Where "the Heartland" comes from

by Doctor Science

One of the topics that's come up in several recent conversations around here is the term "Heartland": what parts of the US are the Heartland? How loaded is the term? Who uses it and why? ... etc.

A quest! First, I went over to Google ngrams to see how the word has been used in American English:

The hits before 1900 are either proper (fictional) names, or typos/scannos.

The blip around 1919 is about the book Democratic Ideals and Realities, by English geographer H. J. Mackinder, which advanced his Heartland Theory. Mackinder called central Asia and Russia, from roughly the Volga to the Yangtze, the "Heartland" of Eurasia and Africa (together making up the "World-Island"), and said:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world.

Basically, he was talking about The Great Game.

Mackinder's theory, and the word "Heartland", languished until World War II. Or, I should say, it languished in the English-speaking world. Mackinder's work greatly influenced the German geographer (and ex-General) Karl Haushofer and his student Rudolf Hess. Through Hess, Mackinder's "Heartland" theory became a crucial element in Mein Kampf and later Nazi geopolitics.

After the U.S. entered WWII -- and especially after Operation Barbarossa began -- the Heartland theory became news. Mackinder's book was reprinted by the National Defense University Press, and the concept of the "Heartland" was explained in popular publications like Newsweek and Life, and in Frank Capra's propaganda film The Nazis Strike.

Within a few years after the end of WWII, "the Heartland" no longer meant central Eurasia: in American usage, it almost always referred to the Midwest.

A few years ago, historian Toby Higbie did a little research on how the Midwest became "the heartland", and found that the term was picked up by various centennials, booster organizations, and midwestern regional publications: "it was part of a vaguer discourse on regional culture that emerged just as the Middle West was reaching the apex of its national influence."

That influence declined in the 1970s and later -- absolutely, as manufacturing started losing ground, and relatively, as the West Coast boomed and as air conditioning made the South more attractive. As this happened, the idea of the "Heartland" became associated ever more with soft-focus nostalgia.

When I look at records from before WWII, the only use of "Heartland" to mean "the American Midwest" is from the 1933 work Man's Adaptation of Nature: Studies of the Cultural Landscape by Patrick Bryan:

We have here a somewhat different America from that commonly depicted. It is this widespreading corn land of the Middle West which is the true heartland of America. Here we have an independent, prosperous body of farmers, farming what is probably the finest land in the world under climatic conditions which, with any sort of decent activity, make heavy yields inevitable.

Notably, Bryan was not American -- he was English, a geography professor at University College, Leicester. It's quite possible that he was familiar with the word "Heartland" from Mackinder, and seamlessly applied it to the American Midwest.

I decided it was time to go to the headwaters of American geographic history: Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier in American History. Bingo: Turner, writing about the Ohio Valley and the Midwest, calls is "a home for six mighty States, now in the heart of the nation, rich in material wealth, richer in the history of American democracy". And he cites Theodore Roosevelt from 1893 (not yet a politician of national significance, but a prominent historian), who said, to the Wisconsin Historical Society:

I almost wish I had chosen as a title "The Heart of Our County", for I am speaking of the old Northwest, not of the new Northwest in the Rocky Mountains and on the Pacific Slope, but of what was the Northwest at the beginning of this century, of the states that have grown up around the Great Lakes and in the Valley of the Upper Mississippi, [are] the states which are destined to be the greatest, the richest, the most prosperous of all the great, rich, and prosperous commonwealths which go to make up the mightiest republic the world has ever seen. These states . . . form the heart of the country geographically, and they will soon become the heart in population and in political and social importance. . . . I should be sorry to think that before these states there loomed a future of material prosperity merely. I regard this section of the country as the heart of true American sentiment.

Clearly the idea that the Midwest is the "heart" of the U.S. was already circulating in the 1890s -- at a time, mind you, when some of these states had been states for only about 50 years. I haven't been able to get more evidence of how the idea was used -- "heart" is too common a word, while the heart of America tends (in the 19th and early 20th century) to be a synonym for "the spirit of America", especially when the subject is the US entry into the World Wars.

Since the idea of the "Heartland" was so important in Germany in the first half of the 20th century, I decided to look back using Google's German corpus. Pay dirt:

"Herzland" was far more significant in 19th-c Germany than "Heartland" was in 19th-c Britain. When I looked at the context, most uses seem to be talking about Germany as "the Heartland of Europe", writing in the years leading up to German unification.

And then I found Beiträge zum geographischen Unterricht ("Contributions to geographic studies") 1856, by Rudolf Nagel, who seems to have been a secondary-school teacher in Remscheid. I say "seems" because my German is very rusty and the book is of course printed in Fraktur, which strains my comprehension to its limit (and beyond).

On p.34, Nagel writes:

To my imperfect understanding, he seems to be saying that the "Heartland" of a nation is properly in the geographic center, and that German immigration to the U.S. was creating an American Heartland in the Midwest that reflected (or duplicated) the "Heartland of Europe", which is Germany. I invite -- nay, beg! -- readers with better knowledge of German to tell me more.

Nagel was a very minor figure, and I suspect he wasn't saying anything terribly groundbreaking here. The idea that Germany is the Heartland of Europe, and should be unified the better to take its proper place among the nations (i.e. first), seems to have been widespread in the years before unification. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it influenced Mackinder, whether he acknowledged it or not.

I also doubt that it's coincidence that Roosevelt talked about the Midwest as "the heart of the nation" when he was in Wisconsin, a state with a very large German population (including my grandfather's family). There's a suspicious amount of overlap between where German-Americans ended up and the states we tend to call "the Heartland":

German population density in the US, 1870.

At the same time, these "Heartland" states were not filling up with English, Welsh and "British Americans", even though these were native speakers of English, resident in North America for many generations. Why would Roosevelt say that a people with shallower roots in America (than, e.g., the British Americans of New England) were "the heart of true American sentiment"?

If someone's looking for a project in American history, it might be worthwhile to look at German-language newspapers in the U.S., and find out if they regularly called the Midwest "Das Herz" or "Das Herzland" of America. Were Roosevelt and Turner using a turn of phrase that was already familiar to German-Americans? Was thinking of the Midwest as "the Heartland" something that started with German immigrants, and eventually became part of national-level thinking?

Comments

[wj]

German-language newspapers in the U.S.

Foreign language newspapers in the U.S.? And in the Heartland of the nation?!?!? Oh, the horror!

Oh well, at least they weren't Spanish language newspapers. After all, Germans may not be Anglo-Saxons, but at least they are Saxons.... ;-)

[Doctor Science]

I remember my grandmother (born in the US, but spoke only Swedish until she went to grammar school) talking about how, at least before 1916, girls she knew couldn't get jobs in the department stores (in Wausau, WI) because they didn't speak German. You had to speak English, too, but German was a required second language.

[Hartmut]

Interestingly, the author sees St.Louis as the heart of the heart (and thus the center of the whole empire*) located at the entry of that heartland and greets it as the capital city of THE (not 'a') new Germany beyond the ocean.

*Reich, while a few lines above he named the US a Freistaat (free state = republic). The term Reich is highly loaded in particular at the time this text was written with the old German Reich** gone and the new one far from yet getting founded. Germany tried to become a nation state (mutually exclusive with being a Reich which is defined as a state of multiple peoples dominated by one like e.g. Austria (Österreich = Eastern empire)) but stuck to the old term for less than rational reasons).

**It has been often said that the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was neither Roman, holy, German nor even an empire and thus the most misnamed state ever.

[Ned]

The whole quote is just one sentence. A rough translation:
So we meet Washington indeed not in the middle of the present borders of the United States, but in the middle of that Atlantic coast, which at its founding comprised the area of this country--but when now the center of gravity of the new Free Country more and more shifts from east to west, when in fact now the heartland of North America, the land between the Ohio, Missouri and the Canadian lakes, in which now the sons of the heart of Europe most densely settle, so now gains in significance, yes, blooms, there lies at the entry to this heartland, as actual heart point of the whole kingdom, Saint Louis, at the meeting of the two largest rivers of North America--may we in spirit greet it as the capitol of the new Germany on the other side of the ocean!

[Hartmut]

wj, even worse up to at least WW2 there were official versions of the US national anthem in dozens of languages, so people could join in meaningfully even without knowledge of English. I have seen the text of the Hawaiian version somewhere once (I think at David Neiwerts' Orcinus blog). These days there are proposals to make singing the anthem in anything but English a crime.

[Doctor Science]

Hartmut:

At the time Nagel was writing it was perfectly logical to think of St. Louis as "the capital of the West" -- it remained more populous than Chicago for some decades. It's not coincidence that St. Louis was built in the same spot as Cahokia, because it's the most obvious place to put a North American city that's not on a coast.

[wj]

up to at least WW2 there were official versions of the US national anthem in dozens of languages, so people could join in meaningfully even without knowledge of English.

Xenophobia has been a feature of U.S. culture from the very beginning. But it must be said that currently we are reaching new depths (one wouldn't want to say "heights") of hysteria. At least among some parts of the population.

[Doctor Science]

Hartmut and Ned:

Thank you for your translation help! Yes, that's what I thought he was implying: that the Germans moving to the American Midwest weren't fleeing from or rejecting Germany, they were going to make another Germany across the sea. I really wonder how widespread Nagel's attitudes were.

My own German great-grandparents were in the classic "fleeing Prussian enlistment" class, in the late 1860s.

[Hartmut]

Still, the heart is thus at the periphery of what he defines as the heartland. ;-)

[wj]

Not so much the periphery as the entry point. At least for those coming by sea and river transport.

[Keith Porter]

I recall that in the 80's TV miniseries "Amerika" the Soviet occupiers broke up the US into various regions with the midwest chirstened "Heartland."

[bobbyp]

My own German great-grandparents were in the classic "fleeing Prussian enlistment" class, in the late 1860s.

You mean to say the heartland was founded by draft dodgers? Welcome to America.

[Roger Moore]

@Doctor Science: It's not coincidence that St. Louis was built in the same spot as Cahokia

Not exactly, and in an interesting way. Cahokia is on the eastern side of the Mississippi, down in the American Bottom, while St. Louis is on the bluffs on the western side. That's because Cahokia might have been an important trading point, but it still had to raise all its food within a relatively short radius of the city, meaning it had to be located on good agricultural land. St. Louis had access to much better modes of transportation, so it could be located on the high bluffs, where it wasn't as easy to grow food but was much less prone to flooding.

[dr ngo]

Doc Science: Thanks muchly for this post, which in raising an interesting question I had scarcely considered before and then starting to explore some of its multitudinous ramifications is exactly the kind of thing for which I keep hanging around Obsidian Wings.

That and the sentences that run on too long, but I can supply those myself.

[liberal japonicus]

I'm a bit surprised by the map, I thought there were concentrations of German immigrants in Texas

And by the mid-1850s, New Braunfels was already the third largest town in Texas. It was exclusively German speaking. And most of the hill country throughout the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s developed into an almost exclusive German-speaking area.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=185348915

Perhaps in terms of numbers, they were outweighed, which accounts for the argument you are making, but I generally don't think of Pennsylvania or New York as part of the Heartland.

[Slartibartfast]

German population density in the US, 1870.

*1872

There are German immigrants practically everywhere. By now (as of 16 years ago, anyway), they've migrated to the Northern Heartland.

[Doctor Science]

Slarti:

The map was made in 1872, based on the 1870 census.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Deny it all you want, Hartmut, but those maps PROVE that Germany is working on a slow, patient plan to conquer the US.

Just like those Dutch, working on their land invasion of England.

Insidious.

[Lurker]

Snarki,

Why should the Dutch wish to invade England? They did that successfully in 1686. The invasion was so successful that even today, the Englishmen talk about glorious revolution instead of remembering in shame how their country was subjugated under foreign yoke by treason and successful hybrid warfare. :-)

[Hartmut]

Snarki, beware of the Donalds. Both Rumsfeld and Trump are descendants of rather recent German immigrants. And the master plan is still in the working: crossbreeding Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse in order to create an army of Duckmäusers (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckm%C3%A4user ).

[Toby Higbie]

Great to see more digging into the origins of "heartland." Quick check of the Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey turns up on "heartland"s but a few "heart of America"s: http://flps.newberry.org/.

Heart of America was used by Kansas City as a tourism slogan in the 1920s: https://flic.kr/p/neLceQ

[cleek]

i like how states that didn't exist for 100 years after the country was founded get to be the 'heart'.

by all rights, the title "heartland" should be something Boston, NYC and Philly challenge each other for.

Kansas? pshaw.

[wj]

It occurs to me to wonder. Has the concern about the importance of "the heartland" grown from unhappiness that "the Main Street of America" (i.e Route 66) is gone? (Removed from the US Highway System in 1985.)

Once Route 66 was an icon -- when I, and a lot of Baby Boomers not to mention our parents, were growing up. Its loss is symptomatic of, if actually unrelated to, the way the country has changed over our lifetimes.

And if that icon is gone, another is needed to take its place. Hence, "the heartland."

[Matt McIrvin]

Politically, the years in which "the heartland" emerged as an icon were also the years of urban crisis, high crime, and, above all else, great anxiety about race in the US. The time was ripe for a nostalgic myth of rural white America as a repository of forgotten, superior values.

[Slartibartfast]

The map was made in 1872, based on the 1870 census.

Ah. And now I must retract, and sit corrected.

[Doctor Science]

lj:

This map is absolute density of German-Americans. You can see relative density here, in the lower right map, and the Germans of Texas are prominent, while the Germans of NY/NJ are not.

[Adam Rosenthal]

What a terrific post. Worthy of Language Log.

[Iron City]

Family stories of pre and during WW I have my great grandfather on my mothers side being removed multiple times and finally banned for his own safety from the local drinking establishment in a western Pennsylvania town for telling everyone that the Kaisers boys would beat the snot out of the Yankees if they were so silly as to go do the English or French bidding. My grandmother was born in the US but not allowed to speak English in the house, only German. Her older brothers were already teenagers when the family moved to the US (port of entry Baltimore, Ellis Island was not the largest port of entry but does have a better PR department)and one was reputed to have gone back to the fatherland to participate on their side in WWI....can not find any evidence to support this though.