The Heartland

by Kristin L. Hoganson

  Urbana Courier, 1918: Writing from the front, Sergeant H. G. Smith reported on the view from the telephone wires that he was stringing to a lookout post. The Germans below had put up their hands, begging to be captured, but they “died from heart failure, with the help of machinegun bullets.”7

  Urbana Courier, 1918: “The big monarch butterfly, who lives on milkweed, migrates like the birds. . . . One naturalist describes a shower of butterflies that he saw off the South American coast. It extended as far as the eye could reach and even with a telescope it was not possible to find where there were no butterflies.”8

  Urbana Courier, 1920: “Bird fanciers would find it interesting to visit the Renner undertaking parlors and watch the collection of birds . . . The Australian Paraquet and the Brunnette Java Rice bird each lost its mate a short time ago and have mated with each other.”9

  Dallas Morning News, 1977: “We are just like the birds. In the fall we come back. That’s the way it’s meant to be. Now they’ll throw you in jail for shooting a migratory bird. But they won’t do nothing when a person practices prejudice and discrimination against a migratory human being.”—Margaret Whitewater, a Kickapoo woman living under the International Bridge at Eagle Pass, Texas10

  5

  FLOWNOVER STATES

  The View from the Middle of Everything

  FLYOVER COUNTRY

  Flyover country. These two words convey a world of meaning. They imply that the American heartland is best regarded through an airplane window; there is really no reason to land, for the rural Midwest is a provincial wasteland in contrast to the cosmopolitan coasts. Cross-country fliers have a lock on mobility; the people below are stuck on the ground, too rooted to soar through the sky. Flyover jokes fit with theories that link heightened perspectives to power. Like the colonial explorers, mapmakers, and military scouts who have positioned themselves on high to capture the landscapes below, fliers-over can grasp entire communities from above. And this is what they see: a land of squares, nothing down there but Flatville.11 By mixing the cachet derived from mobility with the power of elevated place, the flyover slur packs a double whammy on the status enhancement front.

  Yet despite such efforts to claim power and privilege, the view from the air misses much of what is happening on the ground. Even the massive engineering works that undergird the wet prairie evade detection from the air, buried as they are beneath those rectangular fields. The fliers-over who turn Flatville into an insult fail to recognize it as a real place. They overlook the possibility that the people down there might have their own views on how they fit into the world, that they might regard airspace from their own particular perspectives. Such a possibility would demand a different term: flownover states, perhaps.

  But how to capture the perspective from the ground, over a century ago? How can we get at the worldviews of people who rarely sat down to write about themselves in the larger scheme of things? What archival collection would even begin to disclose bottom-up geographical imaginings?

  The Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection, for starters. Developed by librarians at the University of Illinois, this collection contains well over a million pages of Illinois newspaper content. Among the papers scanned into this database is the Urbana Daily Courier, digitized from 1903 forward. Some issues are missing and some of the originals from which the scans were made are torn or otherwise faulty. Speckled text, uneven inking, worn type, variant spellings, line breaks, fading—it’s enough to keep a search engine up at night. And yet, keyword after keyword, the Courier yields glimmerings into aerial consciousness and so much more besides. It is both a source in itself and a generous provider of leads.12 The more I delved into it, the more it appeared that coastal areas had no edge on continental centers when it came to connectivity by air. Airspace has offered the heartland direct connections across long and otherwise insurmountable distances.

  FLATVILLE

  Flatville arose from the muck. Like the wet prairie more generally, its flatness inhibited drainage, contributing to swampy conditions. The firmer lands that had once supported buffalo enabled the first settler colonists to graze cattle, but the land in and around Champaign County was so boggy that in 1840, the area had fewer than two residents per square mile.13 In contrast to the arid West, where farmers struggled to bring more water to land, in the sodden prairies, farmers worked hard to remove the water from the land so as to enable the cultivation of crops. Health concerns factored into the drying campaign as well. Long before the discovery that mosquitoes carried malaria and yellow fever, the association between swampland and ague added to the desire to pull the plug on wetlands—including about 8.3 million acres in Illinois, or about a quarter of the state.14

  Thus began the still ongoing engineering project that has turned the wet prairies into some of the most productive agricultural land in the world. Step one was to dismantle the existing engineering works—the beaver dams that blocked the “smaller water-courses.” In his 1905 history of Champaign, J. O. Cunningham reported that at first the beavers repaired their dams. But as hunters reduced their numbers, the animals abandoned their homes. The near total eradication of beavers culminated in grand euphemism: “finally the last of this interesting and intelligent animal, with his contemporary, the wild Indian, moved westward.”15

  Step two was to introduce new engineering works. To dry the “inundated lands” that were underwater for part of the year, farmers experimented with mole ditching (dragging a plow that would carve out a tunnel) and, when that proved unsuccessful, using cattle (up to forty head together) to drag larger ditching apparatuses.16 An even more laborious method was to dig drainage ditches that fed into creeks and streams.17 This backbreaking work slowly began to yield results. Whereas a traveler who rode through Champaign County in 1873 characterized half the cornfields as being underwater, residents could have pointed out that the other half were not.18 By 1885, Illinois farmers were beginning to use steam-powered dredging machines that opened canals and cleared the course of creeks. They also straightened these creeks, to speed the flow of water from their fields.19

  In addition to creating lateral drainage through ditching, farmers with sodden land invested in underdrainage. They dug up their fields to lay clay tiles beneath, four to five feet deep. Typically baked into tubular shapes, these tiles, when laid end to end, fast-tracked the groundwater that seeped into them out of the fields. Reporting from Champaign in 1863, M. L. Dunlap claimed that tile draining had not caught on yet in the county, since the heavy tiles had to be hauled in from afar.20 By the 1880s, however, county maps show about twenty evenly distributed tile factories, which enabled their widespread adoption.21

  The expertise for these engineering projects came from Europe, either directly or via more eastern states such as New York, Ohio, and Indiana. Nineteenth-century agricultural writings often credited England—and particularly its eastern fen dwellers—for pioneering modern drainage techniques.22 They also acknowledged the roles of other European countries—among them France, Scotland, Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Italy—in producing drainage engineers “of no mean ability and reputation.”23 Along with attributing drainage techniques to European inventiveness, agricultural writings cast better drainage as a means of laying the groundwork for European-style agriculture, with European markets in mind. All that digging in the mud and dirt might suggest an entrenchment in place, but settler colonists dug trenches to move themselves closer to Europe.

  This cutaway illustration shows how to lay clay drainage pipes. After entering through perforations or gaps between the tiles, the water flows briskly downhill, where the farmer has presumably sunk a drainage ditch. Although it is difficult to decipher in the image, the accompanying text describes the tool on the ground to the right as an Irish spade.

  Henry F. French, Farm Drainage: The Principles, Processes, and Effects of Draining Land (New York: Orange Judd and Co., 1859), 245.

  Drainage tiles being
emptied from an Indiana kiln.

  The Drainage Journal 22 (Aug. 1900), 219.

  Knowledge of drainage techniques arrived on immigrant ships as well as through published writings and scientific networks. The Frisian people, living on the coast of the North Sea (in what is now the Netherlands and abutting part of northwest Germany), had centuries of experience draining marshlands. From 1845 to 1895, over forty thousand eastern Frisians, known as Ostfrieslanders, came to the United States, fleeing hunger, poverty, and military conscription by the expanding Prussian state. They also came in search of opportunity. After landing in New York, Baltimore, or New Orleans, many headed for the Midwest, where they purchased the cheapest land on the market: marshy land, that is.

  In the mid-1860s, when land had become scarce around their first footholds, newcomers and those with dim inheritance prospects looked around Illinois for more. Champaign County caught their eye. Although settler-colonists already owned title to most of the county, there were still bargain-rate swamplands for sale in the north. Surveying reports describing the area as “level wet prairie unfit for cultivation” had dissuaded other would-be settlers, but the Ostfrieslanders saw opportunities below the pond waters. At least there was no need for dikes to keep the ocean out. The earliest settlers moved in by night, so as to drive their wagons on the thinning March ice. They soon commenced the arduous process of digging ditches, laying tile, and sloping their fields.24

  Within a few years, the Ostfrieslanders of Champaign had established a German-language school and a Lutheran church—led for a while by a Brazilian-born and German-educated pastor. The settlements that sprang up around these institutions became known as Flatville. In the early summers, scummy green water surrounded the settlements’ houses. The mosquitoes that bred in this soup had free access to their human blood supply through screenless windows. After a rain, it was possible to row from some of these houses five miles into the country—not a promising start.25 Yet by World War I, Flatville contained some of the most valuable agricultural land in the state.26 It had taken a generation, but swampland that had once sold for 25 cents an acre was fetching $250.27 Its increasingly flush farmers soon won a reputation for generosity in their annual missions fund-raiser.28

  Draining produced a remarkable transformation beyond the “swamps” and “sloughs” of places like Flatville to “higher prairie lands” as well.29 By 1900, Illinois farmers had drained hundreds of thousands of acres. By 1930, the state had over ten thousand miles of drainage ditches and a hundred fifty thousand miles of tile: enough ditching, observed one commentator, to stretch from Chicago to Outer Mongolia, enough tiling to circle the earth six times.30 The noted success of Illinois farmers in turning wetlands into productive farms helps explain why real estate agents hawked the agricultural potential of Louisiana cypress swamps in the columns of Illinois newspapers.31 If anybody could turn a bayou into a cornfield, farmers from places like Flatville seemed to have the requisite know-how.

  Despite measurable successes in separating land from water, the rivulets from the past lingered, as seen in the experience of a tenant farmer in northern Illinois. According to the Courier, he awoke one morning to discover his entire field of corn stripped bare. Every leaf and stalk on the twenty acres had disappeared. From nine inches’ growth to nothing, overnight. There was no evidence of hogs or cattle, no broken fences or evidence of trespass. The farmer complained to the landowner, who consulted with Stephen Forbes, the state entomologist and a professor at the University of Illinois. Knowing that the ground had been recently claimed from the swamp, Forbes surmised that insects were not to blame. He had the farmer replant the field and set a watch. Sure enough, his suspicions were justified. One night, by the thousands, scritch-scratching crayfish emerged from the soil to scour the field again.32

  Separating land from water enabled more than agricultural production—it also enabled transportation. Whereas eighteenth-century accounts of the Champaign area describe horses being mired in bogs, so deep that they caused injury, at times “environed on all sides with morasses” so thick as to forbid an advance, by the end of the nineteenth century drained fields supported firmer roads.33 Railroads, too, benefited from drier land. As they channeled more water into ditches, streams, and rivers, Illinois farmers pressed for improved river routes between the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Michigan. Having removed the water from their fields, they sought more removal of land from water, so as to float their crops “northward to the British possessions, south to the Gulf, to Mexico, the West Indies, and south America; and west to the Pacific; and on until the West becomes the East.”34

  By the dawn of the twentieth century, the farmers of Illinois had wrung substantial connectivity from the land and wrested even more from water. Yet their roads and rivers continued to mean fixed routes. Air, in contrast, seemed qualitatively different in its infinite openness. Well before long-range bombers, intercontinental missiles, radar installations, and fallout heightened aerial consciousness in the Midwest and the overlapping big sky country of the Great Plains, air brought to mind a vast array of long-distance connections.35 If land and water were the matter of daily toil and set ways, air offered astounding imaginative flights.

  FROM WIRED TO WIRELESS ACCESS

  Starting in the 1850s, the latest news arrived in Champaign through the air. Following right behind railroad construction, using the railroad right-of-way, high-strung telegraph wires connected Champaign to a network of overhead wires and underwater cables extending as far as Russia and India. Although stories of communications infrastructure often suggest a progression from local to national to global integration, the advent of the telegraph plugged the receiver in Champaign into an increasingly global network without many proximate nodes. As telegraph wires unreeled farther into Latin America and along the routes of empire to Africa and the antipodes, the entire web thickened, with single lines turning into what one history of Champaign described as “the large array of wires which now darken the rights of way.”36 Though far too expensive for routine correspondence, telegraph wires sped up emergency notices and urgent communications. They also revolutionized the gathering and transmission of news. No longer dependent on the publications that arrived through the post, papers such as the Urbana Courier got their timeliest items from the press syndicates that pooled resources for wired reports.37 Reveling in its new connectedness, the Courier attributed its coverage of breaking news to the means of transmission: the wire.38

  The next breakthrough on the communications front, the telephone, also had an aerial dimension as seen from the ground in Champaign, since most of the wiring was strung from pole to pole. At the turn of the century, the Bell System competed with city and township exchanges in a high-speed race for customers.39 By 1905, more than half the farms in the county occupied by owners and many run by tenants had telephone connections. Whereas the telegraph had connected Champaign to national and global networks simultaneously, the telephone started small, connecting users to neighbors, shops, and the doctor. Yet even from the start, the technology promised the longer-distance connections eventually delivered by the Bell System.40

  The breakneck competition to erect a new aerial infrastructure led to a rapid proliferation of poles, some erected in advance of the required permits.41 The pole that appeared one day in the middle of a driveway seemed to stand for the wiring frenzy.42 And then there was the noise. The buzzing attracted the large brown woodpeckers known as flickers, which pecked at the poles as if insects were humming inside.43

  In response to anxieties that too many young people were leaving the farm for the city, early telephone advertisements maintained that rural isolation was a thing of the past—that modern wiring had turned the tables, making the farm the place for “good social times.”

  “Getting Up a Party,” The Prairie Farmer, Dec. 26, 1907, 3.

  Telegraph and telephone poles were more than eyesores and buzzing nuisances, they were also threats to the
tractors, cars, and horse teams that crashed into them. In 1903, white residents of Danville, one county to the east, purposefully turned a telephone pole into an instrument of death when they used it to lynch a black man.44 The wires, too, meant danger, as evidenced by news of fires, “nearly electrocuted” children, linemen who died on the job, injuries befalling people clearing storm wreckage, livestock fatalities, and the harm done to low-flying birds, sometimes “cut almost in two by the force with which they struck the wire.”45 With six hundred poles up and more under way, the frustrated residents of the village of Tolono passed a tax—a pole tax, as it were—to slow the plague, but they never attempted to stop it altogether.46

  Next came the wireless. The first reports of wireless communications that surfaced in the Courier focused on the lifesaving possibilities of maritime messages.47 Though prairie residents had little need for maritime rescue, they soon embraced the new technology. By 1911, the county had its first wireless plant, installed by the manager of the Urbana Western Union office and a university student in electrical engineering who had been an operator for the United Wireless Company on the Great Lakes.48 Wireless stations soon spread to other places in the county. Before the year was out, the village of St. Joseph had four wireless telegraph stations, and the Courier noted that “the boys are getting a great deal of pleasure out of them.”49

  The appeal of wireless stretched beyond those in the communications business to amateurs. Trendspotters might have noted that something was afoot as early as 1910, the year the Courier ran a story of Frank Scroggins’s “Thrilling Adventure.” While experimenting with a wireless telegraph appliance on the roof of his family’s house, Scroggins slipped on the wet shingles and fell two stories to the ground. Remarkably, he escaped injury.50 It seems likely that his parents forbade him from climbing on the roof, because the next time his wireless efforts made the news, it was for falling from a tree.51