Sara Egge on Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno’s *Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest*

In the first chapter of Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest, Britt Halvorson and Joshua Reno make clear that their main goal is to explore the “cultural work of place-making,” not the specific people and places of the Midwest.[1] They argue that studying the ways people imagine the Midwest as “heartland” is more vital than delineating the region’s actual borders, especially when attempts to identify those borders have produced conflict, not agreement. Halvorson and Reno assert that the Midwest as an “imagined national middle,” or a region rendered average, bland, plain, or homogenous, has served as a screen or standard from which people have made normative assertions about whiteness, pursuing national and global projects like nativism, imperialism, and white supremacy.[2] Part of their work is identifying how assumptions about virtue have created classes of “good” and “bad” whites, which allows “good” whites to distance themselves from the so-called “bad,” or less privileged whites. They claim that challenging assumptions about what racism is not only begins to address the difficult work of undoing white supremacy, but it also uncovers hidden narrative threads about pastoralism, insularity, virtue, and labor that hold together the tangled knot of supposed Midwestern ordinariness.

Halvorson and Reno trace how people have formed and continue to engage with many ideas about and meanings of white virtue in the Midwest. Global contexts, cultural processes, and national narratives have cast the Midwest as agrarian, provincial, and economically insular while also paradoxically considering it industrial, modern, and integrated into global markets at disparate times. The authors contend that the difficulty in reckoning with these contradictions is precisely what makes the region a useful screen to project the work of white supremacy. The agrarian myth informed an imagined Midwestern landscape, one with laser-straight rows bursting with corn, wheat, and other crops, that appeared in twentieth-century films, news, literature, and art and that fostered the pastoral heartland ideal. These themes, which the authors locate in various eras in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, amplify national and global assertions that white settlers deserved to colonize the region and own property there. But, as Halvorson and Reno note, this cultural imagery offers only a narrow view of the Midwest, one that erases the tremendous diversity of its people and places.

Not only does white virtue hinge on expressions of the pastoral heartland but also it builds out of assumptions of Midwestern insularity. Claims of insularity make separations between peoples seem natural, and their frequency over time is no accident. Maintaining white supremacy requires imagined insularity in multicultural settler societies. The aesthetics of this inwardness, Halvorson and Reno argue, allowed poets like Robert Bly the privilege of a white-coded gaze from a timeless and eternal Midwest, both nowhere and everywhere. Nationalist projects of white supremacy linked insularity and whiteness together, as did the 1920s anti-Semitic writings of Henry Ford, who labeled Jews and immigrants as insular and unwilling to adopt “American values,” which echoed Nazi literature produced in Germany at roughly the same time. In this case, white supremacy was a transnational enterprise, with the Midwest as imagined insular heartland, one at risk by an insular foreign menace and therefore most worthy of protection.

Another way that the region elicits whiteness is through film and literature that situates outsider threats against a bucolic Midwestern landscape. Halvorson and Reno see some figures, like Dorothy Gale from the Wizard of Oz and Clark Kent/Kal El/Superman, as intimate others, Midwestern young people lost to outside forces, either temporarily or permanently. The authors, along with co-author Jada Basdeo, connect these characters with other lost children found in horror films like Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street. Those children who lose their white virtue become outsiders in their Midwestern communities while those who choose to “come home” can regain it. The Midwest-as-home trope connects intimacy with an imagined heartland, but that intimacy also contains contradictions. For example, the same setting of idyllic and homogenous Midwestern fields and small towns provide hope and forgiveness in Field of Dreams, on the one hand, and terror and violence in Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, on the other hand.

Cultural processes that ascribed whiteness to the Midwest shaped media depictions of the people and politics of the region, especially around the 2016 election. Halvorson and Reno, with co-author Lena Hanschka, explore this discourse by drawing on over one hundred national news articles published between 2010 and 2019. The authors argue that articles featuring white, male farmers producing in a rural heartland retrenched the virtuous white character built out of historical processes of imperialism, nativism, and nationalism. Media sources also relied on cultural narratives of white, working-class industrial laborers whose masculinity, dignity, and self-reliance encouraged economic restraint. Racialized as white, these values obscured the tremendous racial diversity of Midwestern laborers and framed racist claims that workers of color gained work unfairly, labored inefficiently, and spent frivolously. Simultaneously, articles about deindustrialization most often portrayed suffering white laborers, offering a one-dimensional depiction that concealed the structural and racial inequality of deindustrializing Midwestern communities.

Disentangling the knot of Midwestern ordinariness undermines assumptions that the region corresponds to natural political, economic, or geographical boundaries. Halvorson and Reno contend that white supremacy distorts categories of space and time, allowing privileged positions to ignore questions of white power. If the Midwest is a screen for projecting white supremacy, then all studies of the region must take questions about race, nation, and empire seriously to better understand how “power manifests in place, especially who has the power to recognize what is ‘really’ happening.”[3] For Halvorson and Reno, focusing on racial capitalism and uncovering the multiethnic communities in places like Detroit, central Indiana, and Minnesota that sustained the industrial Midwest offer important scholarly examples of how to pull apart the threads of white supremacy.

Halvorson and Reno build on the work of scholars like Kristen Hoganson to deconstruct assumptions about the Midwest.[4] Their comprehensive framework of insularity, intimacy, and white virtue serves as an important analytical tool, one scholars of the region ought to take seriously. In fact, historical scholarship about the region’s racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and class diversity has flourished, and uncovering histories of marginalized peoples erased from previous narratives is already a priority embraced by many in the field.[5] Adding these sources confirms Halvorson and Reno’s contention that ignorance fuels white supremacy and provides evidence of studies already disentangling the knots of racism, white virtue, and regional insularity. As the histories of underrepresented peoples continue to emerge, scholars should extend the work of Halvorson and Reno to trace the ways that notions, structures, and experiences of race, nativism, and empire changed over time. While the authors offer compelling examples, a chronological take offers scholars the contextual precision required to disentangle white supremacy. Finally, questions linger about exactly those people who imagined the Midwest as a white, ordinary, and plain heartland and why they did so when they did. To what extent did Midwesterners themselves engage these positions and to what extent did non-Midwesterners foster these white supremacist projections? How did issues like the historical context, intended audience, and creative purpose shape how individuals or groups of people—painters, filmmakers, or national news reporters, for example—portrayed the Midwest? How have interpretations of these depictions changed over time? Constructions of race, empire, and nation were complex, constituted and reconstituted in dizzying and sometimes unexpected ways, and Halvorson and Reno offer a ready blueprint for further analysis.

[1] Britt Halvorson and Joshua Reno, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 11.

[2] Halvorson and Reno, Imagining the Heartland, 2.

[3] Halvorson and Reno, Imagining the Heartland, 154.

[4] Kristin L. Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History (New York: Penguin Press, 2019).

[5] See, for only a few of the many examples, Megan Birk, The Fundamental Institution: Poverty, Social Welfare, and Agriculture in American Poor Farms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022); Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (New York: The New Press, 2017); Anna-Lisa Cox, The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers & the Struggle for Equality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018); Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ashley Howard, “Then the Burnings Began: Omaha’s Urban Revolts and the Meaning of Political Violence,” Nebraska History 98, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 82-97; Brent M. S. Campney, Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).