Middle West, The

Middle West, The. Among the great subnational regions of the United States, the Middle West is the vaguest in location and identity. Although some situate the area entirely west of the Mississippi River and others entirely to the east, consensus opinion places twelve states within the region: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Wisconsin. People in the plains sections of Colorado, Montana, Oklahoma, and Wyoming also have some attachment to the label.

The confusion over the “Middle West's” precise location has its roots in identity. Unlike many other places, the region lacks an obvious defining trait or moment. It was settled in distinct east‐west bands by peoples from the Northeast, the Mid‐Atlantic states, and the South; its agriculture is split among the corn, dairy, and wheat belts; and its economy features both large industrial cities and extensive farming lands. Physiographically, the region is more united. It is largely a subdued landscape of sedimentary rock, one that has been leveled further by relatively recent glaciation. Exceptions are found along the northern and southern fringes, where the ancient rocks and infertile soils of the Canadian Shield extend into parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and eroded hill lands characterize sections near the Ohio River and in southern Missouri. From a climatological perspective, the Middle West is a region of extremes. Precipitation becomes scarce and highly unreliable in the western borderlands and the growing season north of Milwaukee and Detroit is too short for corn.

When Euro‐Americans first moved into the Ohio country shortly after the Revolutionary War, eastern politicians feared anarchy and secession. They therefore enacted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which provided for public education, orderly government, and free labor. These regulations applied only temporarily, but residents later came to see them as defining elements. Capitalism was the real glue that unified the emerging region, however, especially after the Erie Canal linked the Midwest to eastern markets in 1825. With an abundance of good soil, coal, iron ore, lumber, and other resources at hand, a business mentality came to dominate the culture. Investors financed factories and railroads, and a pervading sense of material progress rapidly overcame local and ethnic idiosyncrasies. By the 1850s, Cincinnati and St. Louis were major import‐export cities on the Mississippi River system, Chicago was becoming a focus for regional railroads, and middle westerners saw themselves as fulfilling the promise of America.

Capitalist enthusiasm gripped farmers and urban speculators alike, and opinions varied only over the degree to which such progress should be regulated. Democrats favored minimal regulation, whereas Whigs thought bank credit and government aid essential to the development process. This latter view characterized Abraham Lincoln's new Republican party. Gaining tremendous stature during the Civil War, the Republican party emerged from the war dominant in the region. Both the place and the party stood for middle‐class, Protestant values and a hard‐working, moralistic bourgeois society. Roman Catholic immigrants and those from the rural South, premodern intrusions into the new capitalist world, were sometimes marginalized at first as lazy, unproductive folk.

Regional zeal for economic development continued unabated through the twentieth century. The urban face of the region was transformed in the first half of the century by millions of immigrants drawn to steel mills and automobile plants. But cultural losses accompanied the gains. As the scale of manufacturing increased, control passed from local entrepreneurs to outside investors. A few cities grew rapidly, but many smaller places stagnated or declined. With such change came nostalgia for the rural and small‐town life of the past, and through an outpouring of gauzy novels, songs, and movies such as State Fair (1945), the Middle West was at least partially reinvented as a pastoral Eden. This process was geographical as well as historical, as the core of the perceived region shifted toward the relatively rural plains states, while residents of Michigan and Ohio began to label themselves as easterners. Meanwhile, novelists such as Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis offered a more jaundiced view of life in the Middle West.

The Middle West at the end of the twentieth century remained an agricultural area without peer, a highly efficient producer of corn, soybeans, hogs, and cattle. Marginal lands on the northern and southern borders had given way to resorts and national forests. Although heavy manufacturing had declined, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis‐St. Paul, and Cleveland remained among the nation's top ten industrial centers. Chicago, with a metropolitan population of nearly eight million people, is by far the region's largest urban place.
See also Automotive Industry; Democratic Party; Factory System; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Industrialization; Lumbering; Mining; Protestantism; Regionalism; Whig Party.

Bibliography

John Mack Faragher , Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie, 1986.
James H. Madison, ed., Heartland: Comparative Histories of the Midwestern States, 1988.
James R. Shortridge , The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture, 1989.
Andrew R.L. Cayton and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Midwest and the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region, 1990.
William Cronon , Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, 1991.
John C. Hudson , Making the Corn Belt: A Geographical History of Middle‐Western Agriculture, 1994.

James R. Shortridge