Interview with Jon Lauck, Author of From Warm Center to Ragged Edge, Part II

Andy Seal: Speaking of institutions, one of the many things I found compelling about Warm Center was the way you connected the decline of Midwestern regionalism to the rise of the multiversity and especially to the transformation of the academic job market. As state universities scaled up into multiversities in the 1960s, they increasingly tried to tap into national and (eventually) international talent pools both for students and for new faculty. From the supply side, a person entering a PhD program also had to think now about applying for jobs all over the nation, as the number of new PhDs had exploded: as you note, “Nearly half of the history Ph.D.s awarded to that point in the entirety of American history were granted during the 1960s” (78)! It made much less sense, then, to specialize in a particular region’s history by the 1970s. Universities and colleges prided themselves on being able to hire the best in the nation—not just in the neighborhood—and new PhDs had to prepare themselves to move almost anywhere for a new job. But side-by-side with this cosmopolitanization was, of course, the breaking down of long-standing forms of segregation and exclusion: the removal of quotas on Jewish students, the first moves toward race-based affirmative action, the moves to coeducation for all the Ivies and many other universities and colleges. To some extent, these processes were interlinked: diversity and cosmopolitanism were working together.

Now, one of the stereotypes that I’ve encountered—and I’m sure you’ve encountered it, too—is that Midwestern history is very white and very male. So if Midwestern universities were to become more regionally-focused, would this mean that diversity—in terms of course offerings but also in terms of faculty and student populations—would decline? Or if not, how could universities become both more committed to regionalism and retain or even increase their diversity?

Jon K. Lauck: Your question reminds me to note that Midwestern universities were largely the first to embrace a co-educational mission in the nineteenth-century and, in the early twentieth-century, to hire Jews. The historian George Mosse at the University of Iowa and then at the University of Wisconsin comes to mind (he wrote a great book about his time in Iowa and Wisconsin). As does the historian Bert Loewenberg, who was hired at the University of South Dakota in the 1930s. African-American students were present on many Big Ten campuses from their earliest days. Laws in the Midwest required the Africans Americans be allowed access to colleges. This whole matter would be a great dissertation for a young graduate student because the sources would be strong, the topic would be highly relevant, and strong regional distinctions could be drawn.

But to your point on diversity, I think it should be said that we’re failing on the diversity front when we’re largely leaving out of the historical discussion an entire region of the country. I’m not sure who precisely is saying Midwestern history is “very white and very male” and if they are referring to the history of the region or the current effort to study Midwestern history, but of course there is great diversity in the actual story of the Midwest. This is demonstrated by books such as Richard White’s and Tom Sugrue’s that we noted above and all the work on the history of rural women in the Midwest in recent years. The keynoter of last year’s Midwestern History Association conference, Erik McDuffie of the University of Illinois, gave a great speech on the history of the African American Midwest which is an excellent primer on race and the Midwest. In short, if universities did more to focus on Midwestern regional history they would find lots of diversity in that story and in so doing present a more representative picture of the nation’s history more generally.

AS: That segues nicely to my last question, which is about a kind of tension in your book that I couldn’t quite resolve between the changes you’d like to see at the national level and changes you’d like to see in the Midwest itself as far as attention and respect go. I often felt while I was reading both Warm Center and The Lost Region that you have two goals or projects in mind in working toward the revival of Midwestern studies. First, there is, as you said, the “catching up” process of institution building in the Midwest: convincing graduate students and graduate programs as well as established scholars to research and write more about the Midwest and within a self-conscious Midwestern studies community; finding universities or other organizations who will fund that research; and generally educating the people of the Midwest about the richness of the region’s history. Second, there is a kind of national public relations campaign of trying to change how the Midwest is depicted in national media, and particularly in the histories that are told about “the nation.” Your extensive documentation of the condescension—historical and current—of particularly the New York and New England cultural centers toward the Midwest has been a major focus of your research and your writing.

My questions are related to how these projects fit together. Are these projects interdependent? That is, can one succeed without the other? Because I can envision a situation in which the former project might succeed without the latter having as much success—Midwestern studies flourishes again in the Midwest without affecting the national stereotypes you find on, say, television or in the New Yorker very much. Could you speak to the way these two goals or projects fit together, and also maybe address why it is so important to change those national stereotypes of the Midwest?

JKL: It’s mostly the former, i.e. I’m focused on helping to rebuild the Midwest as a formal field of historical study. Thankfully we’ve made some progress on that front in recent years in terms of creating the Midwestern History Association, the annual conference, new journals, new books on the field (slight teaser: keep an eye out for a major new book about the field of Midwestern history to be published later this year), new courses being offered etc.

But I also think that the latter, or hoping to draw more attention to the Midwest by way of cultural regionalism, is obviously linked to the former. One way of drawing more attention to a region is to promote study and research about that region. And one way to motivate more people to do research on a region is to highlight how it has been marginalized and why its history should be recovered. If the stirrings of cultural regionalism cause people in the broader world to write more books about the Midwest that would be great. We’re going to need more people from outside academia because—I’m sure you’ve heard the news—the resources of history departments are shrinking. Some of the history departments in the Midwest which had 25 historians 20 years ago now have 8. We need public historians, historical societies, independent historians and writers, journalists, and anyone else interested to contribute to the effort to revive the history of the Midwest.

Here’s a highly relevant analogy that you might like as a Yale grad. In the 1950s, there really wasn’t much of a field of Western history, but then Yale, at the behest of William Robertson Coe (the unfortunate guy who insured the Titanic), created a professorship in Western history because Coe loved the West. Then in the 1960s the Western History Association was created. Then in the 1970s the journal Western Historical Quarterly was created. Then many centers of Western historical study were created. The field really came to life and even had a revolution by the 1980s (see Jon K. Lauck, “How South Dakota Sparked the New Western History Wars: A Commentary on Patricia Nelson Limerick,” South Dakota History vol. 41, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 353–381). Through most of that time—until the last 25 years or so—many non-academics and “buffs” supported and bolstered Western history and made it stronger and helped create an audience for Western history. That’s a good model for Midwestern history and a good example of how the two dynamics you mention can work together. But back to your direct question, I think both projects can move forward together and be mutually-reinforcing.