One of the great tragedies of the Rust Belt* is that it did not define itself as a distinct cultural region until well after its...
One of the great tragedies of the Rust Belt* is that it did not define itself as a distinct cultural region until well after its great era of flourishing was over. For the century from about 1850-1950, this area was not merely the industrial heart of the nation, but also its cultural center. And yet the inhabitants of the area, if they thought of themselves as having a regional identity at all, it was as inhabitants of the generic ‘north’. Its status as a center of cultural innovation was pooh-poohed by the fact that the nation’s political and intellectual elite was, even as it is today, strongly based to the coastal northeast, and this Eurocentric elite had a very different set of priorities than the cultural avant-garde of the as-yet-unRusted-Belt. This area produced little in the way of ‘high art’ in the expected form of novels, symphonies, and oil paintings. But what it did produce…
In 1900, Chicago was the occult capital of the nation, a hotbed of wild theorizing and underground publishing of all manner of Theosophical weirdness. Meanwhile, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were producing the first wholly indigenous tradition of monumental architecture, setting a pattern for all of urban modernity. The Dayton, Ohio based Wright brothers - often abused in pop-historiography as some sort of rude mechanicals - were slowly and methodically systematizing the science of aerodynamics in preparation for the first ever instance of heaver-than-air flight in human history, with world-shaking consequences. And up in Detroit, Henry Ford was not merely revolutionizing transportation and manufacturing, but setting a standard for industrial relations that would create an unbelievably influential model for decades to come. It might sound strange to modern ears to cite Henry Ford as a bleeding-edge figure, but Fordism served as an inspiration to both Bolsheviks and Fascists, as well as to domestic New Dealers, while simultaneously pleasing and alarming old-fashioned Anglo liberals. The Long 20th Century is a series of footnotes to the Rust Belt Golden Age.
As can be seen from this too-brief summary of the luminaries of the epoch, it was a deeply unique Golden Age, characterized by cultural traits all its own. Technical prowess, utopian visions, and thorough systematization were its characteristics, as was a sense that a lone individual or small group could, through sheer innovative genius, change the world. While the archetype of the Mad Scientist is based on Mitteleuropean models, it was here in Mittelamerika that it achieved its apotheosis. The definitive cultural history of this region and era has yet to be written**, which just shows how underappreciated the underlying unity still is, but it in a large part contributed to the dynamic optimism that we all now take for granted as distinctively ‘American.’ But as the area felt the collapse of the long bubble economy that funded its flourishing, and its brightest sons and daughters fled west to contribute to the explosion of creativity along the Pacific slope that is now likewise collapsing, it finally awakened to a sense of unity that had previously been hidden by arbitrary State boundaries.
That, at some point, this area will again be the center of some sort of vigorous culture seems an inevitability of human geography, but will it again share the same features of optimism and technical prowess, or were those mere incidental features of a bunch of people with a Protestant work ethic suddenly getting access to the tremendous wealth provided by a vast agricultural base + fossil fuels? Man alive, I don’t have the slightest clue, but I hope that there is some sort of afterlife or metempsychosis so I can find out.
* here roughly defined as the geographical area constrained by an irregular polygon whose points are Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Davenport, Green Bay, and Flint.
** unless it has and i’m just ignorant of it, in which case please let me know so i can rest easy that i don’t need to do any work and can just sit down and read the thing. honestly, even tangentially related book recommendations are appreciated.