6 



AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



few really large cities, and agriculture almost everywhere seems domi- 

 nant. Except for Illinois, where Chicago heavily overweights the scales, as 

 late as the census of 1920, more people in every state of this region still lived 

 in the country, or in the country towns and villages, than in the city. 3 In 

 the older Middle West as in Illinois, the exact reverse was true. If only Chi- 

 cago and the industrial district surrounding it could be thrown with the 

 eastern Middle West and the rest of Illinois with the western Middle West, 

 the case for the predominantly rural character of the latter region would be 

 complete. Similarly, the eastern Middle West quite outdid the western 

 Middle West in the number and size of its factories. It is true that what is 

 sometimes known as the second mill zone reached as far west as Saint Louis 

 and Minneapolis, 4 but the greater proportion of the region's factories are 

 bracketed by Chicago and Pittsburgh; except for a comparatively few 

 remote outposts, the "black belt" of the manufacturing world leaves off a 

 few miles to the west of Lake Michigan. And, if it makes any difference, 

 a good share of the western outposts of the factory system exist to process 

 foodstuffs or, perchance, to manufacture farm machinery. 



There is yet another way in which the western Middle West has estab- 

 lished its right to be considered a separate regional entity. Here numerous 

 agrarian movements of reform have been born, here they have lived out 

 their short spans of life, and here they have died. The western Middle 

 West has behind it a long history of agricultural discontent. In the seven- 

 ties the Grangers, cherishing a grievance against all monopolies in general 

 but against the railroads in particular, captured legislative control of Illi- 

 nois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota and wrote into statute law their 

 doctrine that the states might regulate railroad rates, even to the extent 

 of fixing maximum charges. Following the Grangers came the Green- 

 backers, whose money reforms attracted followers in every section, but 

 nowhere to quite the extent registered in the western Middle West. In 

 the national election of 1876 Greenback presidential candidates polled over 

 54 per cent of their popular votes in the states of the western Middle West, 



3. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1943, p. 12. By 1930 Wisconsin and 

 Missouri had joined Illinois as states with a predominantly urban population, al- 

 though by very slender majorities. 



4. Clifford L. Lord and Elizabeth H. Lord, Historical Atlas of the United States 

 (New York, 1944), p. 157. 



