Its farmland became the backdrop for the first visit of a Soviet leader to the United States, and its farmers depended on selling grain to the Soviet Union even as they expressed their distaste for Soviet socialism. The region was the birthplace of four of the nine US presidents who served during the Cold War and the site of Winston Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech. In reality, few places were as profoundly shaped by the global trends of the Cold War as the Midwestern United States.įar from being confined to the margins, the region occupied a central place in the Cold War, and the global conflict had a profound impact on the people, environment, economy, and culture of the heartland. In its own mythology, the heartland is a place isolated from the outside world but also held to represent the unchanging essence at the nation’s core. “There’s no nowhere anymore.” With these words, a science professor played by John Lithgow in the 1983 television film The Day After dismissed the idea that America’s “heartland” might be spared a nuclear attack because of its distance from the capital and the coasts.

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