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SHGAPE Presidential Address: Mind the GAPE: Globality and the Rural Midwest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2020

Kristin Hoganson
Kristin Hoganson*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This essay, originally delivered as the SHGAPE Presidential Address in April 2019, takes as a starting point the fiftieth anniversary of William Appleman Williams's The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society. It finds that Williams's claims about the agrarian roots of the modern American empire remain an important corrective to imperial denial, including to the stubborn idea of the American heartland as a locus of isolationist impulses, as a place better characterized as endangered by global forces than as a wellspring of power. Broadening out beyond Williams's export-centered analysis, this essay highlights some of the multi-directional links that connected the rural heartland to the wider world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By turning a seemingly local history inside out, it draws attention to longer histories of settler colonialism, the import side of trade ledgers, transimperial solidarities, and the networks of anticolonial resistance that emerged in land grant colleges. In addition to reframing nationalist mythologies more precisely as white nationalist mythologies, it concludes that there is no going back to the heartland of myth because it never existed in the first place.

Type
SHGAPE Presidential Address
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 176 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2020

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References

Notes

1 “‘I Can Be More Presidential than Any President.’ Read Trump's Ohio Rally Speech,” Time, July 26, 2017. President Trump repeated his praise for President McKinley in his March 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) speech, saying: “And McKinley, prior to being president, he was very strong on protecting our assets, protecting our country.” “Remarks by President Trump at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference,” Mar. 2, 2019, www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-2019-conservative-political-action-conference (accessed Jan. 6, 2020). These positive evaluations of McKinley's record fit with those of Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, as conveyed in Rove, Karl, The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015)Google Scholar.

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6 There was a two-year gap in his service: the Sixty-Third Congress (1913–15). In 1921, William Brown McKinley took up a seat in the U.S. Senate, which he held until his death in 1926.

7 As William Cronon put it in a New York Times interview, the word “heartland” describes “a deep set of beliefs about places that somehow authentically stand for America.” In this usage, the term “heartland” does the political work of defining who is authentically from the middle—“who represents the core.” Cronon cited in Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy, “Where Is America's Heartland? Pick Your Map,” New York Times, Jan. 3, 2017.

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11 “Homeseeker's Excursions,” Prairie Farmer, Sept. 20, 1890, 605.

12 “Big Four,” Champaign Daily Gazette, Dec. 8, 1899. In 1892 an estimated 3,000 people left central Illinois for “the cheaper lands of the west.” Tenants were especially likely to emigrate as rents rose. Destler, Chester McArthur, “Agricultural Readjustment and Agrarian Unrest in Illinois, 1880–1896,” Agricultural History 21 (Apr. 1947): 104–16, 112Google Scholar.

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17 “Our Local Food Supplies,” Champaign Daily Gazette, Dec. 26, 1899.

18 “When You Buy for the Bedroom,” Urbana Courier, Apr. 6, 1910; “Champaign Girl Taken Ill,” Urbana Courier, Sept. 20, 1903.

19 J., “Champaign County,” Prairie Farmer, Jan. 20, 1877.

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45 Thomas, “A Missouri Farmer Argues,” 777.

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55 Marc Palen has shown how efforts to use reciprocity to gain market access in Latin America worried British exporters who feared exclusion from Latin American markets, thereby contributing to the imperial federation movement. Yet such rivalries between the United States and Britain did not foreclose cooperation around the world, stemming from feelings of racially and civilizationally based solidarity. Palen, Marc-William, “Protection, Federation and Union: The Global Impact of the McKinley Tariff Upon the British Empire, 1890-94,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38, no. 3 (2010): 395–418CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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61 “Hon. W. B. M'Kinley Is at ‘Home, Sweet Home,’” Urbana Courier, Oct. 3, 1905.

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63 “Danville Boy Is a Veteran,” Urbana Courier, June 20, 1903; “University News,” Urbana Courier, Nov. 8, 1906; “Joseph Prestine Home,” Urbana Courier, Dec. 14, 1906; “Urbana Boy Is Home from Army,” Urbana Courier, July 12, 1915. Not all soldiers made it home. See “Mother Lives in Urbana,” Urbana Courier, Mar. 11, 1903. On Philippine veterans stationed at the Chanute Air Base, see “Squadron D,” Air Puffs, Nov. 30, 1918, 1; Snyder, Thomas S., Chanute Field: The Hum of the Motor Replaced the Song of the Reaper, 1917–1921 (Paxton, IL: Chanute Technical Training Center: History Office, 1975), 57Google Scholar.

64 “Foreign Student's Career,” Daily Illini (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign student newspaper), May 24, 1907; “Cosmopolitan Club,” Daily Illini, Feb. 26, 1907; “Filipinos Entertain with Program of Native Stunts,” Daily Illini, Apr. 6, 1909. Some of these students also questioned the superiority of American-style scientific agriculture. W. S. Woo from Shanghai, China, worked on a classmate's farm one year, finding that the long days, arduous labor, lack of bathroom facilities, and home life did not testify well to American agricultural practice. W. S. Woo, “On an American Farm,” Bloomington, Illinois Bulletin, Apr. 27, 1912, folder: Agriculture—College, box 2 clipping file, 1912–1919, President Edmund J. James Papers, UIUC Archives; “Ninety-Two Foreign Students at University,” Urbana Daily Courier, Jan. 12, 1911.

65 On McKinley's move away from economic independence toward lowering tariff barriers through reciprocity as a means to advance U.S. economic expansion and an interdependent world economy, see Terrill, Tom E., The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy 1874–1901 (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 12Google Scholar.

66 As Williams put it, “The farmers who were quasi-colonials in the domestic economy thus became anticolonial imperialists in foreign affairs as a strategy of becoming equals at home.” Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, 25.