So the Midwest is flyover country, is it? Don’t tell Jon Lauck that.
His book, “The Good Country,” helps set the Midwestern record straight. Lauck, who edits the Middle West Review and teaches history and political science at the University of South Dakota, wants to remind people that the American Midwest was not only the biggest region of the country in the 19th century but had the most bustling towns and most of the manufacturing and farming business.
The Midwest, by Lauck’s account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the 1800s. The region developed a rich civic culture that prized education, literature, libraries, and the arts; developed a stable social order grounded in Victorian norms, republican virtue, and Christian teachings; and generally put democratic ideals into practice to a greater extent than any nation to date, he said.
“In the 1920s or so, intellectuals in places like New York started to poke fun at the Midwest and it became a common thing for people to do,” said Lauck, who recently gave a presentation on “The Good Country” at the Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield.
Lincoln, of course, figures mightily in the case for the Midwest in Lauck’s book. The outbreak of the Civil War and the fight against the slaveholding South only deepened the Midwest’s dedication to advancing a democratic culture and solidified its regional identity, he said.
The “good country” was, of course, not the “perfect country,” said Lauck, admitting the region has had its own share of racial problems but added there’s been a steady march toward racial progress in the region.
“We need to exert our presence in the nation more than we do. We need our leaders and universities to be part of a national conversation. Sometimes we’re just too reticent,” he said. Lauck lamented that once proud newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, once major forces in the Midwest, don’t have the presence they used to due to cutbacks in the newspaper industry. “We need to reverse that and give our region a voice,” he said.
