Robert Wuthnow

On his book Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s

Cover Interview of April 26, 2011

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“The heart of the American heartland is beating strong.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“Small towns have remained small and many are even smaller than they were a few decades ago. But few have actually died and all but the smallest have proven amazingly resilient.”

On the second:

“Over the past century and a half government has played an enormously important role in the heartland. Before the pioneers arrived, the government surveyors, land agents, and cavalry prepared the way.”

america / polemics / 20th century / sociology / urbanism / education / entrepreneurship / greeley horace / american middle west / egan timothy /

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011