The Midwestern Moment: The Forgotten World of Early-Twentieth-Century Midwestern Regionalism, 1880–1940 ed. by Jon K. Lauck (review)

In the last decade, new studies of the Middle West have been bustin’ out all over. And no one has been more front and center in this upsurge than historian Jon Lauck. In the last few years, he has annually published books or key essays pointing the way for others to provide new or expanded treatments of the history and cultures of the Midwest. The volume under review is another evidence of how much Lauck has been a one-person cheering squad in getting his region back on the research and writing agendas of scholars across several fields.

This collection of sixteen essays and the Lauck “Introduction” covers a variety of subjects about the Midwest. One piece deals with a forgotten midwestern radio announcer, another treats the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, still another discusses a midwestern artist, a fourth addresses midwestern Catholics, a fifth evaluates the role of Jane Addams, and a sixth describes the rise of the Midwest as a separate identifiable region. The remaining ten essays comment on midwestern literature, novelists and novels, poets, and literary movements. More than anything, this gathering deals with midwestern regionalism through its literature.

The Midwestern Moment exhibits a number of clear strengths. In Lauck’s “Introduction” and the next essay by Elizabeth Raymond we get helpful overviews of the flowering of midwestern regionalism in the decades after the Civil War and again in the early part of the twentieth century, up to the end of the 1930s. These two essays set the scene for the following essays that zero in on writings by such well-known writers as Booth Tarkington, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Ruth Suckow, and lesser-recognized authors Jay G. Sigmund, Walt Mason, and Frazier Hunt. All of these essays on individual authors help both specialists and general readers to understand the literary power and achievements of these writers.

Three of the essays deserve specific attention as exemplary brief works. John E. Miller provides a provocative overview of the achievements of South Dakota artist Harvey Dunn. Sometimes lost in the towering shadows of the midwestern artistic triumvirate of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry, Dunn deserves renewed attention for his superb artistic renditions of such themes as people– landscape relationships, homesteads, and one-room schools. Michael Steiner furnishes another first-rate piece in his depiction of Jane Addams as a pioneer in advancing midwestern cultural diversity. This smoothly written, diligently researched work provides illuminating treatment of Addams’s advancement of community building whereby she elevated her midwestern backgrounds and experiences into her pathbreaking work at Hull House. Jon Lauck also contributes stimulating rereadings of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920). He urges readers to rethink the widely held view that these two works clearly illustrate the popular “revolt of the village” theme. Rather, argues Lauck, they are more ambiguous and ambivalent about midwestern societies and cultures.

None of the other essays in this collection is inadequate or weak; all are much more than just acceptable. But a few are less apropos for this volume than the three exemplary pieces. For example, the essay on the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra is not so much an example of regionalism, at least the type revealed in the discussions of midwestern writers, but of an institution existing in the Midwest but not necessarily exhibiting qualities of a regional culture. The essays on the radio announcer Henry Field and midwestern Catholicism are also worthy contributions as standalone works, but they do not markedly to our understanding of midwestern regional culture.

The value of the collection could have been strengthened if other ingredients had been incorporated. For example, although some contributors make a few comparisons between midwestern and southern regionalism, almost nothing is said of western regionalism—regionalism in that half of the country stretching west from eastern edge of...