Imagine you're a young man from a small town in, say, Ohio. Nebraska would do just as well, I suppose. Kansas, Wisconsin, or South Dakota, for that matter. But let’s stick with Ohio, since the particular young man I have in mind was born in what's now Martins Ferry in 1837, over on the eastern edge of the state, and grew up mostly in the town of Hamilton, out in the western reaches of Ohio.
So, you're young, full of unrealized talent—a promising kid, as they used to say, although the promise remains unfocused—and you're hungry to accomplish something important. What do you do? Where do you go?
American literature has always insisted on the desire of the young to flee civilization, Huck Finn's wish to light out for the territory. But in real life, it's far more typical for the ambitious young to flee the settled civilization of their small towns and head off to the established cultural centers of the big cities.
In the case of the literary figure William Dean Howells, our less-than-hypothetical young man from Ohio, that meant settling in Boston, back in the days when Boston was the most culturally prestigious city in America, and becoming editor of The Atlantic in 1871. (It also meant heading to Manhattan and editing Harper's in 1886, as clear a signpost as we have for the era in which New York was overtaking Boston in cultural status.)
Nowadays you might head to New York or Hollywood or even Nashville, each a cultural center in its own way, although Washington, D.C., is a more likely destination for the young with unfocused ambition in our current cultural arrangement. The one certain thing is that you won't stay to molder in Hamilton, Ohio. Or Wahoo, Nebraska; Wauwatosa, Wisconsin; or Pierre, South Dakota. Our picture of small-town life in America was always defined in part—and maybe now in whole—by the people who left, rather than the people who stayed.
As the historian Jon Kevin Lauck understands in From Warm Center to Ragged Edge, his new book about the history of our national picture of the Midwest, the phrase "flyover country" now incorporates much of the derision that established culture had for life in a small town. Even at the peak of the 20th century's derision of the heartland, the small-town milieu of the Midwest was imagined to lurk in cities as large as Minneapolis and Milwaukee—or even Chicago. The Midwest as a whole was understood as an American backwater, home of the booboisie, and the best that ambitious young Midwesterners could do is flee for the East Coast and comment wryly, from time to time, about the inanity of the life they just barely escaped!
For Lauck, the story begins when the critic Carl Van Doren wrote a small review essay for The Nation linking the publication of such works as Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1915), Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920). Van Doren would have a significant influence on American literary perception through the success of his 1921 study The American Novel, and by the 1950s, his account of Midwestern writers turning against their homeland—"The Revolt from the Village," with its exposing of small-town life's "abundant feast of scandal"—had became the received way to understand the American literary rejection of the Midwest.
The received way to understand the American cultural rejection of the Midwest, for that matter. A more accurate reading of Masters, Anderson, and Lewis shows that none of them was correctly understood by Van Doren, but the damage had been done. "Vocal intellectuals," writes Lauck, "recast the Midwest as a repressive and sterile backwater filled with small-town snoops, redneck farmers, and zealous theocrats."
A respected figure in South Dakota, Lauck is an adviser to the state's senator, John Thune, and a reasonable reader will consider the possibility that implicit in From Warm Center to Ragged Edge are the rudiments of a conservative vision a Midwestern politician like Thune could represent on the national stage. Lauck consistently reveals his belief that the Midwest remains not the periphery but the center of the nation, and that communitarian ideals for political engagement are fulfilled far more easily in the smaller settings of the Midwest than in the huge cultural hothouses of the East Coast's big cities.
In his 2013 book The Lost Region, Lauck called for "a revival of Midwestern history" as an academic subject akin to studies on Southern history and the establishment of chairs and departments in Western history. Lauck has worked indefatigably to make that a reality, pushing like-minded historians to join him in scholarly associations, and the second half of From Warm Center to Ragged Edge reiterates his call for a new regionalism. That stands, however, in some tension with his understanding of the Midwest as central to the nation's character. If the Midwest is a region, then it's not national. If it's a separable part, then it's not lending itself to the whole.
This tension—Midwest as region vs. Midwest as center—produces the fuzzy edges of the Midwest as Lauck uses the term throughout the book. We tend to forget how recently the idea of the Midwest was born. Is Martins Ferry, Ohio, near the Rust Belt of the Pennsylvania border, really in the Midwest? Is Custer, South Dakota, as one draws near Wyoming? Is there any univocal use of the word that makes Milwaukee and Omaha equally Midwestern cities in a way that, say, Denver and Boise are not? When the young William Dean Howells wrote an 1860 campaign biography for Abraham Lincoln, Illinois wasn't typically thought of as the Midwest. Lincoln was portrayed as a Westerner, a dweller on the frontier.
From Warm Center to Ragged Edge is a thorough and well-documented book, with almost as many pages of notes as pages of narrative. I think, however, that the time has come for Lauck to set aside his academic ambitions and give us his more general vision of Midwestern life and its political consequences.
The problem will be Lauck's situating that within a national understanding. He takes his title from a line in The Great Gatsby, where Nick Carraway describes his return from the First World War: "Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business." But even F. Scott Fitzgerald felt uncertain about whether the Midwest was distinct from the West, and whether its lessons were transferable.
It's the same Nick Carraway, after all, who concludes about the tale told in The Great Gatsby, "I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life."