Red State Blues

by Martha Bayne

  I soon learned that I was hardly the only Midwesterner left tongue-tied by the Midwest. Articulate neighbors, friends, colleagues, and students, asked to describe their hometowns, replied with truisms that, put together, were also paradoxes: “Oh, it’s in the middle of nowhere.” “It’s just like anywhere, you know.” “We do the same things people do everywhere.” No-places are as old as Thomas More’s Utopia, but a no-place that is also everyplace and anyplace doesn’t really add up. Nor, at least in my experience, does one hear such language from people in other regions—from Southerners, Californians, Arubans, Yorkshiremen. Canadians live in a country that has been jokingly described as America’s Midwest writ larger—Canada and our Midwest share, among other things, manners, weather, topography, and a tendency among their inhabitants to downplay their own racism—yet they are hyperspecific in their language, assuming a knowledge of local landmarks that it never occurs to them non-Canadians may not possess. They assume that whatever their setting is, it is a setting, not, as Midwesterner-turned-expatriate Glenway Wescott once wrote of Wisconsin, “an abstract nowhere.”1

  When pressed, a person might explain these tropes of featurelessness by pointing out the similarities imposed across the Midwestern landscape by capitalism. Boosters sometimes still call the region “America’s breadbasket,” and for much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was also, to a large degree, America’s foundry, and, during World War II, its armory.2 (Such is the extractive quality of Midwestern economic history that some historians have proposed that we take seriously the painter Grant Wood’s irritated description of the region, in his 1935 pamphlet Revolt against the City, as a colony of the East.3) What all of this means in practice, of course, is vast visual repetition: mile upon mile of cornfields, block upon block of crumbling factories. (Willa Cather: “The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.”4)

  But even used and battered landscapes have their particularity: Detroit’s blight isn’t Cleveland’s blight, any more than Manchester’s is Birmingham’s. Nor are any two cornfields truly exactly alike, despite Monsanto’s best efforts. The British cultural imagination has been formed by writers such as Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence who are perfectly capable of distinguishing among bleaknesses; there’s no reason the American imagination should not pay the Midwest the same tribute. Especially in a period when some of the more interesting art and music consists of similar procedures repeated on a massive canvas, when cultured people are trained to find meaning in the tiny variations of a Philip Glass symphony or an early John Adams tape piece, you’d think we could learn to truly see Midwestern flatness as something richer than mindless repetition. (Willa Cather again: “No one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry.”)5

  Even if we insist, wrongly, on seeing the Midwest’s physical geography as featureless, there’s no reason to extend the mistake, as many even within the region do, to its cultural landscape. In a 2015 essay for Slate, “The Rust-Belt Theory of Low-Cost High Culture,” reporter Alec McGillis marveled at the cheapness—and, it seems, the mere presence—of good orchestra and museum tickets in interior cities:

  The Cleveland Orchestra, one of the best in the world, offers a “young professional package,” with regular concerts and special events, for a mere $15 per month—$20 for a couple. When I visited the St. Louis Art Museum, a monumental building deep within verdant Forest Park, I was stunned by its wealth of German expressionists (it has the world’s largest collection of Max Beckmanns)—all for the entrance fee of $0. In Milwaukee, I spent hours with my laptop at the cafe in the art museum’s Calatrava-designed wing.… In Detroit, friends and I got a prime table at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, its oldest jazz club, for a $10 cover.6

  I appreciate McGillis’s enthusiasm, but why on earth was he so surprised? This is a part of the country where, the novelist Neal Stephenson observes, you can find small colleges “scattered about … at intervals of approximately one tank of gas.” Indeed, the grid-based zoning so often invoked to symbolize dullness actually attests to a love of education, he argues:

  People who often fly between the East and West Coasts of the United States will be familiar with the region, stretching roughly from the Ohio to the Platte, that, except in anomalous non-flat areas, is spanned by a Cartesian grid of roads. They may not be aware that the spacing between roads is exactly one mile. Unless they have a serious interest in nineteenth-century Midwestern cartography, they can’t possibly be expected to know that when those grids were laid out, a schoolhouse was platted at every other road intersection. In this way it was assured that no child in the Midwest would ever live more than √2 miles [i.e., about 1.4 miles] from a place where he or she could be educated.7

  Minnesota Danish farmers were into Kierkegaard long before the rest of the country.8 They were descended, perhaps, from the pioneers Meridel LeSueur describes in her social history North Star Country:

  Simultaneously with building the sod shanties, breaking the prairie, schools were started, Athenaeums and debating and singing societies founded, poetry written and recited on winter evenings. The latest theories of the rights of man were discussed along with the making of a better breaking plow. Fourier, Marx, Rousseau, Darwin were discussed in covered wagons.9

  If you’ve read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead trilogy, you know that many of these schools were founded as centers of abolitionist resistance, or even as stops on the Underground Railroad.

  When, looking in your own mind for a sense of your own experiences in a region, you find only clichés and evasions—well, that is a clue worth following. So I began, here and there, collecting tidbits, hoarding anecdotes, savoring every chance piece of evidence that the Midwest was a distinctive region with its own history. In doing so I noticed yet another paradox: If the Midwest is a particular place that instead thinks of itself as an anyplace or no-place, it is likewise both present and not present in the national conversation. The Midwest is, in fact, fairly frequently written about, but almost always in a way that weirdly disclaims the possibility that it has ever been written or thought about before. The trope of featurelessness is matched by a trope of neglect (for what can one do with what is featureless but neglect it?). Katy Rossing, a poet and essayist, has described the formula:

  1. Begin with a loquacious description of the Euclidean-flat homogeneity of the landscape. This place looks boring. It looks like there’s nothing here worth thinking about. Example: “The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?” (Stewart O’Nan, Songs for the Missing)

  2. In fact, it seems no one has really thought about it before, they all write. What IS the Midwest? The West, South, and East all have clear stories, stories that are told and retold in regionally interested textbooks, novels, movies. The Midwest? It’s a humorously ingenuous, blank foil for another region. Example: Fargo, Annie Hall.

  3. But wait a minute, the writers tell you, it turns out this place isn’t empty at all! They spend the remainder of the article crouched in a defensive posture.10

  Rossing misses one or two tricks—there must also be a resentful invocation of the term flyover country (“a stereotype,” as one lexicographer points out, “about other people’s stereotypes”).11 And one must end self-refutingly, by pointing out a number of example of Midwestern distinctiveness or high achievement, all of which—the frontier, Abraham Lincoln, populism, the Great Migration, Chicago, the growth and decline of manufacturing—are so thoroughly discussed as to bring the article’s initial premise into question.12 The density of these let’s-stop-ignoring-the-Midwest takes only increased after the 2016 election13, as national newspapers, ignoring the dozens of articles they had already published on the region, pledged themselves to the Rust Belt as though to a strict Lenten discipline.14

  There is no dearth of commentary upon the Midwest, actually, once y
ou begin to look for it. Historian and politico Jon Lauck points to the region’s rich historiographic tradition in The Lost Region; journals devoted to the region’s history and literature come and go (MidAmerica; Midwestern Gothic); the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature sponsors superb, if frequently ignored, scholarship; regional independent presses win awards and capture attention (Coffee House, Greywolf, Dzanc, Belt, Two Dollar Radio); writers as major as Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Marilynne Robinson, David Foster Wallace, and Richard Powers set book after book in the region. (Morrison in particular is so identified with the South—because, to be blunt, she’s black—that people forget she’s from Ohio. The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved are set there, Song of Solomon in Michigan.) If you took English in high school, you read—or pretended you read—Cather, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Sandra Cisneros, and Theodore Dreiser, all of whom wrote of the region lovingly or ambivalently; if you took it in graduate school, you may also have read Wescott, William H. Gass, Saul Bellow, Jaimy Gordon, Dinaw Mengestu. The situation resembles nothing so much as the episode of the television show Louie in which the main character, stricken with guilt over his lapsed friendship with a less successful comedian, appears at the man’s house and demands a reunion, a reckoning; whereupon the old friend, after a meaningful silence, remarks that Louie has delivered the same speech twice before: He’d forgotten each time. Our reckoning with the Midwest is perpetually arriving, perpetually deferred.

  Andrew R.L. Cayton, one of the foremost historians of the region, gives a partial explanation for this neurotic repetition: Much of the discourse about the Midwest is mentally filed under the heading “local,” not “regional.”

  Historically, when people in the Midwest argue with each other over questions of identity, they fight over issues on universal, national, or local levels. They talk about what it means to be an American, a Lutheran, a farmer, a woman, a lesbian, a feminist, a black man; they almost never talk about what it means to be Midwestern, except in the most cursory fashion. In trying to locate a “heartland code,” one ethicist found that residents of the St. Louis area invoked generalities, such as “respect for family,” “respect for religion,” “respect for education,” “honesty,” “selflessness,” and “respect for the environment.” They rarely got more specific than that.… In virtually all the recent work on the Midwest, it remains a setting, not a particular constellation of attitudes or behaviors.15

  We Midwesterners talk about ourselves, and we are talked about by others, but in terms either universal or local: Abe Lincoln of the log cabin, or Abe Lincoln of world history, but not, despite the movie, Abe Lincoln of Illinois, who was formed in part by that “great interior region” he lauded in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress.16 A Midwesterner may be a human, an American, a Detroiter, at most a Michigander, but a “Midwesterner” only when reminded of the fact. Cayton blames this lack of “regional consciousness” in part on geography: “Regional identity—the creation of an imagined community—requires a strong sense of isolation. And the Midwest is not, strictly speaking, isolated. It is in the middle.” More important, however, is the intensity of local attachment: “But it is less regional rootlessness than local rootedness that makes the construction of a regional identity so difficult in the Midwest.… Localism, this pride in family, town, and state, leaves little room for interest in a coherent regional identity. In general, Midwesterners want to be left alone in worlds of their own making.”17

  Cayton’s last remark, in particular, throws light on the way the Midwest is often depicted in American art, and the way Midwestern artists tend to function. Think of Grant Wood’s farm couple, posted like sentries; of the intensely self-aware little Midwestern scenes that dot the landscape of American popular-music history like a series of private kingdoms: Motown in the ‘60s, Ann Arbor–Detroit in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Cleveland in the mid-‘70s, Minneapolis in the early ‘80s. Think of Prince, who famously shot down Matt Damon’s attempt at conversation—“I hear you live in Minnesota”—with that wonderful remark, at once quintessentially Prince and quintessentially Midwestern: “I live inside my own heart, Matt Damon.”18 From Prince in his private Paisley Park kingdom in the middle of Minnesota; to Robert Pollard in Dayton, with his one-person record industry; to Bob Dylan, cloistered in his private languages and allegories; from William H. Gass’s novels and stories, walled and defended in purple prose and private grudges like old Michigan fort towns; to Marilynne Robinson’s elaborately homemade worlds and worldview; to Gwendolyn Brooks’s lifelong loyalty to Chicago, the Midwestern artist hunkers down on the landscape; she lives in her own heart. We remember her, then, as the artist of that patch of landscape, not as a “Midwestern artist.”

  If it is not the Midwest that is missing from American history or culture, or even from the national conversation, but simply a Midwestern “regional consciousness,” as Cayton puts it, one naturally wonders whether such a category is important in the first place. Do Midwesterners need another “grid” (to borrow a term from the social critic George W.S. Trow) on which to plot their own lives? We already have families, towns and cities, a country, a species. Perhaps we are simply Americans, with no need for further differentiation.

  It’s certainly tempting to think so—because this idea is actually the one that gives the Midwest its most persistent self-understanding, the frame in which we see ourselves and through which others see us. We think of ourselves as basic Americans, with no further qualification. “The West, South, and East all have clear stories,” as Katy Rossing puts it. But in the Midwest, we don’t. We’re free. And that is our story.

  The authors of this story are not terribly hard to name. One of them is Lincoln, who, in his 1862 address to Congress having already labeled the Midwest the “great interior region,” went even further, commending it as “territorially speaking…the great body of the republic.”19 It’s a part of the country, but also, give or take, the country. Another author was Frederick Jackson Turner, whose The Frontier in American History (1920) characterizes the Middle West (as the slightly more dignified phrase of his day had it) as follows:

  Both native settler and European immigrant saw in this free and competitive movement of the frontier the chance to break the bondage of social rank, and to rise to a higher plane of existence. The pioneer was passionately desirous to secure for himself and for his family a favorable place in the midst of these large and free but vanishing opportunities. It took a century for this society to fit itself into the conditions of the whole province.… Little by little, nature pressed into her mold the plastic pioneer life.… From this society, seated amidst a wealth of material advantages, and breeding individualism, energetic competition, inventiveness, and spaciousness of design, came the triumph of the strongest. The captains of industry arose and seized on nature’s gifts. Struggling with one another, increasing the scope of their ambitions as the largeness of the resources and the extent of the fields of activity revealed themselves, they were forced to accept the natural conditions of a province vast in area but simple in structure. Competition grew into consolidation.20

  Turner’s Middle West is a sort of buffer zone between capitalism and the democracy of yeoman farmers, the straw mattress on which Hamilton lies down with Jefferson. “The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast economic organization of the present,” he writes.21 One might have thought this was everybody’s job. By tasking the Midwest in particular with the work all citizens of a developed democracy must do, Turner cannot help suggesting that the region is defined solely by a sort of extra degree of Americanness, by being American to the nth power. (Wescott again: “What seems local is national, what seems national is universal, what seems Middle Western is in the commonest way human.”22) As the geographer James Shortridge puts it, “The Middle West came to symbolize the nation…to be seen as the most American part of America.”23 Nor is average Americanness quite the same as average Russianness or ave
rage Scandinavianness, for the United States has always understood itself, however self-flatteringly, as an experiment on behalf of humanity. Thus, Midwestern averageness, whatever form it may take, has consequences for the entire world; what we make here sets the world’s template. The historian Susan Gray has even detected echoes in Turner’s language of Lamarckian evolution, a theory dominant among biologists a century ago, when Turner was writing. The new characteristics that the “old” races of the world acquired in their struggle to build a world among the prairies and forests would create an actual new, American race.24

  Small wonder, then, that Midwestern cities, institutions, and people show up again and again in the twentieth-century effort to determine what, in America, is normal. George Gallup was born in Iowa, began his career in Des Moines at Drake University, and worked for a time at Northwestern; Alfred Kinsey scandalized the country from—of all places—Bloomington, Indiana. Robert and Helen Lynd, setting out in the 1920s to study the “interwoven trends that are the life of a small American city,” did not even feel the need to defend the assumption that the chosen city “should, if possible, be in that common-denominator of America, the Middle West.” They chose Muncie, Indiana, and called it Middletown.25 We cannot be surprised that the filmgoers of Peoria became proverbial, or that newscasters are still coached to sound like they’re from Kansas.26 Nor that a recent defender of the region’s distinctiveness feels he must concede, in the same breath, that it “was always less distinctive than other regions”,27 or that a historian can call “ordinariness” the Midwest’s “historic burden.”28 If it is to serve as the epitome of America for Americans, and of humanity for the world, the place had better not be too distinctly anything. It has no features worth naming. It’s anywhere, and also nowhere.