Chapter 21
There’s talk says Illinois
Is there says Iowa.
—Archibald MacLeish
The Corn Belt is a gilt of the gods—the rain god, the sun god, the ice god, and the gods of geology.
—J. Russell Smith
IOWA spells agriculture, and agriculture in this part of the world spells corn. This is the heart of agrarian America. We have touched the edges of the corn belt in Nebraska; here in Iowa it actually is.
It was very hot that August afternoon in Des Moines, blisteringly hot. The waitress saw me sweltering. “Never mind,” she said, “this is the kind of weather that’s good for the corn.” Later I drove out in the country, and the chauffeur said, “Our corn is going to have to hurry to get in on time.” Never have I felt with such primitive and searching force the inexhaustibleness of America. “The corn gathers speed like a long freight train going downhill,” I heard it said. You can practically hear and feel it growing. And it is everybody’s chief preoccupation.
Corn is the greatest of all American crops; it grows in every state and in both value and production it outranks wheat, oats, rice, and rye combined. Glance at a Department of Agriculture map, showing the total American acreage of corn, with a black dot for every ten thousand acres. Parts of the map look like the ink blot tests used in psychiatry. The central puddle is Iowa—Iowa is so solid with black that you cannot see where the state begins or ends. Then smears and blobs drip over into adjacent areas, particularly in Nebraska and Illinois.
Corn is everything in Iowa; it is eggs, milk, breakfast cereals, cattle, meal, chemicals, syrup, starch, liquor, and pork. But the chief thing to know about it is that it is not corn. It is hogs. The “corn-hog ratio,” which can be worked out by a child on a blackboard, dominates corn as the formula E = mc2 dominates the production of atomic energy. Corn grows on 11 million acres in Iowa, but only an infinitesimal fraction of these produce corn to be eaten as corn—in the shape of corn on the cob, popcorn or sweet corn. The enormous preponderance of production goes to “field corn,” viz., corn fed to animals—chiefly hogs. Corn is not a corn problem at all. It is a pork problem and to some extent a beef and poultry problem.
The chief characteristic of Iowa agriculture is that the great cash crop is hogs, not corn. What really lifts the mortgage on an Iowa farm is hogs. The “ratio” varies year by year. In theory, the farmer may withhold corn from his hogs, if the price of meat does not hold a favorable ration to that of corn per se. Normally this ratio is highly favorable. For instance if corn is worth $1.00 a bushel as corn, it may be worth $1.40 in the form of hogs. The Iowa farmer is much more than a farmer; he is a processor of meat.
Proceed now to the story of hybrid. This is the key to everything today. The evolution of hybrid corn is one of the great contemporary American adventures.1
Corn, a very peculiar plant, is a kind of hermaphrodite; each stalk has both a male and female element and fertilizes both itself and neighbors. The male is the tassel at the top; the female is the soft silk attached to the ear; normally corn is fertilized when pollen from the tassel falls naturally on silk in the same stalk. But, since millions upon millions of particles of pollen are released when wind ripples through a cornfield, many ears may be fertilized by tassels not their own. So, even in the same field, different stalks of corn may have different characteristics; some are tall, some scrawny; they grow ears at different levels, making mechanical husking difficult if not impossible. Inevitably agronomists began to experiment toward production of a corn more uniform, sturdier, easier to cultivate—and so came hybrid. The details are too technical for inclusion here; I can describe only what I saw. The corn is planted in rows arbitrarily called “male” and “female” by the seed farmers, and these are “segregated” carefully. Then the “female” stalks are detasselized. Workers go through the fields, capping all the tassels. This is hard and expensive work—but worth it. As a result, only chosen male pollen (from the stalks not detasselized) is free to settle on chosen female silk. Thus a carefully controlled crossbreeding is effected. Farmers resisted all this for a time. For generations, they had grown their own seed; it cost them nothing, whereas hybrid seed is fairly expensive. I asked my guides what brought them over. They laughed shortly. “The man not using hybrid grew thirty or forty bushels to the acre and looked across the fence and saw his neighbor, who used hybrid, getting sixty-eighty.”
Seldom has any innovation met with such quick and sweeping success. Hybrid matures in whatever period is best suited to the area; thus it greatly decreases risks from weather. Its rate of growth is almost mathematically precise; the height of the stalks and the size of the ears is more uniform; the roots are vastly stronger; it resists wind better; the mechanical picker can handle it much more easily; above all, different hybrid varieties can be developed to fit the special soil characteristics of any region. In 1933, when hybrid first came in, 143,000 acres or about one-tenth of 1 percent of the total corn acreage of the nation were planted with it. In 1946, the hybrid acreage was 62,680,000, or 67.5 per cent. Different states responded to hybrid with varying alacrity. Corn in Nebraska is now 85 per cent hybrid, in Minnesota 91 per cent, in Ohio 96 per cent, in Illinois and Indiana 98 per cent. The figure 100 per cent is difficult to attain in any category; complete saturation points are rare. But Iowa’s hybrid figure is so near an actual 100 per cent today that statisticians accept it as the figure.
One result: the nation’s corn crop as estimated for 1946 is 3,496,820,000 bushels. This overrides a previous all time high by some 300 million bushels. Iowa itself has had the greatest harvests in its history recently. The crops of 1942, 1943, and 1944 each broke preceding records, and 1946 beat all three.
Henry Wallace, the well-known Iowa boy who has entered many fields with distinction, who was editor of a farm publication years ago and who is now editor of the New Republic, Mr. Wallace who has been secretary of agriculture, secretary of commerce, and vice president of the United States, has been called a “theorist” and a “visionary” by his enemies. So put it down that he is one of the two or three men in the United States most concretely responsible for hybrid. He helped develop it from the beginning, not only as a public servant but as a practical farmer in the field, and his pioneer seed corn company is one of the biggest in the business.
Visit to a Farm
Forrest Seymour, who succeeded Mr. Waymack as editor of the Des Moines Register and Tribune, J. S. Russell, its longtime farm editor, and Harry D. Linn, secretary of the state department of agriculture, drove me out to a farm owned by Scott Ellis. I think they chose it because it was so “typical.” I can only hope it is. Mr. Ellis’s establishment is so superior, so well run, that Iowa is indeed a lucky state if it is typical. Mr. Ellis works with his head as well as his hands; one might think him a prosperous banker if it were not for his cap and overalls; incidentally his mother helped herd cattle in this same region when it was still an open range.
Mr. Ellis showed us his property—inevitably it looked like something painted by Grant Wood—and explained his techniques. He plants eighty acres to corn, forty to oats, and forty to clover, and rotates on a four-year schedule. If you plant corn, you cannot plant anything else on the same land in the same year. The oats are used mostly as feed for young pigs. “We wean ’em on oats, instead of sow’s milk,” Mr. Ellis said. “Corn makes ’em fat, but it’s the oats that make ’em grow.” One-third of the clover is left for hay; the hogs use the rest for pasture. As to the corn about two-thirds are fed to the hogs and poultry; the rest goes to “deficit areas” in Missouri and the East or to the cereal mills.
A farm like this is vastly different from those we have glanced at in the West. It is thickly green and luxuriant. There is less need to irrigate or fertilize or keep half the land fallow. “Our ground is all sweet,” our host pointed out. It grows legumes easily and the droppings of the animals at pasture provide most of the fertilizer. It has, of course, every conceivable type of mechanized equipment—ensilage cutter, hay mower, hay buck, manure loader and spreader, and binder, as well as milking machines. A long, electrically wired fence keeps the livestock from roaming out of bounds. An animal touches it, and is jolted back by a slight electric shock.
We drove over an alfalfa field, and then into Sudan grass. We saw the green mats of clover, solid underneath brown oats; the clover isn’t damaged when the oats are harvested. Finally came the corn itself, a waving sea eight feet tall—as high as a man on horseback. We watched girl workers in white hats pulling the tassels off the female rows, in the fields where commercial hybrid was growing. The detasseled rows give them a certain striped, illogical appearance, as if someone were dressing Nature up in fancy tweeds.
Mr. Ellis has one hundred Holsteins. All are calving—but none has ever seen a bull! They are inseminated artificially. All over Iowa farmers club together to maintain a “bull ring” with six or eight bulls, for artificial insemination. The semen is drawn off in a catch-valve contrivance, which the bulls wear; it is then mixed with an egg-saline solution, kept at a constant temperature, and sold to farmers with dairy cows, at need. The price is $6.00 per cow, for three injections. “The system saves a lot of transport,” one of our party sagely observed.
In winter the Ellises keep beef cattle too, some 150 head, in feeder lots. The steers (when I was there) cost about 10¢ a pound; they weigh about 750 pounds when they come in, and go out at 1,100. “We buy ’em from Wyoming, and put 350 pounds of corn fat on ’em in three months.”
I wanted to know where Mr. Ellis gets his electricity from—he uses and needs a lot. For many years, in the pattern so familiar all over the United States, the utilities would not put power into rural communities until they had a certain minimum number of customers; three “units” to the mile was the rule in Iowa. Now however the Iowa Light & Power Company will sell electricity almost everywhere. The Rural Electrification Administration came in and helped to force rates down. But, my guides told me, the utilities make more money even with rates lower, because so many more customers can now afford to buy. I asked Mr. Ellis what his politics were. He voted for Roosevelt in 1932, Landon in 1936, Willkie in 1940, and Roosevelt again in 1944.
Later I had another Iowa outing, driving with the state highway patrol westward from Des Moines. I watched the bright yellow straw which the combines had left, after chewing off the oats; I heard of farmers who still resisted growing soybeans, because they feared that these gave an oily taste to meat. I saw glimpses of another side of Iowa too; one coal mine, two brick factories, and in eighty miles no fewer than eleven towns. Along this road, the officer driving me said, some of the strangest traffic ever known used to come. Convoys of B-29 fuselages and bomb bay sections, too big for the railways, had to go by truck all the way from Akron to the assembly plant at Omaha. When they passed, the whole road was closed. Also I heard (this was in the summer of 1945) that radio commentators in New York determined to an extent how much work the Iowa highway patrol had to do. If the war news sounded good on the air, the farmers drove carelessly, with spirits high, and there were plenty of accidents. When it was bad, driving was slow, sullen, plodding—and free of crashes! Iowa gave 275,000 men to the armed forces. We hear much of the militancy of Texas and the southern states, but this figure, on a basis of proportionate population, is one of the highest in the country.
Agriculture in the United States is of course a subsidized industry. Why should it not be?—Iowa farmers ask. After all manufactured goods are protected by the tariff or by other measures. Agriculture has, indeed, always been assisted by some kind of subsidy. What was the Homestead Act but an enormous over-all subsidy to agriculture?
Yet I found many troubled consciences. Basically most farmers do not like subsidies; they would much prefer getting a good price in the open market without government support. To a man, for instance, they express theoretical dislike of the Department of Agriculture’s Crop Adjustment Program. But here we encounter one of the most typical of all manifestations of what might be called American “psychology.” Unanimously, farmers talk about the evils of government “control.” But I never found one who didn’t accept the checks the government sends out.
The root problem of American agriculture as seen in Iowa is that the national stomach cannot possibly, in normal times, contain everything that the farms produce. The most pressing issue is that of surplus. In other words, the greatest of all agricultural problems lies outside agriculture, since, strictly speaking, “surplus” simply means lack of consumption. What agriculture needs above all, to become self-supporting, is full employment and a greater earning power by the non-agricultural communities of the United States, so that more people will buy more food.
Corn Belt Dialogue
During the agitated summer of 1946 the New York Times gave James Reston, its well-known expert on international affairs, a brief change of scene. It sent him to the wilds of the Middle West, which is of course fully as exotic as Tibet. Mr. Reston’s lively and sensible reporting deserves a place in the anthologies. One story, written about Kansas, applies equally to Iowa with a change or two:
Farmer—Well, young man, what’s new Down East?
Reporter—OPA’s dead.
Farmer—That’s fine. Now we can get more for our wheat and meat.
Reporter—Yes, but the President says you’ll probably have to pay more for what you buy. Maybe $225 more for cars and 13 per cent more for farm machinery.
Farmer—They can’t do that to us. Prices are too high already. What we want is price control on what we buy and no price control on what we sell.
Reporter—That’s what labor wants. Price control on your wheat and no price control on their wages. Same with industrial management, price control on labor’s wages and your wheat but no price control on its products.
Farmer—That makes it tough, don’t it? Who killed OPA?
Reporter—The President vetoed it.
Farmer—I thought he was for it.
Reporter—He was and he says he’s just begun to fight for it, but he wanted more price control so he killed what there was. He blames Senator Taft for the trouble.
Farmer—How’s that? I thought Taft was against price control.
Reporter—No, he says now he’s for price control.
Farmer—I’ve missed a lot during the harvest. Whatever happened to that fellow Bowles?
Reporter—He quit.
Farmer—But I thought you said the Administration was just beginning to fight for price control. Isn’t Bowles for price control?
Reporter—Sure, but he recommended that the President veto the price control bill and then he quit….
Farmer—We’ve had a whopper of a wheat crop.
Reporter—That ought to make you happy.
Farmer—Happy hell! We’re sore. We’re restricted by the Government in everything we do. A guy has to be an accountant to run a farm these days.
Reporter—You’re getting a good price for your wheat, aren’t you?
Farmer—Almost $2 a bushel at the elevator, but if they’d keep off these restrictions and stick to the good old democratic law of supply and demand we’d be getting $2.50 like we did during the last war.
Reporter—What did you get in 1931?
Farmer—Don’t even mention that year. That was when we had “two-bit wheat.” Yes, sir, we got 25 cents a bushel.
Reporter—Wasn’t the law of supply and demand working then?
Farmer—Sure, but these restrictions from Washington drive a man crazy. It ain’t right. It’s an infringement on a man’s personal liberty.2
Iowa: More Facts and Figures
Three millions yearly for manure
But not one cent for literature.
—Ellis Parker Butler
Iowa, a really fecund state, throws its corn over into Nebraska and Illinois, and its old folks all the way to California. We know what Iowa has done to California; the question might well be asked: what has California done to Iowa; what effect have the great outgoings had? The answer appears to be: very little. When I asked Governor Robert D. Blue, a friendly and able man, why so many Iowans left Iowa, he replied with local spirit, “Because they’ve never seen it!”
He meant that Iowa, lying uniquely between the two great middle western rivers, is somewhat more diversified than most people think. In the north, the “cash grain area,” there is a fairly strong Scandinavian underlay, and in the south a Missouri hillbilly influence; people speak with a more pronounced drawl, and go barefoot in the mud. The state is predominantly Protestant, but many Catholics live in the cities. Prohibition makes another dividing line; the river counties are mostly wet, the southern dry. Also there are two unusual foreign-derived groups. One is the cluster of Dutch centering on Pella southeast of Des Moines. These have been there since 1847; they hold an annual tulip festival; they wear wooden shoes on ceremonial occasions, and their children may not speak a word of English till they are old enough to go to school.3 The other is the German community living near Amana. Here is one of the comparatively few places in the United States where, it seems, the melting pot did not quite melt. The Germans who formed the Amana Society came out of Pennsylvania some eighty years ago; they were an offshoot of the Amish and the Mennonites, and for many years they maintained a completely communal organization, isolated and self-sufficient. A joint kitchen served each group of members, religious faith was strong, and the products of work belonged to the community as a whole.
One-tenth of all the food in the entire United States is produced in Iowa; the state’s list of agricultural firsts is remarkable. It is Number One in:
Agricultural products per capita
Cash farm income
Eggs (7 per cent of the United States total)
Grade A land (a full quarter of the total in the nation)
Prime beef
Hogs
Horses
Marketing of grain-fed cattle
Oats
Popcorn
Red clover and timothy seed
Soybean hay
Poultry (8 per cent of all in the United States)
As well as being second in butter production and soybeans, and third in milk.
But do not think that agriculture is the whole Iowa story. The state is not so strongly industrialized as, say, Kansas, but it has flourishing and diverse industries. Most are, of course, closely associated with agriculture—cereal processing (as in the Quaker Oats plant at Cedar Rapids), meat packing (Ottumwa, Mason City, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines) and agricultural machinery (John Deere at Waterloo). But also Davenport4 has railroad yards and pearl buttons; the Maytag Company calls its headquarters at Newton the “Washing Machine Capital of the World”; Red Oak has a calendar-printing industry known all over the nation; there are famous publishing houses in Des Moines; some of the biggest gypsum deposits in America are at Fort Dodge; Fort Madison has Sheaffer Pen. Two items little known: Iowa has a lively grape-and-wine industry near Council Bluffs, and it is a big fur-producing state, since its shallow creeks are alive with muskrat, mink, and skunk.
Issues and Ideas in Iowa
The major concern of Iowa is, and must be, the welfare of its corn, hogs, and farmers, and the dominant political factor is agriculture of course. This ramifies in almost every direction; for instance the state department of agriculture is even charged with supervision of the hotels, and farmers make up at least half the legislature.
Iowa is an extremely conservative state, but it is not quite so overwhelmingly Republican as most outsiders believe. It went for FDR in both 1932 and 1936, and Democratic governors held office from 1932 to 1938. The farm vote, which is usually decisive, hangs in close balance; it was 70 per cent for Roosevelt in 1932, 62 per cent in 1936, 49 per cent in 1940, and 47 per cent in 1944. A great deal depends on the weather, in particular on the state of the harvest and roads. Corn is a late crop. A farmer may not be able to get into the polls if he is busy in a rainy November.
Then, too, the immediate economic situation—as in all agrarian states—plays an incisive role. When the farmer is rich, he placidly votes Republican by and large. When poor, his vote will be a protest vote.5 “The Iowa farmer is a quiet man,” I heard it said, “but if he starts going broke, can he yell!” The state saw, in fact, the nearest thing to a Jacquerie the United States has known since, let us say, Shays’s Rebellion in 1786. The banks and insurance companies started closing out farms in the early 1930’s; this happened elsewhere too, but nowhere did it meet such fierce and concrete resistance as in Iowa. These farmers have a covered wagon tradition. They are a stubborn and determined folk. They were ready to use violence to save their homes. Mobs assembled on the courthouse steps, armed with shotguns and carrying coils of heavy rope; the sheriffs as a rule took one look, and decided not to go on with whatever forced sale was scheduled.
A cogent force in Iowa, though it does not often express itself on a direct political level, is the state branch of the American Farm Bureau Federation under the leadership of one of the ablest men in his field in the country, Allan B. Kline. The Farm Bureau, probably the most powerful of the three great national farmers’ organizations, has a position in Iowa (and in most middle western states) parallel to that of the Farmers Union in North Dakota and the Grange in New England. Iowa has ninety-nine counties, and the Iowa Farm Bureau has ninety-nine local offices.6 Mostly it exerts influence through the “county agent” (in Iowa called the county extension director), who all over America is a kind of father and mother to the farmer; he is an official of both the “Extension Service” of the Department of Agriculture and the Farm Bureau. Thus the latter is an indispensable link between the farmer and the multifarious services that can be rendered him by Washington and the local land grant college. Again, the Farm Bureau is, like the Farmers Union, extremely active in such matters as insurance and co-operatives. It inaugurated its own life insurance company in 1945, to sell insurance to members at cost; within a few months, it had 26 million dollars worth in force. The commercial insurance companies did not like this development, but they could not easily attack it without seeming to make all insurance vulnerable. The Farm Bureau co-operatives have a very substantial business in Iowa. One handles gasoline as in North Dakota; another has an elevator in Des Moines roughly like that in Minneapolis though not so big; another distributes veterinary serum and biologicals.
Some businessmen resent hotly the entrance of the Farm Bureau into business. Its answer is that anything that increases the wealth and earning power of the farmer will increase the wealth and earning power of the merchant too. The small businessman (who is jealous of the farmer anyway, in that his taxes help pay the farmer’s subsidies, and of the Farm Bureau anyway, in that this is supported in part by public funds) replies in turn that he is being progressively squeezed out by the big chain stores on one hand, and the co-ops on the other. Also it wounds him grievously that the co-ops are exempt from most taxation.
Another strong Iowa force is journalism. John M. Henry of the Des Moines Register and Tribune did me a useful service, when he let me sit in, during most of a day and then at dinner, with a group of country editors from all over the state. In Chapter 17, I mentioned the Capper press in Kansas; there is no concentration of power quite like this in Iowa, but several publications, like the Meredith family’s Successful Farming and Wallace’s Farmer, which is the Henry Wallace paper, have great influence; the latter has a circulation coverage of not less than 93 per cent in Iowa, and almost as much in adjacent states.7
As to the Des Moines Register and Tribune, owned by the Cowles brothers who also own Look and all the dailies in Minneapolis, they comprise one of the most celebrated newspaper properties in the United States. John Cowles takes care of the Minneapolis end, and Gardner Cowles (“Mike”) runs the Register and Tribune. The Cowles duumvirate is the fountainhead of liberal Republicanism in Iowa; the Des Moines papers, together with their radio stations KRNT and WNAX, have a strong enlivening influence on almost everything in the state. When the Cowles paper and the rural press agree on an issue, they are virtually unbeatable. As far as journalism itself is concerned, the Des Moines papers have established an imposing variety of records. Taken together, the Register and Tribune have (a) the largest daily mail circulation of any metropolitan newspaper in the United States, (b) the largest daily farm circulation of any newspaper in the United States, (c) the largest Sunday home-delivered farm circulation in the United States. The Sunday Register maintains more than a thousand rural routes, and is delivered by automobile to more than 90,000 individual farm homes. Every “town” in Iowa (850 in all) that contains more than seventy-five families gets “home delivery.” There are fifty-five cities in the nation larger than Des Moines; only nine have papers with a larger Sunday circulation.
Another powerful element in Iowa is Masonry. Of 108 members of the lower house of the legislature, about seventy belong to the Masonic lodge, though nobody ever runs “as” a Mason, and only seldom is a man asked directly if he is one or not. Governor Blue is a Mason; so is the attorney general; so is every supreme court justice. Two things explain this: (1) Masonry is a kind of badge of respectability, not only in Iowa but in almost all the Mississippi basin states; (2) a man comes up through the local Masonic lodge and, if he shows leadership, is pushed outward to the legislature almost as a matter of course.
Other Iowa forces are like those we have encountered so many times: the American Legion (both Senator Hickenlooper—a first-class senator by the way—and Blue had strong legion support), the Methodist Church, the education lobby, and the Iowa Manufacturers Association, which is the local equivalent of the NAM. The most conspicuous lobbyist in the state is Edward A. Kimball, who is secretary of this last, and who holds, or held, several other jobs. Kimball, I heard it said, “camps on the capitol steps,” and “is in and out of the governor’s office two or three times a day.”
The boss of the Republican party in Iowa is Harrison E. Spangler, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. A friend, not an Iowan, once described him to me as follows: “He is a fine old man. He hasn’t had a new idea since 1902.” The strength of the Republican machine rises from the county courthouse rings; this is a phenomenon we shall encounter later in the South, though a dififerent party of course holds sway there. Politics in Iowa is based on patronage as controlled by these rings. Anybody in state employment, no matter how minor, must have the approval of the precinct chairman, the county chairman, and the district chairman—all three! Even to be a janitor you have to have political support. Actually patronage is based on a point system, according to the vote rolled up. For example, a job paying $2,000 a year counts for five “points”; each county and so on gets jobs to distribute strictly on the basis of the “points” it accumulated in the last election.
The Republican party in Iowa, I heard it said by everybody including most Republicans, lacks vision, ideals, courage, progressiveness, faith, leadership, and élan. It has been too tightly stratified for far too long. Also the traditional pattern wherein a man works himself up—legislator, house leader, speaker, lieutenant governor, governor—kills off bright spirits.
One important issue is schools, and another is, of all things, roads. Iowa has the highest literacy rate in the union, 99.3 per cent, and it has some splendid colleges; yet almost everyone I met said that the state starves education. The Iowa schools are in the main supported by the local communities; the state itself contributes very little. In Kansas, the biggest, smartest, and best building in almost every rural town is the school. Not so in Iowa. The Farm Bureau and other organizations set out recently to put through a reform educational program, with increased state aid, better pay for teachers, and so on. The business interests (especially those representing real estate which might be taxed) moved against this, and in the end, as against $12,000,000 asked for, the schools got only $3,500,000.
Roads make a curious story; they are a chief political preoccupation of the state. It may seem hard to believe, but a powerful wing of opinion is against good roads, because roads cost money, i.e., taxes. In the north where they can be surfaced with material locally available, the secondary roads are generally quite good. But in the south, which has no gravel, thousands of miles of dirt roads exist which, when it rains, become muddy lanes almost impassable. This in Iowa—the first agricultural state of the union! Naturally the southern counties have for years agitated for road improvement. Iowa is forbidden by its constitution to go into debt except for a minor amount; so to get money means raising it out of the local pocketbook. The Northerners, who came to be called the “Mud Roads” group though they live in the “Good Roads” belt, resisted for a long time even a modest “farm-to-market” road program for the south. “The crisis over this had me plumb scared to death,” Governor Blue told me. Finally a compromise was worked out, a penny tax was added to the price of gasoline, and road improvement got slowly under way.8
The United States is a country where good roads seem to be as much part of the essential landscape as bread or baseball. But actually, except for the great interstate highways and the parkways leading into the larger cities, American roads are apt to be quite bad. Of course road building is a comparatively new development from any long-range point of view. They became vital only after the automobile became vital; it is astonishing to think back and realize that, as recently as during the early 20’s, most American roads off the beaten track were as atrocious as those in, say, Jugoslavia or Venezuela now. It was more than merely the automobile that brought the present superlative network of major highways to America. It was grants in aid to the states by the federal government.
1 See “Revolution in the Corn Belt,” by Kurt Steel, Harper’s Magazine, August, 1945, for a brilliant brief description of hybrid. Mr. Steel also points out that corn, hybrid or not, “is an orphan among grains, belonging to no known family.” Like wheat and cotton its origin is unknown. But unlike them it “has never been found growing wild.” It has existed everywhere in the world from the earliest times—“corn is the one global plant”—but it cannot grow “without man’s help.” The implications of this are mysterious in the extreme.
2 New York Times, July 1, 1946. Reprinted by permission.
3 Similar pure Dutch colonies exist elsewhere in the Middle West, notably in Michigan towns like Holland.
4 Which with Rock Island and Moline in Illinois across the river makes a single community.
5 For instance a few counties traditionally Democratic went Republican in 1932.
6 It misses one county, however. In another big county there are two offices.
7 Then too I discovered some remarkable oddities. Several times, for instance in Cheyenne, we have come across men who own "competing" papers in the same city. In Indianola, Iowa, this development reaches a unique peak. On Wednesdays and Fridays, from the same publishing house under the identical ownership, appear the Record Herald and the Indianola Tribune. On Fridays, the name Record Herald is printed in 72-point type, and the name Indianola Tribune in 10-point; on the Wednesdays, the order of type is reversed. It is the same paper, but since the name in the smaller type is all but invisible, it appears to carry a different identity in alternating issues. Moreover the two editions oppose one another editorially; one is as Democratic as the other is Republican.
8 3,500 Iowa farmers now have their own airplanes. One reason is that the roads are so bad. They are, in a manner of speaking, attempting to skip right over the roads era.