Jack Butler wrote recently about the challenges and intricacies of defining the Midwest. Ultimately, he found that the freshwater walleye fish is the most decisive metric, though even the worthy fish is an imperfect gauge. For my money, the Midwest can best be established by its relationship with waterways combined with its status as a stronghold of free states preceding the Civil War. From these two points, there can be drawn ethnic, cultural, and religious similarities that stay near-consistent across a thousand-mile span.
Any American land within about 150 miles of the Great Lakes should be considered Midwestern, with the Mississippi river beginning the West — sorry, Iowa. Central Europeans and Scandinavians decamped from their native lands, crossed the Atlantic entering the Great Lakes chain, and found the soil of their adopted land good and useful.
These settlers de-stumped and de-stoned acres upon acres with their neighbors and established churches and schools that preached and taught in their native tongues — likely without permits and EPA oversight. Drive through the countryside of Wisconsin or Michigan, and one can tell by the denominations and architecture whether the Dutch or the Polish farmed the surrounding land. Because of this immigrant sedimentation, upstate New York closely resembles Minnesota and all places in-between.
Just as crucial to the Midwestern self-conception as immigrant farmers and loggers is the relative progressivism that saw them vociferously maintain their status as free states decades before the Civil War — Wisconsin going as far as to tell the federal government where to stick its Fugitive Slave Act. It’s no accident that the anti-slavery Republican Party began in Ripon, Wis., and that Abraham Lincoln was an Illinois boy. Religious distaste for slavery, as well as a Protestant emphasis on a personal work ethic that sickened at the decadent plantation model, made the chattel-slavery system of the South an unpalatable proposition to the small farms dotting the brooding forests of the Midwest.
Ultimately, the Midwest defies state lines just as it does certainty — mainly on account of Midwesterners being too polite to tell places such as Missouri that they don’t count. It’s an amorphous blob of cultural and religious tradition extending from the East and traveling parallel to the Great Lakes, taking the route of French fur traders and generations of Europeans thereafter. What I can tell you is that it’s where casseroles and hotdish are synonymous, lutefisk is unironically served, and “yeah, no” means “no.” Yeah?