Abstract
A few months after the terrorist attacks on the United States, David Brooks published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “One Nation, Slightly Divisible.” In this essay Brooks offers an analysis of the electoral map that emerged after the 2000 election: a big block of red that stretched across the so-called Heartland surrounded on both coastal and northern edges by intense blue. The red heartland here refers to the Midwestern states, parts of South and Southwest, areas that are rural, agrarian, racially and ethnically homogeneous and religious. The blue coastal and northern areas are more urban, racially and ethnically mixed, and that tend to be more pluralistic and secular. Brooks aims to provide a colorful and polemical characterization of the type of person that inhabits each respective “nation.” The heartland is recognizable because it is a place without “Starbucks, no Pottery Barn, no Borders or Barnes & Nobles. No blue New York Times delivery bags dot the driveways on Sunday mornings. In this place people don’t complain that Woody Allen isn’t as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny. In this place you can go to a year’s worth of dinner parties without hearing anyone quote an aperçu he first heard on Charlie Rose. The people here don’t buy those litter rear-window stickers when they go to a summer vacation spot so that they can drive around with ‘MV’ decals the rest of the year; for the most part they don’t even go to Martha’s Vineyard.”1
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Notes
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 72.
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800–1890 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 20.
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1986 [1920]), 1–38.
R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago and London: Phoenix Books, 1955).
Amy DeRogatis, Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
Frederick Jackson Turner, “Contributions of the West to American Democracy,” in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 245–246.
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 1950), 304.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Rise of the City: 1878–1898. A History of American Life, Vol. 10 (New York: Macmillan, 1933).
See Terrence J. McDonald, “Theory and Practice in the ‘New’ History: Rereading Arthur Meier Schlesinger’s The Rise of the City, 1878–1898,” Reviews in American History 20 (3) (September, 1992): 432–445.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Paths to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 210–233.
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Myth of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 8.
Morton Gabriel White and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and MIT Press, 1962).
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).
Thomas Jefferson, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 290.
Leibniz quote by William James in “Pragmatism” in Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 496.
See Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Robert Fagles (trans.) (New York: Penguin Books, 1982).
See Darice Birge, “The Grove of the Eumenides: Refuge and Hero Shrine in Oedipus at Colonus,” Classical Journal 80 (1) (October-November 1984): 11–17.
See Randall Balmer and Lauren E. Winner, Protestantism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 73–87.
Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1992), 381–386.
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870–1925 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 185.
George Barna quoted in Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2006), 9.
See Jon C. Teaford, Post-Suburbia: Government and Politics in the Edge Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
Jeff Sharlet, “Soldier’s of Christ: Inside America’s Most Powerful Megachurch,” Harper’s Magazine 310 (1860) (May 2005): 41–54
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© 2009 Michael J. Thompson
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Mendieta, E. (2009). Fundamentalism and Antiurbanism: The Frontier Myth, the Christian Nation, and the Heartland. In: Thompson, M.J. (eds) Fleeing the City. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101050_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101050_10
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