Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America

Throughout Amity and Prosperity, Griswold is attuned to how general attitudes toward the role of the federal government lead to a lack of regulation over companies like Range Resources. Such deregulation allows Range to ignore vital safety measures which protect the environment and citizens from harmful pollution and chemicals.

Throughout Washington County, most residents hold a negative view toward both the state and federal governments, seeing them at best as an ineffective nuisance and at worst as an active nuisance. Many of Washington County’s residents are poor or working-class farmers who believe that the bureaucrats running government agencies have little knowledge of what is most effective for their towns. The county leans heavily conservative and tends to view forms of regulation as a hindrance to their individual well-being: “As people in Amity saw it, the [Environmental Protection Agency] didn’t fix problems. They created them, by pointing out issues that required residents to pay for expensive alterations or face government fines” (75).

While governmental agents saw Amity’s residents as an “abstraction,” filtered through data, Griswold emphasizes that “policy made in Washington, D.C., affected people’s jobs, and their health” (223). In Chapter 7, Griswold explores how this mistrust of government has remained at the core of Amity since its founding.