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The Nation's Pulse
The Heart of the Heart of the Country
A dignified calm in the face of economic stress.
This summer found me traveling into the heart of the heart of the country, the place of my birth, the great American Midwest. This is not a journey of dark despair, notwithstanding the collapse of manufacturing in the region, but one of encounter with a dignified calm amidst economic stress, uncertainty, and life’s slings and arrows.
Business, a priestly ordination (my first), and a bit of vacation, drew me to Missouri, Wisconsin and Michigan this summer with quick stops in Ohio and Indiana.
The first thing that strikes me is the number of American-made automobiles on the roads, a big change from Washington, D.C. and its suburbs where I have resided these past nine years. Stopping for a red light, say, in Bethesda, Maryland or McLean, Virginia, you are struck by the fact that very few residents of the Beltway drive American vehicles, including this writer.
The second thing that strikes me is the absence of many immigrants, although I found a robust Hispanic community in Milwaukee, a significant contingent from the Middle East in Dearborn, and a lively contingent of Bosnians in South St. Louis, my hometown. Evidently, the Bosnians have cornered the market on house painting in River City.
Generally, these Muslim immigrants are well received since they “keep up their property,” as old-time German-American burghers might say. However, early on, their tendency to slaughter and smoke animals in their backyards did cause quite a stir, resulting in some new ordinances, or so I am told.
In the Midwest, as in other parts of the country, there are still Anglos working in food service and happy for the opportunity, although you can find Russians aplenty working in hotels and motels, say in Marquette, Michigan.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, 100% of the jobs in food service, hotels, landscaping, retail, and other miscellaneous occupations are immigrants, reflecting a high-end job market in which even middle-class teenagers are not commonly employed in summer jobs. I do not exaggerate. This results, no doubt, from the continued growth of the federal government and its supporting contractor base. Nine-eleven came along, and the federal government expanded. Then, the Great Recession came along, and it expanded some more.
As a friend of mine noted wryly, Washington is a good place in which to ride out a recession. It is also one reason why denizens of the Beltway may be losing touch with the rest of America. But let’s not go there.
St. Louis, my hometown, is similar to Baltimore, another border-state city, with a kind of binary demographic of mostly Caucasian- and African-Americans. St. Louis has completely lost its French connections and most of its German heritage, although it has an astounding number of world-class Italian restaurants which rival much larger cities.
You can still find a good German restaurant or three in Milwaukee, and the Third Ward is a hopping, exciting area just south of downtown.
Historians used to call Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee the German Triangle. My Irish-American grandfather came from Cincinnati, married a St. Louis German-American woman. I married a Irish-German-American woman from Milwaukee, hitting the third point of the triangle. Irish-German inter-marriage is another interesting aspect of Midwestern culture.
There are still a lot of wealthy people, say, in Ladue and River Hills, suburbs of St. Louis and Milwaukee, respectively, and on the Gold Coast of Michigan, i.e., the Lake Michigan coast, where Detroit, St. Louis, and Chicago money still vacations, along with the very, very wealthy hanging out in Harbor Springs on Little Traverse Bay in the northwestern part of the state. Cruise ships used to bring summertime residents from all over the Great Lakes region. Today, they can fly their own airplanes into the local airport on Friday night, spend the weekend with the fam, and fly out Monday morning. The town is manic about historic preservation and has a draconian building code which mandates that even new homes are authentic replicas of 19th century Victorian mansions. But cost is no object for most of the residents there.
That said, Michigan City, Indiana, situated near the magnificent dunes at the southern end of Lake Michigan, a short commute from Chicago, struggles to gentrify itself. My wife and I had the strange experience of patronizing a discount mall in the shadow of a cooling tower for a nearby nuclear power plant. Nevertheless, this strange juxtaposition is a sign of progress in a community that has seen very hard times.
I gave a talk to a business environmental meeting at the Lake of the Ozarks, with 1,150 miles of shoreline snaking through numerous Ozark valleys and hills. It still draws in vacationers and time-sharers with many boats, even “cigarette boats,” party barges, and jet skis in tremendous quantities. This is not a controlled Army Corps of Engineers’ lake, but one developed by a private electric utility company years ago, which put a dam on the beautiful Osage River, creating a Wild West real estate development boom. I do not think you could ever see more boats crowded into one place outside the Strait of Gibraltar.
You don’t have to visit Detroit, Flint, or Saginaw, Michigan to see the signs of economic distress in the Midwest. The auto industry is almost wiped out in Missouri, once ranked with Michigan and Ohio in auto production. Anheuser-Busch is now a Belgian operation, and the heyday of the F-16 and McDonnell-Douglas is only a memory. Like Pittsburgh, St. Louis focuses on health care, education, transportation, and the Cardinals (doing much better than the Pirates, praise God). Like Michigan it is not a Right-to-Work state and suffers for it dearly in comparison to Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, and other points south.
About the Author
G. Tracy Mehan, III served at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the administrations of both Presidents Bush. He is a consultant in Arlington, Virginia, and an adjunct professor at George Mason University School of Law.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (23) | Leave a comment
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Kitty| 8.11.10 @ 7:34AM
"denizens of the Beltway may be losing touch with the rest of America."
"May be losing touch"? Oh, Mr. Mehan, those denizens had lost touch before they had even settled into the DC cocktail circuit.
Deborah D | 8.11.10 @ 7:40AM
Lovely, Mr. Mehan. As a midwesterner myself (hailing from just 60 miles east of St. Louis in farm country, IL), I do agree with your assessment. My sad, little hometown is a hollow shell of its former self, but the people are still welcoming, hard-working and continuing to go with the flow.
Lovely story about your wife's relative's ordination. Thank you for the uplift.
dac| 8.11.10 @ 9:30AM
Lovely, yes, but lovely like a pretty funeral--the midwest is dying of multiple, fatal self-inflicted wounds, and while there are pockets of decency and wisdom, the leadership of most midwestern states is grotesque, bankrupt, and kleptocratic. Illinois being the worst example. Why any productive person or business would locate anywhere in the midwest by choice is mysterious to me. Most of the remaining businesses are there because of historical inertia, and are, slowly but surely, leaving (e.g., Caterpillar, the entire non-federal auto industry).
Soon enough the midwest may need to choose whether to join the rump Socialist States of America (New England & the mid-Atlantic down to the Potomac), Canada or the seceding states, which will be led by Texas and joined by most others (call them the Constitutional States of America, or CSA).
This may or may not come about peaceably. And midwesterners aren't armed well enough, nor do they have enough military bases, to resist Maobama's praetorian guards.
I'll stay in the South, thanks very much. It's hot as hell and they can't make a bratwurst to save their lives (except, I hear, in New Braunfels, TX), but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
ShortNSweet| 8.11.10 @ 9:31AM
Lovely story. Thanks for your assessment of the heart of the heart of the country. I live in the south and your assessment fits where I live too. You left me with a quiet calm. Thanks Mr. Mehan.
Dan Hirsch| 8.11.10 @ 9:58AM
Tracy;
There is no nuclear power plant near Michigan City. The hyperboloid cooling tower you saw is part of the coal fired Michigan City power plant. It is owned by the parent company of the historic local utility company, Northern Indiana Public Service Co. The nearest nuclear plant is 30 miles up the coast in Michigan, it has no cooling tower. It uses Lake Michigan waters to dissipate its excess heat-as Michigan City used to, but now to "save the Lake" they built the 400' tall hyperboloid monstrosity that dominates the entire skyline around Michigan City.
Generally, the fishing is excellent near the warm water discharges of power plants, coal, gas, or nuclear.... Kind of like the caribou population blooming near the warm Trans Alaska pipe line..
Petronius| 8.11.10 @ 10:32AM
I'm one of the hand full of the hard shell krauts left in South St. Louis. The arch conservative white working class is dead. North side residents move here fleeing the gangs in their old neighborhoods. There's one heritage company left downtown; Peabody Coal. And City Hall thinks the answer is government programs, gay bars and boutiques. The old parochial insularity was bad enough. But add to it the current low rent Bohemian mindset with it's economic illiteracy and hatred of commerce and view the results: lots of empty space, vacant housing, and the signs: CLOSED. When people from outside the state ask how the decline started, I get dumped on for telling the truth; Liberal social engineering. Judge Hungate slit this cities throat when he issued that forced bussing decree. And the school board election hijacking of '82 finished the job. This town is now so 10th rate, we don't have any mafia. There's nothing left to steal. Want to live in a viable community? Avoid two things: corruption and coercion.
Fist of the Fleet| 8.11.10 @ 10:53AM
Petronius, interesting comment regarding the judge. Same thing happened here in this dying city on the eastern shore of Lake Erie. Judge Curtin screwed Buffalo with the same type of decree.
The man is in the advanced stages of decreptitude and he still rules on cases.
Corruption and coercion, where pay to play still is the rule of the day.
Jenny| 8.11.10 @ 10:32AM
Praise God for our faithful priests.
Please pass on my gratitude and congratulations.
Tracy Mehan| 8.11.10 @ 11:44AM
My thanks to Dan Hirsch for his correction.
Tracy Mehan
Doris F.| 8.11.10 @ 1:38PM
You took me back to St. Louis. I'm glad I'm in El Paso, TX now, but do miss the Midwest greenery. Economically Louisville, KY (where I just moved from) is very similar to St. Louis. El Paso seems the same. It was nice to hear about M's. relative's ordination to the priesthood,
Ralph| 8.11.10 @ 1:42PM
Although Mr. Mehan is from St. Louis, he is obviously not an expert on McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing. The F-16 was not a McDonnell Douglas airplane. The F-4, the F-15, and the F/A-18 are some of the aircraft built by McDonnell Douglas.
Clinton nee Publius | 8.11.10 @ 2:17PM
I'm glad you can afford lengthy summer vacations. Here in the real world we've been doing without them this year. We aren't buying new cars, clothes are anything else. We're trying to ride it out. Our businesses are dying, the tax bills are piling up and we are treated to more of this cheery stuff.
Golly gee, Beave. That takes courage.
Someone told me 14% of Americans are on public assistance (food stamps, welfare, unemployment and/or housing assistance). More than 7 million have been without a job for more than 6 months and more than 180,000 gave up looking for work last month.
But we can depend upon you to show the leadership and the integrity of purpose that will lead us to a new day with Wally and The Beave...
Tracy Mehan| 8.11.10 @ 2:44PM
Ralph,
You are correct. I am not an expert-forgetful, too. Pax.
Tracy Mehan
irene austin| 8.11.10 @ 7:53PM
It makes me furious to hear that the people in D.C. area are doing just fine! Well, of course they are. the rest of the country is bankrupt . I welcome the coming collapse. It is the only hope that something good can come. The entitlement mentality and crowd in this country has to go. I'm doing my part to kill it in my vicinity.
Tom| 8.12.10 @ 2:37PM
The dear Midwest. Last week when some of our friends were brutally killed in Afghanistan, the couple who run an upscale jewelry and clothing store in Kansas (?!), called their new employee, our daughter, into the back room. They said "did you know those people?" She said, "no, but my parents did." They said, " We want to pray right now for you and those peoples' families and for your parents and for Afghanistan."
Answers1| 8.14.10 @ 5:29PM
It's the out of control fascist left-wing government that's the problem, not the people.
Joanna | 6.6.11 @ 4:25AM
What an interesting article- I hope to read more like this, thanks!UTI Treatment