ON BEING MIDWESTERN D. Bruce Johnstone Pundits, February 8, 1988  

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I am a Midwesterner. I was born and raised in Minnesota, as were my father and paternal grandparents. My mother lived most of her young life in Missouri before meeting my father at a small college in that state where Dad had gone in the late 20’s on a football scholarship. I married a Kansas girl, whose parents and grandparents had made their fortunes in that state. Being Midwestern is, I think, a special part of me.

Some of you are acutely bored already. "My God," you are thinking, "he’s going to talk about Middle-American virtues or soybeans or flat land or Minnesota winters, and there’s no way I can pretend to be interested." Others are probably wondering if I am bragging or complaining: perhaps this "I am Midwestern" bit is the familiar "compensatory bravado," akin to relating with pride that one was born into dire poverty or that one’s uncle was a convicted sodomizer or that one was actually a mere "C" student in high school--the point, of course, being to elicit gasps of admiration from one’s listener, who is supposed to realize how far one has risen from such lowly origins.

I like to think my topic is more than an apology for the part of the country I still often call home, although I admit to the guilt of some nostalgia. Perhaps what I really want to write about is my youth, or perhaps it is the era, the 1950’s, and the Middle West is just where I happened unavoidably to be during that time.

But "whatever," as Minnesotans say when they intend to go right on thinking or saying or doing whatever it was they were about to think or say or do before someone gave them momentary pause: what is this place, this Midwest, for which some of us have such reverence, even if it is those of us who have left it who may be the most reverent?

First of all, where is it? It begins, looking West, as one come out of the Appalachian foothills into the fertile flat lands of Ohio. Buffalo and Pittsburgh are the last of the great cities of the Northeast, and even they bear some characteristics of the Midwest, but Buffalo and Pittsburgh basically face east, watching New York and Philadelphia, no longer even as interested as they once were in the grain and iron that used to come in from the Midwest to fill their blast furnaces and elevators.

The Midwest: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri (although Southern Missouri is more Southern than Midwestern) and at least the eastern portions of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. It is at least arguable that the western halves of those states--Dodge City, Kansas; Scottsbluff, Nebraska; and Rapid City, South Dakota--form the eastern edge of the West, and are something called "The Great Plains," which is not exactly the same as "The Great Prairies" of the Midwest.

The very term, "The Midwest," calls at least to my mind many images, not all of them admirable:

The Terrain. The Midwest is thought, mainly accurately, to be flat and uninteresting -- certainly lacking mountains and foothills and a bit short even on river gorges and forested wilderness, except for Northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, which may have more in common with Western Ontario, or the Missouri Ozarks, which is a lot more like Arkansas than Illinois. There can be a special beauty in treeless rolling hills that are still lush with grain or grass, as in the Flint Hills of Kansas, like the open sea without a tree or a mast to break the view. But, okay, it’s mainly flat.

A Historical Digression on Prairies. As these prairie lands began to be settled during the first half of the nineteenth century, the increasing scarcity, as one pushed westward, of trees and stones -- so ubiquitous in the Eastern forest lands, and in their way so bothersome to the earliest settlers in the East -- posed enormous problems. Trees, for example, answered three great needs of the homesteading farmer: his home, his fuel, and his fencing. Stones, a terrible nuisance to the Eastern farmers, provided nearly indispensable linings for fireplaces, chimneys, and wells, and could even suffice for a fence. In the absence of trees and stones, the early prairie settler turned to sod blocks for his home, twisted dried grass for fuel, and sticks and clay for his chimney. Not surprisingly, the home was often smokey and cold. The roof leaked, as the saying went, "for two days before a rain and three days after," and the chimney frequently caught fire. Until the great prairie-taming invention of barbed wire, livestock constantly broke through skimpy stick and hedge fences. But such adversities, of course, bred into at least the rural Midwesterner those qualities of hard work, resourcefulness, and dogged spirit that some of us Midwestern expatriots like to think we carry today.

The Weather. Midwestern weather is violent. Really, guys, it does get to -40ˇ in Northern Minnesota and -20ˇ to -30ˇ in Minneapolis, and even Chicago is a whole lot colder than Buffalo. Furthermore, it is not "a dry cold and therefore not really all that bad." It is the kind of cold that makes exposed skin tingle and draw tight, as though the blood under the skin were rushing to get to some warmer organs of the body. And the summers are hot. And humid. And there are wonderful violent thunderstorms and awful tornadoes and periods of devastating drought. Oh, we Midwesterners love to talk about the weather.

Lush Fields. The very heart of the Midwest--mid-Ohio through Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Southern Minnesota, Northern Missouri, and the Eastern edge of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas--is indeed the nation’s breadbasket, with thousands of square miles of corn, soybeans, wheat, and other grain and fodder crops. I recall doing my first driving as a child in Northwestern Iowa along the perfect square mile grids of dirt roads that form the boundaries of sections, with the fields of corn and soybeans unbroken but for the farm buildings, willow-lined creeks, tiny tree stands, and occasional gardens and pastures. I know that our balance of trade is not much to brag about. But what we do sell abroad to pay at least some of our foreign bills comes largely from these lush Midwestern fields: corn, wheat, and especially the United States’ greatest single export product: soybeans.

Great Cities. The Midwest is also a place of great cities: Chicago, with more than 7 million inhabitants; Detroit, with 4.5 million; Cleveland, St. Louis, and Minneapolis/St. Paul, with more than 2 million each; Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Kansas City each with 1.5 million; and Columbus and Indianapolis with 1.25 million. Like the industrial cities of the Northeast, these giants of the Midwest have suffered from the demise of steel, loss of heavy industry to the South, and the loss of manufacturing altogether to the nations of the Western Pacific. But these cities have adjusted -- all of the ones I have named far better than Buffalo -- and are today economically, culturally, and politically vibrant.

Universities. Perhaps it’s the line of work I am in, but I also associate the Midwest with the greatest public universities in the nation. In size, in academic excellence, in the tradition of service to their states, in their football and basketball, and most of all in what they mean to the people of their states, nothing in the East begins to compare with the universities of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio State, Iowa, Indiana, or Kansas. I have glorious memories as a 12-year old boy watching Minnesota play Michigan for the Little Brown Jug, wandering an enormous and beautiful campus that even then had some 40,000 students, and feeling even then the pride that the people of the Midwest have in their state universities.

Lakes. Water, to me as a boy, meant a lake. Not an ocean, or the sea. I remember wondering why all of my children’s books pictured swimming and boating on an enormous beach, with big waves, and with the blue sea extending out to meet the sky at the horizon. No, "swimming" was what we did in a small lake with a tiny sand beach, if we were lucky. If we weren’t lucky, the shoreline was weeds and muck, and we had to dive off a rickety dock or swim out to a raft made of planks and oil drums.

Blocks and Concrete. The memory of those children’s picture books with pictures of lakes and beaches I never knew reminds me of other cruel tricks played on me and my friends by big city authors and illustrators -- but here I am perhaps reflecting more my childhood of the country than of the Midwest, per se. But these books always talked about things called "blocks" on which kids were supposed to live, and which measured distances (as in "3 blocks to school") or turf (as in "he lives over in the next block"). In small town Minnesota, we lived on a road, of sorts, that got paved sometime when I was a kid, but our house never had a number on it, and the address was just "Galpin Road," even though we were about a half mile away from the road of that name. But what I really longed for was concrete, like city kids had. We had a large house, with lots of lawn and trees. but the driveway was dirt. I would almost certainly have been as good a basketball player as Larry Bird if I had been able to play basketball every night on concrete. I, alas, was relegated to practicing my dribbling and shooting on hard packed dirt, and spent most of my time chasing errant bounces.

But I am clearly now lapsing into country childhood nostalgia, and I wish to return to the Midwest. The Midwest, perhaps most of all, conveys a set of personal and social attributes, seen by some as virtues and by others as liabilities, with the truth almost certainly being a bit of each. On the "plus" side, Midwesterners are said to be friendly and open...personable...helpful...solid...down-to-earth. Can there be any veracity to these supposed virtues? Are they really supposed to describe folks from Cleveland and suburban St. Louis in the late 1980s...and can these folks, the rich or the poor and the professional or the worker, really be much different from their counterparts in L.A., Dallas, Atlanta, Baltimore, or Philadelphia? Or are the supposed Midwestern virtues, like my memories, more reflective of the Midwest left behind by those who have gone elsewhere and whose nostalgia perpetuates the lore of Midwestern virtue, but whose nostalgia perpetuates the lore of Midwestern virtue, but whose memories are more representative of the small towns and the young ages and the decades past than of the Midwest today?

I think there is some truth to those virtues of openness and trust, at least in the archetypal small towns and small cities of the Midwest. I am not certain that there is a virtuous Midwestern gene at work. Blessedly, these small places are far from the great urban centers of social pathology, with their chronic unemployment, family disintegration, and racism, and also far from the all-too affluent lotus lands of modern suburbia, with its rootlessness, socioeconomic competitiveness, and excessive indulgences of the young.

There are also the less universally complimentary characteristics ascribed to Midwesterners: conventional, small-minded, narrow, hypocritical, chauvinistically patriotic, tasteless. The Midwest of Sinclair Lewis’s George Folanshee Babbitt. Again, a bit of truth. Bible-thumpers, virulent anti-communists, and more Republicans than I’m generally comfortable with. But mainly it is a conservatism of the kind that looks better and better to most of us as we grow a little older, see how hard it is to change things, and realize that a lot of things are as they are for reasons. It does seem as though the Midwest lags clearly behind California and the Northeast urban centers in adopting trends and fads -- whether in new religions, fashions, foods, political movements, art forms, music, hair styles, or variations on standard English. Since most of what is radically new in any of these categories is likely to be grotesque and short-lived anyway, I am not sure but that this underlying conservatism -- particularly when undergirded by a respect for privacy and a genuine concern for people in need -- is not more virtue than liability. In any event, a general disdain for anything originating in California is a useful cultural tie that helps the solid, thoughtful middle-of-our-nation bind together the flakier, flightier, and sometimes quarrelsome peripheries like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Texas, Florida, and the Old South.

What poses as "virtues" to some may also be a less-innocent simple naiveté, particularly in the farms and small towns and small cities of our heartland. The 1988 Iowa precinct caucuses, closing this very evening after months of unimaginably excessive attention from would-be presidents and pandering media, is a case in point. A few tens of thousands of voters in Iowa -- many of whom have never had so much as a casual social contact with a person of color or someone whose native language is not English -- are abut to have a hugely disproportionate influence on that person who will lead this nation in the 1990’s.

I don’t hold this against the small-town Iowan. And I certainly cannot blame him or her for the megabillion dollar budget and trade deficits, twenty years of foreign policy ineptitude, or the demise of the work ethic and the nuclear family. These Iowans, in fact, are on average the best educated folks in the United States, and if we could go back and do the last twenty years all over again, we could do a lot worse than to put the whole darn country under the receivership of Iowa. But I still, in 1988, have to wonder what the rural Midwesterner knows of the problems faced by the great cities in his own state, much less of the urban seaboards and the racial and ethnic mixing bowls of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Florida, Texas, and California, and I am not sure I want the books I read or the movies I view or the people to whom I might want to listen to have to pass any kind of Midwestern litmus test of social acceptability.

Still, it is a great part of the country and one to which I could return and live with great pleasure. Maybe you have to have been there. Maybe you even have to have been born there. But my children will always, to me, carry roots of Minnesota and Kansas, and I hope they pass them on to future generations of Johnstones wherever they may call their homes.

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