The Show-Me State, Missouri's Peculiar Place Between Everything

Missouri is at the center of the American map in a way that is almost too neat to seem accidental. It borders eight states, more than almost any other. The Missouri River flows across it from the west.

The Mississippi River forms its eastern edge. The Ozark Plateau rises in the south and the plains open to the north. Every major American landscape type touches Missouri without any one of them defining it entirely.

The phrase Show-Me State has uncertain origins. One popular attribution places it in a speech around eighteen ninety-nine or nineteen hundred by Missouri Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who reportedly said that frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies him and that he needs to be shown. Whether or not Vandiver actually said it in those exact words is disputed in the historical record.

What is not disputed is that the phrase fits the Missouri character as the state's residents understand it: skeptical, practical, demanding evidence before applause. Missouri gave the country Harry Truman, who made the most consequential decisions of the mid-twentieth century from a small town sensibility that never entirely left him. It gave the country Mark Twain, whose sense of humor was the literary equivalent of the Show-Me attitude: skeptical of pretension, alive to the absurdity of human nature, and rooted in a specific stretch of the Mississippi River that he knew better than any landscape on earth.

It gave the country the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the westward expansion monument that faces east. It gave the country a presidential library in Independence and a jazz tradition in Kansas City and a science fiction that starts right about here in mid-Missouri: what would have happened if the continent's center had become not what it became but something else entirely.

Columbia sits in the middle of this middle state. That is not nothing. That is, in its way, everything.