Editor's Note
This is the sixth and final post in a series of guest posts by Andrew Klumpp, a PhD candidate in American religious history at Southern Methodist University. His research investigates rising rural-urban tensions in the nineteenth-century Midwest, focusing on rural understandings of religious liberty, racial strife, and reform movements. His work has been supported by grants from the State Historical Society of Iowa, the Van Raalte Institute, and the Joint Archives of Holland and has appeared in Methodist History and the 2016 volume The Bible in Political Debate. He also currently serves as the associate general editor of the Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America.
On November 9, 2016, a friend from the rural Midwest called me. “They’re saying it’s all our fault,” he grumbled. “Saying we’re uneducated and stupid, bigots and racists, that we’re the reason Trump won. But, what choice did we even have?”
It was an odd conversation, to say the least. It was also one that I was not entirely prepared to have the day after the election. On one hand, he did not second guess pulling the lever for the Republican Party, yet at the same time, he resented that “uneducated rural voters” were being blamed for the outcome. It was a peculiar combination of intransigence, indignation, and shame.
That conversation over two years ago sparked not only this series of blogs but also a fruitful line of inquiry that, for me, has resulted in a dissertation focused on internationalism, religion, and the rural Midwest in the nineteenth century. I wanted to understand the history behind this response, a fervent support for one party and a deep suspicion of outsiders. I wanted to find the origins of this rural worldview.
As I’ve reflected on that fiery conversation in the wake of the 2016 election, I began to uncover complicated intellectual, religious, and cultural worldviews rooted in rural history. Even a brief analysis of this exchange with my friend provides touchstones of intellectual traditions that continue to shape rural worldviews, particularly in the American Midwest.
For instance, when he used the term “they,” there was an assumed distinction between urban elites and rural folks like him. As a native of the rural Midwest, I instinctively knew that he was referring to that binary distinction. While many have focused on increased disdain for the media during the Trump presidency, as I’ve explored rural Midwestern history, I’ve found a century of tensions simmering between the country and the city as well as a persistent suspicion of urbanites. The us vs. them dynamic aimed at the media or coastal elites in this brief exchange has deep historical roots as a part of a rural ideology that shapes a broader worldview.
My friend also ferociously resisted being called “stupid” by the media. As a white male without a college degree, he fit within the “white, uneducated male” demographic, but he heard that classification as being called “stupid.” In his interpretation, elites had cast producers in rural America as dumb and positioned themselves a superior in some way. By his reckoning, he may not be the best-read person in the world nor the most in tune with high culture, but he knows a lot about the intricacies of farming or car and tractor mechanics. Uneducated meant dumb to him, and he insisted that rural Midwesterners were intelligent and engaged even if their everyday lives didn’t require college diplomas.
This second reflection on this conversation has challenged me to reconsider what constitutes an intellectual tradition. What does the intellectual history of high school graduates who rarely read look like? It’s there, but when we take it seriously, how do we engage it? Ideological, intellectual, religious, and cultural traditions have profoundly shaped many of these communities; however, they have often appeared in newspapers, local legends, monuments, or memories passed down through generations. I believe intellectual history exists in the everyday spaces these men and women inhabit. It just might require us to think differently, looking in unorthodox places to find it.
Finally, the comment from this conversation that is seared most intensely into my memory is when he asked, “But, what choice did we even have?” Objectively, he had a choice. Vote for Hillary. Vote for a third party. Only vote in down ballot races. Stay home on Election Day. No one forced him into voting for Donald Trump, yet when he entered the voting booth, he believed there was no choice to make. He had to vote for the Republican.
Party affiliation had become a part of his identity. And, as I have started to dig into rural intellectual history, I have found a history of party affiliation functioning as a crucial element of community identity. A close reading of newspapers, church records, and election returns in the wake of the Civil War reveals that people who once moved freely between parties and identified primarily with their ethnic heritage and religious affiliation slowly integrated party affiliation to form a trinity of fundamental communal identities.
In my friend’s particular case, his community’s identity is tied to the GOP. In my own anecdotal experience, many of these rural voters claim that they feel obligated to vote for the Republicans in every election because of their deeply held beliefs about abortion. Over the past several decades, that may seem like a plausible explanation, but it does little explain why these same communities have been consistently voting for the GOP since the 1870s. What is more, because of the dramatic shift in the major parties ideological commitments over the past century, it isn’t ideological. It is shear partisan political inertia.
So, how do these insights into rural intellectual history bear themselves out?
I’d argue that more a nuanced history of rural America sheds light on not only the past but also the present. For instance, in one of the many inflammatory moments of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, he claimed, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK.” He said those words at a conservative college in a rural community just a few miles from my hometown. The thing is, for that crowd, he was probably right. As a crowd of rural folks, many likely already distrusted urban and coastal elites, like those who might be meandering down Fifth Avenue, and he was speaking at the center of a county that has consistently voted for the GOP since the 1870s. As uncomfortable as it is for me to say about a place that I still feels like home, as far as that crowd was concerned for the general election, he probably wasn’t too far off. Unintentionally, Trump tapped into long histories of distrust for city dwellers and over a century partisan inertia.
It may seem easy to dismiss rural folks living in the Midwest, particularly due to their support of politicians like Steve King, who represents most of rural Iowa, or Donald Trump; however, there’s an intellectual and ideological history in these places as well. It doesn’t excuse racism, xenophobia, homophobia, or any number of prejudiced and bigoted actions by those who live in rural spaces or those who represent them, but exploring the intellectual history of rural America contributes richly to broader understandings of both the past and our present cultural and political tensions. As presidential hopefuls, including a Minnesotan and a Hoosier, indulge in all manner of fried food at the Iowa State Fair in the lead up to the 2020 Democratic Primary and Republicans and Democrats prepare to slug it out in Wisconsin and Michigan in the general election, rural Midwestern history seems particularly relevant, possibly more relevant than ever.
13 Thoughts on this Post
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Thank you for your posts about northwest Iowa, Andrew. It’s been fascinating but hard to wrap my head around the place you describe. To have maintained party loyalty, even through the 1930s and 40s? Self-contained, self-sufficient, lost to time.
Thanks, Antony. I appreciate it. The more I study these communities, the more I am struck by how peculiar they really are! Thanks for reading.
Hi Andrew, thanks for this overview. A pair of thoughts –
It’s illuminating to think of the dynamic of party loyalty as a factor in itself; I think there might be something there. I do wonder if the changes in the parties reflect ideological changes from their sources of support versus their sources of support always voting straight Republican no matter what, but obviously that’s a question those familiar with the history of party realignments could probably speak to.
Unfortunately it doesn’t quite apply to my life long quest of understanding my father’s politics — or does it? I say this because he doesn’t identify as a partisan or loyal Republican — he’s registered independent — and yet he always ends up voting for the Republican Party, surprise surprise! Your friend’s comment about not having a choice echoed something he said to me, that he would vote for anyone to keep Hilary from winning. What’s especially odd about this (other than the obvious), is that we’re in California — he must have known his vote couldn’t possibly have any chance of shifting our electoral votes into the Trump camp. Yet he went ahead and did something he felt slightly weird about anyway. Why? I think the tribal element is absolutely there as it is when people are consciously loyal to the Republican Party, yet he likes to think of himself as not loyal to any political organization whatsoever. It’s not necessary to produce the same behavior.
Finally, I’d like to point out a slippage or, not always-on-purpose distinction that often occurs in these discussions of understanding the Midwest or, Trump voters more broadly; you write “…there’s an intellectual and ideological history in these places as well. It doesn’t excuse racism, xenophobia, homophobia, or any number of prejudiced and bigoted actions by those who live in rural spaces or those who represent them, but exploring the intellectual history of rural America contributes richly to broader understandings of both the past and our present cultural and political tensions.” This is absolutely correct. But I would take out any sense of contrast; the racism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc, IS the intellectual tradition, or a very substantial part of it at the least. We tend to want to segregate these things and when we do, that’s exactly where our analysis runs off the rails and disconnects from political struggles on the ground. I don’t mean to put words in your mouth — perhaps you entirely agree! — but I think even when we don’t mean to, the tradition we’ve inherited from intellectual history (and the historiography in general, I might add) suggests some sort of line distinguishing between these two. There isn’t. They are all of a piece.
Robin Marie:
Thanks so much for this comment. There’s much to engage with here, and I really appreciate it!
To your first thought, the party loyalty component is one of the most fascinating elements of this to me. Regarding ideologies, what’s interesting about the communities that I study in parts of rural Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin is that their ideological bent has consistently leaned toward the conservative end of the spectrum even when Republicans did not. Many were new immigrants who fiercely protected inherited traditions and harbored a deep suspicion of the government. I even have some great newspaper articles denouncing their conservative backwardness from the 1870s. However, and this is has proven to be the key, these early groups were also pragmatic. They clung to the idea of being hardscrabble folks who supported themselves independently of the government, but they also recognized that Republicans were subsidizing railroads and doling out patronages to members of their communities. In my research, I argue that this frontier pragmatism overrode their ideological misgivings at first. In time, their conservative subculture would more closely align with the GOP’s platform, but at least initially, they were brought into the fold by way of railroading funding and plum government appointments rather than ideological agreement. It very well might be though that as the party’s base shifted toward communities like these that the GOP adopted a more conservative ideology.
Your comment about your father reminds me of my grandmother, who also insists she “votes for the person.” That person just always happens to be Democrat. She lives in Iowa, so her votes often does, in theory, have some consequence. But, there’s something there, too, to this insistence on being above/outside of the partisan battles while simultaneously being clearly committed to one party.
Your second point is very well taken. I agree that traditions of prejudice are a part of the intellectual history of these places just as they are everywhere. One of my hopes with my own work, especially as it contributes to discussions of present concerns, is to dig deeper than oversampling and being satisfied to just characterize all rural folks as racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. As a part of my efforts to situate my work as providing context while not denying these traditions, I think I slipped into contrasting language inadvertently. Historically, this works out differently in different contexts, but it’s particular complicated as I try to make sense of family and friends who express complex understandings of race, sexuality, or any variety of other identities and to the extent possible in remote places, advocate for these groups, yet still feel their GOP affiliation is so central to their identity that they pull the lever for Steve King every other year. Then again, to your point, there are also pervasive racist, homophobic, xenophobic traditions within those societies that allow them to decide such language and behavior are, ultimately, excusable. An important note. Much appreciated.
Thanks so much for the comment. Really enjoyable and important elements to think through.
I grew up in a historically Republican area (southern tier of NY). My more liberal older sister registered as a Republican because the real choices were made in the Republican primary. I believe Broome county had been voting Republican since the party was founded. My mother was a rock-ribbed Republican.The social structure of my area was similar to those described in the comments above. IBut, in 1964, I know the county went Democratic and I believe my mother voted for LBJ–NY went for LBJ by 68 to 31 percent.
According to wikipedia Iowa also went for LBJ by 61 to 39 percent and “As of the 2016 presidential election, this is the last election in which Pottawattamie County, Plymouth County, Mahaska County, Mills County, Harrison County, Grundy County, Shelby County, Montgomery County, Fremont County, Ida County, and Osceola County voted for the Democratic candidate.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_United_States_presidential_election_in_Iowa
I can’t reconcile my view of the ethos of my home county with the 1964 election results, as I can’t understand Sen. Scott in SC, Gov. Wilder in Va, or people switching from Obama to Trump. People can and do surprise us, and we have to be open to the unexpected.
Very interesting and refreshing take. Reminds me of my grandfather who came of age in the South during the Great Depression. He was a devout Baptist and as socially conservative as you might expect but didn’t have a second thought about voting for McGovern.
Quick comment; started to write long ones but they got too unwieldy.
Maybe G. Kabaservice’s recent book or some other books already fully deal with this, but it strikes me that the complete ideological transformation of the Republican Party from the party of emancipation during and after the Civil War (and the corresponding, if less total, transformation of the Democratic Party in the other direction) represents one of the starkest ideological reversals over time in terms of parties and their commitments. No doubt the causal story here could be narrated in a number of different ways, and probably has been. But the complete imperviousness to this and related transformations of these Iowa communities that have apparently been voting Republican in an unbroken line since the 1870s is striking.
By the way, were there any abolitionists in rural Iowa in the mid-19th century? I don’t know, but if there were, then abolitionism is as much a part of the region’s “intellectual history” as xenophobia, out-and-out racism, etc., are. (Racism is probably a tricky term in this context because virtually all white Americans in the 19th cent., including most abolitionists, were racist to one degree or another by our standards today.)
Louis:
Thanks for your comment here. I appreciate it.
Indeed, this story has been told in countless ways and is really just a window into one way that all of these partisan debates get worked out. The imperviousness that you mention is one of the more striking things about these communities. These folks just don’t quite fit into many of the existing narratives about party realignment in the twentieth century. The consistency is part of what makes them so fascinating to me.
There were some abolitionists in rural Iowa during the nineteenth century. Most of the folks in these rural communities had more pressing concerns though, such as building railroads or protecting (or curtailing) immigrant rights, but there is that tradition of abolitionism in some areas as well. There’s also an array of traditions imported from Europe, for instance the Dutch anti-slavery tradition that crossed the Atlantic with immigrants who settled in these remote areas. In short, I think you’re absolutely right to point out that abolition is a part of this region’s intellectual history, albeit a smaller part than might be the case in the Northeast.
Thanks for your comment!
Thanks for the reply, Andrew, and the series of posts.
Have loved all your posts. Let’s get real and talk the language. I grew up in Rantoul, Illinois. Corn and soybeans. The difficult part was what I like to call the “hierarchy of ass-kickings and ass-kickers.” In my high school, we all tried to puzzle out who could kick whose ass. And more importantly, where did you fit in that hierarchy? In our town it was this guy Ward Birch. That guy could anyone’s ass, and we debated this, about whether Dave Cargo might be able to kick his ass or not, then whether Mike could kick Randy’s ass and how that relates to whether Dave could kick Ward’s ass and so on. Complicated calculations. Obviously this is “toxic masculinity” but it was part of the world in which we lived, what it meant to be in that world, just a regular feature.
You could be left alone if you were good at something, basketball or football of course, or a good gear head. If you could break down and build an engine when the corn was down, you had something going for you. We had debates about ass-kickings and about what whether Frank’s brother really did get the horsepower he said he did from that four barrel Holley with the Edelbrock intake, whether he really had nitrous in that “sleeper” or not.
So, people raised on this perspective, when someone says they can get away with it, shooting someone, well, attention must be paid. That motherfucker is at the top of hierarchy of ass-kickings, and he’ll kick the asses of “they” that monstrous abstraction standing in for everyone and everything we resented.
Yet, I loved so many of those flawed men, and still do. The ones still alive (Joey Loy got hit by a truck on a road, dead drunk) probably voted Trump, but they really had no other choice unless you fall off the ledger of the hierarchy. When I worked in a factory in Fisher, Illinois, most everyone there voted Ross Perot in 1992. It seemed inevitable. He knows business. If they have us where we are, why not vote for a guy who can run the country like a business?
You risked ostracism if you voted different in the factory those days, and you worked in your mind to show how it made perfect sense. Some guys were more “informed” than others, and we listened when we had coffee breaks and smokes. My roommate Larry was a weirdo because he was a liberal and did lots of psychedelic mushrooms at work.
So sometimes to me these arguments seem like hopeless abstractions, and I love ideas. When you’re in it, and when you know how your community thinks, you go with that. It’s easier than resisting it. I was confused in 1992, so I didn’t vote at all. I just wanted to roll a number at lunch on third shift at the factory and hope it would all go away.
The upshot is that the Midwest is a black box and I feel so good to read your posts Andrew, for you to ground feelings and ideas in a history, to work on understanding what it is that makes these communities tick, the sediment of experience that begins to explain choices. You’ve explained my life to me and I appreciate that. Intellectual
History can do that.
Thanks for your comment, Peter, sharing your own experiences, and your kind words. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to share some of this work and some of my own experiences.
The experiences you recount resonate with so many of my own stories of living in these rural communities. You’re exactly right on the hierarchies point. One of the things about these small communities is that everyone knows everyone, so you know exactly where everyone fits in the local hierarchy. There’s no anonymity. Everyone in town knew who lived in the trailer park and who lived in the big house on the golf course, who could win a fight, who was going to get the solo at the winter choir concert, who would score the high grade on the Calculus exam, etc. Not only did all of these hierarchies exist, but the whole community, for the most part, knew and abided by them.
Your comment reminded me of a key part of this that I didn’t develop as much in this post, which is the community aspect and the pressure to conform. My friend used the word “we.” He wasn’t thinking just about his choice but the choice of the community.
Your recounting of the 1992 election also reminds me of 2008 Iowa Caucuses in my small and very Republican hometown. The Democrats all met in the middle school cafeteria, fewer than 30 people total showed up out of a community of 1,400. The thing that struck me most wasn’t the small number of people there but the even smaller number of cars parked outside on a frigid February evening. It was like a secret society and God forbid someone drive by the school, see your car (and we all knew each others’ cars), and find out that you caucused with the democrats. Despite the cold, at the time, I thought nothing of walking there from my parents’ house, leaving no trace. That communal way of thinking and pressure to conform, especially in such small communities, is an important element here. Thanks for highlighting it!
Andrew
When I moved to the midwest (from the east coast) one of things that struck me was just how off the charts the hatred Republicans had for Democrats was. I moved in largely Republican circles back east and I’d just never seen anything like it–normally kindly church folk suddenly going all red faced, the spittle, the whole thing. Back east it wasn’t like they wer singing Kumbaya, but it wasn’t like this. Your analysis makes a lot of sense and goes a long way to explain why things are “hotter” here than there.
I realize this is quite a stretch, but I do wonder if some of it goes all the way back to the Civil War. (The state that I’m in hosted a group that actually petitioned the government to deliberately starve Confederate POWs in retaliation for Andersonville.) Was part of it that Democrats were very strong in some of these states and Republicans wanted/needed to paint them as being as utterly evil as possible, for political reasons? I recall Robert Ingersoll’s speech at Indianapolis in 1876, eg:
“Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers, every keeper of Libby, Andersonville and Salisbury, every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the back were a legal tender for labor performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child—every solitary one was a Democrat.”
Thanks for your comment, John. I think your description of the climate as “hotter” is particularly apt. There’s something to the ferocity to partisanship in some corners of the Midwest that can be rather striking.
I think that historically the Civil War played a part. Some of the rural communities that I have studied were largely mixed in their partisan make up prior to the war but in the decades afterward allegiance to the GOP became a way to show patriotism. Waving the bloody shirt worked for them. I think you’re right, too, that these attacks increased when the Democrats challenged Republicans for dominance in the state. In states with unchallenged GOP hegemony the rhetoric was less inflammatory, overall, than in places where competition was fierce. Even in states like Iowa, where the Republicans held power for decades after the war, rhetoric intensified any time the Democrats mounted a credible challenge.
There were other factors, too, but I think you’re right to highlight there was absolutely a draw to the GOP after the Civil War and that rhetoric could get particularly nasty if the GOP was challenged by the Democrats.
A more recent development, which I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, is how some of these Civil War ties have faded. Historically, I think they mattered a lot in these rural communities. But, now the congressman from Iowa’s largely rural 4th District proudly displays a Confederate flag on his desk and rural folks in the Midwest will, on occasion, display the Confederate battle flag on their trucks or on their clothing, buying into the lost cause mythology in a way that they didn’t as recently as twenty-five years ago.