Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest

Midwestern History and Culture

by Jon C. Teaford

"Recommended for all who want to learn about the origins of the contemporary urban crisis." --Library Journal

Teaford writes a definitive history of the transformation of "America's heartland" into the "Rust Belt," chronicling the development of the cities of the industrial Midwest as they challenged the urban supremacy of the East, from their heyday to the trying times of the 1970s and '80s. The early part of this century brought wealth and promise to the heartland: automobile production made Detroit a boomtown, and automobile-related industries enriched communities; Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School of architects asserted the Midwest's aesthetic independence; Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg established Chicago as a literary mecca; Jane Addams made the Illinois metropolis an urban laboratory for experiments in social justice. Soon, however, emerging Sunbelt cities began to rob such cities as Cincinnati, Saint Louis, and Chicago of their distinction as boom areas, foreshadowing urban crisis.

Genres: History

300 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

Jon C. Teaford is Professor Emeritus in the department of history at Purdue University.

Reviews

[Thomas Ray]

AWAY DOWN THE ROAD
(Craig Johnson)


I remember back in ’33
We were all down in Tennessee,
Gettin’ by took all your time,
Away down the road.


Then word went out in ’41
Uncle Sam said get the big job done,
So we hired on at Willow Run,
Away down the road.


O, blow your whistle, up through the pines,
Out across the mountains to the Clinchfield Line,
Blow for better times, away down the road.


We came from the mountains and the damn coal mines,
Started into working on Henry’s line,
Eight hours steady and overtime,
Away down the road.


But the folks up north didn’t want us ’round,
So they moved us out to the edge of town,
Little salt box houses on bulldozed ground,
Away down the road.


O, blow your whistle, up through the pines,
Out across the mountains to the Clinchfield Line,
Blow for better times, away down the road.


Strong backs bending in the welder’s light,
Rivet guns pounding on a windy night,
Another rich man’s war, and a poor man’s fight,
Away down the road.


It’s punch in, punch out, make your time,
Hurry with the turret boys, you’re getting behind,
And the bombers roared low in the blacked out skies,
Away down the road.


O, blow your whistle, up through the pines,
Out across the mountains to the Clinchfield Line,
Blow for better times, away down the road.


You try to pay the rent, you try to save a buck,
Patching up a tire on a worn out truck,
City folks pass and holler "Hey Kentuck!"
Away down the road.


We said we’d move back south when the war geared down,
But your dreams die easy when the check comes round,
You’re caught between the mountains and a factory town,
Away down the road.


O, blow your whistle, up through the pines,
Out across the mountains to the Clinchfield Line,
Blow for better times, away down the road.


Now the plant’s shut down and the gates all closed,
New cars rusting in the rain and snow,
Let me die where the gun-stick laurel grows,
Away down the road.


And bury me back in Tennessee,
“He lived for a dollar” – let my tombstone read
“And died unknown in a strange country,”
Away down the road.

O, blow your whistle, up through the pines,
Out across the mountains to the Clinchfield Line, blow for better times,
Away down the road.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the only Jon Teaford book I've read that left me somewhat disappointed. Sure, he was able to compile a frightening amount of information and translate it into something of a narrative, and he's filled that narrative with great facts and anecdotes, but too often he succumbs to the lure of the US Census and ends up just printing tables and tables of figures. The forest gets lost for the counts of the trees.

Some of those statistics are thought-provoking. Teaford shows that while Northeastern cities like Boston and Providence were overwhelmingly Irish (they outnumbered Germans seven and twelve to one, respectively, in those towns), in Midwestern cities Germans outnumbered Irish two or four to one (somehow the Irish still held onto their public jobs though. They were 43% of Chicago policemen in 1900, typical Irish political genius). Everywhere in the Midwest Germans were the most powerful and numerous ethnic group, and this dominance surprisingly occurred in cities that were the MOST immigrant dependent of any in the country. While we tend to think of steamships docking at Ellis Island, most of those immigrants actually traveled inland. In 1890 Milwaukee of all places had the lowest number of native born whites with native parents of any city in the country, Chicago was third and Detroit fourth.

Also, contrary to all reports, the "Great Migration" of Southerners to the North after World War I was mainly white in the Midwest. In 1950 60% of all Southern born migrants in the Midwest were white, 40% black, almost the exact reversal of the Northeastern statistics, and this pattern continued to the 1970s. Furthermore, many polls, like one in Detroit in 1951, ranked poor white southerns as the most undesirable people in the city, far ahead of blacks in the vituperative response they elicited. The Appalachian whites were often discriminated against in hiring once the employer heard their accent, they were less likely to have indoor plumbing than blacks, and they were often forced into "hillbilly ghettos."

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book to me though was the section on the rise of Midwestern industry, specifically the auto industry. Carriages came first. Flint later became the center of GM because in the 1890s it was the home of Flint Wagon Works, which created Buick wagons, and William Durant, who ran the Durant-Dort Carriage Company before taking over Buick and then founding GM. South Bend Indiana was the home of Studebaker carriage company before they converted to automobiles. Steam engines were also important in this most railroad heavy of areas. Ransom E. Olds came from a family of steam engine manufacturers in Lansing, Michigan, but a Detroit financier told him to bring a new steam-powered carriage to Detroit, which then became Oldsmobile. That city's Leland-Faulconer machine shop made early Oldsmobile engines, before owner Henry Leland jumped ship to start his own company, Cadillac. It was all shockingly like Silicon Valley today, with companies converting and changing products constantly while engineers migrate jobs or find investors to fund their new companies. It's a wonderful story of virtuous cycles (before of course it all went horribly wrong, beginning as early as the 1920s).

There's also great stories on the early fight for state capitals (the once small town Springfield, Illinois promised to donate $50,000 of their own money to build state buildings if the capital was located there, despite losing a state-wide referendum on the capital's location. They succeeded with some legislative logrolling), the intense competition over State Deaf and Dumb and Lunatic Asylums (they were like baseball teams today), and the crusading socialists (like Milwaukee mayor Daniel Hoan) who made the "American heartland" the epicenter for radicalism in the country. I just wish Teaford focused on these stories instead of trying to cram every possible fact, date, and stat into one book.