July 17, 2003

Plains Folk: Micropoli

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

We have some new words to get used to, coming to us courtesy of the U.S. government. I can feel you flinching out there, but take heart, these words actually make sense for us on the plains, even if they are inelegant.

A half-century ago one of the great minds of the Great Plains wrestled words for how society in our country is structured, spatially. He was Carl Kraenzel, a boy from Hebron, North Dakota, who grew up to be the most eminent sociologist the region has produced. He spent most of his career on the faculty of Montana State University. While on leave in Iran, in 1955, he published his masterwork, The Great Plains in Transition.

Kraenzel knew what the society of the plains would look like in future. Think of a slide of tissue under a microscope. Looking down at it, you see the tissue is divided into cells, a nucleus in the middle of each. Smaller bits of matter are satellites around the nuclei. Now, label those nuclei with names like Kearney, Nebraska, or Dickinson, North Dakota. The smaller bits have names like Lodgepole or Crosby. In between, open space.

That’s what things look like today. The bulk of the population on the plains live in small cities. The people who live in small towns, though, and even the people who live on farms and ranches, also are wrapped up in the affairs of the little cities. These are the places we go for parts, clothing, medical care or just a good time. We grew up with this social structure, which is fundamentally different from the rural world of a century ago. I call it a post-rural society. It’s no longer rural, but it’s not really urban, either.

Growing up in Barton County, Kan., I experienced just the tail end of rural society, with card parties at the country school and all that. Then the school was consolidated, and I went to school in a small town, Ellinwood. For fancy dining, though, or for a drive-in picture show, we drove to Great Bend.

Great Bend was not my hometown, so what do I call it to express the relationship we had with it? Kraenzel was stumped. People just used the specific names--Great Bend, Kearney and Dickinson--or indicated the small city with a wave of the arm, he said. Kraenzel also invented his own words, referring to the little cities and the main lines of transportation as the "sutland," and to the small towns and open space as "yonland."

Now comes the Bureau of the Census with a new statistical designation, the "micropolitan statistical area." It’s not a metropolis, it’s a micropolis. (Which sounds like where Superman might have gone for a good time when he was growing up in Smallville, before he moved to Metropolis.)

A micropolis, as induced from the 2000 census, has "at least one urban cluster of at least 10,000" population, with all the people around it "having a high degree of economic and social integration with that core." The bureau recognizes 560 micropolitan statistical areas in the U.S.

Get out a road map of your own state (or province) on the plains, and you’ll see that essentially the whole state is composed of micropoli (plural still indeterminate). Examples: Wahpeton, Williston, Swift Current, Aberdeen, Norfolk, Alva, Salina, Emporia, and Hays--OK, you get the idea. The census bureau calls these "principal cities" of their respective metropolitan statistical areas.

Which is to say, the government is no better than a sociologist at naming things. Language in the air sometimes has a hard time capturing reality on the ground.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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