Very special event here at the Gerald R Ford president ial museum. Really proud to see all of you coming out to enjoy, i think, whats going be a very stimulating discussion about. Our home, we dont know enough about. Im gleaves. Im the executive director of the Gerald R Ford president ial foundation. My this evening is jon lauck, whos a writer and researcher hes written many books. Ive got several of them here that he and i have worked on together on, the midwest. And were going to explore that. So im welcoming you, our Live Audience and our cspan viewers everywhere. So, john, i think we ought get right into it. Please tell us about your background and you have real midwestern roots. I mean, you come by all of this honestly raised on a midwestern you know, you went to big colleges, you know, both your ph. D. In history and your law degree, and youve had quite a career in the midwest. So tell us yourself. Well, thank you. And thanks to everyone here in grand rapids for coming out tonight. Its a great pleasure to be here i i should say that i kind of live in a colony, grand rapids, in this sense. Of course, the dutch are very important to western michigan, grand rapids. But they later chain migrated to pella and then to northwest iowa. We go of course, my home or the place live now is sioux falls, which right by sioux center, orange city, iowa. Theres a big dutch enclave right next to our city and the city of sioux falls now has a dutch mayor whos a very good, very popular. And my kids go to school with lots of vans and lots of other dutch kids. So i feel right at home here tonight. But thanks again. Believes so. Yes, i grew on a midwestern farm in eastern dakota. South dakota. Its kind of a divided state. Eastern part of the states, very midwestern its kind of like iowa and, southern minnesota, the western, which more people are with. Thats kind of the pressure. The plains west, thats where the mountains are and the ranchers are. And the indian reservations, thats sort of a different place. Thats very midwestern. Thats kind of a classically think of deadwood and the black hills. But im from the eastern part of the state where most of the are and a place that used to be populated with lots of little farms. And my great grandfather others farmed 160 acre farms, corn hogs, cattle, very standard midwestern farms. And thats my dad was doing when i was born on a farm about three or four miles south of madison in south dakota. If youve ever heard of madison since were at the ford library, you may remember an old guy named senator carl mundt. I was thinking of him as i walked in here and saw a picture, gerald ford with his pipe. But old senator carl mundt was a pipe smoker, too. I think with this new book by Richard Norton smith. Maybe we can bring back pipe smoking bicycle america. Yeah, but then since i was on a farm all the farm kids went the Agricultural College in south which is south Dakota University its the land grant. And you go there and learn how to be a better farmer and so the way sdsu jackrabbits won National Football championship this year if you want to blood i feel happy theyre getting that please dont confuse them with the north Dakota State University thats a great insult where im from but so i went to the to the ag college and got very interested in history. I had a great professor of history there by the name of john e miller. And he was interested in the history of the his father was a lutheran minister, so they moved around to little towns in the midwest, in minnesota and wisconsin and illinois and kansas and he really started me thinking about the fact that not many people study the history of this region. So i decided to go to graduate school applied various but ended up at the university of because there was a guy there who studied things that i was interested in and went there got my phd in history studied farm economics wrote a dissertation about Agricultural Economics in the postwar decades. If you want to if you want a sleep aid i commend him in that dissertation that turned into a book too. You but when i was in graduate school, it just seemed like the discipline of history and the number of jobs in history was not not in good shape. So i decided to go to law school and i became a lawyer and practiced law for several years. But then this professor that i mentioned id decided he was to retire early and, Just Write Books full time and. He said, you should apply for my job. South Dakota State University and i did. And so i started becoming a history professor writing books and and that led to these books, many of which are written with the great gleaves whitney, who many of you know hes got a lot of great books himself. And you can tell why were so simpatico with our interest in history and and political philosophy. We and were just a sneak peak were cooking up a couple of more books should come out in the next next few years. Thats right well i would be remiss if i mention that we met john in 14. It was an mecosta. It was in the library, the russell kirk center, and at that time when we met, i had not heard of you prior to that and told me about all the projects and the reason johns imagination sort of captured my attention was that those of us who studied history in the eighties and in the nineties, there was a period when everything was shifting to globalization or our colleagues called it. Back then global only. And and so you know, it was it was fun to find who was actually interested in history, local history state histories because we had neglected that for decade. And when i found out that john was the one who perceived just how big the gap had become between, what midwestern studies been, state studies, geography and history had been local histories, kind of a folk village in approach to history. How it had been and the destitute that it fell into the neglect and. John, youre the one who had the imagination really to see it. Tell us about that process. Well, so i was teaching at south dakota state and if youve ever been in a History Department or an academic setting, this this may have happened to you. The a month before classes started. The chair of the History Department came in and. Oh, hey, buddy, i forgot youre supposed to teach the history of south dakota this fall. The person who was going to teach it is ill or wasnt able to make it to campus. So i scrambled around to put together course and i. I hate to reveal secrets from inside the but sometimes tons of preparation dont go into these courses. So i ive put together this course quickly as i could and did the best job i could teach in the of south dakota. But i noticed that there really was not a good book about early south dakota the settlement of the state, the great dakota boom the territory period. And so i started making notes and getting organized ended up writing a book about phase of south dakota history. And it was a book that came out under the title prairie republic and one of the things i noticed writing that book is all these people moving in to dakota. They were coming from the midwest. If you look at all. Our early governors in south dakota, theyre from indiana and michigan and wisconsin, etc. I mentioned im from the town of madison, south dakota. That was founded by immigrants who came in from wisconsin. And they thought the county they were moving into kind of looked lake mendota and madison. So they named it lake county and the name of the town, madison. And that was a very good indication of this chain migration across the midwest and so heres some a statistic that should the point in south dakota, 95 of the settler was who were americans meaning they had already lived in the united they came from the midwest. South dakota was not settled by people from alabama and mississippi and georgia they were it was settled by midwesterners. Now, their course was a big immigrant there, too. So we have lots of norwegians and germans. Luc is obviously a german name. And thats, you know, part of the immigrant groups that came from. So i wanted to say about what does it mean that all these people came in here from the midwest . Theres an old doctrine, geography. Theres a geographer named wilbur zelinsky. And he came up with the doctrine of first effective settlement, meaning the group that ends up in a place and settles that place and settlement and plants the dominant culture. Thats what the cultural dna of that place is going to be for many, many decades, maybe centuries. So i wanted to say or, explain to people what it meant. Midwesterners were moving into dakota. So i thought, well, this will be easy, will go to the library ill read some of the foundational history texts about the midwest. Ill read up on this and ill read a couple of pieces. It well, what i found was there was virtually books rely on for getting a sense of what the history of the midwest was. And i kept digging and i didnt come up with much and all of a sudden im like, you know what . This would make a good book. What happened to this field . Why did it vanish . Where did it go . And so i wrote a little book called the lost region, taught a revival of midwestern history that came out in 2013. And thats when gleaves and i met and he read this book. He was super interested in it and i was trying to revive interest in this region and you know, if youre with history at all, youll know that the history of the American South a massive field there are literally dozens and dozens of basic histories of the American South same true of the American West. The American West was booming field in the seventies and eighties. You may have heard of the western history most History Departments have a western historian and a southern historian actually, we have a article coming out in the journal middle west. Ill ill give you a sneak peek here and kind of give away the punch line for this article. But what it says is all these universities, the midwest, they tend to have someone who teaches the history of the American South and the history of the American West, but they dont have anybody who teaches about the history of the midwest where theyre planted, you know, even places like the university of michigan and big ten universities like the university, minnesota, they dont teach the history of the american midwest. So that needs to be fixed. And if we can accomplish one thing in all this work were doing believes its going to be getting someone hired in these bigger Midwestern University years to teach the history of the region that theyre a part of. This is not a crazy demand this is not a radical demand. This were not demanding a revolution or promoting revolution. This is a very simple scale reform that can easily be fixed. Maybe theres someone on the michigan board of regents who can call up the president of the university of michigan and make this happen. I dont. And also establish the journals there used to be a lot of midwestern youve been able to plumb and get a lot of research out of them. All those journals dried up. They yeah, they did. And we i should say we did create a new journal of midwestern history called middle west review, created about ten years ago when another consequence of gleaves and i meeting and this book, the lost region, was we launched the midwestern history of which gleaves very generously hosted here in grand rapids. So this is like. You know, the the place that the midwestern revival started was here in grand rapids. So you should be very proud of that. And thank is for all as making it happen. Well, the other thing then that we should cover right away is definitionally what is the midwest . Theres a lot of confusion, some amazing confusion about what the midwest. But perhaps could start by defining it in terms of the governing document that the founders left us. Now, its very interesting some people know in 87 the Us Constitution was framed. This is when all the delegates met in philadelphia over that long hot summer between may and september and then september 17th, they signed the constitution of the united at the very same time up the road in new york, the northwest ordinance was being composed. It was ratified, signed on july 13th. John talk about the significance the northwest ordinance for what is to be the midwest later becomes the northwest ordinance. And, you know, this is somebody got your j. D. At the university of minnesota. The northwest ordinance is still got the power of the law of the land. The michigan constitution quotes verbatim out of the northwest ordinance. Tell us a little about it. Well, the creation of the maine american constitution in philadelphia gets all the love attention you and it should. And its absolutely crucial American History. And i hope all this work thats being done revive interest in history and civics. The United States puts a lot of attention on the constitution. I know you have gordon wood out here. Everyone here should, go hear gordon wood talking in grand. He is the master. He is the expert on the founding of the country and the writing of the constitution. So please go hear him. But as gleave said up in new york, the Continental Congress was still meeting and they had to decide what to do with this big chunk of land that they ended up acquiring as of the american revolution, many of you probably know, many of the main battles of the american revolution. And what happened on the eastern seaboard. But theres a little known unsung of the revolution, and that is when George Rogers goes out into the west and takes this territory. That was then called the illinois country and what would become indiana. These used to be old french forts that the british end up acquiring as part of their victory in the french and indian war. While the americans take it over as part of the revolution. And so when the revolution is over and the british have signed over territory to the americans the americans have to decide how it will be governed. And this is new territory. This is separate from original colonies. You the colonies started to be organized in the 1600s and so they had colonial governments, they had colonial governors, they had colonial legislators they had kind of an infrastructure in. But for this new territory, which would be west of the appalachians, north of the ohio river. So its called the Northwest Territory, they had to make decisions how it would be organized and managed and that summer in new york, they wrote a foundational charter for this territory which michigan would be carved out of. And that charter was called the northwest. And it was even more progressive, far reaching than the federal constitution in many ways, it included very basic civil rights, habeas corpus and freedom, the press and freedom of religion. And, you know, i dont want to gloss over freedom of religion. This is absolutely crucial because some of those early. They were sort of theocracies in a way like, massachusetts, connecticut, i mean, those were run by the Puritan Church and the pearson church dominate those state arts for many years into the 19th century. I mean, they used collect taxes to pay for the peer to church in massachusetts into 1840s. But the midwest or northwest would be run differently. And there would be religious pluralism. There all these denominations could openly exercise their religion freely and into this territory you do get puritan, congregate. Thats from new england, of course, but you also get scotchirish presbyterians and you get up countries, southerners of various denominations, and you get germans moving in from pennsylvania and you get lots of immigrants who are lutherans and catholics. So you get a real mixture of people and the most diverse state in the country in. The 1840s was ohio, whereas Eastern States remained rather ethno logically homogenous. So im getting off track. Youre back to the northwest ordinance, so northwest ordinance is very progressive for time. It allows new states to be created instead of becoming colonies. The original states, new states are created. They are required to immediately set up schools and sure that the population highly literate and, but most importantly in then skip to the end the most important thing it did, which the federal constitution did do, was ban slavery. Of course, the federal constitution treat allowed slavery to continue in the south and it had notorious two thirds clause and other things protect the institution of slavery. But from the beginning in the Northwest Territory it was banned here and so it that these two sections as they used to say they didnt use the term regions two sections developed and as the 19th century went on they diverged and in separate directions with south obviously defending to the hilt. The institute of slavery and in the midwest. Many organizations forming undermine slavery. The efforts to abolish slavery. The abolitionist societies were very powerful especially in michigan as a good example, michigan and ohio had lots of these societies so it led to a completely different region than other parts of the United States. And thats why the northwest ordinance, which believes loves these of an expert on this. Hes asking questions about it, but he knows more about it than anybody but well, this is fascinating. Well come back to some of the the especially wonderful features of the northwest ordinance and the promotion of education that we were just mentioning and that Kirk Russell Kirk center a few minutes ago in School Section lake up there is right in the middle, section 16, right in middle of these townships. You had sections devoted to education, the really remarkable and this is just an illustration of how progressive the midwest was. We dont think of the midwest in world historical as being a progressive area of the world. And it was and a lot of that goes back to the wisdom of the founders. Just a footnote, you know, when you had the jeffersonian and the hamiltonian