The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800–1900 by Jon K. Lauck (review)

Reviewed by: The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800–1900 by Jon K. Lauck Timothy Messer-Kruse (bio) Jon K. Lauck, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800–1900. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. xii + 350 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $26.95. I am a Midwesterner through and through. I was born in Nebraska, where my mother’s people had lived for four generations, a few counties over from the Missouri line. My father was a minister and my mother the church organist. They met at a Lutheran college in Wisconsin. When I was seven, we moved to the Dairy State, where my dad’s people had lived since my great-great-great grandfather arrived from Switzerland in 1857. I earned all my degrees from a midwestern state university where, on my first day on campus, I was directed to the stock pavilion to register for classes where we stood in line on freshly spread sawdust. My first academic job took me to Ohio, where I’ve now lived for half my life. I don’t really believe that my background affords me any particular insights into this curious place called the Midwest, though Jon K. Lauck apparently does, as he both opens his book with his own middle western bona fides and lauds other scholars for having “impeccable midwestern credentials” as solid as his own. Lauck is a native South Dakotan who teaches now and then at the University of South Dakota, serves as president of the Midwestern History Association, and has a day job as senior advisor and counsel to South Dakota Senator John Thune, the Republican whip. For all my connections to the Midwest, I’m still not sure what makes it a place at all. Neither is Jon K. Lauck, though he pretends to know. Lauck’s stated purpose is to rescue the Midwest from the elitist sneers of those from Carl Van Doren to Terry Gross who have tarred it as parochial, prudish, and dull. Along the way, he aims to rescue the region from so-called woke scholars. “The history profession,” Lauck soapboxes, “has become too one-sided, too critical, and too focused on American faults and not sufficiently attentive to what would have been considered great achievements in their proper historical setting” (p. 4). In particular, Lauck believes that the “amount of social repression has been greatly exaggerated” and pushes back against “the modern platitudes” about “racial injustice and oppression” that dominate [End Page 30] scholarship today. (pp. 198, 3) Rather, he finds the Midwest “a Good Country, a place lost to the mists of time by chronic neglect” and a “land of democratic vigor, cultural strength, racial and gender progress.” (p. 3) Lauck’s intellectual project attracted quick applause from conservative pundits. The National Review and the Wall Street Journal gushed with praise and George Will’s endorsement graces the book cover and pours over into a column in the Washington Post.1 Having defined the special character of the Midwest as its “unique democratic order . . . one unequaled in world history,” Lauck lands on his central analytical question: What accounts for the Midwest’s “most advanced and most enduring . . . democratic idealism [that] advanced the furthest” of any land in history? (p. 20) His answer blows the dust off Frederick Jackson Turner’s century-old “Frontier Thesis,” which posited that democratic values were nurtured by the remaking of government and community as settlers pushed westward and their increasing distance from the decadent and oppressive states of Europe. Not only did the people who settled the Midwest enjoy an unrivaled natural bounty and a blank slate upon which to write their destiny, they were uniquely free from the Old World’s tyrannies, abuses, and prejudices. Lauck revels in Turner’s explanation, queuing up pages of quotes from Midwesterners and foreign travelers testifying to the region’s uniquely egalitarian qualities. Lauck finds these boosteristic expressions to be proof of his assertion that “Out in the Midwest people could be uniquely free” because they lived in a society where “long-standing rules of social deference and an entrenchment of egalitarianism” had eroded. (p. 22) While Turner’s was...