America's Heartland Quotes

He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it.

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.

Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities. 4

The planes were hijacked, the buildings fell, and thousands of lives were lost nearly a thousand miles from here. But the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an attack on the heart of America. And standing here in the heartland of America, we say in one voice We will not give in to terrorists; We will not rest until they are found and defeated; We will win this struggle, not for glory, nor wealth, nor power, but for justice, for freedom, and for peace; So help us God.

The Klan prided itself on how quickly it could spread a lie: from a kitchen table to the whole state in six hours or less.

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today.

We all know that America is the worst country in the world, except for all the others.

Men talk of the Negro problem,” said Frederick Douglass in one of his last public speeches, in 1893. “There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.

Anti-blackness, in a biological sense, then produces its own anti-whiteness. An illness of the mind, weaponized onto the body of the nation.

Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime.

The white body that refuses treatment rather than supporting a system that might benefit everyone then becomes a metaphor for, and parable of, the threatened decline of the larger nation.

How am I going to bring up the need to raise taxes to pay for better schooling,” one teacher asked, “when parents come to parent-teacher conferences wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats?

... But these skeptics are only selectively skeptical. They think themselves enlightened for resisting all this new proof and remaining steadfast in mistrusting anything that someone else says. But it is a false enlightenment to accept only those ideas that align with one's worldview and reject those that don't.

The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven” against immigrants.

When hate was on the ballot, especially in the guise of virtue, a majority of voters knew exactly what to do.

He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction. He

They didn’t hide by day and only come out at night. They were people who held their communities together, bankers and merchants, lawyers and doctors, coaches and teachers, servants of God and shapers of opinion.

There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place....

white Americans are then, literally, dying of whiteness. This is because white America’s investment in maintaining an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy—that is, an investment in a sense of whiteness—ironically harms the aggregate well-being of US whites as a demographic group, thereby making whiteness itself a negative health indicator.

As Booker T. Washington once put it, “You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.

What should have been shattering news—a Klansman dictating orders to elected officials and leaders of the dominant political party—barely caused a stir.

Native young adults skew toward suffocation/hanging at startling rates; and Asians/Pacific Islanders have shown relatively high rates of suicide attempt–related hospitalization.

Strangers talked freely to one another without caution. I had forgotten how rich and beautiful is the countryside--the deep topsoil, the wealth of great trees, the lake country of Michigan handsome as a well-made woman, and dressed and jeweled. It seemed to me that the earth is generous and outgoing here in the heartland, and perhaps the people took a cue from it.

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.

The Midlanders—a great many of them German speaking—carried their pluralistic culture into the Heartland, a place long since identified with neighborliness, family-centered progress, practical politics, and a distrust of big government.

With the abolition of slavery, Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths but as a full person in the census. Ultimately, that gave twenty-five additional congressional seats to a one-party South that violently suppressed the vote of those newly recognized people. In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right.

At day’s end, he was sitting on his front porch when a member of the Klan walked up the steps of a house nearby and plopped into a chair on the veranda. Once the mask was off, the boy could see that the now visible congregant of the Invisible Empire was his neighbor, Mrs. Crousore.

But black men consistently differed from white men in how they conceived of government intervention and group identity. Whereas white men jumped unthinkingly to assumptions about “them,” black men frequently answered questions about health and health systems through the language of “us.

It's a narrative about how "whiteness" becomes a formation worth living and dying for, and how, in myriad ways and on multiple levels, white Americans bet their lives on particular sets of meanings associated with whiteness, even in the face of clear threats to mortality or to common sense.

Even on death’s doorstep, Trevor wasn’t angry. In fact, he staunchly supported the stance promoted by his elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told me. “I would rather die.” When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained, “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.

As Adam Winkler aptly describes it in his terrific book Gun Fight, “few people realize it, but the Ku Klux Klan began as a gun control organization” that aimed to confiscate any guns that free blacks may have obtained during and after the Civil War and thereby “achieve complete black disarmament.

Yeah,” added a man who owned a lawn-care service. “A lot of the people that I know that are in poverty are not healthy… the vast majority of them are very overweight, and the children are overweight.” “And how do you know they’re not healthy?” I asked. “Well,” the man continued, “just by their physical appearance, generally speaking, although you can look at their facial expressions, their faces and look at the coloring of their skin, that type of thing.

The empty factories, hollowed-out cities, and unemployed workers—all lorded over by a wealthy ruling class—have contributed to the broad sense of disenfranchisement afflicting so much of the country, a combustible mix that helped lay the groundwork for the political rise of Welch’s friend, Donald J. Trump.

As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.

trick, though. Treatment has always been more effective and cheaper than prison for true drug addicts. What’s changed, Norman said, is that no longer are most of the accused African American inner-city crack users and dealers. Most of the new Tennessee junkies come from the white middle and upper-middle classes, and from the state’s white rural heartland—people who vote for, donate to, live near, do business with, or are related to the majority of Tennessee legislators.

On a hike, the days pass with the wind, the sun, the stars; movement is powered by a belly full of food and water, not a noxious tankful of fossil fuels. On a hike, you're less a job title and more a human being....A periodic hike not only stretches the limbs but also reminds us: Wow, there's a big old world out there.

The cost savings weren’t what did the trick, though. Treatment has always been more effective and cheaper than prison for true drug addicts. What’s changed, Norman said, is that no longer are most of the accused African American inner-city crack users and dealers. Most of the new Tennessee junkies come from the white middle and upper-middle classes, and from the state’s white rural heartland—people who vote for, donate to, live near, do business with, or are related to the majority of Tennessee legislators.

Dude, you know I'm not getting paid for this shit, which is probably against the law. Child labor going on right here in the heartland of America! -Dan Garrett

politics fueled by racial resentment eroded faith in hallmark American democratic institutions more broadly.13

racism matters most to health when its underlying resentments and anxieties shape larger politics and policies and then affect public health.

According to the “Cult of True Womanhood,” a popular phrase during those years, a true woman possessed four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.

The biggest achievement of the Oregon Klan—the vote by a majority of the people to essentially outlaw Catholic schools in the state—also fell.

Madge Oberholtzer deserves a plaque of her own.

the Klan birthed in Indiana—a state that had lost 25,000 men fighting the Confederacy just a half century earlier—would soon have more Klansmen than any other state.

By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.

Indiana was the most Southern of Northern states—North Dixie,

Akron, was home to almost 50,000 members, including the mayor.

These people needed to hate something smaller than themselves as much as they needed to have faith in something greater than themselves. The Ku Klux Klan “filled a need,

The Klan wanted to make an example of anyone who threatened the ‘sanctity of the home.

Towns [in the Midwest] with immigrants are growing. Towns without immigrants are shrinking. It's as simple as that.

White backlash politics gave certain white populations the sensation of winning, particularly by upending the gains of minorities and liberals; yet the victories came at a steep cost. When white backlash policies became laws, as in cutting away health care programs and infrastructure spending, blocking expansion of health care delivery systems, defunding opiate-addiction centers, spewing toxins into the air, or enabling guns in public spaces, the result was—and I say this with the support of statistics detailed in the chapters that follow—increasing rates of death.

It does not have to be this way. We know from American history that our communal, electoral power allows us to build vibrant social networks, safer communities, and better education systems—when we decide to do so. If impoverished structures lead to negative outcomes, then a renewed focus on restoring equitable structures and infrastructures will improve individual and communal health.

The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.

Welchism has made America poorer, less equal, and more insecure. It has hollowed out factory towns while filling Wall Street’s coffers. It has left corporations unaccountable for their failings, while leaving more of the population vulnerable to the whims of highly paid executives. And it has created an economy where once proud industrial companies lose their way, with sometimes fatal consequences.

...the Midwest is coping with a twenty-first-century problem [globalization] with a nineteenth-century political and social structure [relying on state and city solutions rather than regional solutions].

At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known and even encouraged within the blue wall, for a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order. Proof of Malcolm X’s later observation that the Klan had ‘changed its bedsheets for a policeman’s uniform

Isn’t it strange that with all our educational advantages,” noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many “Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?

At the same time, through the early 1990s, Missouri’s handgun laws were among the strictest in the nation, including a requirement that handgun buyers undergo background checks in person at sheriffs’ offices before obtaining permits.

Several hundred thousand Hoosiers had pledged fealty to and were effectively governed by a rapist, a murderer, a drunk, and a dictator. He was not a man of God, but a fraud. He was no protector of women’s virtue, but a violent predator.

Steve and Barr also launched poison squads, as they were known on the inside. This was a disinformation brigade—clucks and gossips, but the best-known clucks and gossips in every community, so that false stories could be plausibly true.

Rather than landing a man on the moon, curing polio, inventing the internet, or promoting structures of world peace, a dominant strain of the electorate voted in politicians whose platforms of American greatness were built on embodied forms of demise.

The battle over climate change, I thought, like the battle over civil rights, will not be won by convincing disbelievers of facts or appealing to their morality but by passing the torch of reason down to the generations to come, who will replace and laugh at us all.

What many Americans heard about Jews they got from Henry Ford, operating out of a Michigan base less than three hundred miles from Indianapolis. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was a fire hose of anti-Semitism and reached a peak circulation of nearly one million readers.

In summary, people who reflexively shouted “Gun research doesn’t add up!” were often the same people who supported a ban on effective gun research. It was as if they reprimanded plants for not flowering during a drought while at the same time blocking the trucks that delivered water.

The preacher said Madge’s spirit belonged to Irvington, and Irvington must be there for her memory: “Let us not forget that in coming here today we have not fulfilled our obligations of friendship,” he said. In the days, weeks, and years ahead, the family “will need us as never before

Under the auspices of Just Folks—described by Lindbergh’s newly created Office of American Absorption as “a volunteer work program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life”—my brother left on the last day of June 1941 for a summer “apprenticeship” with a Kentucky tobacco farmer.

This was even harder to accept for 200,000 Black soldiers who had returned from military service in France and felt entitled to be full citizens. “The great war in Europe, its recoil on America, the ferment in the United States, all conspired to break up the stereotyped conception of the Negro’s place,” wrote James Weldon Johnson, the literary polymath, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Cities erupted in violent attacks on Black property and life. And as vigilante executions by a hangman’s noose continued without sanction in the South, Congress could not muster enough votes to pass an anti-lynching law.

Such trends lifted the overall well-being of many Kentuckians and particularly helped people who suffered from what are oddly called preexisting conditions like hepatitis C—oddly, in my opinion, because “preexisting” assumes that a person’s existence begins at the consummation of health insurance coverage.

George Orwell’s dilemma in Down and Out in Paris and London came to mind. Orwell was living as a poor dishwasher in Paris and was chronically worried about the day he’d finally go broke. But on the day he went broke, he discovered he no longer had anything to worry about. Now he just had something to deal with.

Almost on crossing the Ohio line it seemed to me that people were more open and more outgoing. The waitress in a roadside stand said good morning before I had a chance to, discussed breakfast as though she liked the idea, spoke with enthusiasm about the weather, sometimes even offered some information about herself without my delving. Strangers talked freely to one another without caution. I had forgotten how rich and beautiful is the countryside - the deep topsoil, the wealth of great trees, the lake country of Michigan handsome as a well-made woman, and dressed and jeweled. It seemed to me that the earth was generous and outgoing here in the heartland, and perhaps the people took a cue from it.

In that way, my family and our class might have been the least fazed by America’s obsession with wealth. As workers living at the taproot of the agricultural economy, we not only could grow and build our own necessities—we also understood the hard work a loaf of bread represented and thus put less faith in the money that bought it than in the bread itself.

Had he been in the house, he might have faced a lynching. The Klansmen told her that “good Christian white people” would not tolerate a troublemaker stirring things up among “the good negroes.” They smashed every window in the house before galloping off into the night. A few days later, the preacher’s wife gave birth to a son—the boy who would become Malcolm X. —

I imagined, the Main Street of small-town America. I instead found ghost towns. My footsteps echoed down small-town Main Streets. On one, a pharmacist left a note in the window of her store. She had enjoyed serving the town, she wrote, but couldn’t hang on anymore and she hoped they’d understand why she was leaving like all the rest. She left no forwarding address. Walmart was often the only place to buy most of life’s essentials in these heartland towns. Strolling their Walmarts, I imagined its aisles haunted by the ghosts of store owners who once sustained small-town America. On one aisle was the departed local grocer, down another the former hardware store owner, next to that, the woman’s clothier or that long-gone pharmacist.

What was shocking were the rewards my father's cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol' Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father's first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005 - and that on top of whatever they'd earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They'd saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeoman, and now they'd come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America's overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county [in Minnesota] where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies - the perfect feedback loop of government welfare.

Aldo Leopold, the great conservation philosopher, said: “We end, I think, at what might be called the standard paradox of the twentieth century: our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don't think I'd ever heard the term "white working class". The experience it describes contains both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolitical fact for those of us who lived that juxtaposition every day. But it seemed tomake some people uneasy, as though our grievance put us in competition with poor people of other races. Wealthy white people, in particular, seemed to want to distance themselves from our place and our truth. Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn't racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?

A mob with clubs had chased a group of immigrant miners out of town in 1921. The whiff of socialism was enough to inflame the attackers. Irish laborers had helped to build the city; refugees of the Great Famine dug the ditch that would become the Wabash and Erie Canal, largest in the United States, connecting Evansville to Lake Erie, 460 miles to the north. But because of their religion, they were second-class citizens in the caste system that the Klan exploited in Evansville.

On the aromatic hillsides of Santa Barbara, the villas are all like funeral homes. Between the gardenias and the eucalyptus trees, among the profusion of plant genuses and the monotony of the human species, lies the tragedy of a Utopian dream made reality. In the very heartland of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: ‘What are you doing after the orgy?’ What do you do when everything is available—sex, flowers, the stereotypes of life and death? This is America’s problem and, through America, it has become the whole world’s problem

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.

Financial deregulation, easy credit and regulatory neglect combined with the degradation of our value system to create a religion of money and of power. The achievement of infinite wealth and fame became the ultimate standard, to be achieved at any price. The junk-bond peddlers and the raiders, the speculators and the savings-and-loan hustlers with their legions of consultants, their lobbyists and their friendly politicians, turned this country into a vast casino. Crimes were committed, crimes against the entire nation. These crimes will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. They have also undermined confidence in a system that was built up over generations. The nation will need a lengthy recovery from this madness.

Somewhere in between are the rest of us natives, in whom such change revives long-buried anger at those faraway people who seem to govern the world: city people, educated city people who win and control while the rest of us work and lose. Snort at the proposition if you want, but that was the view I grew up with, and it still is quite prevalent, though not so open as in those days. These are the sentiments the fearful rich and the Republicans capitalize on in order to kick liberal asses in elections. The Democrats' 2006 midterm gains should not fool anyone into thinking that these feelings are not still out here in this heartland that has so rapidly become suburbanized. It is still politically profitable to cast matters as a battle between the slick people, liberals all, and the regular Joes, people who like white bread and Hamburger Helper and "normal" beer. When you are looking around you in the big cities at all those people, it's hard to understand that there are just as many out here who never will taste sushi or, in all likelihood, fly on an airplane other than when we are flown to boot camp, compliments of Uncle Sam. Only 20 percent of Americans have ever owned a passport. To the working people I grew up with, sophistication of any and all types, and especially urbanity, is suspect. Hell, those city people have never even fired a gun. Then again, who would ever trust Jerry Seinfeld or Dennis Kucinich or Hillary Clinton with a gun? At least Dick Cheney hunts, even if he ain't safe to hunt with. George W. Bush probably knows a good goose gun when he sees one. Guns are everyday tools, like Skil saws and barbecue grills. So when the left began to demonize gun owners in the 1960s, they not only were arrogant and insulting because they associated all gun owners with criminals but also were politically stupid. It made perfect sense to middle America that the gun control movement was centered in large urban areas, the home to everything against which middle America tries to protect itself—gangbangers, queer bars, dope-fiend burglars, swarthy people jabbering in strange languages. From the perspective of small and medium-size towns all over the country, antigun activists are an overwrought bunch.

and seriously jeopardizing our nation’s internal security, nothing is at stake! To many Americans living in the heartland or far from border crossing hotspots, the “immigration” issue is a distant concern. Or at least we wish it were. But we also know that Mexico has become a Narco-State run by drug cartels vying to supply Americans’ insatiable appetite for marijuana and, increasingly, cocaine and heroin. And U.S. intelligence has linked these drug cartels to Islamic terrorist organizations with their operations spread all across the Latin America jungles.

Kansas. The heartland of America. Somewhere, amid the endless wheat fields and buffalo ranches, was a giant ball of twine.

The periphery of a place can tell us a great deal about its heartland. Along the edge of a nation's territory, its real prejudices, fears and obsessions — but also its virtues — irrepressibly bubble up as its people confront the 'other' whom they admire, or fear, or hold in contempt, and know little about.

In histories and memories of the Old West, the Shawnees often featured as frontier terrorists. They burned cabins, killed and scalped settlers, routed American militia, and like the whites they fought, sometimes committed unspeakable atrocities. They were infamous for capturing Daniel Boone’s daughter, and for capturing Daniel Boone himself on more than one occasion. Long after the fighting was over, pioneer families put children to bed with warnings that if they did not go to sleep the Shawnees would get them.7 In their own minds, of course, Shawnees were freedom fighters, not terrorists. At a time when American patriots were urging colonists to unite against British imperialism, Shawnees urged Indians to unite against American expansion. They fought to keep the heartland of America free from aliens who threatened to steal the land and destroy the world. Thomas Ridout, an Englishman who was taken captive by the Shawnees in 1788, found that when he walked into Shawnee lodges, “The children would scream with terror, and cry out ‘Shemanthe,’ meaning Virginian, or the big knife.”8

Can you smell that black dirt over there Hank?” Hank tested the wind and nodded as Rock continued on. “Yeah. Me too. Just plowed it yesterday. You can’t smell that in the city. There are roots in that dirt. Roots that run deep and strong. I grew up in the country surrounded by dirt like that, and after I retired, well, it just felt natural to get back out into the real America, back into the heartland where real people live and breathe and can smell the rich, black dirt of the earth.

smartass ice heathens from the north descended upon small-town America to laugh at the superstitious but numerically superior yokels of the heartland. In a breathtakingly accurate preview of things to come, the yokels actually won the trial, but history judged them the losers—thanks mainly to the flamboyant propaganda of a godless misanthrope named H. L. Mencken, the brilliant Darwinian ancestor of the modern liberal media.

President Dwight Eisenhower, a native of rural Kansas, said, "Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America." The countryside is no more our nation's heart than are its cities, and rural people aren't more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as "flyover country," is to forget not just a country's foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and ill understood in concrete landscapes.

Eric told me he wanted to share his America because he feared how little we have come to understand each other. The divide between city and country, once just a crack in the dirt was now a chasm into which objects, people, grace, and love all fell and disappeared.

Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer of crushed limestone atop the sediments, effectively paving over the salt. As the researchers noted, the work had to be done before the Maya could move in and set up their milpas and gardens. “Permanent, year-round populations could be established only in the presence of an anticipatory engineering of water supplies.” The Maya heartland, in other words, was a network of artificially habitable terrestrial islands. As Maya numbers grew, so did the islands beneath them.

An example of the extent of the FSB and GRU covert cyber collection and exploitation was the exposure of what was most likely a Russian State Security & Navy Intelligence covert operation to monitor, exploit and hack targets within the central United States from Russian merchant ships equipped with advanced hacking hardware and tools. The US Coast guard boarded the merchant ship SS Chem Hydra and in it they found wireless intercept equipment associated with Russian hacking teams. Apparently the vessel had personnel on board who were tasked to collect intelligence on wireless networks and attempt hackings on regional computer networks in the heartland of America.59

Value-wise, Crystal Falls still had theirs. It was American heartland conservative. There were three churches in Crystal Falls, all of them well-maintained and fully attended every Sunday. Of course, that didn't mean there wasn't a lot of hanky-panky going on. It just meant the hanky-panky was a bit more innocent than everywhere else in America.

We learn to father from our fathers. I am not your friend, I am your father, and it is my obligation to teach you baseball and work, and to try to rein you in.

And it was only after his death, after Wal-Mart’s downhome founder was no longer its public face, that the country began to understand what his company had done. Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs, and more part-time jobs as store greeters. The small towns where Mr. Sam had seen his opportunity were getting poorer, which meant that consumers there depended more and more on everyday low prices, and made every last purchase at Wal-Mart, and maybe had to work there, too. The hollowing out of the heartland was good for the company’s bottom line.

If they are willing to cross the Rio Grande and the Sonoran Desert to get to Storm Lake, that’s the kind of people we want.

Wealth grew more concentrated during his reign. Before Welch, corporate profits were largely reinvested in the company or paid out to workers rather than sent back to stock owners. In 1980, American companies spent less than $50 billion on buybacks and dividends. By the time of Welch’s retirement, a much greater share of corporate profits was going to investors and management, with American companies spending $350 billion on buybacks and dividends in 2000.

CEO compensation has grown by 940 percent since 1978. During the same time, the average worker’s wage has increased by 12 percent.

CEOs are talking about themselves as part of an interconnected whole—just as they had done a half century ago, before Welch came on the scene.

Stamping out Welchism will be a formidable challenge. The great hero of late-twentieth-century American capitalism, Welch occupies an exalted place in the business world’s collective imagination. Even today, with the ruinousness of his methods clear to see, he is revered as a master strategist, peerless in the art of maximizing shareholder value and empire building. Tactics he pioneered are still commonplace, values he embodied are still championed, and in many instances, disciples he groomed are still in charge. Twenty years after he surrendered his office to one of his loyal acolytes, we are all still very much living in Jack Welch’s world.

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