Which is not to say that they are all passport-holding, sophisticated one-worlders. To the contrary. There is something to the assumption that we can find evidence of locality, insularity, national exceptionalism, isolationism, provincialism, and white tribalism in the rural heartland. Like other rural people, those in the Midwest have had fewer proximate neighbors than apartment dwellers have. They have likewise lived in comparatively homogenous communities, many of them formed by chain migration and buttressed by antiblack legislation, such as the 1853 Illinois statute forbidding people with one or more black great-grandparents from settling in the state.20 Despite the crop subsidies, insurance programs, and other federal payouts that have propped up rural economies, farm dwellers have prided themselves on being more self-sufficient than city folk. There are stories of homesteaders so eager for companionship that they danced after barn raisings until their toenails fell off.21 There is some substance to claims that those wanting glitter and excitement (and perhaps smoother dance floors) took off for other places, leaving behind those more inclined to safety, familiarity, and belonging. The Illinois Agriculturalist essay that admonished the farm boys who were eager to see the world that “there is much of the world that is best not seen” seems to exemplify the region’s parochialism.22
Historians have countered such perceptions by alluding to various forms of connection, ranging from Asiatic cholera epidemics to itinerant harvest crews, ambitions of global markets, and the ability to buy the fashionable Staffordshire tea sets of the 1820s within a year of their appearance in London.23 But historians have also reinforced perceptions of rural midwesterners as living on remote islands in the midst of the vast American landmass. They have painted vivid pictures of incessant, exhausting efforts to coax a living from the soil, small-scale communities, church-centered social lives, family economies, and ties to place extending over generations. They have told stories of hellish conditions inhibiting travel: mud, dust, mosquitoes, assailants, unbridged rivers, dangerous fords, verminous lodgings, potholes, ice, snags, and paths that faded into morasses of tallgrass. Histories of the rural Midwest have emphasized the particular isolation of women, bound to home by male privilege, tied tighter by the unremitting burdens of childbearing, child care, and tasks such as cooking, cleaning, vegetable raising, poultry tending, dairying, sewing, and food preservation.24 The heartland myth has sprung from a kernel of truth.
And yet to stereotype the entire rural Midwest—and all the people in it—as narrow-minded locals is akin to imagining everyone in Appalachia as drug addicted, junk-food eating, violence prone, and white. Such simplistic caricatures not only belittle an entire region, they also explain behavioral patterns in terms of site-specific ethnic depravity, thereby hiding their true origins and extent.25 To write such stereotypes into the past creates further distortions, because rural communities have never been static. Indeed, they have declined over the past century as farming has become more mechanized. They have become comparatively smaller as the world has urbanized, comparatively poorer as capital has become more concentrated, comparatively off the beaten track as long-haul flights have joined major hubs.26 The contemporary tendency to associate the U.S. Midwest with spatial fixity would have made little sense to peripatetic pioneers. The rural Midwest may appear to be a cultural backwater now, but in 1800 it had a different kind of reputation: the cutting edge of Western civilization; a place free from the ruts of tradition and open to the possibilities of change: a true city on a hill, however rural and flat.27
Although we can find evidence of all the things the heartland supposedly represents in plenty of other places as well, national mythologies have dumped an overwhelming load of baggage on the heartland’s shoulders. This burden is far too heavy for one region to carry by itself. It bogs the heartland down in place and traps its history in expired approaches to the past, dating back to before scholarship began opening out to the global. By rendering the heartland as one of the last local places, it associates insularity more with geography than with politics, thereby distorting both.
THE HEARTLAND, UNBOUND
The discordance between the heartland of myth and the one that stared me in the face led to the question: What really lies at the heart of the nation? The realization that the heartland of myth was at odds with what was so apparent on the ground made me suspect that we find in the heartland what we’re looking for. Our assumptions about the heartland are so deeply rooted that they can withstand counterevidence howling as loud as prairie winds.
But what if we look out as well as in, going back before the heartland myth took hold, to the time when the meaning of the Midwest was wide open? What if we went back to the point of origin, the local history plot, but instead of stringing more wire on the fences, we let the stories we found there unspool? Might we better comprehend the full complexity at the heart of the nation? Might we uncover a different past upon which to build?
Local. Insulated. Exceptionalist. Isolationist. Provincial. The ultimate safe space. What if, instead of treating these components of the heartland myth as foregone conclusions, we approached them as questions, as invitations to explore?
I nearly started with my backyard, a classroom-sized mess of prior plantings jostling against the shaggy patch of prairie I had seeded and the tomato vines entwined in the forsythia. Tomatoes: Central and South American in origin. Forsythia: a Eurasian shrub that traveled to the United States from Britain. The nitlike starlings on the telephone wires? Invasives. The lady beetles climbing on the screen? Natives of Japan. The mosquitoes lurking somewhere in the shade? For all I knew, bearers of West Nile virus, which was hitting Illinois harder than any other state at the time.28 Internet searching traced the hostas and the peonies to Asia; the creeping Charlie to Europe (brought to the Americas as an herb). The ornamental grass spilling over the fence was not the native switchgrass, but pampas grass from South America. And the compost pile? A heap of tropical and out-of-season peels from someplace else. The very soil of my yard was laced with equatorial residues, all run through the guts of nonnative worms. And at least some of the runoff would flow to the Gulf, where midwestern lawn and farm chemicals have spiked an algae-choked zone of death.
Doubtful that my backyard could really help me go back to the very grounding of the heartland myth and mortified by the prospect of it appearing on a book cover, I decided to make the backyard a bit more figurative by widening my scope to my new home county, Champaign.
Located about 130 miles south of Chicago, 160 miles northeast of St. Louis, and 110 miles to the west of Indianapolis, Champaign is a rural county in east-central Illinois. An 1858 newspaper positioned one of its northernmost towns, Rantoul, “four miles nearer the centre of the world than any other place,” bounded on the north by Chicago, on the east by Sebastopol, on the south by New Orleans, and on the west by Kansas and Sodom.29 The county seat, Urbana, also lies to the south, along with its twin city, Champaign. These cities now house a University of Illinois campus, which grew from the Illinois Industrial University, founded in 1867. Boosters describe the campus area as microurban, but despite the international flavor of the university, its host cities (with a combined population of about 126,000) are not the kinds of places that references to global cities bring to mind. The smaller towns that speckle the surrounding countryside are even less so. A Corn Belt county, Champaign is a landlocked stretch of what was once tallgrass prairie. For as long as I have lived there, the county has skewed red in congressional matches. The highways that bisect it have pro-gun signs along their shoulders, like labels for the rows of corn and soy. The population is predominantly white (over 75 percent), Christian, and native-born; the poverty rate hovers around 20 percent.30
Champaign is by no means typical in its particularities, but no single place in the heartland could serve as a microcosm for such a vast and variegated whole. So Champaign seems as good a starting point as any to figure out if the rural and small-town communities that came to figure at
the center of the heartland myth have always been as insular as that myth suggests, and if so, how. Having settled on a starting point, I set out, sans map, guided by the question: What is the nation at heart, when we unbind it from myth? Intending initially to go back to the moment of origin—the golden age of locality between the region’s incorporation into the newly formed United States and its enshrinement at the heart of the world’s leading power—I discovered that the story was as hard to contain in time as in place.31 To understand the making of the modern heartland, I had to stray from the most heartlandish of times, following strands that stretched further into the past even as others tugged me inexorably toward the present.
The journey took me down all kinds of paths I did not know existed. It led to Anglo-Saxonist pigs, Chinese miracle plants, celebrity bulls, polar explorers, African winds, World War I aces, racialized bees, Cuban radio chatter, and UFOs. One thread led to an 1873 cavalry invasion of Mexico; another to diarrhea-induced scandals on British ships. Still other threads connected Champaign to consular outposts in Germany, bioprospectors in Manchuria, congresses of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and a fledgling agricultural college in Piracicaba, Brazil. I learned of reservations for westward-moving native tribes of birds, the politics of tornado mapping, an Algonquian people living under an international bridge, Malthusian fears of a global race war, a Hindu student’s arrival in a place he hadn’t known existed, and people on the ground wondering when the next bomb would fall.
I found so many leads that I could not possibly follow them all. Abandoning all pretense to comprehensive coverage, I pursued the larger goal of comprehension as a process and intent. After letting go of some of the most tempting leads by registering them in the “archival traces” that launch each chapter, I scrapped plenty more because they seemed too generalized to tell me much about the heartland per se. The rest became the themes that structure this book: human mobility, border brokering, economic ties, alliance politics, geographic awareness, and homeland insecurities.
Having set off in search of a heart, I had found settler colonialism, borderlands, empire building, agrarian solidarity, global consciousness, and a displaced people’s struggle for the right to return. I had found histories that did not advance ring by ring from the local to the global but that unfolded on multiple scales simultaneously. I had found, in sum, histories of foreign relations. Having dug down to the core of the nation, I had unearthed a mesh of global entanglements, stemming from searches for security and power.
Who are the American people at heart?
Judging from their mythologies, a people who have yet to fully reckon with the long, tangled roots of their past.
ARCHIVAL TRACES
An exile’s home
Records Relating to Indian Removal, Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1832: First five entries from a Muster Roll of Kickapoo Indians “who have emigrated West.” The document names only those assumed to be heads of families. Given that it is hard to decipher the handwriting, some of my transcriptions may be off.
Posh. e. che. hoy. (with three male and four female family members)
Ke. an. a. Kuck (with one male and one female family members)
Ah. que. pah (with two male and four female family members)
An. ah. be (with two female family members)
Ah. mah. mo (with two female family members) . . .1
Urbana Union, 1853: Spanish slave dealers captured 180 Yucatan Indians with the intention of transferring them to Cuba for plantation labor. British authorities at Honduras intervened and they were released. “What will not a Spaniard do when he has prospect of gold?”2
Urbana Union, 1854: “How few in this land of plenty can realize the sufferings and privations which fall to the lot of those, who, oppressed on their own native shores are forced to find an exile’s home within the borders of the United States.” (Preface to a story of a Prussian family that succumbed to cholera, one by one, in the lonely prairie on the outskirts of town.)3
Urbana Union, 1855: “Farmers! Champaign County Illinois offers inducements that will attract you all! No better soil exists in the world . . . Come and settle our towns. For all we have room, and all we will heartily welcome with true American hospitality.”4
Appeal signed by Na she nan and others, 1855: “We, the undersigned old men of the Kickapoo Nation, in the absence of our Agent (We believe he is at Iowa) get our old acquaintance, Mr. Talbott, to write for us to you. We think we have been treated badly by some means. The present Agent we do not know, having never seen him, and we fear our Interpreter has not been careful to make us understand every thing. . . . We are broken up and scattered . . . but few are on our Reserve (to which we have objected). . . . We, some old and poor, some widows and orphans, broken up as we are. We have raised but little and what must we do?”5
Champaign Gazette, 1899: “. . . we have been expanding ever since the formation of the government, and have done good and not evil to the people we have absorbed. Our whole acquisition by the process of expansion has exceeded a billion acres and not a single human being has thereby been enslaved or made a vassal, or a serf, or was crushed, or trodden down, or chained to a chariot wheel, or passed under a yoke, or was deprived of any natural right, or of any imaginable liberty. The long process of expansion, now entering upon its second century, has redounded to the glory of the United States and the advantages of all its people.”6
1
BETWEEN PLACE AND SPACE
The Pioneering Politics of Locality
INVENTING THE LOCAL
Cosmopolitanism has signified elite status since well before Gilded Age robber barons began cramming their palaces with imported stuff. Overlooking the passengers belowdecks in steerage, first-class ticket holders have claimed that status for themselves, believing that to be traveled, open-minded, connected, and geographically aware has meant to be modern, cultured, progressive, urbane, and rich.7 To be local, in contrast, has meant to be left behind: close-minded, isolated, ignorant, backward looking, peasantlike, and probably rural. The more recent sense of “the local” as a site of resistance to global capital—as the rock that can speak truth to power—has challenged these perceptions, but it also draws on them. The academics who theorize about “the local” tend to position themselves as cosmopolitan outsiders, peering in and down. In reifying locality, they have perpetuated its reputation as a stubborn holdout from a less dynamic age. Even those who insist that “the local” can no longer be separated from “the global” assume that the former preceded the latter in time.8
In the long nineteenth century, stretching from the American independence era through World War I, various groups of Kickapoos traveled from their villages in what is now the U.S. Midwest south to Mexico City, north to the trading posts in the Straits of Mackinac, west to the Douglas, Arizona, area, and east to Washington, D.C., and Florida. In these travels, they not only passed through the domains of other indigenous peoples—including those of the Delawares, Shawnees, Potawatomis, Piankashaws, Miamis, Eel River people, Osages, Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and Yaquis—they also engaged with a staggering number of Euro-American polities: the Spanish empire, British empire, United States, Mexico, Lone Star Republic, Confederate States, Canada, and a number of U.S. territories and states. This map depicts their pre-removal villages in Illinois and Indiana and their subsequent reservations and communal land, or ejido, in Coahuila, Mexico.
That chronology may be true for some parts of the world but not for the U.S. heartland. Locality did not exist in what became the U.S. Midwest until the so-called pioneers invented it, in large part through their self-serving local histories. The politics of these histories can be hard to spot amid their biographical notes and anecdotes. But they can be detected at the margins, in the stories of the people squeezed aside. These people were, for the most part, Native Americans. Their presence is why the pioneers are so-called.
If the heartland seems local today, i
t is not because of geography but in spite of it. The tallgrass prairies that the pioneers plowed lay in the middle of everywhere. The pioneers strove to make these prairies local to advance their own status and power.
AN AMERICAN WAY OF BEING IN THE WORLD
Much of the prepioneer Midwest was inhabited and traversed by the Kickapoos, an Algonquian people with affinities to Potawatomis, Mascoutens, Delawares, Miamis, Shawnees, Sacs, and Mesquakie (Fox).9 The Kickapoos considered the ability to move freely through space to be a fundamental aspect of their identity, their very name translating roughly as “he moves about, standing now here, now there.”10
Much as the Kickapoos cherished their homes, they did not have a single homeland, for the Kickapoos were mobile across generations. In the seventeenth century, most Kickapoos lived in what is now the area around Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. As the Iroquois strove to increase their power in the fur trade with the French, they pushed the Kickapoos westward. They also decimated the Illiniwek Confederacy in the Illinois country, thereby opening up new possibilities for the Kickapoos, who sought a respite from fur-trade-induced violence by relocating to southwestern Michigan, southern Wisconsin, and northern Indiana and Illinois. By 1712 some Kickapoos had moved south to central Illinois.11 Among the places they claimed as their own were sites along the Salt Fork River, which meandered into what later became Champaign County.12 The Kickapoos also established a village, later known as the Grand Village, on a trail between the Illinois River (to the west) and the Wabash (to the east).13
The Heartland Page 2