Rural Liberalism​​​
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I began my professional life as an economic historian examining the German beet sugar industry. This industry was inexorably linked with the liberalism and the National Liberal party. The birthplace of the industry was in the Prussian province of Saxony (currently the Land of Sachsen-Anhalt) spreading over into the province of Hanover and the Grand Duchy of Braunschweig. The industry was incredibly profitable and benefited all rural producers in the region, not just the beet farmers or sugar factory owners. Its reputation was economically progressive and liberal. Hence my dissertation, “Rural Politics and Sugar: A Comparative Study of the National Liberal Party in Hannover and Prussian Saxony, 1871-1914”. I continued this examination in two conference papers, “Sugar Barons and Bureaucrats: Unraveling the Relationship between Economic Interest and Government in Modern Germany, 1799-1945.”delivered at the 1992 Business History Conference in Pasadena, California and “Liberals and Sugar. A Study in Interest Group Representation.” delivered at the 1989 meeting of the German Studies Association conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I returned to the sugar industry in “State Policy and Differential Development in the German Sugar Industry, 1800-1871,” Competing for the Sugar Bowl, ed. Roger Munting and Tomas Szmrecsanyi, (St. Katherinen: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 2000), pp. 16-38.
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Already before my defense, I presented “The German Peasant League and National Liberal Revival” at the 1987 meeting of the German Studies conference in St. Louis, Missouri. This resulted in a journal article “The German Peasant League and the Limits of Rural Liberalism in Wilhelmine Germany,” Central European History, 24(1991): 147-175, and an encyclopedia article, “Deutscher Bauernbund" (p. 264)”, in The Encyclopedia of Antisemitism, Anti-Jewish Prejudice and Persecution, ed. Richard S. Levy, (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2005).At an early juncture in this work, I had hoped to continue my research on the Bauernbund into the Weimar Republic but was stymied by the paucity of sources. I have since found more and plan to return to the topic in the near future.
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When I discovered GIS, I returned to the topic of rural liberalism in “Local dimensions of the ‘crisis of liberalism’ in East Frisia as reflected in the German elections of 1881 and 1884” a paper that I presented in March 2004 at the conference of the European Social Science History Association in Berlin, Germany and “The Political Sociology of North German Moor and Fehn Communities" presented at the April 2014 conference of the European Social Science History Association in Vienna, Austria.
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As my career progressed, I was drawn the topics of antisemitism and the question of how the heretofore liberal areas along the North Sea coast went enthusiastically to National Socialism at a very early date. In the Reichstag election in May 1924, the völkisch alliance in the Ostfriesian Kreis of Wittmund won the highest percentage of votes recorded in any county in Germany. This led to two public lectures (“Liberals into Nazis” and "Liberals into Anti-Semites”) and an uncompleted article manuscript, "Triumph on the Periphery: Political Anti-Semitism in Rural Northern Germany."
The COVID pandemic interfered with a planned “last trip” to Germany to complete research for my Peasants and Jews manuscript, and in any case I had grown tired of constantly thinking about evil people and decided to turn to the “good guys”, particularly the progressives in Oldenburg. My most recent venture into this topic was “Theodor Tantzen and the Limits of Progressive Rural Policy in Northwest Germany,” that I presented at the April 2025 meeting of the European Social Science History Association conference in Leiden, the Netherlands. I have developed so much material that I found interesting that I plan on continuing my work on rural liberalism, this time using insights that I have developed using my GIS.
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