The Fifties

by David Halberstam

size. As a region it was, wrote Graham Hulton, “surrounded, shielded, [and] insulated” by the rest of the country. The Midwesterners were supremely confident that theirs was the more American culture, one less imitative of the English and less sullied by foreign entanglements and obligations than those in the East. To them the Midwest was “the center of the American spirit,” in Colonel Robert McCormick’s phrase. The people back East, they believed, were essentially parasitic—they went around making money, while the good Midwesterners, purer of spirit but dirtier of hand, went around making products for the Midwest. Those resentments were deep and bitter and they were not unlike the resentments of people in a distant colony toward the leaders back in the colonial power. Some of it was the region’s ethnicity, and a wariness of events in Europe on the part of the people who had settled the Midwest and were glad to leave Europe behind them; some of it came from Scandinavians who were essentially pacifist; some of it came from German-Americans sympathetic to Germany; some of the region’s Irish were anti-British and some were Germans who did not want to fight on the side of the British, and some were Poles did not want to fight alongside Russia. The leading voice of Midwestern isolationism was Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, a paper that modestly referred to itself as “The World’s Great