The special calling

 Scott Russell Sanders says the Midwest was the most fertile place in the United States. Of all the places where a new Garden of Eden might have bloomed in North America, the Midwest was the favored spot.

Instead, what people have witnessed — and what writers have written about — is the damage done to the land. People also discovered that damage to habitats damages inhabitants. Sanders said:

 

Becoming aware of the richness in long-settled, cultivated, often battered and abandoned country is the special calling of Midwestern writers.

 

Sanders’s argument is rooted in two observations by Alexis de Tocqueville, who recorded his impressions of America in 1831-2.

First, Europeans talked of the wilds of America, but the Americans never did. Americans saw a rich land, richer than the Promised Land, and they wanted to master it, subjugate it, dominate it. For Americans, awe and respect weren’t appropriate responses.

Second, for all their talk about freedom of expression, there was little in America. The social pressure to conform was extreme. Expression of opinion amounted to self-congratulatory effusions about community progress. Following the interests of the wealthy, Americans developed aggressively and preserved reluctantly. Collectively, it took a long time to wake up to the damage: to the land, to communities, to individuals.

 

Because of its resources and history, and in spite of its homegrown critics, the Midwest would eventually become in our mythology something of an agrarian theme park, a repository of the values that Americans wish to preserve but not live by: hard work, honesty, frugality, simplicity, integrity, neighborliness, egalitarianism, politeness, and decency. There is enough truth in that list of Heartland virtues for the impression to have survived into our own time.

 

As soon as I open my mouth, people know where I’m from. I’ve never been mistaken for a Midwesterner.

Sanders’s essay made me see how little I know little about the Midwest.

I wondered how many of those American values — hard work, honesty, frugality and the rest — people would associate with my part of the world.

• Source: Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center; Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1997. “Imagining the Midwest” is on pp. 22-51. The quotations are on pp. 36 and 39.