Thoughts on a Critical Regional History of the Midwest: Examining the Legacies of the Dream of a White Yeoman’s Republic

The inescapable questions of midwestern history are nothing less than existential for the field. What is the Midwest? Where are its borders? Why study the Midwest as a place with a regional history? How has the nation shaped, and been shaped by, something called the Midwest and its people? What about the Midwest’s place in international and transnational historical dynamics? Regional historians ignore these questions at their peril. To write as though the spatial and historical contours of the Midwest can be taken for granted, or to see the region as a discrete entity, is to risk falling prey to the myths, blind spots, and distortions of exceptionalism and romanticization. To the degree that Midwest historians write from a critical perspective, however, they will engage important debates not just regarding what the history of the Midwest is, but what it ought to be. We are living in a moment of great possibilities for the writing of a new midwestern history. Recent history allows for a reconsideration of the meanings of the region. Straight-forward recovery of otherwise lost narratives will continue to be important, but what will be most interesting are the debates over whose narratives matter, and what they mean.

It would seem that to write a piece about the future of a historical subfield, one should have some skin in the game. For the record, then, I imagine the Midwest as a region—defined by a shared economic, political, and cultural history, as much as by geography—that stretches from the western borders of Pennsylvania and Ohio to the eastern portions of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, with the Ohio River and the Missouri–Arkansas border as the southern boundary. Such a map is defined by geography and a common agricultural history, while also encompassing the center of American heavy industry at its peak, and, subsequently, the “Rust Belt.” The map recognizes the Ohio River as the threshold of the original “Promised Land” for escaped slaves. At the same time, the map reflects the layers of history in the region, allowing us to account for the way the region was reshaped by the abolition of slavery and the reorientation of the economy around urban industrial areas. But the map gives primacy to the era of Euro-American settlement in the area, precisely because I am convinced that it was the nineteenth-century settlers who—in displacing Native Americans and in taking “free soil” positions regarding the expansion of slavery—created cultural and ideological aspirations that have shaped the region’s long-term history. Indeed, what arguably sets the Midwest apart, more than anything else compared to other US regions, is that the Midwest’s white population (a historically changing category in itself), from the time of major Euro-American settlement, have imagined the possibility of creating a white yeoman’s republic in a way that people in other regions either did not, or could not.

The Midwest’s roots in the political and social visions of free soil, free labor settlers help explain the Midwest’s historically self-contradictory commitments: its egalitarian, producerist politics; its traditionalist strains and uneven resistance to consumerism, countercultural development, and expansionism; as well as its tendencies toward racist exclusion and nativism. Of course, the region has seen revolutionary changes since the time when free soil settlers and Northern- and Western-European Homesteaders dominated the scene. But the influence of these original white farm cultures has endured. In every subsequent era, the Midwest’s history has continued to be shaped by a widely-held feeling that the spine of the Midwest is found in its simple, small-town agricultural origins. Such a feeling, however, also implies that problems in the region are caused by outsiders. And this way of looking at things has been continually reinvented to the meet evolving challenges to the status quo, with those challenges being associated with the continually renewed “other.” A deep racial and social conservatism, then, has profoundly influenced midwestern dynamics of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Future histories...