The Midwest

Thursday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Falling in line with Sinclair Lewis

In 1920 Warren G. Harding was elected president of the United States, after campaigning on a promise to the American electorate to return the country to what he called “normalcy.” Exactly one hundred years later, Joe Biden assumed the same office having offered the same thing, in different language. In July 1922 Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt, a bestselling novel about a normal middle-class American businessman living in a normal small-sized Midwestern city: the quintessential personification of “normalcy.” Around the middle of the same decade, H.L. Mencken, a good (if necessarily patient) friend of Lewis’s, predicted that America would “blow up” in a hundred years. 2022 is Babbitt’s centennial year.

babbitt

Sunday

Bill Kauffman

Hoosiers of New York

Poor March. It has so few defenders. Yet annually, on the first day of the month, I stand in the snow or sleet or icy rain and recite William Cullen Bryant in hopeful placation: “Ah, passing few are they who speak/ Wild stormy month! in praise of thee.” Bryant went on to speak in measured praise of the third month not so much for its qualities, such as they are, as for the promise it contains of the eventual arrival of the fifth month. For me, though, unheralded March offers the spectatorial pleasure of basketball.

hoosiers

Wednesday

Matt Mayer

The 2020 question: which candidate will stand up to China?

Imagine you are in your late thirties living in Ohio working at a steel or other manufacturing plant in the late 1990s. You are the second or third generation of your family working at the local plant. Perhaps even your dad is still working at the plant as a union steward. You’ve already seen the impact the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement had on your plant and other parts of Ohio. Under President Bill Clinton, who you voted for and your union heavily backed, China did enough of what the experts and policymakers in Washington wanted it to do to gain entry to the World Trade Organization, which became final in December 2001.

biden trump craziest 2020

Friday

Lillian Li

Craft brewing’s Midwest comeback

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘No food or drink has evolved as much as beer in the past 15 years,’ says J. Ryan Stradal when we meet for a drink at the Beer Grotto, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The author of the New York Times bestselling debut Kitchens of the Great Midwest is in the middle of his Midwest book tour. His latest novel, The Lager Queen of Minnesota, is a multi-generational saga that starts with two sisters, a stolen inheritance and a dream of making the best beer in Minnesota. It’s a family story told through beer goggles, which charts the evolution of Midwestern brewing from the 1960s to the present day.

craft