Spirit of the (Mid)West: On Jon C. Teaford's "Cities of the Heartland"
Jon C. Teaford | Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest | Indiana University Press | 1993 | 300 Pages
Does geography—or location—shape the character of cities? Frederick Turner thought so. In the late nineteenth century, Turner theorized that a metaphysical “Spirit of the West” endowed frontier communities with a distinctive strain of individualism. Mounting an assault on this claim some fifty years later, Daniel Aaron found instead a cooperative settlement in his Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1819–1838 (1942). This western metropolis displayed the same mutualism in the service of the market as did New York and Boston—it was not fundamentally different at all. Cincinnatians, argued Aaron, identified more with the likes of Alexander Hamilton than Daniel Boone. This thesis influenced Richard Wade’s The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities 1790-1830 (1959), written under the direction of Arthur Schlesinger at Harvard and perhaps the foundational text of modern urban history. Wade extended Aaron’s findings to Louisville and St. Louis, and overturned Turner’s thesis once and for all: it was the cities that spearheaded Anglo-American settlement and indigenous displacement, not farms. Thereafter, historians generally downplayed the influence of region on urban development. When late-twentieth-century observers did differentiate heartland cities from their coastal analogues, they emphasized the former’s “plainness” and “normality,”—their “Americanness.”
Half a century later, Jon C. Teaford’s Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (1994) brought region back into midwestern urban history. His “industrial Midwest”—comprising the cities of the Old Northwest—was not the archetype of “American urbanism” but rather “a legitimate subspecies of urban life.” The geography of Old Northwestern cities destined them for industrial prowess, wrote Teaford. Before becoming “fly-over country,” the Midwest was what we might call “steam-through country.” Networks first of river trade, and then those of the railroad and the semi-trailer cut across the region on their east-west passage. But hyperspecialization of the industrial Midwest’s river, mill, and lake towns that materialized around the nodes of such networks eventually succumbed to that which had enriched them in the first place. The Great Depression ravaged the consumer market that fueled Detroit’s growth, and its industrial tributaries (Dayton, Cleveland, Gary) never really recovered. Teaford also identified the influence of German immigrants on Old Northwestern cities as a marker of their uniqueness. The industrial Midwest came to be known for its socialist rabble-rousers, technocratic reformers, and classical music virtuosos by the early twentieth century. Such regional touchstones as the Haymarket Riots, the Plan of Chicago, Eliot Ness, and the Cleveland Orchestra: Teaford traced all of them back to successive waves of Einwanderung. Finally, Teaford updated Turner’s Spirit of the West for the 1990s as deindustrialization’s effects solidified and “brain drain” set in. He observed that Midwesterners have suffered from an inferiority complex towards the coasts for centuries, what Teaford called an “interior mentality.” “Out East” there was culture, “Out West” a plot of land, but nothing much ever seemed to happen in Ohio. It is not Teaford’s observation that Ohio is boring but rather that Midwesterners seem to have felt this way for centuries.
The most questionable claim of Cities of the Heartland is its assertion that the industrial Midwest is somehow constitutionally German. This frame directly conflicts with another of Teaford’s projects, which he carried out well: showing how ethnically diverse Cleveland, Gary, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee have always been. And where does this kind of reasoning place the plains states where Americans of German ancestry predominate, not to mention Pennsylvania and Western New York? Here the pitfalls of attributing a transcendental ethnic mythos to an anthropomorphized region (a practice more prevalent in Turner’s day than in Teaford’s) are on display.
Still, for anyone interested in a clearer distinction between various subregions of the Midwest, look no further than Cities of the Heartland. Teaford’s strength is to show how geography and region endowed cities from East Cleveland to East St. Louis with similar qualities. He brings region back into the frame without insisting that it is the only important variable in urban life. Readers of this publication and natives of the industrial Midwest who seek to better understand their place in national culture and history will find some answers here.
This review is part of our series on Midwest History, a collection of reviews on texts of historical significance in the region. Writers interested in contributing to this series are encouraged to contact its editor, Jacob Bruggeman.