Mainstreams and Tributaries: The Roles of Midwestern and Intellectual Histories

This is now the seventh time this conference has been held; my oldest child is also seven, so I have a few thoughts about what that age means for our common field of endeavor. For much of the past seven years we have mostly focused on physical growth, marveling at the sheer persistence in time of this new organism and enchanted when others get to know of its existence.

But at seven years, it becomes necessary to consider a few questions that go beyond “how big?” or “how tall?” We feel that some philosophizing might be in order, some rumination on purpose and direction: have we set things moving in the right direction? We also grow increasingly concerned with the way our child treats others, and with the way the child treats themself.

But perhaps most of all, we become concerned with relations of dominance and dependence, of leadership and loneliness, of attention and peripherality. Do others see the wonders that the parent sees, or is the child ignored and excluded? Does the child stand up for themself or imitate others? Are they outgoing or introspective? Who are their friends?

I am speaking as one of the editors of a book that I think can be seen as one of the markers of Midwestern history’s second stage of growth, a stage that is no longer predicated proving the validity of our existence, but that increasingly engages with questions of how we want to interact with other fields. In The Sower and the Seer, we made what we argued was a natural connection: the Midwest has contributed a great deal to the intellectual history of the United States, and the historical study of ideas in America is richer for being reminded of the work that still can be done by focusing on the region.

The other editors and I positioned our book as a rebuke to one of the longstanding stereotypes of Midwestern intellectual life—that it is mostly lived elsewhere, in the boulevards of big cosmopolitan cities. We protested against “the common assumption that the nation’s interior states are excellent seedbeds for the germination of native geniuses—from T. S. Eliot to Jonathan Franzen—but a wasteland for their further growth.” Instead, we argued that “The Midwest has been more than a springboard for the illustrious careers of future expatriates. It has been a hospitable environment for the cultivation of extraordinary communities of intellectuals, for the cross-pollination of a diversity of ideas, and for the harvesting of more than a century of substantial institutional growth.”

Now, if we had left off there, with that assertion of our merits, that demand for attention, I think The Sower and the Seer would have had the spirit of the first stage of Midwestern history’s growth. But here is where I think we tried to take a necessary second step. It is not enough just to declare that we are important, too: boosterism may have its place, but it is not a very mature form of historiography. The question is no longer whether there is a Midwestern history worthy of being told; the question is now, what does telling that history to others do for them? Who do we want to be to others and for others? Or, to put it somewhat more simply, if we have this story to tell, whom we are going to tell it to?

Here are the next few sentences from our introduction:

What is more, by attending to the intellectual bounty that remained at “home” in the region, we are better able to make visible and better able to recognize the significance of the multiple traditions and viewpoints that have staked their claim on the Midwest. The region only looks flat and monochromatic when we see it through the expatriate’s eyes. From within, the contest of shifting interpretations over the very nature of the Midwest and its history—to some a frontier, to others a colonized space, a breadbasket, a crossroads, a heartland—are readily apparent. The tensions between those interpretations—particularly as they are informed by questions of class, race, gender, indigeneity—are alive and evident in the pages of this collection.

The point we wanted to make by insisting that there is something to be gained by refusing the expatriate’s point of view was not that ex-Midwesterners have been unfair to the region, but that the specific nature of their unfairness—depicting the region as culturally homogeneous and spiritually monotonous—has tricked people both inside and outside the Midwest into thinking that Main Street is the only street in town, that if you want to find the variety or the diversity of the American experience, you’re better off looking elsewhere. It’s an idea of the Midwest as the product of a continual sorting process: oddballs and geniuses might be born there, racial or sexual minorities might pass through there, but the only people who stay there are the nation’s average people, its mainstream, its readers of Readers’ Digest and buyers of Folgers coffee.

This is a pernicious myth, one that can be, to some degree, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just yesterday, I read in my hometown newspaper that our high school basketball coach has taken a job with another school system. What was unusual about his departure was his candor about his reasons for leaving: along with professional consideration, he had been subjected to repeated harassment and abuse—much of it anonymous—from “fans” of the team who were unhappy that he was the coach. This wasn’t competitiveness talking—he has been, if anything, much more successful than any coach in a good long time. Instead, it was because of his religion: he is Muslim. While it may be a bit of a stretch to blame this particular situation on the myth of the monochrome Midwest—after all, prejudice exists everywhere—high school basketball in Indiana is thoroughly imbued with a deeply provincial worship of the small, all-white town that is the very essence of that myth of homogeneity. Try to imagine, for example, if Hoosiers had starred not Gene Hackman as the coach, but Sidney Poitier or James Earl Jones.

The trouble is, it is far too easy even for historians to fall back on that image of the homogeneous small town as our default, even when we know better. To be a bit self-critical, that myth may even be part of why some of us are drawn to study the Midwest and its history, in the same way that the soul of the Puritans anchors New Englanders, and plantations remain central images of Southern history. I think you can see the small town’s magnetic pull operating sporadically throughout The Sower and the Seer, deflecting our attention from the reality of a polyglot Midwestern “middle ground”—Richard White’s famous name for a situation in which no culture is fully strong enough to dominate and eliminate others—and pulling us back to the smoother channel of the monoglot mainstream.

To be quite frank, I’m not happy with the amount of diversity our book shows. For one thing, as you can see, the book’s editors are all white men, a starting point that, although not at all intentionally, likely sent an undesirable message to potential contributors. The book contains essays that are in conversation with Native American history, Jewish-American history and the history of racial formation, and African-American history, not to mention several that speak quite well to women’s history, but all three of those essays that are explicitly about race are by white men. (I am responsible for one of them.)

Why did this happen? Well, as anyone who has ever put together a conference or an edited collection or a job search can tell you, it is hard to recruit any person who hasn’t already seen how they fit into the space you are occupying. They either already think they belong in your space, or they find it hard to picture being there.

What does this mean? Well, I think it means that Midwestern history should neither wait for a more diverse set of scholars to come to it nor should it trust that recruitment will be a sustainably effective strategy for preventing a slide toward homogeneity. Instead, I think scholars who are passionate about Midwestern history—whatever their own background—need to engage more deeply with other historiographies—African-American history, Latinx history, the history of Asian-Americans, the history of U.S. imperialism and of immigration to the U.S., the histories of minority religions, LGBTQ history, Native American history—and follow those histories as they lead beyond our region’s nebulous (and much debated) borders.

Then, we need to think how we can bring our knowledge of the Midwest and share it with scholars in those fields, how we can help them see how a Midwestern angle might reveal a part of their project they hadn’t considered, how a connection to some facet of Midwestern culture opens up a new line of thought and insight. We are used to thinking—somewhat self-centeredly, I’d argue—of Midwestern history as a container for other histories, including all those that I mentioned just a moment ago. That makes it seem only natural that if, say, a scholar of African-American history is working on a project about Chicago or Minneapolis, they’ll think of it in the same terms many of us would—as a history of African Americans in the Midwest. But there is no reason why the inner and the outer should not be flipped. Perhaps it would make more sense to think of it on a very different canvas: as a history of the Midwest as just one point in the vast African diaspora. To initiate and hold up our end of a dialogue with that scholar, then, we ought to become more accustomed to thinking of Midwestern history not as a container, but—to mix my metaphors here—as a tributary, as a flow of knowledge that we can connect to other people and their work, demonstrating what Midwestern history can bring to them.

If we can do this tributary work well, it will become only too obvious to all kinds of scholars why they will belong as contributors to Midwestern history—they will be continuing the conversation that we started with them. And when that happens, we will know that Midwestern history has passed not only the first stage of its growth, but is well on its way far beyond even its second. Maturity means connection, not independence, and I look forward to an increasingly mature Midwestern history.