Recognizing the Authentic, Documented Middle West

Abstract

Recognizing the Authentic, Documented Middle West Christopher Reed (bio) As an American historian, I view the Old West (and now the Middle West) as a place of diversity and contradictions, and as being a real place. In the historical mind, but perhaps more importantly, because of the documented record, the Old West/West/Middle West is as authentic as could be experienced, or even imagined. My personal recollection from the mid-twentieth century of the image of the Midwest is linked to an oft-told family story of how my mother's great grandmother "safely brought her little children across the mountains" into Ohio. This bit of oral history from the mid-nineteenth century, backed up by documentation in later years, depicted the Trail of Tears and left an imprint on my mind and in my imagination of the Middle West as a place of safety and security. The offshoot of this sojourner's trek as part of the displacement of the Cherokee nation eventually led to the enlistment of her offspring as combatants and participants in the liberation of an entire people by 1865. So, the Midwest carried a salutary image in my imagination despite its sometimes contradictory resistance to abolitionism counterbalanced by a willingness to embrace a civic nationalism to preserve the Union. This sentiment was embraced by many Whites despite their holding firmly to the notion of White supremacy as "White men fought a White man's war." Despite the current national rancor over censorship in all spheres of communication, the evolving world of academics allows for new interpretations to emerge as is exemplified in the foci of Imagining the Heartland on whiteness and imagination as negative influences. In this somewhat controversial piece, a coterie of writers has undertaken the task of exposing the supposed wholesomeness of the geographical Midwest as established in the popular imagination. Contributing to the latter [End Page 153] dimension, Hollywood with the Wizard of Oz, the media in its forms ranging from television to advertisements, politicians from Reagan to Trump, and leading literary publications have created an impression in the American mind of a nation with a pure regional environment that acts to both nurture and preserve whiteness. What our colleagues across disciplinary lines have advanced as a concept bears little resemblance to a provable theory. Rather than in the Midwest, White racism originated in the South as a justification for the subjugation and economic exploitation of African labor. Unfortunately, its pervasiveness is real and an integral part of the national fabric. Further, the element of racial purity had its roots in the earliest efforts at English settlement along the entirety of the North American coast. America was envisioned as a City upon a Hill, a new Jerusalem bestowed on God's favorites. This is the origin of some of the nation's most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness for it has led to a heritage for almost all non-Black groups, newly arrived or lengthily rooted, in which they locate cultural comfort. America's problem started with an aversion to anyone or any group unlucky enough to be considered an Other. So, it is not just the Midwest that has upheld some of the nation's most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness. From opposition to a recognition of the humanity of Indigenous people, it spread to "Outlandish Africans." For the latter group, it produced an indelible stain that persists even today (even with a near national aversion to use of the "N" word publicly). From the hostility in the Midwest directed against darker-complexioned (and other complexioned) peoples, whether Indigenous, Hispanic or Chinese, it seemed a likely extension of New England coastal aversion to Anabaptists, Catholics, Quakers, and Jews which was aggressively held by Englishmen. With the advent of the twentieth century, a partial acceptance of the Irish within the body of Whites led to their partial welcome by the Second World War. For historians, beginning with the decline in acceptance of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis that featured the admirable and highly successive efforts of hardy White settlers civilizing a demographically empty land to be designated the Middle West with their muscles, good...