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The Midwest: The Region That Made America

The Lost Region. Toward a Revival of Midwestern History. Jon K. Lauck. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013.

 

The Midwest today receives less attention than other regions of the United States from the political and cultural elites of this country. Part of this is due to its political and economic decline, particularly when compared to the Sun Belt; the perception of its stable normality and its uncomfortable distinctness; and the difficulty of defining the region itself. These and other reasons gives credence to the characterization of the region as the Rust Belt, Flyover Country, or Middle America where the food is bland, the people boring, and culture lowbrow.

This perception was not always so. In the early twentieth century, Midwesterners sought to create something new and distinctive, whether in the scholarship of Frederick Jackson Turner, the painting of Grant Wood, or the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. The Midwest became the center of the nation’s transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture; the birthplace of the American labor movement; and assimilated immigrant and migrants into what later became perceived as “normal” Americans. Its accent even became the national standard, lacking any notable regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics. The paradox of the Midwest was that because it had shaped what it meant to be an American, it had lost its regional identity. Being seen as representative of the country, the Midwest had the West, the South, New England, and other regions defining themselves against it, because they had come to believe what was America was emblematic in the Midwest.

But even before the twentieth century, the Midwest played a crucial role in the American history by sparking the events that culminated into the American Revolution, stabilizing the young republic by making it economically strong, and providing the necessary aid for the North to win the Civil War. But perhaps more important was the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Confederation Congress in 1787 that defined the region with its republican institutions, natural rights, public education, prohibition of slavery, and peaceful relations with Native Americans. Unlike the aristocratic East or the hierarchical South, the Midwest was more democratic and more egalitarian.

Today, the Midwest is a place of neglect and decline. The absence of academics and cultural elites committed to studying the region, the fluidity of its borders, and the paucity of defining moment makes the region an abandoned one. The region’s continual economic, demographic, and political decline culminated in the 2013 bankruptcy of the city of Detroit, symbolizing the end of perceived normality for a new, uncharted era: meth labs rather than farms, urban violence instead of unions, deindustrialization than revitalization. As a result of the deliberate policies pursued by the federal government – the globalization of trade, labor, and finance – the Midwest became transformed into a place of labor unrest, political polarization, and departing talent. The success of the other regions to persuade the nation of the benefits of globalization led these regions to enrich themselves at the expense of the Midwest for an America today that is more unequal and individualistic and less democratic and communal.

As political, economic, and demographic power shifts from the Midwest to the South and West, the region’s cultural contributions are overlooked except for the occasional stereotypes of Minnesota Nice as portrayed in Fargo or the discussions of harsh winters on the Weather Channel. Its institutions of public education, labor unions, and cultural assimilation have been eclipsed by the left-wing identity politics of the East, the religious fervor of the South, and the libertarian politics of the West. What was once considered normal or typical in America – tolerant, civil, and a readiness to compromise – has been crowded out in the public imagination by the cultures of the other regions. Although the residue of these traits still reside in the Midwest, they have been disregarded and projected onto another country called Canada.

To reclaim its rightful place in the conversation about what it means to be American, the Midwest first has to understand its own history as a region. To this end, Jon K. Lauck’s The Lost Region is an insightful and much-needed account about the rise and fall of the study of the Midwest among American historians. Although he focuses on the prairie Midwest, as opposed to the Great Lakes, Lauck has written a book that explains a region that is known but not understood, even among its own inhabitants. In four chapters, with an introduction and epilogue, Lauck’s book is accessible to both the academic and public reader, deepening their knowledge about the Midwest and people who made the region known to America.

In the first chapter, Lauck accounts for the importance of the Midwest in American history, the region where the British and French Empire collided and that sparked the French and Indian War (1754-63), the liquidation of France’s New World Empire, and Britain’s acquisition of it. However, the British blundered its colonial policies of taxation and administrative control of the Midwest, which caused Virginia, which had maintained claims to it, to support the American Revolution. After independence, the settlement of the Midwest led the Confederation Congress to pass the Northwest Ordinance, which institutionalized the process of state-making for this region and later for the rest of country. The Midwest made its presence felt again in national politics during the Civil War where it enhanced the Union’s military and economic power, by some estimates, up to 50%. The region would continue to make its contribution to national causes in similar ways during the World Wars with its human, industrial, and agricultural resources. The Midwest also affected national political and intellectual life by creating a distinctive culture apart from eastern elites: a politics of populism and progressivism, small towns and farms alongside urban industrialization, and a slew of cultural institutions like state historical societies, libraries, museums, and public universities.

Chapter two traces the rise and fall of the Prairie School of history that started with Frederick Jackson Turner and his frontier thesis: American democracy was a result of the Midwest’s egalitarianism and absence of violence rather than the influence of the Puritans and New England. The creation of the Mississippi Valley Historian Association (MVHA) in 1907 and the Agricultural History Society in 1919 provided the institutions to explore the themes of Midwestern regionalism and its role in American national history, its democratic practices and egalitarian social order, and the importance of constitutionalism, law, and democratic rights. But, by the 1950s, the Prairie School had lost its influence in American academia with attacks on Turner’s frontier thesis and the ambitions of the MVHA to transform itself into a national organization, the Organization of American Historians, in 1965 was at the expense of the study and teaching of Midwestern history.

This loss of organization focus among Midwestern historians was not the only flaw that led to a precipitous decline of Midwestern studies. In chapter three, Lauck shows how the Prairie School’s neglect of women and minorities and “soft” anti-Semitism also contributed to its demise. In spite of these blemishes, the Prairie School did achieve a foundation of historical knowledge in their collection of historical material for an empirical and objective interpretation of the evidence. This aspiration for a scientific history based on facts and evidence may not be ever possible, but Midwestern historians’ self-conscious awareness of their own biases as well as their incredible work in archival research and other historical endeavors made their goals admirable.

In the final chapter and epilogue, Lauck calls for a return to the study of Midwestern history in the spirit of Frederick Jackson Turner: to explain to a broader audience the significance of one’s studies. Although there are several obstacles to such an enterprise – skepticism of grand narratives, intellectuals attacking the Midwest, the discrediting of the work of Turner – Lauck believes that the Midwest can be rejuvenated as an academic subject for contemporary scholars, whether in social history, new rural history, Native American research, or studies about Populism and the Great Depression. Lauck hopes that the cohesion of the Prairie School can be recovered in making the Midwest a region for scholars to revisit once again.

It remains too early to see whether there will be a revitalization of Midwest as a subject of study and as a region. But in this age of globalization, one of the paradoxes has been that regional identity has mattered more, whether in Scotland, Spain, or the United States. This may seem contrary to those who expected that a globalized world would yield cosmopolitans instead of regionalists, yet this might be beneficial to the country, with different models showing how one can live. Rather than being representative of the nation and standing in for its normality, scholars and citizens of the Midwest could finds what makes the region distinctive and thereby reinvent it by looking both towards its past and future for a more egalitarian, democratic, and fair society as a model for all.

 

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Lee Trepanier is Chair and Professor of the Political Science Department at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and former editor-in-chief of VoegelinView (2016-21). He is author and editor of several books and editor of Lexington Books series Politics, Literature, and Film (2013-present).

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