Writing Wednesday: More on NDQ

My little article on the history of the first 24 volumes of North Dakota Quarterly has gotten a bit out of hand. Not only is it too long, but I’ve lost the thread of my argument amid revisions, start-stop writing, and other mental distractions. I’m still enjoying writing it, but it’s now too long and off point.

You can read the first three part of the article here, here, and here. The fourth part of the article was supposed to connect NDQ to the traditions of 19th-century prairie (regional) radicalism that were slowly absorbed by the state and by various institutions. NDQ represented part of this process, especially after the dismissal of its first editor, as it promoted forms of regional, institutional, progressivism that connected North Dakota to national markets for its resources, broader trends in policy, and a sense of cosmopolitanism (as defined by Tom Lutz’s work).

Needless to say, this section is not tight and it may be jettisoned as I rework this paper to make the word limit imposed by the editors. That said, I wanted to put some words on the page about Hamlin Garland who did so much to articulate a distinct form of midwestern and northwestern regionalism.

Institutionalizing Radical Regionalism (or Regional Radicalism)

The rise of little magazines in the early 20th century manifest more than the anti-establishment impulses of Midwestern, Southern, Western, and Northwestern authors and editors who sought to reclaim literary production from the hegemony of east coast publishers. This desire to reappropriate the literary production of the midwest, northwest, or the prairie state paralleled the rise in rural radicalism in the region across the early 20th century. Figures such as Hamlin Garland made explicit the link between radical politics and literary production in a series of works across the 1890s (Pizer 2010) culminating in his work Crumbling Idols (1894) which combined appeals to Populism with regional literature that embodied realistic representations of life in America. For Garland, this marked a significant departure from American literature that attempted to imitate coastal or European tastes. Garland’s view of regional writing instead reified the distinctive regional values present in the US. As the shadow of the American Civil War continued to fade, Hamlin and other advocates for regionalism could assert that the very regionalism that had almost compromised the integrity of the US could now strengthen the nation. In particular Garland championed the image of rugged and hard working midwesterners unfairly treated by the forces outside capital: landlords, mill operators, and others who held the livelihood of farmers in the balance (Fredner 2021; Foote 2001). By the first decades of the 20th century, Garland’s idealized vision of the moral and hardworking midwestern farmer, became fodder for later critics associated with Carl van Doren’s ”revolt from the village“ (1921; Hilfer 1969). In Van Doren’s critique regionalist writers such as Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and by implication Hamlin Garland and Willa Cather, possessed a kind of cynicism toward idealized views of the “happy village” and in the early years of the 20th century, manifest a growing willingness to foreground the greed, duplicity, and moral ambiguity under the surface of village life. Reading regional literature through a moral lens sough to thread the needle and both situate regionalist writing in the broader, national and European context of moral critique while still preserving the narrower context of regional identity.

The tensions between cosmopolitanism and regionalism manifest in the “revolt of the village” emphasized the practical realities of life in the midwest and informed a view of the US and the world as inscribed with distinct regional (and ultimately national) identities. In the late 19th century, the cosmopolitan turn manifest itself in the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago which celebrated the Columbus’s voyages to the west. The massive fair featured pavilions erected by nations, colonies, and US states designed to show the distinctive character of these places in a shrinking world. The strong connection between national and colonial institutions and early-20th-century concepts of regionalism invariably lead to the institutionalization of regional values and politics. Magazines such as the Quarterly Journal emphasized the historical, social, institutional, geographic and geological features of the new state as the embodiment of the region. By appealing to the social and physical sciences, legal and economic theory and history, and the challenges facing public heath and social services as ways to define the distinctive potential and character of the region, the Quarterly constructs a definition the region in generalizable academic terms. The emergence of state sponsored historical societies in Minnesota (Minnesota History 1915-) and North Dakota (North Dakota Historical Quarterly 1926-) produced a parallel wave of contemporary magazines. The inaugural issue of Minnesota History featured an article by C.W. Alvord who commends the writing of history in the state of Minnesota to professional historians “trained in economics and political science, should be familiar with literature and philosophy and with the most recent trend of thought in the natural sciences. ” In this way, the Quarterly followed the claims by Hamlin Garland that literature, and by extension literary regionalism, was “at the bottom sociologic“ (Garland 1894: 185; Lutz 2004: 32-33). The effort of these journals to conjure the region as an academic object of study found awkward parallels with magazines such as The Midland, which while founded at the University of Iowa, eschewed university support and stressed the potential of regional literature to do more than reify the region, but to transform the world. As Lutz put it, for The Midland’s editor, John Frederick, “The world, not the local, is the frame” (Lutz 2004: 134).

By the early decades of the 20th century, the region’s progressive political culture suffused the concerns of the regional magazine in the Northern plains. The call for the region to be both autonomous and generative, in cultural, economic, and political ways found fertile ground in universities which sought to negotiate the tension between the radicalism implicit in the distinct character of regional identity and the progressive values manifest in the standardization of education, the understanding of social conditions (i.e. the “sociologic“), and the national economy. For Lutz, by the early 20th century, the institutionalization of regional values, particularly at universities, made them handmaids to centralized expressions of cosmopolitanism. In literature, the Frontier maintained its ties to the University of Montana; as we have seen, the Midland remain circumspect. The trend is most visible in the Quarterly, which amplified its university affiliation through its emphasis on social science, economics, education, and natural resources. It made manifest the potential for regional literature and resources to benefit both the region, the nation, and the world and to benefit from its engagement with national and global audiences.