From Literary Hub:
When they ask, I tell people that I’m from the Midwest. Indiana, I’ll say with a playful, nasal intonation if badgered further, though I don’t typically expect a follow-up question. Only on the rare occasions when explicitly asked “but what city?” will I offer up my hometown: Fort Wayne, which I describe as a small place where “there’s not too much,” despite it being the second largest city in the state. I’ll say I’ve seen Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but that I don’t love the teasing nature of their implication; I’ll say Fargo is one of my favorite movies, though Indiana and Minnesota aren’t totally the same.
. . . .
But the script is always the same—when people find out that I come from a place known as the Heartland, I know I can expect one of two responses: That I’m so lucky to have escaped such a conservative place, or that people from the Midwest are so nice. Neither of these statements are necessarily false, though neither convince me that the speaker has a nuanced understanding of the region: something that mainstream pop culture and literature have done little to subvert.
. . . .
Oversimplifying any part of the United States can be irresponsible and, in some cases, discriminatory, though most regions have come to be defined by certain broad traits: New England is steeped in Puritanism, the Southwest has Spanish-Catholic and Indigenous traditions, and the South is bound by its Confederate past. But then there’s the Midwest, where not even those born and raised in the area can offer up a consistent response as to which states belong and which ones do not. The region is overwhelmingly white, though ethnically heterogeneous; early settlers came not only from surrounding domestic regions, but also Germany, Scandinavia, Ireland, and Poland. There are the major cities likes Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis, but as Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib writes in The Baffler, “the divide between its rural and urban constituencies is . . . sharp, [and] ten miles outside of a city there’s often a rural area that feels like an entirely different world.” There is no defining Midwestern accent; the phrase “Midwestern music” is meaningless.
. . . .
Though not the sole factor, the dearth of nuanced understanding of the Midwest results from its failure to arrive at wholly truthful or enduring cultural distinction. In a 1998 essay titled “The Heartland’s Role in US Culture: It’s Main Street,” University of Kansas professor James R. Shortridge traces the region’s relative undefinability, starting with the first geographical reference of the “Middle West” in the 1880s. at the time, the phrase referred only to Kansas and Nebraska, and by nature of its small scope, the cultural tropes and mannerisms associated with the region were more universal: the people there were kind and moral, idealists; they were pragmatic and hard-working, but also humble. It was very Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series based on her childhood in the Midwest during the 1870s and 1880s—happiness is a piece of maple candy, manual labor is an integral part of your character.
. . . .
But by the turn of the century, “the Midwest was America,” Shortridge writes, as multiple industries in the region (notably Detroit’s automobile industry) were proof of industrialization’s success, and immigrants were finding opportunities in states that were thought to know the meaning of hard work. However, it was this very industrialization that would cause the heart of the country to suffer its first crisis of identity. The urbanization of cities like Chicago and Detroit did not coincide with the area’s reputation for Christian morality, pastoralism, and agriculture. And, at least colloquially, many people within the region attempted to disassociate themselves from what they saw as centers of depravity, which is reflected in what we today consider “Midwestern.” As Athitakis said, “We change both the borders and the definition of Midwest to accommodate the visions most close to religion and the nuclear family.”
. . . .
Over the past 20 years, Atihtakis argues, a good handful of writers have sought to drill into the “hearty, churchy, white-bread vision” of the region that’s been projected through literature popular culture. But a specific region or issue must first become newly relevant for it to merit such a meditation. Athitakis brings up Detroit, a city crippled by decades of white flight, falling home prices, and the collapse of the automobile industry, which left it in an exceptionally poor state after the Great Recession. In 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy case in US history and quickly became the national media’s favorite example of economic collapse and urban struggle. It was only after this, Athitakis says, that people outside of the region were ready to read about the Motor City.
Link to the rest at Literary Hub
Although he doesn’t live there any more, PG has spent quite a lot of time in the Midwest. For him, it doesn’t really seem to be one region culturally.
For example, Chicago and Minneapolis are much different cities. PG has lived in and enjoyed both cities and, for him, they are more distinct than Boston and New York.
Chicago was largely settled by Poles, Irish, Germans and Italians while Minneapolis was settled by Swedes, Norwegians and a smaller number of Germans. At the turn of the 20th century, Chicago was the third largest Czech city in the world after Prague and Vienna.
During the first half of the twentieth century, large numbers of African-Americans migrated north to settle in Chicago, where there were lots of jobs, but few traveled further north to Minneapolis. During the 1920’s and 30’s, Chicago had blues, jazz, nightclubs and Al Capone. Minneapolis had General Mills and Pillsbury.
Even within Midwestern states, generally much larger geographically than Eastern states, there are significant differences. Northern Missouri is a different place than southern Missouri. Western Nebraska is not much like eastern Nebraska geographically or culturally.
As PG thought about the OP, it occurred to him that it might be useful to think of the Midwest the same way he thinks about Western Europe.
Obviously, the Midwest doesn’t have different languages (although Minneapolis and Chicago had distinctly different accents when PG lived there), but no one seems to worry about the defining characteristics of the Western European arts as opposed to German, French, British, etc., arts.
PG says let Iowa be Iowa. Don’t try to shoehorn it into the Midwest.
We Midwesterners *are* nice. A generalization, but also true. 🙂
And we can always tell when someone isn’t originally from the Midwest. Not because they’re not nice, but because they aren’t *as* nice. 😉
There are significant differences not just “within Midwestern states” but within a single state. For the past twenty years my wife and I have raised our family in a small town in Ohio. Our youngest son has known no other life. Moving to Cincinnati (1.5 hours away) for him was a drastic change, though he adapted pretty quickly.
Frp, what I saw when I travelled to the US, the only thing that united “Midwest” culturally, was the fact that it wasn’t a part of the other more culturally cohesive regions.
As the post says, the south west has a Spanish-Catholic influence, the South has it’s Confederate past, New England has its thing going on. The “Midwest” seemed to be a way to describe the rest of the states that didn’t really fit into those other regions. That doesn’t make them the same. Perhaps a better word for the group is “Misc”.
Perhaps Midwesterners are defined by their collective yawn when they hear that writers don’t understand the Midwest.
>the South is bound by its Confederate past
Not as much as some would like to believe, and often by those who don’t live here. Outside of a vocal minority, the South is and has been pretty much a modern region.
It would be nice if we could get past labeling people with useless things like this.
For the record, Indiana had an underground railroad at one time. Some of my relatives moved to Decatur County, Indiana. At the time, beyond the town was wild territory so if people escaped into it they were free. The man mentioned here is one of my relatives, by marriage. https://www.in.gov/dnr/historic/files/donnell.pdf
I’m from Northeastern Ohio, which is part of the Midwest to some people, but I think of it as Great Lakes.
However, that area was colonized by people who lost their homes in the Revolutionary War, mostly from Connecticut. The Finns, Swedes, Irish and Italians came in later. So it’s a melting pot.
Every area has its own history.
I dont even know where to start with this, it is funny for saying ‘folks dont get it re hoosierland, then writer launches into thinking there is a ‘one way’ to see any land.
He missed on the southwest entirely which was rife with slaves, native americans, spaniards, jews fleeing spain, italian and greek thugs who came on and stayed re the Conquest. There are ‘ladinos’ and “latinos.’ There are chicanos, a whole other set of people. There are missionaries up the kazoo, including renegade LDS etc. There are euro americans of every stripe, and there are huge numbers of mestizos everywhere, including at all 19 pueblos and amongst the Dine, Ute, White Mountain Apache, and more.
Having lived in hoosierland with their rabid and serious and good-natured layer of insane ‘hoosier hysteria– basketball seasons’ and their prevasive ‘go Irish’, I see also that the writer left out the huge indigenous groups of Indiana lake tribes and the enormous ‘been there since the 1940s’ latino populations from mexico, guatemala and el salvador, not to mention the ENORMOUS immigrant populations from E. Eu, fleeing from ethnic cleansing at end of WWII.
His ‘fort wayne’ is apparently not the fort wayne others may experience.
Just saying, and not in a mean way, that there is NO monolith about any culture, even a small village has its outliers, its core, its know it alls, its loving souls, it varying degrees of devoutness about many things
“Indian-er” is a strange land, but then so are all the regions, terrains and hollers, strange. There do seem to be some unifying features, for many, but not all. As aforementioned a sports team might be unifier in some way that matters to some. A religion like Baptist, might be a unifier for some. FISHING is THE UNIFIER in the upper midwest for MANY. lol
Id also add, the entire midwest was ‘settled’ by Native people for long and long, then came the french fur trappers, and the russian trappers… much much later came others.
One of the other problems for those living in BosWash is their screwy sense of distince. For example, driving distance between NYC and Philadelphia is about 95 miles, give or take; Richmond and DC are similar, and Baltimore to DC (or Baltimore to Philly) are about half that.
It’s 135 miles from Chicago to Champaign, IL, the site of the state flagship university. It’s farther than that to Indianapolis… or to Milwaukee. St. Louis and Chicago are about 300 miles apart — farther than it is from Boston to Philadelphia, or Philadelphia to Richmond.
It’s “flyover country” as much because it requires flying to do a roundtrip in a day (with a business lunch in the middle) as anything else. That, and the cowpats.
I’m from Michigan. My default assumption as to why others don’t get “the Midwest” right in pop culture is because they don’t bother visiting.
I was all excited to watch Designated Survivor when I saw the trailer. Second or third episode in I’m rolling my eyes because it’s clear the writers have heard of Dearborn, but they don’t grok who lives there and the rest of Southeast Michigan. I bailed.
The episode involved a Michigan governor deciding to round up all the Muslims. There’s no dialogue explaining how the Chaldeans, Lebanese Maronites, Syriac Christians & Coptic Orthodox are excluded from the purge.
The episode also doesn’t explain how the governor excludes South Asian Hindus & Sikhs from South Asian Muslims. Yes, there is a small clue with the clothing, but only up to a point, depending on how assimilated the person is. Most dress like Westerners. I suspect the show’s writers didn’t know any of these groups existed. Writers of America: Research is your friend!
Moving along, I agree that different parts of the same state will have different cultures. I gather Up North there’s a large Finnish population. West Michigan has the Dutch, who kindly gave us Meijer, the original and superior Wal-Mart 🙂
A few election cycles back, I read a column from a political reporter from out east who had come to Detroit for an event. On a lark, he and his friends decided to take a road trip. They went, he said, to “West Michigan”.
No, they went to Hell. You probably know this, but for the rest, Hell is a tiny little village about an hour from Detroit. It’s not West Michigan. It’s not even central. Many people from that area commute to Detroit or Detroit suburbs for work every day.
As C.E. Petit notes below, the easterner had no grasp of the scope of the state. An hour on a freeway on the east coast crosses a state, or even takes you to another state. In the Midwest, an hour means your trip is finally started. It’s three hours from Detroit to Lake Michigan. 300 miles from Detroit to the Bridge, another 160 to Marquette. They don’t grasp the distances.
Michigan is comparable in size to Great Britain. Other Midwest states are similar. Anyone who expects an area that size to be homogeneous has a pretty parochial view. “Oh, I’ve been to Detroit, I know Michigan.”
This. This is so very much true. I’m in North Dakota, practically on the Montana line. Many people in this town will drive 2 hours to the nearest mall. Others will drive 4 hours to the capitol for malls, Sam’s Club, flights out, specialist healthcare, etc. It takes 6 hours to get to Fargo from where I am and some people make that trip fairly regular. Myself, I load up, check the oil, and make the 5-6 hour drive to Billings for Costco, flights out, etc. The idea of driving only one hour and calling it a long trip is…ouy
(And then they all plan their Alaska trips and want to be on a boat in Seward or Homer one day, and up in Denali on a bus the next. But that’s a gripe for another time 😛 )
Yes. Hell yes to all of this. Although, I have somehow never gone to Hell. I should put that on my list of places to visit 🙂
I am a Finn / English Yooper.
I have been to Japan more times than I have been to Detroit, 8 to 4.
Now, I have gone across the Bridge to the L.P. a few more times than to Japan, but not that many times.
And I have no reason to go to either place anymore.
I like living where there is a whole bunch of nothing.
Which Iowa? Dutch (Pella-region and Sioux County), Quad Cities, Scandinavian (Decorah and surrounding Northeastern Corner), almost Southern, Des Moines, Native American (Tama County)… 🙂
To me, “the Heartland” is Indiana. But any place with lots of corn and tornados can qualify.
And “Midwest” makes me think of Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota. I guess that has to include Illinois, too, but my impression of Illinois is distorted by suburban Chicago. I went to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. A few blocks west of Northwestern, there was a Northeastern University.
If you’re from Nebraska or Kansas and want to claim you’re in the Midwest … well, okay, whatever. But the western halves of those states are in the Great Plains.
I live in Eastern Montana, which is in the Great Plains, but also in the West – the Old West, with Wyoming, not the New West, with Seattle, Denver, and Portland.
There really isn’t such a thing as *the* midwest.
There are at least three distinct cultural regions in the area miscast as the midwest, plus one enormous anomaly called Chicago which is its own entity just as New York and Atlanta are anomalies in their regions.
The so-called midwest includes most of the Rustbelt, the now fading industrial heartland; the breadbasket agrarian states; and the sparsely populated mountain states of the “empty quarter”. None of this is new.
The oldest look at the real cultural regions of the US I know of is THE NINE NATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, dating back to the 1980’s.
https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Nations-North-America/dp/0380578859/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490632429&sr=1-1&keywords=nine+nations+of+north+america
Since then other books have sliced and diced the country into 11 or even 12 cultural blocks and even that is undercutting the native american cultures.
Garreau’s book includes the cross-border similarities across much of the continent so he counts Quebec, Ecotopia, the Maritimes, Mexamerica, and most of the Caribbean among the nine nations. The only traditional regions that fit his model are Dixie–the southeast–and New England.
Considering that most of the “literary” and pop culture filters out of a self-absorbed city divorced from its own geographical roots it should be no surprise that neither really understands the rest of the country.
And yes, I really like NINE NATIONS. Too bad there is no ebook version.
Fortunately, some of the others exploring the terrain are.
As someone born and raised in Kansas, I am still amused by the notion that states to the east of the Mississippi river are referred to as being in the Midwest. It always seemed to me to be an Easterner’s conceit, to refer to any state not in New England or the Mid-Atlantic as “West.”
As the OP points out, the first reference of the term referred to Kansas and Nebraska. Even St. Louis, with it’s famous arch, is referred to as the Gateway to the West.
Likewise, the term Heartland (which denotes the heart of the country) should point to the geographic center. Again, that would be Kansas. By definition, it might stretch to include the surrounding states. But calling Indiana part of the Heartland? Perish the thought.
Perhaps it is a fool’s folly, but I would love to see a geographic revolution, wherein the Midwest (from the Mississippi west to the Rockies) would stand apart from the Great Lakes states (Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio).
To paraphrase PG: Let Indiana be Indiana. Don’t try to shoehorn it into the Midwest.
Indiana is more like Ohio and Pennsylvania than Kansas.
And definitely nothing like Texas or Oklahoma.
Not in geography, economy, or culture.
Actually, Ohio was historically part of the Northwest Territory. Everybody west of us is just more west. “Midwest” was a nice compromise with this view of things.
Heartland and Great Lakes tell you nothing. New York is a Great Lakes state, for goodness sake.
Most Midwestern states not only are covered by complex settlement patterns, but contain multiple dialects created by the interaction of residents. Without even getting into non-English speakers, many Midwestern cities also contain multiple dialects.
People on the coasts think the rest of us are a monolith. I remember at one point looking at the Yellow Pages for a small Ohio town and counting the denominations for some online friends, as an experiment. It blew their mind that a tiny town could have twenty or more denominations, not all Christian. But it seemed normal to me. Why wouldn’t there be?
It always seemed to me to be an Easterner’s conceit, to refer to any state not in New England or the Mid-Atlantic as “West.”
Hardly. When the US border was the Mississippi River, anything West of the then-difficult-to-traverse Appalachian Mountains was “The West”, and rightly so.