Scholar traces origins of Midwest ‘flyover countr y’ derision

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – The name of President Donald Trump appears only once in professor Jon Lauck’s new book about perceptions of the Midwest as “flyover country,” and then only in a footnote involving polling in Missouri.

Yet the book’s exploration of decades-old historical trends helps explain the attraction Trump held in the election for people who felt alienated by the political and cultural mainstream.

“When the 20th century dawned, the American Midwest stood tall as the republic’s ascendant and triumphant region – economically prosperous, politically formidable, culturally proud, and consciously regional,” Lauck writes in “From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: the Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 19201965.”

Yet just a few decades later, in an era of growing globalism, “vocal intellectuals recast the Midwest as a repressive and sterile backwater filled with small-town snoops, redneck farmers, and zealous theocrats,” wrote Lauck, a history and political science professor at the Uni- versity of South Dakota.

The book takes its title from an observation by Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby”: “Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe – so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.”

The region’s isolationist tendencies after World War II were out of sync with the rest of the U.S., Lauck said, and these tendencies clashed with the country’s growing cosmopolitanism and desire to be part of the larger world.