What can we learn from the "flyover" states?
A pre-Civil War cemetery beside a two-lane road near Freeport, Ill., in 2018. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
"Thanks to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 — the nation’s finest act of statecraft prior to the Constitution — the region that would become the Midwest’s 12 states, all west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas) never, with the exception of Missouri, had slavery. Instead, these states had the crackling entrepreneurial energy that Alexis de Tocqueville, floating down the Ohio in Jacksonian America, saw to his right, in Ohio, but not to his left, in slaveholding Kentucky.
"In 'The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900,' Jon K. Lauck, editor of Middle West Review, recalls that historian Frederick Jackson Turner (born in Wisconsin in 1861) said, 'It is in the Middle West that society has formed on lines least like Europe,' with fewer hierarchies and less deference: Kossuth County, Iowa, is named after a Hungarian revolutionary. Lauck, professor of history and political science at the University of South Dakota, notes that even Wisconsin-born (in 1867) Frank Lloyd Wright’s 'Prairie Style' was a Midwestern declaration of architectural independence." - George Will
Opinion: In Unsettled Times, Look to Midwestern Values