The Midwestern Century

‘Midwest” was a term not yet coined in 1835, when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of his journey down the Ohio River toward Cincinnati. But the region already stood apart. What he observed on the broad stream’s northern bank stood in stark contrast to what he saw on its southern.

The Kentucky side, sparsely populated, reflected a slave culture, a place of relative idleness. But the north side of the river hummed with activity. People there appeared to enjoy “that wealth and contentment which is the reward of labor.”

He found a flourishing place poised to embody American exceptionalism. It was a territory destined for difference by the Founders a generation earlier, in 1787, when Congress approved the Northwest Ordinance, the governing document for vast lands west and north of the Ohio River — future states unencumbered by the compromises required for passage of the United States Constitution. With no need to placate the South, the ordinance was a Founders’ dream that plays well today, banning slavery, championing public education, expanding the right to vote. It was a template for a sort of yeoman utopia that sectional divides and economic pressures precluded the young nation at large from embracing.

From the ordinance, along with a blessed blend of free labor, rich soil, and Victorian morals, sprang the places and people celebrated in Jon Lauck’s welcome new study, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800–1900.

Some of us in the Midwest suffer from region envy. How richly identifiable is flinty and literate New England, the South in all its gothic glory, Texas because it is Texas, and the vibe that belongs to California. Are we resigned to the ranks of the nice but nondescript? Lauck, a Dakotan and preeminent midwestern historian, knows better. For him the Midwest — broadly the Great Lakes states extending through the Great Plains — has its own compelling singularity.

But he does harbor a mild midwestern grievance. He finds the region — and the era upon which he concentrates — diminished in the eyes of many historians by the attitudes of the self-exiled. Literature brims with “revolt from the village” accounts of émigrés to the East, eager for approbation and nursing the need to rebel against something.

H. L. Mencken later led a chorus that was delightfully receptive to those sentiments. As the era chronicled in The Good Country came to a close, Mencken found in midwestern yeomanry and booster culture the perfect foil. And that was before the jet-age disdain for “flyover country.” Lauck offers an antidote to that easy disregard. He brushes aside the “veil of stereotype” to find in the American heartland “a place lost to the mists of time by chronic neglect but one well worth recovering.”

Was the region north and west of the Ohio really “the most advanced democratic society that the world had seen to date”? Lauck argues persuasively that in the 19th century the Midwest really was the loftiest city on the hill. The claims can be audacious, but he backs them up. This would be a relatively slender volume without its 100 pages of footnotes — a valuable resource in its own right.

Manasseh Cutler, a central figure in the late David McCullough’s last work, Pioneers, promoted one of the earliest settlements in the Ohio territory. He declared that in the new land there were “no wrong habits to combat and no inveterate systems to overturn — there will be no rubbish to remove before you lay the foundations.”

For Walt Whitman, on a speaking tour in Kansas later in the century, it was the “newer garden of creation.”

And its origin story? Back to the Northwest Ordinance. Article One guaranteed religious freedom, crucial in a territory soon bustling with immigrants who brought with them “an utter fragmentation of Protestantism,” in contrast to the more homogeneous original colonies. (To easterners these newcomers were “impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality,” with evangelical fervor and an aversion to taxes.)

Article Two was a checklist of small-“r” republican ideals: trial by jury, property rights, the right to habeas corpus. Article Three declared that “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” (Article Three also insisted on good faith “towards the Indians,” although the promise was all too frequently observed in the breach.)

Finally, Article Six banned slavery — all labor would be the free labor that so impressed Tocqueville. In Daniel Webster’s words, the ordinance “fixed forever the character of the population in the vast regions northwest of the Ohio, by excluding from them involuntary servitude.” This before most of the original states had taken such a step. Per Webster the ordinance “impressed on the soil itself . . . an incapacity to sustain any other than freemen.” It was a first act of definition of what it meant to be a midwesterner.

Of course, there were flaws aplenty in this frontier Athens. Lauck’s chapter “Racial Failures and Advances” offers a frank assessment of the region’s shortcomings. The new states were slow to eliminate remnants of slavery dating back to French and Spanish rule and slow to grant suffrage to African Americans. Race riots by whites threatened by labor-force competition from free blacks tarnished Cincinnati, among other cities.

But Lauck also offers context, and comparisons that flatter the region, noting that Cairo, Ill., is farther south than Richmond, Va. Abraham Lincoln, favorite son of the 19th-century Midwest, spoke more openly in northern Illinois of ending slavery than when he campaigned downstate.

The midwestern pantheon has many heroes. Lauck introduces Edward Coles, a Virginian who freed his slaves while on a flatboat in the middle of the Ohio River. As governor of Illinois, Coles would ask the state legislature to “take steps to liberate the French slaves” — a vestige of an earlier colonial legacy.

The northernmost tier of states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota — proved more open to integration and quicker to extend equal rights. (Of course, the farther north one farmed, the more remote the slave economy and the crops that drove it.) Michigan became known for the “consistency and brazenness” with which its citizens flouted laws forcing runaway blacks back into slavery.

The Erie Canal, drawing New Yorkers and New Englanders, and the Great Awakening, sparking evangelical fervor, both helped to create a “cultural colonization of the Middle West by abolitionists.” Indeed, Oberlin College in Ohio welcomed black students in 1835. Cleveland was soon dubbed “Negro Heaven.” And by 1865, more black children attended school in Ohio than in several southern states combined — and a quarter were in integrated schools.

As the historian Eric Foner phrased it, for all its shortcomings, the Midwest “recognized black humanity.” One might even say that with Lincoln and the region’s ardent abolitionists, black lives, for the first time, mattered.

When the Civil War came, the Midwest saved the Union. Another audacious claim? Lauck is again persuasive. More than half of the Union troops came from midwestern states that accounted for only a quarter of the population. Men of the new states joined the ranks at much higher rates than did those of the eastern seaboard. The student body of Michigan’s Hillsdale College enlisted en masse.

Lincoln’s cabinet and general staff were drawn chiefly from the region — Ohio supplied 64 Union generals, including William Tecumseh Sherman. Their commander, Ulysses S. Grant, so recently a clerk in Galena, Ill., triumphed in the western theater before going east to compel the South’s surrender.

During Reconstruction, the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing voting rights, was ratified by every midwestern state, even as it failed to win approval in New York and California. In 1883, the same year the Supreme Court upheld an Alabama law making interracial marriage a felony, the Michigan legislature repealed a law against miscegenation.

Along with abolitionism, the Midwest was marked by populist agrarian movements. Perhaps the zeal was contagious. The Grange was born in Minnesota at a time when railroad freight rates were so high that to ship wheat from Minneapolis to Milwaukee cost as much as from Milwaukee to Liverpool.

Midwestern progressives had grievances against both the South, with its aristocratic pretensions and bias against protective tariffs, and the East, where the railroad tycoons and money power resided. The regions even battled over butter versus oleomargarine, with midwestern farmers trying to protect the dairy product while southern planters profited from the cottonseed oil that went into oleo.

The Midwest was overwhelmingly Republican, the party of Lincoln’s yeoman farmer. Republicans may have elected Gilded Age presidents — mostly midwesterners — but they were also the trustbusters. Theirs was a very big tent. As one Iowa politician declared, his state “would go Democratic when Hell went Methodist.”

Coeducation was also a by-product of the frontier. Before the Civil War, nearly all the colleges in the U.S. admitting women were in the Midwest. There, “real women” were contrasted with the dainty stereotypes of eastern drawing rooms. The frontier accelerated the erosion of patriarchy and vestiges of traditional European hierarchies that might still hold sway in the East. As one pioneer put it, “In this country there is no mistresses nor masters; I guess I am a woman citizen.”

Women were in the forefront of prairie activism. A push for civic betterment akin to abolition animated the Ohio organizers of the Anti-Saloon League. In 1874 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was founded in Cleveland. In 1887 the country’s first female mayor was elected, in tiny Argonia, Kan. Two years earlier, Michigan senator Thomas Palmer delivered the first major speech in the U.S. Senate in favor of women’s suffrage.

By the time the century of midwestern ascendancy began to wane, its sons and daughters had become towering figures in progressive politics, from Jane Addams to Clarence Darrow to William Allen White. By then midwestern populism struggled against monopolists in an era of increasing economic concentration. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute, Ind., denounced “crowns and castes” imposed by industrial might. Jacob Coxey’s “army” of poor veterans seeking bonus payments embarked from Ohio on its march to Washington, D.C.

Midwestern muckrakers were relatively genial activists. They were, as Michigan native Ray Stannard Baker wrote, “far more eager to understand and make sure than to dream of utopias.” That note of pragmatism runs through Lauck’s story and is a cornerstone of the distinctive culture. While the ideals of tolerance laid out in the Northwest Ordinance may have made the Midwest uniquely hospitable to the utopian communities that popped up with far greater frequency there than anywhere else, common sense was the order of the century in the Good Country.

Modesty, too. It’s the “Good Country,” not the “Great Country,” after all. Modest, pragmatic: No wonder Carl Van Doren wrote in 1921 of his hometown in Illinois that “dullness has come to be the villain, as sin had once been.” He escaped the village with a condescension that suited Mencken and the more sophisticated, moneyed, and industrialized East Coast.

That old culture of church socials and county fairs seems quaintly conservative today. Lauck insists it deserves a second look. This era of clubs and joiners would inspire Ohioan Robert Putnam’s latter-day notions of social capital. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, an activist preacher in Detroit before joining the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, would lament the waning of the “roseate hopes of the previous century.”

By 1900 the region was beginning to change in profound ways. An influx of immigrants stirred social tensions. Entrepreneurs in the auto industry and other innovators made the Midwest the Silicon Valley of its day. But the new prosperity would take a toll. The ravages of the Rust Belt would cast a shadow on the riches of the Corn Belt. Yet this remains a region more disposed to rootedness than to rancor. Lauck finds in Niebuhr’s roseate hopes a “reservoir of idealism” that could again inspire America to be, if not great, then certainly good.