Industry And The Midwest

The expansion of the United States and indeed the Midwest would not have been possible in the slightest had it not been for an industrious spirit. This is a fair, and obvious enough statement, but one area where it shines is in the Midwest.

When large masses of northern European peoples started arriving in this country and making their way to what would become the Midwest, the area was wild and untamed. There was really not much beyond rolling hills, dense forests, and coursing rivers aside from native tribes, who were not thrilled, and the various predacious animals, which may well just bring death or severe injury to your family. Yet, out of that wild and almost completely untamed wilderness, came our Midwestern society.

When you ask someone to name Midwestern cities they’ll say things like Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Duluth, or Fargo. Maybe they have family in New Ulm, or Sioux Falls. These are cities with long and fascinating histories of their own, like why all of Milwaukee’s bridges are at an angle, or the soft rivalry between St. Paul and Minneapolis. What connects all of these cities though, is the spirit of the men much greater than us who raised them from little more than timber cabins and sod houses, cities of stone and steel. Cities like Duluth, at one time the busiest and most important port in the country.

It’s not cities that make the Midwest however, but the small towns filled with ma and pa shops, blue collar mills, and the hometown football team that “almost made state”. This is the true Midwest, and it is here where you find the true culture of industry. These are men and women who break their back running a small diner, niche shop, or used book store just so their sons can play football at the local high school, or so their daughters can do ballet. Take for example the teacher I had for high school homeroom and a number of classes. He retired up the North Shore to hand build and restore canoes with his son. It was him who really taught me the value of industry, usually by shutting the classroom door on me and telling me to finish my work before I would be allowed into his classroom.

To this day, years later, I can still hear him yelling at me down the hall to get my work done, and then slamming the door. Tough love to be sure, but it illustrates part of the point; we are a people who take pride in our work, whatever it is, and we expect on some level that others do the same for their own.

You can see this attitude in the average folk that live here. It’s the young father that builds furniture in the garage for his family and the farmers market, or the mother with her garden. Hearing things like this is not uncommon by any means. To the contrary, most of us hear from our friends and families that so-and-so is starting a new garden plot, or has a small side business doing any number of things from reselling on eBay to home carpentry. These things could be simply hobbies, or ways to make extra money, but either way this is normal for us. We think very little of it because it is so deeply ingrained in our local and regional culture.

The Old-World Prussian virtues placed a very high value on this idea of industriousness, and we have Frederick William I to thank for preserving this, and other values by naming them and implementing them through his reforms. Certainly, in my very German family, this value on industry is the case. As a child while gardening with my grandmother, she would share stories of her father renting flower and vegetable gardens all over her hometown. He’d bring flowers home for his wife and vegetables for the family. This endearing anecdote exemplifies the old spirit of industry which flows through our veins.

Some of this attitude which we see can arguably be traced back to the “Protestant Work Ethic” identified by Max Weber in the earliest years of the twentieth century. But I would argue that this is something deeper, something much older. It calls back to the early renaissance and its awe inspiring cathedrals. It calls back further to the castles of the medieval era. Indeed, it hearkens back even to the Germanic tribes that held the Romans back at the Rhine. The spirit of industry is not limited to making things with one’s hands. It is seen in the cultural works of Beethoven or Goethe’s Faust and it is seen now in our present struggle to create and build beauty in a world full of garish replicas.

From governments, institutions, and even society itself down to the homemade, custom bookshelf, the spirit of industry is one which has lifted our European forebears from the forests and hills of the Midwest to the “German Athens” that Milwaukee once was, and could be again.

The spirit of industry runs deep in the primarily German and Scandinavian people who built this region. But the spirit of industry that is so deeply rooted in the Midwestern mind is not one of lumber or steel barons which we learn about in school. It’s of the quiet, hardworking men and women of the out country. The homesteaders, and the lumberjacks that cleared the forests. The mill workers, dock workers, and entrepreneurs that used to populate this region, long before the interstate and cubicles.

These people will long outlast the hyper-corporate world that we live in, and if not them, then their memory and spirit, which is alive in every Amerikaner, will.