Everything you know about x is wrong” has always been a hit with the reading public. Take Columbus. On Columbus Day, the righteous will complain that students aren't taught the ugly truth about the Great Admiral. They will push this point, as they do every year, as if Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States hadn't scuttled Columbus's reputation decades ago. (As if, even before that, Ogden Nash hadn't written the damning couplet “Once upon a time there was an Italian, / And some people thought he was a rapscallion!”) The ugly truth about Columbus is old news — but people find that story so satisfying that they pretend to forget it and beg, “Read it again, Daddy!”
The adversarial, myth-busting approach to United States history is, from a publishing perspective, a surefire winner. Usually. “Everything you know about the Midwest is wrong,” the implicit promise of Kristin L. Hoganson's The Heartland: An American History, may leave the reader feeling that (a) he doesn't know a damn thing about the Midwest, right or wrong, and (b) he'd rather just, as Iris DeMent sings, let the mystery be.
But the reader relents. This reader spent his senior year of high school in Illinois (Professor Hoganson is employed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), having moved there from that enclave of sneering coastal elites, Connecticut. Much of what those who regard the Midwest as “flyover country” think they know about it is true. It is big, flat, carpeted wall to wall with corn, soybeans, wheat, and sorghum. What looks monotonous in HO scale from a low-flying plane remains monotonous viewed at full size from a moving car. Yet if Professor Hoganson is in possession — as Edgar Lee Masters was, a century ago — of a truth concealed within this landscape, it is our duty as patriots to consume it with relish.
The Heartland is, it happens, not so much about convincing the rest of the country that the Midwest is interesting as it is about convincing the Midwest that it doesn't know itself. It recalls the religion scholar whose project is to tell modern-day Christians what they believe and then why the historical Jesus would have disapproved of it. It seems unlikely that much of what this book contains would scandalize or even necessarily surprise a midwesterner. But much of what it says is interesting, anyway — at intervals, in manageable doses, not unlike historical markers along the interstate.
The “heartland,” Hoganson tells us, is a myth — but what is the content of that myth? Who believed in it? Who does today? In the mid 20th century, Hoganson writes, the myth was of “a land of farmers of northern European descent, less the core of an expansive empire than a psychic fallout shelter. . . . From the start, the vision of security offered up by this heartland came wrapped in nostalgia, for it seemed just as imperiled by the urbanizing, multi-hued, industrial heartland as by distant threats.” This heartland was insular, peaceful, provincial, even isolationist. Picket-fenced-in, one might say.
The reality, Hoganson amply demonstrates, was always far more complex than that. Her narrative, which focuses on her adopted Champaign County, Ill., challenges the myth from two directions. It forces outsiders to examine their prejudices, whether rose-tinted or dismissive or downright contemptuous, about the Midwest. It forces midwesterners to examine their self-perceptions, on the one hand to accept blame for their past sins, on the other hand to accept praise for having been more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than they admit even to themselves.
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