The "Midwest" Should Not Be a Region

 

The "Midwest" as defined by the US Census Bureau.

The United States is often divided into regions, which makes sense with countries that large. There are many different ways that people will name or define their own region, with common ones being the West, the South, the North, etc. One of the most commonly mentioned regions is, of course, one that I find random, arbitrary, and meaningless: the "Midwest".

Let's talk about that name first. Why is it called the "Midwest" if none of the states included here are even close to the middle of the western half of the contiguous U.S.? Some might readily answer that the West used to begin at the Appalachian Mountains. Alright, but why does this include Canadian border states? Wouldn't that make it the Northwest, in a way?

States that used to be in the Northwest Territory, as well as Minnesota whose land east of the Mississippi River was in the Northwest Territory too.

Actually, before the 1950s or so, the term "Northwest" was often used for the states that more or less are called the "Midwest" today. When I would read old newspapers on microfilm for work/volunteering, "Northwest News" appeared to be about news from states as far east as Ohio and as far west as Nebraska. Well, I say they should have stuck to the land within the former Northwest Territory, because little else is common between all the states included in the "Northwest" or "Midwest".

For starters, there's the history problem. Let's compare North Dakota and Ohio, two states commonly placed in the same region. During the American Revolutionary War, Ohio already had a few towns and was well within the boundaries claimed by the new U.S. North Dakota, on the other hand, was more or less home to Native Americans only, although split on the map between the British and Spanish Empires. The Dakotas as well as Nebraska and Kansas didn't even border American soil at the time.

There's also the environmental problem. Almost every state east of the Mississippi has abundant forests, especially Wisconsin and Michigan. If you get to the land from North Dakota to Kansas, however, grasslands are very prominent. The same contrast could be said for southern states too, if we compare (for example) Texas and Georgia. Those two states do, however, have a common history together as rebellious states in the Civil War, making them both in "Dixie", the South. But the Dakotas and Nebraska were only territories during the Civil War, not Union states like Ohio, making the "Midwest" fail on this test also.

What about dialects or accents? After all, this unites the South. But again, the same cannot be said for the "Midwest". If you go to northern Minnesota, many will have the "Minnesota" accent (which really stretches from northeast Montana to the upper peninsula of Michigan). But if you go to rural parts of southern Missouri, Illinois, or Indiana, people might even have a Southern accent. If we confine the "Midwest" to areas where you might hear the occasional "ope" or "uff da", then out goes Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, lower Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, and large portions of South Dakota. You'd also need a new name. "North Central" would make sense, but I don't know what region the states I just mentioned would go to.

A lot of people think of corn fields and barns when the word "Midwest" comes to mind. Well, upon looking at a map of corn production in the United States by county, it would seem that some areas of the "Midwest" are left out (northeast Minnesota, northern Michigan, and the western Dakotas) while others are added (eastern Colorado and even the Texas panhandle). Therefore, I don't think that's sufficient. Neither is the idea of abundant farmland and the politeness that is associated with it, because that could be literally any rural area east of the Mississippi River where forests have been cleared. Even if that was a real marker of the "Midwest", wouldn't that mean we exclude large cities like Chicago, Detroit, and so forth?

Anyway, you might wonder what regions I place these "Midwest" states into. I put North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas into the West, because they all have a low population density in common. If you look at a population density map of the United States, there's almost a line running down the eastern boundary of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas that divides high population density from low population density. The same effect can be seen if you look at a nighttime satellite image of the United States. I use this line to divide the West from the East (further divided into North and South) and another line of contrasting population densities to divide the West from the Far West, which I consider as the land west of the Cascades, Sierra Nevada, and other coastal mountain ranges. As for the rest of the "Midwest" states, they are all in the East. Since Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio were all Union states, I place these in the North part of the East. Missouri is a grey area to me, because it was technically a Union state but was also claimed by the Confederacy. It also seems like people in Missouri have a Northern accent, Southern accent, or somewhere in between. Regions can be complicated, but there should always be some common feature that unites all the states or areas in that region.