Frontier in American History — IV - The Middle West - Part 4

The Populistic movement of the western half of the Middle West is a complex of many forces.

In some respects it is the latest manifestation of the same forces that brought on the crisis of 1837 in the earlier region of pioneer exploitation.

That era of over-confidence, reckless internal improvements, and land purchases by borrowed capital, brought a reaction when it became apparent that the future had been over-discounted.

But, in that time, there were the farther free lands to which the ruined pioneer could turn.

The demand for an expansion of the currency has marked each area of Western advance.

The greenback movement of Ohio and the eastern part of the Middle West grew into the fiat money, free silver, and land bank propositions of the Populists across the Mississippi.

Efforts for cheaper transportation also appear in each stage of Western advance.

When the pioneer left the rivers and had to haul his crops by wagon to a market, the transportation factor determined both his profits and the extension of settlement.

Demands for national aid to roads and canals had marked the pioneer advance of the first third of the century.

The "Granger" attacks upon the railway rates, and in favor of governmental regulation, marked a second advance of Western settlement.

The Farmers' Alliance and the Populist demand for government ownership of the railroad is a phase of the same effort of the pioneer farmer, on his latest frontier.

The proposals have taken increasing proportions in each region of Western Advance.

Taken as a whole, Populism is a manifestation of the old pioneer ideals of the native American, with the added element of increasing readiness to utilize the national government to effect its ends.

This is not unnatural in a section whose lands were originally purchased by the government and given away to its settlers by the same authority, whose railroads were built largely by federal land grants, and whose settlements were protected by the United States army and governed by the national authority until they were carved into rectangular States and admitted into the Union.

Its native settlers were drawn from many States, many of them former soldiers of the Civil War, who mingled in new lands with foreign immigrants accustomed to the vigorous authority of European national governments.

But these old ideals of the American pioneer, phrased in the new language of national power, did not meet with the assent of the East.

Even in the Middle West a change of deepest import had been in progress during these years of prairie settlement.

The agricultural preponderance of the country has passed to the prairies, and manufacturing has developed in the areas once devoted to pioneer farming.

In the decade prior to the Civil War, the area of greatest wheat production passed from Ohio and the States to the east, into Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin; after 1880, the center of wheat growing moved across the Mississippi; and in 1890 the new settlements produced half the crop of the United States.

The corn area shows a similar migration.

In 1840 the Southern States produced half the crop, and the Middle West one-fifth;

by 1860 the situation was reversed and in 1890 nearly one-half the corn of the Union came from beyond the Mississippi.

Thus the settlers of the Old Northwest and their crops have moved together across the Mississippi, and in the regions whence they migrated varied agriculture and manufacture have sprung up.

As these movements in population and products have passed across the Middle West, and as the economic life of the eastern border has been intensified, a huge industrial organism has been created in the province,--an organism of tremendous power, activity, and unity.

Fundamentally the Middle West is an agricultural area unequaled for its combination of space, variety, productiveness, and freedom from interruption by deserts or mountains.

The huge water system of the Great Lakes has become the highway of a mighty commerce.

The Sault Ste.

Marie Canal, although open but two-thirds of the year, is the channel of a traffic of greater tonnage than that which passes through the Suez Canal, and nearly all this commerce moves almost the whole length of the Great Lakes system; the chief ports being Duluth, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo.

The transportation facilities of the Great Lakes were revolutionized after 1886, to supply the needs of commerce between the East and the newly developed lands of the Middle West; the tonnage doubled; wooden ships gave way to steel; sailing vessels yielded to steam; and huge docks, derricks, and elevators, triumphs of mechanical skill, were constructed.

A competent investigator has lately declared that "there is probably in the world to-day no place at tide water where ship plates can be laid down for a less price than they can be manufactured or purchased at the lake ports."

This rapid rise of the merchant marine of our inland seas has led to the demand for deep water canals to connect them with the ocean road to Europe.

When the fleets of the Great Lakes plow the Atlantic, and when Duluth and Chicago become seaports, the water transportation of the Middle West will have completed its evolution.

The significance of the development of the railway systems is not inferior to that of the great water way.

Chicago has become the greatest railroad center of the world, nor is there another area of like size which equals this in its railroad facilities; all the forces of the nation intersect here.

Improved terminals, steel rails, better rolling stock, and consolidation of railway systems have accompanied the advance of the people of the Middle West.

This unparalleled development of transportation facilities measures the magnitude of the material development of the province.

Its wheat and corn surplus supplies the deficit of the rest of the United States and much of that of Europe.

Such is the agricultural condition of the province of which Monroe wrote to Jefferson, in 1786, in these words: "A great part of the territory is miserably poor, especially that near Lakes Michigan and Erie, and that upon the Mississippi and the Illinois consists of extensive plains which have not had, from appearances, and will not have, a single bush on them for ages.

The districts, therefore, within which these fall will never contain a sufficient number of inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the confederacy."

Minneapolis and Duluth receive the spring wheat of the northern prairies, and after manufacturing great portions of it into flour, transmit it to Buffalo, the eastern cities, and to Europe.

Chicago is still the great city of the corn belt, but its power as a milling and wheat center has been passing to the cities that receive tribute from the northern prairies.

It lies in the region of winter wheat, corn, oats, and live stock.

Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cincinnati are the sister cities of this zone, which reaches into the grazing country of the Great Plains.

The meeting point of corn and cattle has led to the development of the packing industries,--large business systems that send the beef and pork of the region to supply the East and parts of Europe.

The "feeding system" adopted in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, whereby the stock is fattened from the surplus corn of the region, constitutes a species of varied farming that has saved these States from the disasters of the failure of a single industry, and has been one solution of the economic life of the transition belt between the prairies and the Great Plains.

Under a more complex agriculture, better adapted to the various sections of the State, and with better crops, Kansas has become more prosperous and less a center of political discontent.

While this development of the agricultural interests of the Middle West has been in progress, the exploitation of the pine woods of the north has furnished another contribution to the commerce of the province.

The center of activity has migrated from Michigan to Minnesota, and the lumber traffic furnishes one of the principal contributions to the vessels that ply the Great Lakes and supply the tributary mills.

As the white pine vanishes before the organized forces of exploitation, the remaining hard woods serve to establish factories in the former mill towns.

The more fertile denuded lands of the north are now receiving settlers who repeat the old pioneer life among the stumps.

But the most striking development in the industrial history of the Middle West in recent years has been due to the opening up of the iron mines of Lake Superior.

Even in 1873 the Lake Superior ores furnished a quarter of the total production of American blast furnaces.

The opening of the Gogebic mines in 1884, and the development of the Vermillion and Mesabi mines adjacent to the head of the lake, in the early nineties, completed the transfer of iron ore production to the Lake Superior region.

Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin together now produce the ore for eighty per cent of the pig iron of the United States.

Four-fifths of this great product moves to the ports on Lake Erie and the rest to the manufactories at Chicago and Milwaukee.

The vast steel and iron industry that centers at Pittsburgh and Cleveland, with important outposts like Chicago and Milwaukee, is the outcome of the meeting of the coal of the eastern and southern borders of the province and of Pennsylvania, with the iron ores of the north.

The industry has been systematized and consolidated by a few captains of industry.

Steam shovels dig the ore from many of the Mesabi mines; gravity roads carry it to the docks and to the ships, and huge hoisting and carrying devices, built especially for the traffic, unload it for the railroad and the furnace.

Iron and coal mines, transportation fleets, railroad systems, and iron manufactories are concentrated in a few corporations, principally the United States Steel Corporation.

The world has never seen such a consolidation of capital and so complete a systematization of economic processes.

Such is the economic appearance of the Middle West a century after the pioneers left the frontier village of Pittsburgh and crossed the Ohio into the forests.

De Tocqueville exclaimed, with reason, in 1833: "This gradual and continuous progress of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains has the solemnity of a providential event.

It is like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly, and driven daily onward by the hand of God."

The ideals of the Middle West began in the log huts set in the midst of the forest a century ago.

While his horizon was still bounded by the clearing that his ax had made, the pioneer dreamed of continental conquests.

The vastness of the wilderness kindled his imagination.

His vision saw beyond the dank swamp at the edge of the great lake to the lofty buildings and the jostling multitudes of a mighty city; beyond the rank, grass-clad prairie to the seas of golden grain; beyond the harsh life of the log hut and the sod house to the home of his children, where should dwell comfort and the higher things of life, though they might not be for him.

The men and women who made the Middle West were idealists, and they had the power of will to make their dreams come true.

Here, also, were the pioneer's traits,--individual activity, inventiveness, and competition for the prizes of the rich province that awaited exploitation under freedom and equality of opportunity.

He honored the man whose eye was the quickest and whose grasp was the strongest in this contest: it was "every one for himself."

The early society of the Middle West was not a complex, highly differentiated and organized society.

Almost every family was a self-sufficing unit, and liberty and equality flourished in the frontier periods of the Middle West as perhaps never before in history.

American democracy came from the forest, and its destiny drove it to material conquests; but the materialism of the pioneer was not the dull contented materialism of an old and fixed society.

Both native settler and European immigrant saw in this free and competitive movement of the frontier the chance to break the bondage of social rank, and to rise to a higher plane of existence.

The pioneer was passionately desirous to secure for himself and for his family a favorable place in the midst of these large and free but vanishing opportunities.

It took a century for this society to fit itself into the conditions of the whole province.

Little by little, nature pressed into her mold the plastic pioneer life.

The Middle West, yesterday a pioneer province, is to-day the field of industrial resources and systematization so vast that Europe, alarmed for her industries in competition with this new power, is discussing the policy of forming protective alliances among the nations of the continent.

Into this region flowed the great forces of modern capitalism.

Indeed, the region itself furnished favorable conditions for the creation of these forces, and trained many of the famous American industrial leaders.

The Prairies, the Great Plains, and the Great Lakes furnished new standards of industrial measurement.

From this society, seated amidst a wealth of material advantages, and breeding individualism, energetic competition, inventiveness, and spaciousness of design, came the triumph of the strongest.

The captains of industry arose and seized on nature's gifts.

Struggling with one another, increasing the scope of their ambitions as the largeness of the resources and the extent of the fields of activity revealed themselves, they were forced to accept the natural conditions of a province vast in area but simple in structure.

Competition grew into consolidation.

On the Pittsburgh border of the Middle West the completion of the process is most clearly seen.

On the prairies of Kansas stands the Populist, a survival of the pioneer, striving to adjust present conditions to his old ideals.

The ideals of equality, freedom of opportunity, faith in the common man are deep rooted in all the Middle West.

The frontier stage, through which each portion passed, left abiding traces on the older, as well as on the newer, areas of the province.

Nor were these ideals limited to the native American settlers: Germans and Scandinavians who poured into the Middle West sought the country with like hopes and like faith.

These facts must be remembered in estimating the effects of the economic transformation of the province upon its democracy.

The peculiar democracy of the frontier has passed away with the conditions that produced it; but the democratic aspirations remain.

They are held with passionate determination.

The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast economic organization of the present.

This region which has so often needed the reminder that bigness is not greatness, may yet show that its training has produced the power to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.

The democracies of the past have been small communities, under simple and primitive economic conditions.

At bottom the problem is how to reconcile real greatness with bigness.

It is important that the Middle West should accomplish this; the future of the Republic is with her.

Politically she is dominant, as is illustrated by the fact that six out of seven of the Presidents elected since 1860 have come from her borders.

Twenty-six million people live in the Middle West as against twenty-one million in New England and the Middle States together, and the Middle West has indefinite capacity for growth.

The educational forces are more democratic than in the East, and the Middle West has twice as many students (if we count together the common school, secondary, and collegiate attendance), as have New England and the Middle States combined.

Nor is this educational system, as a whole, inferior to that of the Eastern States.

State universities crown the public school system in every one of these States of the Middle West, and rank with the universities of the seaboard, while private munificence has furnished others on an unexampled scale.

The public and private art collections of Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Paul, and other cities rival those of the seaboard.

"World's fairs," with their important popular educational influences, have been held at Chicago, Omaha, and Buffalo; and the next of these national gatherings is to be at St. Louis.

There is throughout the Middle West a vigor and a mental activity among the common people that bode well for its future.

If the task of reducing the Province of the Lake and Prairie Plains to the uses of civilization should for a time overweigh art and literature, and even high political and social ideals, it would not be surprising.

But if the ideals of the pioneers shall survive the inundation of material success, we may expect to see in the Middle West the rise of a highly intelligent society where culture shall be reconciled with democracy in the large.

FOOTNOTES:

[126:1] With acknowledgments to the _International Monthly_, December, 1901. [129:1] 1901. [132:1] See F. J.

Turner, "Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era," in _Am.

Historical Review_, i, pp. 70 _et seq.

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