Fred Siegel

The Midwest hasn’t held center stage in American political life since the early 1950s, when Ohio’s conservative Sen. Robert Taft challenged Dwight Eisenhower for the GOP presidential nomination. During those years, notes South Dakota native John Lauck, “Eastern liberals saw the rural Midwest as the home of McCarthyism, ‘ignorant biblical literalists, rednecks, and crypto anti-Semites,’ fascist and authoritarian undercurrents, and the generally darker aspects of democratic life.”