There's a reason why Midwestern states don't make any sense in the global age. The reason is that they've never made any sense. For a couple of centuries, this wasn't crippling. Now it is.
A recent post discussed the incompetence of Midwestern states in dealing for with the crises of the current recession and with the Midwest's long-term needs -- economic, educational, social. It accepted the obvious, that these states aren't going to go away, that the United States is a federal system based on the 50 states. But it also said that if we rely on these states and their governments to create our future, we won't have a future.
Future posts will puzzle over possible solutions. For the moment, though, let's talk about how we got into this jam.
Midwestern states were artifical and arbitrary, even before they were states. Most of the Midwest -- from the Ohio River to Canada and west to the Mississippi River -- emerged from the Northwest Territory, decreed by Congress in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The rest became part of the United States 16 years later, with the Louisiana Purchase.
At the time, this region was mostly unsettled. But the Northwest Ordinance decreed that the Territory could divide itself up into "not less than three nor more than five states," when it had enough people to form states. The Ordinance went further -- it dictated where these state lines would be drawn.
This is how we got Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. Part of the Territory became part of Minnesota. Later parts ofthe Louisiana Purchase became Missouri, Iowa and the rest of Minnesota, plus 11 other states, including the Plains states.
Some of the state lines made geographic sense. The Ohio and Mississippi River were natural boundaries then, even if they aren't now. So were the Great Lakes. But the state lines between Michigan, Ohio and Indiana divide what should be a natural economic unit -- the old Auto Alley -- into three warring and jealous state fiefdoms. The invisible state lines cutting Chicago off from its natural hinterlands in Wisconsin and Indiana are as effective in blocking every-day cooperation as so many walls.
Even natural boundaries like the Mississippi have no real relevance any more. We've had bridges for some time now. Ditto for telephones and other means of communication. There's no reason why it should be so hard to communicate across the Mississippi between the Quad Cities, but it is.
One of these state lines started a war. This was the Toledo War of the 1830s, a comic conflict over the exact place of the Michigan-Ohio state line. Both states claimed a 468-square-mile strip. Troops were mustered. In the midst of the squabble, an Ohio drunk named Two Stickney stabbed a Michigan sheriff in a bar brawl, the war's only casualty. Ohio ended up with the Toledo Strip and the city of Toledo. As compensation, the federal government gave Michigan its Upper Peninsula. I wouldn't dream of arguing which state got the better deal.
The Northwest Ordinance went further, with equally baleful consequences. In a spasm of Jeffersonian democracy, it decreed that the new states would be carved up into counties and even into townships, to provide for as much local control as possible. Unlike states, these counties actually made sense 100 years ago or so, when roads were bad, travel was slow and life really was local. That day is long past. But Iowa still has 99 counties, Illinois 102, Missouri 114. Almost all have no functions that couldn't be done better and more efficiently by consolidated units. But they employ lots of county judges, county recorders, county clerks and county sheriffs, all of whom want to keep their jobs and so have a vested interest in opposing any reform at all.
When states were formed, they needed capitals. It would have made sense to put these capitals in the biggest, strongest cities. But almost all these cities -- Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis -- depended on lakes or rivers, the main transit routes of the day, for their livelihoods. Since the same lakes and rivers often formed the borders of these states, that meant that these cities lay on the states' geographical fringes, as they do today. With travel hard and slow, it was decided to put the capitals more or less in the center of states, where they would be accessible to the most far-flung residents. This is how we got Springfield, Jefferson City, Lansing, Columbus, Des Moines.
Like counties, the location of these state capitals thus possessed a certain geographical logic. Over time, some of these centrally-located backwaters evolved into real cities: Des Moines, Indianapolis and Columbus are examples. But others, like Springfield, never evolved into anything more than remote towns where legislators are condemned to spend part of the year.
More important, these state capitals remained remote from the real economic action of their states, which stayed in those big cities on the fringes. No wonder state governments are so often hostile to the needs of the big cities that power the economies of the state. It's not frivilous to assume that Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis would all be in better shape today if they had been state capitals, marrying political clout to economic power.
Alas, it wasn't to be. To this day, state capitals control many of the lifelines of their cities -- tax power, control over schools, annexation rights, transport -- and keep a stranglehold over these cities' future.
Still, there's no law that says these states couldn't join in regional cooperation, nor that their cities couldn't reach across state lines to form true urban areas. Except they don't.
State capitals control politics within state lines. State universities, hopping to the demands of legislatures and trustees, keep ideas and information locked within those same state lines. State governors "just love to cut ribbons," as their aides say, meaning that each state fights with other states, using tax holidays and obscene subsidies, to win investment that would benefit them both. Each state has different taxes, even different means of computing those taxes, all in an attempt to prove that it's the cheapest place to do business: The result is that too much of the Midwest lacks the sort of things, like good schools and roads, that higher taxes could buy. States compete with states even in areas, like bioscience, where the Midwest would seem to have a comparative advantage: each state has its own bio plan and bio organization, keeping the region from leveraging its bio assets into a true critical mass.
The examples could go on and on. But they all flow from that act of Congress 223 years ago. Like many of life's mistakes, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But it wasn't, and we're paying for it today.
There's got to be a better way. There's got to be some way to meet global challenges for which these states were never designed, without new acts of Congress or outright secession, neither of which seems likely or wise. Future posts will seek these solutions.
For more information, visit the economic competitiveness pages of the In the News and Special Reports sections of the Global Midwest Web site.
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