Despite an abundance of scholarship denouncing isolationism as a misleading myth, the term refused to die.11 Efforts to debunk the isolationist legend by parsing policy preferences and tracing private sector ties have lacked traction because this legend was never only about ideology and practice; it was always just as much about place. Those who made the case for American isolationism claimed that in its earliest incarnations it referred to the nascent nation as a whole, separated from Europe by an oceanic moat that took more than a month for wind-powered vessels to cross. Proximate neighbors, whether indigenous, Mexican, Canadian, or Caribbean, fell off the map in this Eurocentric geography. With the advent of telegraphs, cables, and steamships, such a sweeping appellation made even less sense. To label a place like New York City “isolationist” would have been manifest nonsense. But rather than retiring the misleading concept, its proponents merely relocated it, from the nation as a whole to the rural Midwest, the so-called isolationist capital of America.12 Even in an age of American global ascendance, the heart of the nation remained stuck in a more local past.
The isolationist capital of America won its title by seeming quadruply insulated from the rest of the world: through vast oceans, a mass of land, distance from urban centers, and historic proclivities. One historian characterized isolationism as “an idealized vision of small-town and rural America applied to international affairs.”13 Though insisting that “the isolationist movement was by no means exclusively rural and small town,” another described it as “rooted in the interests and values of agriculture in the upper Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio river valley.”14 Stretching far beyond particular policy choices, the term “isolationism” came to evoke an inward outlook that made sense only if anchored to a seemingly isolated place with a long history of going it alone. The heartland myth took root in such soil, with offshoots that sprout to this day.
The idea of the heartland as the home of isolationism remains so entrenched in nationalist imaginaries that we mistake it for an apt characterization of core convictions, if not a timeless truth. But history suggests otherwise. Keyword searching small-town newspapers prior to 1945 reveals that rural midwesterners did not use terms like isolationist or isolationism to refer to themselves or their politics.15 The term isolation mostly turns up stories on medical quarantines, with scattered hits for stranded polar expeditions and Indian Ocean islands.16 On the occasions when rural midwesterners did refer to their own “isolation” (note the lack of an ism), they presented it as a liability, fortunately in the process of being remedied by railroads, paved roads, automobiles, telephones, Grange meetings, newspapers, telegrams, and rural free delivery.17 A report on a convivial Commercial Club meeting captures the connotations of the word: “Isolation means death. Hermits are abnormal people.” No wonder, continued the report, that women constituted a majority in insane asylums, for confinement at home was stultifying.18 Although calling oneself a local could be a means to claim place-based entitlements, to be called isolated was no compliment, as the allusion to disturbed housewives indicates.
From its inception, the word isolationist was not so much a description as an insult—the kind of insinuation of inferiority that continues to rankle the region. By associating particular policy perspectives with hayseeds, it misrepresented both politics and place.
SWORDS AND PLOWSHARES
If the isolationist legend had been rooted in evidence and logic, it would have withered from the start, for historians have long realized that the settlers who forged the heartland hankered after foreign markets. From the nation’s founding to 1911, agricultural goods constituted the majority of U.S. exports. Pick up a musty old farming journal, rural newspaper, or agricultural report from the Midwest, and you will find aspirations of conquering the globe.19 An early dean of the Agricultural College at the University of Illinois made these ambitions clear: “we shall never rest satisfied . . . until we have attained commercial supremacy in the agricultural markets of the world.”20
Farmers called for greater market access so vociferously that the biggest boundary enforcers of them all, the protective tariff proponents of the Republican Party, reassured them that agricultural exports would continue to flow out even as imports faced more obstacles to entry. Democrats, Grangers, and other tariff opponents doubted the feasibility of that Gore-Tex-like scenario, insisting that their exports would rise and cost of living fall only if the tariff barriers that advanced the interests of urban manufacturers were removed. Speaking on behalf of the “agricultural classes,” one Champaign resident claimed that “the farmers of Illinois can supply the world, if need be, with meat and grain—with wheat, corn, hogs and cattle, and why they should not be suffered to buy as freely as they are allowed to sell in the markets of the world, is one of the infamous outrages of the age.”21 In response to manufacturers’ nationalist arguments, this Champaigner against the tariff prioritized profit and economy over the coinage of the trade.
Though seemingly motivated by a sense of unbounded productive capacity and taste for imported goods, ambitions of feeding the world sprang from anxiety as well. Undercurrents of concern were particularly strong between 1865 and 1894, when foreign competition drove down U.S. grain prices in international markets. Increasing competition also affected prices closer to home. Earlier in the century, farmers could hope to weather poor harvests through high commodity prices nearby. But by the late nineteenth century, cheaper grains from elsewhere flooded in whenever their own harvests were poor.22 As consumers suffered less of a wallop, growers suffered more. The threat that foreign rivals posed to profits focused farmers’ attention on competitors.
Much of this attention zeroed in on the temperate agricultural regions stretching from Argentina to Australia and Canada to Russia. Federal Department of Agriculture reports warned of the European immigrants pouring into the “vast areas of productive lands” of South America, bringing with them knowledge of modern agricultural methods and a “good degree of enterprise and ambition.” The realization that U.S. manufacturers were selling these settlers cutting-edge agricultural implements heightened the sense of threat, as did news that these “agricultural colonies” would have ready access to markets thanks to expanding railway lines.23
Accounts of rising threats prompted midwestern farmers to regard foreign rivals as antagonists. Though by no means isolationist, the farmers bent on export markets do not appear collaborationist. They seem to exemplify an us-versus-them mentality, a desire to dominate in a win-or-lose world. A drawing published in the Illinois Agriculturist in 1898 captures this stance—under waving flags and an arrow-clutching eagle, a cannon bombards the world with corn.24 Such aspirations provide a powerful rebuttal to the isolationist legend. But militant unilateralism is not the whole story.
The Illinois Agriculturist proposed rendering this image in ears of corn at the Paris Exposition of 1900, so as to “excite the curiosity of the foreign people long enough to convert them to the use of corn products.” Although the artist meant to signal hereditary friendship through the depiction of Lafayette, he seemed unconcerned with the ways that European audiences might regard the reach of the American flag or the threat posed by the cannon.
E. S. Fursman, “Finding a Market for Our Corn Crop,” Illinois Agriculturist 2 (1898), 81, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Archives.
The career of Congressman William Brown McKinley hints at a more collectivist outlook than that suggested by cannonades of corn. This William McKinley should not be confused with the Ohio congressman William McKinley, who won the presidency in 1896 and subsequently took Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam as spoils of the Spanish-American War, annexing Hawai‘i along the way. The Illinois McKinley represented Champaign and neighboring counties. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he made big money in public utilities. Financed in part by capitalists in Montreal and England, his business empire grew from the waterworks of Champaign to electric, gas, and streetcar lines and interurban t
rains in several states.25 Having amassed a fortune from downtown infrastructures, McKinley turned to agriculture as a hobby.26
He also turned to politics, winning election to the U.S. Congress in 1904. He served until 1921, with the exception of the Sixty-Third Congress (1913–1915). In 1921, McKinley took up a seat in the U.S. Senate, which he held until his death, five years into his term. Given the composition of his district and his investments in railroading, his service on the House’s Agriculture and Pacific Railroads Committees comes as no surprise.27 His third major committee assignment, on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, may seem less apt, but it enabled him to advance his constituents’ trade-related interests.28 Yet protecting U.S. farmers from competition and extending their markets were just two of the issues that animated McKinley.29 As he rose to become the ranking minority member on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, he also embraced the movement for global governance.30
McKinley did so primarily through his membership in the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Founded in 1889, this organization brought legislators from different nations together on behalf of international arbitration treaties and the judicial resolution of international disputes. In pursuit of this larger mission, it took up related issues such as the protection of private property at sea and “interdicting the use of aeroplanes in war.” As of 1912, eighteen European nations belonged, joined by Australia, Canada, Japan, Liberia, Turkey, and the United States. By 1914, the union had held eighteen conferences, mostly in European capitals but on one occasion in St. Louis. Although its efforts to promote world peace failed spectacularly in 1914, members held on to that vision, endorsing the League of Nations at the close of World War I.31
In 1904, the U.S. affiliate of the union had about forty members from the two chambers of Congress.32 McKinley threw himself energetically into the work, rising to become leader of the global organization shortly before his death. His participation in the union’s congresses added to his tally of transatlantic crossings: fifteen round-trips, thirty crossings overall.33 In 1911, he brought over a dozen men from Champaign County with him to the union’s congress in Rome.34 McKinley denounced the millions of dollars expended “for the purposes and machinery of war” as a waste. He regarded peace advocacy as the means to shift these investments to “the betterment of human conditions.”35
The Urbana Courier joked at the congressman’s expense when Italy started a war around the time of the peace conference in Rome, but it more generally praised McKinley’s efforts. As a Republican paper, the Courier stood behind its Republican representative, claiming that McKinley “may justly be regarded as one of the foremost exponents of universal peace in this country.” It lauded his service on the Foreign Relations Committee as a credit to his district and indeed the entire “middle west” and proudly reported that the noted Chautauqua orator Reverend John Wesley Hill had praised McKinley’s peace advocacy as an exemplification of Christian principles.36 Along with endorsing the kinds of economic self-advancement that McKinley supported, the Courier also endorsed McKinley’s efforts on behalf of international cooperation. Positioned in the midst of two sets of politics—self-interest and collective well-being—McKinley and his backers chose both.
Competition or cooperation? Struggles for global domination or world peace? How to strike the balance and with whom? McKinley and his largely rural constituents faced the same questions as the nation as a whole. In refutation of the isolationist legend, they had no particular proclivity for walls. Having so egregiously misrepresented their stances on the major foreign policy debates of their day, the legend proceeds to overlook a more intriguing story: the particular relations that unfolded on the ground. As an urban legend in more than one sense, it completely misses the possibility that the isolationist capital of America was a veritable hotbed of alliance politics, with a specifically agrarian bent.
IMPORTING THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION
The farmers who colonized the Midwest in the nineteenth century did not export indigenous coneflowers or big bluestem grass; they plowed them up instead. Nor did they export the varieties of Indian corn that they encountered upon arrival. To the contrary, they mixed eastern flints (traceable back to ancient strains developed from Canada to Georgia) and southern dents (traceable back to strains imported more recently from Mexico) to develop the signature grain of the Corn Belt.37 Just as they applauded themselves for improving on Indian corn, they saw the extent of their cultivated fields as a sign of civilizational advance. Where once small plots of cultivated land had dotted the prairie, small parcels of untilled prairie became lonely holdouts against furrowed fields. The pioneers often praised themselves for forging homes from the wild. But the more familiar they made their fields, the less domestic those fields became in ecological terms.38
The extent of the environmental transformation wrought by these farmers can be glimpsed in an 1859 guide to what was then known as “the American West.” The guide reported on the staples to be found there: wheat, oats, Irish potatoes, hay, butter, and cheese. With the possible exception of hay (depending on its composition), none of these things were found in Illinois prior to European colonization. A few exceptions—maple syrup and some nuts and berries—aside, this guide trumpeted products new to the prairie.39
As ever more settlers packed up their seeds and went west, ever more exogenous plants took hold. With the important exception of maize, all the pioneers’ major grains came via Europe, tracked back much farther by agricultural writings of the time. According to an 1853 article in the Urbana Union, wheat originated in the central tableland of Tibet, “where its representatives yet exist as a grass, with small, mealy seeds.” Rye grew wild in Siberia; oats in North Africa; barley in the Himalayas. The article traced garden beans to the East Indies, onions to Egypt, potatoes to Peru and Mexico, pears and apples to Europe, cherries to Asia Minor, walnuts and peaches to Persia, and radishes to China and Japan.40
Other publications played the origins game, too, in this time of radical biological change. The Prairie Farmer claimed that Duchess apples, though native to Russia, disembarked from England and Germany.41 The Illinois Farmer attributed a rival, the red Astrachan apple, to Sweden, by way of England.42 It reported that the Chinese sugarcane (sorgo) had arrived via Europe, whence it was brought in 1851 by the French consul to Shanghai. It tracked the travels of imphee from Port Natal (now known as Durban, South Africa) to England, France, Belgium, the West Indies, Mauritius, and Brazil.43 Attention to origins helped farmers evaluate the likelihood that a new plant would prosper in their clime and soil; attention to previous migrations suggested that, having adapted to new lands already, these plants could thrive elsewhere as well.
The histories of well-traveled plants conveyed a third important message: desirability. Before the nineteenth century, American farmers typically planted seeds that they had saved from the previous year’s harvest. When they moved, they brought their own starter seeds along. To broaden their plantings beyond the seeds from their own plots, pioneers traded with their neighbors and exchanged seeds within agricultural societies.44 This meant that much of what nineteenth-century colonists grew could be traced to eighteenth-century importations, and some back as far as the “Columbian exchange” of the early colonial era.45 Important though these older strains were, the colonization of Illinois in the nineteenth century coincided with a new wave of botanical importation, stemming from a desire for world-class plants.
This wave reached Champaign later than less swampy parts of the state, but the inexorable advance of drainage efforts in the aftermath of the Civil War led to the ascent of mixed farming—meaning farms with a variety of crops and animals. Even farmers who did not specialize in stock typically raised some animals on the side and most farmers kept draft animals before the advent of mechanical tractors. The need to feed these animals led to even more importations. Rather than rely on native prairie grasses, the farmers of Champaign began planting exogenous grasses and fodder such as timoth
y. Among the seeds hawked by a Champaign County hardware store in 1913 were ones for millet, soy, rye, rape, clover, redtop (a Eurasian grass), and alfalfa.46 A 1917 Champaign County directory reveals the effects of these purchases. It listed over twenty-nine thousand acres of “tame or cultivated grasses,” but none in the category of wild prairie grasses.47
Farmers’ transformational efforts extended to the farthest margins of their land. To establish boundaries, farmers planted hedgerows like those of Europe, many grown from Osage orange seeds obtained in Arkansas and Texas.48 To block winter winds, they grew timber breaks of Norway spruce, Austrian pine, Scotch pine, European silver fir, Siberian arborvitae, cedar of Lebanon, and English yew.49 For ornamental purposes, they purchased black European mulberries, English bird cherries, and Siberian crab apples.50 The biological transformation of the wet prairie was so thorough that less than a tenth of 1 percent of its original sweep remains in Illinois, the so-called Prairie State.51
NON-NATIVIST DEVELOPMENT AGENCIES
The U.S. government played a significant role in these importations. In the 1830s, the commissioner of patents, Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, started collecting seeds from consuls and naval officers, even though he had no legal authority to do so. He distributed them through congressmen—who mailed thousands of packets of free seeds to constituents—and through agricultural societies.52 In 1839, Congress began budgeting money for such work and the Patent Office ramped up its efforts. In the 1850s, it sent agricultural explorers to Europe, South America, and Japan. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, founded in 1862, carried on the efforts to improve and broaden the genetic stock of grains, grasses, fruits, legumes, and vegetables through importation.53
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