COLUMBUS, Ohio — President Donald Trump's name appears only once in Professor Jon Lauck's new book on perceptions of the Midwest as a “country beyond aircraft” and then only in a footnote featuring a Missouri poll .
But the book's exploration of decades of historical trends helps explain Trump's electoral appeal to people who felt alienated from the political and cultural mainstream.
“As the twentieth century dawned, the American Midwest stood tall as the rising and triumphant region of democracy—economically prosperous, politically formidable, culturally proud, and self-consciously regional,” Lauck writes in “From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: the Erosion of Lidestary and Midwest Regionalism, 1920-1965.
Yet just a few decades later, in an era of increasing globalization, “vocal intellectuals are revising the Midwest as an oppressive and sterile backwater filled with small-town spies, farmers and zealous theocrats,” wrote Lauck, a professor of history and political science. at the University of South Dakota.
The book takes its title from a remark by Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby: “Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Midwest now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.'
The region's isolationist tendencies after World War II were out of sync with the rest of the US, Lauck said, and those tendencies clashed with the country's growing cosmopolitanism and desire to be part of the wider world.
Growing intellectual hostility toward the Midwest also discouraged some writers from telling stories of the region, including accounts of everyday life in the Midwest, Lauck wrote. Others who tried drifted away, like Ohio's own Louis Bromfield, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist now little known outside the state.
“It's a major cultural problem in this nation, the degree to which the coast dominates culture — Manhattan and Hollywood in particular,” Luck said in an interview.
History professor Nicole Etcheson dates coastal disdain for the Midwest to the 19th century, when the region was still considered “the West,” a region populated by uneducated people, including an indisposed fellow named Abraham Lincoln, whose accent and behavior they made the country a bit. accustom.
“Flyover Country has deep historical roots in old regional prejudices and Eastern attitudes toward the uncivilized frontier,” said Etcheson, who teaches at Ball State University.
Among some additional observations in Lauck's book, published last month by the University of Iowa Press.
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“Geography and history and places and regional attachments still matter in the world. Fargo is not San Diego. The Quebec and Catalan secession uprisings and Grexit and Brexit continue to dominate the news, and Scottish rebels are still fighting the 1707 Act of Union.”
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“Victorian ideals were particularly strong in the rural and small-town Midwest, leaving the region vulnerable to the criticism of literary modernists.”
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“The early Midwest was where the first genuine American tradition of democracy took root, ultimately, and where the democratic tradition expanded to include more citizens of the republic and a functional ethnic pluralism took root.”
