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The Woes and Potential of the Midwest

Richard C. Longworth has written a book titled: Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism. This sobering and provocative book paints a fairly break picture of the Midwest. Salvation, according to Longworth, will require several things to happen, including (a) the creation of a regional identity and (b) embracing regional cooperation. The latter will require Midwesterners and their leaders to stop thinking so much in terms of state boundaries, and other artificial jurisdictional boundaries.  He points to the success of "the South" during the past 30 years or so; and the role played by the Southern Growth Policies Board as the type of entity that would make sense for the Midwest. 

Caught in the Middle: America's Heatland in the Age of Globalization

Have you heard about Chicago Tribune columnist Richard C. Longworth's latest book, Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalization? Here's what the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has to say - In Caught in the Middle, Longworth chronicles the many ways in which globalization is transforming the Midwest – not only its economy but its educational system, its cities and small towns, its farms and factories, its politics and its very future.

The Midwest is the great swath, from Ohio through Iowa, which has relied on farming and heavy manufacturing to survive. Globalization has turned both upside down.

Some cities like Chicago thrive as global cities. Others, like Cleveland and Detroit, crumble. Workers in old factory towns like Dayton, Muncie, Galesburg and Newton see their factories go and wonder what they will do next. The family farmers who supported the Midwest’s galaxy of farm towns have gone away. Midwestern states struggle so hard to support the workers and communities left behind by globalization that they have no time, money or political will to deal with a globalized future.

There are bright spots – not only cities like Chicago or Minneapolis but small towns, like Warsaw, Indiana, which leads the world in high-level manufacturing of artificial hips and other orthopedic devices. Peoria is recovering and so is Des Moines. Cities and states are working to make bioscience and nanoscience the industries of the future. The best news is the arrival of immigrants – both PhDs from India and unskilled laborers from Mexico. Towns and cities that are magnets for immigrants thrive: those that aren’t shrivel.

Caught in the Middle is, as Longworth writes, “a report from the front line of America’s new economy.” One of the first books to deal with the Midwest as a region, it investigates why the world-is-flat dream remains out of reach for much of America’s heartland.

Longworth argues that the individual Midwestern states, locked within borders drawn more than 200 years ago, are too small, parochial and incompetent to compete in a globalized world. Each Midwestern state faces the same problems, but each is dealing with them on its own – and failing. Midwestern thinking is dominated by state schools and Midwestern politics is dominated by state governments. Instead, the Midwest needs a regional approach – new alliances across states lines between cities, businesses, workers and universities to set a regional agenda and reach regional solutions to the economic and political challenges of this new era.

This is a Midwestern problem – but a national one, too. As Longworth writes, “the Midwest has always been the bellwether for American social issues, economic trends and political movements. What happens to America, happens first in the Midwest.”