Cory Haala is a political historian of the United States Midwest, specifically political organizing, activism, and the Democratic Party. His manuscript-in-progress with the University of Illinois Press, How Democrats Won the Heartland: Progressive Populism in the Age of Reagan, argues that grassroots activists applied the historical principles of left-populist parties to revive working-class solidarities that transcended rural-urban, racial, gender, and other divides. Beginning in response to the 1980s’ twin economic shocks of deindustrialization and the Farm Crisis, these self-described “progressive populists” fought to re-center liberal politics on “pocketbook” issues, electing a generation of, representatives, and local officials across the Midwest at a time where the United States—and the Democratic Party—swung to the political right.
His public work has appeared in TIME’s Made By History, Indiana Public Media’s Inner States podcast, and Minnesota Historical Society’s MNopedia, and he has published chapters in The Conservative Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest (University Press of Kansas, 2020) and its counterpart The Liberal Heartland (University Press of Kansas, 2025). His current research projects include articles on populist organizing against the North American Free Trade Agreement, voter registration initiatives from Minneapolis welfare offices to South Dakota reservations, and re-centering the working class in political histories of the American left.
Project Statement:
Citizen Action, the Midwest Academy, and the Fight to Remake the American Left
This book-length project documents the rise and fall of the Citizen Action activist group, a national federation of state-level activists who had supported causes from utility rate regulation and health care reform to labor rights and farmers facing foreclosure.
Formed with the help of the progressive training organization Midwest Academy, in the 1980s Citizen Action aggressively involved itself in Democratic politics by embracing a range of populist organizing and policy solutions to the intertwined crises of neoliberalism—in the American Midwest, the deindustrialization of the Great Lakes region and the collapse of family farming. Working with self-described “progressive populist” elected officials in the 1980s like Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, Citizen Action backed national figures like 1988 presidential candidate Jesse Jackson before becoming embedded in the Clinton Administration’s quixotic efforts at health care reform.
This project highlights the successes of economically-populist organizing against deindustrialization, the challenges of embedding those politics within the Democratic Party, and the interconnectivity of rural and urban spaces affected by deindustrialization.
