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One of the great iconic films conveying a picture of contemporary midwestern culture is the Coen Brothers’ black comedy Fargo. At its most positive, it portrays a Midwest—or at least an upper Midwest— of hockey, duck stamps, all-you-can-eat buffets, and guileless folks demonstrating “Minnesota Nice.” As a longtime resident of the real Fargo, I occasionally saw shades of the fictional one, as when my wife and I heard a diner at a nearby table answer the server’s inquiry as to how she was by saying “Pretty darned OK!” But mostly I didn’t see much resemblance. The real Fargo is dependent on a service and high-tech economy . While there are still plenty of “sons” around, the growth segment of the population consists of nonwhites and non-Anglos, including Hispanics, African Americans, and lots of “New Americans”—Somalis, Sudanese, Liberians, Bosnians, Kurds, and more. Fargoans mainly eat at franchise places and buy clothes at stores like American Eagle or Target. They watch Celebrity Apprentice and America’s Biggest Loser. Among the city’s biggest annual events are a film festival, a blues festival, a marathon, and a zombie pub crawl. Is there anything here that makes Fargo uniquely midwestern, or is it pretty much interchangeable with almost every other medium-sized city in the United States? Now, I recognize that Fargo is a city, and that this collection deals with the “rural” Midwest of farms, villages, and small towns. Yet I contend that what is Conclusion—The Indistinct Distinctiveness of Rural Midwestern Culture David Danbom The Indistinct Distinctiveness of Rural Midwestern Culture 297 true of Fargo is true of the region generally: that an image of uniqueness that may be held elsewhere breaks down when one looks closely at the place in question; that whatever made the place unique or special at one time (and that has probably always been overemphasized) has been eroded by modern communications, population movements, and a market economy; and that what is most noteworthy about the region is its Americanness—its similarity to every other place. After all, when marketers try their products in Peoria, Illinois, or politicians and media moguls ask “how will it play in Peoria?” they do so not because Peoria or, by extension, the Midwest of which it is a part, is unique, but because it is so relentlessly the same as most other places. Part of the problem with defining culture in the Midwest is that it is so difficult to define the Midwest itself—a protean region that bleeds off easily into the more distinctive East, South, and West that border it. As Andrew Cayton and Susan Gray wisely note in their introduction to their essay collection The American Midwest, “we were acutely aware that the Midwest lacks the kind of geographic coherence, historical issues, and cultural touchstones that have informed regional identity in the American South, West, and New England.” They add that “historians writing about the Midwest carry a historiographical burden loaded with irony: rather than argue for the distinctiveness of the Midwest, they must always demonstrate the national , even universal, significance of what is generally considered both the most American and the most amorphous of regions.” The burden on the contributors to this volume is rather different but no less onerous. We must try to find distinctiveness in a region that has always been amorphous and is increasingly so.1 A brief recapitulation of the settlement history of the Midwest illustrates why defining the rural culture of the region is so devilishly difficult. The Old Midwest, comprised of the states bordering the Ohio River, was settled in the early nineteenth century by two very dissimilar groups—Butternuts, from the Upper South, and Yankees, from New England and upstate New York. Oil and water mix more easily than those groups. The agricultural settlement history of much of the rest of the region was shaped largely by immigrants who poured out of western and northern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. They frequently settled in relatively homogenous communities, enabled by railroads and land companies eager to move large tracts quickly. Many of the celebrations that we consider markers of midwestern culture today—from hostfests to oktoberfests to fall suppers—are actually the descendants of ethnic celebrations, albeit sometimes polluted by such American abominations as tractor pulls and deep-fat-fried Snickers bars. These immigrants and natives developed agricultural systems that—if [18.191.189.85] Project MUSE (2024-04-20...

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