MIDDLE WEST, THE, the northern portion of the central United States and more specifically the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
In his American Commonwealth (1888), James Bryce ob served that in the United States there were four areas which were diverse in cultural aspects. After a long generation the most recent serious commentator on American affairs, Andre Siegfried, is still able to note the differentiation that Bryce described. There is an East, a South, a Far West and a Middle West.
The four cultural areas are by no means equal in their social weight, Of the 105 millions of people resident in the States in 1920, the South, with 3 7 million, led the groups; the East, count ing from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, had 29 million; the Middle West had 26 million, and the Far West 13 million. There is no greater equality in the areas which they roughly occupy; and there is an inversion of order. Of the 2,974,000 sq.m. of land which they cover, the Far West has nearly half, or 1,483,000; the South 947,000, the Middle West 382,000 and the East 162,000. The Middle West thus covers about 13% of the area of the United States and contains nearly 25% of the population. At the time when Bryce wrote their proportion of the population was already about 25%, as it had been a generation earlier, at the opening of the Civil War in 186o. For 6o years or more these States—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota—have retained their constant proportion of the American people and have been regarded, as Bryce regarded them, as "the most distinctively American part of America," and as "one of the most interesting subjects of study the modern world has seen." (American Commonwealth, 3rd. ed. 1895.) It has been noted (under AMERICAN FRONTIER) that the United States was occupied in the century, along its eastern front, where the Atlantic rivers meet arms of the oceati and afford easy lodgment at numerous places between Florida and Nova Scotia. Before the 13 English colonies asserted their independence their people had spread thinly over the Atlantic coastal plain, had passed beyond the geographers' "falls line," and had begun the penetration of the parallel valleys of the Appalachians that open corridors running north-east and south-west between Albany, N.Y., and Chattanooga, Tenn. In the older sections of these original colonies there were already aristocracies of standing before the Continental Congress at Philadelphia undertook to direct their common effort against England. This tidewater section, and its
immediate hinterland, was to become the East, when a West should arise behind it. It has remained the East until to-day, containing by a natural social drainage the administrative heads of many American institutions, the agencies of control of the wealth of the United States, the executive and legislative estab lishments of the Government of the United States, and the oldest and most crystalline society that the United States can display. It has also, by its location, received the inflow of immigrant people that have affected all percentages of population, and it has put the immigrant workers into the industrial machine that was the great product of the i9th century. Its constant drift has been towards the social and economic standards of western Europe ; and its international commitments in finance have here been paralleled by the strongest of the American sentiments for internationalism in government and a world league.
Out of this old East, came the young West. The American Revolution did not stop, or seriously check, the pioneer process whereby the young, and the landless, and the ambitious among the people of the East sought to better themselves and gain eco nomic independence. The new communities west of the Ap palachians began to take shape while the Revolution was under way; and at its close Kentucky and Tennessee were growing rap idly towards statehood. A few years more, and the organization of the territory north-west of the Ohio river became a step that led to other new States in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. All of these regions came to be known as West ; and by this fact gave sig nificance to the term East, which had no special meaning as long as there was no West to contrast with it. The East was the start ing point ; the West was the derivative. The East was becoming a stable community; the West was on the make. Wealth in the East was showing itself, and was shaping society to its condi tions; poverty and debt were the universal qualities of the pioneer West. The people of the East were differentiating, according to their duties and opportunities in life ; the West started uniform, and retained its uniformity throughout the greater part of the cycle of pioneer development. For something more than a gen eration the American sectional antithesis was East and West.