View from the Countryside David A

BOARD OF EDITORS David Apter, David Baltimore, Daniel Bell, Guido Calabresi, Natalie Z. Davis, Wendy Doniger, Clifford Geertz, Stephen J. Greenblatt, Vartan Gregorian, Stanley Hoffmann, Gerald Holton, Donald Kennedy, Sally F. Moore, W. G. Runciman, Amartya K. Sen, Steven Weinberg STEPHEN R. GRAUBARD Editor of Dædalus PHYLLIS S. BENDELL Managing Editor SARAH M. SHOEMAKER Associate Editor MARK D. W. EDINGTON Consulting Editor MARY BRIDGET MCMULLEN Circulation Manager and Editorial Assistant SASIMA CHUAPRASERT Circulation and Editorial Office Assistant Cover design by Michael Schubert, Director of Ruder-Finn Design Printed on recycled paper frontmatter su00.p65 1 07/19/2000, 3:08 PM DÆDALUS JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Minnesota: A Different America? Summer 2000 Issued as Volume 129, Number 3, of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences frontmatter su00.p65 2 07/19/2000, 3:08 PM Summer 2000, “Minnesota: A Different America?” Issued as Volume 129, Number 3, of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. ISBN 0-87724-022-1 © 2000 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Library of Congress Catalog Number 12-30299. Editorial Offices: Dædalus, Norton’s Woods, 136 Irving Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Telephone: (617) 491-2600; Fax: (617) 576-5088; Email: [email protected] Dædalus (ISSN 0011-5266) is published quarterly by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. U.S. subscription rates: for individuals—$33, one year; $60.50, two years; $82.50, three years; for institutions—$49.50, one year; $82.50, two years; $110, three years. Canadian subscription rates: for individuals—$42, one year; $78.75, two years; $109.50, three years; for institutions—$60, one year; $102, two years; $138.50, three years. All other foreign subscribers must add $7.00 per year to the price of U.S. subscriptions. Replacement copies for damaged or misrouted issues will be sent free of charge up to six months from the date of original publication. Thereafter, back copies are available for the current cover price plus postage and handling. GST number: 14034 3229 RT. All subscription orders, single-copy orders, and change-of- address information must be sent in writing to the Dædalus Business Office, 136 Irving Street, Suite 100, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Printed in the United States of America. Printing Office: 2901 Byrdhill Road, Richmond, VA 23228. U.S.A. newsstand distribution by Eastern News Distributors, Inc., 2020 Superior Street, Sandusky, OH 44870 Telephone: 800-221-3148. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, MA, and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to DÆDALUS, 136 Irving Street, Suite 100, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. frontmatter su00.p65 3 07/19/2000, 3:08 PM Contents V Preface Rhoda R. Gilman 1 The History and Peopling of Minnesota: Its Culture Annette Atkins 31 Facing Minnesota Joseph A. Amato and Anthony Amato 55 Minnesota, Real and Imagined: A View from the Countryside David A. Lanegran 81 Minnesota: Nature’s Playground John S. Adams 101 Minnesota: A Work in Progress Shaping the Landscape and the People Thomas D. Peacock and Donald R. Day 137 Nations Within a Nation: The Dakota and Ojibwe of Minnesota Richard M. Chapman 161 Mixing New and Old Wine in Minnesota: Spirituality, Ecumenism, and Religious Traditions in Ferment John E. Brandl 191 Policy and Politics in Minnesota Virginia Gray and Wyman Spano 221 The Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object: Minnesota’s Moralistic Political Culture Confronts Jesse Ventura Michael O’Keefe 247 Social Services: Minnesota as Innovator frontmatter su00.p65 4 07/19/2000, 3:08 PM Jon Pratt and Edson W. Spencer 269 Dynamics of Corporate Philanthropy in Minnesota Joe Dowling 293 Theater and the Arts: A Personal Reflection Robert J. White 307 Minnesota and the World Abroad ADVISORY BOARD John S. Adams, Anthony Amato, Joseph A. Amato, Nina Archabal, Annette Atkins, Lou Bellamy, James Borgestad, John E. Brandl, Robert Bruininks, Clarke Chambers, Richard M. Chapman, Donald R. Day, Cheryl Dickson, Joe Dowling, Rhoda R. Gilman, Virginia Gray, David A. Lanegran, Archie Leyasmeyer, Robert MacGregor, Debbie Miller, William Morrish, Charles Mundale, Michael O’Keefe, Thomas D. Peacock, Jon Pratt, David Rodbourne, Tom Scott, James P. Shannon, Wyman Spano, Edson W. Spencer, Tom Swain, Robert J. White frontmatter su00.p65 7 07/19/2000, 3:08 PM Preface V Preface to the Issue “Minnesota: A Different America?” QUESTION FREQUENTLY ASKED of the Editor is how issues of Dædalus originate, how the specific subjects are cho- A sen. The answer is not a simple one. In this instance, the first time the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has chosen to treat a single American state—Minne- sota—the issue may be said to have originated in Europe, in conversations in London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome. This may come as something of a surprise to those who read this issue. In the pre-Ventura age, when most of these conversations took place, Minnesota was not a subject of great moment even for the mass media in Europe, let alone for ordinary citizens. How, then, did the issue come to be conceived abroad? Europeans, increasingly aware since 1989, and particularly after 1991, that the United States, for all its pretended and real interest in the world, had turned inward—some, for example, read with genuine amazement early in the 1990s that a majority of the members of the Republican congressional caucus had never had an American passport and had never crossed either the Atlantic or the Pacific—wondered what this growing cultural and political isolation might mean in the long term. V Preface su00.p65 5 07/19/2000, 3:09 PM VI Dædalus If they were distressed with what they perceived to be a growing distance between Europe and the United States, they were candid enough to acknowledge a second, no less compel- ling concern. In their view, the representations of the contem- porary United States, as conveyed by Europe’s mass media, dwelled overwhelmingly on happenings in Washington, D.C., New York, and to a lesser extent Los Angeles. They acknowl- edged that while there was always space for the unique twen- tieth-century American tragedies—the bombing in Oklahoma City, for example—the older generation, recalling their own first visits to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, spoke of all they had learned as they crisscrossed the country by car, bus, or train. Their children were no longer traveling as much by those slightly archaic modes of transport. In the age of mass tourism, planes were carrying the young predominantly to the great cities of the East Coast and the West, to Florida, of course, for the incomparable sun and surf and, more occasion- ally, to the great national parks of the West, but the great Midwest and Southwest were being largely passed over. For the English who knew that Yorkshire could never be mistaken for Sussex, the French who recognized the differences between Britanny and the Auvergne, the Germans who distinguished between the Rhineland and Bavaria, and the Italians who never mistook Sicily for Lombardy, the question increasingly asked was whether all regional differences in the United States had in fact disappeared, or whether for all the homogenization that had taken place, differences persisted. And, if so, what were these differences? Would it not be useful to draw attention to them? The members of the European Union recognized that a certain homogenization had occurred in their own countries, but this did not blind them to the differences that persisted. They wanted to know whether a similar situation exists in this country. These conversations, random and occasional, led several to ask questions that may have originated in their political inter- ests. With two recent presidents of the United States having come from Texas, and two vice presidents from Minnesota, it was not at all strange that several, acknowledging their ignorance of both states, expressed the hope that something could Preface su00.p65 6 07/19/2000, 3:09 PM Preface VII be done to remedy their ignorance. Neither state figured greatly in Europe’s mass-media treatment of the United States. Euro- pean readers of Dædalus, while admiring the catholicity of interest of a Journal that found space to treat societies as different as India and Australia, Canada and Germany, relying principally on citizens of these countries for their contributions, could not understand why we did not attempt comparable studies of individual American states. As such conversations multiplied, the idea was born of doing two Dædalus studies of the two states at either end of the north-south highway Inter- state 35—Minnesota and Texas. While support for the Minne- sota project quickly developed in Minnesota—its strong philan- thropic traditions are well known and are admirably described in this issue—there was no comparable support for a study of Texas, although one friend of the Journal was more than ready to help with funds from his own private foundation. The publication of this issue on Minnesota may stimulate interest in such a possibility, in Texas and even elsewhere. As I explained in my initial meeting with those who helped plan the issue at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, summoned by the University’s president, Nils Hasselmo, our object was not to publish a “puff” for Minnesota. The state had no need of such advertisement, and Dædalus had no interest in producing one. Nor were we engaged in a romantic search for the “true Minnesota,” essentially different from other states in the region, very different from those giant states of the East and West Coasts, New York and California.

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