Agrarian Mythologies

Abstract

Agrarian Mythologies Debra Bricker Balken (bio) Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno tell us at the outset of Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the Midwest that the election of Donald Trump to the Oval Office in 2016, and the rise of his MAGA followers, spawned a long-standing interest to consolidate their research into the cultural tropes and aesthetic languages that grew from the Corn Belt since the Great Depression. Both anthropologists, this collaborative duo has lived in Michigan, an experience they present as bona fides, or personal reflections, alongside their fused scholarship. In these authors' hands, the Midwest is mined for its "seeming ordinariness," a narrative that they argue masks a deep-seated racism that can be read in representations that embody Whiteness, both through its histories, literary traditions, and visual arts, as well as more recently in mass media discourse. Certainly, the heartland has not always been viewed as a preserve of tolerance: that is, immune to racial and class prejudice despite its geographical isolation from the Northern colonies and slave-holding South. On the contrary, there has been ample study of its imagery to reinforce that artists and writers who spent time in the Midwest were attuned to the social fissures that stemmed from segregation and difference. However, Halvorson and Reno focus only on a small handful of Regionalist artists, novelists, and filmmakers, figures who were bent, they claim, on countering the progressive ethos that drove antithetical movements such as modernism which was a global direction. Already, Imagining the Heartland reveals its limitations and is on shaky ground. Foremost among the many conceptual flaws and contradictions that pervade this book, is the assumption that the Midwest has been fantasized primarily as a rural territory that depended upon "agrarian mythologies" to shape its accumulated depictions of flat, endless plains planted with either [End Page 105] wheat or corn all to vivify not only plentitude and bounty but the virtues of hard work, self-sufficiency, and middle-class conformity. This iconography of mundaneness, as they see it, extends to entrenched stereotypes of a god-fearing, white picket fence America whose populations are homogeneous rather than a racialized entity, its White folks idealized through painting and literature for their homespun values and Christian morality. Admittedly, this view of the Midwest as a pastoral oasis was a conceit employed by Thomas Hart Benton, an artist who hailed from Missouri and whose prominence and visibility was such that he appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1934. After briefly engaging abstract forms as a painter in New York, Benton reversed course and became an academic artist before he returned to Kansas City in the mid-1930s where his murals and canvases similarly utilized traditional, by then retro, tactics such as verisimilitude or realism to convey the heartland and its authenticities. The prominent undulating line and curvilinear forms that define his bodies and landscapes purposefully exaggerate the traits of his middle western subjects while distilling a patriotism aimed at undermining what Benton considered as the extravagant degeneracy of modern art wherein the expression of the artist's subjectivity was made a wellspring of originality and invention. To be sure, his new-found identity as an artistic patriarch on the Great Plains drew from latent declarations of antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny. However, not all the Regionalists succumbed to a stratagem of agrarian idealization braided with White nationalism. In fact, the story is not as one-sided, unequivocal, and seamless as Halvorson and Reno let on. Benton's overt goal may have been to destabilize the modernist expressions that still emanated from cities such as New York during the Depression, but a dip into the representations that issued from the studios of his Regionalist cohorts such as John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood—who were frequently constructed by critics as an aesthetic triad—reveal little unity outside of their revival of Renaissance-type painting techniques. While Wood yielded to the puritanism associated with small town Iowa farm life in paintings such as Stone City (1930), where nature is a benevolent, verdant, stabilizing force, the artist did not play into the same "agrarian mythologies" in American Gothic (1930), a painting that thrives on...