Small-Town Dreams: Stories of Midwestern Boys Who Shaped America by John E. Miller (review)

The field of midwestern history is bearing rich fruit these days. And isn’t it exciting. Once at the center of the United States and a good part of American history, the Midwest is reemerging from the bicoastal dominance of recent decades. In 2013 Kai Rissdahl of American Public Radio’s Marketplace called Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the “center of the economic universe.” And James Fallows in an Atlantic magazine series called “American Futures” identified it both as “one of the most interesting towns in America” and a place that “represents a long-standing part of the essential American bargain.” A 2014 New York Times series by Damien Cave and Todd Heisler went from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minnesota—up Interstate 35—to look at immigration in “the middle of America.” Jon Lauck, historian and attorney, has recently published (with the University of Iowa Press), The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History, that one blurber called “the definitive manifesto for a new midwestern historiography.” Something’s coming to a boil.

The study of American history long started with Columbus’s “discovery” and continued through the triumphal account of the American colonies’ fight for freedom and the march of “civilization” westward to California. Schoolchildren all over the country learned this American narrative of heroes and progress. Historians and social critics since the 1960s fractured this common story by adding to the “Americans” under consideration slaves, American Indians, women, the underclass, immigrants, and Canada and Mexico, who did not fit the story (or America at the time—read: Irish, for example, or Muslims). The inclusion of these people challenges, changes, and indeed enriches the American narrative. The first story is easier to tell, and considered by some to be more patriotic. The second is more difficult politically and emotionally—and historiographically.

In Small-Town Dreams: Stories of Midwestern Boys Who Shaped America, Professor John E. Miller—a well-published historian from South Dakota State University—is exploring yet another fracture—the importance of region. Westerners and southerners have long told counternarratives to the larger story. The Midwest has been less assertive (part of the midwestern culture?). Here, he selects twenty midwestern men (by design, so no women) and “seeks to enhance our understanding of the importance of the small town in American life and the influence it has exerted across time” (2). He features men as diverse as George Washington Carver, Johnny Carson, John Wooden, Meredith Wilson, and Ernie Pyle. His method of selection is a bit idiosyncratic. (Why James Dean, for example, but not Bob Dylan or Garrison Keillor?) He includes only William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan among the many midwestern politicians. Why not Hubert Humphrey? But allowing him his selections, how do they add up?

About the twenty he provides fascinating biographies based on prodigious research in primary and secondary sources. The book is clearly and even charmingly written. These men come off well and together they do demonstrate varied and widespread influence in the United States. They showcase multiple talents—economic, scientific, artistic, economic. He allows them to be complicated and ambivalent about their roots. Other commonalities are less evident. Frederick Jackson Turner trumpeted the frontier. Sinclair Lewis critiqued it. Only a few of them actually grew up in small towns (more on farms), and virtually all of them made their names far away from their origins.

By birth each of them is a midwesterner, and Miller argues that place is crucially important to understanding each of them. He tries to capture their feelings and their ties to their origins, but struggles to pinpoint the nature of their midwesternness. This is a central issue for midwestern historians: What is it that is midwestern? Westerners and southerners seem to have an easier time finding common cause. But is there a culture that North Dakotans and Ohioans share? Are we more trusting and trustworthy, friendlier, harder working? Innocent? Naïve? Old...