The Heart of the United States

“ THE centre of population, now in Indiana, is traveling straight towards the middle point of Illinois. The centre of manufacturing has reached as yet only eastern Ohio, but is marching in a beeline for Chicago.” This, the Illinois boast, is perhaps with somewhat rare coincidence the truth; and that state, in more than one meaning, is soon to be the controlling Heart of the United States. Therefore it is of vital, as well as of curious interest for New Englanders — fast becoming mere onlookers in the national administration — to examine and, so to speak, to auscultate this organ which wall increasingly regulate the body politic.

Illinois drips fatness. Its black, oozy soil which eagerly devours one’s shoes; its corn that, refined by selective processes, almost exudes oil; its hogs that can scarcely see through the deep folds of their unctuous envelope; its beefsteaks, pork-chops, and corn-cakes, glistening from the ceaseless sizzling of the fryingpan; its very speech, with mouthed syllables and exaggerated r’s, — all are fat with a fatness almost indecent to the spare New Englander. Moreover the oleaginous carnival seems only just begun. Fertilizers and nitrogen-collectors are making the sand-dunes blossom; swampdraining and well-driving are equalizing conditions of moisture; rotation of crops is averting possible soil-exhaustion; while scientific breeding is enriching the corn at will and is blanketing the corn-fed hog with ever thicker layers of obesity.

To classify the huge industries of the stockyards — ventilated in the press if in no other way — as agriculture, is to place Illinois first among the farming states. To call them manufactures — and the people of Chicago generally do both — is to give her the rank of third among industrial commonwealths. She needs no forced construction of words, however, and she is not dependent upon Chicago alone, to put her in the forefront of manufacturing communities. For, having learned how to extract a high caloric from her low-grade coals; having begun, in dearth of other large mineral deposits, to coin her clays into those bricks, tiles, and cements which, with steel, are the essence of modern building; possessing lake, river, steam, and electric transportation uninterrupted by any mountain or desert barriers, she is creating enormous enterprises which will soon place her at the very head.

Illinois takes toll, too, upon most of the main highways of America. In the wide area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Rocky Mountains she stands at the middle point. The raw and manufactured products of the earth — north, south, east, and west — must, in our seething traffic, surge largely through her territory; she is, and from geographical necessity must always be, the chief sluiceway for this ceaseless flood of things. More than this, the multitudinous sea of restless Americans — old ones and new ones — pours into and through her avenues of travel. Unlike New York and Boston, mere filters through which the immigrant stream rushes or trickles, leaving behind the scum and dregs of alien peoples, Illinois is a smelting-pot in which the stronger and more active foreigners are fused with one another and with the older stock into real American citizenship.

The established population of Illinois, moreover, is already a remarkable alloy of North and South; for, from Chicago down to a line passing irregularly through its centre, the state is of Yankee origin, having been settled mainly by New England pioneers; but from the Ohio River north to that irregular line, the Illinois stock is distinctively southern. The “ Egyptians,” as they call the natives of Cairo, Thebes, and other grotesque namesakes of Old Nile, are in looks, in dialect, in habits of thought, and in instincts and traditions, markedly of the South.

An immigrant who gets as far from the coast as Illinois is almost certain to become Americanized, since the journey to the Atlantic is too great to be taken often, and there can be, therefore, little of that sailing back and forth which makes the immigrant of the seacoast cities frequently a denationalized being, severed from the old world, but not yet joined to the new. But in the smaller cities and in the towns of Illinois, as well as in those of other Middle-West States, amalgamation has so far progressed that one may say, Here is social and political America as it will be when immigration shall have become normal, when the unsettled spaces shall have been filled up, when the face of substantially the whole country shall have become thick-sown with towns joined to one another and to the great cities by every form of present and yet undiscovered means of intercourse.

Such is the Illinois of to-day. In primeval times, however (that is, about forty years ago), she was as lean as she now is fat. The state has not simply gained materially, — she has been regenerated; she is a Cinderella translated from the ash-heap to the palace among states. Less than thirty years ago Illinois was a place disheartened. New Englanders, tired of attempting to raise crops on stone-heaps, had gone hopefully out to this frontier where a pebble is a curiosity. Southerners, set adrift by war or averse to working with emancipated blacks, had come North to make fortunes out of corn. The Easterners, however, still clung to the primitive agricultural methods of New England, while the Mississippians tried to cultivate cereals in the same way as cotton. The breaking up of so much virgin land, moreover, opened a very Pandora’s box of miasmic fevers. A people who knew nothing of the habits of the mosquito fought the “ chills,” as they Indiscriminately called the fevers, with whiskey and quinine. Two-thirds of the population of the Southern Illinois bottom-lands died, in those pioneer days, of malaria and of diseases which found ready entrance into constitutions weakened by its assaults. The chills, the bad whiskey, and the adulterated quinine, produced a type little more ambitious than the Georgia “ Cracker.” The once active Yankee, weakened by malaria, depressed by the flat monotony, contaminated by the shiftlessness of his poorwhite neighbors, became even more inert than they; and thus was produced the typical, hideous Illinois landscape of about 1880.

Treeless distances were broken only by rare bits of “ timber,” or by hedges of the melancholy osage orange, planted as breaks against the frightful winds. Roads that were impassable for a third of the year, mountainous with ruts for another third, and whirling dust-breeders during the remainder, sprawled untidily in miscellaneous directions. There were no bridges to speak of; but there were fearful mud-fords called “ slews,” into which one plunged at a terrifying angle from the hither brink, through which the natives urged the horses or oxen by merciless beatings and incredible oaths, and out of which it seemed, as in Pilgrim’s Progress, impossible for such sinners ever to emerge.

The so-called towns, clinging here and there to the single-track railroads, were mere huddles of one-storied shacks, pretending to be two-storied by the palpable device of a clapboarded false front. At long distances from these towns, and from one another, would be found a house, single-roomed, with a cock-loft, and set upon stilts to form a shelter for the pigs. Its front steps were a slanting board, like the approach to a hen-roost, and it was swept inside and out, above and below, by every blast from heaven. Outside the door, just where the sinkspout emptied, would be dug a shallow well, its water so rich in lime as actually to taste of it, and as a consequence so hard that a person who should spend his whole life in Illinois would be a sedimentary deposit of the dust and mud of all his days. Scattered around were a few sheds to give pretense of shelter to the illkept cattle; scattered still farther around, and shelterless, were agricultural machines, once costly, but now rusted and practically useless; and spreading away as far as one could see was an ocean of the Illinois staple, corn.

Were the harvest promising, however, along came the chinch-bug, the armyworm, or the locust, to eat it clean, or the prairie fire to burn it. Were it brought actually to the point of a fine harvest, there would be no demand, or the rickety railroads would be so choked with freight that the grain could not reach a market, and must be used for household fuel. Working listlessly in those fields were gaunt men, shaking with “chills;” in that shanty were a gaunt woman and many cadaverous children, also shaking with chills, the lives of all of them a seemingly hopeless struggle against the elements, sickness, poor food, and the uncertainty of “ craps.”

So far as they could navigate the prairie and the “ slews,” the people were hospitable, and at harvest-time the neighbors over a wide circle would, in turn, help each the other with his crops. At funerals, too, — almost the sole diversion, — friends and relatives would come from far and near, and would encamp for a fortnight upon the bereft, eating in melancholy festivity the funeral fried meals, Religion, like everything else, was rugged and strong, for the pains of eternal damnation were far more conceivable than the blessings of paradise. Schools were scarce and doctors scarcer. In short, there was found in Illinois at that time frontier life with none of the excitement which comes from the dangers of exploration, but with all the discomfort arising out of remoteness from even the rudiments of civilized existence.

What has transformed the feverstricken, mortgage-ridden, and povertyblasted Illinois of the eighties into the thriving, hustling heart of the United States ? Two things: modern science, and real, effective education. Draining the fields and discovering the proximate cause of malaria practically destroyed the chills and fever; extending and modernizing railroad and steamship lines gave ready access to the markets of the world; the telephone put an end to the horrible isolation and loneliness of the farmhouse; the interurban trolley-line made pathways over the muddy prairies and bottomless “ slews; ” cement manufacturing enabled the smallest hamlet to build sidewalks and even to pave streets; while, as for education, the farmers have been systematically and wisely instructed how to make farming pay.

This education of the farmer has been carried on in at least two ways. At the time when the face of Illinois was that of grim desolation, certain shrewd investors — notably some from Great Britain — bought up, for the proverbial song, great areas of these poorly tilled farms from their ague-stricken owners, and began to cultivate them in wholesale, scientific ways. So large grew these foreign holdings — in some cases embracing the greater part of a county — that the state government became alarmed and passed legislation forbidding the inheritance of land excepting by bona fide citizens of Illinois. These and other extensive farms, however, all skillfully and very profitably developed, served, and still serve, as wellappreciated object lessons to the lesser owners, and have done much to revolutionize the farming methods of the entire Middle West.

The main work of education, however, has been performed by the state, entering the field as a practical teacher of scientific farming. The State University and Agricultural Experiment Station together began the work, fifteen or twenty years ago, of finding out what might be the best crops for Illinois, how those crops could most profitably be raised, in what ways they might be increased; and then, of teaching all this to the adult farmer through farmers’ institutes, local experiment stations, and demonstration trains, and to the farmer’s son through courses in agriculture in the University.

The State University cannot be acquitted of all ulterior motive in this; on the contrary, it deliberately developed this sort of education in order to catch the farmers’ votes. For years that State University had been going to the capitol, humbly begging for ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars, and finding it almost impossible to secure even that pittance from rural members who could see nothing for them, directly or indirectly, in the University. But when Dr. Andrew S. Draper was made president, he and some of his colleagues among the trustees and faculty determined to win the farmer vote by proving that the University could put millions of dollars into the pockets of the farmers by increasing the yield of corn, by teaching how to utilize swampy and sandy lands, by improving the breeds of cattle, by developing dairying, etc. Nobly the University fulfilled its self-imposed task, and generously did the farmer-legislature respond with appropriations, so that today it gives millions where formerly it begrudged ten-thousands.

Other elements, of course, have entered in. The rapid growth of the University of Chicago has spurred the country districts into a rivalry most profitable to the State University at Urbana; and a skillful type of advertising, appealing to the average Westerner’s love of bigness, has been used with consummate skill. Whatever the means, however, — and they have all been honorable, if more breezily Western than those to which the East is accustomed,— and whatever some of the ill effects upon the University, the results in the state as a whole have been little short of magical. For the University, in its campaign for votes and funds, has not stopped at the farmers. It has sedulously catered, too, in the good meaning of that word, to the manufacturers. The engineering side has grown even faster than the agricultural; and its schools, housed in a number of well-designed buildings, are fast taking high rank. These schools are making themselves directly useful to the state, among many other ways, by conducting experiments upon the low-grade coals of Illinois, burning them with every sort of grate-bar, under every conceivable condition, and in all kinds of mixtures, in order to determine in what ways they may be made to produce the most power at the least expense. They are carrying on an elaborate series of tests upon concrete, plain and reënforced, to ascertain the value of the various mixtures and the behavior of this new building material under all manner of demands. And in coöperation with the Illinois Central Railroad and the interurban railways, the University maintains two elaborately fitted dynamometer cars, running them for long distances, and placing the results at the disposition of the state.

What have been some of the effects, from the standpoint of a casual Easterner, of the enormous and comparatively sudden development of this great, pivotal state ? The characteristic most obvious, as has been said, is that of omnipresent fatness, and of the materialistic attitude of mind which such plenteousness breeds. Fertility, be it of fields or of beasts, is a topic which never wearies, and which makes one feel at last that the very sows and cornstalks are in a conscious race for fecundity. The stockyards are proudly shown, not as a triumph of modern ingenuity, but as a spectacle of animals by the acre. The increased oil of the selectively bred corn is exhibited, not as an intellectual conquest of the chemist, but as a feeder of hogs still fatter than before. Even the frenzy of the wheat-pit, and the fortune-hunting schemes which rob the poor of their savings, are attempts to make money breed faster than it has any right, or real power, to do.

The dominant note in conversation, therefore, is that of gain, — gain in acreage, gain in yield, gain in income; and to one who looked no further it would appear that the mass of the people are sordid and materialistic, are mere worshipers of the fast-waxing dollar. It. is this superficial materialism, with its fungusgrowth of hideousness, that makes the New England traveler condemn, in large part, Chicago. A lake-front unsurpassed in possibilities of beauty is usurped by the tracks and purlieus of an ill-kept railroad. Business streets that, ten years after the great fire, promised to be almost grand in their width and perspective, are now mere smoky tunnels under the filthdripping gridirons of the elevated railways. State Street, which then had the elements of a noble main avenue, affronts one with the unspeakable lines of cast-iron department stores. Palaces on certain avenues are cheek-by-jowl with dilapidated hovels; the semi-detached villas farther out of town are, many of them, wretchedly bedraggled; and the whole impression left by large areas is a mingling of interminable clothes-lines and flaming, peeling bill-boards. The city’s buildings are black with the smoke blanketing the sky; factories, each more hideous than the other, intrude almost everywhere; and the vile river, only partly cleansed by the drainage canal, makes even suicide abhorrent. One does not hesitate thus to scourge Chicago, for she has no excuse. She cannot plead newness, for she is no younger than Cleveland, which is beautiful; she cannot plead swiftness of growth, for the magnificent city of Berlin has developed quite as rapidy as she.

Leaving Chicago, however, — and the city has annexed so much territory that it takes an hour or two to do so, — and getting out upon the uncontaminated prairie, one realizes that this vast area of farms and towns and small cities is a very different thing from the Babel metropolis; and it is this rural Illinois which is the true flesh and blood of the great heart of the United States. The Atlantic seaboard states, with the ocean in front of them and the mountains behind them, with Europe and South America and the islands of the sea feeding them with ideas more or less new to the United States, will never wholly lose their individuality. The Pacific states, for like reasons, will have distinctiveness for all time to come. But the enormous basin between the Appalachians and the Rockies will, as it consolidates, grow, like its monotonous plains, more and more indistinguishable, the one section from the other, until it will think and act and live substantially as a unit, dominating by its bulk and the vastness of its homogeneity the political life of the United States. As the advance type of what this interior empire is to be, — indeed as the dominant pioneer which will largely impose its own characteristics upon that extensive area, — Illinois should have the careful study of all thoughtful Americans.

The first characteristic which strikes one in the Illinois people is their friendliness. It is said of the Australians that the question of ancestry is tabooed in polite society, lest investigation hark back to Botany Bay. While the Middle Westerners have no such fear, while most of them, did they choose, could go back to the purest Southern and New England strains, so many of them have come “ out of the everywhere ” that they do not stop to inquire who was a man’s grandfather, but, on the contrary, bid him welcome without even waiting to be introduced. The old hospitality of pioneer days has survived, and opens the house without apology for its shortcomings, or lamentations that it is not more fit. This kind of hospitality, unfortunately, is becoming obsolete in Massachusetts, where to-day, in order to see his neighbors, a man must put on evening dress, play bridge, and eat caterers’ ice-cream.

A second thing which impresses a New Englander is the restlessness and abruptness born of lifelong “ hustle.” The people of Illinois are in too much of a hurry to mind the little niceties of etiquette; they say the blunt thing because it takes less time than courtesy; their behavior in the hours of supposed relaxation is that which the Massachusetts man keeps for his office, where he has to be brusque in order to get through. This gives everything in Illinois an air of ceaseless business, and leads to the unwarranted conclusion that all Westerners (as some of them do) sleep in their working clothes.

A third characteristic of the people of the Middle West is their large view of things, or, to speak more accurately, their way of looking at things in the large. Because of the habit of ploughing fields by the square mile and of killing pigs by the carload, the man of Illinois deals in commercial ideas by the yard, not, as Easterners do, by the quarter-inch. He plays for high stakes in business, and if, as is likely, he loses, he plays again. Whether he is up or whether he is down seems to matter little, provided he keeps in the game. This sweeping habit of mind, however, is fatal to fine analysis; and while, for example, the Illinois teacher is ready to try splendid, comprehensive ex periments in the schools and colleges, while he handles the problems of education as Napoleon handled strategy, he is lacking in intellectual discrimination and finesse. As a result of this habit of mind, most of these Middle Westerners seem to the Easterner superficial and inclined to accept what Gelett Burgess so cleverly calls “ Bromidioms ” for revelations of new truth.

What strikes one most startlingly, however, in the people of Illinois is their lack of imagination. This, moreover, is a fundamental deficiency. They are a plains people, with no mountains to vary their view-point, no changes of altitude to foster modifications of temperament, no salt breezes to make their brains tingle, no expanse of ocean, no beetling cliffs, no roar of breakers, no play of color upon the sea, no awfulness of tempest on ocean and on mountain, none of those natural phenomena — except perhaps cyclones — which are absolutely essential, not only to the making of poets, but also to the developing of the humbler imaginations of Tom, Dick, and Harry. Of course many of them travel,— journeying they treat in the same large way as business, thinking nothing of traveling four hours by train to buy a spool of thread, — but the rank and file of them do not go far enough from home ever to see the ocean or to climb a respectable hill.

There is, therefore, and always must be, over this vast central United States this limitation of experience which places the natives, figuratively as well as literally, upon a lower plane than mountain and coast-dwellers. They have some, and will have more, idealism; but it is the idealism of doing things on a large scale, not that of seeking to attain such perfection as only the highly developed imagination is able to portray. Their ideals for America are, and probably always will be, sturdy but commonplace, — not like those, therefore, of the men who conceived the Declaration of Independence and framed the Constitution.

Because of these fundamental qualities, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Cannon (from Danville, Illinois) are to these Middle Westerners the greatest and wisest among statesmen. Both these leaders are honest, like the average of men in Illinois; both are “ hustlers” like them; the one is nervously busy, the other is shrewdly canny, like them; both are blunt, like them; both are fighters, as those men of Illinois have had to be; both lack imagination, and therefore utter long-accepted platitudes with the sonority of new-found wisdom; and, like those folk of the Middle West, both are genuine democrats, accepting men for what they are, and liking them, not because they had good grandfathers, but because they seem in a fair way to be good grandfathers. Political leaders of the Roosevelt and Cannon type are doubtless to be, therefore, the very highest which we can ever again reach in statesmanship, and democracy of the Illinois type is to be the standard of the twentieth century.

New England must recognize this, accept it, and govern herself accordingly. She must appreciate, not only that she never again can take that leading part in the councils of the nation which she held for a hundred years, but also that she must never expect to see the kind of democracy which was the ideal (however inadequately reached) of the Atlantic states when they were the leaders of America. The democracy of the government is henceforth to be that of the great Central Plain, a democracy much more widespread but far less fertile of great men and of high aspirations than was that of the first century of our national life. Mediocrity is in the political saddle; and the business, therefore, of the educational, as distinguished from the political leader is to provide that type of common schooling which shall tend to uplift mediocrity rather than, as is the usual result of our present methods, to perpetuate mediocrity, and to discourage even the gifted youth.

Hence the rôle of Massachusetts, with her history, her climate and topography, her lead as the best educated and the most “ otherwise-minded ” (that is to say, the most uplifted above mediocrity) state of the Union, with her inheritance of sea-power and her nearness to Europe, — her special rôle under the new order is to develop, through the intelligent education of the many and through the special training of the few, the exceptional man, whether in literature, art. science, statecraft, commerce, or manufacturing.

Massachusetts cannot compete with the thousand-acre farms of Illinois, in that species of agriculture; but she can hold her own and can excel, even with her tiny holdings, by stimulating that intensive farming which makes an acre of swampland yield more in point of value than a square mile of prairie. She cannot manufacture in a large way, as the West and South can, close as both are to the raw material, and accustomed as the former is to dealing with large propositions; but she can make the finer and the finest things, most of which now come from abroad, but all of which might readily be fashioned within the four boundaries of the commonwealth.

Massachusetts can solve the hard problems of nurturing and training the most highly skilled workmen, if she will utilize the energy of the men and women who are eager and fit to make a sound study of that vital question. The state can produce, not only great artisans, but great artists, if she will but give that encouragement which has always been essential to their flowering. And those great colleges and schools for which the commonwealth is justly famous can keep themselves at the front as leaders and inspirers if they will be true to that idealism which, from its very founding, has been the life and soul of Massachusetts.

The deservedly large and phenomenally growing state universities of the Middle West will, fortunately, press these Massachusetts institutions hard; but they can never catch up if the education of the commonwealth keeps going too. These western universities will lose breath in the running, for two reasons: first, because they must always keep an eye upon politics and must often do, not what they know to be educationally right, but what they are certain the people will demand, — and that people, as has been seen, are governed by mediocrity. Secondly, because these state universities must dovetail in with the common-school system and must admit practically every publicschool boy or girl who can show a very moderate proficiency. Therefore no statesupported university in a democracy can ever compete on equal terms with one privately endowed, which has none to placate excepting the alumni, and which may weed out its student body just as far as it thinks necessary to maintain the highest standards of efficiency.

Massachusetts, however, has many things to learn of the opulent, optimistic Middle West, and it is greatly to be wished that every citizen of the Bay State might spend at least one year of his early manhood in such a state as Illinois. Indeed, our educational system will not be complete until it is made possible for a youth seeking a higher education to take his college and professional courses partly in the East and partly in the West, the leading institutions having put themselves, for that purpose, on some common basis of scholarship requirement and each having consented to give, like the state law, “ due faith and credit ” to the educational work of all the others.

Could the great bulk of “ leading ” Massachusetts men be induced to make even a temporary acquaintance with the spirit of the people of the Middle West, they would discover that the Hub of the Solar System has been moved, and that an attempt to make a close corporation, capitalized upon ancient prestige, of Bostonianism is to invite commercial, industrial, and intellectual dry-rot. Too many native Bostonians are of the mind of the aristocratic lady from Cambridge who, late in life, was induced to spend a few weeks at Gloucester, and who announced to her amazed friends, on her return, that she had met there quite a number of excellent persons whose names even she never before had heard. Massachusetts men, too, were they to go West occasionally, would learn the merits — as well as the demerits — of “ hustling,” and would perhaps acquire some of that simple, hearty friendliness which so lubricates the machinery of social intercourse.

There are, however, more specific and important things for Massachusetts to learn from Illinois. She ought, above all, to adopt the well-considered plan — almost magical in its effects — of scientifically exploiting her resources, and teaching her farmers, merchants, manufacturers, importers, and exporters, what the state is capable of doing. It is a trite saying that only a few of the possibilities of a human being are developed in the ordinary course of a man’s or woman’s life. It is still more true, however, that but the merest beginning has been made in the development of the resources of Massachusetts or of any other state of the Union.

The forests, in a political division so small and so densely peopled as is Massachusetts, would seem hardly worth consideration; yet, were even the rudiments of the science of forestry comprehended by the farmers, immense areas of land, now waste, might be made to yield, every thirty or forty years, a crop of great value. The applications of chemistry to farming have so revolutionized this industry that — including these forest areas — there is scarcely a foot of the bleak soil of Massachusetts which might not be made profitable. Her conformation provides hundreds and thousands of little water-courses, which, properly utilized, might be made, by electrical transmission, large sources of manufacturing power.

The Bay State has no coal-beds; but she has enormous areas of peat, to utilize which is now a theoretical, and soon will be a practical, possibility. With her many cities and large towns, and with the growth of rapid transit, dairying, market-gardening, and the raising of fowls may be indefinitely extended, with increasing profit to both producer and consumer. Above all, with a long seaboard protected by encircling capes and presenting many safe harbors, with ample water-powers, with a comparatively dense population providing, together with immigration, an abundant supply of potential workmen, and with her long history of manufacturing prowess, Massachusetts should always remain great among industrial states.

For such a development of her resources, the commonwealth needs to study and heed the example of the Mid dle West: that of educating her citizens in the fundamental principles of production and distribution, and in the application of those principles to the requirements of modern life. The world to-day is a world of applied science; and the line of development to be followed — especially in such states as Massachusetts — is that of the application of science to agriculture, to manufacturing, to commerce, to transportation, and, not least, to education. The states of the Middle West — many of them daughters of Massachusetts — have clearly pointed out the way; it is for Massachusetts to profit by their example and to recover, in leadership along these modern lines, the educational prestige which, in the ancient and now outworn paths of learning, she for so many years maintained.