The Empires Strike Back

This week: what the “midwest” and manifest destiny teach us about imperialism, and some difficulties with the word “mainland”.

So the week’s big news – my news, that is, not the news – is that I can finally talk about my next book. A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps is a collection of essays covering borders from the unification of Egypt in 3100BCE to the Branson-Bezos space race of 2021, via the Great Wall of China, the free trade policies of Genghis Khan, the invention of the Prime Meridian, the failure to invent the International Date Line, plus assorted dates (843, 1494, 1885, 1916) on which European powers divide up the world between them with hilarious results. It’s not out until April, but it has a cover, and also you can pre-order it now:

This week I am mainly concerned with getting the final draft in, so I’m breaking with our regular format once again. The nature of a book like this is you end up cutting stuff – because it doesn’t fit the story you end up telling but can’t see that you’ve nearly finished; or because it simply doesn’t fit. The result is, a handful of essays have ended up on the cutting room floor. What follows is one of them: we cut it because, while it’s one of my favourite observations about the relationship between geography, identity and empire, it is not, in the strictest of senses, about a border. Below that, you’ll find all the usual maps and links. Enjoy. 

What the “midwest” and manifest destiny teach us about imperialism

“I see now that this has been a story of the West after all,” Nick Carraway, narrator of The Great Gatsby, says in the novel’s last chapter. “Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

The funny thing about this quote is that, by any reasonable standard, those characters aren’t from the “west” of the United States at all. The characters come variously from Minnesota and Kentucky and Illinois, all states that are comfortably within the eastern half of that great continent-crossing land mass. Gatsby himself claims to be from San Francisco, but since that claim comes in answer to the question “What part of the middle west” he is from, and since it’s not true anyway – he’s from North Dakota, pretty much bang in the middle – he is clearly either deliberately lying or joking or both. The “west” Carraway refers to is the “midwest”, a region which begins only a couple of hundred miles from the east coast and ends still nearly a thousand from the west. East versus west, anyone who has ever sat through a high school literature class will remember, is a key theme of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel – yet the west being referred to is really hardly west at all.

In some ways, the midwest doesn’t really exist – it is not, for example, a unit of government – and as a result its boundaries are sometimes a little fluid. The region defined by the US Census Bureau, the closest it has to an official existence, includes 12 states, stretching from Ohio in the East, to the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas – the first states beyond the Mississippi – in the west. Other bodies, though, use other definitions, perhaps throwing in Kentucky or Arkansas or omitting Missouri. 

The US census bureau’s definition of the Midwest. Image: Wikipedia/CC BY 2.0.

The Midwest nonetheless retains a very strong cultural existence. In the collective American unconscious, those on the eastern seaboard may be stuck up, those in the west weird, those in the south backwards and perhaps a little scary. The midwest, though, is where the real America is to be found. It’s not called the heartland merely because it’s the bit of the country that’s furthest from the ocean, although that helps: it’s also because it’s where people are nice and wholesome, a little conservative perhaps but fundamentally decent. It’s the land of Happy Days and Frank Capra films, the sort of place where over-educated characters in Aaron Sorkin shows go to learn a little something about themselves.

In recent years, the idea of the midwest has picked up another, related implication: it’s also home to most of the “rust belt”, the industrial region that has spent the last half century in sharp decline, and whose citizens have consequently switched from reliably blue (in both their collar, and their tendency to vote Democrat) to unnervingly red (going Republican to support Donald Trump and, in many cases, not coming back). This is almost certainly a local and entirely explicable matter of economics and demographics – short version: economic decline means a bunch of young people leave for the coasts and never come back – but it nonetheless, combined with the nonsense discussed in the previous paragraph, generated thousands upon thousands of think pieces about how the “real America” was giving up on the Democrats. It has also sometimes led to Pennsylvania, which is not a midwestern state by any definition – it gets to within 40 miles of the Atlantic Ocean; it’s literally where the constitution was written – being bundled up with it as if they’re the same thing.

To understand how a part of the United States that is not in any sensible sense “west” ended up tagged as such, it helps to remember that the United States was not always the size or shape it is today. All but one of the thirteen colonies which declared independence from Britain in 1776 had an Atlantic coastline. The new nation’s territorial claims may in places have reached deep inland; but the part containing actual Americans in any number was over a thousand miles long but only a few dozen miles wide, a sort of 18th century Chile. Beyond that lay a vast block of French territory, and beyond that the Spanish Empire. Neither power could be said to fully control the land that it claimed – Europeans were thin on the ground, and native tribes rather stubbornly insisted on existing – but what matters for our purposes was that this land was not, in the newfangled national sense, “American”.

Since the vast majority of the US population lived all but in sight of the coast, it made sense to describe anywhere beyond the Appalachians, the mountain chain playing the part of the Andes, as “the west”: as late as the 1820s, Bill Bryson notes in Made In America, Kentucky’s leading newspaper could call itself the Argus of Western America. It was based in Frankfort, a city roughly a fifth of the way across the continent. 

As the 19th century wore on, though, the shape of the US changed, so the notion of the west changed with it. In 1803, the government of Thomas Jefferson paid $15m – just $18 per square mile – for the stretch of land the First French Republic actually controlled, plus the right to throw native tribes off the rest of the vast territory known as Louisiana. Napoleon got some funding for his European wars; the US got enough land for a dozen new states. The existing inhabitants got displaced. 

More western expansion followed: Texas, and the vast swathe of land conquered in the Mexican American War of 1846-8; the Oregon Territory, incorporated after an agreement with the British, rather than the locals, on how to divide up the Pacific Northwest. Throughout this time, settlers moved west in search of gold to make their fortunes, or virgin lands for farming. Some, though, were motivated simply by the sentiment expressed by the popular columnist John O’Sullivan, who spoke of the “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions”. At risk of sounding like a broken record here: what providence had in mind for the people whose ancestors had lived on that land for centuries did not seem to come into it. 

In British English, the word “frontier” had a meaning similar to “border”: this entire book, really, is about frontiers. In the new country, though, it came to mean something different: the line between civilisation and wilderness, between the settled and the unexplored. For the first century or more of the United States’ existence, the frontier moved gradually westwards, from the Appallachians to the Mississippi to the Rockies and beyond. And so, the concept of the “west”, as the land hard by the frontier, moved westwards with it.¹ 

All of which means that, as Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby in the early 1920s, there would have been people alive, just, who could remember when states like North Dakota really were the west: it was not an affectation, even if it was now wildly inaccurate. And because labels our elders have used since childhood can be hard to shift, the original west didn’t lose its name: it simply became the midwest, to distinguish it from the true west. The existence of the midwest, in other words, is testament to manifest destiny, and the US’s long century of westward expansion.

There is, though, another way of seeing it.

Regions and provinces of China. Image: China National Bureau of Statistics.