Ohio Literature and the Cultural Assault on the Midwest

In the early 20th century, literature satirized the Midwest as provincial and backwards, paving the way for contemporary narratives about the Rustbelt.

‘Bright Day’, Emerson Burkhart. 1956.

After recently reading Sinclair Lewis’ famous 1922 novel Babbitt, I found myself opposing certain notions of what might be called Midwestern morality—if there is such a thing. The novel, considered a blow to early 20th century American capitalism, ends with the main character, George F. Babbitt, joining the right-wing Good Citizens’ League and revoking the liberal-minded, union-friendly curiosities he engaged in throughout the middle of the story. After encountering overwhelming barriers to his leftward turn (losing business, friends, and structure), he returns to, with much excitement, his conservative booster businessmen of the fictional city of Zenith (based on the real Ohio city of Cincinnati, allegedly). 

The author, Sinclair Lewis, who grew up in Minnesota and went to college in Ohio, was not abstract about his regional messaging. He wrote in the concluding pages of the novel that “nowhere was [the League] so effective and well esteemed as in cities of the type of Zenith, commercial cities of a few hundred thousand inhabitants, most of which—though not all—lay inland, against a background of cornfield and mines and of small towns...” Babbitt’s attempt to resist the path of conformity and submission thrust him into a life of disrepute, prospective divorce, and financial ruin. Was the Midwest truly a poster child for the conservative superficiality of small-city capitalism? Or was Lewis’ target something more universal? A small community of academics have been struggling with this question in recent years and the answer will give a glimmer of hope to those wandering aimlessly through the region.

Revolt From the Village

Babbitt was released with a wave of culture critical of Midwestern lifestyles in the 1920s. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Lewis’ Main Street and Babbitt, and the rise of the New Yorker (with the motto “Not for the old lady from Dubuque”) painted a less-than-rosy image of the interior lands. After the rise of popular novels critical of the Midwest lifestyle, synonymous with village-life, small towns, and rural living, an editor at The Nation declared the beginning of a movement called the “revolt from the village”. The region that was once praised for its qualities of fertile soil, simple morality, and engaged democratic citizenry, was smeared in the age of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing image-obsessed culture. 

The revolt from the village vilified the backwardness and sentimentality of Midwestern small towns and was only reinforced in the subsequent decades through the Great Depression and WWII—which required national and international mobilizations to effectively combat—and through a popular culture produced by the coastal hubs of Madison Avenue and Hollywood. Jon K. Lauck, author of From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, argued that Hollywood and NYC “would overwhelm local, regional, and folk cultures and undermine American pluralism.” Following this was an academic shift that saw the university turned into a professional administrative apparatus that focused less on developing nearby students to study local and regional history and more on securing ivy league academics from elsewhere.

The image of the Midwesterner became the naive Babbitt figure, a bland idealist who coastal intellectuals mocked. That image rings true today with the reputation of the Rustbelt and the average rural Trump supporter, an evolution of the Footloose cliche of a backwards town banning rock music and dancing. Those seeking nuance, historical roots, and pride in the Midwest, ran up against a culture that detested them and an academia that had little funding or historical societies to back them. 

Revolt Against the Revolt

The negative images of Midwestern life in Main Street and Winesburg, Ohio can, however, be read another way. In The Midwestern Moment, Lauck goes as far to assert that the books have been “badly typecast,” maintaining “they do not represent what the critics claim.” Both books present a portrait of the Midwest that is not black or white, but constantly dancing somewhere in between. In Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson’s short portraits of pre-industrial life in a small Ohio town are not romantic. The characters are isolated, the stories are unadventurous, and the town is painfully simple. But one should avoid the knee-jerk reading of this as a blanket condemnation of the Midwest. Lauck insists that reading Winesburg properly should portray the Midwest “as a source of roots and comfort and strength.” In fact, both Anderson and Lewis rejected being thrown into the revolt from the village trend. Anderson, an Ohioan, lived in the Midwest for almost the entirety of his life, writing that he was “glad of the life on the farm and in small communities.” One critic characterized his career as “the return to the village, not the revolt from it.” Sinclair Lewis said that he “intended Main Street as a constructive criticism of his country,” arguing that he criticized prairie villages “no more than I have New York, or Paris, or the great universities.” 

Those stereotypes of the Midwest of course ignored Midwestern industrial hubs like Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago and the racial struggles in the time of the underground railroad, Civil War, and the Great Migration—which the novels of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and the recently published A Brick and a Bible are a testament to. The revolt from the village also overlooks regionalist resurgences like painters Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton and radical writers like Meridel Le Sueur. Too much attention has been given to the complacency of George F. Babbitt and not enough to the passionate labor leader in the novel, Seneca Doane. 

The Iowan writer, Ruth Suckow (who, at one point lived close to Dubuque), a contemporary of Lewis and Anderson, wholeheartedly rejected the revolt from the village and had little respect for those “village rebel” types who “hustle off to find themselves an art and a civilization that was ready-made for them somewhere else.” The radical Minnesota writer, Meridel Le Sueur, emphasized the unique place of Midwestern writers, arguing that “Every writer in the Middle West has had to work alone as far as connection with other writers is concerned, therefore he has been in closer contact with the American experience.” In such a chaotic time like the present, Midwesterners should look back to their roots, to the old lady from Dubuque, and find the inspiration to connect and engage with the place we live, not to cynically dream of a utopian other. “You must begin to dream,” one of the characters in Winesburg says, “From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.”