My father grew up in a small town in southwestern Ohio. He met my mother in Madison, Wis., where I was conceived. I mention these facts not to assert my authentic Midwestern identity but to question if such a thing really exists.
Whatever else happens at the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night, the Midwest is sure to be an important theme. Both JD Vance and Tim Walz have become national figures by trading on their biographical ties to the region. The ideological distance between them can hardly be overstated, but each grounds his political persona — the small-town football-coaching dad, the up-by-the-bootstraps grandchild of hillbillies — in an appeal to the values and traditions of the heartland. An implicit argument on Tuesday night will be about who more genuinely reflects those values, the progressive governor of Minnesota or the right-wing junior senator from Ohio?
The answer might be both. The Midwest is a curious region, often treated less as a distinct geographical or demographic zone than as a symbol, a synonym for the country as a whole. While the U.S. Census Bureau specifies a sprawling expanse of 12 states — east of the Rockies, west of the Alleghenies, south of Canada and north of the South, home to nearly 70 million people — in the cultural imagination “Midwest” is code for the average, ordinary, normal, real America.
Bland as they may sound, those adjectives have always been fighting words, and it’s no accident that in presidential elections — quadrennial contests about who we, as a nation, really are — the Midwest serves as a battleground and a bellwether.
Like “working class,” “Midwestern” too often assumes a default setting of whiteness, and papers over profound political divisions. The region has been a fertile breeding ground for leaders of every factional stripe. Robert M. La Follette, the tribune of early-20th-century progressivism, represented Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate, as did the anti-communist crusader Joseph McCarthy a generation later. In the decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Ohio alone, known as “the cradle of presidents,” sent seven of its sons to the White House, all of them Republicans.
Since World War II, Minnesota has spawned three Democratic vice-presidential nominees: Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and now Tim Walz. Indiana is responsible for Mike Pence, Pete Buttigieg and Eugene V. Debs, who won nearly a million votes as a socialist presidential candidate in 1920, at a time when the state was a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan.
Illinois can claim Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama in addition to Adlai Stevenson II, Hillary Rodham Clinton and William Jennings Bryan, the silver-tongued orator who lost the 1896 and 1900 elections to the Ohioan William McKinley.
The list goes on (we see you, Bob Dole), but let’s not forget the quintessential Illinoisan (though Kentucky-born) Abraham Lincoln, everybody’s favorite president even as he may have been the single most divisive political figure in U.S. history. In that way he crystallizes a quintessential heartland — and American — paradox: the entanglement of intractable conflict and smiling consensus. The Midwest is a tidy house with a picket fence, perpetually divided against itself.
In the years before the Civil War, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska were scorched earth in the Indian wars and the sectional fight over the expansion of slavery, a history that was all but forgotten a century later. That amnesia, the unacknowledged persistence of old wounds, is the deep subject of Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” and its companion novels, “Home,” “Jack” and “Lila.” At the same time, those books, which take place in a small Iowa town in the 1950s, are sincere celebrations of faith, family, neighborliness and hard work — ideals central to the mythology of the Midwest.
The two-sided moral coin — the buffalo nickel, the wheat penny — has been in circulation for a long time; doubleness is the currency of the region that volunteers itself as America’s Main Street. “Main Street,” as it happens, was the title Sinclair Lewis chose for his breakout novel, an acid-tinged study of small-town narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy set in his native Minnesota. The action takes place mainly in the fictional Gopher Prairie, though the heroine, Carol Milford, hails from Mankato, the real town where Tim and Gwen Walz taught high school. Carol, curious and independent-minded, with a zeal for civic improvement, is stymied by the conformity and complacency of Gopher Prairie, where she moves after marrying a local doctor.
Her plight struck a chord with the reading public, and also stirred up some discord. At least one small-town library banned “Main Street” from its shelves, and the Pulitzer board, overruling its own jury, denied Lewis the prize. But the book was the best-selling novel of 1921. Nearly as popular was Lewis’s follow-up, “Babbitt,” a literary sensation whose protagonist’s name entered the language as a synonym for provincial boosterism.
In 1930, Lewis became the first American — North or South — awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, for his “ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.” His work can fairly be said to poke fun at ordinary Americans, but it also expresses the self-critical, self-satirizing spirit that has always been a feature of American literature.
Perhaps especially the literature of the Midwest. In the roster of American Nobel laureates, the region is a dominant and multifarious presence. T.S. Eliot, born in St. Louis, may or may not count, since he embraced British citizenship. But Ernest Hemingway, a child of Oak Park, Ill., surely does, in spite of all the years in Paris and Cuba. So does the mighty Chicagoan Saul Bellow, who had the nerve to be born in Quebec. And so, of course, does Toni Morrison, whose imagination was rooted in the soil of Ohio, and Minnesota’s own Bob Dylan.
The very middleness of this stretch of America has made it a crossroads and a patchwork, a landing place and transit point for migrants from east to west, south to north, countryside to city. Swedes, Germans and Irish in the mid-19th century; Jewish and gentile Eastern Europeans after that; African Americans and Appalachians between and after the world wars; strivers from Haiti, Somalia and Central America in the present.
The culture of the Midwest reflects this mix, this constant flux and refinement of identities. Indiana was the birthplace of Hoagy Carmichael, Axl Rose, Michael Jackson and Freddie Gibbs. Michigan gave us Motown, and also Eminem. Minnesota is Hüsker Dü and Prince. Charlie Parker, Aretha Franklin, Doris Day, Kanye West—all midwesterners. You can make your own list, and your own arguments about authenticity.
My two cents, offered in a modest, friendly, cheerful spirit, is that authenticity is a counterfeit coin. The Midwest is above all a land of self-invention. I can say that: It’s where I come from.
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