WHO WE ARE

We are a stew of Upland Southerners, Midlanders and Yankees,
but mostly we are fierce individualists

Essay by Harold Henderson
Artwork courtesy of the Illinois State Historical Library

On a cold November day in the 1830s, Eliza Farnham stopped in to see her Tazewell County neighbors. She soon wished she hadn't. For one thing, their cabin had no windows. "All the light came down the wide chimney, or through the open door," she wrote later. "There was a long shelf in one corner, on which two plates, two cups, and three saucers were arranged, in conjunction with an iron skillet, a small bake kettle and a tin teapot. A broken table stood against the wall, on which the breakfast things yet remained, though it was eleven o'clock. ...

"There was one dilapidated chair in the room, besides a single bench and a double one ... the wife rose from her seat near the table, took her pipe from her mouth, and placing it near the edge of the hearth, invited me to sit. A second child was playing in the ashes. The door was wide open, and the raw wind swept in gusts through the miserable place, filling it with ashes and smoke. ...

"I remarked, that it must be a serious inconvenience to live through the winter with the door open."

"Why, yes," she replied, "tain't as warm hyur as it used to be in Kaintucky: twasn't of much account there."

"But we obviate the difficulty of a colder climate by windows; they admit the light without the cold."

"Yes, I reckon they're mighty convenient, but we hain't had one yet."

"How long have you lived here?" "Four year." "Have you never had a floor?" "No, we hain't yit; but I reckon we shall git one afore long."

Farnham was no wimp (later in life she became matron of Sing Sing Prison). Nor was she naive about the rigors of the central Illinois frontier. She knew that her neighbors could live differently if they chose, and she blamed them for not doing so. Her visit was a classic confrontation between Yankee and Upland Southerner — two cultures that responded to the Illinois environment in very different ways.

Culture is not everything, but it's a lot. And even in homogenized America it still reflects somewhat the regions we live in. There is a reason why eight of the first nine state "bottle bills" were passed in New England and in states dominated by New Englanders' descendants. There is a reason why, according to In These Times, the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend Health Care (against profit-making companies) is strongest in Massachusetts. There is a reason why, as David Hackett Fischer wrote in 1989, southern cultures "strongly supported every American war no matter what it was about or who it was against," from 1798 to 1965. There is a reason why an out-of-state legislator who visits Chicago with a proposal to further the common good through regional governance (as Myron Orfield did last year) comes from Minnesota, not Mississippi.

Within Illinois, these cultural divisions continue to shape ourselves and our politics, even though they are no longer as clearly tied to regions of the state as they once were.

Between 1800 and 1850, Illinois was settled by three cultures: Yankees from New York and New England; Midlanders from Pennsylvania and Ohio; and Upland Southerners from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. These people talked differently, built differently, kept house differently, partied differently, worshiped differently and had different ideas about how to live together. They tended to settle in different regions — Yankees north, Midlanders central, Southerners south — but that was only a tendency.

Politically, the Yankees were "moralists" who believed in reform-seeking amateurs making common cause for the common good. Midlanders tended to be "individualists" who believed in live and let live, getting ahead in business or farming, and letting professional politicians distribute the rewards incidental to their particular line of business. Upland Southerners were "traditionalists," more oriented to clan and church than to commerce but, like the Midlanders, preferred to leave politics to a minority.

What these three cultures had in common was domination. They weren't

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the first to come to Illinois. The Illiniwek had them beat by millennia, the French by a couple of centuries. And they certainly weren't the last. But, for better or worse, they took charge. Later comers — even the numerous Germans and Irish, who were right on their heels — in many ways had to react and adjust to the terms that Yankees, Midlanders and Southerners set, and the disputes that had already sprung up among them. Illinois was settled in layers, and these three layers have imparted their contrasting flavors to the state ever since.

The first layer — Farnham's neighbors — came over the Appalachians, through the Kentucky country, down the Ohio River. (Thomas Lincoln followed one such path from Kentucky to southern Indiana to central Illinois; surely one of the less-appreciated strengths of his son's presidency was his ability to speak to the heart of all three cultures.) In their time they were known as "Suckers" or "Hoosiers." Those few historians who pay attention to cultural geography know them as "Upland Southerners," "backwoodsmen" or "borderers." Today we'd call them hillbillies or poor whites — but perhaps not to their faces. Violent, clannish, emotional in religion, poor in material goods, they first settled in the mountainous "back country" of Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas, where they provided the raw material for the pioneer stereotype. Many were Scots-Irish; in his book, Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer attributes much of their culture to its origins between England and Scotland, an area torn by war and instability for centuries. Those who emigrated were "a double-distilled selection of some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land. ... During the [American] Civil War some [Southern Highlanders] fought against both sides. In the early 20th century they would become intensely negrophobic and anti-Semitic. In our own time they are furiously hostile to both communists and capitalists." In Illinois their hostility was vented on their Native American forerunners. In his old age Thomas McKee recalled an episode from his boyhood in Schuyler County (quoted in John Hallwas' book. Western Illinois Heritage). The Upland Southern settlers let their cattle and hogs forage freely in the woods. In the fall of 1825, they began to suspect that the few Indians remaining in the area were occasionally poaching one. Rather than fence their stock, they "made up their minds... not to let the Indians winter in that country." Twenty-one men, including a "whipping-master" equipped with a "big hickory gad [goad]," first visited a Frenchman who traded with the Indians. The trader quickly agreed to move on. Then an Indian blundered into the cabin. The whipping-master "struck him time and again with the hickory gad," but he escaped to warn his encampment three miles away. By the time the unwelcoming committee caught up, there was nobody left to whip. "They must have been badly frightened, as they left everything," recalled McKee. "The committee tore down the five wigwams. The kettle of wild potatoes sizzling over the fire they overturned, and then they threw the potatoes far and wide. They made a search for the fugitives. Suddenly my father discovered an old white-headed Indian closely hugging the ground behind a log. Father wrested his gun from him and then left him to the tender mercies of the whipping-master, who did not spare the rod, I tell you." Town-building, schooling and the rule of law were not high priorities in this culture. Between 1839 and 1876, just six of 285 murders were punished by the courts in "Bloody Williamson" County. Southern-settled Belleville got its first private subscription school in 1815, courtesy of Yankee missionaries. "They are a verry ignorant people," wrote another Schuyler County settler in 1836, who at least aspired to education. "Thare is many among them that cannot read nor write but they are verry kind and friendly." For this group, "freedom in this new land meant cutting all ties to society except those to family and church," writes University of Illinois political scientist Frederick Wirt. Politically,

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Upland Southerners were more tradition-minded than commercial-minded. But in the absence of either slaves or gentry, their traditionalism gradually mutated into "a new spirit of 'rugged individualism,'" according to political scientist Daniel Elazar. "Thus private activities immune from governmental intervention are very broadly defined and the rights of traditional local elites strongly protected."

The next layer of Illinois settlers came by way of the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. Known as "Yankees," their original culture hearth was Puritan New England, but they were more likely to hail from New York state. (Eliza Farnham was born in Rensse- laerville, N.Y.) Today we'd call them ministers," writes Ernest Eimo Calkins in They Broke the Prairie, explaining Gale's own state of mind in the 1820s as he mulled over the idea. "With its great area and potential wealth it would one day be a dominating factor in the nation." He feared that it might "fall under the control of what he considered an untaught, ungodly people." Not only did Gale want to convert the southerners to Presbyterianism, he wanted to ensure a continuing supply of missionaries: "Poor men's sons made the best ministers. They were prepared for hardship and self-denial. But poor men's sons had not the means to pay for education. The solution was manual labor. The students could sustain themselves while studying, the institution supply creation of a better society," writes geographic historian D.W. Meinig. "Government was a positive instrument dedicated to the well-being of the commonwealth; politics was a noble calling and a proper concern of every citizen."

"Yankee" did not equal modern-day "liberal," though. It just meant that they were likely to decide the merits of government action or inaction on universalistic moral grounds.

The third layer of settlers came more slowly across the young Midwest, across Ohio and Indiana, into central Illinois. Their original "culture hearth" was eastern Pennsylvania — a place where, according to geographer Peirce Lewis, "the highest values were freedom, tolerance, and the ability to make

do-gooders, and they wouldn't mind.

Unlike the southerners, who migrated into Illinois in small family groups and "squatted" wherever they liked, the Yankees were meticulous to the point of compulsiveness about the process of settlement. They often came in organized communities of people with similar backgrounds, first sending out reconnaissance parties to pick the best ground, and then paying for it at the land office before moving in. George Washington Gale of upstate New York founded Galesburg and Knox Manual Labor College in just this way.

The Yankees typically had an elaborate moral rationale for making the move. "The West was growing faster in population than it was in churches and the work, the products support the school and pay for board and teaching."

The missionaries had plenty to learn about pioneering, though. The Upland South culture was well adapted to making do on a frontier where necessities were hard to come by. Their one- room log cabins with stick-and-clay chimneys, their prowess with gun and ax meant survival. "Most of the shifts and devices employed were learned by the Galesburg colonists from their southern neighbors, who had been on the ground seven years, and who even in the states they came from knew no higher standard of living."

Politically, Yankees tended to be moralistic reformers. "The purpose of politics was understood to be the money." Their identity isn't quite as sharply defined as the others. They tended to be commercial farmers or urban businesspeople, out to make a good living, more likely to put down roots than the always-mobile Upland Southerners, less likely to share the crusading zeal that animated both Yankee colleges and southern feuds. Today we might call them "bourgeois," and they might be too busy to notice.

Western towns like Cincinnati, Terre Haute and Peoria mimicked Pennsylvania and "were soon full of industrialists, artisans, and mechanics," writes D.W Meinig in his remarkable retelling of American history. The Shaping of America: Continental America, 1800-1867. "Flour mills, distilleries, breweries, sawmills, wood-

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working plants, and farm implement factories were dotted through the region. These Midlanders, along with their Yankee neighbors, were in the forefront of development and adoption of new plows, rakes, seed drills, corn planters, reapers, and threshers in the 1840s and 1850s."

Pennsylvania, by design, had long been the most heterogeneous of the original colonies. This pluralism was something that the Yankees, who set great store on cultural and ethnic uniformity, also had to learn from the Midlanders.

Politically, Midlanders were individualists, content to leave politics to the professionals. Peirce Lewis writes that "New England and New York have produced some of America's most distinguished statesmen, while Pennsylvania, just as wealthy and populous, has more often produced a succession of political hacks." Of course, that's a Yankee pejorative. Meinig is more appreciative of this culture: "Whereas Yankees and Upland Southerners tended to line up on opposite sides of issues, whether it be taxation, education, public improvements, powers of government, or whatever, Midlanders brought a focus on private economic interests that helped to bridge that chasm and build a broader consensus." For Midlanders, politics was neither a moral crusade (Yankees) nor defense of a traditional order (Upland South), but something to be settled by professionals while the rest of us got on with business. Also, diversity (and compromise) was less problematic for Midlanders than for the other two cultures. So it was in Illinois.

If Illinois, Indiana and Ohio had been laid out horizontally, as Thomas Jefferson originally planned, American history might have been different. Certainly these three cultures would not have had to learn to get along as thoroughly as they did in each state. As it was, they confronted each other in myriad ways. Yankee women methodically cleaned and refurbished the cabins they bought or borrowed from their mystified Hoosier, or Upland Southern, neighbors. Hoosier lawmakers, when the capital was still in Vandalia and they held a majority, protected themselves by setting liquor license fees at $2 a year and clock- peddling licenses — the province of avaricious Yankee salesmen — at $50.

Yankee missionaries found, to their bewilderment, that the southerners preferred their Baptist or Methodist preachers semiliterate and enthusiastic. Eliza Farnham attended one such camp meeting; she lost her decorum altogether when the preacher climaxed his sermon by solemnly asking the congregation, "Now, my friends — What is the Soul?" and after a suitable pause, replying, "My brethren, soul and body is enonemous terms." Hoosiers, on the other hand, found Yankee preachers boring at best. One Congregationalist overheard two pioneer women commiserating: "I don't like these Yankee preachers, they are always proving things, just like lawyers."

The two cultures clashed over temperance, too. "Whisky was a beverage as natural to the southerners as water to the teetotalers," writes Calkins; they were offended that Yankees would consider it a moral question. The two cultures even clashed over slavery: "The Hoosiers, who owned no slaves, and never had, and never would, and lived in a state technically free, hated an abolitionist like a rattlesnake."

Cultural differences became regional and then political. Wirt notes that the Yankees (with the help of immigrant Germans) won passage of an 1855 state public school law. But that same year they lost a statewide referendum on prohibition, 55 percent against to 45 percent for. In the southern counties the vote against prohibition was as

About the illustrations They are woodcuts created from 1935 to 1943 by Illinois artists working in the Federal Art Project, a Works Progress Administration relief program that sought to provide jobs for millions throughout the country during the Great Depression. Artistic works were made available for allocation to such tax-supported institutions as schools, libraries and post offices. The "American Scene" was the predominant theme, but participating artists used a variety of media and ¦ personal creativity. Illinois' topography, ranging from natural country landscapes to man-made cityscapes, is well-represented. Citizens are shown laboring in field and factory. When the project disbanded, the tally of works was staggering. In Illinois alone, more than 200 murals, 500 j, sculptures and nearly 5, 000 easel paintings were produced. "It was important that during a time of economic hardship, the Federal Art program allowed artists to continue to work as artists," says Jim L. Zimmer, director of the Illinois State Museum's Lockport gallery. "Whether or not it was the intention, the program sent the strong message that creating art is a viable form of work." A Central Allocations Unit was set up in Chicago to disburse undistributed art works. The Illinois State Museum served as one of the repositories for paintings, prints, sculptures, photographs, ceramics and textiles by artists from around the country. The Illinois State Museum's WPA art was augmented by a substantial collection of prints from the Illinois State Library and a donation from a private collection of sculptures. The museum recently held an exhibit in Chicago, coordinated by Zimmer, that featured approximately one quarter of the museum's WPA collection. For more information about WPA art in Illinois, read The Federal Art Project in Illinois, 1935-1943 by George J. Mavigliano and Richard A. Lawson published by the Southern Illinois University Press at Carbondale. Linda Classen Anderson

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much as 90 percent; in Yankee-dominated Winnebago County it was just 14 percent.

Drawing exact boundaries of these culture regions is no easy task. Illinoisans did a fair amount of mixing even before the railroad and telegraph made it easier, and some aspects of culture change faster than others.

You can try drawing them according to the way people talk. When dialectologists interviewed Illinoisans between 1939 and 1962, they found that a line running roughly from Galesburg, in the west-central part of the state, to Danville, near the Indiana border east of Champaign, separated what they called the Northern and North Midland dialects from the rest of the state. In the 1856 presidential election, anti- slavery Republican candidate John C. Fremont carried all the counties north and east of that same line. In other words, the areas where people called the fenced-in area around their barn a "barn yard" (not a "barn lot"), and referred to sledding downhill on your stomach as a "belly-flopper" (not a "belly-buster") in the 1940s and 1950s, were the same areas where antislavery Republican Yankees had clustered a century before.

You can also try drawing the boundaries — fuzzy ones, to be sure — by looking at the ways people built their houses in small towns and rural areas. In northern Illinois, you're more likely to see the "upright-and-wing" (or "L-house") New York/New England style, which looks like two houses pasted together with one part two stories and a front-facing gable, and the other part a one story with the gable facing the side; in Midland settlement areas, the two-story houses built of red-painted brick, two rooms deep with two front doors; in areas of southern influence, houses of various types with chimneys typically on the outside to disperse excess heat.

Most recently. Eastern Illinois University geography professor Douglas Meyer has redrawn the boundaries between northern, central and southern Illinois after comparing immigration patterns in Illinois counties in 1850. The earlier thinking was that the three sections of Illinois could be pretty well defined by drawing one line running easterly from Rock Island, and another from St. Louis. Meyer, however, concludes that the influence of Upland Southerners came farther north, and the Yankees' farther south than previously thought. His book, Making the Heartland Quilt: A Geographical History of Settlement and Migration in Early Nineteenth Century Illinois, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press.

While Upland Southerners and Yankees were confronting each other downstate in the early 1800s, Chicago was still an easy-going multicultural trading post. In an essay published in Ethnic Chicago, Jacqueline Peterson describes the town in 1832 as "a bustling paradise of exotica. Races and accents mingled freely, as if the mere place had momentarily destroyed the compartments in people's minds and the territorial divisions of the town. Next to survival, 'frolicking' was the major preoccupation of the town. No one expected to make a fast buck; that heady prospect had not yet presented itself. Instead, winter and summer, residents spent a part of their day and uncounted evenings at the Point, swapping tales, playing at cards, racing on foot or horseback, trading, dancing, and flying high on corn 'likker,' rum, and French brandy." Mark Beaubien apparently slept more than two dozen in shifts in his 16-by- 24-foot tavern. "He played the fiddle like a madman, and full-blooded Potawatomi, French Creoles, Yankees, and Virginians could not keep from dancing."

This carefree Chicago vanished with the coming of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Beaubien gave away the canal lots he'd bought; the Yankees bought and sold and built on them and got rich. Nine of the city's first 10 mayors were Yankees.

Of course there could be no canal without people to dig it, so on the heels of the Yankee ascendancy in the city came multitudes of poor Irish Catholics, who offended the Yankees at least as much as the French and Indians and downstate "Hoosiers" did, and for many similar reasons. Theodore Parker, a liberal Unitarian from Boston and a paradigmatic Yankee, described the Irish in 1850 as "an ignorant, idle, turbulent and vicious population" unlikely to be made industrious, provident, moral, or intelligent by a mere change of laws.

Time, however, did the trick. According to Elazar, the Irish "blended in with the pluralistic (and hence more receptive) Midland from the first, adopting its individualistic orientation for their own," making it clear that culture is not the same thing as ethnicity.

In Chicago a cultural region might be a neighborhood of a dozen square blocks, whereas downstate it could encompass a dozen counties. But the underlying cultural divides were often just as great. In 1871, in the aftermath of the Chicago fire, moralistic newspaperman Joseph Medill won election as mayor on the Union Fire Proof ticket. "I shall endeavor to be governed in all my official action by an eye single to the public good," he said. His notion of the public good was to be "unalterably opposed, from this time forward, to the erection of a single wooden building within the limits of Chicago." In her 1995 book. Smoldering City, Karen Sawislak dissects the way in which this seemingly universalistic "good-government" policy reflected Medill's culture and class, and provoked a strong and legitimate political resistance from the immigrant poor.

"Fireproofers, people largely connected to the native-born commercial class [largely Yankees or Midlanders at this time], were eager to realize their vision of what was best for Chicago in the physical form of a city completely built of expensive and substantial structures supposedly safe from fire," she writes. "Their theory of politics imagined a group of citizens that were made equal by their very status as citizens — and who thus were bound to assume the personal costs of any measure deemed to advance a public good, even if those costs imposed unequal burdens. In this way, Fireproofers claimed to move beyond the realm of particular interests, to speak and set the best course for a unitary 'public.'..

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Like the Progressive urban reformers that he to some degree anticipated, Medill believed that a city in some sense could be 'managed' by its 'best men'— the 'disinterested' experts of his day."

The question of how to rebuild Chicago was in fact a regional (neighborhood) question, a cultural question and a class question. Much of the city's low-cost housing, occupied by Germans on the North Side, had burned down — and its owners could not afford to rebuild in brick or stone. They managed to prevail: When the City Council passed a fire protection bill February 12, 1872, their wards were not included in the new "fire zone."

Mayor Medill reluctantly enforced Sunday-closing laws on saloons, an effort just half-hearted enough to make him the target of Yankee and German wrath alike. In August 1873 he abruptly resigned from office and left the city. His departure, when he found his high ideals could be contested in the political marketplace, symbolizes the Yankees' retreat from running the city.

In their place came Kentuckian Carter Harrison and his son, followed in another generation by the adaptable Irish and other immigrant ethnics. All of them learned, as Medill did not, that tolerance of diversity is good politics. "What men like Medill would deride as a politics of 'interests'... came to shape the contours of a citywide election. Others, of course, saw this same moment as a happy flowering of pluralism, as an opportunity for immigrant and working-class Chicagoans to name their interests as those of their city," says Sawislak. Thereafter — with occasional episodes of moralistic reform — the various Chicago political machines have run a system in which professional politicians reward their multicultural adherents with jobs and services, a long-lived variant of the individualistic Midlander political culture.

Today, we try to create identities that will distinguish ourselves from the surrounding sameness. We trace our "roots" and recover past differences. In the 1850s, those differences were a matter of life, not lifestyle. There was a clear and present danger that they might tear the nation apart. Technology and government subsidy accelerated the mixing process and helped make sure they didn't. The Illinois Central Railroad played its part, according to the New York Evening Post (September 22, 1858): "The land sales of the Illinois Central Railroad, by opening the [southern Illinois] country to the advent of settlers, have introduced the men of the East, who bring certain uncomfortable and antagonistical political maxims and thus the time- honored darkness of Egypt is made to fade away before the approach of middle state and New England ideas. Let these land sales go on and a change will take place in the political physiognomy of Southern Illinois." For instance, "Jonesboro is a mile and a half from the railroad. The station is called Anna' and is as large as the town itself. The station is Republican; the town is Democratic." This mixing and remixing has continued ever since. On the political level, Daniel Elazar describes the 1848 Illinois Constitution as a de facto compromise between the Yankee moralists, who were in the minority, and the Southern and Midland versions of individualism in politics. "In effect, the representatives of both political cultures were forced to settle for a compromise which ultimately led to the separation of Illinois' political system into two separate though interacting segments. The individualistic political culture retained and even

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increased its dominance over the state as a whole, with a few traditionalistic survivals and moralistic increments built in. ...

"At the same time, the various civil communities were tacitly given the option of remaining largely outside the state political culture and maintaining a culture — traditionalistic or moralistic — of their own choosing." For instance, county boundaries, many of them drawn before the Yankee influx, were to be left alone by the General Assembly, but individual counties could choose to divide themselves into townships as the Yankees preferred. (Most did.) Yankee strongholds like politicians.... Ideology or even a concern with issues is notably lacking. ... 'Polities' is conceived to be a specialized activity for professionals." All this is reminiscent of the Midlanders' political culture with a few southern additions — not the result of a particular election or party's control. There is a reason why Paul Simon and Adlai Stevenson stand out in that crowd, moralists who succeeded in Illinois politics by personal effort and historical circumstance, not because their culture was dominant or even close.

After the Civil War, region and culture become harder to trace in between political cultures, and how much was it simply an ordinary political struggle over who got what spoils? For that matter, how deep was the division really? Political scientists Michael Frank, Peter Nardulli and Paul Green did not find the expected Chicago-downstate division when they analyzed 20th-century election results. "The Chicago-downstate dichotomy characterizes Illinois elections in only seven of the 22 elections in this century," they write, "and in no election before 1944."

Diligent political scientist Daniel Elazar did detect some pre-Civil War differences when he reported on the

Rockford and Moline maintained their more moralistic culture, and, as a result, politicians who succeeded within those towns were unlikely to succeed outside them in a more individualistic environment.

Elazar describes the typical Illinois politician as "conservative in a quite individualistic way ... reluctant to exercise the powers of government, doing so only in response to immediate and unavoidable pressures and generally avoiding advance planning or even middle- or long-range policy-making. The mechanisms of government are extensively used to provide economic rewards for the state's professional Illinois, and few have tried. The rush of immigrants and the looming immensity of Chicago complicate the picture. Historian Robert Sutton writes, "The old regional and sectional antagonisms prevalent in the nineteenth century had all but disappeared" by 1900, "to be replaced by a single, overriding concern that still lies at the heart of Illinois politics" — the division between Chicago and downstate. Thus rural lawmakers defied the state Constitution from 1910 to 1955, refusing to reapportion the state legislature to reflect the massive population shift to the city. But how much did this rift reflect deep-seated divisions political cultures of downstate in his 1970 classic, Cities of the Prairie. He identified Rockford and Moline as primarily moralistic in political culture; Champaign, Joliet, Rock Island and Urbana as primarily individualistic with a tincture of moralism;

Decatur, East Moline, Peoria and Springfield as individualistic; and Alton, Belleville and East St. Louis as individualistic with a traditional element as well.

In a very general way these assessments reflect the settlement patterns of 150 years earlier. But it would be hard to argue that the difference between Rockford and Alton today is anywhere

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near as great as the difference between Farnham's Tazewell County cabin and her neighbor's. Of course, individualism remains the dominant political culture statewide.

How deep does regionalism go in Illinois today? The most recent work on regionalism in Illinois suggests, "Not very."

University of Illinois political scientists Nardulli and Michael Krassa surveyed Illinoisans in the late 1980s and found astonishingly little evidence of regional self-consciousness or regional divisions in opinion. Most said they thought of Illinois as being composed of different regions, but almost a third couldn't name even one.

"More people named southern Illinois and northern Illinois [as constituent regions] than Chicago. This is startling in a state that has been talked about by academicians and political and media elites in terms of 'Chicago and downstate' for the better part of a century. ... Only 22 percent of Chicagoans identified Chicago as a distinct part of the state."

On such questions as the role of God in society, sexual freedom for individuals and the death penalty, Illinoisans from each part of the state exhibited similar (wide) ranges of opinion. Nardulli and Krassa then looked only at those Illinoisans (about half) who had three-generation or longer ties to their region. It made little difference: Those ties still accounted for no more than a miniscule 6 percent of the differences in opinion.

In short, Nardulli concludes, "People from different parts of the state are not as dissimilar — in terms of basic attitudes, views, and wants — as conventional wisdom has suggested."

But people within different parts of the state may be as dissimilar as ever. The cultures are still there, but less tied to physical regions of the state. The creative tension between ideas of liberty — the Upland Southerners' freedom to be left alone, the Midlanders' freedom to make money, the Yankees' freedom to join together to build "a City on a Hill" — remains as sharp as ever even as their geographic bases slowly flow together. Where we live has gradually become less important than who we know and how we think. '

University of Illinois anthropologist Sonya Salamon compared "entrepreneurial" and "yeoman" (i.e., German) farmers in seven downstate communities in her 1993 book, Prairie Patrimony. Her German informants tend to

For More Information Books about culture and regionalism tend to be scattered all over the library. Here's an arbitrary selection of favorites: • Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer, 1989, Oxford. • Cities of the Prairie: The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics, by Daniel Judah Elazar, 1972, Basic Books. • Common Houses in America's Small Towns, by John A. Jakle, Robert W. Bastian, and Douglas Meyer, 1989, University of Georgia. • Diversity, Conflict, and State Politics, ed. Peter F. Nardulli, 1989, University of Illinois. • Immigrants in the Valley: Irish, Germans, and Americans in the Upper Mississippi Country, 1830- I860, by Mark Wyman, 1984, Nelson Hall. • Life in Prairie Land, by Eliza Farnham, 1988, University of Illinois. (Originally 1846, Harper.) • Making the Heartland Quilt: A Geographical History of Settlement and Migration in Early Nineteenth Century Illinois, by Douglas Meyer, forthcoming, Southern Illinois University. • The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History, Vol. 2: Continental America, 1800-1867, by D. W Meinig, 1993, Yale. • They Broke the Prairie, by Ernest Eimo Calkins, 1939, Scribner's.

see land as a sacred trust to be handed on to generations untold. "Profits are not typically cited as the end desired, but more the means to an end. ... 'I'd like to come back in five hundred years and see what my great-great-great grandchildren [have] done with it.'"

The entrepreneurs, on the other hand, see land as a commodity, farming as a business and profit as the goal. Professional agricultural prognosticators routinely take that same viewpoint, and "assume that all farmers are consummate entrepreneurs basing operation strategies entirely on profit maximization. This model for the farm enterprise is taught at land-grant universities to future agricultural economists, who go on to predict the long-term trends," perhaps in error. Evidently the Yankee/Midland culture has taken up residence in Midwestern colleges of agriculture, and assumes that its values are the only ones around.

Similarly, the highbrow elements of the media often act as the cultural descendants of George Washington Gale. They remain perpetually appalled by what they see as clear-cut moral failings in the political arena: 0low voter turnout, the power of money in campaigns, the fragmentation of governance in metropolitan areas and the resulting inability to pursue the common good.

Whatever their merits, these are quintessential Yankee laments, and, as such, minority reports in a predominantly individualistic state. However trenchant the reporting or the editorials, mere logic — "always proving things, just like lawyers" — will not soon break down a pervasive statewide culture of individualism, whether it is rooted in the land, in the mind or under the Capitol dome.

Harold Henderson is a staff writer for the Chicago Reader. His last article for Illinois Issues was "Betting on the Farm" in the September 1996 issue.

This article was made possible by a grant from The John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundation.

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