The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Defining Chicago

If you live in Chicago, you’re probably familiar by now with the duststorm unleashed by Rachel Shteir, an expatriate New Yorker and heretofore obscure professor at the city’s DePaul University, who wrote a review of three Chicago-related books which led the New York Times Book Review on April 21. Actually, it wasn’t a review so much as an excuse for an essay by Shteir on the city and what‘s wrong with it. If you don’t live in Chicago, here’s a link to the review.

The Questionable Benefits of Right-To-Work Laws

As the right-to-work movement makes progress in the Midwest, it’s time to ask if these laws do any good for the states that adopt them, or for their workers. The answer: Not so’s you’d notice.

Certainly, nothing that you can prove. Two broad gauges of worker well-being are unemployment rates and per capita income. In the unemployment rankings, right-to-work (RTW) states are all over the map, some at the top, some at the bottom. On per capita income, they’re mostly at the bottom, but there are a few near the top.

What does this prove? Not much. Certainly, workers in RTW states earn less on average, but many of these states are in the South, where wages are generally lower. Perhaps there’s a cause-and-effect here, but so many other factors apply that it’s hard to draw firm conclusions.

But one thing can be said, and it’s important. Advocates of right-to-work laws who claim they boost a state’s economy and living standards have not made their case.

Leveraging Philanthropy for the Economy

There's a new community foundation in St. Joseph, Missouri, that is trying something really new -- to marshal the funds it oversees to promote economic development in St. Joseph and the northwestern Missouri region that neighbors it.

A community foundation exists to house personal or family foundations in its area. Most wealthy families can't set up vast billion-dollar foundations, lavishly staffed, like the Fords or MacArthurs. So they set up smaller foundations and park them inside community foundations, which handle the paperwork and see that the funds are spent as the founding families direct.

This money can go to scholarships, or to an arboretum, or to the care and feeding of cats. The Community Foundation of Northwest Missouri will accommodate these directives, if asked. But one of its goals is to educate the region, including its philanthropists, on the importance of repairing the region's tired old economy, generating a new economy and reviving the area as an economically decent place to live.

So far as I know, no other community foundation in the country --and there are more than 700 of them -- has set itself this goal.

Failing Economies Shorten Lives

A recent study has come up with some shocking news: life expectancy of the least educated white Americans, both men and women, is going down. White women without a high school diploma now live five years less on the average than they did 20 years ago: for white male dropouts, the decline is three years.

This is a calamity matched only by the six-year decline in longevity among Russian men in the waning years of Communism there. But that decline, blamed on rampant alcoholism, has been mostly reversed.

What's going on here? No one really knows, but my bet is that the cause is economic -- the collapse of the industrial, steady, low-wage jobs that once supported even the least-educated Americans. These people once were lower middle-class. Now they're just poor, the losers in the global economy, increasingly cut off from jobs, a steady income and, not incidentally, decent health care.

The New Paper Trail

Paper is in the Midwestern news these days -- specifically the paper grown, pulped and produced from forests and mills in states like Wisconsin and Minnesota. Most of this news, alas, isn't good, because it describes a once mighty industry under assault from digital technology and (like so many other Midwestern industries) China.

If there's a silver lining here, it's that some of this paper is going to put out newspapers like the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Neither paper is immune to the financial problems plaguing the American press, but both still employ first-rate reporters and are willing to give them the time, money and space to do stories on the economic forces transforming the economies of their states.

Going Blue in the Driftless Area

By now, everyone is familiar with those post-election maps of the United States, showing most of the nation a bright red, solidly Republican, speckled with some small blue dots, where Democrats dwell. It looks like an overwhelmingly Republican country, but Democrats dominate, as they did last week, because the blue dots are cities, where people live. The red vastnesses are more rural, with fewer voters and more empty space.

But there are some exceptions, splotches of blue in rural, less-populated areas, Democratic outposts where you wouldn't expect them, Obama bastions unexplained by cities or university towns. Some of these are in New England, naturally, but also a patch in northern Montana, a swath along the Mississippi River between Mississippi and Arkansas, a Democratic stronghold in the iron range north of Duluth, where Minnesota juts out over Lake Superior.

And then there's one true curiosity -- a cluster of mostly rural counties and small towns in southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa, southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois. This also happens to fit exactly with a region called the Driftless Area, a four-state region around the Mississippi River. It's called the Driftless Area because the glaciers that flattened most of the rest of the Midwest gave it a pass, leaving a lovely hilly area carved by rivers, home to small farms and little towns.

More Good Books from Iowa

I like to keep an eye on the literature of my native Iowa, from the baseball fantasias of W.P. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy) to the heart-breaking explorations of small-town life by Marilynne Robinson (Home, Gilead.) Recently, I wrote here about the short stories of J. Harley McIlrath, who does for farms what Marilynne Robinson does for the small farming towns.

Two new books are out, one deeply felt, the other riotously over the top. Both deserve a mention and, for Midwestern readers, a place on the shelf.

Mary Swander is the poet laureate of Iowa and an Iowa State professor. In 2007, she dispatched a class around the state of Iowa to interview residents, mostly about environmental issues. As time passed, the focus on the environment developed into a panorama on farming and how it's changing. They interviewed successful farmers and unsuccessful farmers, farmers who had lost the farm, organic farmers, workers in the state's meatpacking plants, townies, a winery owner. All were part of the changing rural landscape.

The Midwest Rules

With the selection of Paul Ryan as the probable Republican vice presidential candidate, this year's election has become mostly a battle between Midwesterners.

Not since 1976, when Gerald Ford (Nebraska/Michigan) and Bob Dole (Kansas) led the GOP ticket and Walter Mondale (Minnesota) became Jimmy Carter's VP, have three of the four spots at the top of the two major party tickets been filled by politicians with roots or careers in the Midwest.

Barack Obama (Illinois), Mitt Romney (Michigan) and Paul Ryan (Wisconsin) are all sons of the Midwest --- indeed, the inner Midwest, the real Midwest, the old industrial heartland clustered around the Great Lakes.

But if they share a geography, that's about it. One can't imagine three more different men less shaped into a common mold. If geography is destiny, it's hard to see it in these candidates.

Vacation Time

The calendar and the weather both announce it's summer, so The Midwesterner is taking a couple of weeks of vacation. Hope you're doing the same.

See you in July! 

Where Are the Happy Places?

You can't buy happiness, we're told. The same, I suspect, holds true for optimism and satisfaction.

But you can find it, according to a new survey by Gallup and summarized in an article by the "creative cities" guru, urbanologist Richard Florida.

The article lists the cities where residents are most and least satisfied with their communities, and most or least optimistic that their towns are getting better. The standings won't make Midwesterners feel either satisfied or optimistic.