Unfinished Business
It's Not an Empty Field, Folks!
Our daughters don't believe me when I say that Iowa once was a politically competitive state. They don't remember much about Tom Vilsack’s two terms as governor, long-serving Senator Tom Harkin or Congressman Neal Smith, and certainly not former Governor Harold Hughes. They were too young to appreciate Iowa's moderate four-term Republican governor, Robert Ray, or veteran Congressman Jim Leach.
Iowa has been slowly transitioning from its historical role as a swing state for most of their lives. What's behind this trend? Iowa was settled by pioneers looking for rich, fertile farmland. Although its economy has diversified since my farm forebearers arrived in the 1850s, I'd suggest that Iowa's shift to a noncompetitive state stem from significant changes in agriculture impacting farmers and rural communities over the past few decades.
To understand this evolution, I highly recommend a new book by Iowa State University professor Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, titled When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. (Full disclosure--I am mentioned in this book.)
Iowa was the epicenter of a nationwide agricultural collapse unmatched since the Great Depression, Riney-Kehrberg contends. Unfortunately, our collective memory of this crisis has been swept into the dustbin of Iowa history.
But as William Faulkner once wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Today when I hear Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's inflation pledge, "We must keep at it until the job is done," I get a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I can't forget Fed Chair Paul Volcker, who pulled the rug out from under farmers in 1979 by raising interest rates to levels that dramatically spiked their costs of borrowing.
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During a recent visit with our younger daughter, the topic turned to today's rising inflation and interest rates. My farmer husband and I mentioned how interest rates had soared to 21.5% in 1981. She was incredulous.
Unlike the Great Depression, when all Americans suffered, farmers bore the brunt of the fallout from interest rates. The value of their land (their largest asset and source of collateral) collapsed almost overnight. The resulting agricultural restructuring also closed the doors of many ag-dependent businesses. Population declines accelerated, closing schools, and today it's still grinding away at our churches. As Riney-Kehrberg writes, "The farm crisis did serious damage to institutions and structures upon which these people depended."
The crisis lingered into the 1990s. My 1992 story, called "Diminished Expectations" in Successful Farming was based on a survey of 3,500 readers. "The results on the next eight pages reveal changes in the rural landscape since 1974, and the diminished horizon envisioned by many farm families," I wrote. Not all farmers had to file for bankruptcy. About one third suffered financial repercussions, but the next crop of younger farmers was encouraged to leave the farm for a better life.
This outcome was exaccerbated by NAFTA, the North American Free Trade agreement. Although it opened grain markets for U. S. farmers, it also allowed Canadians to send their cattle directly to the U.S., raising competition for U.S. farmers. At the same time, it increased the leverage of multi-national meat packers and corporations who moved production to lower-cost countries. But it lowered the prices for consumers.
Farmers who managed to hang onto their acreages took local manufacturing jobs, but these were shrinking, too. NAFTA exported many good jobs overseas, reducing the options for rural Iowans and farm families to earn off-farm income. Trump bashed NAFTA for these reasons, stoking the fires of resentment and anger. But he replaced it with a similar agreement.
Rural/Urban Divide
These simmering undercurrents hit close to home in 2017, when J.D. Vance (yes, the newly elected Ohio Senator) was invited to my undergraduate alma mater to give the annual Waite Lecture. I had read his book, and seen the movie, Hillbilly Elegy. At that time, Vance was a vocal Never Trumper, and was touting his intention to put together a venture capital fund aimed at helping rural Americans. I was curious to see him in person. I asked my sister if she'd meet me there, and I drove to Sioux City.
Following his speech, my sister noticed a high school friend with her husband in the crowd. I knew her friend, but had never met her husband. As we chatted about Vance's speech, he brought up the problems of young men (and seemed to imply that women were partly to blame). I wasn't sympathetic. "Men have had it pretty good for a long time," I said.
I made a couple of other comments during the conversation, but I don't recall saying anything provocative. Suddenly, the husband stepped toward me, grabbed my forearm, and growled, "Are ya blue?" His grip on my arm tightened--it hurt!
I was shocked. To spare my sister and her friend further embarrassment, I pulled away and changed the subject. I could not believe that this man I barely knew would lay a hand on me in a public place, in front of his wife and my sister.
He wasn't a farmer. But he lived in one of the small left-behind rural Iowa towns nearby. I've never forgotten his aggressive behavior.
During the past decade, Iowa's urban population centers have grown by leaps and bounds, as youth from our farms and rural areas flocked there for jobs. The Iowa Democrats' strategy has seemed to be to win big in urban areas to compensate for the inevitable losses in rural America.
Rural economic development has received lip service since the farm crisis, but there's been little follow-through for the smaller towns. I recently read about plans for the huge Grand Experience water park south of Jordan Creek. It's great news, but one sentence jumped out at me: "The project will have just as much impact on the area as Jordan Creek Town Center and could transform empty fields into a destination for the Midwest." Empty fields? Really?
It reminds me of a time I when I was flying home from a speaking trip, and found myself seated beside a guy from Pittsburgh. We were having an enjoyable conversation, and when he asked me about my job, I replied that I was a writer for Successful Farming, a national magazine based at Meredith Corporation in Des Moines. He paused, and then asked in an incredulous tone, "You write about dirt?"
Yet there are signs of hope in the small rural towns near me: a new Fareway store opening in Ogden, a successful grassroots campaign by farmers to save the one-story school addition in Boxholm from the wrecking ball and re-purpose it as a community center, and even a new online business on the main street of Pilot Mound (population 160).
But today, more than ever before, Democrats need to reconnect with rural and farm voters, focusing their outreach on bread-and-butter issues, like infrastructure and expanded technical training at community colleges, and de-emphasizing cultural and lifestyle wedge issues. Fetterman, a Democrat, won his Senate race by doing this in Pennsylvania, also a very rural state. (Tim Ryan was unable to do this in Ohio.) Republicans won the rural vote in both states by about 2 to 1.
Republican leaders in Iowa have not shown much interest in going beyond tax cuts and scare tactics about children's gender issues to work to create a rural agenda. Expanding charter schools and giving tax dollars to these private schools clearly offers no benefit to rural schools struggling with demographic challenges. It's not a winning rural strategy.
There's more at stake. Yesterday I heard a former Democratic chair of the House Committee on Agriculture say he's worried about the next farm bill. He said there are fewer and fewer Democratic representatives from farm states, and a bipartisan coalition has the best chance of success. Cindy Axne served on the House Ag Committee. Now her voice will be lost.
There's much more to this, but you can order When a Dream Dies from the University of Kansas Press, or online from other sources. For now, I'll end this piece with a riddle. "When is a door not ajar?"
"When it's closed!" Let's begin work today to open the door to making Iowa a swing state again!
Delighted to be pat of The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative
Cheryl, this is outstanding. I just cross posted it to my paid subscribers. Thank you!
Excellent history and insights....thank you!