The Heartland

by Kristin L. Hoganson

  The Chanute airfield extended beyond the parameters of the base to the surrounding fields of corn, as seen in this photograph of a plane that went down due to engine trouble in 1917. The plane and aviators apparently fared well, although some stalks of corn were totaled.

  Chanute Collection, Champaign County Historical Archives, The Urbana Free Library, Box 13, Series 9: Aerial and Aircraft, Folder 3: Aircraft, 1917–1930s.

  The military named the base after Octave Chanute, the Paris-born engineer who designed the Union Stock Yards in Chicago. Chanute had experimented with gliders and planes, founding the Aero Club of Illinois, which took up the cause of international aviation meets. Chanute saw the political implications of airplanes as far vaster than collaborative efforts and friendly competition. Before his death in 1910, Chanute had written that airplanes would “make war so terrible as to compel peace.”279

  The hope of compelling peace through deterrence may have motivated many of the two million men and women who lived, worked, and trained at Chanute over the next seventy-five years.280 But in 1917, the goal was to compel peace through military victory. From its establishment in a time of war to the Treaty of Versailles, the military personnel at Chanute looked toward France. Aviation instructors arrived from France to offer instruction.281 The Rantoul Weekly News reported on the popularity of French language classes.282 Graduates served in the Third Provisional Aero Squadron in France.283

  As they directed their own thoughts toward France, the aviators at Chanute helped make the war tangible to the surrounding communities. They did so when they socialized with the women of Rantoul, who greeted their arrival with cherry and custard pies, when they patronized nearby bars and other businesses, when they departed for Europe with great fanfare, and when they wrote of their experiences at the front. Whether they gained great celebrity as aces, won more modest acclaim for felling a plane or two, insisted on the need to withhold details, or were shot down by the enemy, Chanute airmen brought the war home through the papers as well as through their presence on the ground.284

  But above all, they brought the war home when they flew.

  MILITARIZED AIRSPACE

  The airmen of Rantoul turned Chanute into the military equivalent of the county fairgrounds. According to the Courier, “scores of automobiles” lined the nearby roads as crowds as large as eight thousand to nine thousand people came to watch the pilots in training fly.285

  Those well used to exhibition flights did not leave disappointed, for in the final stage of combat training, pilots practiced the acrobatic tricks—the loops, tailspins, spirals, and so forth—that typified aviation entertainment.286 They also engaged in live combat: “An unknown hero created some excitement at Chanute Field Wednesday morning when at a height of about 100 feet he met the enemy and plunged headlong into them . . . What chance has a poor pigeon with a Curtis plane?”287

  The show spilled well beyond Chanute Field, for its pilots militarized airspace for miles around. The people of Urbana, reported the Courier, had formed the habit of scanning the sky for planes, “as there is now no telling when one may appear.”288 The airmen circled around before landing for gas.289 They took nearby bigwigs on trial flights.290 They “bombed” towns in central Illinois with Liberty Loan circulars and colored flares.291 They performed aerial circuses over Red Cross parades.292 They were featured attractions at patriotic events and drew crowds to off-base exhibitions featuring “fancy flying” and “all kinds of aerial stunts.”293 The most moving display: a lone aeroplane dipping low over a military funeral, so as to drop flowers into the grave.294

  And they went down, mostly landing in fields, but on one occasion on a coal car on a moving freight train.295 Reports of the two pilots who died in the center of the business district in the village of Fisher provide a glimpse into the proximity of military aviation to civilian space. They had been flying “very low directly up the street” and their plane, no more than a story overhead, hit a flagpole.296 Two other pilots from Chanute scared a farmer so badly that he jumped off his wagon to avoid being hit. According to witnesses, the pilots “arose almost perpendicularly” to clear the nearby telephone wires. The farmer lost a leg, above the knee, after his frightened mules turned course.297

  Thousands of spectators flocked to Rantoul to watch World War I aviators train. They lined the roads and walked onto the field itself, taking particular pleasure in the stunt flying that prepared the pilots for combat.

  Chanute Collection, Champaign County Historical Archives, The Urbana Free Library, from collection in processing.

  Pilots in training navigated by the grid, sometimes swooping below treetop height.

  Chanute Collection, Champaign County Historical Archives, The Urbana Free Library, Box 13, Series 9: Aerial and Aircraft, Folder 3: Aircraft, 1917-1930s.

  It was not just the aviators who blurred the line between civilian and military airspace—their messenger birds did as well. In 1917, Major General John J. Pershing, the commander of the American forces in France, asked for thousands of carrier pigeons “to assist the American aeroplane observers in sending their reports and maps of German positions back to headquarters.”298 Following through on that call, the airmen at Chanute built a pigeon loft on the base. The fliers in charge of the pigeons trained seventy-five young carriers. Every morning, they took a bunch out in a motorcycle and let them loose. Two deserted. A few went AWOL but eventually returned. Those that made it through “basic training” got to ascend in a plane. All that were released from the air made it home. The Rantoul papers warned “the amateur Nimrods in Champaign” to turn their heads if they saw any pigeons in the sky, because it was a crime to kill “one of Uncle Sam’s trained Homers” as they prepared for service in France.299

  BIRDMEN

  The people of Champaign and the airmen themselves called the aviators “birdmen,” and, like birds, they were migratory, for they decamped to Texas for the winter months, when the ground turned hard and snowy and the air became bitingly cold.300 Lieutenant John M. Foote, who flew from Chanute Field to San Antonio, reported a flying time of ten hours and twenty minutes, despite a snowstorm so fierce that his propeller blades dulled.301 Other men took the Illinois Central, on routes previously advertised to home seekers in search of land in the Southwest.302 These routes provided such reliable connections to Texas that the U.S. military assigned Illinois Guard members—including over a hundred from Champaign County—to service on the Mexican border. On the long haul south, the Chanute birdmen may have mingled with Illinois guardsmen and with some of the prospective aviators from Champaign assigned to basic flight training in Texas.303 Their fellow travelers may have taught them the lyrics to “We Came to Kill the Greasers,” a song they sang upon detraining.304 But it is likely that the Chanute airmen already knew the words.

  According to ornithological standards, Texas was the true home for at least some of the Chanute aviators, because that is where they fledged as military pilots. Several of the first instructors at the base had served with General Pershing along the U.S.-Mexican border and in the “Mexican Punitive expedition” that chased after Pancho Villa.305 Among the 159 members of the Tenth Aerial Squadron who arrived from San Antonio was Captain J. E. C. McDonnell, “one of the best known aviators in the United States service.”306 McDonnell came to attention in Champaign well before his arrival at Chanute, because, as the Rantoul paper reminded readers, he was one of two American aviators “lost in the desert at the time of the Mexican troubles.”307 McDonnell and the other pilots of the squadron had flown reconnaissance and communications missions, completing 540 flights during six months of military operations.308 One reconnaissance flight was over 315 miles, round-trip. Another plane, headed for the city of Chihuahua, crashed into the side of a mountain, sparking a forest fire that burned for forty miles. The pilots’ subsequent complaints about mountain and desert operations helped lead to the founding of the base in Champaign.309
It was, claimed the Courier, the Mexican theater that had made American army fliers “the superior of any aerial force in the world.”310

  If the standard for true homes was not the first airborne mission, but the first tour of overseas duty, then the true homes of some birdmen lay even farther from Champaign. For some of the Chanute airmen, that true home was the Philippines, where they had served as part of U.S. occupation forces, amid the same winds that meteorologists of the time traced to the Midwest.311 Looking up at the military planes overhead, or flying themselves, the people of Champaign could place themselves at a different kind of true home: at the birthplace of a rising power, at the heart of an ascendant nation with a military that could determine the destinies of millions, somewhere far beyond view.312

  PROVINCIAL WORLDVIEWS

  Flyover jokes arose from the presumption of heartland provinciality. But the last joke may be on the joker, for positioning the heartland as a place that can be both literally and figuratively looked down upon reveals another strain of provinciality: the inability to recognize the heartland as a vantage point. Tracing the view from the ground uncovers forms of geographic consciousness not visible from peripheral perspectives. It shows a sense of being in the middle of everything.

  This sense of geographic connection unfolded both laterally and in 3-D. Flatter imaginings resonated with maps depicting set routes between different points and jurisdictional bounds. Aerial awareness, in contrast, lent itself to an understanding of place that was relatively more open, a vision of place that spilled into space. And yet, even as looking to the air opened up all kinds of vistas, it also prompted efforts to draw boundaries: to limit access, insist on distance, and privilege some forms of connection over others. The world as seen from Flatville was anything but flat, for it was stratified by power. Though disparaged by self-proclaimed sophisticates in the urban centers of culture and capital, the supposed bumpkins of the heartland did more than look up, they looked down. Though derided as being in the middle of nowhere, the heart of the nation coalesced smack in the middle of everywhere: between north and south, east and west, and flyover and flownover, too.

  ARCHIVAL TRACES

  America for Americans

  History of Champaign County Illinois, 1878: “About 1832, a large body of Indians (believed to have been the Miamas), nine hundred in number, in removing from their reservation in Indiana to the Western Territories, passed through Champaign County. . . . These Indians were entirely friendly to the whites, and encamped two days at the Point for rest, where the settlers gathered around them for trade and to enjoy their sports.”1

  History of Champaign County Illinois, 1878: “In the winter of 1852–3 came a company of braves from the West, through Urbana, on their way to Washington to have a talk with the President. While stopping here one of their number sickened, died, and was buried in the old cemetery at Urbana. His comrades greatly mourned him, and planted at the head of his grave a board, upon which were divers cabalistic signs.”2

  Champaign Daily Gazette, 1899: “Mrs. W. T. Green will speak on ‘My Work in Mexico’ at the Christian church.”3

  Urbana Courier, 1914: “Dreaming that he was being chased by a crowd of Indians intent on scalping him, Barney Hyatt, the local restaurant man, plunged out of his bed Wednesday night and dislocated one of his knees.”4

  A Standard History of Champaign County, Illinois, 1918: “Her motto has always been America for Americans.”—On Champaign resident Mary A. Taylor, born in Dundee, Scotland5

  Urbana Courier, 1918: “This was the first day for registration of alien enemies but none put in an appearance at police headquarters where they are to have their finger prints taken, leave their photographs and submit to other requirements of the law.”6

  Urbana Courier, 1918: “One elderly German woman who appeared before the registrars [of alien enemies] yesterday afternoon became so nervous that she forgot what English she knew and had to depend on an interpreter. She has been in this country many years and under ordinary circumstances speaks the language well. There was no little sympathy for her for her family connections are of undoubted loyalty and her predicament was embarrassing to say the least.”7

  Rantoul Weekly Press, 1920: Sheriff Davis, his deputy, and a federal officer came to Rantoul, looking for Bernard Gardeman, who was charged with violating the immigration law. They found him at his uncle’s home. The young man had left Germany several months earlier. When his ship neared the United States, he jumped overboard and swam to shore, thereby eluding the U.S. immigration bureau. Following Gardeman’s arrest, State’s Attorney L. A. Busch went to Chicago to intercede for him. “Mr. Busch says that if the public could have seen the mess of humanity the officials have to deal with at the Chicago office it would little wonder that no favors are shown. . . . He saw nearly 200 undesirable Russians, Roumanians and others who are radicals herded together for deportation.” Immigration officials released Gardeman after some leading businessmen in Rantoul enlisted their congressman to plead his case.8

  6

  HOME, LAND, SECURITY

  Exile, Dispossession, and Loss

  THE ULTIMATE SAFE SPACE

  The heartland of myth draws the nation together around a shared sense of vulnerability. As the quintessential home referenced by its lexical offshoot, the homeland, the heartland is the place that must be protected at all costs. It is the ultimate safe space, the national stronghold or keep. And as with other such citadels, its security appears to depend on its well-guarded walls, for the heartland myth starts from the assumption that danger arises from outside, not from injustice at home.

  We might call the comforting promise of a national safe space in the midst of a fearsome and dangerous world a little white lie—a little white nationalist lie—except its politics are far from harmless and its magnitude is far too large. The heartland is not a microcosm of the nation as a whole nor is it just any old place. It is no coincidence that the innermost redoubt in fantasies of national security is generally considered to be especially white. The mythical heartland is more little house on the big prairie than wickiup or cotton fields; more the starched farmers of American Gothic than the sunburned workers of migrant camps. Despite its antislavery commitments and pivotal support for the Union in the Civil War, it is a place shaped by long histories of antiblack legislation, dotted with sundown towns that forbade people of color to loiter on the premises when the working day was done.9 The whiter-than-average homes of the rural heartland built on earlier foundations, hacked out by settler colonialists in the heyday of Indian removal. In affixing security to this particular place, the heartland myth has attached it to particular people, at the cost of detaching it from others.

  Along with hiding various forms of insecurity emanating from the homeland, the promise of a safe space at the heart of the nation hides the tremendous reach of U.S. power. Depictions of the heartland as a place of innocence at risk plaster over the reality of U.S. engagement in the world. The heartland myth fails to recognize that at its most self-aggrandizing, the nation’s heart has added its muscle to empire, that the struggle to achieve security for some has created tremendous insecurities for others, among them the Kickapoo people, whose claims to the heartland precede the prairie’s enshrinement in myth. While Chanute aviators, inspired by calls to make the world safe for democracy, were winging through the air in pursuit of openness, access, and influence, the Kickapoo people who had once hunted on the aviators’ training grounds were confronting an ever more bordered world.

  For the Kickapoos, the heartland of myth is less a safe space than ground zero for generations of exile, dispossession, and loss. For the members of the Kickapoo diaspora who sought refuge in Mexico, the wall-building impulses of the heartland myth were not the solution to existential angst but the all too palpable cause. The Mexican Kickapoos’ unfolding history may seem out of place in a history of the heartland, but that is precisely the point. The white nationalist boundary drawing of the
heartland myth has contributed to larger processes of erasure. Writing the Kickapoos back into the history of the heartland can help us understand some of the consequences of these politics as well as other, less bunkered, ways of being in the world.

  DISPLACEMENT

  Seemingly oblivious to policies that tore native peoples from their villages and forced them onto the road, U.S. officials insisted that they wished to turn Indians into settled farmers. As the head of the Kickapoo Indian School in Kansas told his students in 1914: “Farm your own land and as much of the other fellow’s as you can get, do your own work, stay at home.”10 Disregarding Kickapoo women’s historical roles as agriculturalists, the Bureau of Indian Affairs agents assigned to the Kickapoos strove mightily to tie Kickapoo men to plows. Objecting to the Kickapoos’ heavy reliance on hunting, they also urged Kickapoo men to tend livestock, an endeavor that would keep them close to home.11 As Kickapoo men replaced women in the fields, agents urged Kickapoo women to dedicate themselves to housekeeping.

  Only some of the Kickapoos heeded these admonitions. The white agents charged with supervising them did not give up, believing that if admonishments wouldn’t change behavior, then necessity would. In addition to restricting the Kickapoos’ ability to leave their reservations to hunt, U.S. Indian policies continued to carve away the Kickapoos’ lands, thereby preventing them from sustaining themselves by hunting on their own holdings. Promises of perpetual rights in their removal treaties notwithstanding, the Kickapoos continued to lose land as the nineteenth century unfolded. They lost it to the government, to railroad lines that claimed rights-of-way, and to swindlers, including one of their government-appointed translators.12 As more white settlers occupied and traveled through their lands, Kickapoo men were set to work on public roads, under the direction of overseers.13