Among the conditions whose influence has been to perpetuate the sectional consciousness of the Middle West, there is none that ranks higher or has been more pervasive than that of economic dependence. The frontier was always in debt. In this it did not differ greatly from a large part of society everywhere ; but it was unique in the universality of the dependence. By definition, there were few residents in the frontier who possessed free capital. Those who had it stayed away from the frontier. Each new region was built out of the hopes of pioneers and the capital of the East. The poor equities of the West or Middle West, made the eastern capitalist loath to part with his wealth except at a high interest rate and often with bonus to boot. The Westerner, in the period of enthusiasm, was ready to agree to any rate, and inclined to believe that his soil could earn it. But inevitably there came the moment of liquidation. Much of the apparent wealth of the growing Western communities was derived not from the produce of the soil but from the enhancement of nominal land values as population increased. When the sad moment ar rived when the Western borrower found himself unable to meet his interest charges, uniformity turned his condition of economic dependence into social or political reactions.
In the more complex East, debtor lived next to creditor, and the tone of his society was commonly dictated by the solvent members. It was hard for repudiation movements to get under way. But when one Westerner was in debt and insolvent, his neighbour was in the same condition. And absenteeism made it as easy to diabolize his creditor as common trouble made it easy for self sympathy to become a local virtue. In two ways at least this tendency has affected the Middle West. Here have originated movements of currency inflation. In the Jackson generation, the West enthusiastically backed up the wrecking of the Second Bank of the United States, largely because it operated as a check upon easy money and Western banks of issue. In the Civil War period, the same Middle West saw no defect in the scheme to pay the creditor of the nation and the holder of Western obliga tions in legal tender paper money, manufactured by the printing press. Towards the end of the 19th century Bryan swept the Western States with free silver inflation as his panacea for the common man. Eastern interest in Western investments has tended to hold the sections apart , while Eastern distrust of Western economic theory has tended to confirm the Easterner in his assumption of his own superiority of intellect and virtue.
The Western liability to inflation finance has kept the West apart in a second way: it has created and developed a jealous suspicion of Eastern motive. Under best conditions it is hard for a debtor to love his creditor; under Western conditions of debt it was inevitable that he should hate him. The Eastern centres that controlled the lending of money, and the collection of debts, became synonyms for greed. The Second Bank was an "octopus"; the Civil War bond-holder was "inflated" and grasping; the "gold bug," if not actually in the pay of Britain, was at least party to a conspiracy of Wall street. Eastern suspicion and Western jealousy came naturally to accentuate the sectionalism, and to prolong the existence of the Middle West. By the very nature of its existence, the Middle West has had few reflective and dis criminating exponents of its point of view. Its active fighting leaders have been partisans. The East has drawn off and adopted a large share of its exceptional individuals. The market for literary and artistic wares has forced the Western maker of these to invade the East, and to adapt his output to his custom. The result has been that the Middle West has drawn few conscious pictures of itself, and the historian or literary artist who seeks to identify it must generally work among either the unconscious records of events that were transpiring in the West, or the jaundiced expressions of the alien who visited it and frequently did not like it. It can best be understood when one realizes that the qualities that identify the Middle West are the old qualities engendered along the fighting frontier of the United States in the period when the struggle for existence was a reality ; that these qualities, by accident, survived beyond their normal ex pectation of life; that their uniformity gave them vividness and permanence; and that their normal reflexes are still capable of flaring up to influence affairs to-day, even in an industrialized society.
BiBuoGRAPHY.—Prof. Turner has discussed the Middle West in his Frontier in American History (1920) ; and the literary histories have tried to evaluate it in R. L. Rusk, The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier (1925) ; and L. L. Hazard, The Frontier in American Literature (1927). (F. L. P.)