Hoganson - The heartland: an American history

What is the nation, at heart? Who do Americans think they are, as a people? As a nation of many peoples and multiple faiths, assembled from a variety of disparate regions, further divisible into fifty semiautonomous states, over 560 federally recognized Native American polities, a handful of far-flung territories, and the District of Columbia, the United States may seem more a crazy quilt than a body with a heart. Fractured by partisan politics and competing interests, bitter antagonisms and knife-sharp divides, bloody conflicts and histories of soul-wrenching violence, the nation at its starkest seems patched together from a motley mess of parts, held together by straining stitches at their borders.

And yet Americans persist in imagining a heart. Beset by disunity, they imagine their nation as a body with a protected, essential core: the heartland. With the term referring to values as much as to place, its boundaries are a matter of dispute. Though quibbles persist, most mappings of the heartland place it somewhere between the Appalachian states of the East and Rocky Mountain states of the West, with the long North-South state of Illinois near its core.

Though ostensibly a geographic center, the heartland serves as a symbolic center in national mythologies. Including border states such as Minnesota and Michigan, the heartland could be seen as readily as an edge. But the other moniker for this regionthe Midwestplaces it between the East and far West, rather than between Canada and Mexico. Instead of being construed as a place of connection, much less a wellspring of global power, the U.S. heartland is more often seen as static and inward-looking, the quintessential home referenced by homeland security, the steadfast stronghold of the nation in an age of mobility and connectedness, the crucible of resistance to the global, the America of America First. Walls might be built on the margins, but the impetus for them putatively comes from here.

References to the heartland tend to depict it as buffered and all-American: white, rural, and rooted, full of aging churchgoers, conservative voters, corn, and pigs. Those who have denounced this stereotype as a gross distortion, invoking cities like Chicago as proof, have not refuted the myth, they have only tied it to rural areas dotted with small towns. This pastoral heartland is a place of nostalgic yearnings. It is the garden of prelapsarian innocence before the fall into global entanglements. Critics view the rural heartland in grimmer terms, seeing it as a holdout of compulsory normativity, exclusionary politics, and national exceptionalism. Flyover jokes deride it as a provincial wasteland. Out of touch, out of date, out of stylethe heartland is the place that makes isolationism seem possible, the place where people think it desirable.

Americans may not agree on who they are as a whole, but they think they know the nature of their heart. Local. Insulated. Exceptionalist. Isolationist. Provincial. The ultimate safe space. Love it or hate it, the heartland lies at the center of national mythology. This mythology seems so natural and inevitable, the inexorable outcome of history and geography, that it is easy to forget that the heartland myth emerged only in the mid-twentieth century, from the crucible of total war.

Coined by British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder in 1904, the term heartland initially encapsulated the idea of central Europe as a geostrategic pivot point. In opposition to prevailing theories that saw naval power as the key to global power, Mackinder argued that whoever controlled the Eurasian heartland would control the world. The efforts of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi war machine to prove Mackinders theory right brought the word