Global Heartland

Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm

Peter Simons

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781452964584
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Comrades in the Heartland
• Chapter 1. After the Golden Harvest: World War I and the Postwar Collapse
• Chapter 2. A Rainbow over the Pacific: Lend-Lease and a Rebirth of Agricultural Exchange
• Chapter 3. Necessary Men: Farm Labor in Wartime
• Chapter 4. Global Heartland: Reimagining the Midwest in Wartime
• Chapter 5. Your Feedlot Touches the World: Feeding the Peace
• Epilogue. Starving the Red Menace: Anticommunist Food Relief
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Author Biography