Flood Stories Enhance the Myth of Midwestern Virtue

It was just one sentence in the newspaper, a sentence tucked into the middle of a story about the flooding in the Midwest.

It read: “A shelter was opened at the elementary school, but no one slept there last night because everyone had been offered a bed in someone’s home.”

That was in a Missouri town of about 500, but which is now nearly doubled in size because it has taken in virtually everyone from a neighboring town of 400.

Similar stories are coming from other places in the Midwest. Even in Des Moines, a city of more than 200,000, shelters were sparsely populated. “Don’t look for crowded shelters because you’re talking about good old Midwest values here in Des Moines,” the assistant police chief said.

From the large urban centers on the East and West coasts, rife as they are with crime and congestion and various other scourges, the big media have romanticized the Midwest over the years to the level of a Camelot. Farmers have become folk heroes and average citizens have been ascribed personal virtues far beyond those of mortal man, defined as anyone living on either coast. And now with each passing day, as the rest of the country watches from relative safety, the Midwest adds to its legend as a place where people are stronger, steelier, more resourceful and, yes, kinder.

Who needs homeless shelters when you have neighbors?

When it comes to outsiders’ perceptions of the Midwest, how much is fact? How much is fiction? Are they really better than the rest? What are “good old Midwest values,” anyway?

Having spent my first 27 years in Nebraska, including stints in urban Omaha with more than 300,000 people and in two small towns with populations of 200 and 1,000, my Midwest credentials are fairly solid. After leaving Omaha, I moved first to Sodom (Denver) and then on to Gomorrah (Southern California).

Are people better in the Midwest? From my perspective, the answer is no. That doesn’t mean they’re worse or lesser--just that they’re no better, no worse than people I’ve met elsewhere.

In the Midwest, you can get hit by a drunk driver, harassed by a petty boss and be subjected to vicious gossip. You can get ripped off by your mechanic, be deceived by a salesman and lied to by your children. Public officials get indicted, ministers play church politics and people sometimes don’t return your phone calls. Not everyone says please and thank you.

In short, they’ve discovered vice out there in the Heartland. Indeed, some people have raised it to astounding levels. You could blame it on cable TV, except that the problems existed even before everybody got wired.

What I’ve said so far, however, only addresses the mythology of the Midwest.

It doesn’t speak to what else goes on every day back there, something as dependable as January snow and pure as a country stream.

And that is the sense of taking care of each other. It is as ingrained in the people as is the tendency to be nosy or to save a couple bucks.

There’s nothing phony about the empty shelters in Des Moines or in that Missouri town along the Mississippi. Those townspeople really are taking in their fellow citizens. Their instinct to help has nothing to do with public relations or impressing Ted Koppel.

It’s real, and it would be happening if TV had never been invented.

And on that count, Midwesterners could legitimately ask us here in Southern California: Would the same thing happen in Orange County if hundreds of people were suddenly homeless? Would we see people by the dozens taking in their neighbors?

I think we would not. Some of the reasons are practical. In many small towns in the Midwest, people are taking in their blood relatives who still live close by. But that doesn’t account for strangers taking in strangers.

In addition, many Midwestern families have lived in their towns for years, if not generations. The townspeople know them and can trust them. In California, we may not know our next-door neighbor.

But even after factoring in the practical reasons, the Midwest does have something on us.

An anthropologist might say it’s in their genes, handed down from pioneers who were, by turns, self-reliant and community-spirited, because that’s what it took to survive the tough times. Maybe the harsh winters or the broiling summers made everyone feel vulnerable. Maybe that engendered a shared sense of both personal limits and personal comfort. You couldn’t “do your own thing” when your plow broke down. If your neighbor didn’t lend you his, you lost your crop.

That kind of reality makes neighbors of people. It’s why in small-town Nebraska or Iowa or Missouri you can still leave your door unlocked at night.

We’ll have a natural disaster someday in Orange County. If it’s real bad, hundreds or thousands of families will be homeless--at least for a while.

It will be interesting to see how much Midwest there is in all of us.