I own it as a fault of mine that patriotic feeling for the United States is something that doesn’t come to me with particular ease. I’ve never been a particular fan of the American founding mythology or the Whig historiography that comes with it, and that’s something that long predates my conversion. Indeed, if anything, my loyalties go strongly in the other direction. What’s more: I fully own that there are both familial and psychosexual grounds for this. Such loyalties as I have tend to be regional, familial and local.
I say all the foregoing so you may imagine, gentle reader, the gratitude with which I read Dr Allan Carlson’s most recent article on Midwestern cultural history at Front Porch Republic! I think I may have noted before how influential his book Third Ways was on my own political development, both towards and away from the legacy of Christian democracy. But here: his polyphonic weaving together of influences across the fields of visual arts, poetry, prosody, music, history, sports and political activism across the Midwest is nothing short of stunning.
The focal point of the essay is a triumvirate of Midwestern cultural figures and their reactions to the Chicago World Fair of 1893. Radical novelist Hannibal Hamlin Garland, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and historian Frederick Jackson Turner are presented as the chief shapers of the ‘classic Midwestern identity’; even though these three men had dramatically divergent views of both the Fair, they all came to embody in their respective works the regionalism that Carlson celebrates.
The celebration of Iowa girls’ basketball is also worthy of note – the ‘six-on-six’ half-court games that were unique enough to attract a considerable regional following. Carlson tantalisingly quotes sports historian Max McElwain that these Iowa girls’ basketball leagues represented a ‘simultaneously conservative and progressive’ sensibility reflected in the broader state culture. He also notes a certain sense of loss, that occurred with the homogenisation of the sport. After girls’ basketball went full-court, with the pursuit of a levelling gender equality desired by ‘big-city reformers and columnists’, their popularity quickly faded.
I have often felt, and struggled to articulate for myself, the idea that this mixture of conservatism and progressivism highlighted by Carlson (and McElwain, Lauck, Leary, Butler, Allen and the other contributors to the edited volume he reviews here) was somehow related to a Midwestern heritage. I have occasionally done that by reference to the migration of the Tories and the rise of the Populists in a partial pushback against the Woodard thesis (which I still find to be thought-provoking, albeit crude and incomplete). The latent radicalism of the Great Plains states continues to be something of a lodestar for my own thinking, and here Carlson manages to articulate several dimensions of that, which are not expressly political but which are still intriguingly suggestive.
If there’s one thing I wish he had dwelt a little bit more on – and this really is a bit of a parochial hobby-horse for yours truly, so it’s best taken with a grain of salt – it’s the influx of immigration from the less-genteel parts of Europe that marked so much of the Midwest in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A good deal of Midwestern popular culture, not to mention a good chunk of the labour activism, derives from the Poles, Serbs, Croats, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Carpatho-Rusins who arrived here around the turn of the century. Part – a small but significant part – of the fabric of that peculiarly-Midwestern ‘religious Tower of Babel’ Carlson mentions, belongs also to the Catholic and Orthodox spirituality which these folks brought over. Still, this essay promotes works which look to be worthy deep dives, and I’m always grateful for further reading materials with which to explore local and regional history. As I said above, it’s not often I get patriotic thrills down my jaded millennial spine, but this piece certainly gave me those. It may well be worth picking up the books mentioned herein, by Burns, Gjerde and Lauck et al.
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