Review by New York Times Review
AS A MIDWESTERNER, I've always been baffled by the term "heartland." Other parts of the country are not similarly personified - though it's tempting to extend the analogy. (Is New York the brain? Las Vegas the groin?) Midwesterners, of course, never use the term. It is kept alive by people outside the region - op-ed writers, presidential candidates, whoever's responsible for titling academic conference panels - all of whom persist in the strange belief that maps can be reduced to metaphor; that the geographic interior of the country can be read, symbolically, as a place where the center still holds. "The heartland myth insists that there is a stone-solid core at the center of the nation," writes Kristin L. Hoganson in her new book, "The Heartland: An American History." "Local, insulated, exceptional, isolationist and provincial; the America of America First, the home of homeland security, the defining essence of the center of the land." Hoganson, a history professor who spent most of her life on the East Coast, studying at Yale and teaching at Harvard, bought into this narrative until 1999, when she took a position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While Champaign is the kind of Corn Belt town that is often upheld as prototypically Middle America - predominantly white, Christian and Republican - Hoganson discovered it was far from a backwater: Her neighbors bought imported goods at the same big box stores that dotted the rest of the country; they ate produce from Mexico and Chile and kept in touch with family members who had migrated to coastal cities. These observations don't seem to warrant the status of revelation, but Hoganson was thinking as a historian. Since the end of the Cold War, history had focused on how place is shaped by global relations; this trend, she realized, had left the Midwest behind. In an era of globalization, it was regarded as the last truly local place. The dissonance between the mythical heartland and contemporary reality inspired Hoganson to embark on a historical quest to discover the truth: "What is the nation at heart, when we unbind it from myth?" she asks. Using her new home as a lens, she dug through local histories of Champaign County to probe the region's supposedly isolationist roots. Her book begins with the first European settlers to the region, who invented the idea of "the local" to distinguish themselves from the Kickapoo people, whose nomadism they regarded as vagrancy. Pioneers frequently invoked their own property holdings to rationalize their rights to the land, positioning Native American transience as justification for dispossession: The Kickapoo could not truly lay claim to the land because they had not put down roots. The irony, as Hoganson points out, is that the settlers themselves were equally mobile: They spent years on the road as soldiers, salesmen and missionaries. They traveled the country with exotic menageries and explored the circumference of Lake Superior on snowshoes. As the region developed, foreign relations were inscribed onto the habits of daily life. Far from an "insulated core," the Midwest - particularly during the period between the Civil War and World War I - was a place where borderlands converged, a region dependent upon the flow of cattle across the borders of Canada and Mexico and imported British hogs that had been crossbred with Chinese stock. From the beginning, these global relationships were not equitable. Midwestern farmers regarded Europeans and Canadians as worthy trade allies, but feared Mexicans and Native Americans as threats. They insisted on borders to protect themselves from outsiders but violated these demarcations when it served their interests. In several memorable passages, Hoganson uncovers dog-whistle racial politics in the pages of agricultural gazettes. Descriptions of the Berkshire pig, for example, known as the "black breed," drew heavily on phrenology textbooks. One of Hoganson's central points - an original contribution to the history of the region - is that Midwestern farmers were deeply entangled with British imperialism. Throughout the 19th century, Illinois farmers "piggybacked" on existing imperial infrastructure to boost their profits. They relied on railroads that were built with British capital and supplied provisions for British soldiers, capitalizing on imperial conflicts like the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion. IN THE END, Hoganson is not overturning the heartland myth to demonstrate that Midwesterners are cultivated citizens of the world, but rather to prove that they are, and always have been, "agents of empire." Her book follows in the footsteps of the historian William Appleman Williams, who made a similar case in the 1960s, and shares a bloodline with older cultural artifacts (Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street," Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown studies) that pulled up the skirts of smalltown America to prove it was not an innocent idyll, but a backwater of greed, consumerism and blinkered moralism. Although Hoganson's history does not proceed much beyond World War I, it seems in conversation with our contemporary moment (there are many sly allusions to building, or desiring, "walls"). One cannot help feeling, when reading it, that it is designed to implicate the region, historically, in the dirty work of globalization at a moment when many of its residents are conflicted about the costs and benefits of such arrangements. This argument becomes most explicit, and somewhat precarious, in the conclusion, when Hoganson insists that the heartland myth continues to shape political thought today. She expresses frustration that people persist in seeing the Midwest as a place of "fixity instead of flux, insularity instead of interdependence" and cautions against choosing the "pabulum of nostalgia" over the reality of global interconnectedness. But who in 2019 remains in denial? Surely not Midwesterners themselves - not the Gary, Ind., steelworker whose job was exported overseas, nor the Detroit family displaced from their neighborhood by multinational investors. Even the recent resurgence of isolationism and protectionism is more about fear of "flux" and global "interdependence" than a disavowal of these trends. Of course, contending with this fact would require an account of the more disruptive economic shifts that began in the 1970s. It would also have to include industrial, majority-nonwhite cities like Detroit, Flint and St. Louis that have experienced the brunt end of these trends. It would require, in other words, moving out of the mythical realm of the heartland and into the actual Midwest. It's unclear whether a national readership has any interest in this reality, or whether its constituents are content to beat straw men to death. The heartland myth is often portrayed as a nostalgic fantasy of the right, but it is equally sustained by a more liberal, urbane sector of the country that seems to derive an almost erotic pleasure in revisiting it, again and again, only to see it ritually falsified. Hoganson's purpose is to undermine the myth from within, and yet like all such revisions, even the most progressive and well-meaning, it leaves intact the most pernicious core of the fiction: that the Midwest is synonymous with small-town America, and that by peering into any one of these hamlets one can glimpse the soul of the nation. If the Midwest was once a place to indulge in fantasies of innocence and escapism, it is now regarded as the locus of our worst tendencies as a country, a dead zone to offshore national guilt. It is the place we turn to in our darkest hours, to discover what lies in our own hearts. Midwestern farmers were deeply entangled with British imperialism. MEGHAN O'GIEBLYN is the author of the essay collection "Interior States."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this sophisticated, complex work, history professor Hoganson (Consumers' Imperium) uses the history of Champaign County, Ill., to explore and question the American myth of its "heartland" as a safe, insulated, provincial place-"the quintessential home referenced by 'homeland security.'" The first chapter shows how white settlers in 1700s and 1800s emphasized local settlement to justify taking land from the mobile Kickapoo population of Central Illinois. Hoganson uses the raising of cattle and hogs in Champaign to trace shifting borders on the North American continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then she dismantles the myth of the isolationist heartland with an analysis of Champaign's involvement with organizations such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the International Institute of Agriculture. And she flips the "flyover country" cliché, looking at how Champaign citizens are connected to the rest of the world by telegraph wires, the weather, migratory birds, and military planes. The final chapter follows the Kickapoo people's experiences into the 20th century, demonstrating that, contrary to myth, nothing about the heartland's geography makes it a safe place. Deeply researched with a well-proven argument, Hoganson's book will attract many scholars as well as general readers who like innovative, challenging history. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A revelatory examination of America's "symbolic center in national mythologies."After teaching at Harvard and living in the Washington, D.C., area, among other stops, Hoganson (History/Univ. of Illinois; American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents, 2016, etc.) found herself unexpectedly transplanted to the Midwest. Instead of readily accepting stereotypes of the nation's so-called heartland, she began mining the roots of many of these preconceptions. The result is this brilliantly reasoned, meticulously researched book, which refreshingly pushes against stereotypes at every turn. The author demonstrates how the stereotypes and myths about the heartland eventually became conventional wisdom. For decades, any attentive Midwesterner has known that Illinois is not Iowa, is not Missouri, is not Indiana, etc. However, even Hoganson had not realized the gap between reality and the lumped-together reputation of many of these states. For this book, she first began digging into data close to her new home in Urbana-Champaign, where the University of Illinois is located, and then moved beyond to explore community and national elements. Hoganson looked at practices that many conventional scholars have missed: how the raising of cattle for beef led Midwestern farmers to interact with markets around the world, how the raising of hogs for pork led to many of the same results, how most Midwestern voters have never subscribed to isolationist politics, and how so-called flyover country turned out to be anything but boringly flat and technologically backward. Consistently, the author persuasively argues that the term "heartland" must be retired; the geographic center of the United States, she writes, is pulsing with global connections, innovations, varieties of human experiences, and ecological diversity. Hoganson closes by reiterating how "the heartland myth came to be so commensensical: its scaled-up localness is far easier to grasp than the vast complexity of the real world."With lively prose, Hoganson delivers an eye-opening, outside-the-box book that is mind-bending in all the right ways. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
