Ep. 130: 'Heartland,' 'Middle America,' and US Media’s Vaguely Nostalgic, Racialized Code for White Grievance

“We need a president whose vision was shaped by the American Heartland rather than the ineffective Washington politics,” declares presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. “AOC Kills Jobs Middle America Would Love to Have,” proclaims The Washington Examiner. Amy Klobuchar insists she’s a “voice from the heartland,” while The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin tells us, “[Bernie Sanders] is not going to sell in Middle America. You have to WIN Middle America.” 

Everywhere we turn in American political discourse, the terms “Heartland” and “Middle America” are thrown around as shorthand for “everyday” men and women somewhere between the Atlantic Ocean to the East, Pacific to the West--homespun people who are supposedly insufficiently represented in media and Beltway circles. Those evoking their status presumably are interjecting these true Americans otherwise overlooked needs into the conversation.

But terms like “Heartland” and “Middle America” are not benign or organic terms that emerged from the natural course of sociological explanation, they are deliberate political PR products of the 1960s, emerging in parallel with a shift from explicit racism into coded racism. Their primary function is to express a deference to and centering of whiteness as a post-civil rights political project.

On this episode, we explore the origins of the terms “Middle America” and “Heartland,” what they mask and reveal, why they’re still used today and how conversations about “whiteness” as a political ideology would benefit greatly from clarity, rather than relying on code words to vaguely allude to the subject of political “whiteness,” while still trying to obfuscate it.

Our guest is Professor Kristin Hoganson of the University of Illinois.

Guest

Kristin Hoganson is a Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of books including Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920; American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century; and Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. Her latest, published in 2019, The Heartland: An American History.

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Show Notes

Dismantling the Myth of ‘The Heartland’

Meghan O’Gieblyn | April 23, 2019 | The New York Times

The Democrats’ New Favorite Dog Whistle: Invoking the “Heartland”

Michael Arria | August 1, 2019 | In These Times

The Heartland and the Myth of the “Real” America

Nicholas Gilmore | June 24, 2020 | The Saturday Evening Post

Democrats ignore black, working-class midwesterners at their peril

Malaika Jabali | February 3, 2020 | The Guardian

The Heartland’s Revival

Joel Kotkin | Fall 2020 | American Affairs

Pete Buttigieg’s Coded Use of American Heartland

Ben Zimmer | January 30, 2020 | The Atlantic

Why Pete Buttigieg’s Paeans to the ‘Heartland’ Are Nonsensical

Eric Levitz | January 20, 2020 | New York Magazine Intelligencer

How America's heartland loses black people

Caleb Gayle | August 4, 2018 | The Guardian

Man and Woman of the Year: The Middle Americans

January 5, 1970 | TIME

Report From The American 'Heartland'

Lauren Soth | June 3, 1962 | The New York Times

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Transcript

For a full transcript of this episode, go here.

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