Midwestern States of Mind: Regionalism in American Historical Writing

“As long as there is corn in Indiana and hogs to eat the corn, Charlie Beard will bow to no man.” Thus spoke Professor Charles Austin Beard, a larger-than- life figure who, armed with an independent and democratic attitude, walked out of Nicholas Murray Butler’s Columbia University in 1917 in protest against the victimization of anti-war activist colleague J. McKeen Cattell. Retiring to a Connecticut farm to raise dairy cows, Beard was freer than ever before to pepper the historical establishment with his irreverent views, which he did—promoting historical relativism, championing the role of “the people” against “the interests,” and opposing American foreign policy adventurism. He became the most influential historian in the United States and testified to the ascendance of the Midwest within American historiography in the 1920s and 1930s. Born in 1874, Beard hailed from near Knightstown, Indiana, a sleepy little farming community on the road to Indianapolis. His is but one story among several in this assuredly written and delightful book on the prominent bearers of a midwestern tradition of historical writing in the United States.

For David S. Brown, the sight of waving wheat, the sound of cornstalks rustling in the fields, and the energy of farmer protest and reform run deep in the emotional roots of American historiography. The tradition had its origins in the work of Frederick Jackson Turner and his frontier thesis announced so inauspiciously at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Chicago in 1893. Armed with this idea, historians from the Midwest gradually turned professional historical scholarship from an elitist practice centered in the Ivy League colleges to a more democratic one that made history useful to large social purposes. These historians, Brown tells us, were increasingly restive about liberalism’s expansive state and interventionist policies abroad, preferring an older progressive tradition rooted in Jeffersonian ideas.

From the 1890s to the 1940s this midwestern tradition was the dominant one in U.S. historiography. After World War II its position was challenged by eastern liberal-consensus historians who looked down on the provincialism of their midwestern rivals. Though no longer ascendant, historians who carried the imprint of the Midwest, like the mild-mannered Merle Curti, became dissenters against the so-called cult of American consensus. Through the foundation of the Studies on the Left group at the University of Wisconsin and the work of William Appleman Williams in the 1950s and 1960s, Beard’s hostility to the growth of the American state and Turner’s theme of geographic expansion as an American dynamic melded into a critique of empire that made Williams and his students one of the most influential “schools” of American historians. More surprisingly, Brown treats cultural historian Christopher Lasch as a carrier of the midwestern mission, through his attacks in the 1970s and 1980s on the “therapeutic state” and his desire to see a “revived public culture capable of keeping corporate power and influence in check.”

Despite the pressures of cosmopolitanism, regionalism is not dead and buried today, according to Brown. Williams’s work faced damaging attacks for its empirical lapses and questionable methods of citation and quotation, yet his ideas surfaced once more in the 1990s and beyond as the Cold War’s end brought a new American muscle-flexing onto the world stage. In the wake of the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, conservative historian of empire Andrew Bacevich found much to applaud in Beard’s questioning of an anti-democratic and war-mongering American leviathan. From a complementary perspective, Brown also finds much that is appealing, and notes the midwestern spirit’s reincarnation in such work as William Cronon’s. Brown is right to end the story with Cronon, who, in a remarkable new key reinvented the role of the West in American history and, with colleagues in the emerging subfield of environmental history, made plain the connections between the midwestern tradition and ideas of public history that are increasingly championed as ways to make the discipline useful.

Behind these waves of historiographical change Brown finds a subtle process at work. He challenges the idea of American historiography...