What Ohio Means, A Closing Meditation

There is a persistent national habit of treating Ohio as a placeholder for America itself, a place where the real country supposedly lives, undiluted by the coasts. Presidential campaigns have been making that argument since at least the eighteen sixties, and it has worn thin. Ohio is not a mirror of America; it is a specific place with its own specific history, and that history is stranger and richer and more violent than the placeholder version suggests.

The same land held the most sophisticated pre-Columbian earthwork culture north of Mexico, and then had that culture explained away by European settlers who could not accept what they were looking at. The same state that outlawed slavery in its first constitution also passed laws making free Black life there legally precarious, and then sheltered thousands of freedom seekers anyway, one safe house at a time. The state that built the tire and the steel and the glass and the automobile, and built them so well that it seemed the arrangement would last forever, watched those industries leave in the span of a decade.

Ohio sent the country seven native-born presidents. It sent the country the airplane. It sent the first American into orbit and the first man to the moon.

It sent the country the Clean Water Act, courtesy of an industrial river that caught fire one time too many. What you are driving through, wherever you are in Ohio, has been inhabited by human beings for at least twelve thousand years. The people before the Adena are not well understood; the people before them less so.

The ground has been shaped and reshaped by hands, by water, by industry, by abandonment. The mounds are still here. The river is cleaner than it has been in a century.

Ohio has not finished its story.