Global Heartland ? Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm

Highlighting the critical role of midwestern farmers in the creation of the American Century

Though often left out of the story of the making of the American Century, the farmers of the Midwest were at its center, fueling the nation’s growing power in the midtwentieth century. In Global Heartland, Peter Simons explores how, after decades of slipping to the margins of an urbanizing economy, these farmers assumed renewed strategic and cultural importance as they produced essential sustenance for overseas troops and food rations for a domestic population.

During the mid-1900s, once-isolationist midwestern farmers came to see the continental interior not as an insulated space but as an environmentally rich landscape that mandated them to accept a larger stake in global affairs. Simons traces this transformation from an older agrarian internationalism rooted in religion and ties to family abroad to illuminate the increasing influence of the U.S. agricultural community during the Cold War. Examining regional political parties, Lend-Lease programs, wartime mass media, and farmer-led relief programs, and interspersing this history with vignettes revisiting the Mercy Wheat campaign of 1947, the postwar International Farm Youth Exchange, and the Flying Farmers organization, Simons offers an enlightening consideration of midwestern farmers’ involvement in America’s international ascent.

Unique in its focus on farmers and their work rather than the more common attention to food or agricultural commodities, Global Heartland complicates and expands ideas of the farm industry’s role in American history.

"This rich and revealing book reclaims the role of not-so-isolated Midwestern farmers in American diplomatic history—and transforms the way we think about the rural heartland."—Michael J. Lansing, author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics

"From Lend-Lease to Food for Peace, Global Heartland reveals how rural Midwesterners came to see their farms as being at the heart of the world. Just as importantly, it shows how the humanitarian and cooperative impulses of agrarian internationalism contended with more nationalist leanings to determine the nature of that heart."—Kristin Hoganson, author of The Heartland: An American Histor