“Without the Midwest, what was America?” So asked historian Paul Johnson in Modern Times, his comprehensive 1983 survey of the 20th century. Johnson, a Brit, understood why the region was so important to the United States, giving it a spiritual core, supplying a rooted moral center, and making it more than “a mere coastal fringe.” The coastal fringe often has contempt for the supposed Midwestern backwater, but that doesn’t lessen the need for the latter. If anything, it only reinforces that need.
But to accept that the Midwest is essential to America is to raise another question: What is the Midwest? It is a popularly disputed question. The U.S. Census Bureau divides the regional category in two: “East North Central” (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin); and “West North Central”: Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
The Census designations have not settled the matter, however. Perhaps a recent survey by Emerson College Polling and the Middle West Review, “the only scholarly print publication dedicated exclusively to the study of the Midwest as a region,” can. It collected more than 11,000 responses from residents of 22 states — some traditionally Midwestern, some thought of as adjacent — asking whether they believed their state was Midwestern, and whether they considered themselves Midwestern. The most self-identified Midwestern states, in the survey’s findings, are Iowa and Minnesota, 97 percent of whose surveyed residents believe they live in the Midwest. Most surveyed residents of Missouri, Illinois, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, South Dakota, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Wyoming also believed they “live in the Midwest.”
The survey introduces some fascinating complications, however. One is evident from the above list, which includes several states typically considered part of the Great Plains, and nearly encompasses Colorado (42 percent of whose residents consider their state Midwestern). Combine that with the fact that residents of a given state gave different answers concerning whether their state is Midwestern and whether they considered themselves Midwestern, and we have the makings of a cultural identity that is not entirely dependent on region. It instead becomes something to which people from other regions can aspire, or from which others in the region itself can shrink.
As a resident of Washington, D.C., from Ohio, I consider myself a Midwesterner-in-exile. But this survey gives a bit more evidence than I am comfortable with to those spurious partisans who would cast Ohio out of the Midwest: Only a little more than three-quarters of Ohioans believe they live in the region. These breakaway Buckeyes are sadly mistaken. They ought to embrace the rich history of their state as part of the Northwest Territory, the original core of the Midwest, and as an essential force in ending the Civil War (as I have written, “a conflict often perceived as primarily between New Englanders and Deep Southerners in fact required the Midwest to resolve”). And they should be proud of the powerful culture of humble Midwestern free-soil republicanism that both contributed to and emerged from that history.
The survey’s many fascinating results make a strong case for additional investigation of Midwestern regional identity. “These intriguing results underscore the strength of Midwestern identity, despite what some have claimed, and further justify the efforts being made to study the Midwest and its history,” said Jon Lauck, the editor of Middle West Review and the author of The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest. There are many good reasons for further inquiry. Not only to settle, once and for all, what states qualify as parts of the Midwest. But also to identify, preserve, and cultivate the Midwestern character, which does so much to make this country great.