Show Me State, Character, Stubbornness, and What Missouri Became

The phrase Show Me is Missouri's informal motto, and its origin is, appropriately for a state with this history, disputed. The most popular attribution credits Congressman Willard Vandiver, who said in a Philadelphia speech in eighteen ninety-nine: I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri.

You have got to show me. Whether Vandiver coined it or simply popularized it, the sentiment stuck. Missouri in the twentieth century occupied a strange position in American geography: neither fully South nor fully North, neither fully East nor fully West.

It was one of the few states that touched both of the great westward-migration rivers. It had been simultaneously slave state and Union state during the Civil War. Its two major cities, Saint Louis and Kansas City, faced in opposite directions culturally and competed fiercely for primacy.

Harry Truman, born in Lamar and raised in Independence, became the thirty-third president of the United States after Franklin Roosevelt's death in nineteen forty-five, and made several of the most consequential decisions of the twentieth century from a background that was entirely, unmistakably Missouri: plain-spoken, stubborn, disinclined toward pretension. The state's slogan turned out to be a reasonable description of its people. Missouri absorbed waves of German immigrants in the eighteen forties and fifties, Saint Louis was briefly one of the most German-speaking cities in North America, and later communities of Italian, Czech, and other European settlers.

It built one of the great arches of the modern world on the Saint Louis riverfront and put a man from Independence in the White House. It remained, through all of it, a border place: belonging fully to no single region, shaped by all of them, harder to categorize than any of its neighbors, and not particularly interested in making it easier for you.