The Midwest: Talent, Ambition and Culture

It's hard for a region's people and cities to be great, when being good enough is celebrated and striving for more is considered brash.

A view of Lakewood, OH, a suburb of Cleveland. It could be anywhere in the Midwest. It’s… nice. Source: gettyimages.com

Last weekend there was a debate taking place on a very small corner of the Internet. It was about the Midwest’s culture and its impact on growth and development prospects.

Before I get to the sides of the debate, I’d like to conduct a quick exercise. Pretend you’re invited to a focus group to discuss the Midwest, however you define it. You are to give one word that explains your perception of the region. What comments would you make about how it would be defined?

OK. Have a word? I can probably come up with some that might’ve crossed your mind:

·         “Rural.”

·         “Industrial.”

·         “Cold.”

·         “Insular.”

·         “Nice.”

·         “Flat.”

·         “Simple.”

·         “Rusty.”

·         “Decline.”

·         “Heartland.”

The ten words above would probably be near the top of anyone’s list. Other words like “middle”, “average”, “ordinary” or “normal” might also enter many people’s lists. Taken together, they could all be described with another single word: “mediocre”.

That’s the crux of the debate. Is the Midwest a mediocre region?

One side says no. There are plenty examples of excellence in the region that can serve as the building blocks for real economic growth in the region. We have top-tier private and public colleges and universities. We have scores of Fortune 500 companies. We’re at the center of the nation’s rail and air network, making us an excellent place for the distribution of people and goods. We’re the nation’s breadbasket, we’re affordable, we offer the best work/life balance of any region in the nation. We already have excellence, and we just need to do a better job of utilizing it to our advantage. And besides, who are you calling mediocre?

The other side of the debate disagrees with this. They say the region is inherently risk-adverse. They see a Midwest that is often unwelcoming to outsiders. They see it as a region that accepts the status quo, even when there are strong arguments for doing otherwise. The world is constantly changing, and the Midwest hasn’t kept pace. Ambitious Midwesterners must leave for the coasts if they want to succeed, they say, and that’s what’s keeping the region from prospering in the 21^st century.

I’ll lay out my position here and describe it in more detail later. Simply put, but sides are right. The Midwest has wonderful assets that would be the envy of any region, or nation. Yet having those assets hasn’t necessarily vaulted the region to greater prosperity over the last 50 years or so. The Midwest is lagging the coasts and the Sun Belt because outsiders view its culture as incompatible with excellence.

And they’re right.

The Culture Problem

Aaron Renn is a friend of mine who agrees with my position. Aaron’s southern Indiana native who grew up near Louisville, KY, but lived in Chicago and New York City before moving to Indianapolis. Prior to creating a Substack newsletter focusing on men’s issues and evangelical Christianity, he wrote a blog that provided news, analysis and insight on Midwestern cities. He played a big role in providing me a platform for the writing I do today.

His take has been a little different than mine, but check this out from a recent X exchange:

“This is a good encapsulation of the Midwest attitude: if you want to strive to achieve, then you must think you are better than everybody else.

@paulg talks about how cities whisper to you about what you should be. He notes, "How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot."

 This is what I mean when I say these places are suppressive of the pursuit of excellence. Every day you are bombarded with implicit messages that you shouldn't strive. That's hard to overcome.

 If people are content with the status quo, that's fine. It's a free country and they can live however they want. But they don't feel the same in return. Too many people in the Midwest think there's something wrong with you if you want to try something different, or try to improve yourself (again, unless it's in sports).

 This not only affects individuals, but communities. Because the people who want things to stay the same and the people who want things to change can't both get what they want. This often results in the people who want change leaving. And it becomes difficult to attract and retain newcomers who don't fall in love with the way things are (or used to be).

Again, there's nothing wrong with a place that wants to stay the same. That's a perfectly valid choice. But as per my original post, this does explain why, despite the seemly great qualities and potential, few people move to places like Indiana and Ohio. (And the mere act of newcomers showing up changes a place, so perhaps that's for the best).”

I can’t find it now, but Aaron went on to say in a subsequent X post that Midwesterners have a particular disdain for elite strivers, usually those whose ambitious nature also comes with an Ivy League degree. Later on, architect and urban designer Kevin Klinkenberg, a Kansas City native, made a similar comment in an X reply:

“Today, for some reason we just blindly accept anything anyone does. It often feels like a culture of desperation and low self-esteem. And say what you want about the South, but my experience was Southerners weren’t afraid to have hard, challenging conversations. About anything, in fact. Midwesterners are lovely people, some of the genuinely nicest on the planet. But we avoid difficult or challenging conversations, especially in public.

We really do have fantastic places, people and landscapes that I truly love. But life is a competition, and our collective ambivalence toward striving for better has not served us well in the Midwest.”

The Midwest as pass-through, not destination

There’s an explanation for this. The region has always been overlooked by the ambitious, even as it was cleared of Indigenous people and settled by American colonists and European immigrants.

The sentiment is captured in Horace Greeley’s 1854 quote, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” The Midwest was the first non-Thirteen Colonies American territory to be settled, after the War of 1812.  That also made it the first begin exporting its strivers in search of excellence.

One might say that the East Coast was the first exporter of strivers, and one would be right. However, the East Coast was able to have dynamism and permanence. It had a regular stream of new strivers entering the country, and a 200-year head start on community-building over the Midwest. Once one part of the West opened up, then another, it beckoned to strivers to seek fortune. There was always a metaphorical West that Americans were moving to, the moment they learned of the breadth of the continent.

The early promise of the Midwest was agricultural. There was plentiful land for growing crops and establishing a solid, respectable livelihood. But if you wanted more you had to look elsewhere. The promise of mineral riches brought mid-1800s strivers into the mountain West and to the West Coast, and left behind people who were fine with their stable agricultural lifestyle. California became the destination. With no real place to go beyond the Pacific Ocean (well, besides Hawaii), California became a place of dynamism and permanence, in a way no Midwest state did. I know the South less well, but I think the same could be said for interior Southern states like Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, which also were settled in the early 19^th century. However, Texas became the destination of dynamism and permanence.

For a century, starting with the end of the Civil War and through the early 1970s, The Midwest was a place of limited dynamism and limited permanence. The dynamism was the influx of laborers from Europe, the Deep South and Appalachia to take on well-paying manufacturing jobs. However the dynamism was limited because those job seekers weren’t coming to factory work as creators or innovators; they were seeking the middle-class lifestyle those jobs offered. The permanence was limited because Midwestern cities built partly-permanent environments. They have some, but not to the same extent, of the classic urban design features and charm that East Coast cities have. Post World War II suburban sprawl had a much greater impact on them than it did to East Coast cities.

There have been countless stories in books and film of ambitious and starry-eyed Midwesterners seeking fame and fortune on Broadway or in Hollywood. This extends to other fields as well. Rappers like Kanye West and Eminem had to leave Chicago and Detroit, respectively, to achieve fame. In each case their talent was undeniable, but neither was within an ecosystem that could take them further. Could they have achieved the same levels without making their moves?

The Midwest’s culture problem can further be seen by extending the hip-hop analogy. Talented rappers and producers sprouted all across the South in the ‘90s and ‘00s when East Coast and West Coast hip-hop was prominent. Instead of moving to the coasts or waiting on offers from coastal record companies, the Southern hip-hop community created its own hip-hop ecosystem. That’s something the Midwest has yet to do on a national scale.

So maybe mediocrity, benign acceptance, and being “good enough” are built into the DNA of the Midwest. This can be fixed. However, the Midwest will have to figure out a way to solve another problem – the network problem. I’ll discuss that in a future post.