It’s near the end of pandering season in my home state of Iowa — a political season rather than a meteorological one, also occurring in New Hampshire and other states every four years. Suddenly, for a short period, a few states are awash in politicians and pundits trying to understand what lurks in the hearts of rural voters.

Few people, others than those living there, give the Midwest the respect it deserves for its vibrant cultural contributions and the fundamental goodness of its people. Even some residents shortchange it.

I gave up my bristling anger over East (and West) Coast snobbery decades ago because it was too common and persistent to combat. And after 50 years of New England life, I can feel bits of it creeping into my knee-jerk reactions when I read about some of the bonehead politicians who have hijacked Iowa and a wide swath of its geographic neighbors. Iowa now counts as a solid red state rather than the battleground purple it was for years.

But in general, I have retained positive memories, visions, and connections with the area and people that brought me into my 20s, including a grandfather who never owned a tractor and only swore at mules and bankers, and school friends with whom I shared the agonies and ecstasies of growth from child to young adult.

In the 1980s, I mapped out a book titled “Faith and Disillusion,” meant to explore the monumental changes that occurred in my hometown and across the region during my youth and after (sparked by the “Farm Crisis” foreclosures of the time), but never managed to pursue it beyond a few dozen rejections of the proposal. I was guessing at some trends that I believed in passionately at the time (and still do), particularly those related to the boom and bust of corporate industrialization, as well as the corporate-financed move from smaller farms to increasingly larger, mechanized agriculture.

A new nonfiction book, “The Lies of the Land” by Steven Conn, reviewed in The New Yorker on Oct. 16, shows that I guessed right, at least some of the time. It provides events and statistics that dispute a sentimental view of the Midwest which falsely portrays it as an area removed from urban influences and founded by dogged individual effort. In this view, people formed communities with deeper roots than coastal cities (although Eastern cities were decades, even centuries, older), and weathered the free-market storm of supply-and-demand economics.

Conn points out that landowners may have been rugged individuals, but ownership itself was granted by the federal government after 1,600 military battles with Indigenous people, and multiple violated treaties. The Homestead Act of 1862 (and its extensions) continued to give away formerly Indigenous lands until 1988, using standard mile-square grids. The graph-paper regularity of gravel roads is striking when seen from above.

Another part of the myth, according to Conn, is that small, family-owned farms have a long and important history across the Midwest. Instead, he notes that the trend towards mechanization and industrial principles has been happening for 100 years or more.

Most of the small farms left behind during the drought years and Depression had been established only a few decades previously. Large, corporate groups consistently bought them, then used the newest machinery and scientific knowledge to replace antiquated family practices and bring crop yields per acre to unheard-of levels. The “Farm Crisis” of the 1970s and ’80s, when families tried to hang on to smaller farms in the face of daunting economic realities and inspired the ”Farm Aid” concerts by Willie Nelson and others, continues today, so persistent that Conn suggests it’s no longer a crisis, but merely an everyday reality.

During pandering season in 1988, Michael Dukakis suggested that financially challenged Iowa farmers try growing Belgian endive like some small farms in Massachusetts. He was widely ridiculed for his failure to understand modern, large-scale farming (although he won the state) because he relied on a persistent myth. Conn says calling 1,500 acres of subsidized and genetically modified corn intended for a high-fructose syrup factory a “farm” is like calling an automated GM factory a “workshop.” Large farms and factories also draw on the same source of labor: Two-thirds of the hired workforce on farms today is foreign-born.

Essentially absent from the Midwest for 50-plus years, I can claim little current knowledge of the area or its people. But I do understand the anger shown in elections toward the elites who feign interest during pandering season but disappear shortly afterward.

Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era historical fiction novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on Saturdays. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.