The Heartland
Page 1
ALSO BY KRISTIN L. HOGANSON
American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Consumers’ Imperium
Fighting for American Manhood
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2019 by Kristin L. Hoganson
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Portions of this book appeared as “Meat in the Middle: Converging Borderlands in the U.S. Midwest, 1835-1900” in Journal of American History 98 (March 2012): 1025-1051 and “Struggles for Place and Space: Kickapoo Traces from the Midwest to Mexico,” in Transnational Indians in the North American West, Andrae M. Marak, Clarissa Confer, and Laura Tuennerman, eds., College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2015.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hoganson, Kristin L., author.
Title: The heartland : an American history / Kristin L. Hoganson.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018060308 (print) | LCCN 2019001019 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525561620 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594203572 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Middle West--History. | Middle West--Civilization. | Group identity--Middle West. | Human geography--Middle West.
Classification: LCC F351 (ebook) | LCC F351 .H75 2019 (print) | DDC 977--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018060308
Map infographic (this page) and map painting (this page) by Meighan Cavanaugh
Version_1
To the seven generations of my family who have called the heartland home. And in recognition of the first peoples of the tallgrass prairie and their descendants, among them those who struggle for the right to return.
An 1893 map of Champaign County, carved from Vermilion County in 1833 on traditional lands of the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Weea, Miami, Mascouten, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquakie, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Chickasaw, and Kickapoo Nations.
In the middle of everywhere: Champaign County, Illinois.
Top circle: Rantoul, the home of the Chanute aviation field (later Chanute Air Force Base), established in 1917.
Center circle: The Illinois Central Railroad: speedway to the Caribbean and, via Chicago, to the East Coast and Europe.
Bottom circle: West Urbana (later renamed Champaign) grew on the outskirts of Urbana following the 1854 arrival of the Illinois Central Railroad.
Upon the organization of Champaign County, the town of Urbana became its seat.
CONTENTS
ALSO BY KRISTIN L. HOGANSON
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
MAP OF CHAMPAIGN COUNTRY, ILLINOIS
INTRODUCTION:
What Is the Nation, at Heart?
1. BETWEEN PLACE AND SPACE
The Pioneering Politics of Locality
2. MEAT IN THE MIDDLE
Converging Borderlands in the U.S. Midwest
3. HOG-TIED
The Roots of the Modern American Empire
4. THE ISOLATIONIST CAPITAL OF AMERICA
Hotbed of Alliance Politics
5. FLOWNOVER STATES
The View from the Middle of Everything
6. HOME, LAND, SECURITY
Exile, Dispossession, and Loss
CONCLUSION:
The Nation, at Heart
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS THE NATION, AT HEART?
What is the nation, at heart? Who do Americans think they are, as a people? As a nation of many peoples and multiple faiths, assembled from a variety of disparate regions, further divisible into fifty semiautonomous states, over 560 federally recognized Native American polities, a handful of far-flung territories, and the District of Columbia, the United States may seem more a crazy quilt than a body with a heart. Fractured by partisan politics and competing interests, bitter antagonisms and knife-sharp divides, bloody conflicts and histories of soul-wrenching violence, the nation at its starkest seems patched together from a motley mess of parts, held together by straining stitches at their borders.
And yet Americans persist in imagining a heart. Beset by disunity, they imagine their nation as a body with a protected, essential core: the heartland. With the term referring to values as much as to place, its boundaries are a matter of dispute. Though quibbles persist, most mappings of the heartland place it somewhere between the Appalachian states of the East and Rocky Mountain states of the West, with the long North-South state of Illinois near its core.1
Though ostensibly a geographic center, the heartland serves as a symbolic center in national mythologies. Including border states such as Minnesota and Michigan, the heartland could be seen as readily as an edge. But the other moniker for this region—the Midwest—places it between the East and far West, rather than between Canada and Mexico. Instead of being construed as a place of connection, much less a wellspring of global power, the U.S. heartland is more often seen as static and inward-looking, the quintessential home referenced by “homeland security,” the steadfast stronghold of the nation in an age of mobility and connectedness, the crucible of resistance to the global, the America of America First.2 Walls might be built on the margins, but the impetus for them putatively comes from here.
References to the heartland tend to depict it as buffered and all-American: white, rural, and rooted, full of aging churchgoers, conservative voters, corn, and pigs. Those who have denounced this stereotype as a gross distortion, invoking cities like Chicago as proof, have not refuted the myth, they have only tied it to rural areas dotted with small towns. This pastoral heartland is a place of nostalgic yearnings. It is the garden of prelapsarian innocence before the fall into global entanglements. Critics view the rural heartland in grimmer terms, seeing it as a holdout of compulsory normativity, exclusionary politics, and national exceptionalism. Flyover jokes deride it as a provincial wasteland. Out of touch, out of date, out of style—the heartland is the place that makes isolationism seem possible, the place where people think it desirable.3 It is the mythic past that white ethnonationalists wish to return to, the place that animates their calls to the barricades.4
Americans may not agree on who they are as a whole, but they think they know the nature of their heart. Local. Insulated. Exceptionalist. Isolationist. Provincial. The ultimate safe space. Love it or hate it, the heartland lies at the center of national mythology. This mythology seems so natural and inevitable, the inexorable outcome of history and geography, that it is easy to forget that the heartland myth emerged only in the mid-twentieth century, from the crucible of total war.
THE ORIGINS OF THE HEARTLAND MYTH
Coined by British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder in 1904, the term heartland initially encapsulated the idea of central Europe as a geostrategic pivot point. In opposition to prevailing theories that saw naval power as the key to global power, Mackinder argued that whoever controlled the Eurasian heartland would control the world. The efforts of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi war machine to prove Mackinder’s theory right brought the word heartland into circulation in
the United States.5 During World War II, dispatches from Europe referred to fighting in—and for—the European heartland.6 In the aftermath of the war, as Cold Warriors began to identify Soviets as a greater menace than Nazis, U.S. references to the heartland continued to locate the most critical geographic area where Mackinder had placed it: Eurasia.7
Yet the midcentury fixation on geostrategy also prompted Americans to take a new look at their own landmass and the power base it could provide. Commentators began to affix the word heartland to the U.S. Midwest, using it alongside terms such as the middlewest and midlands.8 From the start, references to the U.S. heartland implied more than just geographic centrality. In keeping with the word’s original usages, the term brought to mind national might, especially in references to the “industrial heartland.”9 While seeming to deny American empire, the word heartland evoked the tremendous strength emanating from the United States. The cockiest of Cold Warriors heralded the U.S. heartland as the center of the greatest power ever known.
The idea of the American heartland as an imperial center (in essence, though not name) may have bolstered confidence, but it did not put existential anxieties to rest. The lurking fears of superpower showdown, of airborne bombs obliterating the fields of corn, launched a very different conception of the term. This was not the heartland of ethnically and racially mixed industrial assembly lines. It was instead figured as a land of farmers of northern European descent, less the core of an expansive empire than a psychic fallout shelter in which to seek refuge from a changing and dangerous world. 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, multihued, industrial heartland as by distant threats.10
This soft-focus version of the heartland could trace its ancestry back to ideas about the Midwest that took hold between the Civil War and World War I. As the region once known as the Old Northwest and Great West moved from the edge of national maps to the center, it came to appear as a middling place. “The most American part of America,” noted a British traveler in 1891. When its hyphenated inhabitants foreswore their German ancestry in the great Hun hunt of 1917, they cast their lot with the 100 percent Americanism that was coming to signify the region.11
As the word heartland began to gain currency as a synonym for the Midwest, Americans in search of a national essence faced a choice: Which heartland would come to represent the mythical core of the nation? The one that drew attention to power and imperial reach? Or the more defensive one, of picket fences and clapboard houses symbolizing the dream of security?
In the struggle over nation-defining mythologies, the picket fences won. Americans bound the center of their country up in myth as they struggled to keep the nation as a whole from unraveling into the world. The more they bound, the more they obscured the full spread of American power. The more entrenched the myth became, the more natural it seemed. The more distant its origins, the easier it became to forget that it did not arise from solid historical and geographical analysis but from the stuff of political need.
This is not to say that there was no historical basis for the heartland myth. To the contrary, its lineage can be traced back beyond the first tendencies to regard the Midwest as the all-American region, to an older set of stories about place. The originators of the heartland myth were able to weave their stories so deftly—and convincingly—because they had inherited a big basket of yarns.
THE LOCAL HISTORY PLOT
The nineteenth century was a golden age of local history. Not the kind of local history that used locality as a method to explore wider themes such as witchcraft or family life, but the hoarier form of local history, of a more calcified, antiquarian vein.12 Starting with stories of the European explorers, these histories move on to the first white inhabitants and last Native Americans.13 The establishment of churches, courthouses, schools, and parks all merit mention, as do gleaming hospitals, depots, and streetcar lines. These histories make nearly everyone within their ambit look good, by slighting everyone who didn’t fit the proper mold, whether transients, radicals, people of color, audacious women, unruly children, the disabled, the queer, or the poor. Even as they speak in nostalgic tones, these antiquarian accounts serve norm-making, particularist, and boosterish ends.
Nineteenth-century local histories and the generations of descendants that followed in similar veins have helped individuals situate themselves in history by placing the known into a longue durée. They have fostered community and advanced historic preservation. They have served as fabulous teaching tools by helping students to draw connections between the familiar and the far-reaching, the tangible and the foundations obscured by time.14 Antiquarian local histories have held enduring appeal because they speak in an intimate voice. Even the commercialized versions slapped together by out-of-town corporate agents tell stories of neighbors who, whatever their differences, are bound to us through ties of place. They make us feel that our lives, our surroundings, our very localness is historically meaningful. As the global has seemed to swamp the world in a homogenizing tide, local history has won new adherents. Local histories provide glimpses into repositories of distinctiveness. They present the refuge of small-scale relationships in which individuals matter, the possibility of more consensual politics, the importance of place.
Yet in teaching us that we matter in both time and place, antiquarian local histories also run the danger of teaching xenophobia and parochialism.15 Though long associated with boosterism and elite biases, these histories have anchored another, less recognized, kind of politics. They have advanced a particular plot, the locality plot as it were. This plot starts and ends in the same place, for it is tidily fenced. There may be a nod here or there to distant ancestors, the backgrounds of new arrivals, the departures of native daughters and sons, but in general, the story unfolds within set boundaries, rarely venturing outward.16 And it looks inward in a particular way, addressing the questions: Who are we as a people? What sets us apart? Antiquarian local histories may help us see beyond our own time, but they reinforce the most myopic perceptions of place.
Antiquarian local histories appear, in sum, to be the heartland myth writ small—or, to get the sequence right, the archetype that makes the heartland myth seem plausible. They have served as the gateway histories to much stronger stuff, in the process dulling more critical perspectives. For all their seeming innocence, they have sustained the heartland myth, preventing us from seeing it as bunk.
THE LAST LOCAL PLACE
The end of the Cold War ushered in a seismic shift in our understanding of the nation. As superpower rivalries faded in importance, globalization became the word of the day. Geographers began to question the local history plot as soon as the Berlin Wall came down. “Can’t we rethink our sense of place?” asked geographer Doreen Massey in 1992. “Is it not possible for a sense of place to be progressive; not self-enclosing and defensive, but outward-looking?”17
Such questions formed the backdrop against which historians began to question their tendency to carve history into national units, each served on a separate plate. Thomas Bender became a leading advocate for histories that followed their subjects wherever they went, making his case in Rethinking American History in a Global Age. His rallying cry shook national history like an earthquake, rattling the foundations and changing the lay of the land. Increasing attention to border-crossing people, politics, goods, culture, and capital began to transform understandings of the national past, as did histories of environmental issues that transcended jurisdictional lines. Metaphors of webs began to outpace references to blocs. The emerging narratives showed the nation to be far less local, insular, and provincial than previously thought, and many of them helped flesh out narratives that were far less white.18
And yet in the frenzied rush to rewrite histories, some places got left behind.
This dawned on me in July 1999, the month I moved from the East Coast to a colle
ge town in the Midwest. The first morning in central Illinois, assessing the bare kitchen, the dirty grout, the sticky walls, on a day so hot it was melting, no water to be had for cleaning because of a break in the main, wondering where in the world to begin, I turned on the radio. Static . . . more static . . . a buzz . . . then out poured weather forecasts for China, Argentina, Brazil.
Listening to the news from China, I registered something that I had missed in my readings on global connection. All those histories were not really global at all. They had advanced the conceit that there were particular geographies of global connectedness, involving places such as coastal areas, borderlands, major cities, and tourist destinations. Through omission, they implied that there were geographies of disconnection, of left-behind places. Where to find the U.S. heartland in these geographies of globalization? Somewhere close to Appalachia on the list of the last local places, never mind the weather report.
The utter surprise of that broadcast sharpened my antennae for other signs of dissonance. The more I settled in, the less my environs seemed to fit my preconceptions. It wasn’t just the news reports of global commodity markets or my dawning recognition of the ways that NAFTA benefited nearby industrial farms. It was the realization that the rural and small-town Midwest also held stories of immigrants and refugees, of military service and mission trips, of exchange students and Caribbean cruise passengers, of invasive species and farm families investing in land in Brazil.19 People in the Corn Belt buy pretty much the same imported products in pretty much the same box stores as people on the coasts. They eat Chilean grapes in the winter and Mexican strawberries in the spring. They stay in touch with family members who have left for cities such as New York and L.A. They adhere to faiths with cobelievers around the globe.