Land of Progress: On Jon K. Lauck’s “The Good Country”
Jon K. Lauck | The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900 | University of Oklahoma Press | 2022 | 366 Pages
Where is the Midwest? How do we define its boundaries? Does it include Iowa? Yes. Nebraska? Maybe. The Dakotas? Absolutely not. Missouri? Trickier. But while the where is an open question, the answer to what the Midwest is seems pretty settled: it’s a place of stultifying conformity, hokey and hypocritical religiosity, and manners passed through gritted teeth.
Anyone who has been here however knows that is a sweeping stereotype; after all, a region that contains both Cairo and Detroit, Omaha and Cleveland, can’t be painted with a few broad strokes. In The Good Country: A History of the Midwest 1800-1900, Jon Lauck takes that pushback even further, showing that the Midwest is in fact the birthplace of reform, of a new democratic American culture, and of true progressivism. In doing so, he attempts to redefine what the Midwest is, which could help us reimagine where it is, precisely.
Lauck is a leading historian of the Midwest, and teaches history and political science at the University of South Dakota (he might disagree with my excommunication of the Dakotas). While the book is not purely academic, it is dense with footnotes and voluminous examples of each point in his arguments.
This is not a pop history book either, framing the world through the lives of a few plucky characters. While it is filled with people, its arguments are marshaled through the minutes of town council meetings, university records, and archival newspaper editorials. The author’s reliance on hard facts doesn’t mean the book is written at a remove and without a point of view. Lauck has an agenda: to change the accepted history of the Midwest.
As Lauck tells it, the dominant school of academic and cultural thought is “grounded in attacking the supposed sins and villainies of the Midwest west,” a school that still persists. He places this in the larger context of American history, which is “too one-sided, too critical, and too focused on American faults and not sufficiently attentive to what would have been considered great achievements in their proper historical setting.”
What Lauck is trying to do, it seems, is revise a needed correction to the sunny and bright school of Midwest virtue. Lauck isn’t saying that everything was good back then, or making a “this was the Real America” claim, substituting an imaginary past for a political agenda. He is trying to show that the Midwest was, for all its flaws, a place where the idea of true democracy began to flourish. Indeed, he concludes, “the American Midwest was the most democratic place in the world as it took shape in the 19th century.”
The story starts by defining the Midwest by what it was not: the East and the South (both are states of mind as much as compass points). This was literally the case. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 carved out the Northwest Territory, then the far-flung frontiers of the new country. New for settlers, it had been colonized by Spanish, English, and French, and of course not new soil for its native peoples). However, it was a new ground for the American idea.
For decades, the colonies and then the original 13 states had been divided, creating their own cultures and their own ideas of what America should be. The East was hierarchical, titled, still essentially English and snobby. The South was much worse, a slaving empire where feudal lords ruled over all. The Midwest refused to be either.
This is where the argument really gets interesting. In defining itself against those two, especially as successive waves of migrants took the land as their own. The Ordinance was anti-slavery, and each state outlawed the practice. As Lauck points out, each state also argued fiercely about whether to free slaves that were in the states, remnants mostly of French rule—and this usually happened. There were also deep arguments about the rights of fugitive slaves and free Blacks in terms of suffrage, housing rights, jury rights, and more. And while the states usually came down on the wrong side of things, Lauck argues the votes were always contentious and very close.
Does that count for anything? After all, what good does it do to the disenfranchised to brag about how close they came to having rights? But the closeness of that debate, as Lauck presents it, was at least much more so than was happening in the settled and sclerotic portions of the country. As he points out, the free Black population in Ohio grew from 337 in 1800 to 36,000 in 1860, from both escaped slaves and from other non-slave states. Ohio, and the whole of the Northwest Territory was for free Blacks what it was for others: a land of a new type of freedom.
With respect to Native American displacement, the rights of Black people, and of women, it’s clear that Lauck wants the record straightened. He argues that debate about their political sovereignty was the flint to the spark of actual democracy. That it was in these debates that abolitionism bloomed. That the space accorded competing ideas (not a stereotypical Midwest virtue) culminated in the anti-slavery Republicans, real Lincolnism (and Lincoln himself, of course) and armies of boys who hated the slaver South.
To readers used to more modern history, it is easy to roll our eyes. The North was just as racist as the South, just with different laws. The soldiers didn’t care about freeing slaves. But that’s not entirely true. There was an abolitionist fire, and Lauck places its real blooming in the Midwest. People loathed slavery, and not just because it hurt the factory system of the Northeast. People felt that Southern backwardness was a plague on the country—he produces hundreds of letters, articles, speeches, and primary sources to back this up.
Lauck demonstrates how the democratic spirit flourished in the Midwest. Women’s civic groups exploded, newspapers cropped up across the region, and universities grew out of land grants. While these could seem like isolated incidents to the modern reader, Lauck paints a broader picture of more direct actions. There is a refreshing bit of space given to the stirring collective acts of Grangers against the moneyed interest of the railroads, for instance. Lauck shows the uprising of union labor against the monied East as a positive development, which it was. However, the rise of labor power is complicated by the fact that it also led to a backlash against Irish and German immigrants, forming a deeply segregated movement.
One can argue that Lauck focuses too much on reclaiming Midwestern virtue and assumes that his readers are deeply familiar with its vices: the sins of racism, misogyny, extermination and extirpation, and all the ills of a region where going along to get along was considered the mark of good character. This could be valid criticism. But it is also the point of the book—to be a corrective, or at least an addition, to the critiques. And in that it succeeds.
One of the most moving areas of the book is Lauck’s discussion of the rise of regionalism. He argues that Eastern poets and novelists spent “too much time focusing on the elites,” and here in the Midwest writers created more democratic stories—folkier, sometimes mawkish, sometimes silly, but with ramshackle grace. Regionalism was in a way realism, a path to seeing things how they were, for good and ill, and that led to reform. Lauck cheekily calls it an “Age of Mild Reform,” but of reform nonetheless.
So if there is regionalism, is there a region? Where, in fact, is the Midwest? If you read between the lines, or perhaps read too much into it, it could seem like the Midwest is defined by this spirit of real democracy, of debate, of faltering and imperfect steps toward freedom, of Progressivism. The heroes of this book are men like Progressive politician John Altgeld, who stood up to business and stood for the rights of workers. Other giants include the reformer Ignatious Donnelly and Fightin’ Bob LaFollette, the ferociously progressive governor of Wisconsin. Lauck also includes activists like Jane Addams, who forced a reckoning with the poverty wrought by Chicago’s unfettered capitalism.
It’s somewhat unproductive to define the Midwest by the boundaries of its states. Those boundaries imply uniformity but obscure vast differences. Illinois, after all, nearly remained a slave state at its founding. Its strange, swampy southern region was powerful then and nearly carried the vote to allow slavery. That area still remains spiritually in the South. And Indiana was anti-Black from birth, the largest Klan state in the 20th century, and deeply red now. Should the borders of this hopeful, democratic Midwest exclude Indiana? Iowa is barely different. Even Wisconsin has become the battleground to erase the Wisconsin Idea: that you are more than a worker for some distant rich person. Wisconsin used to be the heart of radicalism. Maybe we need to stop defining the Midwest by mere geography.
If there is a Midwest, though Lauck doesn’t quite argue this, it is in the spirit of trying to reach the American ideal. People in Wisconsin are fighting for it. Michigan is fighting for it. Reforms on the ground fight against corporate interests and distant big city mayors. Maybe the true Midwest can’t be categorized by lines on a map. Maybe it’s the idea that we aren’t actually bound by other people’s ideas of who we should be.
Hokey? Sure. But one thing we Midwesterns aren’t afraid of is being hokey. And anyway, that’s an idea worth fighting for.