The 19th-century Midwest was, historian Jon Lauck argues, “the most advanced democratic society” the world had yet seen. It was inhabited by people born in the young republic, mostly farmers cultivating land so bountiful that, the saying was, if you planted a crowbar, nails would sprout overnight. Aspiring adults inspired children mostly immune to “modernity’s corrosive cynicism, the kind that yields indifference and decay.”
Such is true for my mother, a farmer’s daughter.