“The Corn Belt,” “America's Breadbasket,” “The Heartland,” “The Bible Belt,” “Flyover Country”—all (except for that last) endearing nicknames applied to the region of the U.S. that lies between New York and Los Angeles, that region that coastal elites like to forget exists.
In other words, the Midwest.
Midwesterners are those Americans for whom ten-hour road trips are no big deal. We know what “detasseling” season means, and a good number of our teenagers have spent a hard summer with their feet buried up to the ankles in black Midwestern mud, earning a minimum wage for an eight-hour day of detasseling. We build house-sized bonfires for entertainment in the fall, know how to drive in fourteen inches of snow, drink pop, and eat casseroles and pasties. We generally go to church on Sunday.
We're also the “red states”—that swath of crimson that makes up most of the continental U.S., and which the coastal elite is just learning has to be reckoned with.
We're the Midwest, and we're largely looked down upon by the citizens of both East and West coasts. We're a bit backward, or so we're told. And many of us have come to believe it. “The Rural Brain Drain” is a real thing, wherein our best, brightest, most educated, and most talented flee the cornfields of Illinois and Iowa for places like New York, Boston, L.A., or San Diego.
But there was a time not that long ago when our best and brightest, instead of picking up and leaving, made a concerted, defined effort to stay put. This “Midwestern Moment” is the subject of a new book edited by Jon Lauck. Lauck is a faculty member at the University of South Dakota (a solidly Midwestern location), founding president of the Midwestern History Association, and associate editor of the Middle West Review. The book, The Midwestern Moment: The Forgotten World of Early Twentieth Century Midwestern Regionalism, 1880–1940, is published by Hastings College Press in Hastings, Nebraska (also solidly Midwestern).
The book's subject matter varies widely—everything from how corn became the predominant symbol of the region; to the fiction of Booth Tarkington, Ruth Suckow, Willa Cather, and Sherwood Anderson; the poetry of Jay Sigmund and Walt Mason; the “regionalist identity” of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra; South Dakota painter Harvey Dunn; and the fierce agrarianism of a certain segment of Midwestern Catholics. The unifying theme is that all of these wildly different individuals and institutions understood their artistic identity as firmly Midwestern, and sought to increase respect for the Midwest as a serious source of art, literature, and ideas. This is an academic work, well researched and heavily footnoted. Nonetheless, the phrase “highfalutin” appears more than once—always a good sign.
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