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It's all relative..compared to Alabama..Missouri won't feel Southern...compared to Minnesota it probably will. I mean the lower Midwest has always been a transitional zone even in southern Indiana, Ohio and Illinois. In Missouri you have the added influence of the West in the Western parts of the state.
There's no black/white way of looking at it especially since in practice a lot of these regional differences are getting neutralized by national and even global standardization trends.
That is somewhat the case, but there is also a major difference due to the fact that you don't have the large-scale industrialization, manufacturing, or Rust Belt Effect once you get to the southern half of Missouri like you commonly find further east in the Ohio Valley at a similar latitude. The Upper South/Lower Midwest areas like Cincinnati, Louisville, Evansville, etc. have some northern industrial union job components historically, and still some remnants of that today.
Missouri gets very little snow in the last few decades with warming winters. Kansas City literally shuts down for a few inches of snowfall, very similar to other areas of the South.
That's not true at all.
KC gets snow very frequently. They just usually get warming days in between the snow events that keeps there from being a constant snow cover. Lots of people drive 4WDs and know how to get around in the snow.
It's not a Minnesota winter, but it's a very real one nonetheless.
As if rural Minnesota isn't very pro-Trump, either. Since it definitely is(maybe Duluth, Mankato, and Rochester being among the few exceptions), outside of the Twin Cities.
And IIRC, Missouri has a higher percentage of rural residents, than Minnesota does. Which skews Missouri appearing to be more red, for sure. Keep in mind Missouri activist groups often do a successful go around of the legislature being GOP ran, by doing ballot initiatives. I.e. a higher minimum wage passed in the past, and more recently full marijuana legalization passed.
I know in southwest Minnesota, activist GOP groups did defeat one of the long time Blue Dog Democrat Congressmembers(think it was Collin Peterson) in southwest Minnesota. So you can't say rural Minnesota isn't very red, since it definitely is.
Rural Minnesota is extremely conservative. Minnesota is a blue state because of the concentrated population in the Twin Cities metro.
I live in Iowa, and I see far more conservative/Trump yard displays in Minnesota. The farther left the Twin Cities, the farther right the rural areas have gotten, it looks to me.
I remember plenty of snowy days growing up in KC. The snow may not have stuck around the way it does in the Twin Cities, but it definitely fell, and fell enough for school to be canceled at least once each winter if not more often.
There's a little burg downriver from KC called Missouri City. Being small, it didn't quite have the snow removal capacity of the big city upriver, so its schools closed more often. I know that some kids used to take the radio announcement "All Missouri City public schools are closed" to mean they were closed in Kansas City as well, it being a city in Missouri.
KC gets snow very frequently. They just usually get warming days in between the snow events that keeps there from being a constant snow cover. Lots of people drive 4WDs and know how to get around in the snow.
It's not a Minnesota winter, but it's a very real one nonetheless.
I wouldn't consider a paltry average of 15 inches of snowfall a winter to be "very frequent," considering some winters have less than that fall. When I lived in Kansas City region many years ago, schools would frequently cancel classes for the entire day over a few inches of snowfall, that would be unheard of in the majority of the Midwest along and north of I-80. AWD is far better than 4WD in the snow, unless you live in a very rural area on dirt and gravel roads, or in a Snowbelt area that averages 100-200''+ in a season.
I wouldn't consider a paltry average of 15 inches of snowfall a winter to be "very frequent," considering some winters have less than that fall. When I lived in Kansas City region many years ago, schools would frequently cancel classes for the entire day over a few inches of snowfall, that would be unheard of in the majority of the Midwest along and north of I-80. AWD is far better than 4WD in the snow, unless you live in a very rural area on dirt and gravel roads, or in a Snowbelt area that averages 100-200''+ in a season.
That's about all we get in most of Iowa anymore. Still seems like winter to me.
Minnesota is far better in every single important metric, even if the taxes are higher there. Missouri has far more poverty, poorer health metrics, and far more social dysfunction.
Minnesota has four distinct seasons, Missouri has disgusting heat and humidity, and nasty wet winters without much snow at all.
I had a chance to visit the Twin Cities recently and it was very interesting place to me. For one, it was almost like I was visiting a Pacific Northwestern city than a Midwestern city. It didn't have the old, heavy industry feel, was very clean and modern looking, felt way more like Seattle or Portland to me than any other Rust Belt city. Everything was very foreign to me, the architecture, the layout, the demographics, etc. As far as Missouri, I think you're somewhat spot on. I would say that Missouri has a bit of a Lower Midwest, Upper South kind of vibe to it that would be very noticeable to someone from the Upper Midwest. With that said, I think you're coming off somewhat elitist in your comparisons of Minnesota to Missouri, Missouri is still a very important state with a lot of industry, culture, and educational offerings. You make it sound like Missouri is some sort of cultural backwater and I'd argue that Missouri has just as much cultural and economic relevance to the United States as Minnesota, if not more influence. As far as social dysfunction, let's not forget the recent George Floyd protests and the unjustified killing of Philando Castile (whole is actually a blood relative of mine) and act as if Minnesota is somehow free of any social dysfunction.
I feel Missouri, even St Louis, is far more Southern than people let on. That's my experience with it as an outsider of the Midwest who has lived in Chicago.
I think it was understood that Missouri is a border state and St. Louis is a border city, very akin to the role that Baltimore and Maryland play on the East Coast. I always found it strange that people from the Upper Midwest (especially Chicago) always try to play up St. Louis' Southerness as if it's some kind of put down. I think the Southern influences in St. Louis' culture is what makes it one of the most interesting cities in the region. Also, St. Louis is a very ancient city by Midwestern standards, like it's literally Chicago's smaller big brother if that makes sense. It's also literally at the geographic crossroads of a lot of regional influences.
I'm a Missouri native, and I tend to bristle at people who call the state "Southern", in large part because, as with Maryland, the Civil War actually tore it in two. Maryland is the site of one of the major battles of the war (Antietam, on the road to the Confederates' Waterloo at Gettysburg, PA), and the "Western Gettysburg" was fought entirely within the present-day city limits of Kansas City, MO (the Battle of Westport in 1864, one of two major Civil War battles fought in or around Kansas City, the other being the Battle of Lexington in 1861 in adjacent Lafayette County).
And just as Maryland's largest city, Baltimore, may have had legal segregation but looks far more industrial than any Southern city save Birmingham, which was founded after the Civil War, the same goes for St. Louis.
There is one big difference between the two states, however, that may bolster your contention: While the Mason-Dixon Line — the historic dividing line between North and South — is the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, the Old Line State has gone all Northeastern politically; it's heavily Democratic. Meanwhile, the Show-Me State has followed the Southern trajectory of going from heavily Democratic to almost totally Republican ("almost" because, as in many other red states, the largest urban counties — St. Louis City, St. Louis County, Jackson County (pre-WWII Kansas City) and Boone (Columbia, home of Mizzou's flagship campus) — are bright blue).
And Missouri was a slave state, and the southeastern third of the state (including most of the Ozarks) is definitely Southern culturally.
But while you do find the same sort of sharp racial divide in Kansas City that you do in cities like, um, Chicago, you don't really find the Southern cultural patterns of race relations there. Blacks were never disenfranchised in Missouri, and the Pendergast machine of the 1920s and 1930s in Kansas City treated Blacks as just another ethnic group to be harvested for votes and rewarded for voting with turkeys on Thanksgiving. (They couldn't hold elective office, however, beyond the City Council district where they were in the majority, and that too didn't really happen until after the fall of the Pendergast machine in 1940.). Kansas City, I would say, is culturally more Western than Southern. Have you ever visited?
Interesting fact is that New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts were also slave states literally a generation before the Civil War kicked off.
Interesting fact is that New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts were also slave states literally a generation before the Civil War kicked off.
All 13 colonies had slavery when the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.
But by the time the Constitution was written in Philadelphia [oops! not the Declaration], most of those north of that Pennsylvania-Maryland line had passed laws that would abolish it within their borders, either gradually (as in Pennsylvania, the first Northern state to move to abolish slavery) or suddenly (as I believe Massachusetts did after the Declaration was proclaimed). ISTR that New York State, however, was a laggard, not getting around to abolishing slavery until around the time the Erie Canal opened.
Nonetheless, it's that difference that ultimately led to that Civil War some 80-odd years later.
(There's an interesting installation on the front wall of the Independence Visitors Center here in Philadelphia. It's a panel with the words of the Declaration of Independence on it, with holes in the text through which the words Jefferson wrote accusing the king of England of "caus[ing] us to traffick in MEN", words that were deleted from the Declaration, are visible.)
Edited to add: To be nit-picky, Massachusetts had abolished slavery well more than a generation before the Civil War broke out: it ended there by judicial fiat via three cases decided between 1780 and 1783. But I didn't know that slavery had not formally been abolished in New Jersey until 1866, after the Civil War was over but before the Civil War Amendments had been ratified.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 08-29-2023 at 05:55 AM..
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