The leaders of Eastern thought continued to think of their sec tion as the legitimate and normal United States. Their Univer sities, responding to the nourishment of wealth, educated not only their own people but also the youth of all sections, and left an Eastern stamp wherever they made a contact. Their control of capital for investment, whether of their own accumulation or borrowed from Europe, gave Eastern financiers a power of direc tion and exploitation over the West that they exercised with little check or sympathy for the remainder of the century. Their op portunities for communication made them the centre of journal ism and literary production, whose natural tone was that of cul tural superiority. They were recruited continuously by a pro cession of successful Americans from the other sections, who had reached a level at which they demanded larger fields of activity or more sophisticated standards of life ; and these generally made haste to slough off the traits of West or South, and to accommo date themselves to the Eastern type with all the ardour of the convert. The differentiation among the sections that had been begun by the rise of the West and the deviation of the South was perpetuated by the absorption of the East within the main cur rents of the industrial revolution.
Youth was another condition of the pioneer. The heavy labour of frontier development was no task for the old or the infirm. The normal frontier unit was the young or youngish family, all of whose members worked at the common tasks in and outside the cabin home. There were few of the dependent old, or of the middle-aged workers, among them. The mental traits of any pioneer group were those of youth and unbroken spirit. Hope and enthusiasm went with youth and poverty into the making of a Western settlement. It took hope, courage and a willingness to run risks to make a pioneer. One may suppose that, other things remaining equal, the brothers and cousins of an Eastern family who made the break from custom, and sought new homes in the West, were somewhat more adventurous than those who stayed at home. There are "pockets" in the East to-day where sociologists believe that they find a stagnant life that may be attributed to the long-repeated drift of the able and the enterprising to the West or to the cities. The West was enriched, and often was sur charged with an enthusiasm that bore too many traits of youth and lack of information.
Bearing these resemblances, and bound together by the geo graphic bonds of the Upper Mississippi valley, the people of the Middle West developed a great community whose centre and whose highest uniformity lay within the radius of 500 m. of the
tip of Lake Michigan. They were held to their similarities be cause of their agriculture and because of their financial bonds. There was no great force operating among them which, like the plantation of the South, tended to separate the magnate from the common man : or, like the industry of the East, tended to raise the rich above the poor. Those who became rich were likely to move to the Eastern centres ; those who remained in the West continued in a wide and real substantial unity. They lacked both depths and heights. There were few of the very rich ; but the I very poor were lacking. They were not peasants or proleta rians; yet they lacked that acceptance of the going world that makes the bourgeois mind. They were citizens and democrats, and saw nothing incongruous in a Lincoln advancing from the cabin to the White House or in a Grant rising from the tan-yard to be a general of the army. They believed in opportunity, which they had themselves enjoyed; and they conserved it for their children by devoting to their schools and universities the greater portion of their public revenues.
The hundred years that have elapsed since the election of Andrew Jackson have seen this Upper Mississippi valley pass through three generations, and three distinct cultural phases, without losing the high concentration of westernism that was its main characteristic. For the first generation, it was the West, with the other sections of the United States emphasizing its nature by developing along contrasting lines. In the second generation, between the Civil War and the first defeat of William Jennings Bryan (1896) it became imperceptibly the Middle West; not because it was greatly changing in its point of view, but the emergence of the Far West made necessary a change of epithet. And it retained its character largely because it continued to be agricultural, and its unlike or unusual elements tended to be drafted into the East. In the third generation the old spirit has been thrown upon the defensive, as an industrial organization, a working class and an economic independence have broken into the old uniformities. It is likely enough that within the generation to come it will be largely absorbed, and will cease to exist as a geographical section. The whole United States is moving towards class stratification in place of geographic regionalism and the Middle West cannot forever hold its own against the tendencies of the times. Andrew Jackson was the first great indigenous prophet of the West ; Robert M. LaFollette was perhaps the last.