The Midwest

My daughter is currently living in Michigan and counting the days until she can move to the east. What got me thinking about this was the current issue of the Atlantic. There were two articles that particularly caught my eye. One was on Reinhold Niebuhr and the other was on Saul Bellow. It turns out that Niebuhr got his start in Detroit. Of course Belows is from Chicago. Both these guys were great thinkers. They did there most important work before 1970. I left Michigan in 1969. Not that I am at all equal to Niebuhr or Bellow. But the dates are significant.

In 1962 a bunch of people who would soon become my friends got together in Port Huron Michigan. They wrote a document that is still interesting today. If you have never read it take a look at the Port Huron Statement. The people I knew at the University of Michigan were often the kids of union organizers, one kids father had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The dads were generally doing well but when we needed bail money to get us out of jail after some protest they could usually be counted on to help out. They were generally proud of their kid's activism. This was the exciting intellectual world of the Mid-West.

While Michigan was never New York, it was something. So was St. Louis and Cleveland and Buffalo and Minneapolis . People lived there with great ideas. The union movement attracted large numbers of intellectuals who felt that they could change the world. In fact they really did change the world but they never went far enough. They settled for high wages and no change in the basic structure of industry. They came to do good and stayed to do well.(Sounds a little like the UFT and Albert Shanker)

So when I got to college a lot of their kids decided it was time to change the world. I imagine that we did change the world, just not as much as we wanted to. In the end we were not that much different than the union organizer fathers of so many of the SDS kids.

What is most sad about all of this is the fact that the middle of the country seems to have lost its intellectual core. Today when you think of most of these places you think of reactionary thinking. People who are anti homosexuality, abortion, immigration, evolution and almost every thing else.

The middle of the United States once elected a socialist to congress, they founded the Grange and the Farm Workers Party. The mid west was home to the Cleveland Symphony and the Detroit Opera. Artists did not leave as soon as they could. Is this still true? Actually I know that it is still true to some extent. There are still small theater groups in Buffalo and Minneapolis and I am sure lots of other cities. There are lots of smart people out their but they are slowly but surely being pushed out.

I think the current immigration debate is a symptom of something that has been building for a long time. The desire of too many of the Mid Western politicians to push everyone but their constituency out. Often people with different ideas were are part of this unwanted group. The reason the coasts have done so well is that these unwanted people have moved there and many of them turned out to have something good to offer. Taking in the unwanted is what places like New York have always been good at. The problem is, can this country prosper with this type of division? It is sad that Michigan is going to loose a liberal voice.