Hunter Dickinson is a college basketball player. For three years, he played for the University of Michigan. This coming year, he will play for the University of Kansas. He is enjoying his time in Lawrence. “Super-, super-welcoming,” he said. “Super-nice. Definitely get those Midwest vibes.”
And in Ann Arbor? “They were nice people, but not as nice. I feel like Michigan is like a fake Midwest.”
Well. I begin my Impromptus column today with this subject. I go on to politics, language, and various other things. But, here in the Corner, let us stay with the subject of the Midwest.
I asked some National Review people for a word. Scott Howard is from Hartford, S.D. He writes,
From South Dakota the view of the Midwest is all of Middle America stretching from our western borders to Ohio in the east and from the Canadian border to Oklahoma in the south. People in the Rust Belt may disagree, but South Dakotans refer to themselves and their region as the Midwest. Culturally the region, or at least the Plains part of the Midwest, has a strong sense of rootedness; people do not leave for idle reasons, and many familial roots can be traced back generations. Everybody knows everybody and in many cases everybody is cousins with everybody else.
And here is Alex Hughes, from Marshall, Mich.:
Geographically I think the Census Bureau’s definition of the Midwest is about right. Expressed otherwise, if you’re somewhere that is full of corn fields, experiences winter, and treats the opening day of deer season as a holiday, you’re probably in the right place.
There are few things I could praise about the Midwest that are by themselves uniquely Midwestern. Its deep inclination towards self-sufficiency is shared with the West, its agrarian sense of rootedness is borrowed from the South, and its appreciation for industry and town life is inherited from the Northeast. But that doesn’t mean the Midwest isn’t distinctive in its own right. Jon Lauck’s recent book The Good Country offers a compelling mission statement for the region. He argues that some of the Founders saw the Midwest “as a place where the remaining obstacles to a properly functioning American republicanism could be overcome”; its less aristocratic spirit and lack of slavery offered a more natural home for the Constitutional framework than even the original 13 colonies. When the Midwest is at its best, I think this vision bears fruit. The rest of the time, it gives us something worth aspiring to.
Last, let me give you a Tulsan, our Mark Wright:
Despite so much needless overcomplication of this subject, the geographical and cultural conception that we call “the Midwest” isn’t at all hard to define.
The Midwest is the American region that is tied to the Great Lakes. Chicago is its capital. It’s north of the Ohio River, west of the Allegheny Mountains, and it fades out as you head into the Great Plains long before you reach the Rockies. It’s historically rooted in the Northwest Territory established in 1787 (which included the soon-to-be states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota east of the Mississippi). Culturally, it’s seen as not Eastern, and definitely not Southern. For a long period of American history, the Midwestern version of the American was seen as the normative one. The region contains rich agricultural lands and retains a good portion of American heavy industry. It’s peopled, especially in the Upper Midwest, disproportionately by German and Scandinavian immigrants. It’s full of Methodists and Lutherans and Catholics. It’s Big 10 country.
Some Americans somewhat lazily or ignorantly consider the “Midwest” to be everything east of California and west of the Washington-Philly-New York-Boston coastal strip. But America contains multitudes. Some places are just plain weird or lie on sectional boundaries. We used to call these states “border states,” a concept I find useful and accurate. All my life, I’ve had a bee in my bonnet about people thinking that Oklahoma, my home state, is the Midwest. I find this astonishing. Oklahoma is culturally and economically tied to Texas and the South. Tulsa is a four-hour drive from Little Rock. It sits at the foothills of the Ozarks, which are the westernmost spur of the southern Appalachians. In Tulsa, it snows three or four times every winter — usually no more than a couple of inches. When this happens, the city shuts down for a week. The people are either Scotch-Irish Southern Baptists, Indians, or black, and they say “y’all.” Okies are thrilled about the Oklahoma Sooners joining the SEC — the Southeastern Conference — in 2024. Does that sound very much like Cleveland to you? Does that sound very much like Minneapolis?
Midwesterners are, famously, nice; Southerners are polite — there’s a difference.
Thank you one and all!