America's Heartland: A Case for Social Resilience?

IntroductionHeartland is a nonspecific term used more commonly in the media and in literature than in social science. Unlike homeland, which has been used to designate the entire United States since the attacks on September 11, 2001, heartland connotes an ill-defined part of the nation, a central geographic region in which traditional values prevail. In blogs and newspapers, the heartland is typically the Midwest, small towns, and places distant in space and time from large cities and centers of recent immigration or technological innovation. Although the heartland in these accounts is a place in which something wholesome and somehow genuinely American is found-"the real America," as political candidates sometimes argue-it is also associated with the past and decline more than with the future and growth.Imagining the heartland as a Venn diagram where the closest meaning occurs at the intersection of three overlapping circles provides a more precise definition of the term. The first circle refers to the part of the nation that lives in rural areas, which included 19 percent of the US population in 2010. The second circle refers to small towns with populations less than 25,000, of which there were approximately 15,000 in 2010 that were located outside of census-defined urban areas. The third circle refers to inland parts of the nation, which extend from West Virginia and Tennessee to Wyoming and Idaho, and from North and South Dakota to Oklahoma and Arkansas, and regions that exclude California and Florida, but include parts of Texas and Upstate New York. In recent presidential elections, a majority of inland states have voted Republican, which is one of the reasons that the term heartland is associated in media accounts with conservative politics and traditional values.Heartland in this conception includes, but is not restricted to, topics that have been of central interest in rural sociology. In addition, the values, beliefs, and public connotations associated with the term are of particular interest among cultural and political sociologists. These cultural and political topics refer as much to particular constructions of space and time as they do to actual places and populations. Studies emphasizing these topics include investigations of where people think the heartland or particular regions such as the Midwest or "Middle West" are located (Shortridge 1989), analyses of local and regional subcultures in literature and music (Griswold and Wright 2004; Peterson 1999), and discussions of nostalgia, attachments to place, notions of home, and arguments about authenticity (Erickson 1995; Cameron and Gatewood 1994).Although sociological interest sometimes focuses on regional geography, the more relevant analytical aspects of heartland in these terms are the relatively small size of populations involved in considering the social and cultural dynamics of families, neighborhoods, and communities; the relative economic importance of agriculture, agribusiness, and extractive industries such as mining, oil, and gas compared with manufacturing, services, and the professions; and the effects of location, race and ethnicity, and cultural legacies that may combine to forge distinctive values, beliefs, and identities. From its inception, the sociological literature has dealt extensively with questions about these aspects of demography, economic structure, and culture, and in recent years has developed theoretically grounded arguments about social change in the communities and regions involved. At the same time, sociological interests are sufficiently concentrated on topics located in large urban places and presumed to be of greatest relevance there, such as urban neighborhoods, urban poverty, urban schools, urban segregation, and urban ethnicity and immigration. Therefore, examining topics outside of these places necessarily provides opportunities for interesting comparisons.The classic theoretical formulations were so closely associated with observations about the shifts from agrarian to industrial society and from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft that tracing these arguments is tantamount to reviewing the entirety of the discipline's intellectual development. …