The Essential Midwest

“Without the Midwest, what was America?” So asked historian Paul Johnson in Modern Times, his comprehensive 1983 survey of the 20th century. Johnson, a Brit, understood why the region was so important to the United States, giving it a spiritual core, supplying a rooted moral center, and making it more than “a mere coastal fringe.” The coastal fringe often has contempt for the supposed Midwestern backwater, but that doesn’t lessen the need for the latter. If anything, it only reinforces that need.