The Valley of Democracy

Meredith Nicholson turned his keen observational eye on his own American heartland in this vanished portrait of Middle America at a crossroads. Written during the heady years between the wars, when the Midwest still imagined itself the moral center of the republic, The Valley of Democracy captures a region certain of its importance yet anxious about its future. Nicholson writes about "Folks" - the plain-speaking, common-sense citizens who believed democracy was not a system but a way of life, lived in their barns and parlors and town halls. He traces how these people, rooted in soil and small towns, understood their role in a democratic experiment that seemed to promise endless possibility. The book is both affectionate and clear-eyed, celebrating the region's virtues while acknowledging its blind spots and tensions. For readers who want to understand what America thought about itself before the sunbelt shifted the nation's center of gravity, this is an essential time capsule.