Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s

Introduction

During the half century that began in the 1950s, the American Middle West— Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Arkansas , and Oklahoma—underwent a dramatic social transformation. The region’s population grew at only half the national rate. More than three thousand towns declined. Agriculture suffered from adverse weather and wild market fluctuations in the 1950s, experienced worse conditions in the 1980s, and became far less significant to the region’s economy. At the start of the period, analysts wondered if the Middle West would ever fully recover from the devastation of the Dust Bowl era. Large numbers of rural families lived in houses without electricity , telephone service, or indoor plumbing. By the early 1960s, the number of farm youth going to college was startlingly low. Social scientists administered IQ tests to determine if these youngsters were intellectually inferior. Journalists wrote of country hicks lacking refinement. Big-city newspaper editors complained that many of these yokels were on the government dole. The region, analysts wrote, was a huge scar on the national psyche that needed somehow to be fixed—or turned back to grassland and buffalo. But the heartland was far different in the early twenty-first century than predictions of its demise had suggested. The region’s economy fared surprisingly well. While its population declined relative to the nation, its economic productivity grew as rapidly as the rest of the nation, and its contribution to the nation ’s economic strength remained undiminished. Agribusiness was flourishing. Stereotypes of a benighted hinterland had been replaced by images of hospitality and ingenuity. The region’s elementary and secondary schools were among the best in the nation. Its commitment to public higher education consistently ranked high. Without any of the nation’s largest cities, the region was known for innovative medical research and bioscience technology. It hosted some of the nation’s largest businesses and had become a magnet for sprawling exurban commercial districts and housing developments. A transformation of such magnitude is not without costs. Millions of Americans were displaced. They lost the farms their parents and grandparents had worked hard to create and maintain. They said goodbye to neighbors who moved on and to children who left, never to pursue the lifestyles their parents anticipated. Country schools closed by the thousands and were replaced by large consolidated districts with fleets of yellow school buses. Retailers in small Introduction 2 | Introduction towns lost business to franchise outlets in regional centers. People who moved to cities in other states where employment opportunities were better experienced in-between lives still tethered in their home communities. Those who stayed sensed acutely that much of the action was elsewhere and composed accounts of why staying was a sensible choice. The region was not devoid of tensions roiling into political, moral, and religious conflicts. The Middle West nevertheless remade itself without the extreme ill effects that often accompany such economic restructurings. Hardly any strikes, work stoppages, or protests took place. Families who found it necessary to move on did so. They did not hunker down and opt for poverty but sought opportunities wherever they could be found. Unemployment and the numbers of people receiving public assistance remained markedly low. People may have regretted school closings, but they seldom resisted. They found ways to improve the weakest schools and equalize educational opportunities. Racial divisions gradually eroded. The influx of new immigrants that came with agribusiness expansion resulted in fewer conflicts than might have been anticipated. How did communities adapt to—and indeed facilitate—the kind of transition that middle America experienced during the last half of the twentieth century? Adaptation depends on the resources at communities’ disposal and the habits residents have developed for making use of these resources. For the Middle West, land was a key resource. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory that became America’s heartland for its water, chiefly the port of New Orleans and access to the Mississippi River, and for security against invasion from the rear that these assets provided. But it was the land that proved far more valuable to the nation’s development. Public land, purchased from the French and taken from the native peoples who occupied it, became a vast resource affecting nearly everything the nation did in the nineteenth century. Public land paid for the founding of the Middle West’s common schools and subsidized its colleges and universities. It served as an inducement for Northern farmers to join the Union army during the...