Is that what greater Minnesota is? I mean, that-- following the normal logic, the normal usage of greater, that's what it should mean. And obviously, that's not what they mean here.

JOHN BIEWEN: Furthermore, says Zdon, Greater Minnesota is an obvious euphemism designed to make people in what he proudly calls Outstate Minnesota feel good. Many observers agree that non-metro Minnesotans have been feeling increasingly alienated from Twin Cities people in recent years, which may explain why, after decades of use, the term "Outstate" began to sound like a put down to some. If you ask a small town or rural Minnesotan what they want their part of the state to be called, their answer often becomes an explanation of why they don't live in the Twin Cities. Lauren Taylor is a dairy farmer near New York Mills in West Central Minnesota.

LAUREN TAYLOR: I love the outdoors, I guess, mostly. And I like to be on my own or alone most of the time, and that's why I like the country life. But I really don't know what they call us or really how to even answer that.

JOHN BIEWEN: So you're not-- you don't spend a lot of time thinking about worrying about what they call what Twin Cities people?

LAUREN TAYLOR: No, I really don't care. I just hope I never have to move down there. [LAUGHS] I hope I can chisel out a living up here somehow and stay up here.

JOHN BIEWEN: Most people I've talked with agree there's no easy answer to the question of what to call Minnesota outside the Twin cities in fact, Steve Ronald of the Star Tribune says even though it's cumbersome, he prefers to say just that, the area outside the Twin cities. There are problems with Greater Minnesota and with outstate, and rural and non-metro don't work for places like Duluth, Fargo-Moorhead, Saint Cloud, and Rochester. But Al Zdon of Hibbing says the problem is more fundamental than just finding the best term.

AL ZDON: You just can't refer to this diverse and amazing area that is beyond the Twin Cities area in just one term, I don't think. I think if you're going to talk about Northern Minnesota, you should say Northern Minnesota. If it's Southern Minnesota, you ought to say that. They're really different areas. If you want to define it more closely, you can call it the Iron Range. You can call it the Red River Valley. I mean, there's all kinds of neat places in Minnesota, and to generalize them under one term, I think, is where you're getting into trouble.

JOHN BIEWEN: Zdon says he'll continue his battle against the use of Greater Minnesota. But he says, especially since the phrase has been made official in the title of the Greater Minnesota corporation, we're probably stuck with it, at least for a while. Zdon wonders, though, if the rest of the state is Greater Minnesota, how would twin citizens feel about being called Lesser Minnesota? This is John Biewen.

BOB POTTER: We are going to continue our conversation on the topic of the differences between rural and urban Minnesota. Two guests have joined me in the studio. George Donahue is a rural sociologist from the University of Minnesota. George, welcome. Nice to have you with us today.

GEORGE DONAHUE: Thank you.

BOB POTTER: And Mr. Paul Gruchow, who is Editor and Co-Owner of the Worthington Globe for almost a decade, author of a couple of books, Journal of A Prairie Year and The Necessity of Open Places. Paul is now chair of the Minnesota Humanities Commission and teaches English at Saint Olaf College in Northfield. Paul, nice to have you back.

PAUL GRUCHOW: It's good to be here.

BOB POTTER: Well, what do you guys make of the dispute over Outstate Minnesota or Greater Minnesota? Paul.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well, I never liked the term Greater Minnesota. I have to confess, I'm with those people. I think the thing that I became keenly aware of a few years ago when I made a modest proposal in this regard was that the reason we grapple with this term at all, I think, is that the word rural has become, in some ways, pejorative.

We were at an associated press meeting, and the associated press is all organizations do has contests. And there was a category for Outstate Minnesota and one for Metro Minnesota. And some of the rural folks felt that they didn't like the outstate designation. And so I hesitantly, tentatively suggested that we ought to call the divisions Metro Minnesota and Rural Minnesota.

And the room fell upon me. It was just taken as an outrageous suggestion. Nobody wanted to be known as rural for heaven's sakes. And I really do think that that's at the basis of the question. But Greater Minnesota seems to me patronizing, both toward Metropolitan people and toward rural people. So I don't much like it. But on the other hand, I suppose I don't care a lot either about what they call us.

BOB POTTER: George Donahue, what do you think?

GEORGE DONAHUE: Well, we're in the age of image building, and I think that's what the GMC was related to, an attempt to bolster a development program for the, quote, "outstate" unquote, area and give it an image that it did not have. But perhaps being new, it was not very well understood and still isn't very well understood as to what is included or not included in greater Minnesota, except among people who have come into contact with the name and asked what it was.

BOB POTTER: Do you think it's a trivial dispute when it boils right down to it?

GEORGE DONAHUE: Well, I think so. There's certain realities to the differences between the Metropolitan areas of this country, not only of Minnesota, but of the country as a whole, and the non-metropolitan areas, which statisticians are now prone to use rather than rural. Because the non-metropolitan is perhaps a more functional definition because it includes the socioeconomic interdependencies of the metro and non-metro areas. The old division of rural and urban no longer really exists in terms of the functional reality of the relationships between the rural and the urban areas.

BOB POTTER: Well, even metro and non-metro gets to be blurred because, I guess, you have this whole area that stretches from the Twin Cities to Saint Cloud and down to Rochester that's becoming a semi-urban area, isn't it?

GEORGE DONAHUE: Well, it is, but I would say that there are-- Saint Cloud and Duluth and Rochester act as channels to the Twin Cities. There's such a unity there between those large cities and the Twin Cities in terms of the socioeconomic transactions. But also, there's the same type of relationship between Saint Cloud and the communities surrounding it as there is between Saint Cloud and the Twin Cities. They're not independent islands. They're all part of a functional whole at the present time.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well, perhaps the real distinction that you could make is the distinction between that central core, which does include parts of Northeastern Minnesota too and the urban stretch from Rochester to North of Saint Cloud. That part of Minnesota, which in general is still gaining population, and the fringes of Minnesota, which are still in general either holding their own in population or losing population modestly, I suspect that there's a somewhat different frame of mind, at least, in those two communities in Minnesota. And in a real sense, those fringe communities that are outside the state's population growth really are outstate communities. In fact, that's quite a precise definition for a relationship, I think.

BOB POTTER: Talking about urban and rural differences today, Paul Gruchow and George Donahue are with us. We'll open the phone lines for your questions on the subject. In the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area, the number is 227-6000, 227-6000. Outside Minneapolis-Saint Paul, toll free 1-800-652-9700, 1-800-652-9700. That number, by the way, is good in the surrounding states as well. What about the political and economic power Of? The Minneapolis-Saint Paul area compared to the rest of the state. How do you define that and how do you see it changing as time goes on? Paul.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well, I think if you're talking, again, about the very rural fringes of Minnesota, that you're really talking about an economic situation that in some ways I think of as colonial. What's happened in those parts of Minnesota, in Worthington, where I lived for 15 years, for example, is that the economic base of those communities has become a manufacturing base in some significant ways. A very large proportion of the jobs in a place like that are jobs in low paying industrial settings.

And where the retail base of those communities and some of their basic institutions, newspapers are a good example of that, are owned elsewhere. And where there's a-- where there's an outflow of profits to urban centers, that really leaves those communities depressed both economically and in terms of leadership. And I think that leadership depression is the biggest problem that communities like that face. They're very definitely are, I think, two worlds in some parts of Minnesota.

BOB POTTER: And how do you get young people, George, to stay in their home towns rather than flock to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area or other large population centers in other states?

GEORGE DONAHUE: Well, historically, we've had the rural to urban migration because the rural typically overproduced not only in the fields, but also in the families. And they had to find places for the young people. And as long as the cities were expanding and growing, they were happy to receive that flow. It was very essential to the development of the country.

How do you keep em down on the farm? You don't keep em down on the farm. You don't keep them down in a small town. If you have a surplus of population, if you keep them there, the only thing you do is develop greater pressure on the available jobs and available resources for involvement on the part of young people. And the general level is depressed by the fact that there is really not much for them to do.

And this bothers a lot of parents because at 17 or 18, typically, the rural family is broken up more than the urban family. Because in the urban area, the person can find jobs within a reasonable distance. The extended family, which was once a rural phenomenon, is now a metropolitan phenomenon. Your kids may live in the South part of the cities and you may live in the North or vice versa. And there's a lot of interaction in the family. Whereas in the rural areas now, quite often, even with modern means of transportation and communication, the big days of the holidays.

BOB POTTER: Yeah. It's about a quarter past the hour. Let's get to some folks on the telephones with questions for our two guests, George Donahue and Paul Gruchow. Thank you. You're on the air now. Go ahead, please.

AUDIENCE: Sure. I wonder if we shouldn't be discussing this in terms of the country mouse and the city mouse.

[LAUGHTER]

BOB POTTER: Do you have a question or is that it?

AUDIENCE: But I see the whole thing as intertwined with all kinds of concepts of rural morality and the fast city life. And we have a-- the governor who, as a political scientist, I see him as the greatest political animal I've ever seen, and a lot of legislators too. And they have a reparations concept to the rural area. And they set up things like the Greater Minnesota Corporation.

They fund money-losing ski areas and Taconite villages, interpretive centers, and little boondoggles and hornswogglers and pork barrels. And they set them up all over the state as a, as I say, a concept of almost reparations in abeyance to excuse us for our fast moneymaking ways in the city. But we still love you, and here's a little money to prove it.

And then again, we turn around and we tax the hell out of everything in the state. And it seems to me like a real a lurching from event to event kind of approach. And like I say, I think it's in part because I see the governor as the greatest political animal I've ever-- animal I've ever seen as a political scientist.

BOB POTTER: OK. I wonder if George or Paul wants to comment on the thrust of these remarks. George.

GEORGE DONAHUE: I don't think this is new with our current governor. These types of activities have gone on historically. Various so-called equity payments have been made to the rural areas, whether they're in the form of farm programs or in area redevelopment programs. So I think historically, he's correct. It's not necessarily a reparations as much as it is an equity payment, saying that, after all, you have historically put a lot of resources into young people.

They have fueled the expansion of the city and so forth, and you did not get any return out of that public investment. And in a sense, the rural areas are saying we wish some type of equity. We produce basic food and fiber, and we produce it in quantities as requested by the government during war and other periods. And yet we don't have the same type of price mechanism that General Motors or somebody else has that's in a position to dictate price quite frequently. Even though we think it's a competitive situation, it's certainly not.

BOB POTTER: Paul Gruchow.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well, I essentially agree with that. I certainly agree with the sense of the questioner that much of this effort is futile, isn't very helpful. I think the one long term thing that one could do in terms of development in rural Minnesota, as I doggedly call it, is to think carefully about the way in which we farm. And there's a trend toward a kind of agriculture that might, in fact, involve some repopulation of the countryside in a very modest way.

And it would be a development that had good environmental repercussions as well as good social repercussions for our communities. But that's very long term stuff, and it's very difficult. And the one general thing I might say beyond that is that I'm always puzzled by the use of the term political as a pejorative. It's like saying of a doctor that he's medical or a farmer that he's agricultural or something. Of course, governors are political. Why shouldn't they be?

BOB POTTER: Back to the phones. Another question here for our guests as we talk about urban rural differences. Hello, you're on the air.

AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm calling from uptown, Minneapolis.

BOB POTTER: All right.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: And just carrying on with this same theme, the old game of the ins and the outs, who is in, who is out, you end up with a term that becomes exclusive. And to me, it's-- your guests have talked around the heart of the matter, which is that the gap between the rich and the poor and the richest fifth and the poorest fifth of the country is wider than it has ever been.

And touching on what you said earlier about reparations, it's a guilt thing that. We want to help them out and all that, but we don't want to recognize the fact that our high living in the cities here really contributes to the problems in the rural, outstate, whatever you want to call it, part of Minnesota. I am not a native Minnesotan. I've only been living here a couple of years.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I'd be interested, George, if you've seen any figures on that. I have a strong impression that one of the things that has happened since the farm crisis of the 1980s is that the gap between rich and poor in the rural parts of Minnesota has in fact widened perhaps even more significantly than it has in the society in general. That one of the consequences of how we've lived is that.

GEORGE DONAHUE: Well, the stratification of incomes in rural areas has never been as great as it is in Metropolitan areas. And while it's increased slightly, it's not-- it's because of the diversification which is occurring in that area. As you pointed out in Worthington, a lot more occupations that are non-farm occupations at minimum wages where they're farming out, let's say, the practices to the rural areas simply because there's a cheaper labor advantage in that area.

But the real inequality in the country exists in the urban areas. The stratification, whether it's in the United States or South America or England or anyplace, that real stratification, the difference between the big and the low, the high and the low, is the biggest in the cities of the country as a whole. And it's growing at the present time. Clark, the British economist, Nelson, the US sociologist, and others have all documented the spread that's occurring in the system as a whole.

So really, the difference between rural and urban continues to exist. But it exists more not necessarily in terms of income, but in terms of services available. If you look at the number of services available, whether they're religious, economic, educational, and so forth, the rural areas suffer, relatively speaking, in terms of the per capita services they have at the present time. And people would argue they not only suffer in terms of the per capita, but they also suffer in terms of the quality of those services.

BOB POTTER: Back to the telephones and another question. Hello. Where are you calling from today?

AUDIENCE: Calling from Montrose. That's West of the cities.

BOB POTTER: OK.

AUDIENCE: Highway 12. I was on my way home, and I thought I'd better stop at a payphone to talk to you. I am originally from Buda, Texas. And it's not Buda. It's spelled B-U-D-A, and it's 13 miles West of Austin. And all my life, as I was growing up in Texas, I never had the trouble of with the rural area and the city area. First of all, there's a corridor that runs from San Antonio, maybe further, to Austin, and then you have Dallas. Interstate 35 goes through there, same as here.

And growing up, there was never a distinction whether the rule and the city life. And I find it so hard to hear everybody talking about let's label you this, let's label you that. When all you have to do is mention a town and anybody who's lived in Minnesota as long as they have should know where it's at, whether it's in the Central area, the Northern, the East, or the West, or the South.

BOB POTTER: Well, it's interesting point. And maybe we'll get our guests to comment, how big a rift is there, do you think, between urban and rural Minnesota? Paul.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well, I think there's always-- perhaps Texas is different from Minnesota. I don't know Texas well, but I can't think of a time in the century when there hasn't been certainly keen sense of consciousness about the differences, at least, in a general way, between urban and rural life. There's been a big change. I think we started the century assuming that the great Youmans myth was true, that to live on a farm somewhere in the countryside was to live a clean and pure and wonderful life.

And then we had the great revolt, at least in literature, in the 1920s. And following the Sinclair Lewis's of the world arrived with the news that it wasn't all purity in the countryside either. And I think we probably moved toward a sense that the good and pure life tends to be lived in urban areas. Now I really-- and I it just reflects where the majority of people live. Certainly, I think there's always been, at least in my mind, a sense of that division.

GEORGE DONAHUE: Historically, the Liberty Hyde Bailey's and others in the country life movement have always thought of the country as being a divinely ordained area and the city being artificial, man-made, and a den of iniquity. And the literature is full of the disputes between people about which would be the best place to rear children or which has the best cultural values and what-- the whole idea was that the country life with the independent entrepreneur on the farm and on Main Street was really a cornerstone of our socioeconomic philosophy of capitalism also. And whereas, the city, with its large corporate structures, was a departure from the historical notion that Adam Smith and others had about a free enterprise economy of that order.

BOB POTTER: Paul, I'm surprised to hear you say that you think now the good life is being led in the cities as opposed to the rural areas. The cities where there's problems of crime and drugs and things of that sort. In some of the small towns, people, at least one here, still leave their doors open at night or when they go to work during the day. You don't do that in the cities.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Probably shouldn't say this on the air, but I do.

[LAUGHTER]

BOB POTTER: Leave the door open.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Absolutely. But that's different from our perceptions generally about where people who are knowing and smart and aggressive and so on. What's happened in rural Minnesota is that in the course of the century, rural Minnesota has ceased to be a community of entrepreneurs. And it's really entrepreneurship that we have worshiped in effect. And the Youmans myth was an ideal that expressed a country made up of entrepreneurs. And in fact, entrepreneurship has become as rare in rural Minnesota as it is in urban settings. And so the ground has shifted, I think.

GEORGE DONAHUE: I think there's-- excuse me, you have brought up the usual stereotype of the city that rural people have--

BOB POTTER: Yes, I--

GEORGE DONAHUE: --by talking about the crime and the drugs and so on and so forth. Well, it depends on where you are in the city, whether you have crimes and drugs that you confront all the time. Most of the city doesn't have that. There are core areas in the city where the drugs are a tremendous problem.

But you find that in the city, the ways in which you can learn to cope and deal with these situations is such that they're not nearly as great as they would be for, let's say, a crime to occur in a rural area and upset this rather docile setting and be the topic of conversation for weeks on end. In the city, you learn to live with certain deviant behaviors, whether they're religious or criminal behaviors or whatever they happen to be, and you develop structures to deal with this as that are perhaps more effective than we have had historically.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Of course, I would say that. You brought up the other stereotype in the other direction, which is that small towns are docile places. I've never seen any evidence for that in my own experience in small towns. The adjective sleepy, which is just habitually applied to small towns-- they have their crimes and their drugs and their excitements just as people do anywhere. It works both ways.

GEORGE DONAHUE: --filtering down here. Exactly.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Correct.

BOB POTTER: Half past the hour here talking with Paul Gruchow, who is a writer and teacher of English at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota now, and George Donohue, rural sociologist at the University of Minnesota. On to your question, please. Thanks for waiting. Go ahead now.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. I'm calling from uptown, but not upscale Minneapolis. I grew up in Greater New York, and I've actually been through Buda, Texas.

GEORGE DONAHUE: Oh, good heavens. Hi, Stuart.

AUDIENCE: Hi. I spend a lot of time driving blue highways and back roads due to do my work as a photographer, and just down in the Carolinas. But see the same thing everywhere, and that's the phenomenon of the hollow Main Street. And some towns that se-- to all appearances because now they're ringed by those enterprises that once were in the middle of their city centers or town centers.

On the main streets, you see empty places mostly, and then small businesses that have nothing to do with anything that I would consider vital to the life of a community. And that seems to be endemic around this society. And I surmise some of the reasons why, but I just would like to get a more informed analysis of why the money has shifted whereas the towns haven't grown that much, and many cases, the towns don't look like they've lost much of their income.

BOB POTTER: Paul or-- Paul.

PAUL GRUCHOW: The generalization probably-- and then George can comment on this, but I think the generalization that is true is that at least small towns of a certain size, say 2,500 or 3,000 or somewhere in that range and above, in fact haven't lost a lot of population. That was a recent study that I saw by John Fraser Hart at the University of Minnesota, which looked at Minnesota towns carefully in terms of population trends and reached a conclusion that seems evident to me as I look at Minnesota.

But what has happened, of course, is that the economic base of many of those small towns has changed radically. The people still exist, and in some senses, the jobs still exist. But they tend to be manufacturing jobs, not retail and service jobs. In a sense, this grand generalization we have about becoming a service industry isn't working in rural Minnesota. And the result, I think, is serious in a social sense. I do think that we've lost a lot of the foundation for good communities. Even as we've kept the populations themselves and even the jobs, the sacrifice we've made is a sacrifice in the quality of those communities.

GEORGE DONAHUE: Hollow streets are a phenomenon throughout rural America and have been for a long while. If you were in Idaho, Montana, in the mountain towns, and so forth, you would find where mining fell out and went to South America and other areas earlier than it did in Minnesota, that you had these hollow main streets.

Hollow main streets in Minnesota are more frequent in areas that are monolithically structured in terms of agriculture being the base, because agriculture is consolidating and will continue to consolidate. Its consolidated at a slower rate in Minnesota than it has in either the Dakotas or Montana or Nebraska because all the farms were-- farmland, the fertile farmland was pretty much occupied under the old homestead. But the further West you went, the less that was true.

So the phenomena in Minnesota is-- it's coming to Minnesota a little later than it has come to other areas. But there hasn't been a disappearance of towns. They persist until the last thing is the bar on the corner. Even the church goes before the ubiquitous tavern leaves. And Four Corners, Minnesota is still there and it's listed in the census, the data that John Frazier Hart and others were dealing with. But it simply is not a community any longer. It's very incomplete at the present time.

BOB POTTER: I wonder where in that list the post office fits.

GEORGE DONAHUE: Yeah. The post office is consolidating very rapidly, as you know.

PAUL GRUCHOW: That's right. That's one of the big recent changes, as a matter of fact.

BOB POTTER: OK. Let's go back to the phones here and get some more questions. Paul Gruchow and George Donahue with us, and you're on the air with him. Hello.

AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I live in a rural part of the Metropolitan area.

[LAUGHTER]

PAUL GRUCHOW: Every variation here. Downtown Saint Paul.

[LAUGHTER]

BOB POTTER: What is your question today?

AUDIENCE: --dirt road. In a way, I find the whole concept-- I realize, some of the problems that you're discussing are rather serious. But I do tend to find the problem with what to call ourselves to be, at times, an exercise in absurdity. One would think that the brainpower state could find a better use for its talent. However, I have come up with a potential name that we could take on ourselves for the whole state, home of the objectless prepositional phrase.

[LAUGHTER]

I'm tempted to take out a post office box in Wisconsin just out of embarrassment when I'm corresponding with friends and relatives that get some of this-- when the wire services pick up, some of this silliness.

BOB POTTER: All right. Interesting comment there. I'm not sure that it demands a response. Gentlemen, if you care to, fine.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I think let's go on and--

BOB POTTER: Let's move on, find out what is on the minds of another caller here. You're on the air from where today.

AUDIENCE: Winona, Minnesota?

BOB POTTER: From Winona. Go ahead, please.

AUDIENCE: Well, I guess the first question is, should the Twin Cities area be able to issue any more building permits until they clean up their sewage effluent? And if they weren't, wouldn't this tend to disperse the population? Another problem I see with the Twin Cities area is the road building and maintenance in the Twin Cities outstrips the rest of the state. And of course, they have more population, but the other problem I see is that there are so many more state aid roads, even in the smaller areas of the Metropolitan area.

And I think this is caused by-- and I'd like a comment on it, caused by the fact that the political districts have been made pie shaped and all end in a small section of the Twin Cities. Consequently, we get a legislator from the Twin Cities, he's being voted on by people down as far as Red Wing. And to the North, I imagine, it's the same problem. And so the outstate areas out of the immediate Twin Cities are not really being represented.

BOB POTTER: Well, we have at least partly an infrastructure question here, sewers and roads. George, what's your view on that?

GEORGE DONAHUE: They are indeed problems. But I think he's looking down the road to whether or not the environmental impacts of large urban areas are such that they're not sustainable in the long run. And I would say that most people tend to take a technologic view of that. That somehow or another, we'll develop procedures and technology that will deal with the effluent-- we have to, their feeling is.

The idea of a redistribution of population by declaring a moratorium on building permits or migration has never squared very well in this country as a whole. And he hit the nail on the head of why that's true, and that's because the political power is in the city. And if we have to, we will ship whatever effluent we have or environmental waste down to Illinois or to Missouri or maybe ship it around on barges forever or shoot it out into space.

The feeling is that the political power that he spoke of-- we do gerrymandered districts. And historically, we've always gerrymandered districts in this country. And that political power struggle will go on forever, and it's one of the reasons why rural areas will continue to lose out, because they don't have a political base that they once had.

BOB POTTER: Paul Gruchow. Well, one observation to make on this, I think, is that it represents a characteristic pattern of thinking. And one challenge for us is to decide in the long run whether we can change that pattern of thinking. And the pattern of thinking is to say that technological solutions will override social and political priorities.

That is to say, with respect to the question that the caller from Winona asks, we might, on the one hand ask, is it good public policy to have most of Minnesota congregated in one place? Most of Minnesotans congregated in one place, is that good public policy? Would we like that in the long run? Would their citizens be best served and would the state be best served. And would our lives be happiest if that's the way we organize things?

And we allow ourselves to do it because we're confident that the technical problems like waste, we can solve technologically. So that we don't have to think about the public policy implications of what we do. It's a way of drifting, in effect, of letting the world take an unplanned course.

GEORGE DONAHUE: The question to the sociologist is not whether or not I would like another type of social situation or a different type of social policy. It's a question of why certain social policies have persisted? What are the forces, political, economic, and otherwise, that bring us to this state? If I begin to think in terms of setting a goal and saying, this is what I'd like to see and this is how I would like to achieve it, I can do that as an individual. But as an analyst, it becomes very difficult because then I'm superimposing whatever values I have on you, Paul, or anybody else.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I'm not suggesting you should do it as an analyst, but that we might do it as communities.

GEORGE DONAHUE: Oh, indeed. Indeed. We are doing that, except that Bush isn't going along with us.

[LAUGHTER]

BOB POTTER: The discussion continues here with George Donahue, rural sociologist from the University of Minnesota, and Paul Gruchow, chair of the Minnesota Humanities commission and English teacher at Saint Olaf College in Northfield. Next question. Go ahead. You're on the air. Thanks for waiting.

AUDIENCE: Hello.

BOB POTTER: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I'm calling for a listener in KDPR in the Brainerd area. This is Linda from KDPR, and he wanted to bring up upstate Minnesota as an alternative to a naming problem. I just called in with-- he said that that's what he's been using to refer to it to politicians and to people he talks to, and it's worked for him.

BOB POTTER: Upstate as opposed to outstate or greater or something. Well, they do that in New York. They call it upstate New York.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Upstate new York.

GEORGE DONAHUE: Which is a pseudonym for rural.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Right.

BOB POTTER: Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

All right. Well, that's another possibility for us to talk about.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I don't think Worthingtonians would want to be called upstate Minnesotans.

BOB POTTER: Well--

PAUL GRUCHOW: There's a geographical problem there. But--

BOB POTTER: How about downstate?

PAUL GRUCHOW: Downstate.

GEORGE DONAHUE: That's Illinois.

BOB POTTER: That's Illinois.

PAUL GRUCHOW: That's Illinois. That's right.

[LAUGHTER]

BOB POTTER: I don't know. I don't think we're ever going to get this language thing worked out here. Talking about urban rural differences, and on to your question. Hello there.

AUDIENCE: Hi. I have a comment and a question. I engaged in alternative farming for about four years. And it became clear to me that for every advantage, that there was a disadvantage in rural. In a rural setting, there was one of an equal magnitude in the urban setting. And so to say that one is better than the other seems like an impossible task. My question is, are there any incentives now for buying land or equipment to get more alternative farmers onto land in Minnesota?

BOB POTTER: Paul, that's an area you're interested in, I know.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well, I think the answer is that, at least in terms of federal policy, in fact, there are disincentives, this is one of the things we've got to work on. The National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report that in many ways is quite excellent on sustainable agriculture in this country. And one of the findings of the National Academy was exactly that.

That our federal policies, particularly as they relate to compensation for commodities, tend to lock us into a particular way of farming. Basically, the big scale industrial style of farming that we have come to and that we continue to practice and that we continue to develop. If we wanted to have a different kind of farming, we would need some changes in federal policy in particular to help achieve it.

GEORGE DONAHUE: Well, we've had a version of sustainable farming in the form of part time farming around the country as a whole. And it wasn't very great down in Worthington until more recently in the last 10 or 15 years. It used to be back in the '50s, about 10% in that area. It's up around 20 some percent now, I guess.

But in the areas where you have a lot of off farm employment, it becomes very important. And it's not really a resource-intensive usage of the land. 40% of our farmers are part time farmers in the nation as a whole, and they sell about 2% of the product. And in a sense that if you want to talk about sustainable agriculture, that is having people out in the country on the land living in an alternative lifestyle, that's probably the alternative that is going to grow the most in the next period of, let's say, a quarter of a century.

But I don't think you should forget the fact that rural areas aren't disappearing. Rural areas, if you take the number of people are in rural areas, there are more people right now in rural areas than there happened to be in the whole country at the turn of the century. There has been a relative decline because of the great increase in the Metropolitan areas, but we have about 70 some million people in rural areas right now. And that is in the most rural of rural. It's 2,500 or under.

Now, if you talk about non-metropolitan areas, many of which are quote, "rural" in terms of their functions, you would have perhaps hundreds million people or more living in what traditionally have been known as rural areas. So they are alive, but they're changing. And some areas are losing out just as some cities are losing out at the present time because of certain shifts in the economy as a whole.

BOB POTTER: What will be the characteristics of those which survive, do you think, and survive and thrive well into the new century?

GEORGE DONAHUE: Well, I think that what has happened is the setting has been there when the motor-- the car makers consolidated, say, one for seven. They used to have a car dealership in every community, and then they decided to consolidate about seven to one. And then the banks are consolidating, and the medical facilities.

And so if you look for the areas where they're consolidating, they're going to grow. And around those, we'll grow some bedroom or dormitory suburbs as happening in Worthington and Aiken and other areas. County seat towns-- but county towns that develop economically will survive. The others will survive insofar as they provide, let's say, dormitory basis.

Now, the big question is in the Western reaches of the state where we are having real problems, in Madison and other areas, maybe they'll have to have boarding schools. They have boarding schools in Montana and parts of the Dakotas and Idaho and other areas where they have a sparsity of population. And the churches are facing a tremendous problem now with congregations of something around 100, 150 in many of these communities.

BOB POTTER: Paul, do you think that we, as society, should let this take its course or should society intervene in some way to preserve those towns and those ways of life that might not otherwise survive?

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well, it seems to me that the one factor that might realistically change-- I've alluded to this earlier, and so did one of our callers, is that we might well decide for a variety of reasons, most of which don't have anything per se to do with rural America, but we might well decide that we wanted to farm in a different way. And if we decided that, it is possible that what seemed like inviolable trends at the moment would change. There's reason for people to want the way we farm to change, I think so. One could hope for that.

And we're talking about in particular breaking the fossil fuel and petrochemical dependency of farming. And again, the National Academy report that I've alluded to suggests that at the technical level, this is quite practical, but it can be done if we want to and if we have social policies in place which allow it. So that's one optimistic sign, I think, on the horizon for rural places.

BOB POTTER: All right. Let's go back to the phones here and get some more questions. Paul Gruchow is with us, chair of the Minnesota Humanities commission, English teacher at Saint Olaf college, and also George Donahue, rural sociologist from the University of Minnesota. Thanks for waiting. Where are you calling from today?

AUDIENCE: Southern Minnesota, sir.

BOB POTTER: From Southern Minnesota. Go ahead, please.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. Would you gentlemen care to discuss the impact of the large influx of Asian refugees upon the larger cities as well as the rural areas?

BOB POTTER: George Donahue.

GEORGE DONAHUE: Well, I think that Minnesota has one of the largest Hmong communities in the US. Apparently, the Hmong are adjusting reasonably well, according to all the information I have received, perhaps better than our forefathers did when they first came to this country given the difference in complexity that exists now in our system compared to then.

I would say that perhaps the contribution of the Asian population generally is to perhaps emphasize the traditional entrepreneurial aspects of our economy. They are highly individualistic. They're highly motivated individuals who show a great deal of energy and devotion to the traditional capitalism that has existed in this country. And so I would say that if people want this country to return to the individual entrepreneurial model, these people are excellent advocates of that position.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I think that's very much true. There's a wonderful thing that's happened, and I think a very sad thing that's happened as a result of this influx in rural places, at least Worthington. Minnesota is an example of a place that now supports an Asian grocery store, for example. The new diversity that's come to the countryside as a result of this influx of people has really been quite wonderful.

On the other hand, and I think in my own mind, this is the most serious social problem that we face in rural Minnesota. I think there has been a concomitant increase in open expression, at least, of racism in many rural communities. I think that's a very serious issue that industrial towns in rural Minnesota are facing. It's very nasty. It's a very open, and it's an issue that we are going to have to address one day soon.

GEORGE DONAHUE: It's very present not only in rural America, but urban America as well. And at the University, the prejudice towards the Asian graduate students who are more numerous than they have been in the past is at-- their levels of performance are so high, that they represent unfair competition at the present time. So I would say that typically, prejudice occurs when there is some sort of a competitive relationship between a group or an individual and another group an individual. And I think you're right on target with the idea that the yellow peril of a lot of Stoddard and others that was true in the '20s and so forth is rearing its head once again, in our system.

BOB POTTER: We have about 10 minutes left as we talk about urban rural differences. Here with George and Paul. And you're next. Thank you for waiting. Go ahead, please. Where are you calling from?

AUDIENCE: This is close to Southdale in the corner of Edina. And the differentiation between small town and suburb-- Hopkins, I think, is the smallest city I ever lived in. And when I lived there, people walked to work. They shopped there. They did everything. They didn't have to jump in a car to get their goods and services and all of that kind of stuff.

And I discovered that it really wasn't a suburb. It was a small town that happened to get surrounded by the suburbs. But I think the attitudes and the fact that if it is closely-centered, small community, people know your comings and goings. And many people, in my observation, have left the small town because they wanted the anonymity of the big city.

And I think that now those things have changed for Hopkins, as well as others, because there are not big enough employers to employ all of the labor that's available there. But I think there is a difference between a small town like Hopkins and the surrounding suburbs. And I'm still wondering, how much of Northfield is a bedroom community for the Twin Cities?

BOB POTTER: All right. Paul, you live in Northfield. What do you think about that?

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well, I live in Northfield, but I've lived there for three months, so I--

BOB POTTER: Oh, not exactly an expert on that.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I can't claim to be an expert on that. This question about small towns in that sense is interesting to me because I say to people, and it's true, that the best small town I ever lived in was the neighborhood that I lived in, in Saint Paul. In the classic sense that we talk about the virtues of small towns, having neighbors and having an organization that they walk to level and having people looking out for each other and so on. I think that occurs probably as often and maybe more often than in many urban settings as it does in rural communities. So the distinction is one that seems to me to entirely depend upon the characteristics of the neighborhood you live in, not the setting, rural or urban and--

GEORGE DONAHUE: I think it's the escape that the Metropolitan area permits you. For instance, in any community you live in, your immediate neighborhood will know something about you, who you are, and what your comings and goings are, and look out for one another, more so in some areas than in other areas. But once you move beyond the residence to your workplace and, let's say, to a recreational place, those are all segregated in a large Metropolitan area whereas they're not as segregated in a small town.

And so I think that the escape-- that gives you the anonymity that he spoke of, gives you this degree of freedom from the social pressures that you would find in a small community. Everybody you meet in the city may be-- in your neighborhood may know you, but people you meet, let's say, in downtown, Saint Paul don't know you.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Yeah, I think that's true. And I think the compensation, the small town compensation on the other side of that equation, is that I'm convinced that-- I've not lived in a suburb, but I have lived in big cities and I've lived in small towns. And the thing about small towns that I particularly liked simply as a resident is that the diversity of our social acquaintances, it seems to me, has been very much broader in small communities out of necessity than it has been in urban places. I can spend a life on the fringe of the Twin Cities now dealing with other academics and writers and so on and get pretty isolated in a way that I simply couldn't when I was living in Worthington.

GEORGE DONAHUE: If you're in a more affluent bracket, and I'm assuming you are, Paul, that whether you live in the country or small town or the city really doesn't make that much difference because even in the small town, if you want accessibility to the Guthrie, you go to the Guthrie, if you often talk to bankers and others who can afford it.

But the lower incomes in the small towns are far more restricted and perhaps have less in the opportunity structure available to them. You're labeled in a small town more so than a large town. You're so-and-so's son. And if so-and-so did this, that, and the other thing, you're expected to behave in that fashion as well. And you're really pushed into that channel of behavior.

BOB POTTER: We have less than five minutes left. I want to get a couple of callers on too. But one thing I'd like to have you both respond to before we run out of time, we've talked about the differences between urban and rural Minnesota. We've talked about the split between them and so on, some of the stereotypes that each have of the other. What do we have in common as Minnesotans, do you think? Paul Gruchow.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well, I think we have almost everything in common.

BOB POTTER: We have more similarities than differences?

PAUL GRUCHOW: Oh, I think there's no doubt about that. And I think the similarities have grown stronger with the decades. We read the same newspapers. We have the same allegiances to sports teams. We buy the same commercial products. We see the same television programs. I think the culture gets more homogenized all the time. One can be happy about that or sad about it, but I think it's just a fact, that we're so interconnected now that at the cultural level, at least, those distinctions don't survive.

The exception that George was talking about earlier, I think, is very much true. There is, for seriously economically disadvantaged people living in small towns, a deprivation that sets that group of people quite apart from the rest of Minnesota. But it's a circumstance of economics, not a place.

BOB POTTER: George, a quick observation.

GEORGE DONAHUE: I think there are certain things that transcend, such as the sports teams and so forth. But I still think that while-- I don't think the modernization is as great if we look at the data on differentiation. Because the characteristic thing of a city and as the diversity occurs, you get this differentiation of people, this degree of specialization. You're forced to deal with writers and artists and so forth in the large city.

And as the country becomes that way, I think where we're getting together is the interdependencies between the small town and the large town. We have to get along. Particularly, the small town is forced to get along. If it's going to survive. It has to develop the infrastructure, the linkages with the larger system in order to exist.

But all of this said and done, I think the real thing we haven't even touched upon, and perhaps we should have, we don't have time to, is the global system we're going in at the present time and what consequences that has for the small town as well as for our Metropolitan areas. When it comes to farming, I don't think we're going to be a first class farming nation much beyond 2025. I think really, what we're going to do is export all these environmental problems to other systems around the world, whether it's in--

PAUL GRUCHOW: We're already doing it.

GEORGE DONAHUE: I know, but it's going to be mass scale. We're not going to be an agricultural producer the way we are at the present time.

BOB POTTER: I think you've just hit upon the topic for another hour, another time.

GEORGE DONAHUE: [LAUGHS]

BOB POTTER: Thank you both very much for coming in. Most interesting.

PAUL GRUCHOW: It's great to be here.

GEORGE DONAHUE: I've enjoyed it.

BOB POTTER: Paul Gruchow, who is a writer, lives in Northfield now, teaches English at Saint Olaf College, chair of the Minnesota Humanities commission. And George Donahue, rural sociologist from the University of Minnesota. As we talked about rural-urban differences in the state of Minnesota.

All right. Briefly, the weather outlook for Minnesota. Partly to mostly sunny and warmer this afternoon. Highs ranging from the upper 30s in the Northeast to the mid 50s in the south. Then partly cloudy in the North both tonight and tomorrow. Cloudy in the South. Lows tonight in the teens and 20s, and highs tomorrow in the mid 30s to 40s. And there's a chance of showers in the South tomorrow.

A reminder that today's broadcast of Midday was made possible with financial assistance from the James R. Thorp Foundation. Stay with us, many more interesting things ahead this afternoon on Minnesota Public radio. This is Bob Potter. This is KNOW Minneapolis-Saint Paul in the Twin Cities. 46 degrees under sunny skies. Looking for a high of 50 today. Right now, a soft wind of 15.