What is the Midwest?

Growing up in Canada, certain designations given to regions, cities, and peoples seemed inappropriate to me when I moved down to the States and was suddenly inundated with a new world view regarding the way things are to be properly labelled.  Southern Ontario and the corridor from Windsor to Quebec had always felt like an equivalent to the eastern United States, even the corridor paralleled it geographically more than 300 miles inland.  Needless to say, I was a bit puzzled when people referred to Detroit and even Cleveland as "Midwest".  For one, despite what people may wish, Michigan on the whole shares more of a political affinity to interior New York and Pennsylvania than it does with Iowa or Illinois.  We largely have the same regional dialect of American English here as they do in Buffalo or Altoona, and even our quintessentially "Midwestern" German immigrant population out in the countryside came to us around the same time as it did for western New York and much of southern Ontario.  Our cities, in contrast, are islands of Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrants, and a deeper heritage remains of our French beginnings.

Geographically, we are due north of Florida and Georgia, and the vast majority of our state lies within the Eastern timezone.  (And yes, so do Indiana and Ohio).  Finally, our landscape and climate is far more a child of the Great Lakes and the legacy of the Laurentide Ice Sheet than it is that of the Midwestern prairies.  Back during the 1790's, Michigan was called the Northwest.  The frontier has long since moved on, however, and with it all the good land values that have been packed off to places like Washington and California.  The beaver migrations undoubtedly had much to do with this, the small aquatic rodent ever on its quest for virgin stands of birch trees in which to build moderately priced condos.  

Now, I am likely to generate some controversy with this map, but have patience, I can explain it.

The red line indicates my proposed definition of the American Midwest.  The blue line offers a new region altogether, which is international in scope.  I call this the Nearwest or Lakes region.  As you can see, I straddled Chicago on both areas, but Chicago is, much like New York and Toronto, an Alpha World City.  The area above both regions is something different, something northern, and a bit harder to define and broadly include into one region.  To the east we have the Appalachians and the Maritime lands of New England and the Atlantic Provinces.  To the south we have the upper South.  To the west we have the Great Plains and the beginning of Western America.  The notable gap in the upper center is the Wisconsin Dells and the Mississippi valley around La Crosse and Winona.  The area, which I have been to many times, just has a different feel to it than the rest of the country.  The glaciers never even came here during the last glaciation, and the area is thus known as the driftless area.

So how is it that we can have towns like Independence, Missouri, and Davenport, Iowa considered Midwestern but not Toledo, Ohio or even Gary, Indiana?  Well, take a walk down the old downtown sections of each place and tell me if they are really the same.  Let's start in Independence, once the furthest western bastion of the United States.  On the map above, it is where that I-35 shield is on the Kansas/Missouri border.

That town center is quintessentially Midwestern.  The places of prominence are the civic buildings and large social gathering spots like the theater.  The layout is quite open and focuses on two features: space for congregation and space for the sheer enjoyment of space.  Space is something that defines the Midwest.  There are forests everywhere, of course, but they are not nearly as intact as they are in the Lakes region, even after intensive logging and farming there.  Savanna and prairie have a lot to do with this, but so does resource management and agricultural practice.  Mentality is the biggest driving factor; the Midwest is the land of initial expansion and Manifest Destiny, lands that Americans had to fight for even after they secured them in the Treaty of Paris.  George Rogers Clark National Historic Park is the place to go if you want to see what this entailed, the battlefield where this part of North America was first truly defined.  I admit that I have yet to go to it myself, and count it as a big gap in my firsthand experience of our continent.  Needless to say, those who fought here under the flag of a young nation were the first in a line of Mid-westerners who burned with a convert's zeal for a land they not only secured for that nation, but in many ways for themselves in a friendlier declaration of independence from the eastern lands across the mountains that they left behind.  Their descendants and those of the immigrants and freed men that joined them share their values, their love for open spaces, even their unique barbecue cuisines, vocal inflections, and particular styles of blues music.  Take a look at Springfield, Illinois.

This is a city of wide avenues and spaced buildings.  The state capitol takes the most dominant place, and the other prominent features are libraries, churches, and theaters.  Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines, and even St. Louis have such streetscapes.  What about the rest of town?

The last home is Abraham Lincoln's house.  As you can see, space is a dominant element, both in the yards and streets.  These are scenes from the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, and the entire neighborhood where Abraham Lincoln lived much of his adult life in Illinois is preserved intact.  Similar spaces can be seen at Truman Home National Historic Site in Independence, Missouri.  The homes are those of the middle class and wealthier residents, but even the poorer sections of both towns have the same design elements in terms of urban planning.

  

In contrast, towns in Michigan, southern Ontario, and western New York have centers that maybe feature a small green space with a gazebo in it, and closely packed buildings that are largely commercial in nature.  Social gathering spaces are smaller in scale, and while you may still have a theater or two downtown, it will be surrounded by quaint cafes and small restaurants, bookstores and other shops.  The civic buildings are off to the side, as if government is relegated to its own space.  Does that mean one region is better than the other, or Independence is more authoritarian than Saline?  Not at all.  What it means is that both towns are monuments to the variants of American (meaning North American) democracy.  In one case, democracy means participation.  In the other, it means delegation and separation from daily life.  The Midwest is a land of broad community, inter-dependence, and the freedom of homesteading and frontier.  The Lakes region is a land of industry, individualism, and the making of cities into truly habitable and enjoyable spaces.  I actually do not have any pictures of nearby down-towns!  I suppose that is because I see them all the time.  Examples are everywhere, from Ypsilanti to Port Huron, Milton and Orillia, Ontario to Batavia and Williamsville, NY.  The region is very much a bi-product of the United States and Canada, a claim that Tim Horton's has latched on to (the region I closed in with blue is actually where most of their franchises are located).  

In terms of landscape, if you want to see the contrast, just drive along I-94 in Michigan, and then I-80 or I-55 in Illinois.  There are exceptions of course, such as parts of I-75 in Michigan being very open, the westernmost parts of the 401 looking more like parts of Iowa, or I-70 in Missouri being forested.

Take a look at I-70 in central Missouri just before the Missouri river crossing.

Or, far more typical, restored tallgrass prairie on I-55 near Bloomington, Illinois.

Prairies, you see, once covered far more land in the center of our continent than most people realize.  Today they can often be derided as "fly-over areas" or something to race through to get to the more interesting mountains, deserts, and forests which border them.  In truth, the first settlers of Indiana and Illinois ran into these large expanses of grass, flowers, and shrubs and absolutely fell in love.  Many towns in the Midwest were actually founded in the middle of them or atop hills, rather than near rivers or woods, because the allure of the open lands was such a contrast to the woods that had to be cleared and the stumps that had to be removed further east.  There were still trees around, and most towns, as seen above in Springfield, were planted thick with them.  In the Midwest, settlers could have the best of both worlds.  The endless flat grasslands most people think of when they hear "prairie" existed farther west, in central Kansas and Nebraska.  Here there were fields, forests, good soil and easy topography for farming.  There were and are also challenges.  There were blizzards, scorching summers, tornadoes, all things that made some people want to move back across the mountains or head further west to the new frontiers that opened up there.  For those that stayed, and those who later came to fill the plentiful room, this would be their American paradise they had dreamed of.  

Others stayed further north, in larger industrial cities or in smaller farms surrounded to this day by extensive woodlands.  Their story and land is cause of another post, however.  They are the people and lands of the doorway between east and west, of the Erie Canal, the Detroit River, of Toronto, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Rochester.  I suppose, if you needed a better label, you could use the "Nearwest".  I, of course, still prefer Upper Canada.  For a parting shot, you can see that it is not too hard to imagine the straits between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair as a highway, rather than a border.