The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900
By Jon K. Lauck.
University of Oklahoma Press, 2022.
Paperback, 366 pages, $26.95.
Reviewed by Daniel J. Fischer.
Historians have a complicated job. Their ultimate aim should be to use the available sources to reveal what truly happened in the past, but their reading of the past is largely the product of their time and place. Furthermore, they know that what they say about the past will influence the future by shaping readers’ attitudes.
In The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900, the presence of these three considerations is particularly pronounced. The author, Jon K. Lauck, notes that he was born in South Dakota and is descended from generations of Midwesterners. Also on his mind is his setting in the early 2020s, a “period of decay – an era of callow tweets, sensationalism, celebrity worship, extreme loneliness, and mass and manufactured and purposeful distraction, all of which is unleashing rampant anxiety and depression and devouring our young.” His country is riven by conflict between “the square” who want to maintain an old way of life and “the hip” who want to overturn it, often abetted by historians who despise the past. One tactic of the hip is defacing the memory of Midwestern icons Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln. Further dividing the country is that throughout their history but especially in the last century Midwesterners have felt “disregarded and mocked by the coastal news industry and commentariat,” including authors Carl Van Doren and Philip Roth, playboy Hugh Hefner, and National Public Radio host Terry Gross. Lauck seeks to write “a more accurate history” of the Midwest not only as its own end but to address this troubled time.
Lauck succeeds at this balancing act. His setting shapes The Good Country without undermining it as sound history.
At a time when scholarly and public historians’ interpretations of the American past are relentlessly negative, Lauck counters that the nineteenth-century American Midwest was “the Good Country”—though not perfect. A place of cultural productivity, virtue, liberty, and widely available opportunities for education, political participation, and fruitful work, it was “the most advanced democratic society that the world had seen to date.” It failed by discriminating against women and African Americans and treating Indians as mere obstacles, but the extent of its sins was limited, and it purged many of them over time.
The book is thoroughly researched. Almost 40 percent of The Good Country is a citation and discussion of a staggering volume of sources, mostly the writing of other historians. One of the contributions of The Good Country is providing students of the nineteenth-century Midwest with a bibliography for a vast array of subjects.
Lauck makes his argument by examining the Midwest’s record in several categories. He assesses the nineteenth-century world to set the Midwest’s accomplishments in sharper relief. Japan, China, Brazil, Russia, Britain, and France were warped by instability, autocratic rulers, oppression of the lower classes, and narrow access to voting and land ownership. Eighty percent of China’s population was overtaxed, impoverished peasants. As late as the 1880s, barely a quarter of adult males could vote in England and Wales. By 1900, only 15 percent of Brazilians could read.
Even in the United States, the Midwest’s development stood out. It was less violent, more democratic, less dominated by the upper class, and better educated than the South. By 1870, the proportion of Midwestern children in school almost tripled the South’s. The South depended on slavery and tore apart the Union. Many Midwesterners resisted slavery and racial discrimination. Antislavery politicians won many elections, and some Midwesterners helped slaves to escape. Union victory in the Civil War depended on the Midwest. (One wonders if using the South as a foil for the rest of the country is an essential ingredient for less critical interpretations of American history.) The Midwest also outdid New England, though the distinction was less sharp. The Midwest was less socially and politically dominated by an elite and less influenced by slavery.
While the rest of the world lagged, Midwestern democracy flourished. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set the region’s trajectory by banning slavery, requiring that governments provide education, and establishing rights such as trial by jury and protection of property. In the Midwest, common people had almost as many privileges as the elite. With the exception of a short-lived restriction in Ohio, early state constitutions allowed universal white male suffrage. In the nineteenth century, a higher proportion of people could vote in the Midwest than in the rest of the nation, which often raised barriers such as taxpaying requirements. Common people often held office. More than anywhere else in the world, ability, not birth, was the key to entering one’s chosen career. The Midwest also led the nation in equality between the sexes. Midwestern colleges were by far the most likely to admit both men and women. The Midwest was home to hundreds of female physicians by the late nineteenth century, and it was where the first American women entered and graduated from law school.
Upholding Midwestern democracy were not only laws but also values and institutions. Midwesterners believed in Christianity, optimism, tolerance, local involvement, equality, and embracing hard work, including physical work, while avoiding luxury. They lived out their values by extensive reading, attending public lectures, and founding colleges and primary schools that taught character.
The Midwest established itself as a distinct region. Its differences from the East and South contributed to its salience, but so did its achievements. Midwesterners wrote and published books and periodicals; founded museums, symphony orchestras, and historical societies; began telling regional folktales, such as the stories of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed; and developed their own architecture, fine art, and folk art and music. By the 1850s, Americans began to speak of the “Middle West.” Around 1900, the region hit “Peak Midwest”: a period of significant influence over the nation’s news media, politics, and culture.
Lauck admits the Midwest’s failings. Evicting Indians through treaties and by force opened land to settlers. Indians who remained faced pressure to adopt the culture of the white majority: farming, education, and Christianity. A wall of discrimination against African Americans, especially early in the nineteenth century, was “the Midwest’s greatest failing.” French colonists who inhabited the Midwest before the Northwest Ordinance were allowed to keep their slaves. Illinois allowed short-term use of slave labor. Midwesterners deprived blacks of the right to vote or serve in the militia, barred the entry of free blacks, banned interracial marriage, and rioted violently against blacks. But Lauck also dampens the fires of criticism. Midwestern attempts to change Indian culture were fueled by good intentions, and some Indians were allowed to enjoy the rights of citizens. The Midwest eventually improved its treatment of African Americans by freeing the small number of slaves, allowing blacks to vote, opening its borders to black immigrants, and integrating schools.
Midwesterners achieved a great deal of reform in the late nineteenth century. Midwestern reform tended to eschew the radical ideas of populists and socialists and instead conserve the society they had always known by curbing the rising power of big business, protecting the power of farmers and other ordinary people, and maintaining traditional values. Midwestern reformers regulated railroads and grain elevators, paved city streets, protected workers, limited corruption, and gave more help to vulnerable people, such as orphans. Women played essential roles in reform movements, achieving more in the Midwest than in any other part of the country. Until voting became a right of all American women, Midwestern women had the greatest access to the polls.
Although Lauck succeeds at his goal of burnishing the Midwest’s legacy, by choosing to organize the nineteenth-century Midwest into an argument, he leaves to another historian the challenge of fashioning the themes and events he addresses into a compelling story. Still, by thoroughly making the case that the Midwest deserves more respect, Lauck can credibly consider what his findings mean for the present. He suggests that Midwesterners practice what literary scholar Rita Felski has called “stickiness,” a willingness to commit to particular places even though that limits one’s freedom. He also calls for readers to treat past Midwesterners the way The Good Country does: acknowledging their faults but also “remembering their virtues.”
Daniel J. Fischer is an adjunct history teacher at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is also a freelance tutor and copy editor and writes on Substack as the A La Carte Scholar.
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