
Bridging the Gap Between Urban and Rural
Like many in the rural Electoral College Homesteaded States, I was raised on a family farm in Michigan. My family came from the Netherlands in the late 1800s after the civil war ended and the United States was soliciting families to come to America to settle the Midwest and West. The Amish and the Calvinists (my ancestors), came for religious freedom. The U.S. railroad companies, which were the economic kings at the time, wanted hardy settlers to settle around their new lines to the West. They established offices in various Northern European countries soliciting farmers, with the promise of 80 acre plots, to satisfy their economic interest in having the land surrounding the railways to the West Coast surrounded by prosperous farms. Though not disclosed to these farmers, the secondary agenda was for security around the railroad lines. Immigrants at the time came for economic opportunity, religious freedom, or both.
My father was the last generation to farm with a team of horses. He was drafted at the end of WW II and when he returned from his service in Korea in the 1950s he got married, returned to farming, and eventually bought his first tractor. In my early years in the 1960s our farm still had an outhouse and a hand pump in the kitchen for water. We certainly did not have a television. Our house was heated with wood, which we cut down over the summer, and my day started at 4:30 am in the winter when I got up to re-stoke the fire so that it would be warm by 5:30 am when everyone else got up. Some of my grandparents, who lived into their 100s (and were infants on the ships that came from the Old World), were still alive when I was born. Many of their stories, skills, and attitudes were passed down directly from them to me. It puts in perspective how young our country really is.
My mother had plans for me that did not involve the farm. Through relentless lobbying she was able to secure a spot for me as a Rotary exchange student and when I was 15 I went to live for a year in Uberlândia, Brazil. My parents had numerous arguments over this as my father was essentially losing his only farm hand. My mother’s point was that she wanted me to see that there was life outside of the farm and to expand my horizons. And I did. My mother also knew that I would be the first generation on either side of the family to attend college.
Interestingly, the view of both my parents was that the purpose of college was to teach you how to think, to make you interesting, and to prepare you for graduate school. It did not prepare you for a job. The farm already did that – by the time a farm kid is 15, having worked every day from sun up to sun down, you essentially have a dozen apprenticeships under your belt. I could have walked into any factory or machine shop and been immediately productive. I still can.
College was merely the requirement for getting into law or medical school. As a farm kid, those were the only two professions of which I was aware. I chose Kalamazoo College because it had a mandatory foreign study program, Brazil having been such an enriching experience. I spent my junior year abroad in Strasbourg, France. Had I not gone to college, I could have obtained a job anywhere where I was raised because of the skills I acquired on the farm.
After college, I went on to law school and upon graduation began private practice as a litigator at the Detroit office of a Philadelphia law firm. At the invitation of the Corporate Group in Philadelphia, I switched practices to corporate law, eventually leaving the firm and going in house at a large regional bank. I eventually ended up as General Counsel of a Fortune 500 company.
This path of extremes used to be common and was followed by many farm kids. As the farm to urban exodus ran its course, the urban landscape was sprinkled with people like me. Not by design.
Organically, politicians, corporations, education, and science all had robust diversity of background in their staffs and employees because so many people came from farm and military backgrounds.
That period has ended and all of that diversity has aged out. People like me used to translate between rural and urban and act as ambassadors between the two. This natural diversity is gone and it simply hasn’t occurred to politicians that it is in their interest to re-create it.
When I worked at the bank in Detroit, out of the blue, and thinking I never wanted children, I was asked to adopt my great niece. For whatever reason I said yes and 48 hours later she was in my arms. My niece later told me that the reason she asked me is because the father was black and I was the only one in the family who wouldn’t care. She said it helped that I was gay and would have experience with discrimination. This was more true than I even imagined at the time. Not wanting my daughter to think that everyone had all the resources that I and my neighbors in Grosse Pointe, Michigan had, I became a licensed foster home for the City of Detroit. I did temporary, emergency and respite placement in part to ensure that my daughter had a view into another segment of America. This again was a sobering experience. It was also extremely rewarding. Though I had no intention of adopting a second child, through a series of unusual events I ended up adopting a second child out of foster care at the age of 4 – which is outside the age most people are willing to adopt.
This created an entirely new lens for me to see through, my family being one of extremes. It is not every day one encounters a corporate lawyer, a single, gay, tall, blue eyed Dutch guy with two black children.
While working in Denver at a farm credit bank, I co-founded an organization with a sitting federal judge called “Law School Yes We Can.” The purpose of this organization is to increase the number of under-represented people within the legal system through a program of mentoring. This organization has been enormously successful.
Right as the Covid epidemic began, both my parents passed away and I ended up inheriting the family farm. Because of Covid, I remained on the farm and became re-acquainted with rural life. It again gave me a whole new perspective on how large the gap between urban and rural has become and how there just aren’t many people left who can act as translators between the two.
I hope to use this experience to help Democrats connect with rural voters.