In Medias Res
WE are accustomed to speak of the middle West as if there were an eastern West and a western West, and, somewhat subtilely, we are right. The appellation is at least not inappropriate; it possesses spiritual, intellectual, and material truth; there is in reality an eastern, a middle, and a western West. What is, for the occasion, most important to us is the fact that in the old Northwest Territory we find the part for which we are looking, the middle West, the edges of which are spattered with influences from the regions back of it and in front of it. It is not as western as it was; it is not eastern, and its people are grateful for both blessings, as they would call them. It is western to the Bostonian and the New-Yorker, and it is far-eastern to the man of the plains. Its people are proud of certain inclinations toward the East, as they are of certain racy characteristics of the new soil that is growing older. Its successful men and women look to the rising sun for its possessions of ripeness, while their adventurous children look to the setting sun for the promises of stirring life which are hidden under the entrancing, mysterious shadows. Its people, especially its women, love the virtues of the older parts of the land, and are proud of the descent which links them to the birthplaces of the nation; they are also acquiring some of the vices, or, if this be too strong a phrase, some of the lack of the sterner virtues, found in the older parts.
In this region of the country, which starts in at Buffalo, and runs through to the newest fringe along the Mississippi, the extremes are not the most awakening and stimulating to the visitor from the—well, to please the centre, let us say the imitative East. In a topsy-turvy sort of way one goes from a hoary East at Buffalo, through ripened life in which the pulse of youth still stirs at Chicago and St. Paul, on toward the plains and mountains which ring and echo with the joyous music of extreme youth and despotic equality.
To the man from the older section the middle part of the West affords more entertainment than does the eastern West, because it differs far more from his own home in the most ancient of our geographical fringes—that along the Atlantic seaboard. It is the punditory custom to say of this section when it is contrasted with New York, for example, that it is "more American," just as it is customary to knit the brow over the self-same phrase when the "far West" is contrasted with the remainder of the land, including this central cradle of modern Presidents. But no part of the country is more American than any other part; the shouting, pistol-shooting, bronco-riding nuisance on the plains—a remnant of whose class is still on this side of the grave and outside of the jail—is no more American, as he is no more pleasing, than is the most simian of New-Yorkers whose consuming love of London society has been acquired by observing other Americans imitate its bad manners in the dining-rooms of the Savoy or of Claridge's on a Sunday night.
When we get into the Middle West on our journey from the Atlantic, we see Americans most of whom have a great advantage over certain characteristic Eastern Americans. They start and go on through the race of life depending more on their own powers, and arrive at their goal not only self-reliant, but more kindly inclined toward the democracy which gives the free opportunity. At the same time one cannot say that these typical lives of the Middle West are not also typical of the East. We have a social fringe as well as a geographical fringe, a great distinction being that the one is more bedraggled than the other; and our social fringe on the so-called upper side
