Editing Midwestern United States (section)

==== Yankees and ethnocultural politics ====
[[File:Rome Waterfront, on the Ohio River.jpg|thumb|[[Ohio River]] near [[Rome, Ohio]]]]
{{Main|Indiana Territory}}

Yankee settlers from New England started arriving in Ohio before 1800, and spread throughout the northern half of the Midwest. Most of them started as farmers, but later the larger proportion moved to towns and cities as entrepreneurs, businessmen, and urban professionals. Since its beginnings in the 1830s, Chicago has grown to dominate the Midwestern metropolis landscape for over a century.<ref>"Yankees" in Reiff, ed. ''Encyclopedia of Chicago''</ref>

Historian John Bunker has examined the worldview of the Yankee settlers in the Midwest:

<blockquote>Because they arrived first and had a strong sense of community and mission, Yankees were able to transplant New England institutions, values, and mores, altered only by the conditions of frontier life. They established a public culture that emphasized the work ethic, the sanctity of private property, individual responsibility, faith in residential and social mobility, practicality, piety, public order and decorum, reverence for public education, activists, honest and frugal government, town meeting democracy, and he believed that there was a public interest that transcends particular and stick ambitions. Regarding themselves as the elect and just in a world rife with sin, air, and corruption, they felt a strong moral obligation to define and enforce standards of community and personal behavior....This pietistic worldview was substantially shared by British, Scandinavian, Swiss, English-Canadian and Dutch Reformed immigrants, as well as by German Protestants and many of the [[Forty-Eighters]].<ref>{{cite book|first=John|last=Buenker|chapter=Wisconsin|editor-first=James H.|editor-last=Madison |title=Heartland: Comparative Histories of the Midwestern States |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TMUCo0UXCjoC&pg=PA72|year=1988|publisher=Indiana University Press|pages=72–73|isbn=978-0253314239}}</ref></blockquote>

Midwestern politics pitted Yankees against the German Catholics and Lutherans, who were often led by the Irish Catholics. These large groups, Buenker argues:

<blockquote>Generally subscribed to the work ethic, a strong sense of community, and activist government, but were less committed to economic individualism and privatism and ferociously opposed to government supervision of the personal habits. Southern and eastern European immigrants generally leaned more toward the Germanic view of things, while modernization, industrialization, and urbanization modified nearly everyone's sense of individual economic responsibility and put a premium on organization, political involvement, and education.<ref>John Buenker, "Wisconsin"</ref><ref>Richard J. Jensen, ''Illinois: a Bicentennial history'' (1977) ch 1-3</ref></blockquote>