The Land Where Decency Comes From

Featured

May 16

When we think of the United States, we see it as a patchwork of regions, states, and communities. This is especially evident during the presidential election season. We resort to language that captures the richness and complexities of place. Commentary such as “will Michigan go Trump or Biden this year?” disregards the Dutch influence in the southwest, the Middle Eastern communities in Dearborn, the African American population in Detroit, the white ethnics along automobile alley, the Finnish in the UP, and others.

In Mental Maps of the Founders; How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders, Michael Barone shows how place framed the Founders’ view of America. Examining the lives of Benjmain Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Albert Gallatin, Barone explores how the “geographic imagination” of each Founder shaped their political perspectives. Franklin was one of the first Founders to see America as a singular entity due to his years living abroad advocating in Parliament for the colonies, while Washington’s military experience in Ohio made him recognize the future importance of the upper Midwest to the United States. Virginia’s westward claims of land also influenced Jefferson and Madison, who both saw the west as America’s future, with Jefferson purchasing the Louisiana Territory and Madison intent on obtaining Florida. Hamilton, born in the West Indies and raised in New York City, saw commerce as the primary way to bind the new nation as a country. Opposed to Hamilton’s policies was Albert Gallatin, who was born in Geneva and whose first language was French. Gallatin served as Treasury Secretary under both Jefferson and Hamilton and, after his retirement from public life, published books on Native American language, making him “the father of American ethnography.”

Just as their local geographies influenced the Founders’ outlook about the future of the country, so did the Midwest shape Gerald Ford’s views of American politics. While the Midwest today is ridiculed by coastal elites as “fly-over country” and continues to remain the most understudied region of the United States, it wasn’t always that way. During most of the twentieth century, the Midwest reflected America with its immigrants assimilated, its accent the national standard, and its economic might in labor, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation emblematic of America’s economic strength. The Northwest Ordinance passed by the Confederation Congress in 1787 defined the region politically with its republican institutions, natural rights, public education, prohibition of slavery, and peaceful relations with Native Americans. When compared to the hierarchical East or segregated South, the Midwest was more democratic and egalitarian (and still is). The regional distinctiveness of the Midwest disappeared because it had become representative of the entire country, with the West, South, and East defining themselves against it because they had believed that America was represented in the Midwest.

Gerald Ford’s Michigan

Ford was born in Omaha, raised in Grand Rapids, and went to the University of Michigan for his undergraduate studies. Ford’s mother, Dorothy, was a devout churchgoer to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, and his stepfather, Gerald Sr., took his “civic obligations as seriously as his spiritual ones” and believed that character and integrity “were the most important things in the whole world.” Gerald Sr. was involved with the Elks, Kent County Republicans, and cofounded the Youth Commonwealth, an attempt to help the poor, which included African Americans, in Grand Rapids. The values of Ford’s parents, and which they instilled in Gerald Jr., were stereotypical Midwestern: churchgoing, family-oriented, civic-minded, and valuing honesty, hard work, and decency.

While Ford was an attentive student who worked hard, he believed his most useful education was outside the classroom by being a member of the Boy Scouts and playing high school football, which led him to be recruited by the University of Michigan. Lacking funds to pay the $100 tuition bill, Ford was able to come up with the money through hard work and determination:

I'd saved one hundred dollars that summer working at the paint factory. For three hours every day, during the lunch period, I waited tables in the interns’ dining room at the university hospital, then helped clean up the nurses' cafeteria. A wonderful aunt and uncle, Roy and Ruah La Forge, sent me a two-dollar check every week. And once every two or three months, I received twenty-five dollars for donating blood at the university hospital.

Ford received a B average at Michigan, graduating with a degree in economics, and was off to Yale Law School; but he never doubted the contributions that football made in shaping his character, teaching the importance of teamwork, perseverance, and standing up for what is right.

As Wil Haygood wrote about Ford, “There is something about landscape and upbringing, about how it often seems to come to bear upon the temperament of an individual.” The Michigan of Gerald Ford was, on the one hand, picturesque with lakes and wooden cabins, football fields and fall foliage, helpful neighbors, and civic cheer. On the other hand, beneath this image of Midwestern charm were the facts that Ford’s mother was a divorcee, his stepfather had financial problems, and Gerald only had wit and a work ethic to better himself. Yet because of the support from his neighbors, teachers, coaches, and others, Ford remained true to his principles of decency, integrity, and honesty. As Haygood put it, “Ford was a decent man, and he seemed to admire in others, more than anything else, that trait.”

These values of decency, forthrightness, and perseverance guided Ford’s political career in Congress as a representative and Minority Leader, such as his support of the 1963 Civil Rights Act and the 1964 Voting Rights Act. His reputation for honesty and openness made him a popular congressman during his 25 years in office. As President, his pardon of Richard Nixon may have cost him the presidency in the 1976 election. But in the words of Senator Ted Kennedy, who had initially opposed the pardon, Ford made the correct decision for the country, a decision reflective of the values of Ford’s parents and the place from where he came.

A Transformed Place?

In his 1974 essay in The New York Times, “The Midwest is What’s Left Over,” Calvin Trillin argued that, although much was being made of Gerald Ford being a Midwesterner, he was not: “He is an Expatriate Midwesterner.” Trillin pointed out that Ford had for a quarter of century lived on the East Coast. But more telling, according to Trillin, was that Ford probably feared that “his mother or aunt or cousin will be cornered by some neighbor at his hometown supermarket and informed that he has become too big for his britches.” “This worry about being accused of being too big for one’s britches,” wrote Trillin, “is very Midwestern.”

According to Trillin, the Midwest was “what’s left over” because “those Americans who don’t think of themselves as Westerners or Southerners or Californians or New Englanders or Easterners, etc.” think of themselves as Midwesterners. This creates a psychological defensiveness in Expatriate Midwesterners such as Ford because they fear people back home will think they have become “too big for one’s britches” and therefore “feel guilty about leaving and thus symbolically rejecting their hometowns.”

That might have been true about the Midwest in the mid-1970s when there was economic prosperity, excellent public education, and civic-mindedness (imagine a time when Flint was the richest city for young people). Now the Midwest is a place of neglect and decline with the 2013 bankruptcy of Detroit and the 2014-16 Flint water crisis symbolizing the region: Meth labs rather than farms, urban violence instead of labor unions, and deindustrialization rather than economic growth. The Midwest has been transformed into a place of labor unrest, political polarization, and departing talent. Its once robust public institutions, excellent schools, and practice of cultural assimilation has now been eclipsed by the left-wing identity politics of the East, the religious fervor of the South, and the libertarian and utopian dreams of the West.

What was once considered the “mental maps” of the Midwest—and more broadly of the country as a whole—a tolerant, civil society that was willing to compromise—has been crowded out by other region’s “geographic imaginations.” The question Midwesterners—and Americans—should ask today is whether, in today’s Midwest, would someone like Gerard Ford emerge with his values of honesty, decency, and openness.