A Moral Redoubt in the Heartland
The Culture of the Plains States
by Anthony Harrigan
Many contemporary travelers in the heartland region have noted the quality of life in the Plains states, a quality of life that is markedly superior to the metropolitan centers on the coastal rim. A reporter for The Economist called attention to this in an unsigned article published on Sept. 5, 1992. His route took him from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Rapid City, South Dakota. Writing from Victoria, Kansas, he said that “Victoria is the ideal place to consider the small town values that politicians now talk so much of.” To some extent, he said,
the politicians are onto something. That coarsening of American culture that is so evident in the cities is less obvious in the small towns. Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rapid City, South Dakota, The Economist’s correspondent was unable to find a copy of Playboy openly displayed for sale.
The heritage of Christian culture is still at work in this small high plains town. As The Economist reporter recounted,
The town was settled by Volga Germans. Devoutly Catholic, they built a church, and then another one, and then, when they had outgrown that, yet another one. In 1908, when no more than a couple of thousand people lived there, they started work on the magnificent Romanesque church of St. Fidelis, whose twin towers soon stood 141 feet tall. Glass was brought from Germany; marble from Italy. Each family was allotted a set amount of stone to cut, by hand, from local quarries. When St. Fidelis was completed, Bryan called it “the cathedral of the plains,” and with reason.
This history is part of the culture of the Plains states. Culture in the Plains states, in the sense employed here, isn’t a matter of artistic amenities—art galleries, symphony orchestras and theatre companies—but the organic character of a people’s life. It is this kind of culture that is threatened in the United States in an era that makes a fetish of multi-culturalism and that introduces artificial political and psychological components—thought control—into communities of all sizes (most of it through the medium of the mind-regulating mechanism of television).
A few years ago, for instance, public officials in Dubuque, Iowa, decided, without any public demand, that the citizens were suffering from diversity deprivation. A plan was put forward to import a certain number of minority families into the city each year. Lorrin A. Anderson, an Iowan writing in National Review, Feb. 17, 1992, said that “the citizens of Dubuque were not feeling any severe pain from their underprivileged condition” and opposed the attempted forced transformation of their community and its values.
But the process of thought control and culture bending goes on in many parts of the American heartland, as elsewhere in the nation. At the university in Iowa City, Mr. Anderson reported, students are required to have eight units of “multi-cultural studies” in order to graduate—an example of thought control in higher education. Mr. Anderson explained how the mind-bending process is accelerated in the state by the fashionably liberal-left Des Moines Register, owned by the Gannett chain “with its wide-ranging espousal of all the current orthodoxies: doctrinaire feminism, affirmative action, multi-culturalism—pretty much the whole bag.”
This is the nature of the assault on the culture of the Plains states, which has been traditional, Eurocentric, respectful of heritage, and firmly grounded in its Christian belief. This assault amounts to what Bruce Fein, writing in The Washington Times, Sept. 8, 1992, called “ascriptive balkanization”—balkanization of the traditional American culture as evidenced most strongly by the current drive for multi-culturalism, particularly the introduction of values contradictory to the American heritage. Mr. Fein said that such balkanization “engenders consequences that resemble those of endogamy, a degeneration of vitality and acuity. . . .”
Happily, one finds in the Plains states a decent respect for the values of traditional American life. Dr. John Howard, former president of Rockford College in Illinois, cited these values in an address at St. Paul, Minn., Oct. 24, 1992. Among them, he said, are modesty, decency, probity, rectitude, honor, politeness, virtue, magnanimity, chastity, piety, righteousness, propriety.
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