INTERVIEW WITH JON LAUCK, AUTHOR OF FROM WARM CENTER TO RAGGED EDGE, PART I

“Geography and history and place and regional attachments still matter in the world. Fargo is not San Diego,” Jon Lauck writes in the introduction to his new book. To back that up, he notes that “The revolts of the Quebecois and Catalonian secession and Grexits and Brexits continue to lead the news and Scottish rebels still fight the 1707 Act of Union.” Although he reassures the reader that Midwesterners do not share such separatist aspirations, there is little denying that the fractures which plague the United States at present have a starkly regional cast. It is therefore not at times disquieting to read Lauck’s richly documented history of Midwestern intellectual culture, for it proves amply that the present hostility between the coasts and the “flyover states” is not some recent misunderstanding. It is both very old and much more substantial than we may like to think. Moving beyond it will, it seems certain, require more than reading a few elegies to hillbillies. (Watching Coal Miner’s Daughter couldn’t hurt, though.)

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge documents three steps in the way the cultures of the Midwest and the Northeast diverged and grew more antagonistic to one another. The first step that Lauck retraces was the so-called “Revolt from the Village,” an artificial mashing together by New York-based critics of a number of Midwestern novelists and poets whose works had depicted the Midwestern small town as provincial and suffocating. (Think Winesburg, Ohio or Main Street.) In reality, most of the authors grouped together as “village rebels” had much more ambivalent feelings about Midwestern small towns—some spent most of the rest of their career defending its culture. While not quite calling it a conspiracy, Lauck portrays this critical consensus as opportunistic and superficial—without really seeking to understand the Midwest, northeastern critics jumped on these novels to prove the inferiority of the hinterland. In prestigious journals of opinion and the books columns of metropolitan dailies, “cosmopolitan” litterateurs like H. L. Mencken fixated on any possible criticism of the Midwest they could glean from these novels while studiously ignoring any elements that didn’t fit their preferred narrative. (Fake news avant la lettre!)

 

The second and third steps in Lauck’s book recover a “revolt against the revolt”—a concerted effort within the Midwest to retrieve a sense of pride and to direct the intellectual resources of the region—from its universities to its little magazines—toward a more self-conscious regional identity. Half of this movement (reconstructed in Chapter 2) was undertaken by novelists and poets; the other half (Chapter 3) was pursued by historians. Lauck calls this a “failed” movement because it petered out around World War II, swamped by the mass disruptions of wartime service and the nationalism that came with the war effort. Mass culture, concocted by the bastions of cultural power on either coast, flooded in after the War, sweeping out the last ragged regionalists.

 

Lauck tells this story as a one-sided assault—an “erosion,” as he puts it in the title: cosmopolitanism has been hammering away at the rich earth of regionalism, and it is solely the disdainful coastal elites who are to blame. I’m more than a little skeptical that the history of the distrust and resentment that throbs between the heartland and the coasts is so one-sided, or that East Coast condescension can be held solely responsible for a decline in the region’s cultural vitality. But regardless of how we piece this history back together, the need to pay more attention to regions and to regionalism in twentieth-century intellectual history is an incontrovertible point that From Warm Center to Ragged Edge makes extremely well.

In my conversation with Lauck, I tried to draw out some of the implications of this history, and of the reconstruction project Lauck and others have embarked upon in trying to revive Midwestern regionalism, and to do so especially by recovering the history and historiography of the region.

Andrew Seal: First, one of the most striking and enjoyable aspects of the book is how abundant and informative the endnotes are. This may be a very historian thing to care about, but at a time when presses—both academic and trade—increasingly need to cut costs and often try to reduce the scholarly apparatus of books in order to do so, how did you convince yours (the University of Iowa Press) to give you such ample space for including all these references and explanations in the endnotes?

Jon K. Lauck: I had to beg, essentially. But I think I had some good arguments working in my favor. Most importantly, the topic I’m writing about has been so obscured by the mists of time that it was in many ways an excavation project. It required, in other words, the assembling of a lot of old sources and information to make the key points. Also, I think the press understood that both Warm Center and The Lost Region were attempting to persuade scholars to dip their toes into the pool of Midwestern studies and to be successful on that front it helps to leave a broad paper trail discussing the potential angles and areas of development for the field. The footnotes also allow the book to operate on two levels. At roughly one hundred pages of text, a general reader can get through most of the book on a travel day or a couple of plane rides. If they want to know more and follow a thread, they can turn to the footnotes. If a professor or other expert is reading the book, well, they of course love footnotes, so they are usually sold.

AS: With this abundance of references, I’m wondering about your argument that the Midwest’s history has been forgotten or, as you say at one point, has “retreated so far into the recesses of the historical imagination.” Clearly, there’s been a lot of writing—and even a good deal of excellent recent writing—about regionalism and about Midwestern history and culture specifically. My feeling has always been that there’s also a lot of history written about the Midwest which simply doesn’t have a regionalist consciousness—its authors don’t think of themselves as “Midwestern historians” but simply as telling a piece of a national (or increasingly often, a transnational) story. And then the primary sources for Midwestern history are also incredibly deep and broad, thanks to marvelous collections all over the Midwest. So, it would seem like all the pieces are in place for anyone to write a truly rich and well-sourced history of just about any part of the Midwest. Is it the lack of writing about the history of the Midwest or the lack of a really powerful and prominent Midwestern regionalism that is the key issue? Or to put it another way, what do you think is missing—what still needs to happen for Midwestern history really to flourish?

JKL: I guess I would contest your assumption that there’s been a lot of writing about Midwestern history in recent years, say, post-1965. In recent decades, the field really went into a nosedive. Carl Ubbelohde, who used to teach at Case Western – an institution without peer in terms of Midwestern roots, by the way – wrote a great essay about this in the mid-1990s for the Wisconsin Magazine of History. I try to explain all this in The Lost Region too. I would certainly agree with you that there has been some great history written in recent years that is set in the region, but it is not framed in regional terms and is instead framed in terms of more trendy categories of analysis or in terms of local interest. I think once we’ve also tackled the regional dimensions of these topics we will have really accomplished something. But that will take some work. Some of the topics that appear in the state history journals in the Midwest obviously fit well into state history silos, but what happens in Michigan doesn’t happen in a vacuum—there’s usually something similar happening in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It’s a regional matter, which we need to underscore. But sometimes state history journals like to simply focus on their own state and not get too far afield, which I certainly understand given the pressures they are under and their particular constituencies. Also, for the researcher, a regional approach requires visiting several states and several archives instead of just those in one state. I hope the new journals focused on the region such as Middle West Review can help facilitate more writing about the region as a whole. The Midwest hasn’t had a regional history journal in roughly a half-century. The Middle West Review is making strides, but it will take some time. The annual conferences on Midwestern history are also helpful in terms of facilitating new research and meetings among people interested in rebuilding the field. Finally, we simply have to have a prominent research university in the Midwest decide that they are going to be The Place for Midwestern studies and that they are going to put resources into supporting the field, hire a professor or two to focus on the field, and then start training Ph.D. students who will write sophisticated dissertations based on years of work that become foundational books in a revived field.

AS: I definitely see your point, but I’d like to push you maybe a bit more on how you’d distinguish history “set in the region” from regional history, or fiction “set in the Midwest” from “Midwestern fiction.” Clearly from what you’ve just said and from what you’ve written in Warm Center and The Lost Region, a lot of this has to do with institutions: universities and colleges that actively sponsor research or writing on the basis of its regional content; well-funded state historical societies and regional associations that preserve and promote wider knowledge about the Midwest’s history; journals and informal networks that have as their principle of commonality a regional identity. Some of this regional institution-building is occurring again—as you explain in the book—but there’s no doubting that something like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a self-consciously cosmopolitan institution rather than—as it was in its earlier days—a hub for regionalism. But are strong institutions the sine qua non of a strong Midwestern history or a good Midwestern novel? For instance, thinking about the 1990s, three of the best histories published that decade are, I would say, Midwestern histories: William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991), Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991), and Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996).  Are those Midwestern histories, and if not, why not?

JLK: They are wonderful books, there’s no doubt. They will be central to the history of the American Midwest for a long time. But they were largely researched and written three decades ago. That certainly does not minimize their importance, but I do think it speaks to the point about the minimal amount of work that has been done on the Midwest in recent decades. Richard White has been very supportive of our efforts—he likes new angles on the past and he even blurbed The Lost Region—and Bill Cronon is based in Madison and is of course working on his history of Portage, but their famous books were, on a basic level, not focused on the Midwest as a region. Richard’s work has been more focused on the farther American West, of course. The Middle Ground is a product of his time at Michigan State and his proximity to sources. It is also focused on colonial North America and on Native American history. That is to say there really wasn’t a Midwest (or even a United States) during the time period covered by The Middle Ground if you accept the convention that the identity of the Midwest didn’t really take shape until the early/mid-nineteenth century. We should all cover White’s earlier era in our courses, of course, but it’s worth keeping in mind that it is in some ways a pre-history, a time before the Midwest had unfolded as a region. As to Cronon, his classic book is set directly in the Midwest during the high point of the Midwest’s regional influence, but he also was seeking to frame his book as an epic of environmental history, the field in which he became famous. Something similar could be said of Sugrue—his book on Detroit is greatly shaped by the history of civil rights, the 1960s, urban disorder, race, urbanization etc.

Again, let me emphasize, all of these books are classics of Midwestern history and they must be in the Midwestern history canon close to the top. I’m just pointing out that they aren’t precisely focused on the Midwest as a region. That’s completely fine, of course, because they are still very impressive and highly useful, but we should also aim to generate a few books which are more regional. And please keep in mind that with regard to the decline of Midwestern history as a field I’m not saying that scholarly production has dropped to zero in recent decades, only that it has declined a great deal in relative terms. The Midwest is also crippled by an absence of supporting institutions. The South and the West have a dozen centers of regional study each. New England and New York obviously enjoy an embarrassment of riches. I’m arguing that the Midwest needs to catch up.