by Matt Weiland
STATE
BY
STATE
A PANORAMIC PORTRAIT
OF AMERICA
EDITED BY
Matt Weiland & Sean Wilsey
Contents
List of Tables
Preface
Introduction: State by State
ALABAMA
ALASKA
ARIZONA
ARKANSAS
CALIFORNIA
COLORADO
CONNECTICUT
DELAWARE
FLORIDA
GEORGIA
HAWAII
IDAHO
ILLINOIS
INDIANA
IOWA
KANSAS
KENTUCKY
LOUISIANA
MAINE
MARYLAND
MASSACHUSETTS
MICHIGAN
MINNESOTA
MISSISSIPPI
MISSOURI
MONTANA
NEBRASKA
NEVADA
NEW HAMPSHIRE
NEW JERSEY
NEW MEXICO
NEW YORK
NORTH CAROLINA
NORTH DAKOTA
OHIO
OKLAHOMA
OREGON
PENNSYLVANIA
RHODE ISLAND
SOUTH CAROLINA
SOUTH DAKOTA
TENNESSEE
TEXAS
UTAH
VERMONT
VIRGINIA
WASHINGTON
WEST VIRGINIA
WISCONSIN
WYOMING
Afterword
THE 50 STATES IN NUMBERS
Acknowledgments
About the Contributors
About the Editors
Also edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey
Copyright
About the Publisher
Notes
List of Tables
TABLE 1. POPULATION
TABLE 2. POPULATION INCREASE 1950-2000
TABLE 3. FOREIGN-BORN POPULATION
TABLE 4. POPULATION BORN ELSEWHERE IN U.S.
TABLE 5. BIRTH RATE
TABLE 6. MEDIAN AGE
TABLE 7. GROSS STATE PRODUCT PER CAPITA
TABLE 8. BANKRUPTCY FILING RATE
TABLE 9. MEAN TRAVEL TIME TO WORK
TABLE 10. UNEMPLOYMENT RATE
TABLE 11. MILITARY RECRUITMENT RATE
TABLE 12. POPULATION CLAIMING NO RELIGION
TABLE 13. PUBLIC EDUCATION EXPENDITURE PER PUPIL
TABLE 14. VOTER PARTICIPATION RATE
TABLE 15. OIL CONSUMPTION PER CAPITA
TABLE 16. GASOLINE CONSUMPTION PER CAPITA
TABLE 17. CLASSIC MOVIE THEATERS AND DRIVE-INS PER CAPITA
TABLE 18. ROLLER COASTERS PER CAPITA
TABLE 19. VIOLENT CRIME RATE
TABLE 20. INCARCERATION RATE
TABLE 21. BREASTFEEDING RATE
TABLE 22. POPULATION WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE
TABLE 23. TOOTHLESSNESS RATE
TABLE 24. OBESITY RATE
TABLE 25. ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION
TABLE 26. CIGARETTE CONSUMPTION
TABLE 27. DIVORCE RATE
TABLE 28. SUICIDE RATE
TABLE 29. HIGHEST MONTHLY TEMPERATURE
TABLE 30. LOWEST MONTHLY TEMPERATURE
Preface
Matt Weiland
This book started with a hunch and a conviction. The conviction was the easy part: that despite drive-time radio and the nightly news and the Sunday paper, despite all the books and blog posts, the documentaries and songs, America and the lives lived here remain strangely and surprisingly underdescribed. So many mirrors and yet we know ourselves so poorly! Often it takes a tragedy to remind us so: when residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans stand dazed on their rooftops wondering why the flood water came so fast and the drinking water so slow; when coal miners are rescued in West Virginia or entombed in Utah; when the lives of cleaners and brokers, accountants and firemen are memorialized after September 11—who hasn’t marvelled at the richness of lives we don’t know?
The same is true of the landscape and the past we’ve lived across it. The topography and climate of America may be the richest in the world, yet what ends up on the page so rarely seems to capture its dynamism, its variety, its intensity. Sure, the deepest canyons and the wettest waterfalls and the curviest roads make cameos in ads for automobiles and soda pop and life insurance; and plenty of stories, fictional and true, are set in the streets and skylines of our principal cities. But what about everywhere else: the half-dead towns too alive to be ghosts, the rusting historical markers buried in the weeds, the anonymous bits of land with their own hidden histories and surprising beauties and grace? There is poetry in the Rand McNally Atlas and wonder in the back rooms and basements of a thousand local archives and historical societies, but all too often it seems trapped there. Somehow we’ve come to take for granted what our country looks like, what happened here, and what it feels like to live here. Shouldn’t we know it all in finer detail?
The hunch was less obvious, but the more we thought about it the more convinced we became of its truth. It was this: that America, for all its bland interstate highways and big-box superstores, retains an essential, deep-grained variety. No one doubts that America is growing more homogeneous with each passing year. Go from one time zone to another and the increasing sameness of everywhere is plain: one city blurs into another; the same architects build the same buildings, the same stores line the same streets, the same songs play on the radio; regional accents fade and everyone seems to be from somewhere else. And yet the fifty states—united by rhetoric and musket nearly 250 years ago, reaffirmed in their unity by rhetoric and rifle a century later, and bound together today as tightly as any confederation on earth—somehow stubbornly resist blending into a single undifferentiated whole.
The fifty states differ in landscape, topography, and weather; in political outlook, cultural preference, and social ideals; in accent, temperament, and sense of humor. It’s not just that the West Coast is a world away from the East, that Yankees stick out in the South, or that Blue States and Red States don’t see eye to eye. It’s deeper than that: The fifty states themselves have individual places in our collective imagination, and they offer their natives a mind-set, even a world-view. For all the talk of identity in American life, the personal fact that defines American lives as much as gender, ethnicity, or class is where you’re from, which more than anything means your home state.
Sean Wilsey and I started talking about all this last year, just as I was moving back to America after four years of living abroad. I was hitting the Americana hard: I read Moby Dick and Huck Finn again, and I gorged on Preston Sturges films and Will Eisner comics and the aching Old Time music that is heavy on banjos and beards. I spent a long Sunday walking down Broadway and a weekend bicycling on the Jersey Shore and a week driving 3,000 miles through the Midwest. I ate a whole lot of pie. I was reveling in what the poet Delmore Schwartz called “the beautiful American word, Sure,” and growing obsessed with the vibrancy and individuality of the American states. I told more than one person that I thought the Indian mounds of Ohio were deeply, profoundly fascinating; that the glories of the Nevada desert remain shockingly unsung; that I wanted a long slow bus ride in the wake of Sherman’s March through Georgia or along the Great Western Cattle Trail from Texas through Oklahoma and Kansas. I don’t know what I was after, exactly, except to experience again some simple American virtues: the essential looseness of American lives, the vitality and variety of American vistas, the cut and jib of American talk.
The more Sean and I talked about it, the more we wanted to know the details—what makes one state different from another? What are each s
tate’s particularities and idiosyncrasies, their prejudices and biases, their beauty marks and moles, their cadences and jokes? We knew we couldn’t find out everything—who could possibly be comprehensive about their own household, let alone an entire state? But couldn’t we put together a book that captures something essential, something fundamental and distinctive about each state? We wanted something broad-minded and good-hearted; something bold, intimate, and funny; something full of personal anecdote and strange characters and hidden truths. What we wanted, we realized, was a road trip in book form. Who better to turn to than our finest novelists and reporters?
Such a project had been done before on a much grander scale: the WPA American Guide series of the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. As part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers’ Project put more than six thousand American writers, archivists, and researchers back to work, creating a vivid, detailed, and lasting portrait of America at the time. Some of the finest writers in the country worked for the project, including Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, John Cheever, Jack Conroy, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, David Ignatow, Meridel LeSueur, Kenneth Rexroth, Wallace Stegner, Studs Terkel, and Richard Wright. The project produced hundreds of books and pamphlets, including guides to dozens of major cities, as well as to interstates and regions (U.S. 1; The Oregon Trail; The Arrowhead of Minnesota; Here’s New England!). The project also gathered oral histories, slave narratives, recordings of folk songs, and collections of folklore and social history (The Italians of Omaha; The Negro in New York; Baseball in Old Chicago; Who’s Who in the Zoo).
But the crowning achievement of the Federal Writers’ Project was the creation of the state guides. Taking as their mantra “To describe America to Americans,” these books documented the forty-eight states of the time in unprecedented detail and with great charm. Each guide ran more than 500 pages and featured original, unsigned essays on a state’s history, its literature and art, its architecture and public transportation, its flora and fauna, its industry and agriculture. Many included essays on topics unique to each state as well: on the movie industry in California and dairy farming in Wisconsin; on marine lore in Michigan and tall tales in Oregon; on arts and crafts in Arizona and cuisine in Louisiana; on mining jargon in Nevada and Chinook words in Alaska; on Abraham Lincoln in Illinois and Daniel Boone in Kentucky. Each guide also featured detailed descriptions of that state’s major cities and towns; maps and guided tours of each state’s principal monuments and attractions; and a section of original photographs, too. (Eudora Welty took photos for the Mississippi guide; Ben Shahn took ones for Ohio.)
It was an extraordinarily ambitious project, guided by the will to describe, by intrepid curiosity, by raw idealism, and by a reinvigorated sense of national pride even at the depths of the Depression. Writers, critics, and historians of the time hailed it as a landmark undertaking. John Steinbeck called the state guides “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together … by the best writers in America.” To Lewis Mumford, they were “the finest contribution to American patriotism that has been made in our generation.” And Alfred Kazin said they constituted “an extraordinary epic. … Out of the great storehouse of facts behind the guides—geological, geographic, meteorological, ethnological, historical, political, sociological, economic—there emerged an America unexampled in density and regional diversity.”
Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the project an encomium, though he wasn’t at his fireside chattiest when he said of the guides that they “ably illustrate our national way of life yet at the same time portray variants in local patterns of living and regional development.” Still: He was right. The BBC reporter Alistair Cooke was looser lipped when he wrote to the director of the Federal Writers’ Project in 1939: “I hope to buy, beg, steal, annex, or ‘protect’ a complete library of the guides before I die.” (He did, and with their model in mind he set off on a cross-country reporting road trip for the BBC in 1941. The result is the recently discovered manuscript published as The American Home Front, 1941—1942.)
But for all that, the Federal Writers’ Project wasn’t perfect. It was wracked by a Red Scare that tagged its underlying ideals and practical commitments as Communist propaganda, and it was riven by an ongoing argument over which writers federal money should be used to support: the most indigent or the most talented. This latter argument was reflected in the fact that some of the guides suffer from leaden prose and read as though they were written by committee—which was often the case. John Cheever, who was an editor on the WPA Guide to New York City, bitterly described his job as “twisting into order the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards.” The WPA Guides were also conceived as guidebooks, which meant that for all their charm and information, they were too anonymous, too stiff, and too formulaic for what Sean and I had in mind.
So though we wanted to make a book inspired by the ideals behind the WPA Guides and the lore and telling details within them, we also wanted something more personal, more eccentric, and more partial. And, lacking the $27 million that the United States government poured into the Federal Writers’ Project, we envisioned a single book rather than a thousand, this one featuring a different writer for each of the fifty states. Others over the years have had a similar idea, and we looked to them for inspiration too: the underappreciated journalist John Gunther’s monumental Inside U.S.A. (1947); the anthology of fiction set in each state called U.S. Stories (1949); Neal R. Pierce and Jerry Hagstrom’s astoundingly informative Book of America: Inside Fifty States Today (1983); the stylish series of pieces on each state that John Leonard edited for The Nation in 2002. We also looked to the wry charm of radio programs like Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, Ira Glass’s This American Life, and Michael Feldman’s Whad’Ya Know?, as well as the travel writings of Calvin Trillin, Ian Frazier, and Roy Blount, Jr., and the songwriter Sufjan Stevens’s quixotic project to record an album devoted to each of the fifty states.
So one spring day in Manhattan Sean and I huddled in a booth at the Old Town Bar to sort out a plan. First we agreed that we didn’t want the pieces to be victory laps for writers known for writing about a particular state: We have loved and learned from—for example—Joan Didion on California, Carl Hiaasen on Florida, Garrison Keillor on Minnesota, and Larry McMurtry on Texas, but you won’t find them here. We wanted some pieces by writers native to a particular state, of course, but we also wanted some by newcomers, and others by writers we’d send to states they’d never been to, to get a sense of the place as only a writer with a map and fresh eyes and a deadline can get. Second, we agreed that we didn’t want the book to become a kind of beauty contest full of partisan arguments for the superiority of one’s own state: We wanted the good, the bad, the ugly. Third, we wanted the book to go beyond personal history—so we sought out and commissioned travel accounts, historical essays, contemporary reportage, and works of oral history. To everyone we said: Tell us a story about your state, the more personal the better, something that captures the essence of the place. Not the kind of story one hears in a musty lecture hall or one reads in the dusty pages of an encyclopedia. The kind of story the enlisted soldier tells his boot-camp bunkmate about back home. The kind of story, wistful and wise, that begins, “Well, I don’t know about you, but where I come from …”
With a map of America and a list of a couple hundred of our favorite writers before us, we started to seek out writers to tell us something we didn’t know. I don’t think it does any discredit to the writers here to say that others we asked declined our invitation: John Updike felt his knowledge of the place we asked him to write about was too rooted in the past for the task at hand; Don DeLillo preferred to write about what originated in his own “dim interior;” J. D. Salinger stayed silent. Other responses were disappointing but helpful in stirring our resolve: Richard Ford pointed to the danger of superficiality—quite right, we thought, and one we’ve strived hard to avoid, always
prodding our writers to get out of their own skin, to write about ways their own experience was informed by that of others. Roger Angell was dubious about our hunch: “I would guess that a lot of the strong regionalism that was around in the 1930s has been wiped away, flattened by interstates and TV and by whole generations leaving home as fast as they can.” Too true! And all the more reason to plow ahead, we thought, and see what particular, local, remains.
Angell also mentioned that he “remember[ed] the WPA books pretty well. The authors were inflamed by the concept and most of all by being paid money to write.” Our authors were inflamed, but whether it was by the concept or the money I’m not sure. Some, it’s true, took some convincing. I’m pretty sure we’ve promised a beer and a bump to every writer in the book. And the carton of frozen orange juice that Sean mailed to William T. Vollmann (uh … long story) likely has the Department of Homeland Security on our trail. But the simple truth is that everyone responded with enthusiasm and gusto even without—or anyway before—the juice and whiskey. Three writers even vied for the privilege of writing about New Jersey.
In the end we assembled a mix of novelists, reporters, cartoonists, a cook, a playwright, a filmmaker, and a musician. Their pieces total more than 200,000 words. What would someone who has never been to America make of it from their work? Perhaps she would detect a robust ambivalence about home: the kind of deep and nuanced patriotism, I’d say, that can only come from knowing your country’s past and having faith in its future. Perhaps she’d note a prevalence of that singular American trait of buoyancy, an energetic warmth and open-mindedness, as well as a surprising obsession with bumper stickers, Native Americans, and Wal-Mart. And I imagine she’d notice a strong sense of renewal, of the great flux and energy that new waves of immigrants bring (as the pieces about Bosnians in Missouri, Chinese in Georgia, Mexicans in Iowa, and at least one Ghanaian in Michigan make plain).
But for my part, in reading State by State, I’m just glad to have gone to some interesting places. Some are well known, like the Civil War battlefield at Shiloh, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the Alamo, Roswell, the headquarters of the IRS, the parking lot at Mount Rushmore, John James Audubon’s house in Hendersonville, Kentucky, and Mark Twain’s boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri. Others are more anonymous but no less significant in their way: a pawnshop in Las Vegas, a roadhouse in Wichita, an S&M club in San Franciso, a diner in Key West.