The Heart of a Nation

In September 1879, Walt Whitman headed for the American Midwest. The 60-year-old poet traveled from Philadelphia to St. Louis, then visited Kansas before moving on to Colorado. The beauty and scale of the heartland stunned him, but he saw more, musing that “no one can begin to know what America is, or what it is destined to be in the near future, without exploring and living a while in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado.” These central states distilled the American project, Whitman felt, and foreshadowed what America would become. In his poem “The Prairie States,” he called the Midwest the culmination of history: “The crown and teeming paradise, so far, of time’s accumulations.” Whitman’s enthusiasm might raise eyebrows today, but in “The Good Country,” Jon Lauck argues that from 1800 to 1900 this region was the best existing version of America, taking democracy to new heights, and achieving material and cultural prosperity.