Behind the Midwestern Curtain

When Frederick Douglass’s tour of abolitionist preachings brought him to Indiana, he was pulled offstage by a mob of white vigilantes and nearly murdered in public. The experience proved to be transformational for him. After this episode in 1843, he ultimately broke with the pacificist approach championed by William Lloyd Garrison. Douglass’s new path set a political course to emancipation. He mobilized Black soldiers to fight for the Union, lobbied for the Thirteenth Amendment, and later served as U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia during Reconstruction (Blight 2018:133–34).

Teaching about the U.S. Constitution with historical context like this may soon be illegal across the Midwest. More than 70 bills targeting “Critical Race Theory” have flooded midwestern state legislatures over the last year, more than any region outside of the south (UCLA 2023). ¹ Indiana Senate Bill 167 (2022), which sought to censor discussion of so-called divisive concepts, was emblematic of the trend. The state senator who introduced SB 167, Scott Baldwin, represents a district that lies geographically adjacent to the town of Pendleton. That is where proslavery Hoosiers almost prematurely ended Frederick Douglass’s life on September 16, 1843. Anti-CRT bills would suppress this history of violence in favor of presenting the United States as a conflict-free, race-neutral society.

Britt Halvorson and Joshua Reno’s Imagining The Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest was written before the current moral panic over schools. The book’s framework, however, explains how SB 167, and other bills like it, deploy covertly racialized but seemingly neutral policy tools. Jim Crow literacy tests once whitened the electorate through administrative obstacles before any voting took place (pp. 54–55). During urban renewal, midwestern cities raised highways over demolished Black neighborhoods like Black Bottom in Detroit (Sugrue 2005:47–48; Digital Scholarship Lab 2023). Both literacy tests and urban renewal constructed an unmarked white body politic through displacement. Anti-CRT laws work in the same way. Prohibiting a meaningful discussion about white supremacy creates an official standard of who is valued above others.

America’s Placeless Middle

The Midwest has a reputation for epitomizing the ordinary. But it is only through a project of erasure, according to Halvorson and Reno (along with chapter coauthors Jada Basdeo and Lena Hanschka), that the Midwest could then be portrayed as a blank canvas (p. 92). Whiteness then “hides in plain sight” by shaping a commonsense notion of who belongs and who is coded as different (p. 5). The book likens this representational process to theater. The best way to understand the role of the Midwest in American culture, the authors argue, is how the region operates as a screen or stage where meaning is conveyed and popularized (pp. 4, 92, 116). “I’ve gone to look for America” are the Simon and Garfunkel folk lyrics about hitchhiking through the region.

Middle America’s purported lack of distinction is why journalists flew in from the coasts for decades to cover the Iowa Caucus. Long the first stop on the presidential nominating contest, with so few delegates to win—no more than 1 percent for either party (FHQ 2023)—the real stakes have always been symbolic. National media coverage infused the caucus with a special moral weight by communing with down-to-earth voters in local diners and state fairs. Candidates who won Iowa could boast they had earned the political equivalent of Middle America’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Imagining the Heartland suggests that what the public has in mind is this notion of the Midwest as interchangeably “placeless.” Only then could the region stand in for the country as a whole.

Across five chapters, the authors work to deconstruct cultural representations of the Midwest. Chapter Two focuses on the role of twentieth-century art movements in fostering an association with pastoral symbolism. Chapter Three links the feeling of insularity, a dominant regional theme in poetry and fiction, to whiteness and white supremacy. Chapter Four examines the many cultural anxieties of settler colonialism that reappear in comics and film, from Superman to Freddy Krueger. Chapter Five analyzes contemporary discourse about the region in media outlets from across the political spectrum. Following each chapter is a brief anecdote recounted by Halvorson and Reno from own lives as white Midwesterners. By making their own positionality explicit, they aim to conspicuously mark cultural representations that are subtly or implicitly coded as white. Imagining the Heartland scrutinizes the region, then, not as a natural geographic formation, but rather as a myth that projects ideas of whiteness, nationalism, and Americanness.

The book’s central thesis is that what makes the region ideologically useful is how it grounds an emotional center for the country’s self-understanding of whiteness. Narratives about the region conjure up visions of endless farmland, quaint towns, and plain-speaking inhabitants. By this standard, Pendleton, Indiana, an overwhelmingly white town mentioned earlier for its role in Frederick Douglass’s biography, is quintessentially midwestern. A town like Pendleton “could be any place in the Midwest” ready for Hollywood scene-making (p. 104). Thirty minutes southwest by car is Indianapolis, a multi-racial, multi-faith metro area represented in the U.S. House by André Carson. He is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and one of the few Muslims serving in the 118th Congress. ²

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All three currently serving Muslim members of Congress hail from the Midwest.

Yet, through the warping of cultural logic, Indianapolis gets coded as “urban,” not midwestern. It is not placeless. It is different.

Behind the Pastoral Curtain

Many actually existing Midwesterners are thus drawn outside of regional iconography. Cultural erasures displace Chicago’s Black community, Somalian neighborhoods in the Twin Cities, and the Arab American diaspora around Dearborn, among others (pp. 11, 100–101). The book’s analysis of the American Film Institute (AFI) database, for instance, finds that 97 percent of films about the Midwest are catalogued under the topic of “Heartland” (p. 93). But does the AFI category reflect the true complexity of rural life? Hardly. Very few films cover the rural experiences of those coded by Hollywood as nonwhite: Indigenous peoples like the Menominee, Hmong farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota, or immigrants from Mexico and Central America who power the region’s dairy, meatpacking, and corn-fed agrarian economy. Why so much erasure?

Imagining the Heartland looks behind the curtain of the Heartland’s pastoral ideal to answer this central question. The Wizard of Oz invested great moral weight into agrarian symbolism with the adage, “there’s no place like home,” first as a book, then musical and silent film before the 1939 classic movie starring Judy Garland. So, too, did the artistic movement of Regionalist painters during the 1930s, for example, with the austere faces of Grant Wood’s American Gothic and the pristine farmscapes of Thomas Hart Benton (p. 42). Iconic midwestern imaginaries like these were produced by a double reaction against, on the one hand, rapid industrialization and, on the other, the imperial pull of the East over everything from capital flows to modern art.

If you find yourself at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, make sure to visit the Paul Bunyan Room in the Memorial Union building. The book does not mention this example of “proletarian Regionalism,” specifically, but the room fits with Chapter Two’s discussion of Wood and Benton. Beginning in 1933, James Watrous painted a sprawling 40-piece set of murals that recount the folk tale of Paul Bunyan and his great Blue Ox (Union Story 2023). The visual narrative is a parable for the vigor of the newly organized working class, while the murals convey the Popular Front’s political aesthetics through the medium of large-scale public works (Denning 1997:133). The room itself is a monument to the New Deal era that expanded the university and, with it, the role of technocratic expertise in building social democracy in Wisconsin and nationally.

Halvorson and Reno’s framework suggests that laborism is not the full extent of the cultural work being done by artists like Watrous and other Regionalist painters. There is yet more ideology “hiding in plain sight,” as the authors frequently note. Heroic depictions of the New Deal’s central subject, those burly white male workers who adorn the Paul Bunyan Room, also reinforce white supremacy by equating productive labor with whiteness and citizenship (p. 51). The most exclusionary variant of this brew can be seen in the surprising third-place finish that Wisconsin voters gave to George Wallace, the Alabama segregationist, during the 1968 Democratic presidential primary, when the New Deal coalition was unraveling. The association of whiteness with productive labor, of course, had been layered with cultural meaning further back than the twentieth century.

To deconstruct the midwest pastoral, the authors reach back to the history of settler colonialism. Whiteness was legally conjoined with property ownership over Native lands by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a process of dispossession that was cemented by the Dawes Act (1887) and Curtis Act (1898). Protests over pipeline megaprojects at the Standing Rock reservation in 2016 dramatize how the past is not even past, to paraphrase William Faulkner. Land dispossession is ongoing. Even today, Lockean virtues of racialized productive labor are mass marketed by the images on milk cartons. Smiling faces of white farmers standing in green pastures and embracing their children harken to both past and future claims over the land. Imagining the Heartland puts it this way: “stories about who owns what are simultaneously about who should” (p. 50).

Reacting White Virtue

What sparked this book’s genesis was the Midwest’s pivotal role in the 2016 presidential election. Candidate Donald Trump deftly mobilized the image of the “hardscrabble farmer” and the “down-on-his luck” blue-collar factory worker to narrowly win the electoral votes of Wisconsin and Michigan, and, decisively, the once-battleground states of Ohio, Iowa, and Missouri. These figures invoked by Trump, however, were pale simulacra of the old farmer-labor alliances that had dominated the region throughout the twentieth century. Per the authors, the long-suffering regional icons that Trump conjured up reflect a kind of “mono-cropped” image of insularity that stands in for white virtue and white supremacy (pp. 21–22). “White supremacy gets reinforced,” they argue, “through prevalent images of dignified, property-bearing individuals that seem on the surface to not have anything to do with race” (p. 51). Imagining the Heartland offers valuable insight about the cultural place of the Midwest in racially coded narratives of national identity.

To make this point empirically, Chapter Five analyzes news articles from major national and international media outlets like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and Al Jazeera. The period examined, from 2010 to 2019, covers the reactionary crest from the Tea Party to Trump. Time and again, the authors uncover nostalgic storylines of whiteness, labor, and virtue. Media narratives about “working people” were thinly veiled allusions to whiteness. Sometimes they were not veiled at all (p. 134). Flagship regional newspapers like The Des Moines Register, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, or the Cleveland Plain Dealer are not included in the data set (p. 118). It is not exactly clear why. My best guess is that the chapter’s research design on media discourse approximates the book’s theatrical paradigm of an external audience (of outside reporters) looking at its (midwestern) stage. But if the authors seek to unearth the region’s hidden script, lack of attention to the self-image cultivated by local papers seems like a missed opportunity. Nobody moralizes like a hometown paper.

All political currents across the spectrum in the United States engage with whiteness in some way, Trumpism included. But do they all have the same relationship to white supremacy? Research by the political scientists Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins (2016) demonstrates how the two major political parties are in fact asymmetrical in many respects. Democrats are a coalition of various policy-demanding social groups, such as environmentalists, feminist organizations, LGBTQ+ groups, labor unions, and Latino and Black civil rights organizations. By contrast, Republicans are an ideological coalition of small government advocates, cultural traditionalists, and nationalists. Halvorson and Reno’s thesis has a great deal to say about how the Republican party’s pillar of “nationalism” mobilizes whiteness in ways both explicit and implicit. Without any clear theory of political conservatism, however, Imagining the Heartland often struggles to connect how Trump mobilized whiteness, as a structuring idea, through nostalgia, an affective medium.

Theorizing a common pattern of reactionary vision would help tie together many disparate threads across this book. Corey Robin (2011) argues the hallmark of modern conservatism is how elites tap into popular reaction against horizons of liberation, wherever they emerge. Faced with challenges from below, ideological entrepreneurs rejuvenate ailing hierarchies for a new age. Imagining the Heartland’s study of whiteness also touches on these other social hierarchies periodically in recomposition: Henry Ford’s antisemitism, the anti-feminist poetry of Robert Bly, Ronald Reagan’s renewal of nationalist rhetoric in the 1980s, and colonial anxieties over generational succession (what the authors call the “intimate other”) in horror franchises like Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street. Clearly, the Midwest has stood at the vanguard of cultural and political reaction at several historical conjunctures raised in this book. That is true when it comes to the construction of racial difference, but also for other struggles over social reproduction, from gender and sexuality to settler colonialism.

Engaging with a political theory of conservatism would help to explain why, as we see with the anti-CRT moral panic, the region has now reemerged as a fulcrum of cultural and political reaction. And it is not just the American Midwest. Comparable rust belts in Italy, France, and the United Kingdom have also become vanguards of the global far right. This reactionary wave lies at the very center of democratic backsliding at home and abroad (Lieberman et al. 2019:472–73).

Midwestern Imaginaries

Another aspect in the book is also left unresolved. What is the relative importance of cultural artifacts in staging (as the authors put it) midwestern racial imaginaries? Are reruns of Superman, with its pastoral Kansas backstory, primarily responsible for reproducing the association of the Midwest with whiteness? Or does it have more to do with how ideology emerges from living with inequality, for example, from the everyday structures of racial segregation that plague midwestern metros? The book only briefly mentions redlining as part of the contradictions of the Long New Deal (p. 133).

The midwestern experience of race-making is shaped by decades of suburban growth that cemented around industrial cities before the 1968 Fair Housing Act, compared with the post-civil rights era suburban boom in the South or West. Housing segregation is far more extreme here, even today (Acs et al. 2017:Figure 6). Black residents live with lower property values and all the social dangers associated with the unequal provision of public goods (Trounstine 2018). Racialized geographies persist because they are continuously reproduced, not only by the link of whiteness to exurban sprawl, but also by contemporary policy choices. The spectacle of public suffering inflicted on Flint, Michigan, a majority-Black city, during its governance by state officials under emergency manager laws (2011 to 2015) has arguably done more to generate racially exclusive visions of imagined community than all the coastal journalists “swimming in cultural narratives” examined in Chapter Five.

The study is also unclear how the Heartland idea of whiteness fits with other competing representational pillars of midwestern society. Political institutions, along with culture, require a hefty investment in symbolic representation (Pitkin 1967). What is the weight of pastoralism in molding regional identity relative to, say, political partisanship? The electorate’s two imagined party communities, after all, are also distinctive social identities (Mason 2018). Legislative gerrymandering since 2010 has supercharged the midwestern urban-rural divide.

And what of the high drama of football rivalries? Collegiate and professional sports foster regional coherence, too. Neighboring teams march against each other as if they were invading armies provisioned by fanatical publics in search of glory. Ohio State versus University of Michigan was the most viewed NCAA football game in 2022 (Bromberg 2022). A record audience of 17 million people watched the game played at Ohio Stadium, a literal arena, which fits quite nicely with Imagining the Heartland’s framework of theatrical staging.

It is no more intellectually rigorous, of course, to examine partisanship, sports, or another realm for cultural meaning in place of the cases already skillfully presented by Halvorson and Reno. My point is rather that situating whiteness alongside other sources of regional identity would give us a sense of where competing imaginaries come from, when they might interact, and if they find themselves in tension.