Download rural Iowa in American culture during the Great Depression

University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Summer 2014
Honest to goodness farmers: rural Iowa in
American culture during the Great Depression
Wayne Gary Anderson
University of Iowa
Copyright 2014 Wayne Gary Anderson
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2036
Recommended Citation
Anderson, Wayne Gary. "Honest to goodness farmers: rural Iowa in American culture during the Great Depression." PhD (Doctor of
Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2014.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2036.
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Part of the American Studies Commons
HONEST TO GOODNESS FARMERS:
RURAL IOWA IN AMERICAN CULTURE
DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION
by
Wayne Gary Anderson
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the
Doctor of Philosophy degree
in American Studies
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
August 2014
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Kim Marra
Copyright by
WAYNE GARY ANDERSON
2014
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
________________________
PH.D. THESIS
________________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Wayne Gary Anderson
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in American Studies at the August 2014 graduation.
Thesis Committee: ____________________________________
Kim Marra, Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________
Bluford Adams
____________________________________
Joni Kinsey
____________________________________
John Raeburn
____________________________________
Shelton Stromquist
To my family, my friends, and my teachers
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the long hours in front of my computer spent writing this
dissertation and the even longer fallow periods waiting for inspiration to strike, it
sometimes seemed as if I was alone in this endeavor. The truth, of course, is that
countless people assisted and encouraged me as I moved toward completing the
project. I owe an enormous debt to my dissertation advisor, Kim Marra, for
providing incisive comments on my chapter drafts as well as for her positivity and
patience throughout the process. I am lucky that she has been on my team since
my first graduate school seminar. A hearty thank you also goes out to the other
members of my committee: Bluford Adams, Joni Kinsey, John Raeburn, and Shel
Stromquist. They consistently showed enthusiasm for my project and collectively
constitute the friendliest committee that anyone could ever hope to assemble. I am
especially grateful that John and Shel have continued to serve on my committee
after their retirements, and that Joni was able to participate in my defense despite
being an ocean away. Laura Rigal also deserves special thanks here for serving on
my preliminary committees and being influential in the initial development of my
project.
I also want to thank the American Studies Department at the University of
Iowa, especially Director of Graduate Studies Lauren Rabinovitz and
Departmental Administrator Laura Kastens. Lauren went to bat for me a number
of times during the search for funding and Laura always had the answers to
perplexing logistical questions.
iii
Financial assistance also came to me from the University of Iowa
Graduate College, the Executive Council of Graduate and Professional Students,
and the Graduate Student Senate, so I want to recognize all of those organizations.
I was also fortunate to receive a generous dissertation grant from the State
Historical Society, Inc., which is based in Iowa City. The archival sources for this
dissertation would not have been nearly as rich without the research trips to
Washington D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles, which this grant supported. Thank
you to Dean Oakes and the rest of the board for approving my proposal, and to
Sharon Lake for initially making me aware of the organization.
Many librarians and archivists provided helpful assistance with this
project, so I want to thank Janalyn Moss and Marianne Mason at the University of
Iowa Library, as well as the entire staff of the University of Iowa Special
Collections. Thank you also to staff members at the library of the State Historical
Society of Iowa in Iowa City, the Library of Congress, the University of IllinoisChicago’s Daley Library, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’
Margaret Herrick Library, UCLA’s James Young Research Library, and most of
all to Mark Quigley at the UCLA Film and Television Archive for going above
and beyond the call of duty to repair a damaged source during my visit. I am also
grateful for being able to include reproductions of cartoons, paintings, and
photographs thanks to permissions from the Jay N. ("Ding") Darling Wildlife
Society, Figge Art Museum and VAGA, and the Library of Congress’s Prints &
Photographs Division.
iv
My project also benefitted from being part of the Agricultural History
Society and participating in its conferences. Thank you to the new friends I have
made as well as the colleagues who attended my panels and asked questions about
my work. Special thanks to Anne Effland for graciously reading an early chapter
draft and providing helpful feedback.
Finally, I do not have enough words to properly say thank you to the many
friends and family members who have been supportive throughout this journey. In
Iowa City, Jennifer Ambrose has been with me on this crazy ride since the first
week of graduate school, and has been an enormously helpful sounding board,
writing partner, and good friend. Jennifer was also part of a helpful, albeit shortlived, writing group that also included Cinda Nofziger, Brad Parsons, Karen
Smith, and Mark Warburton. All of them have contributed ideas that are
contained in these chapters. Many other University of Iowa friends have enriched
my work and my free time, but special thanks go out to Michael Winslow for his
helpful source recommendations and Audrey Shelton for her research assistance.
I also want to acknowledge the many friends and family members in
Minnesota and elsewhere who helped me maintain my sanity throughout graduate
school. Thank you to everyone who provided food, lodging, and fun, especially
these frequent hosts: Rebekah and Julia Twaddle in the Twin Cities, John and
Kristen Charlson in Milwaukee, and Beth Marino and Ben Beard in Chicago.
Thank you most of all to my parents Ardith and Gary Anderson, as well as my
stepmother Jean Nelson Anderson, for all of their love and support.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………...vii
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1
CHAPTER ONE
STARTLING THE NATION: IOWA’S FARM STRIKES
IN AMERICAN PRINT MEDIA……………………...……...…13
“The last stand of American agriculture”…………….………………………….14
“Flee to the hills; the dam is going out!”...............................................................26
“They don’t sound like honest-to-goodness Iowa farmers to me”………………39
“A cheerful and noticeable contrast”………………………………………….…53
CHAPTER TWO
REVOLT AGAINST THE CITY: RURAL IOWA IN
ART AND LITERATURE………………………………...…….61
“At last timid Iowa has dared to lift its eyes”……………………………………63
“The finest hog that ever was”………………………..………………………….78
“A long way from breadlines and stock crashes”…………..……………………91
CHAPTER THREE A BEAUTIFUL LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE: IOWA
“FARM PICTURES” IN HOLLYWOOD…………………...…105
“We’re from I-O-way, I-O-way / State of all the land”………...............………108
“The curse seems to be off rural pictures”…….………………………………..118
“My God, how the money rolls in”….……………………………………….…130
“We even grow better cinema”……………………………………………...….142
CHAPTER FOUR
RUBBING THEIR NOSES IN THE FACTS: RURAL
IOWA AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT………………154
“I have the brand of Iowa upon me”……………………………………………158
“As earthy as the black loam of the corn belt”…………………….………...…172
“We need you; we need you”………………………………………………...…192
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………213
APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………..222
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………238
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure
A1. Jay N. “Ding” Darling, “That’s Where the Tall Corn Grows,” undated…….…222
A2. Jay N. “Ding” Darling, “What Would You Do If He Did?”, Aug. 17,1932........223
A3. Jay N. “Ding” Darling, “A Great Holiday for the Farmer,” Sept. 1, 1932..........224
A4. Jay N. “Ding” Darling, “They’re All For You, Frank,” Sept.29, 1932....……...225
A5. Carey Orr, “The Farmer’s Black I-owa,” April 29, 1933.……………………...226
A6. Jay N. “Ding” Darling, “In Iowa? -- Then Where Not?”, Apr. 29, 1933..……..227
A7. Grant Wood. American Gothic, 1930.………………………………………….228
A8. Grant Wood, Young Corn, 1931…………………………………………..……229
A9. Grant Wood, Farmer with Pigs and Corn (Fruits of Iowa series), 1932…….…230
A10. Grant Wood, Farmer’s Daughter with Vegetables (Fruits of Iowa series),
1932……………………………………………………………………………..231
A11. Grant Wood, Dinner for Threshers, 1934……………...……………………....232
A12. Grant Wood, Daughters of Revolution, 1932.…………………...…………….232
A13. Grant Wood, Appraisal, 1931.…………...………………………..……….…..233
A14. Grant Wood, Death on the Ridge Road, 1935..………...………………...……234
A15. Grant Wood, The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, 1931.…………….…...…….235
A16. Russell Lee, “Christmas dinner in home of Earl Pauley. Near Smithfield,
Iowa. Dinner consisted of potatoes, cabbage, and pie,” Dec. 1936…………….236
A17. Russell Lee, “The hands of Mrs. Andrew Ostermeyer, wife of a
homesteader, Woodbury County, Iowa,” Dec. 1936…………………………...237
vii
1
INTRODUCTION
An article by Peruvian-American writer Alfonso Washington Pezet titled “The
Middle West Takes Up the Torch” appeared in the respected Forum and Century
magazine in December 1936. In his article Pezet, the Harvard-educated son of the first
Peruvian ambassador to the United States, sets out to answer the question of which
location in this country is most likely to allow a foreign visitor to experience genuine
American art. Looking in turn at various regions of the United States Pezet finds reasons
to dismiss them all save for the Midwest. New England is too focused on erecting
monuments to the past; New York is too much of a gateway city to the rest of the world;
Washington, D.C. is too geographically nondescript; Florida is too vacation-minded; the
South is too stained by slavery and the Civil War; and Hollywood is too superficial. That
leaves the middle of the country (which he lumps together with the Pacific Northwest), as
the area in which “a life struggle essentially and peculiarly American must in time give
rise to a culture definitely and uniquely native.”1
Pezet, of course, is not the only observer who has tabbed the Midwest as being a
singular region in terms of its American-ness, but his Ivy League pedigree and
international diplomatic connections serve as a good example of how widely these
impressions had spread. For more than a century now the region has been portrayed by
writers, artists, and politicians as both a repository of bedrock American values and a
cultural wasteland populated by well-meaning hayseeds. Even someone as bullish on the
Midwest as Pezet felt that it offered “no pleasurable excitements,” “no scenery,” and a
“ruthless” climate, but he believed that this combination of hardships “tries men’s souls,
A. Washington Pezet, “The Middle West Takes Up the Torch,” Forum and Century, December 1936,
288.
1
2
toughens them in body, and sharpens their senses,” ultimately producing a hardy class of
rooted pioneers.2 These Midwestern pioneer virtues have tended to go in and out of
fashion due to economic, cultural, and political ebbs and flows, but rarely have historical
circumstances highlighted a single state as they did Iowa in the 1930s.
One reason the Hawkeye State figured prominently in culture and politics during
the Great Depression is a lucky chronological convergence of charismatic and talented
native-born Iowans who gained notoriety around the same time. Grant Wood in the world
of art, Phil Stong in literature, Henry A. Wallace in politics, and protest leader Milo
Reno, are among those who gained the most national attention for their endeavors. The
other more basic cause of Iowa’s renown is the state’s pastoral reputation, which
resonated deeply for Americans beset by economic woes. Cultural geographer James R.
Shortridge contends that Iowa “defined yeoman society” because of its “combination of a
prosperous agriculture, a relatively homogeneous population, and an absence of major
cities.”3 Despite a turn toward modernism in the previous decade, Americans showed a
newfound appreciation of these rural virtues in the 1930s because, according to
Shortridge, “Fighting the Depression was often compared with heroic acts from the
regional past [such as] the pioneer’s conquest of the land,” plus the collapse of Wall
Street (a symbol of industrial and banking interests) served as a “justification of the
[Midwest’s] traditional way of life.”4
2
Pezet, 288.
3
James R. Shortridge, The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture (Lawrence: University of
Kansas Press, 1989), 99-100.
4
Shortridge, 58-59.
3
Some of Shortridge’s phrases, particularly his references to a “homogeneous
population,” a “traditional way of life,” and the “pioneer’s conquest of the land,” raise
questions of race, class, and gender that I have attempted to grapple with in the chapters
that follow. In doing so I have found it helpful to call upon my knowledge of the 1920s as
during that decade America witnessed race riots, immigration restrictions, and labor
unrest, in addition to controversies over women’s suffrage, evolutionary theory, and
Prohibition. The fissures in American society contributing to those differences still
existed in the 1930s, even if many of them were less prominent in public discourse
because of the overwhelming focus placed on the economic crisis. Nevertheless my
explorations of critical whiteness studies by Neil Foley, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Matt
Wray, and Annalee Newitz, as well as Gary Gerstle’s work on Americanism have led me
to consider the extent to which the idea of a patriarchal white society was normative and
comforting to Americans who may have been left feeling bewildered or betrayed by a
quickly modernizing society.5 Iowa, then, because of its geographical middle-ness and its
preponderance of Caucasian residents, could serve as a blank, white canvas onto which
many Americans could project their desires for a simpler life.
That elusive idea of the simple life has long been fascinating to me, especially in
regard to portrayals of the Midwest and its farmers.6 This interest stems from my idyllic
5
Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European
Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Matt Wray and
Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Gary
Gerstle, Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
When using the phrase “simple life” in this context, I am reminded of The Simple Life, a reality television
show in the 2000s starring Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, two socialites who are placed into a rural milieu.
One of its most prominent marketing photos was a parody of Grant Wood’s famous 1930 painting
American Gothic.
6
4
childhood growing up on a hog and cattle farm in rural southwestern Minnesota that has
been owned by my family for more than one hundred years. During my formative years I
enjoyed interacting with the barnyard animals, helping my dad with manageable chores,
and picking garden vegetables with my mom, all before going into the house to “play
farm” with my toy tractors and plastic animals. My love for rural life, however, waned as
I became a teenager, in part because I began to understand that farming was not an easy
or guaranteed way to make a living. A number of years later I realized that my childhood
on the farm was an increasingly unique experience in contemporary America, and this
newfound appreciation ultimately led me to study rural history and culture in graduate
school.
With my subject field established, the idea for this dissertation began to form after
reading Melani McAlister’s excellent book Epic Encounters: Cultural, Media, and U.S.
Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000, which has unquestionably been my primary
inspiration and model. In her very first sentence on page one she states, “This is a book
about the cultural and political encounters that have made the Middle East matter to
Americans,” and I remember looking at that sentence and thinking that I would like to
write a dissertation about encounters between Americans and their own country’s Middle
West. 7 The Middle East and the American Midwest do not share many obvious
similarities, but I contend that a majority of U.S. citizens have an equivalent amount of
first-hand knowledge about these regions, which is to say, none. Therefore Americans are
mostly reliant upon news reports and popular culture texts to teach them about different
areas, whether those places are a thousand miles down the highway or five thousand
7
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1.
5
miles and an ocean away. I have tried to tell a multi-faceted story about cultural
perceptions of Iowa by borrowing McAlister’s methodological approach of putting a
diverse array of sources in conversation with each other. She links cultural texts,
contemporary events, and government policies that were all swirling in the culture at the
same time and coming together to educate large numbers of Americans (not always
accurately) how to think about the Middle East, so I hope that the following chapters
about different versions of Iowa are similarly illuminating.
Epic Encounters has, of course, been of great use in helping me explore the
dissemination of information about a single region, but my work also involves tracking
the cultural perceptions of a single figure, the Iowa farmer. A similar project that has
provided a model for me in this latter regard is Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an
American Icon by Anthony Harkins, which traces the image of the southern “poor white”
through its twentieth century manifestations in country music, comic strips, films, and
television. While Iowa farmers of the 1930s were not portrayed as an “other” as hillbillies
frequently were, Harkins’s work has provided me with a guide for how to explain varying
portrayals of backwardness, militancy, wholesomeness, and helplessness. Furthermore he
devotes three full chapters to Depression era images of hillbillies in which he argues that
the “general mood of economic distress [led to a] decade-long expansion in both
academic and popular interest in the rural folk in general” and that the hillbilly character
“provided cheering reassurance that rural poverty was not as bleak as it appeared in news
accounts.”8 Even though the portrayals of hillbillies and farmers were quite different in
many ways, the similar “cheering reassurance” that they often provided to audiences
8
Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004), 103-104.
6
during the 1930s helped me make better sense of my own analysis and placed my
understanding into a wider context beyond the more common, although rarely
“cheering,” Dust Bowl representations of rural folk.
These corresponding interpretations pushed me to reassess the dominant cultural
images of Depression era rural America, such as the pictures and stories of Dust Bowl
migrants captured by Dorothea Lange, John Steinbeck, John Ford, and Woody Guthrie.
Those four artists in their fields all created deservedly indelible classics of American
culture, but those works date from the late 1930s and early 1940s. Their continuing
ubiquity has overshadowed other rural-themed texts featuring Iowa farmers that were just
as important during the early 1930s, which were the harshest years of the Depression.
Therefore I feel that the primary contribution this project makes to existing scholarly
literature is to recapture the cultural messages being received by Americans in 1932 and
1933. They were not continuously being confronted with images of rural failure, instead
they were more often being entertained by idealized stories and images of fat hogs,
abundant fields, and happy farmers, which offered entertainment, hope, and a very
particular view of a normative white patriarchal society.
Even though I contend that the “Okies” should only represent part of the rural
story of the Depression, there are a number of very fine scholarly books that have
addressed the cultural significance of the Dust Bowl and the rural citizens of the Great
Plains who were affected. One such classic work is Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The
Southern Plains in the 1930s, which holds that prominent artists such as Lange,
Steinbeck, and Guthrie “found in the dust storms a potent symbol for the decade [which]
7
stood for an entire continent that had been ravaged by economic ambition.”9 Another
influential book in the field is James N. Gregory’s American Exodus: The Dust Bowl
Migration and Okie Culture in California, which argues that the Dust Bowl migrants
loomed so large in the culture because “America looked at [them] and saw itself: first
finding a symbol of Depression-era failure, later an affirmation of success and
deliverance.”10 Finally a cultural historian who has built on the work of these two classics
while having an approach that influences my own is Charles J. Shindo, author of Dust
Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination. Whereas Worster focuses on how
capitalism led to a misguided use of land and Gregory discusses the impact of migration
on the “Okies” and the places (particularly California) to which they moved, Shindo
highlights the role of cultural producers (including Lange, Steinbeck, Ford, and Guthrie)
who appropriated the migrants’ stories to “further their own agendas rather than the goals
of the migrants.”11
Each of these works, and dozens of others in a similar vein, are valuable additions
to the historiography of the Great Depression, but taken together they present an
unbalanced view of the cultural role played by rural America during that period. As a
case in point, a recent five hundred and thirty page book by Morris Dickstein, purporting
to be “A Cultural History of the Great Depression” somehow fails to mention Grant
Wood, more understandably misses Phil Stong and Milo Reno, and devotes just two
9
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979), 44-45.
10
James N Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989), xiv.
11
Charles J. Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1997), 2.
8
sentences to Henry A. Wallace.12 In comparison Lange, Steinbeck, Ford, and Guthrie are
each mentioned dozens of times, with Steinbeck and Guthrie each being singled out for
coverage in ten-page sections. I am not arguing that coverage of Iowa farmers should
equal that of Dust Bowl migrants, but some attention is surely necessary for anyone
wishing to fully understand American culture during the Great Depression.
This project also contributes substantially to the scant existing literature on the
literary and cinematic portrayals of Iowa during the 1930s. Novelist Phil Stong, most
well known for writing State Fair, is the key figure in both worlds, as his books became
popular among Hollywood producers, leading to some screenwriting work, which in turn
gave him material for a novel about Iowans in Hollywood (which itself was turned into a
film). He never fulfilled his life’s ambition of becoming a respected serious novelist, but
he achieved fame during the 1930s and was a more complicated figure than his books
suggest. The only scholarly work of any note done on him in the past forty years has been
an engaging article about his career by Chris Rasmussen for Iowa Heritage Illustrated, as
well as a dissertation chapter about State Fair by the same writer.13 The films based on
Stong’s work are unavailable on home video, but I was able to view them as well as
archived production files during a research trip to Los Angeles, and those sources have
never before been used in any scholarly analysis of Stong’s work. I originally learned
about the existence of those films from the work of Marty S. Knepper and John S.
12
Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company), 2009.
Chris Rasmussen,“Mr. Stong’s Dreamy Iowa” in Iowa Heritage Illustrated, Winter 1998, 146-155; and
“State Fair: Culture and Agriculture in Iowa, 1854-1941.” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1992.
13
9
Lawrence, who published an extremely helpful, very detailed filmography in the Annals
of Iowa, along with some strong essays on Iowa as a film setting.14
Grant Wood has been represented quite well in scholarly literature, especially
over the past three decades since Wanda Corn was influential in reviving his artistic
reputation.15 Steven Biel, James M. Dennis, R. Tripp Evans, Joni L. Kinsey, and Anedith
Nash, are among the other historians of art and culture from whom I’ve drawn most
heavily for my understanding of Wood.16 The primary addition I have made to this body
of work is to put his artistic work in conversation with Stong’s novels. To my knowledge
that connection has never been made even though the two were contemporaries who were
born and raised less than one hundred and fifty miles apart in eastern Iowa and achieved
similar levels of national notoriety within two years of each other for their creative works
featuring rural Iowa settings and characters. There is an entire book devoted to Wood’s
connection to another Midwestern novelist, Sinclair Lewis, so it stands to reason that
there is room for a chapter pairing the two Iowans, one an alcoholic and the other a gay
14
Marty S. Knepper and John S. Lawrence, "Iowa Films, 1918-2002," The Annals of Iowa 62 (Winter
2003), 30-100; and “World War II and Iowa: Hollywood’s Pastoral Myth for the Nation” in Representing
the Rural: Space, Place, and Identity in Films about the Land, eds. Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006): 323-339; and “Visions of Iowa in Hollywood Film,” in
Iowa Heritage Illustrated, Winter 1998, 156-165.
15
Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
Steven Biel. American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 2005); James M. Dennis, Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture (New York: Viking
Press, 1975); R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Joni L. Kinsey,
“Cultivating Iowa: An Introduction to Grant Wood,” in Grant Wood’s Studio: Birthplace of American
Gothic, ed. Jane C. Milosch (New York: Prestel Publishing, 2005), 11-32; and Anedith Nash, “Death on
the Ridge Road: Grant Wood and Modernization in the Midwest,” Prospects 8 (1983): 281-301.
16
10
man, who were largely responsible for the deceptively reassuring portrayals of their home
state.17
This dissertation as a whole uncovers a variety of cultural artifacts through which
rural Iowa was presented to a national audience as an ideal place where the “real”
America still flourished despite the difficult conditions of the Great Depression. News
reports, magazine articles, political cartoons, novels, paintings, films, photographs, and
political speeches, are among the primary sources being analyzed to reveal the ways in
which a comforting version of Iowa was constructed to invoke traditional pastoral
imagery and uphold a traditional racial, gender, and class hierarchy. The truth behind the
pleasing images, however, was far more complicated and often unpleasant, a fact that
some observers wanted to reveal to the public, while others worked to keep it hidden.
My first chapter explores national news media reports and political cartoons of
Iowa's farm strikes. These occasionally violent protest actions, which indicated the
presence of serious problems within the state, were commonly explained away as the
work of outside agitators, not “honest-to-goodness Iowa farmers,” who were personified
by the champion corn huskers to whom the strikers were sometimes compared. I argue
that the farm protesters were frequently cast as non-farming Communists and anarchists
in order to capitalize on lingering nativist fears of the previous decade.
Chapter Two analyzes the creative output of novelist Phil Stong and painter Grant
Wood, as they each achieved similar levels of success with their Iowa-themed creations. I
focus on several texts which display their common themes of rural beauty, agricultural
plenty, and the cultural clash between city and country. I argue that these shared elements
Lea Rosson DeLong. Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, IA:
Iowa State University Museums, 2004).
17
11
allowed their works to correspond with other symbols of national unity during the
Depression, and even though they seemed to present white normativity as a default
American standard, their complicated personal lives throw those surface impressions into
considerable doubt.
Chapter Three expands upon the argument of Chapter Two by investigating links
between Southern California and Iowa, particularly the “farm pictures” that became
popular for a brief time in Hollywood. Centering primarily upon the production and
reception of three films: State Fair, Stranger’s Return, and Farmer in the Dell; I describe
the six essential traits of the era’s “farm pictures.” I go on to demonstrate that through
movie-making magic these Hollywood adaptations gave further credence to the idea of
Iowa as a “make-believe” Caucasian land populated by admirable rustics with a special
connection to the land.
Chapter Four considers rural Iowa’s links to the federal government during the
Depression, beginning with Herbert Hoover and then Henry A. Wallace, two prominent
native Iowans who occupied the heights of government influence at different points
during the 1930s. The unpopular Hoover's inability to adequately portray himself as a
“true” Iowan stood in stark contrast to the political newcomer Wallace, whose rural
credentials earned him respect despite being faced with a difficult agricultural policy
situation. The chapter concludes with a section detailing government-sponsored cultural
texts about Iowa, and I argue that those efforts called the American Dream into question
as the culmination of Wallace’s stated intention to present the American people with
facts.
12
Finally my conclusion acknowledges the continuing cultural influence of 1930s
Iowa by considering the legacy of State Fair which has spawned two feature film remakes in 1945 and 1962 and a successful Broadway musical in 1996; as well as the
appetite for published memoirs of Depression era Iowa childhoods such as Mildred
Armstrong Kalish's Little Heathens which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007.
These examples, along with the continuing popularity of Grant Wood’s American Gothic,
indicate that the decade is still not truly in the past as comforting, overly simplistic, ideas
about rural Iowa are still common today in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the
Great Depression.
13
CHAPTER ONE
STARTLING THE NATION: IOWA’S FARM STRIKES
IN AMERICAN PRINT MEDIA
Officers Hurt in Clash with Striking Farmers; Many Gassed as Iowa Deputies
Attempt to Clear Highway of Menacing Throng
Los Angeles Times, Aug. 25, 1932
Iowans Mob Judge on Bench; Farmers Twist Neck in Noose; He’s Defiant
Chicago Tribune, Apr. 28, 1933
Iowa Troops Rule Farm Riot Areas; Mob Blocks a Sale
New York Times, Apr. 29, 1933
During the fall of 1932 and spring of 1933 these shocking front page headlines in
the nation’s leading newspapers challenged the traditional notion of rural Iowa as an
idyllic pastoral land populated by simple, honest, and hard-working folks. The cause of
this journalistic attention was a series of farm strikes and occasionally violent protests in
Iowa and surrounding states that resulted from falling commodity prices and a rising rate
of farm foreclosures. Perpetrated by increasingly angry and desperate farmers, these
events became the focus for recurring newspaper and magazine articles and political
cartoons that attempted to make sense of the situation for a confused American public.
Some reporters and cultural critics characterized the situation as a revolt, and they
argued that such drastic action by the nation’s most stalwart citizens was clear evidence
of the increasingly dire situation facing America. More commonly, however, members of
the print media chastised the strikers for their unlawful actions and placed the blame on
rabble-rousing outsiders in an attempt to preserve the established image of dependable,
law-abiding Midwestern farmers. At the same time a number of national media outlets
14
diverted the attention of readers and listeners away from the farm strikes with their
coverage of the yearly National Corn Husking Contest, a heavily-attended event which
featured authentic farmers who appeared to be straight out of central casting. The
glorification of these heroic huskers attempted to reassure the American public that the
Midwest was still in strong and steady hands, despite the economic ravages of the Great
Depression.
The “honest to goodness” farmers and the troublemaking outsiders were both
fictional media creations that recurred throughout the 1930s in a variety of texts, which
will be explored further in this and the following chapters. These opposing
characterizations highlight the degree to which representatives of America’s entrenched
power structure were invested in protecting the nation’s founding Jeffersonian ideals,
which were frequently presumed to reside in the nation’s midsection. The rural protest
actions simply did not have a place in the preconceived narrative about trustworthy
Midwestern farmers. Instead, destabilizing violent uprisings were typically associated
with “Reds” or “undesirable” immigrants who had frequently become a focus of
suspicion and hatred over the previous quarter century. The widely held assumption was
that only outsiders or those at the bottom of American society would turn to a philosophy
of armed resistance, so when agriculturists in the heart of the country erupted into
violence, many influential spokesmen felt those activities needed to be explained away in
order to calm the citizenry and preserve the established order.
“The last stand of American agriculture”
The years of 1932 and 1933 witnessed the most frequent and dramatic incidents
of Midwestern farm protest, but the first significant instance of farm violence during the
15
Great Depression occurred one year earlier in Cedar County, Iowa. National newspapers
ran ominous front page headlines on the morning of September 22, 1931, such as “Iowa
Calls Soldiers to Farm War” and “Iowa Mobilizes 1,500 Troops to Quell Cow-Testing
Revolt.” Publications from coast to coast continued their coverage in succeeding days,
with the New York Times dispatching reporter Roland M. Jones to eastern Iowa for a firsthand analysis.18 Jones labeled the situation the “T.B. Rebellion”, but historically it has
come to be known as the “Cedar County Cow War.” At issue was the governmentmandated testing of cows for tuberculosis, a practice which had been ongoing in one
form or another in Iowa since the passage of the Bovine Tuberculosis Law in 1923. The
law required that all cows in a given county must be tested if a certain percentage of
cattle owners in the county agreed to do so. When an extension of the law in 1929
dropped the required approval percentage from 75% to 50%, some cattle owners in Cedar
County filed a court injunction and later resorted to direct action in an attempt to stop the
testing from occurring on their farms.
Even though most farmers were not necessarily opposed to the idea of testing
cattle for tuberculosis, they found any number of reasons to thwart this particular attempt.
Some blame was placed on the outspoken “radical” radio broadcaster Norman Baker who
owned a station in Muscatine and spread rumors that testing caused cows to abort.19 The
colorful Baker, who just one year later lost his broadcasting license and was charged with
practicing medicine without a medical license, no doubt had his followers, but there were
18
For example see the New York Times, Sept. 22, 1931, 1; Sept. 23, 1931, 20, and Oct. 4, 1931, 57; and the
Los Angeles Times, Sept. 22, 1931, 1; Sept. 23, 1931, 1; Sept. 24, 1933, 11; and Sept. 25, 1931, 3.
For more on Baker see: Warren B. Smith, “Norman Baker – King of the Quacks,” The Iowan, VII
(December-January, 1958-59), 16-18; “2,000 Iowa Troops in Cow Revolt Area,” New York Times,
September 23, 1931, 20; and “Quack Quelled,” Time, March 28, 1932, 27.
19
16
two factors that were more significant: the dubious reliability of the test results and the
lack of proper compensation for infected animals.20 An estimated nine to fourteen percent
of cows that tested positive were found, after slaughtering, to be uninfected, and those
mistakes were exacerbated by the fact that owners of slaughtered animals were not
reimbursed for the full value of their livestock, losing approximately $130 per
slaughtered animal on average.21 John L. Shover, the leading historical authority on
Midwestern rural unrest during the 1930s, notes that the testing would likely have been
accepted with little complaint had the state’s Department of Agriculture only undertaken
a widespread educational campaign in advance of the tests. 22 That step, however, was not
taken and the resulting violence directed against the state veterinarians was only too
predictable, especially in a depression year.
The resistance began with a series of small incidents during the summer of 1931,
which hampered the state’s plan to carry out its testing in Cedar County (which,
incidentally, was the boyhood home of then-President Herbert Hoover). One such
example occurred in August when a mob of farmers pelted state veterinarian Peter
Malcolm with eggs and water as he arrived at a farm near West Liberty to conduct
testing.23 The unrest culminated in September of that year, when state agents targeted the
herd of Jake Lenker, a prosperous farmer from Wilton Junction who was the president of
the Farmers’ Association, a group formed specifically to oppose the testing. Lenker had
promised, “They’ll test my cattle only over my dead body,” and when the veterinarians
20
Dale Kramer, The Wild Jackasses, New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1956, 209.
John L. Shover, Cornbelt Rebellion: The Farmers’ Holiday Association (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1965), 30, from Loftus et al v. Thornburg, District Court for Mitchell County (Iowa), 1929.
21
22
Shover, 30.
23
Shover, 32.
17
arrived they brought along Cedar County Sheriff Foster Maxson and 62 deputies. Time
magazine reported the subsequent events:
At the gate the party was met by a force of 200 farmers, blocking the
entrance. Without a moment's hesitation the 200 farmers fell upon the
sheriff's men, doused them with water, plastered them with mud, pelted
them with rocks, clods and aged eggs, menaced them with pitchforks.
Through the melee the Law's truck forced its way into the Lenker farm.
Farmer Lenker & friends promptly halted it, forced Sheriff Maxson to pay
$5 damages, then shooed the truck back into the road. By this time the
deputies were on the run. Dr. Malcolm, who tarried longer than the rest,
lost his hat, brief case and suit case, had the gas line of his car broken, the
radiator filled with mud, the windows smashed, the tires slit with
pitchforks. He refused to get out of the car, was pushed in it to Wilton
Junction. From there he scurried to Iowa City and soon had his appeal for
aid telephoned to Governor Dan Turner.24
Governor Turner mobilized between fifteen hundred and two thousand National Guard
troops and sent them to the area under the command of Brigadier General Park Findley,
who declared, “I mean business.” When they arrived at Lenker’s farm the next day, they
found no cattle because he had sold his entire herd rather than submit to testing.
Nevertheless he was arrested and later charged with contempt of court; as the troops were
taking him away he told his wife, “Well, Maw, I guess we've resisted all we can without
bloodshed.”25
The unfolding of this story in newspapers across the country brought with it a
wide range of opinions and a general sense of bewilderment to most observers. The Los
Angeles Times editorial page showed itself to be unconcerned with the general plight of
the rural Midwest and completely missed the larger implications of the uprising, chiding
the Iowa farmers for being “foolish” and “display[ing] a lack of respect for the rights of
24
“At Lenker’s Place,” Time, October 5, 1931, 12.
25
Ibid. and New York Times, September 22, 1931, 1.
18
milk consumers.”26 A less judgmental tone was adopted by the New York Times in its
editorial page feature “Topics of the Times”, which noted:
Iowa is generally so peaceful that these military tidings from its loamy
plain startle the nation… American farmers have a habit of resisting
unpopular laws, and often they have given sharp evidence of their
disbelief in ‘new-fangled foolishness,’ such as the bovine tuberculosis test.
But seldom has it been necessary for a Governor to provide troops to
enforce it.27
The final straw that pushed Iowa farmers over the edge in this case, at least
according to Milo Reno, a long-time farm activist who was described by one associate as
the “spiritual father of the Cow War”, was that “their property is no longer their own.
Any little shyster who has come out of a certain college in this state can go to a farmer’s
property and conduct a test which is more apt to be wrong than right.”28 Roland M. Jones,
the visiting New York Times reporter, came to a similar conclusion after spending some
time amongst the angry farmers. “At the bottom of this unusual situation,” he wrote,
“appears to be bitter resentment against the encroachment of the State upon the farmer’s
affairs and its interference with what he regards as his right to manage his farm in his
own way… It is an invasion of his castle, which to him is not only his home but the acres
surrounding it.”29
These events in Cedar County had little direct connection to the more attentiongetting farm strikes of 1932 and 1933 that occurred primarily in the western part of the
state, but similar feelings of rural disempowerment boiled to the surface in each instance.
26
“Cow Testing in Iowa,” Los Angeles Times, September 27, 1931, A4.
27
“Topics of the Times”, New York Times, September 25, 1931, 22.
28
Shover, p. 32; and Dale Kramer, The Wild Jackasses: The American Farmer in Revolt (New York:
Hastings House, 1956), 208.
29
“Martial Law Stirs Corn Belt Farmers”, New York Times, October 4, 1931, 57.
19
John L. Shover labels the Cedar County Cow War a “revolt of traditionalism against
modernism and change” and characterizes it as a “harbinger of the rebellious spirit
depression had set astir in the countryside.”30 Historically in these situations a “rebellious
spirit” is turned against the government, and Iowa in the early 1930s was certainly no
exception. Jake Lenker and his supporters directed their anger at the Bovine Tuberculosis
Law and the government agents attempting to enforce it, but more generally there was a
widespread sense of dissatisfaction with nearly every elected government official.
Even before the events in Cedar County warranted national attention, The Nation
had published an editorial in May, 1931, titled “Midwest Discontent”, which outlined a
different kind of potential “revolt” in the region: a political revolt against President
Herbert Hoover in the traditionally Republican Midwest.31 After returning from “an
extended trip through the region,” the editorial writer revealed:
[T]he voters, in their present temper, would apparently be willing to
accept almost anyone in [Hoover’s] place… His refusal to recognize the
magnitude of the depression and particularly his failure to call Congress
into special session have hurt him beyond measure. The Hoover donothing policy irks the Middle Westerners more than anything else.32
These warnings proved to be true, of course, as Franklin D. Roosevelt swept the
Midwestern states on his way to a landslide victory in the 1932 election. But even though
Roosevelt was anything but a do-nothing president, Milo Reno and scores of Midwestern
farmers also turned against him when they deemed the New Deal agricultural policies to
be misguided and ineffective.
30
Shover, 33.
31
Iowa, for example, had gone Democrat just once in a Presidential election between 1856 and 1932. The
one exception was the 1912 election when Woodrow Wilson triumphed over a Republican party that had
split loyalties between its own candidate William H. Taft and Progressive Party candidate Theodore
Roosevelt.
32
“Midwest Discontent,” The Nation, May 6, 1931, 495.
20
The article in The Nation only referred to political discontent with elected leaders,
but a more active and confrontational discontent, like that on display in Iowa’s Cedar
County, took shape in other Midwestern states as well. Farmers' frustration sometimes
boiled over into violence, as clashes occurred in rural parts of Nebraska, Minnesota,
Wisconsin, and elsewhere. But without a doubt the farm protest activity of the 1930s was
centered in Iowa. Journalist Bruce Bliven, a native Iowan, visited his home state during
the strikes and reported that a “wise Iowan” told him it was no accident that the nation’s
most volatile region during this period was the one with the richest farmland: “It’s where
the farmers had something a few years ago, and have had it suddenly taken away, that the
agitators find responsive audience.”33 Bliven’s “wise Iowan” points out the same worries
that would be felt by any group of people under financial duress, but he also highlights
concerns about the impending loss of class and social status. Midwestern farmers, despite
fluctuations in prices, had long been able to think of themselves as a vital part of the
American fabric. Even in a nation that had been rapidly industrializing since the Civil
War, landowners in key farm states like Iowa ran no risk of being lumped together with
the likes of southern sharecroppers who existed on the margins of society. But the
agricultural recession of the 1920s, followed by the onset of the Great Depression, had
stripped away those assurances.
Neil Foley, who studies critical whiteness and Texan cotton culture, has written
about an analogous situation in the Lone Star State during the 1920s and 1930s when,
“The emergence of a rural class of ‘white trash’ made whites conscious of themselves as
a racial group and fearful that if they fell to the bottom, they would lose the racial
privileges that came with being accepted for what they were not – black, Mexican, or
33
Bruce Bliven, “Milo Reno and His Farmers,” New Republic, November 29, 1933, 64.
21
foreign born.”34 As a former Confederate state that was once part of Mexico, Texas has
some obvious geographic and demographic differences from Iowa, but it is no
coincidence that similar perceived threats to the status of rural white landowners existed
in both places at the same time, especially since the nation as a whole had been
preoccupied with questions of race and ethnicity during the preceding decades.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had witnessed a swelling tide of
“Americanist” sentiment and belief in pseudo-scientific theories of eugenics which
privileged the “Nordic race.” These ideas took hold in response to the waves of so-called
“undesirable” immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe from the 1890s into
the 1920s, and many influential people espoused these thoughts. For example James J.
Davis, who was the Secretary of Labor under Calvin Coolidge, described the newer
immigrants as “rats” who had come to America to “house under the roof that others
[whom he described as “beavers”] built.” He argued that when they arrive in this country,
“[T]hey try to undermine and ruin it because it is in their nature to destroy. They call
themselves anarchists. […] When the rat-men get the upper hand the civilization falls.”35
Iowa farmers were by and large “beavers” by birth instead of “rats,” but if some of the
nation’s popular news publications were to be believed, the “rats” had sunk their teeth
into the farmers and were dragging them down to their own low level. The journalists’
rhetoric did not match the reality on the ground, but the perception had potentially
significant ramifications. Foley identified how “successful whites” in Texas, such as
merchants and bankers, “began to racialize poor whites as the ‘scrubs and runts’ of white
34
Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), 7.
35
James J. Davis, The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1922), 61.
22
civilization, both as an excuse to displace them and as a justification for the impoverished
condition of those who remained.”36 Therefore as banks began to foreclose on numerous
Midwestern farms in the early 1930s, Iowans also had reason to worry that they might
soon be considered no better than “white trash.”
The most vocal leader of the effort to rectify the worsening situation for farmers
in Iowa was the aforementioned Milo Reno, president of the Farmers’ Holiday
Association, a well-publicized farm organization based in Des Moines which had been
officially launched in May 1932 as an independent wing of the Iowa Farmers’ Union.
The national Farmers’ Union was founded in 1902, but by the 1920s it drew most of its
support from the Midwest and was characterized by an economic program based upon
uniform commodity prices and the establishment of cooperatives. A faction within the
union, however, advocated a more active political program and called for guaranteed cost
of production prices. “Cost of production” became a popular slogan in subsequent years
and was regarded by many farmers as a cure-all for their economic miseries. While its
precise definition was often unclear or contradictory, supporters of this idea wanted a
price formula that would guarantee a reasonable profit as well as full compensation for a
farmer’s costs and labor in bringing livestock and crops to market. This policy would
eliminate the increasingly common occurrence of farmers selling their products at a loss,
such as the story about McGregor, Iowa, farmer August Werger that was published on the
front page of the February 20, 1933, edition of the Farm Holiday News. The headline
reads: “Ships Five Calves; Gets Bill for $1.98,” and the story goes on to explain what
happened after Werger shipped five “choice vealers” to Chicago markets: “When the
mail arrived, there was no check for his livestock. Instead he received a bill for $1.98,
36
Foley, 6.
23
the cost of freight, commission, and feed in excess of the amount brought by the five
calves.”37
Milo Reno considered himself to be a champion for farmers like August Werger
and became the most vocal supporter of legislation to secure cost of production prices. A
native of rural Wapello County, Iowa, and an ordained Campbellite minister prior to
making a career of lobbying on behalf of farmers, Reno is vividly described by John L.
Shover as an outgoing man who wore a “flaming red necktie” and “expensive ten gallon
hats” while being a fiery orator “who embellished his speeches with homely farm
analogies and liberal invocations of Biblical writ.”38 A supporter of the Greenbackers,
Populists, and nearly every other rural protest movement that flourished during his
lifetime (1866-1936), Reno introduced a portentous resolution in 1927 to the Corn Belt
Committee, a loose association of farm groups that intended to formulate a coherent plan
for agricultural legislation. His resolution warned, “If we cannot obtain justice by
legislation, the time will have arrived when no other course remains than organized
refusal to deliver the products of the farm at less than production costs.”39 This statement
provided the kernel of an idea that within five years grew to become the Farmers’
Holiday Association.
In a July 1932 speech titled “Why the Farmers’ Holiday?”, Reno described his
new organization and outlined its goals for a large listening audience over the airwaves of
37
Farm Holiday News, February 20, 1933, 1. This issue is filled with similar evidence of ridiculously low
commodity prices. On page 2 underneath the caption, “What This Farmer Got Out of $16.87 Worth of
Cream”, there is a photograph of a check from the Eagle Bend (Minnesota) Co-Operative Creamery
Association made out to dairy farmer W.H. Saddlemeyer for five cents. The same page contains this wry
joke: “An Iowa farmer obtains so small return from his hens that he insists on spelling ‘egg’ with one ‘g.’”
38
Shover, 25.
Milo Reno, “Why the Farmers’ Holiday?” Radio address of July 20, 1932, quoted in Roland White, Milo
Reno: Farmers’ Union Pioneer (Iowa City, Athens Press, 1941), 149.
39
24
KFNF, a powerful radio station located in Shenandoah, Iowa, which was owned by
Henry Field, a prominent seed entrepreneur, broadcaster, and sometime politician. In his
address Reno announced that the Farmers’ Holiday was officially born in Des Moines on
May 3 at a “monster meeting of earnest men and women” as the “last stand of American
agriculture in defense of their rights and their homes.” Lashing out at the “absolute
failure of the present congress” and questioning whether the lack of action was an
indictment of the politicians’ “intellectual ability or a lack of patriotic courage,” Reno
linked Midwestern farmers with America’s founding fathers, claiming that a solution to
the economic crisis “can only be accomplished through heroic measures; a patriotic
determination to faithfully carry out the objective for which this government was formed
– a guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the citizens of this
Republic.” Reno commonly peppered his speeches and articles with patriotic flourishes
as he hearkened back to an earlier time in the nation’s history when America was a land
of farmers and the majority of the nation’s leaders felt a close kinship with the land. By
doing so he hoped to cast his strident calls for direct action as patriotic appeals to “stand
shoulder to shoulder to preserve the republic of Jefferson [and] Lincoln.”40 In doing so he
was interestingly turning around the era’s racial and political emphasis on “One Hundred
Percent Americanism” by, in the words of historian Gary Gerstle, “using Americanist
rhetoric to focus attention directly on the unequal distribution of power between capital
and labor that prevailed in the workplace, community, and nation.”41
Milo Reno, “When We Scrap the Constitution, Then What?” Radio address of January 21, 1934, quoted
in Roland White, Milo Reno: Farmers’ Union Pioneer (Iowa City, Athens Press, 1941), 192.
40
41
Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8.
25
Reno also provided his listeners with a passionate history lesson on the worsening
economic situation plaguing rural America since the early 1920s, describing it as nothing
less than the “most amazing and confounding situation in the history of the world” and
blaming it on a conspiracy among the “money lords of the nation” that was “as
destructive and damnable as has ever occurred in this history of mankind.”42 This sort of
overheated rhetoric was common to Reno, who frequently assumed conspiracies against
himself and his constituency of farmers when the blame could more accurately be placed
on a series of complex economic and political factors.43 Nevertheless he either failed to
see these larger forces, or he actively ignored them, and instead thrived on his selfcreated role as a crusader against a group of dastardly villains plotting the downfall of
rural America from a smoke-filled boardroom in some large eastern city.
When not stirred up by an agitated crowd or fixated upon conspiring bogeymen,
Reno could prove to be remarkably reasonable and persuasive. This side of him is on
display in the same May 1932 speech when he lays out the Farmers’ Holiday vision for
reclaiming agricultural prosperity and provides a justification for the means of doing so:
The Farmers’ Holiday Association proposes to fix a fair valuation on farm
products, based on production costs, and to refuse to deliver until those
prices are conceded. Some may call it a strike. Very well… Why should
other groups of society expect the American farmer, to produce the food
and raw material that makes existence possible for them, and deliver his
product at a price below production costs, which inevitably means
bankruptcy and destruction?
Reno viewed this withholding action as a last resort because the “farmers of the middle
west… are standing with [their] backs to the wall” and economic power “is the only
42
Reno, “Why the Farmers’ Holiday?”, 148.
43
Shover, 26.
26
power left [to] the farmer today.”44 In the months to come Reno used his influence to
attract farmers to his organization but while he took the brunt of the criticism for the
resulting events, he only occasionally was in control of the Midwestern farmers’ pent-up
anger that he was about to release beginning in the late summer and fall of 1932.
“Flee to the hills; the dam is going out!”
Milo Reno declared a beginning to the farm strike during the second week of
August in 1932, and it got underway in the northwestern counties of Iowa with
“seemingly mild protest” according to the New York Times. The action, however, quickly
gained attention from many major newspapers, as by August 16, the New York Times was
joined by other major newspapers in carrying daily articles about the “picketing, boycott,
and threats” arising from the nascent strike.45 There were not any particularly shocking
actions to report during these early days of the strike, but news of the “manhandling” of a
dairyman and the subsequent dumping of his load of milk served as a harbinger of more
serious confrontations to come.
Reno was recognized as the strike organizer by all major publications, and he
hoped the withholding action would gain the attention of legislators in Washington and
force their hand into passing a bill that guaranteed farmers the cost of production.
Moving Congress to act was his primary goal, but most contemporary observers, along
with many of the farmers themselves, possessed a narrower frame of reference and felt
the strike was solely meant to tip the balance of supply and demand and drive up market
44
Reno, “Why the Farmers’ Holiday?”, 150.
45
“Farmers’ ‘Strike’ Spreads in West,” New York Times, August 16, 1932, 2.
27
prices.46 These two differing agendas coalesced for farmers near Sioux City, Iowa, where
the Farmers’ Holiday strike coincided with a price dispute between a local milk
producers’ cooperative and the J.R. Roberts Dairy Company. Because milk is a
perishable commodity, any given dairy company at the time was reliant on the relatively
small number of dairy farmers within a thirty-mile radius to provide a steady supply of
the product. Therefore the Roberts Dairy became a prime target of a withholding action
after it lowered the purchase price for farmers’ milk, refused to negotiate with the
farmers’ cooperative association, and then boasted about “breaking” the cooperative.47
When the strike got underway the local Woodbury and Plymouth County farmers,
many of whom belonged to both the milk producers’ cooperative and the Farmers’
Holiday Association, took it upon themselves to picket the highways leading into Sioux
City to stop everyone from delivering milk, regardless of whether or not they supported
the strike. Road barricades were not part of Reno’s plan, but John L. Shover credits the
Holiday Association for providing an “impulse” that “triggered a spontaneous grass-roots
movement and prompted action from groups seeking redress of local grievances” while
Reno and the Farmers’ Holiday were “carried along on the unexpected flood tide.”48 The
milk strike on the roads leading to Sioux City in the northwestern part of the state
intensified as the weeks passed and provided inspiration for similar actions in other parts
of the Midwest. Time magazine reported that the Farm Holiday idea had “trickled across”
Shover, p. 42. An example of the media’s faulty interpretation of Reno’s goals is found in “Stomach
Strike” in Time, August 29, 1932, 13, which reports that Reno asked Holiday members to “withhold their
goods until prices reach a level above the cost of production.” Absent is any mention of the hope for
legislation.
46
47
Shover, 43.
48
Shover, 42.
28
the Iowa border into Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, and Illinois.49 But
Iowa remained the epicenter, and New York Times reporter Louis Stark filed a special
front page report from the Hawkeye State on August 30, 1932, which told of “Disorder
on a wide scale… as the roll of sluggings, fights, and acts of violence mounted.”
Roadside pickets were well established near Sioux City and were beginning to form
around Des Moines. He notes that the business leaders of Sioux City “threw up their
hands” because the picketing was “beyond the control of local authorities.”50
The situation around Sioux City was described for a national audience in that
week’s edition of The New Republic in a guest article penned by Donald R. Murphy,
assistant editor of the influential Des Moines-based agricultural journal Wallaces’
Farmer. Murphy aimed to paint a “picture of the most dramatic phase of the Farmers’
Holiday”, which he did by immediately placing the reader in the position of a truck driver
“On a paved road in northwestern Iowa”:
Suddenly a log-chain stretched between two trees bars the road. From the
sides of the highway, where they have been lounging under the trees in the
tall grass, a dozen tanned men, the leader waving a red flag, bar the road.
There are pitchforks handy for puncturing tires, rocks for cracking wind
shields, clubs to persuade the truck driver.
‘Where you bound?’
‘Sioux City.’
‘What you got?’
‘Cream.’
‘Turn around and git outa here. Don’t you know the Farmers’
Holiday is on?’
Usually the truck backs up. Sometimes the driver takes a chance and tries
to break through. A few of these chance-takers have finally retreated with
49
“Stomach Strike,” Time, 13.
Louis Stark, “Wide Rioting Flares in Farmers’ Strike; Troops Requested,” New York Times, August 30,
1932, 1..
50
29
broken windshields and punctured tires. The cream has been dumped in
the road.51
Throughout his article Murphy describes a situation in which “the time for direct
action had come” after a series of legislative defeats, an increase in foreclosures, and a
drastic drop in farm buying power to less than fifty percent of the pre-WWI average. He
expresses his sympathy for the farmers and understands their increasing impatience:
Farmers have submitted with surprising meekness to a long period of
deflation… and no serious attempt – or so it seems to farmers – has been
made by those in power to improve conditions. After twelve years of this,
it relieves a farmer’s feelings a good deal to throw a rock through a
windshield or to take any positive step, no matter how futile it may
ultimately prove to be, that seems to lead toward better prices.52
At this time Murphy worked directly beneath future Secretary of Agriculture
Henry A. Wallace, whose grandfather had published the first issue of Wallaces' Farmer
in 1898. Within the year Murphy assumed Wallace's position as editor when Wallace
joined Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s cabinet, where he became highly influential in
crafting the nation’s first major farm bill, the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Like Wallace,
Murphy was also a strong supporter of using legislative means in order to improve the
lives of farmers, and he saw these actions as a way of gaining necessary national attention
for the farmers’ cause, even if they were unlikely to succeed in the short term. Common
sense held that the milk strike and road blockades would fail because there were too few
picketers, too many roads, and too many other ways for blockaded cities to receive
foodstuffs. The New York Times, for example, reported that “several thousand pickets”
would be needed to effectively blockade the twenty-eight roads leading into Des Moines,
Donald R. Murphy, “The Farmers Go On Strike: The Blockade of Sioux City,” The New Republic,
August 31, 1932, 66.
51
52
Murphy, p. 67.
30
and even if enough men were found for that job, railroads could still bring necessary
supplies into the city.53 The likelihood of the strike’s failure was a non-issue for Murphy,
because he saw these events as simply the first wave of change, with the second wave
expected to come in the form of direct action to halt farm foreclosures:
Even if the holiday ends with no real results, the irritation of farm people
against low prices will not cease. There will be another outbreak. It may
logically take the form of neighborhood defense against foreclosures…
Even now conservative farmers who see no success in the holiday
movement express considerable sympathy for the project or for any
project aimed at raising farm prices and keeping farmers on their own
farms.
Murphy concludes with a warning that the farmers constitute a “great conservative class”
that is “finally ready to employ radical measures… Unless farm prices go up this will not
be the last outbreak in the corn belt.”54
Murphy’s article in The New Republic was just one of a number of articles in
national magazines in 1932 and 1933 written by prominent current or former Iowans. As
the farm strike persisted through the fall publishers felt that the American reading public
needed an explanation for the uncharacteristic news out of the Midwest. This first wave
of farm strike activity spawned some negative or dismissive articles (which increased in
number during 1933), but by and large the initial sentiment was a mixture of surprise,
sympathy for struggling farmers, and concern for the future of the country.
The Iowan who likely reached the widest reading audience during the period was
not a writer at all, but a noted political cartoonist: Jay N. “Ding” Darling. He worked at
the Des Moines Register but had his cartoons syndicated in approximately 130
newspapers nationwide. Darling was an immensely popular and well-connected figure
53
Stark, 1.
54
Murphy, 67-68.
31
with a deep interest in politics, especially in conservation issues. He and his wife were
close friends with the Hoovers and were frequent White House guests, while supporters
even mounted a serious “Ding for Senator” campaign in 1932, urging him to run for the
U.S. Senate on the Republican ticket, but he declined. According to his biographer David
L. Lendt, it would have meant temporarily giving up his drawing career and his
independence, not to mention a cut in pay. “I don’t want to be a senator,” he said, “but I’d
be very grateful for a chance to vote for a good one.”55
It should come as no surprise that Darling drew a number of cartoons in response
to the farm strikes, as agricultural issues were among his most frequent subjects and he
was responsible for creating the popular “Uncle John Iowa” character that came to
embody his home state and was described by Time magazine in 1932 as a “stalwart, chinwhiskered Iowa farmer, sound of sense and strong of spirit.”56 Uncle John Iowa appeared
in many cartoons throughout Darling’s career, but an especially representative depiction
is his appearance in an undated cartoon titled “That’s Where the Tall Corn Grows”
(Figure A1). The cartoon’s title evokes the chorus of the popular “Iowa Corn Song,”
which is illustrated by the clusters of musical notes appearing around the words in the
cartoon’s upper left corner. Uncle John Iowa stands proudly at the center of the frame,
which is presented from a low-angle view. He is wearing his customary overalls with
“Iowa” spelled out just above his round belly which mirrors the shape of the robust hog
and plump chicken that stand at his feet. He has one workboot-clad foot crossed over the
55
David L. Lendt, Ding: The Life of Jay Norwood Darling (Mt Pleasant, SC: Maecenas, 2001), 53-54.
“Campaign Cartoons: Potent Pictures,” Time, October 24, 1932, 31. Interestingly the article also
describes Samuel H. Cook, the man upon whom the Uncle John Iowa character was modeled. Cook was
born in New York state, and had lived in Iowa for more than fifty years, not as a farmer, but as a grain
dealer and farm implement merchant.
56
32
other, and is chewing on a long piece of tasseled prairie grass, conveying a jaunty
appearance, as if he is utterly at home standing on his farm. In his right arm he is holding
a bushel basket overflowing with round apples as his left hand grasps a towering corn
stalk whose top is out of frame. Two large ears of ripe corn which have burst open their
husks hang onto the stalk while the large hog next to Uncle John holds a third,
completely husked, ear in its mouth. The background shows a hog pen, a large barn, twin
silos, and four large haystacks, with a farmhouse in the distance. The overall impression
is one of abundance, satisfaction, and happiness (as witnessed by the twinkle in Uncle
John’s eye and the smiling faces of the hogs in the right corner of the frame. It is an
image of how Iowans perceived themselves and their role in feeding the nation.
The 1932 Iowa farm protests inspired Darling to bring the national image of Iowa
farmers back in line with this scene, but his first cartoon on the subject was a balanced
depiction of the situation that sounded a wake-up call to all Americans whose food came
from farms, especially those living in cities who lacked enough space to grow their own.
The cartoon entitled “What Would You Do If He Did?” (Figure A2) was published on
August 17, 1932, and it shows a smiling farmer sitting inside a padlocked room marked
by the sign: “Closed ‘Farmers’ Holiday.’” He is surrounded by a cache of fresh
foodstuffs, including apples, sacks of flour, sides of beef, bottles of milk, chickens, ears
of corn, potatoes, and eggs (in a crate marked “Strictly Fresh”). Peering in through a
window are the concerned faces of a group of well-dressed men and women. A bug-eyed
woman wearing a hat with a feather tucked into the brim asks, “What you tryin’ to do?
Starve us to death?” The thin long-nosed farmer, who with his hat, overalls, and chin
whiskers resembles a shrunken elderly version of Uncle John Iowa, takes a bite from an
33
apple, grins, and replies, “Betcha I could do it if I wanted to.” As a staunch Republican
Darling often aligned himself with the interests of the urban business community, but as
can be gathered from his celebratory image of Uncle John Iowa, he also clearly
appreciated farmers and their importance to his home state. In this cartoon he places
himself on both sides of the fence: as a city dweller himself, he identifies with the
concerned citizens on the outside of the storehouse looking in, but at the same time he
displays an admiration for the farmers’ ability to produce food and a recognition of their
vital role in the food chain.
While Darling was showing his concern for the food supply and pointing out the
power that could be wielded by farmers, a number of writers took a broader view of the
farm strike and evinced worries about what it meant for the future of America. One of
these writers was Remley J. Glass, a self-described country lawyer, who provided an
insider’s view of Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, for the July 1933 issue of Harper’s
Magazine in an article titled “Gentlemen, the Corn Belt!” He argues that his job places
him in a unique position to observe “the present and potential danger of the existing
economic crisis as it affects the citizens of the farming areas of the Middle West and the
country itself” because on a daily basis he deals with “people suffering loss not only of
surplus and profits, but of homes and lifetime savings which they have held as security
against sickness, old age, and death.”57 Through telling stories about the Johannes
Schmidt and George Warner families, he details the ways in which respectable,
established farmers failed through no fault of their own and presents them as examples to
explain the “gradual change to near-radicalism” among some of the region’s farmers.
57
Remley J. Glass, “Gentlemen, the Corn Belt!”, Harper’s Magazine, July 1933, 199.
34
Glass argues that this “growing feeling of bitterness” has not only opened up a
gulf between city and country, but has also resulted in a “desire for retaliation” because
“repeated knockdowns have made [farmers] sullen, discouraged, and ready for any and
every remedy suggested.”58 He estimates that ten to twenty-five percent of the farm
population is “definitely radical” with the same number needing only “the urge of
effective leadership and the power of mass psychology to be swung into the radical
alignment,” which is a significant proportion of farmers – so he is reasonably concerned
about what lies ahead. “[U]nless,” he warns, “definite and constructive plans are made by
the powers that be, political, financial, and economic, and the necessary steps are taken to
carry those plans to a solution which will assure the Corn Belt farmer of returns adequate
to cover the needs of existence, God help the country in the next five years.”59
An agrarian revolt is surely one of the potential ramifications to which Glass
refers. Rural “revolt” and “rebellion” were two terms that were frequently bandied about
during the period, and the North American Review addressed the issue directly in a July
1933, article titled “Do Farmers ‘Revolt’?” by socialist writer Karl Pretshold. Even
though Pretshold leaves open the possibility that worsening conditions could change his
analysis, he clearly states that the “‘rebellious’ Middle Western farmers are not
‘revolutionists’” despite the “city dwellers [who] are becoming more and more convinced
that the American farmer is ‘becoming revolutionary’ or ‘going Bolshevik’ or ‘turning
red.’” Pretshold notes that it is the “editors, politicians, business men and (especially)
bankers [who] feel that the once dependably conservative farmer is ready to ‘line up
58
Glass, 202, 206.
59
Glass 206, 209.
35
with’… the Communists.” 60 The first Red Scare, of course, had occurred just over a
decade earlier following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and those feelings of fear
and suspicion still lingered in the minds of many, even though the government had
effectively cut off immigration from “undesirable” nations and neutered radical labor
organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World.
Despite the government crackdown labor unrest continued and became common
once again in the early 1930s, as at least twelve notable strikes occurred in the United
States from 1930-1933. Most of these occurred in the West, South, and Midwest, with the
Imperial Valley Farmworkers’ Strike in California and the Harlan County Miners’ Strike
in Kentucky among those garnering the most attention. Additional attention was trained
on labor issues after the 1932 shooting of five demonstrating workers at the Ford plant in
Dearborn, Michigan, and the military attack against the Bonus Army marchers in
Washington D.C. Pretshold points out that Americans who followed the news during this
time were obviously familiar with labor agitation and political radicalism, but not with
the new group of participants. “They [were] not,” he writes, “accustomed to seeing
groups of farmers defying sheriffs, intimidating judges and threatening to burn down
courthouses.”61
Four months after Pretshold’s article was published, Bruce Bliven, the Iowa-born
editor of The New Republic, explored a different aspect of rural revolt in the opening
paragraph of an article for the November 22, 1933, issue. “Is the Middle West,” he asked,
“in revolt against the New Deal? The answer to that question is in the affirmative, but it is
a highly qualified affirmative… By no means does it at present embrace the general mass
60
Karl Pretshold, “Do Farmers ‘Revolt’?”, North American Review, July 1933, 13, 20.
61
Pretshold, 13.
36
of the plain people. Nevertheless it is an important phenomenon.”62 Bliven wrote these
lines in the fall of 1933 when Milo Reno and the Farmers’ Holiday experienced a brief
resurgence following a summer of relative dormancy as FDR’s New Deal was given time
to bear fruit, so he is considering the possibility of revolt against legislation, rather than
against bankers and law enforcement officials. But it is telling that the specter of revolt,
fueled by other class unrest, was still in the air fifteen months after the beginning of the
first farm strike in August 1932.
Bliven grew up in Emmetsburg, Iowa, a small town in northern Iowa, less than
one hundred miles from LeMars, one of the hotbeds of farm protest activity. After
learning the journalism trade in college at Stanford, he moved to New York and forged a
strong career as a writer and editor for a number of well-respected periodicals before
establishing himself at The New Republic, where he served as an editor alongside
Malcolm Cowley, R.M. Lovett, George Soule, and Stark Young. His impressions of the
Iowa farm strikes display sympathy for the farmer, nostalgia for the Iowa in which he
grew up, and above all a concern about what the uprisings in rural Iowa might signal for
the future of the nation as a whole. These characteristics are on clearest display in his first
piece in response to the strikes, which was published alongside Donald R. Murphy’s
article in the August 31, 1932, issue of The New Republic.
Bliven’s article, titled “Home Thoughts from Afar” is a fascinating piece of
writing in which the one-time Iowan combs through his Iowa memories for a precedent
that allows him to wrap his mind around the events of the farm strike. This process is
clearly a struggle for him even as he notes, “I feel that I know the people of that part of
the world rather better than I do those anywhere else.” His personal experiences color the
62
Bruce Bliven, “The Corn Belt Cracks Down”, The New Republic, November 22, 1933, 36.
37
piece as he tells of visits to church dinners and conversations about local food, but he also
allows a great many nostalgic memories to creep into his analysis of the present situation:
I can see that something astonishing must have happened to these Iowa
farmers since I was last there, not long ago. These stories of men armed
with pitchforks patrolling the roads which lead to town, intent on keeping
farm produce away from the markets and thus raising the price – these
tales in the daily press of farmers’ committees who fire on trucks and let
through only the vehicles with free milk for the babies – such things fill
me with amazement. They sound like some far-off foreign country, not
like the Iowa of big red barns and small white farm houses, where the
wooded banks of the Des Moines are a meandering green interruption to
black-soiled fertile fields, among the richest in the world.63
No images accompany the article, but there could just as well have been a Grant Wood
landscape to illustrate the colorful picture that Bliven paints for his readers.
Similar to Wood’s approach with his art, Bliven is remembering what he wanted
Iowa to be rather than relating an accurate memory of what it once was. He is describing
a place and time that resonated for many Americans, because even if they were living in
cities, more than half of the population at that time was no more than one generation
removed from living on the farm and they had their own rural memories. Furthermore
during the Great Depression these bucolic scenes from rural life became increasingly
appealing as an antidote to the confusingly modern way of life, which was sometimes
blamed for the economic distress plaguing the country. Even though rural areas
experienced every bit as much poverty as urban areas, there was something especially
reassuring about red barns, neat rows of crops, and grazing livestock, which was borne
out by the millions of urbanites who are estimated to have migrated to the country as part
Bruce Bliven, “The Farmers Go On Strike: Home Thoughts From Afar,” The New Republic, August 31,
1932, 68.
63
38
of the era’s “back to the land” movement.64 These folks were pulled by nostalgia, either
for their own family’s or the nation’s past, or both. Gary Gerstle describes this sentiment
as the “traditionalist” dimension of Americanism. He argues that it is “rooted in nostalgia
for the mythic, simpler, and more virtuous past when the essence of America was to be
found on the farm and in the small town; when family values were paramount; when
individuals were hardy, virtuous, and God-fearing; and when all Americans were white,
Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.”65 This mythic past still resonates with many Americans
today, as the popularity of conservative media outlets such as Fox News attests, but it
was and still is important to remember that this nostalgic vision is anything but inclusive.
Not all Americans of the period felt equally welcomed into this green Midwestern oasis
even though it was presented as the ideal America for so many.
It was no easy task for Bliven to square his nostalgia-soaked memories of his
solidly traditional home state with the surprising stories appearing daily in the pages of
the New York Times because never before had Iowa “gone radical” to this extent. “Iowa,”
he rhapsodized, “drowsing among her prize hogs, tall corn, her prairie flowers and
cottonwoods, Iowa [had always] stood firm.” Therefore he imagines the “mental wrench
which it must have cost those Iowa farm men and women last week to take weapons and
go out on the beautiful new cement roads to put the ring of steel around Sioux City and
keep the foodstuffs out.” Despite his penchant for nostalgia Bliven notably does not deny
the fact that real Iowa farmers were the participants in these actions, as did so many other
observers in the coming months. This very refusal to hide from the difficult truth is what
64
For a more in depth look at this phenomenon, see: James R. Shortridge, The Middle West: Its Meaning in
American Culture (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 58-60.
65
Gerstle, 11.
39
makes Bliven’s article so fascinating, because in the end he accepts the new position that
many Iowa farmers had taken, and he realizes that it bodes ill for the country that these
upstanding citizens felt they were left with no other choice:
[These farmers] are no victims of foreign agitators; they have been in
America a long time – most of them for several generations; they are
steeped in our traditions, acquired in little white schoolhouses which have
now been swept away in favor of big ‘consolidation schools’; they read
the Des Moines Register and the Chicago Tribune and are fond of Lincoln,
who lived not so far away across the river… I know, of course, that the
farmers’ strike is hopeless, doomed from the start; but it seems to me not
without significance. When Iowa resorts to violence, it is time to take a
horse and gallop through the countryside calling: ‘Flee to the hills’; the
dam is going out!’66
“They don’t sound like honest-to-goodness Iowa farmers to me”
While the cautionary words of Bliven, Glass, Murphy, and others, were
representative of many responses during the initial phase of the farm strike, a number of
prominent voices and leading publications were concerning themselves with protecting
Iowa’s wholesome image by condemning these actions and crafting denials of any
involvement on the part of “real” Iowa farmers. These voices only grew louder and
became more common as the strike took on a more violent character in the spring and fall
of 1933. But even in the strike’s early days of August and September 1932, “Ding”
Darling and the editors of Time magazine both set a precedent for later critics by
attempting to erase or at least minimize the participation of rural Iowans in the farm
holiday.
Darling’s cartoon from September 1, 1932, is titled, “A Great Holiday for the
Farmer” (Figure A3). In the center of the frame there is a truck carrying a bespectacled
66
Bliven, 68.
40
middle-aged farmer and his wife. A sign on the vehicle’s door reads “The Only Farmer in
the Picture” and an arrow points straight up to the farmer who is well-dressed in a vest
and tie. The truck’s progress has been stopped by a log across the road and approximately
two dozen portly, unshaven men are ransacking the produce that the farmer is hauling to
town. Some of the men are tossing watermelons, pumpkins, apples, baskets of eggs,
crates of chickens, jugs of milk, and hogs, from the rear of the vehicle while others are
carrying their booty up a hill. Finally at the top of the frame three more men rest under a
tree and watch a pot boiling over a fire as a sign on the tree says “Farmer Holiday Picket
Camp.” The image leaves no room for ambiguity, as the roadside picketers are portrayed
as nothing better than common thieves preying on a respectable farm couple.
The physical appearance of the picketers is particularly noteworthy given the
similarity to depictions of radicals in political cartoons during the Red Scare.67 Those
cartoons, which appeared in multiple newspapers and periodicals ten to fifteen years
earlier, almost unanimously portrayed Communists and anarchists as bearded, shaggyhaired, shabbily-dressed malcontents with dark complexions and occasionally
animalistic, rat-like features. The men in Darling’s cartoon share many of the same traits.
Nearly all of them have dark beards or shaded faces representing stubble and most do not
appear to be well-dressed. The two men on the right of the frame appear to be smiling as
they enjoy their thievery, but the group of six men on the left that has approached the
truck are an angry bunch as they attempt to pry a basket of eggs from the grasp of the
farm wife. The man who appears to be the ringleader of that group is every inch the bully
as he wears an open-mouthed, belligerent expression, seemingly yelling at the farm
67
There are multiple examples of Red Scare political cartoons at the online Red Scare archive created by
Leo Robert Klein: <http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/alumni/online_exhibits/digital/
redscare/default.htm>. Accessed Apr 15, 2014.
41
couple while he wields a thick wooden club in his right hand. Meanwhile the man on his
left could have stepped directly from one of the Red Scare cartoons with his hooked nose,
thick beard, and beady eyes. Finally the man who is making off with a live hog in the
middle right of the cartoon sports remarkably simian facial features that make him appear
more animal than human. None of these men can be mistaken for Uncle John Iowa, and
there is anecdotal evidence that some of the men who joined the strikes had little
connection to farming, but most first-person accounts paint a decidedly more agrarian
picture of the participants.
Noted left-wing journalist and novelist Josephine Herbst was one such observer.
Herbst, who grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, prior to living in Europe and on the East Coast,
was a frequent contributor to Marxist journals such as The New Masses and at this time
was working on a trilogy of novels about the fictitious Trexler family. Her article about
the Farmers’ Holiday published in Scribner’s displays a strong sense of solidarity with
the farmers and casts them as underdog heroes engaged in a class struggle with “town
folks” who think the farmer is “getting just about what he deserves.” She returned to
Iowa to conduct research, and much like Bliven, she noted the “hilly green fall country,
the fat barns, good houses and good crops” and she remembered spending time with her
family while “eating fried chicken and chewing corn on the cob.” 68 Much of the article
details her visits to a picket line to talk with the participating farmers. Unlike the thieving
villains in Darling’s cartoon, she encountered principled men. “You can,” she writes, “see
their kindness – the civilized ability to put themselves in another man’s place.” She
68
Josephine Herbst, “Feet in the Grass Roots,” Scribner’s, January 1933, 46.
42
describes the men as “good company” and lauds their resolve, which “has the reasonable
quality of men who are calm because they are desperate.”69
Even though stories such as Herbst’s were available, Darling persisted with his
argument about the absence of “real” farmers. In fact he stepped out from his drawing
table and wrote an article about the Farmers’ Holiday for the October 1932 issue of New
Outlook, a monthly newsmagazine edited by former New York Governor Al Smith. His
article has twin goals: to downplay the significance of the farm strike and minimize the
participation of Iowa farmers in the uncharacteristically radical actions First he portrays
the events as much ado about nothing:
At no time during the authorized period of the strike was there evidence of
anything more than sporadic and local disturbances… [and] at no time
was there anyone seriously inconvenienced nor the flow of the necessities
of life to the market centers interrupted sufficiently to disturb the comfort
of the urban dwellers… The picture of the farm strike seemed to have
been magnified in an inverted perspective. The farther away the
observer, the bigger it looked.70
Next he takes pains to remove any unsavory associations from the “friendly” Iowa
farmers who instigated the strike, and instead places blame on “outsiders” for any
“rowdyism” that occurred. “Probably no one was more surprised than the farmers
themselves,” he writes, “when their ranks became augmented by gangs of radical
volunteers from the cities, and the peaceful picketing was turned into a roadside ‘racket,’
their own neighbors pulled from their loads and their cargo of produce appropriated or
dumped into the ditch.”71 He characterizes the withholding action as initially being
“entirely good-natured and not unmixed with the elements of a lark”, but it turned into
69
Herbst, 47-48.
70
Jay N. Darling, “The Farmers’ Holiday”, New Outlook, October 1932, 18.
71
Darling, 18.
43
something that relied on “force and intimidation.” Without providing evidence, he
estimates that outsiders on the picket lines numbered “as high as ninety percent,” a
number that is not corroborated by any other accounts of the strike. Nevertheless he uses
this dubious statistic to support his claim that “the management of the blockade had
suddenly and unexpectedly passed out of the farmers’ hands and into the control of total
strangers. Such violence as was reported followed this transfer of participants.”72
Leaders of the Communist Party of America and its affiliated United Farmers
League were often assumed to be prime examples of the “total strangers” who had
instigated much of the farm protest activity, but that characterization was wrong on two
counts. In reality those who were involved with the party had deep roots in the soil, but
their small Midwestern organization was more follower than leader. According to Lowell
K. Dyson, the leading chronicler of Communist involvement in American agriculture, the
agitators did not fit the common Communist stereotype of “thickly accented immigrant
urbanites who were completely out of place in country settings.” Instead his research
revealed that they “could pass a pretty stiff muster,” as longtime activist “Mother” Ella
Reeve Bloor had colonial ancestry and her husband Andy Omholt “was a western North
Dakota wheat farmer who was well respected in his region.” In fact “most of the best
organizers in every area… were, or had been, farmers.” Even Lem Harris, the most
prominent strategist behind the Communist Party’s agricultural endeavors, “had
renounced a background of great wealth to become a manure-shoveling farm hand” after
college.73 The party members’ rural backgrounds, however, did not translate to leadership
72
73
Darling, 19.
Lowell K. Dyson. Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1982), ix-x.
44
of the Midwestern farm protests. They often worked at cross-purposes with the Farmers’
Holiday Association and Dyson reveals that the “Sioux City strike caught the
Communists unprepared” and that “rapidly unfolding events… kept [them] off
balance.”74 Despite their relative ineffectiveness at capturing the trust of Midwestern
farmers, the party remained a convenient bogeyman upon which to focus blame.
Darling did not specifically refer to Communist involvement in his article, but his
characterization of the picketers as non-farmers allows him to conclude the piece by
disavowing the strike while still supporting the farmers’ right to withhold their produce
from market. He also expresses support for a reduction in the number of farm foreclosure
sales. “In the case of the farmer,” he writes, “his impossible mortgage and back-breaking
taxes enlists human sympathy and a sense of honest justice compels a withholding of the
iron hand of the law until some more equitable solution may be found.”75 So while he is a
city man, he clearly retains his sympathy for farmers and has a clear-headed view of their
situation and rights. On the other hand, he is either unwilling or unable to countenance
the existence of revolutionary or radicalized farmers because it does not correspond with
his preconceived notions of the wholesome and non-threatening image of the Iowa
farmer.
Despite Darling’s denials of Iowa farmer involvement, he held a somewhat
nuanced view of the situation. Time magazine, however, was a vociferous critic of the
entire Farm Holiday Movement in general and Milo Reno in particular. Time’s editor
Henry Luce, was a committed pro-business, anti-union Republican who loathed any
inflammatory tactics that upset the status quo. Beginning with the magazine’s very first
74
Dyson, 75-76.
75
Darling, 20, 44.
45
mention of him in August 1932, Time’s writers attacked Reno’s disposition and showy
demeanor. In addition to deriding his “baggy trousers,” “thin lips,” and “bushy hair,” the
article describes “Agitator Reno” as a “belligerent… [and] radical exhibitionist” who
uses “cowbarn language.” Furthermore there is a photo accompanying the article showing
a grinning Reno posed in a suit, tie, and fedora (which unfortunately hides his bushy
hair). While that sounds as if it may be a respectful photo of the man, his grin is given a
ghoulish tone upon reading the caption: “Milo Reno… tried to starve Sioux City.”76
With his oversized personality Reno proved to be an easy target for anti-radical
publications, but Lowell K. Dyson notes that “Reno came by his hell raising naturally,”
as his mother had been a Granger and he had grown up around rural protest movements.77
Time, however, clearly used his “emotional brand of reformism” against him in order to
depict a man who was slightly deranged and out of control. Darling shared a similarly
dim view of Reno, which is displayed in his only cartoon featuring the Farm Holiday
leader. In a cartoon titled “They’re All For You, Frank” (Figure A4) dated September 29,
1932, Darling anticipates a Roosevelt victory in the November election by showing FDR
standing beneath the “Political Nut Tree,” gathering up the likenesses of ten political
“nuts,” in which a dour Reno with his bushy hair and pinched, downturned mouth is
placed alongside a wild-eyed “Hooey” Long, a cantankerous Smith Wildman Brookhart
(Iowa’s controversial U.S. Senator), and seven other “political nuts” of the period.
Despite his chilly reception in the media Reno’s undeniable impact gained him
some consideration for Time’s Man of the Year honor for 1932. In the January 2, 1933,
issue that bestowed the honor upon newly-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Reno
76
“Stomach Strike”, Time, August 29, 1932, 13.
77
Dyson, 71.
46
is listed among the “flashes in the Man-of-the-Year pan” alongside another man seen as a
troublemaker in some quarters: Walter Waters, commander of the Bonus Army.78
Defying his “flash in the pan” categorization Reno remained in the news throughout
1933, which brought forth even more of Time’s name-calling, as the publication referred
to him in October as a “bad-weather bird,” a “wild-haired [and] bespectacled” strike
fomenter, and with reference to one of his former occupations as a “rampaging Des
Moines insurance man.”79 Even after Reno succumbed to a heart attack in 1936 the
publication could muster little better than a back-handed compliment as his obituary
described him simply as a “tireless, belligerent, Iowa farm strike leader.”80
Time also had few kind words to spare when describing the actions of striking
farmers. This attitude is clearly displayed in an article titled “Stomach Strike (Cont’d)” in
the September 5, 1932, edition of the magazine, which describes a clash between
roadside picketers and law enforcement officials near Council Bluffs, Iowa. “In Iowa last
week” the article begins, “a thousand shiftless, debt-ridden farmers, many of them with
no underwear beneath their ragged blue overalls, extended their strike for higher produce
prices.”81 That single sentence sparked a number of letters to the editor from outraged
readers who were determined to protect the image of Iowa farmers. F.B. Taylor of
Dickinson County, Iowa, wrote and asked, “Where on earth do you get the idea that Iowa
farmers are shiftless? They not only have shirts but generally keep them on… I have just
78
“Man of the Year: 1932”, Time January 2, 1933, 9.
In the 1920s Reno served as President of the Farmers’ Union Life Insurance Company and the Farmers’
Mutual Automobile Association. Descriptions of Reno taken from the following articles in Time: “Prairie
Fire”, October 30, 1933, 11; “Money to the Grass-Roots!”, November 6, 1933, 17; and “100 Percent
Failure”, November 13, 1933, 12.
79
80
“Milestones” Time, May 11, 1936, 64.
81
“Stomach Strike (Cont’d),” Time, September 5, 1932, 13.
47
traveled 300 miles in the state and have seen nothing in farmstead or roadside which by
any reasonable standard could be called shiftless.” Taylor was joined by A.D. Stephens of
Crookston, Minnesota, who criticized the magazine’s unfortunate terminology: “The
farmers you mention are not shiftless, simply unfortunate… I believe there will be found
less shiftlessness among farmers than in any other vocation.” The editors responded to
these letters with a note of clarification that minimized the involvement of established
Iowa farmers which undoubtedly made “Ding” Darling nod with approval: “Time did not
imply that all western farmers are shiftless, did say that many of the Iowa picketers were
such. Observers variously described the picketers as youngsters ‘just blowed in;’ as
former farm-owners reduced, because of debts to the class of farm laborers; as the
poorest class of farm tenants.”82
The articles in Time notwithstanding, criticism of the strikes remained fairly
muted through the fall of 1932, but a fresh round of violent incidents in rural Iowa
captured headlines in April 1933 and dealt a further blow to the reputation of Iowa
farmers. A group of Plymouth County farmers had been standing guard at the Ed
Durband farm near LeMars for several weeks due to an impending foreclosure sale. On
April 27 they sensed that officers of the court would be coming to evict Durband, who
had been labeled a delinquent tenant. The farmers sent out a call for help, and
approximately 100 men responded, some of whom had been involved in a scuffle with
authorities in neighboring O’Brien County earlier that morning while unsuccessfully
attempting to thwart another foreclosure. The men arrived at the Durband farm to find
that it was a false alarm, but they heard there was a foreclosure proceeding underway at
the county courthouse in LeMars, so they decided to attend.
82
“Letters: Shiftless Iowa Farmers,” Time, September 19, 1932, 4-5.
48
Their entry into the courtroom upset Judge Charles Bradley. He announced, “This
is my courtroom,” and ordered them to put out their cigarettes and remove their hats.
Reacting to what they perceived as disrespect, the men were “seized by a vengeful spirit
of mob anger,” rushed to the bench, and pulled Bradley from it.83 The farmers tossed the
judge into a truck and drove him outside of town. The Chicago Tribune reported on the
host of indignities visited upon Bradley by the angry farmers along that rural roadside:
They then had crowned him with a smeary hub cap from the truck. They
had wiped grease upon his face. Into the grease they had rubbed the black
dirt of Iowa, the good black dirt that makes the land that bears the
mortgages that have driven Iowa agriculturists to the desperate methods of
revolutionists. They had tied a handkerchief over his eyes. Next the
masked leader of the mob affixes the noose and had given Judge Bradley a
command. “Swear,” he said, “that you never will sign another foreclosure
action against an Iowa farm.” “I cannot swear that,” replied the judge.
The noose was tightened as the farmers removed his trousers and filled them with dirt. In
addition, according to some reports, he was even threatened with castration, but the judge
still firmly refused to accede to their demands. Next, according to the newspaper report,
“with his tin crown upon his head, and still blindfolded, Judge Bradley knelt in the
roadway next to the pole that might have been his gibbet, and prayed… Observers
reported that the simple prayer marked a change in the whole affair.”84 The farmers
clearly had not planned on following through with the lynching, so they released him at
the conclusion of his prayer. The fifty-four year old judge suffered minor injuries, but
soon made a full recovery.
The actions taken by these farmers were obviously shocking and freighted with
sexual and racial overtones that were not present in any other incidents in Iowa during
83
Shover, 118.
84
“Iowans Mob Judge on Bench,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 28, 1933, 1.
49
this period. As John L. Shover has written, “This was as much a lynch mob as any pack
of angry men that ever disturbed the peace of a southern town.”85 Lynching numbers had
been on the decline in America since the early 1920s, as there were a total of twentyeight nationwide in 1933, but Bradley was treated almost as if he were a Southern black
man who had whistled at a white woman. 86 The practice was typically used as a tool of
intimidation and punishment, while tarring and feathering was usually employed as a
method of public humiliation. The farmers’ actions at the end of the incident indicate that
the situation went much further than they had intended, but there is little doubt that they
intended to intimidate Judge Bradley into suspending foreclosures and to humiliate him
for the perceived disrespect he had shown toward them in the courtroom.
The sexual nature of some of the threats, however, can likely be explained by a
rumor that was uncovered by Shover during personal interviews with two of Bradley’s
contemporaries: W.C. Daniel, a local Farm Holiday leader, and Edward L. O’Connor,
Iowa’s attorney general in 1933. Each man revealed that there had been gossip that
Bradley, an unmarried man, was “living in sin,” which was likely an allusion to a
homosexual relationship. As Shover notes, the rumor’s veracity is less important than the
fact that the attacking farmers “believed it was true” and if a different judge had been in
the courtroom that day “it is doubtful the attempted lynching would have occurred.”87 In
the farmers’ view Bradley had transgressed the boundaries of acceptable conduct and had
85
Shover, 118.
86
Lynching statistics available at: The Charles Chessnut Digital Archive <http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/
classroom/lynching_table_year.html>. Accessed Apr. 15, 2014.
87
Shover, 118, 118n.
50
failed to live up to the expectations of a man in rural Iowa, so he was treated as if he were
someone further down the social or racial ladder.
The incident made news nationwide and was a front page story in every major
newspaper. On April 29, 1933, the Chicago Tribune ran a political cartoon by Carey Orr
on its front page depicting the harrowing scene (Figure A5). Orr, a noted cartoonist and
future Pulitzer Prize recipient, created an arresting panel with the caption, “The Farmer’s
Black I-owa”, as a commentary on the damage done by the farmers not only to the state’s
reputation, but also potentially to their hopes for receiving government relief. In the
lower left corner the cartoon is labeled “The Attack on Judge Bradley, 54 Years Old, By
Iowa Farm Mob,” and the backdrop features the roadside scene with the judge slumped to
his knees with a noose around his neck. The rope is being held by a large man wearing
overalls and a wide-brimmed hat, who is yelling, “Pray, D— You, Pray!” He is joined by
more than a dozen other jeering men who are dressed in farm clothes as they brandish
clubs and shake their fists toward the judge. A careworn middle-aged man stands in the
foreground, outside of the above scene, and his shirt is labeled “The Cause of the
American Farmer.” With his left hand he holds up a mirror, labeled “Public Opinion,”
while his right hand rests beneath his blackened right eye, labeled “Iowa,” as the
Chicagoan Orr presents the situation for what it was, rather than attempting to deflect
blame to outsiders.
“Ding” Darling’s front page cartoon for the Des Moines Register on the same day
similarly depicts a large group of glowering male vigilantes, but he shows countless
dozens of them spilling down the front steps of the “Court of Justice” and into the street
(Figure A6). These men are only partial sketches, little more than body outlines with
51
monstrous, angry expressions. Meanwhile the figure of Judge Bradley stands out because
Darling has heavily inked in his black robe. With a rope around his neck the judge is
being pulled and pushed down the steps of the “Court of Justice” by the angry mob. The
simple but awkwardly-worded caption above the cartoon reads, “In Iowa? -- Then Where
Not?” Unlike Orr’s image, there is nothing to mark the mob of men in Darling’s cartoon
as farmers. They look like angrier, somewhat less ethnic versions of the farmers in his
earlier cartoon depicting the roadside blockade. These men are brutes, ruled by hate, and
given his other work it is unlikely he had farmers in mind when sketching them.
The Judge Bradley incident was shocking, but perhaps could be explained away
as an anomaly because LeMars had developed a reputation as a hotbed of radicalism.
Time magazine described it as a “little fester of farm unrest” in part because “toughs”
from neighboring Sioux City frequently made the drive to LeMars and “mixed violence
with ‘striking.’”88 But the state of Iowa appeared to descend even further into chaos when
the very next day following the attack on Judge Bradley, approximately two hundred
“shouting and running” farmers formed a “flying wedge” and charged sheriff’s deputies
conducting a foreclosure sale on the Joe Shields farm near the town of Denison, located
seventy miles south of LeMars. “Sticks, fists, and brickbats flew” as the fighting “surged
back and forth on the farmyard between two big barns” and ultimately left twelve
deputies lying injured.89 The farmers successfully halted the sale, but it resumed the
following day when newly elected Iowa Governor Clyde L. Herring called out the
National Guard and placed both Plymouth and Crawford Counties under martial law in
response to the events near LeMars and Denison.
88
“At LeMars,” Time, May 8, 1933, 15.
89
“Sale halted as Mob Routs 31 Deputies,” Des Moines Register, April 29, 1933, 1.
52
Herring, who described the attack on Judge Bradley as the product of a “vicious
and criminal conspiracy” made many attempts to deflect blame from Iowa farmers. First
he cast Plymouth County Sheriff R.E. Rippey as a scapegoat, telling the Chicago
Tribune, “The difficulty in matters of this kind usually can be traced to local peace
officers… The trouble is that weak sisters haven’t the nerve to uphold the law. That’s the
trouble as far as Rippey is concerned.”90 He also disputed newspaper reports that farmers
had instigated any of that week’s violence and, without naming names, pointed the finger
of blame at the likes of Milo Reno and other protest leaders.91 He announced,
In times such as these, professional agitators sponsor first one
organization, and then another ostensibly for the purpose of helping those
in trouble, but whose real purpose is to collect an organization to serve
their own personal interests… We have suffered much in the past few
years from the activities of these parasites. Partly through persuasion, and
oftentimes through fear, they have induced good citizens to join with them
and this accounts for their apparent numerical strength.92
Herring was not alone in his suspicions, as the Communist Party was explicitly blamed
by Park A. Findley, the head of the State Bureau of Investigation. He stated,
Communistic propagandists have been making the best of their
opportunity in a section made fertile for discontent by drought,
grasshopper invasion, and depression… Many of the farmers are not
aware of the Red backing in the troubles, but it is there nevertheless.
There is very little spontaneity in the uprisings in western Iowa.93
Herring’s and Findley’s arguments, however, are directly contradicted by firstperson accounts by local observers of the events in Denison and LeMars. Andrew Bell,
the Crawford County Attorney, responded, “The farmers were Holiday sympathizers,
90
“Governor Assails Sheriff,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 29, 1933, 10.
91
“Iowa Troops Rule Farm Riot Areas; Mob Blocks a Sale,” New York Times, April 29, 1933, 1.
92
“Herring Ready to Keep Order,” Des Moines Register, April 30, 1933, 2L.
93
Des Moines Register, April 29, 1933, 1, 4.
53
organized to stop foreclosure sales all over this part of the country. If there has been any
activity by Communist agitators in this part of the state, I have not heard of it.”94
Furthermore a person on the scene during the Judge Bradley incident told the New York
Times that “many in the crowd were recognized as farmers from O’Brien, Primrose and
Sioux counties,” and this bystander was proven correct years later by historian Rodney D.
Karr, who discovered that fifty-nine of the sixty people implicated in the Bradley incident
either owned or worked on farms.95 Nevertheless expressions of shock and disbelief
poured in from all corners during the weeks and months following the violence, most
notably from Will Rogers, who played an Iowa farmer in that year’s hit film State Fair,
which will be discussed further in Chapter Three. Rogers passed through Des Moines on
a publicity tour and when asked about the farmer’s actions he opined, “They don’t sound
like honest-to-goodness Iowa farmers to me. They wouldn’t do that sort of thing.”96
“A cheerful and noticeable contrast”
The ugly events of April 1933 generated their share of negative publicity and
denials of farmer involvement, but they do seem to have made an impact in Washington,
where discussions had bogged down on a major New Deal farm bill that was largely the
brainchild of the Secretary of Agriculture, Iowa’s Henry A. Wallace. It was no
coincidence that just two weeks after the violence, on May 12, 1933, the Agricultural
Adjustment Act was enacted. Wallace’s biographers John C. Culver and John Hyde argue
94
Des Moines Register, April 29, 1933, 4.
“Iowa Troops Rule Farm Riot Areas; Mob Blocks a Sale,” New York Times, April 29, 1933, 1; and
Rodney D. Karr, “Farmer Rebels in Plymouth County, Iowa, 1932-1933,” Annals of Iowa, 47, no.7 (Winter
1985), 640. Furthermore my own unpublished research reveals that 21 of the 22 men charged in Crawford
County were either farm owners or farm workers.
95
96
“‘Not Farmers’ – Will,” Des Moines Register, April 30, 1933, 2.
54
that news out of LeMars and Denison “changed the dynamics of the farm debate”, and
historian Joseph Frazier Wall writes that it, “perhaps did more to place the agricultural
relief problem at the top of the New Deal’s agenda for action than had all the
conferences, programs, and platforms of the various farm and political organizations
combined.”97
Legislative action had long been a goal of the Farmers’ Holiday movement and
Morris Cope, a farmer from Plymouth County who was involved in the Judge Bradley
incident, remembered why he and others decided to take action: “Our troubles forced the
people in the East to look this far west to see what was happening. It all helped. I thought
it was good.”98 Farm strikes and protests became far less common in the wake of
government action, as most farmers waited for the programs to provide help. The New
York Times even noted this development in its July 2, 1933, issue, reporting, “Advancing
farm prices and a decline in foreclosures have routed the farmers’ holiday movement.
Just as suddenly as the association jumped into the limelight last fall and soon became
almost a national menace, it has suddenly dropped out of existence.”99
The organization’s demise, however, proved to be slightly exaggerated, as Milo
Reno and the Farmers’ Holiday Association leaped back into the headlines in the fall of
1933. Dissatisfaction over continued low commodity prices and the absence of a cost of
production provision in the farm bill fueled this final wave of discontent. Soon there were
again troubling headlines emanating from Iowa, as the front page of the November 7,
Joseph Frazier Wall, “The Iowa Farmer in Crisis, 1920-1936,” Annals of Iowa, 47, no.2 (Fall 1983), 126;
and John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace (New York: Norton,
2000), 118.
97
Cope quote taken from: George Mills, “Years of Shame, Days of Madness,” Des Moines Sunday
Register, February 18, 1979, Picture Magazine, 4.
98
99
“Farm Holiday Fades as Prices Advance,” New York Times, July 2, 1933, 8.
55
1933, New York Times, reported, “Farm Pickets Fire Iowa Rail Bridge, Shoot Into
Train.”100 Likewise Time detailed a spate of incidents in Iowa and Wisconsin:
A man driving a truckload of cattle into Sioux City was badly beaten.
Governor Herring called out militiamen to help patrol highways in the
western part of the state… Ten thousand pounds of milk were dumped
from the vats of a Milan [Wisconsin] cheese factory; more than 100 other
cheese factories and creameries closed voluntarily throughout the state.
Near Marshfield a farmer trying to sell a load of wood was brutally
clubbed. A picketer near Madison was shot and killed by a truck driver
running a blockade.101
Stories of this nature proliferated in the national press along with details of special
meetings between Midwestern governors and federal agricultural officials as they
attempted to find a solution to this renewed threat of rebellion. But as the month of
November wore on, some publications began interspersing their stories of the farm strike
with more positive news from corn husking contests that were being held in the wake of
harvest season.
Corn husking was a hugely popular sport in the Midwest from the 1920s until the
outbreak of World War II, experiencing an especially a rapid growth throughout the
Great Depression. In fact each year’s national finals were broadcast live from coast to
coast on NBC radio’s National Farm and Home Hour. Furthermore Time magazine
described it as “the fastest growing sporting spectacle in the world” declaring the crowd
of 160,000 people at the 1936 national championship to be the “second biggest ever
gathered at a sporting spectacle in the U.S.,” behind only that same year’s Indianapolis
500.102 The contests made a competition out of a common, and often grueling, farming
100
“Farm Pickets Fire Iowa Rail Bridge, Shoot Into Train,” New York Times, November 7, 1933, 1.
101
“Money to the Grass Roots!” Time, November 6, 1933, 17.
102
“Elmer’s Brother,” Time, November 23, 1936, 49.
56
task, as competitors began in their assigned portion of a cornfield and then raced against
each other to hand-pick ears of corn from their stalks, remove their husks (usually with a
steel hook or peg strapped to their wrists), and toss the cobs into a wagon. Speed was of
the essence, as the contest lasted only ninety minutes, but accuracy and efficiency also
mattered as huskers were penalized for any husks that were found in their wagons as well
as for leaving unpicked ears on their stalks.
The sport was the brainchild of Henry A. Wallace, who sponsored the first
husking contest after his friend Frank Faltonson, a retired farmer, complained to him
about hearing unbelievable stories about husking “records” being claimed by other
farmers in the region.103 Wallace, a man with a lifelong passion for scientific innovation,
at the time was editing Wallaces’ Farmer in Des Moines and wrote a column for his
October 27, 1922, issue announcing his intentions:
If the spirit of athletic contests could be applied to corn husking, it is
probable that we should soon become more efficient. Athletes tell us that
as soon as a man breaks a record in an athletic contest, all other men show
prompt improvement… we want to see the farmers of Iowa take a great
step forward in corn husking efficiency. They spend more time in husking
corn than in any other work on the farm, with the possible exception of
corn cultivation. In spite of this fact, improvements in corn husking have
come rather slowly.104
In the following years Wallaces’ Farmer featured a number of articles detailing various
husking techniques and equipment and debating the merits of each. Clearly the contest
had the intended effect because the first Iowa state champion, Louis Curley, husked
fifteen bushels per hour while Ivyl Carlson, the state champion in the final official contest
in 1941, husked thirty bushels an hour.
Leonard J. Jacobs, Battle of the Bangboards: The Complete Corn Huskers’ Digest of Contest Records –
Alleman to Tonica (Des Moines: Wallace-Homestead Book Co., 1975), xvii.
103
104
Henry A. Wallace, “Who is Iowa’s Champion Corn Husker?”, Wallaces’ Farmer, October 27, 1922, 4.
57
While the primary intention was to improve husking speed and efficiency the
contests had the secondary effect of becoming a popular attraction for spectators and a
source of positive publicity for Wallace’s magazine and the competing huskers. Wallace
had an inkling of the event’s impending popularity, and after the first contest he wrote,
“We hope to see the day when farm people will get as much enjoyment out of watching
corn huskers competing for a record as the people of the cities now get out of watching
track athletes in their efforts to do unusually well in running and jumping.”105 Soon ten
other states began holding their own state contests, with each state sending its top two
finishers to the national meet.106 The competitions were accepted alongside another
popular fall sport even though it lacked some of the colorful pageantry to be found on the
gridiron, as a Chicago Tribune editorial pointed out that the “somber clad huskers bear
only a remote resemblance to the gay blanketed football athletes.” Nevertheless the
editorial argues, “All of the elements of the one sport are found in the other. Strength,
speed, and courage are accouterments of the cornhusker as well as of the football player.
The same tenseness which characterizes a great football stadium crowd is found in the
crowd at the edge of the cornfield.”107 The spectators, who typically followed along with
the huskers as they worked their way through stands of corn, lavished attention on their
favorites, and oftentimes got in the way or trampled the corn before the competitors could
reach it. More frequently, though, the attention proved to be a boon for the competitors,
as the champions enjoyed perks similar to other sports heroes of the day, including
105
Quoted in Jacobs, xxii.
106
The other participating states were: Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The list of each state’s annual champions can be found in
Leonard J. Jacobs’s Battle of the Bangboards.
107
“Cornhusking as a Sport Rather than a Task,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 5, 1933, 14.
58
attention from women and lucrative endorsements for “everything from steak restaurants
to insurance policies.”108 Muscular 1936 champion Carl Carlson, however, wished there
were even greater perks, as he told a reporter, “I did $10,000 worth of work and all I got
was a gold cup and $100… I wish those Hollywood folks would make a picture about
husking and hire us as actors.”109
Time magazine’s three-page article about the 1936 National Corn Husking
Championship, at which Carlson captured the top prize, provides an instructive look at
the sport’s popularity. Meriting two pages of text, along with an additional full page
photo spread with eight images, the event is described as being “like a football game and
a county fair.” A high angle photo provides a sense of the contest’s large scale, as just
one of the expansive fields is shown stretching for many acres and is dotted by hundreds
if not thousands of spectators. The article also includes photos of a large marching band
performing on the ground (playing Sousa marches, according to the text) and of the
Midway, which is lined with various informational and food booths as well as farming
equipment on display. Most of the spectators shown in the images are men, but
particularly in the shot of the Midway, women and children are also prominent among the
crowd. Their thrilling day at the husking championships is captured in a single exhaustive
sentence providing a caption for Time’s photo page, cataloguing nearly everything that
could be seen and heard: “It is 25 parking lots, snorting tractors, blaring loud-speakers,
cider, freshly painted barns, pickpockets, bookmakers, state flags, 35¢ all-white-meat
108
Betty Fussell, The Story of Corn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 307.
109
“Elmer’s Brother,” Time, November 23, 1936, 51.
59
chicken dinners, tents, new overalls, lots of mud and fun.”110 The pickpockets and
bookmakers stand out as being apart from typical depictions of the rural Midwest, but
perhaps they would have been explained away as simply further examples of outsiders,
visiting the countryside and causing trouble.
Their presence, however, did not overshadow Carl Carlson and the other
champion huskers. Perhaps it was only natural given the social and political climate that
magazines and newspapers in 1933 would juxtapose the wholesome and heroic huskers
with “radical” and unpredictable farm strikers. Readers desired positive stories from the
Midwest and husking contests provided a welcome diversion from unsettling bad news,
and if the New York Times is to be believed the strikers themselves were more interested
in the husking contests than in their own crusade for fair prices, as a headline in its
November 5, 1933, issue read, “Pickets are Called Off and Revolt is Forgotten for CornHusking Contest.”111 Two weeks later reporter Roland M. Jones noted the “cheerful and
noticeable contrast” between the activities of the Farmers’ Holiday Movement and the
National Corn Husking Contest held near West Point, Nebraska. He wrote that the 40,000
spectators at that year’s event “constituted the greatest gathering of farm folk outside the
state fairs, and in all those crowds it would have been difficult for a farm striker to have
been turned up with a fine-tooth comb.” He also furthers the rhetorical strategy of “Ding”
Darling, Will Rogers, Clyde Herring, and others by deflecting blame for the strikes from
true Iowa farmers: “It is a fair presumption that these crowds were much more
110
“Elmer’s Brother,” Time, November 23, 1936, 51.
111
“Farm Strike Does as Governors Meet,” New York Times, November 5, 1933, E6.
60
representative of the real corn belt than the bridge-burning, milk-dumping, truck-halting
gangs of cocklebur farmers called into action by the holiday leaders.”112
Likewise Time noted the “grim, menacing contrast” between a group of picketers
near Thurston, Nebraska, who had been responsible for recent bridge burnings and the
spectators at the National Corn Husking Contest, just 25 miles away. “No football crowd
in the land,” the article begins, “could have been cheerier than the throng of farmers,
bundled in sheepskins and mackinaws who converged one morning last week… to see
the National Corn Husking Championship.” The writer conjures a scene of rural splendor
as he describes how the spectators “cheered and stomped lustily as, with pheasants
whirring up out of the sere corn rows and the yellow ears whacking against the
bangboards, husker Sherman Henriksen of Lancaster County, Nebraska, beat sixteen
competitors.”113 This was the welcoming pastoral scene that Americans craved during the
Great Depression, and it became much easier to believe in when the protest activity
dwindled and quickly disappeared from the front pages. A figurative sigh of relief could
have been heard as Time also reported that “checks from the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration were descending on the land in a gentle, pervasive rain, damping the
prairie fire of farmers’ anger.”114
112
“Radicalism Wanes in Corn Belt Area,” New York Times, November 19, 1933, E6.
113
“Millions of Bullfrogs,” Time, November 20, 1933, 16.
114
Ibid.
61
CHAPTER TWO
REVOLT AGAINST THE CITY:
RURAL IOWA IN ART AND LITERATURE
It is certain that the Depression era has stimulated us to a reevaluation of our
resources in both art and economics, and […] has awakened us to values which
were little known before the grand crash of 1929 and which are chiefly nonurban.
Grant Wood, “Revolt Against the City,” 1936
While worrisome stories about Iowa’s farm protests were appearing on the
nation’s front pages in 1932 and 1933, an altogether different view of the state could be
seen on the walls of art galleries and in the pages of widely read novels. There the
nostalgic impression of a simpler, happier Iowa was given power through words and
images that presented a lush land of plenty peopled with healthy, honest, hard-working
folks who were skeptical of big-city ways. These depictions of Iowa farm life emerged at
an opportune time to quell the anxiety of Americans who craved a sense of stability
during the harsh economic conditions of the Great Depression.115 Thanks largely to the
widespread appeal of the work by two native-born Iowans, painter Grant Wood and
novelist Phil Stong, rural Iowa became a cultural touchstone from coast to coast during
the early to mid 1930s. From a farm-themed charity ball thrown by New York high
society (complete with live barnyard animals and a corn husking contest) to a nationwide
search by Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg for a “Corn Fed Iowa Venus” to be his
Chris Rasmussen reached a similar conclusion in his article about Phil Stong’s career: “‘Mr. Stong’s
Dreamy Iowa’” in Iowa Heritage Illustrated, Winter 1998, 147.
115
62
next “It” girl, the rural Midwest loomed large in Americans’ consciousness during these
years.116
Despite all of this popular attention during the early years of the decade, which
included prestigious art prizes and lucrative book deals, a small coterie of critics refused
to let these pastoral charms overwhelm their sense of outrage over the apparent
whitewashing of the unpleasant realities in Depression era rural America. Their
arguments, however, fell largely on deaf ears as these outnumbered commentators were
little match for a myth-making machine that was presenting the rural Midwest as a
“haven of security” (to borrow a phrase from Grant Wood), which appealed to a broad
range of people in the disheartened nation.117 This consciously created “haven of
security” fit together neatly with other “symbols of national community” from that
period, which historian Gary Gerstle has identified as including, “Patriotic terms like
‘Americanism,’ New Deal icons like the Blue Eagle, and mass cultural images like Frank
Capra’s nostalgic cinematic rendition of the wholesome, virtuous character of small-town
life,” all of which “offered individual Americans security and a sense of belonging to a
greater whole in a time of deep distress.”118 Many of these symbols also presented
“whiteness,” in the words of Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, “as a sort of invisible norm,
the unraced center of a racialized world [... in which] white Americans stand as
unmarked, normative bodies and social selves, the standard against which all others are
“Park Av. Cows Moo as Society Dances,” New York Times, November 29, 1934, 40; and “Wanted—A
Corn Fed Iowa Venus,” Des Moines Register, December 10, 1933, 1X.
116
Wood’s phrase appears in his pamphlet Revolt Against the City reproduced in the endnotes of Thomas
Hoving, American Gothic: The Biography of Grant Wood’s American Masterpiece (New York:
Chamberlain Brothers, 2005),152. Revolt Against the City pamphlet originally published in Iowa City by
Clio Press in 1935.
117
118
Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 6.
63
judged (and found wanting).”119 Wood and Stong both outwardly fit comfortably into the
ethnic, racial, and class norms of the day, and their creations bolstered that impression,
but each of them was leading a complicated life that belied the outward serenity and
normativity of their fictionalized versions of Iowa.
“At last timid Iowa has dared to lift its eyes”
Prior to the onset of the Great Depression, Iowa was seldom in the national
spotlight. In fact precious few events garnering national headlines happened within the
state’s borders during the century between the Blackhawk War of 1832 and the rural
unrest of the 1930s. Iowa-born novelist Ruth Suckow summed up Iowa’s rather dull
reputation in a 1926 article observing that Iowa “seems […] the most undistinguished
place in the world.” She attributes this impression to the “lovely, open pastoral quality”
of the state which “smooth[s] down” its geographical and social differences “with a touch
of gentleness.”120 In a similar vein Iowa’s preeminent historian, Dorothy Schwieder, has
labeled the state “The Middle Land” because of its “homogeneous” population and
centralized location. She likens Iowa to the Midwest’s heart, “pulsating quietly, slowly,
and evenly, blending together the physical and social features of the entire region.”121
Quiet, slow, and undistinguished also can serve as a description of the state’s
contributions to national culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This
absence from the artistic scene is largely because the early settlers from Europe and the
Eastern states were too busy carving farms and villages out of the Midwestern prairies to
119
Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, Introduction to White Trash: Race and Class in America, Matt Wray
and Annalee Newitz, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.
120
Ruth Suckow. “Iowa” The American Mercury, September 1926, 39.
Dorothy Schwieder. “Iowa: The Middle Land” in Heartland: Comparative Histories of the Midwestern
States, edited by James H. Madison (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988), 278.
121
64
turn their attention elsewhere. Suckow points out that the period of settlement was
“frankly material in its nature” because migrating Americans “came to farm and to
acquire land,” not to “plant […] culture in the wilderness.”122 The state was rapidly
settled within approximately fifty years from 1833 to 1883, and a literary scene did not
blossom within the state’s borders until at least the 1890s.123 According to the 1938 WPA
guide to Iowa this attention to culture took place when “the pioneer period was slipping
out of memory, when industry and agriculture were well established and many towns had
grown up.”124 Realistic depictions of pioneer challenges and small town rural life were
written by Iowa-raised novelists such as Alice French, Hamlin Garland, and Herbert
Quick, in preceding decades and paved the way for Phil Stong, whose many novels about
rural Iowa were widely known and loved in the 1930s. Likewise art associations began
appearing in Iowa towns during the 1890s as interest in painting and sculpture followed a
similar trajectory as that of literature. “Ding” Darling was in his second decade as a
nationally recognized cartoonist, but not until Grant Wood developed his Regionalist
aesthetic in the early 1930s did any other artists from the state find success using “the
homely richness of the Iowa scene” for their subject matter.125
During this turn of the century period of cultural development within Iowa many
Americans held a generally favorable attitude toward the region because its booming
agricultural economy and central geographic location contributed to a sense of the
122
Suckow, 39.
123
Federal Writers Project, Iowa: A Guide to the Hawkeye State (New York: Viking Press, 1938), 131-2.
124
Ibid., 132
125
Ibid., 140.
65
Midwest as the “most American part of America.”126 The Midwest also became
associated with a long history of pastoralism which, according to noted scholar Leo
Marx, could be traced back to Thomas Jefferson’s idealized vision of America as a
republic of yeoman farmers, which the founding father set forth in his Notes on the State
of Virginia in 1785.127 Marx’s colleague Henry Nash Smith refers to this pastoral ideal as
the “myth of the garden” and he points out that even though “the garden was no longer a
garden” at the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of an “agricultural paradise […]
embod[ied] group memories of an earlier, a simpler and, it was believed, a happier state
of society.”128 Therefore despite America’s rapid industrialization in the decades
following the Civil War most Americans retained these positive ideas about rural life and
the notions became increasingly associated with Iowa because the state “virtually defined
the yeoman society.”129
Elaborating on the ideas of Marx and Smith, cultural geographer James R.
Shortridge notes that the positive thoughts about the Midwest included both a sentimental
attraction to a simpler way of life and a close association with the very core ideals of the
nation:
Prosperity was attributed not only to the richness of the land but also to the
industry of the people. Bountiful rural life fostered independence and selfreliance, and these traits in turn produced other characteristics of yeomen:
an egalitarian society […], a natural aristocracy in which any man might
rise to important leadership roles […], and social progress on a wide
126
James R. Shortridge, The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1989), 33-34.
127
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1964), 142.
128
Henry Nash Smith. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1950), 124.
129
Shortridge, 100.
66
variety of fronts. With no one beholden to any other person, true
democracy could flourish.130
Iowans could lay claim, at least in Shortridge’s formulation, to being the truest
Americans, but Ruth Suckow, writing in 1926, observed that inhabitants of the state grew
up with a “timid, fidgety, hesitant state of mind” because they “always felt themselves in
the nature of intellectual poor relations to the Eastern States.”131 However she notes with
pride that younger generations and newly arrived immigrants helped the state break out
of its shell, proclaiming, “at last timid Iowa has dared to lift its eyes even in the presence
of the East.”132
Suckow announced Iowa’s arrival on the national cultural scene just four years
prior to Grant Wood’s unveiling of American Gothic (1930), which is still the state’s
single most enduring artistic creation (Figure A7). This image of a plain young woman
and her stern pitchfork-wielding father standing in front of a small Gothic home has been
described by cultural historian Steven Biel as “America’s most famous painting.”133
Likewise art historian Wanda Corn has written extensively about how the canvas “has
been adopted by mass America as a national portrait, the homespun couple coming to
stand for the archetypal American family.”134 In fact as early as 1934 Time declared,
“The picture could have been painted nowhere outside the U.S.”135 Even today, some
130
Shortridge, 29.
131
Suckow, 39.
132
Suckow, 44.
Steven Biel. American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (New York: W.W. Norton
and Company, 2005). The quote appears in the book’s subtitle.
133
134
Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 134.
135
“U.S. Scene,” Time, December 24, 1934, color insert between pp. 24-27.
67
eighty years later, this “national portrait” is commonly parodied in political cartoons,
advertisements, films, television shows, and personal photographs, usually as a marker
for someone’s American-ness.136
Prior to his national breakthrough the thirty-eight year old, Cedar Rapids-based
Wood had achieved some artistic notoriety in his home state, receiving commissions for
murals and a large stained glass window while also winning art prizes at the Iowa State
Fair. But everything changed for him when American Gothic captured third prize and an
award of $300 at the Art Institute of Chicago’s 43rd annual exhibition of American
paintings in October of 1930. Art critic C.J. Bulliet, in a review of the exhibit in the
Chicago Evening Post, celebrates Wood for providing the highlight of the show:
In the midst of skilled workmanship (and the occasional exception), now
and then there is a flash of “inspiration” that makes the visitor glad to be
alive in Chicago in 1930, and the biggest “kick” of the show comes – not
out of New York or Woodstock or the effete east, nor even out of Al
Capone’s jazzed-up realm – but out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The painter is
Grant Wood, and he has two pictures, American Gothic and Stone City.137
In his description of American Gothic Bulliet writes, “The picture is worked out with
masterly technique – and yet remains quaint, humorous and AMERICAN.” He deems
Stone City (a landscape featuring Wood’s signature rounded hills) “a bit too intricate” in
comparison to American Gothic, but he appreciates how “it demonstrates that we don’t
have to paint American landscapes as Cezanne or Claude Monet painted the French fields
136
Both Wanda Corn and Steven Biel devote significant sections of their books to these parodies.
Furthermore the Gothic home that formed the backdrop for the painting still stands in Eldon, Iowa, and has
been turned into a tourist destination as the “American Gothic House” where visitors are supplied with
costumes and props so they can easily recreate the famous pose.
C.J. Bulliet. “American Normalcy Displayed in National Show” Chicago Evening Post, October 28,
1930, unknown page. Part of the Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection.
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/grantwood/id/1030/show/905/rec/1.
137
68
and hills.” In fact, he argues, it is Wood’s work with American motifs that marks his “big
contribution to the joy of the moment.”138
The Chicago exhibit was personally momentous to Wood because it was not only
the first award he had earned outside the state of Iowa, but the Art Institute’s subsequent
purchase of the painting also marked his first-ever sale to a museum.139 Shortly after its
prizewinning debut American Gothic began appearing in the rotogravure sections of
national newspapers, especially in the East and Midwest. Many Iowans were proud of
this home-state success story, but others reacted harshly to the painting. Objections were
raised over what some viewed as a negative caricature of their sober, old-fashioned ways,
a concern which may have been heightened after a spate of novels in the 1910s and 1920s
(most notably Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street) skewered life in rural and small town
America.140 Angry letters poured into the Art Institute and many were sent to Wood
himself at his studio in Cedar Rapids. Iowa farm wives seemed to be particularly upset
and Wood remembered in a 1933 interview that one of them telephoned to say she
wanted “to come over and smash my head.”141
Despite the negative reaction from some Iowans, the notoriety of American
Gothic resulted in a certain degree of national anticipation for Wood’s next works. He
responded during the next two years with a number of pieces; among those most relevant
to this study are Young Corn and Appraisal in 1931, the Fruits of Iowa murals and
Daughters of Revolution in 1932, while Dinner for Threshers and Death on the Ridge
138
Bulliet, unknown page.
139
Corn, 131.
Biel, 47-48, 70. It is worth noting that Wood contributed illustrations for a 1937 edition of Lewis’s Main
Street.
140
141
“An Iowa Secret” in Art Digest, October 1, 1933, 6.
69
Road, followed in 1934 and 1935, respectively. These works established two key aspects
of Wood’s style that would be present for the rest of his career: sly critiques of urban life
and lush, bountiful rural landscapes with his signature rounded trees and hills. His
depictions of rural people and scenes struck a chord in the art world and in 1934 Time
magazine dubbed him “the chief philosopher and greatest teacher of representational U.S.
art,” which came to be commonly known as the Regionalist movement.142 Wood’s
influence crested during the mid-1930s as he continued to exhibit his paintings across the
country; led a summer art colony in Stone City, Iowa; directed the federal Public Works
of Art Project in Iowa; began teaching at the University of Iowa; and with friend Frank
Luther Mott wrote “Revolt Against the City,” a manifesto on the need for a “growth of
nonurban and regional activity in the arts and letters.”143
These multiple duties, along with Wood’s visually pleasing rural-themed canvases
and jovial overall-wearing public persona, helped mask the very likely fact of his
homosexuality, which he was at great pains to keep hidden from the broader public.
“Even the most cursory investigation of Wood’s life,” writes R. Tripp Evans, “calls into
question its supposedly uncomplicated character.”144 In his recent controversial
biography, Evans cites multiple instances in the historical record of the artist’s close
acquaintances making not-so-subtle references to Wood’s sexuality. For example in
1930, the painter’s friend, MacKinlay Kantor, who went on to become a Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist two decades later, published a gossip column in a Des Moines
newspaper which suggestively observes, “Grant Wood is a bachelor… Pink of face and
142
“U.S. Scene”, Time, December 24, 1934, 25.
143
Grant Wood, “Revolt Against the City,” in Hoving, 158.
144
R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 4.
70
plump of figure, he was most nearly in character one night when he appeared at a
costume party dressed as an angel – wings, pink flannel nightie, pink toes, and even a
halo, supported by a stick thrusting up his back.”145
If this was Wood “most nearly in character,” it was very far indeed from the
character the public witnessed in his self-portraits and magazine appearances. Most
commonly he appeared in denim overalls, as he did in a photo laughing alongside fellow
artist John Steuart Curry for an important 1934 Time cover story about the Regionalist
movement.146 Rejecting artist’s smocks as too “arty,” the overalls were likely convenient
for painting, as well as conveying a sense of kinship with his rural Midwestern milieu,
but he originally began wearing them during a mid-1920s commission at a dairy
equipment plant in Cedar Rapids, which required him to spend time with the workers on
the shop floor. Evans surmises, “Wood’s uniform appears to have derived from […]
seemingly conflicting motives: the fear of being branded effeminate, combined with the
urge (however private) to mirror a desired ‘type’ in an artificial way.”147
Despite his public attempts to fit Midwestern expectations of a Caucasian male
(while transgressing those boundaries by dressing up for costume parties with friends or
as part of the Little Theatre group he started in his Cedar Rapids loft), rumors of his
sexual proclivities dogged him during the final years of his life while he was a member of
Quoted in Evans, 60. MacKinlay Kantor’s originally appeared in the Des Moines Tribune-Capital in
1930.
145
146
“U.S. Scene,” Time, December 24, 1934, 25.
147
Evans, 63.
71
the University of Iowa Art Department.148 A victim of intra-departmental jealousy and
politics, Wood wrote to the dean about “charges [which] indicate a deliberate campaign
to destroy my reputation as an artist and a teacher and to impugn my personal integrity.”
One of the chief perpetrators of those charges was the new chairman of the art
department, Lester Longman, who made a thinly veiled statement claiming, “Mr. Wood’s
personal persuasions [emphasis added] have nothing whatever to do with our granting
his leave of absence.” As art historian Joni L. Kinsey has discovered, the subject was
more specifically broached in notes from a 1941 meeting in the university president’s
office about a “comment [that] had been made on the ‘strange relationship between Mr.
Wood and his publicity agent [Park Rinard],’ the inference and intimation indicating that
Grant Wood was a homosexual.”149
The rumors of homosexuality seem to have been part of Longman’s overall
campaign to discredit Wood’s artistic contributions, which stemmed from the Ivy
League-educated Spanish medievalist’s plans to turn the University of Iowa into a
“model of progressive art education,” which had no place for Regionalist themes.150 At
the same time world events had allowed room for Longman and, later, another of Wood’s
colleagues, H.W. Janson, to cast Wood and his fellow regionalists as American Fascists
because of what was seen as their “dangerous and stifling” local worldview that
handicapped free expression. This position now seems rather ridiculous, but Wanda Corn
A controversy sparked by Sultry Night, Wood’s 1937 lithograph depicting a full frontal nude male
farmhand dumping a bucket of water over his head, also revealed a “visible (and dangerous) faultline in
the artist’s previously unassailable public image,” according to Evans, 244.
148
Quoted in Joni L. Kinsey, “Cultivating Iowa: An Introduction to Grant Wood,” in Grant Wood’s Studio:
Birthplace of American Gothic, ed. Jane C. Milosch (New York: Prestel Publishing, 2005), 29. Archival
information in this paragraph is taken from the Ed Green Collection in the Papers of Grant Wood,
University of Iowa Special Collections.
149
150
Kinsey, “Cultivating Iowa,” 27, 29.
72
notes that much of the art world began to draw “parallels between the regionalist’s
figurative art, his celebration of the common folk, and his anti-modern art views and
similar prejudices in the official state art of Nazi Germany,” even though Regionalist art
“was rooted in traditional democratic ideals, not those of modern totalitarianism.”151
Wood died of cancer in 1942 with his reputation in the art world on the decline,
but just two years earlier, Phil Stong, the other key national figure in creating popular
Iowa-themed cultural products in the 1930s, praised Wood in Hawkeyes, his 1940
“biography” of Iowa. Stong labeled Wood “one of the greatest painters who ever lived”
and posited that Wood’s “typically Iowan half-mocking and half-sympathetic treatments
are undeniable classics; something new and splendid among the world’s expressions.”152
In addition to appreciating Wood’s work, Stong undoubtedly felt a sense of kinship with
the artist because of their similar paths to fame. Both Stong and Wood were born in rural
Iowa in the 1890s (Stong near Keosauqua and Wood near Anamosa), both left Iowa as
young men to pursue their literary or artistic dreams (Stong decamped to New York City
while Wood went to Paris), both were in their thirties when they achieved national fame
for their representations of rural Iowa, and as it happens they both were leading much
more complicated lives than their artistic and literary creations would have audiences
believe.
Stong’s breakthrough occurred with his first published novel State Fair, which
was published in 1932, just two years after Wood debuted American Gothic. State Fair
follows the four members of the Frake family as they have a series of adventures at the
151
152
Corn, 58-59.
Phil Stong. Hawkeyes: A Biography of the State of Iowa (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1940),
42, 171. It is also worth noting that Wood’s painting Stone City (1930) was used to illustrate the jacket
cover of Hawkeyes.
73
Iowa State Fair after traveling from their farm near the fictional town of Brunswick,
which is closely based on the area near Stong’s boyhood home. Stong was working as a
journalist in New York at the time and had already attempted to write a number of novels
when his wife suggested that he write about his “native State's great harvest festival, the
Fair.”153 Years later in a letter to his occasional pen pal Cyril Clemens, the third cousin of
Mark Twain, he recalled his writing process once the idea took hold:
[W]hen I finished work at five I went home to East 55th St., had dinner,
stripped to my shorts – it was the season called summer which is
intolerable in New York – ordered a quart can of beer [from a nearby shop
called Billy’s which offered illicit beer with “well over 12% alcohol”],
with directions for a replacement at 10 o'clock, and went to work. […] The
boy then appeared with a quart, took fifty cents for the beer and a two-bit
tip, and took your reserve growler back to the shop. When he reappeared
at ten you gave him the original growler, emptied by then, and took his
filled one. The book ran about 1000 words to the quart or around 2000
words an evening. At a dollar and a half an evening this could have been
expensive, but it was a short book so it didn't come to much over $50.154
Stong’s reliance on alcohol (during Prohibition, no less), indicates a potential
drinking problem, which was in fact the case as he suffered from alcoholism for virtually
all of his adult life. In the fall of 1922 shortly after his graduation from college there was
already evidence of a problem, as in a letter to his old roommate he attributed his “good
health” to pipe-smoking “and also to the fact that I take a large hooker of liquor each
night before retiring and each morn on rising. When I can get the liquor.”155 His drinking
habit understandably caused a great deal of stress for those closest to him, based on the
153
Letter from Phil Stong to Cyril Clemens, February 23, 1956. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
154
Letter from Phil Stong to Cyril Clemens, February 23, 1956. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
155
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, November 3, 1922. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. Incidentally, a “hooker of liquor” typically meant two and one-half
ounces, but there is no telling how much Stong’s “large hooker” contained.
74
letters of his wife Virginia Swain to her friend Bertha Craver, as she frequently mentions
Stong’s drinking. In 1937 after an extended visit to Stong’s mother in Iowa, Swain
describes how her mother-in-law “was so horrified at Phil's behavior [“snoring all day on
the floor, and quarreling when he stopped snoring”] that she cried all winter, mostly on
my shoulder. Granting that she had something to cry about, she should have seen that I
have been in this mess for ten years.”156 A talented professional writer herself, three years
later she wrote to her friend and complained about Stong’s negative effect on her own
career: “It's not so easy to stick to your typewriter when your husband is reeling drunk
and determined to take the car out unless you can think of some device to keep him
interested at home.”157 Stong’s wistful, typically happy, stories about wise farmers
enjoying life on their bounteous farms obscure the unhealthy lifestyle he was leading and
the trouble he was causing for everyone else. In his own letters and novels he comes
across as a smart, humorous, moderately talented man who cared quite deeply about good
writing, but little did his readers know that the architect of their beloved fictional worlds
was battling a significant demon that did not square with his own portrayals of cleanliving rural Iowans.
His debut novel was warmly received by the public as it was serialized in a
number of prominent newspapers, appeared on bestseller lists in major cities including
New York and Chicago, and was a featured selection of the Literary Guild for the month
of May.158 Perhaps most impressively it was one of three novels nominated for the
156
Letter from Virginia Swain to Bertha Craver, March 26, 1937. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University
of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
157
Letter from Virginia Swain to Bertha Craver, November 6, 1940. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The
University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
158
Chris Rasmussen, “Mr. Stong’s Dreamy Iowa” in Iowa Heritage Illustrated, Winter 1998, 148.
75
inaugural Prix Femina Americain, an award created with the patronage of the French
ambassador Paul Claudel. The nominees, which also included 1919 by John dos Passos
and Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather, were selected by an all-female committee
presided over by Edna St. Vincent Millay.159 The cherry on top of Stong’s success in
1932 was a movie deal which resulted in an Academy Award-nominated film adaptation
of State Fair starring Will Rogers. It was a heady time for Stong, evidenced by a short
article in the Des Moines Register which estimated that in the first three months of the
novel’s release he had earned $45,000 from royalties and movie rights, which equates to
more than $500,000 today.160 He used a good portion of those earnings to buy back the
family farm near Keosauqua which had been established by his maternal grandfather in
1852 after his Grandpa Duffield had returned from a successful foray in California’s gold
fields. Stong later proudly wrote, “I, too, had dug some gold in California […]. My
digging was done in a movie studio, but it was just as strenuous as grandpa’s.”161
Seizing upon the success of State Fair and the public’s apparent interest in rural
tales Stong churned out several additional farm novels in quick succession: Stranger’s
Return in 1933, Village Tale in 1934, Farmer in the Dell in 1935 and Career in 1936.
These novels and seven more were set in the fictional region of “Pittsville,” a re-creation
of that part of southeastern Iowa near Keosauqua where Stong spent his formative years.
The most popular of these subsequent works was Stranger’s Return, the story of Louise
159
“Three Books Picked for the Prix Femina” in the New York Times, May 18, 1932, 19.
“Stong’s Return Put at $45,000” in Des Moines Register, August 8, 1932, 3. This short article also
included a criticism of Stong’s work that would become more common in later years, as Forrest Spaulding,
Des Moines’ city librarian was quoted as saying State Fair was simply “a second or third rate novel which
just got the breaks.” The estimate of 1945 income in today’s currency comes from the calculator at the
Measuring Worth website: www.measuringworth.com.
160
161
Phil Stong, “Christmas in Iowa,” Holiday, December 1952, 92.
76
Storr, a disgraced New York divorcee returning to the relative safety of her grandfather’s
farm in Iowa. Like State Fair the complete work was serialized in newspapers, received
generally positive literary reviews, and was also turned into a successful motion picture
in 1933. The New York Times celebrated Stong for bringing “a welcome quality to the
American novel of the soil” and predicted the book was “likely to meet with a wide and
enthusiastic response.”162
Reviewers, however, were less kind to much of Stong’s subsequent work,
criticizing his reliance on stock characters and settings. Paul Engle, Iowa’s most famous
native-born poet, added his voice to Stong’s detractors in a 1937 review of Buckskin
Breeches, a novel about Iowa’s frontier past, in which the “honest material” was
“overshadowed by the artificial,” especially its overabundance of “purple [and] abstract
language.”163 In a similar vein New York Times reviewer Louis Kronenberger voiced his
frustration that Stong was not properly using his gifts of observation and had become a
“slick[…] realist who, at the decisive moment, runs away from the truth.” Most damning
of all to Stong’s literary ambitions, Kronenberger correctly observed that Stong was
“heading dangerously toward mere popular success.”164 Stong was concerned that he was
being pigeonholed as a writer of pleasant rural pastorals and he yearned to branch out. In
an April 1934 letter to a friend he wrote:
J.D.A. [J. Donald Adams] “Phil Stong’s Rib-Tickling Iowa Comedy” in New York Times, July 9, 1933,
BR7.
162
Paul Engle, “The Gemutlich Frontier” in Saturday Review of Literature, April 17, 1937, 11. Buckskin
Breeches was actually Stong’s favorite among his own novels. He stated this more than once in his letters,
including one to Cyril Clemens dated June 20, 1938, found in the Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University
of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
163
Louis Kronenberger, “Phil Stong’s Village Tale and Other Recent Works of Fiction,” New York Times,
March 11, 1934, BR8.
164
77
Confidentially, I'm trying to get away from the pig and pickle and playboy
stuff and see what I can do on my merits. In other words, I'm trying to
write a book that will be sufficiently sound to make people forget that I
wrote “State Fair.” I'm not ashamed of the little story, but I'd hate to stand
on it. […] Please don't think that I'm going upstage or high hat or anything
of the sort. It's only that I feel that I've got to quit clowning pretty soon if
I'm ever going to quit clowning.165
Stong’s characterization of pastoral themes as “clowning” marks a clear
divergence from Grant Wood’s own thoughts set forth in “Revolt Against the City.” That
pamphlet espouses a break from a traditional reliance on European models in favor of
using one’s native surroundings as the source for art. Unlike Wood, Stong never returned
to live permanently in Iowa after his move to the East in 1925 and it seems that he had
acquired an Eastern prejudice toward rural settings and characters, believing them to be
too simple for serious literature. More than a decade later Stong had resigned himself to
the fact that he had failed in his desire to broaden his reputation. Writing to the Director
of Libraries at the University of Iowa, he lamented that State Fair “seems to be the only
novel of mine that anyone will remember.”166 From today’s perspective he was partially
correct because even though his name has been largely forgotten, State Fair retains some
cultural relevance because of the three film adaptations and the stage musical it
spawned.167 Grant Wood’s place in the culture is far more secure today, despite a long
period in which reputation was dragged through the mud, but during a short time in the
165
Letter from Phil Stong to Laurence Fairall, April 30, 1934. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
166
Letter from Phil Stong to Ralph Ellsworth, November 21, 1945. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University
of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
167
In addition to the 1933 film starring Will Rogers, there was a Rodgers and Hammerstein film musical
version in 1945 and a 1962 film musical re-make (set in Texas) starring Pat Boone. The stage musical
version premiered in St. Louis in 1969, starring Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, and the first Broadway
production occurred in 1996 with John Davidson in the starring role.
78
1930s both men rose to the heights of their professions by relying on similar artistic
themes of rural bounty, beauty, and wholesomeness that meshed perfectly with the
desires of an American populace looking for appealing alternatives to the stresses of life
during the Great Depression.
“The finest hog that ever was”
Grant Wood and Phil Stong were not the only artist and writer creating Iowathemed work in the 1930s, but they were undoubtedly the most popular nationally. Iowa
produced a number of fine artists during the decade, many of them acolytes for Wood’s
Regionalist philosophy, but few made waves in the American art world. Wood’s friend
Marvin Cone may have been the most accomplished, but Des Moines-born William C.
Palmer landed a one-man show in New York City in 1933. Palmer’s “apocalyptic”
landscapes such as Rough Pasture, met with a lukewarm response and were deemed
“melodramatic” by New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell, the same critic who
described Wood’s first New York show as “distinguished… delightful,” and the work of
“an artist of real power and originality.”168 Iowa fielded a more renowned collection of
fiction writers; chief among them was Ruth Suckow, whose massive 727-page novel The
Folks, published in 1934, received high praise from Time magazine, whose reviewer
hailed it as “a solid masterpiece” and “a better book than Main Street.”169 Most
Midwestern farm fiction of the period, however, was closer to the quality of Howard
Erickson’s 1933 novel about an Iowa immigrant titled Son of Earth, which the New York
Edward Alden Jewell, “W.C. Palmer in One-Man Show at the Midtown, Expresses the Mysticism of
Iowa,” New York Times, January 14, 1933, 11; and Jewell, “Grant Wood, Iowa Artist,” New York Times,
April 21, 1935, X9.
168
169
“Plain People,” Time, October 1, 1934, 62.
79
Times deemed as “pleasant, artless, sentimentally conceived [and…] lack[ing] the robust
gayety of State Fair.”170 Nevertheless as John T. Frederick, the leading literary historian
of Iowa, has pointed out, “The body of writing about Iowa farm life, in the 1930s and
early 1940s was very large, far exceeding the production of any preceding period.”171
Regardless of the quality or medium of these Iowa works, the majority of it
displays an interest in the physical landscape, and according to the 1938 Guide to the
Hawkeye State by the Federal Writers Project, the “real Iowa to the majority of
Americans” is the region of “fertile farmland, originally prairie” where one can see “corn
and wheat fields, the characteristic white houses, big red barns and tall silos; and at
regular intervals, grain elevators and church spires dominating the little towns.”172 These
are the very elements that are present to varying degrees in the major works of Wood and
Stong and they highlight two powerful themes: the land’s beauty and its bounty. Crops,
barns, silos, and fences, are all markers of the vital agricultural commodities being
produced in these places, but at the same time Wood and Stong also emphasized the
scenic aspects of the surrounding landscape.
Grant Wood acknowledged that not everyone would see the beauty in rural Iowa.
“I find it,” he wrote, “quite contrary to the prevailing eastern impression, not a drab
country inhabited by peasants, but a various, rich land abounding in painting material.”
Compared to more typically beautiful locations, he found Iowa landscapes to be “more
sincere and honest [and…] less obscured by ‘picturesque’ surface quality”173 Perhaps he
170
“Iowa Farm Life,” New York Times, April 16, 1933, BR7.
171
John T. Frederick, “The Farm in Iowa Fiction,” Palimpsest, March 1951, 136.
172
Federal Writers Project, 26.
173
Wood, Revolt Against the City, 152-3.
80
is articulating an idea that Leo Marx calls “the soft veil of nostalgia” which many
Americans attached to “the once dominant image of an undefiled, green republic, a quiet
land of forests, villages, and farms dedicated to the pursuit of happiness.”174 Accordingly
most of Wood’s landscapes are vividly green and depict a quiet land with apparently
content farmers going about their daily chores.
These traits are present in one of the best examples of Wood’s landscapes, Young
Corn (1931), an oil painting dominated by gently rolling green and brown hills marked
with fence posts and newly planted crops (Figure A8). The horizon line, broken only by a
handful of trees and a solitary windmill, appears only one-eighth of the way below the
top of the frame. This placement allows an immense land of green fields and pastures
outlined by full, rounded trees to warmly envelop three figures: a centrally placed farmer
working in a field and two children walking out to meet him. The natural scene also
dwarfs a cream-colored farmhouse positioned beside a dirt road on the right edge of the
frame. Just above the house the sliver of a red barn and a portion of another windmill
peek out from beyond a grove of trees. In the foreground lies the work’s titular young
corn just poking through a brown field which rises much like a woman’s breast before
plunging straight down to a line of green trees. Accordingly preeminent Grant Wood
scholar Wanda Corn likens his landscapes to a “gigantic reclining goddess,
anthropomorphizing the contours of fields and hills so that they look like rounded thighs,
bulging breasts, and pregnant bellies, all of them swelling and breathing with sexual
fullness.”175 Meanwhile art historian James M. Dennis notes that Wood “not only is
174
Marx, 6.
175
Corn, 90.
81
moved by the land but [he] moves with it, gliding over smooth hills […so] the observer is
invited to join in the exhilarating visual experience as an alternative to exploring distant
houses and barns.”176
Many of Phil Stong’s characters are similarly exhilarated and comforted by the
experience of looking out upon the Iowa landscapes by which they are surrounded.
Louise Storr, the New York-born protagonist of Stranger’s Return who is newly arrived
at Storrhaven, the southeastern Iowa farm of her grandfather, wakes on the first morning
in her new home to see “a bright, clean lawn; a stretch of varied fields; a road that ran to
places she did not know; a tangle of green trees and the broad river.”177 She tells her
grandfather, “This isn’t like the farmland I’ve been riding through [in other states…].
That seemed so desolate and flat. You’ve trees and hills here. […] The air’s so warm and
sweet and the moon’s so warm – you can’t somehow feel lonesome here, even though it’s
strange.”178 Even Abel Frake, the grounded pater familias of the quintessential Iowa farm
family in State Fair, retained the ability to be inspired by his natural surroundings. On the
nighttime trip home from the family’s eventful week at the State Fair in Des Moines, he
drives along the river road past small Iowa towns and realizes, “He liked the river. It
made him think of Indians, and the Church Tree – the great elm under which his
176
James M. Dennis, Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1975),
222.
177
Phil Stong, Stranger’s Return (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933), 25.
178
Stong, Stranger’s Return. 19.
82
grandfather had arranged the first religious services ever held in that part of Iowa – and of
things so old and enduring that they did not even disquiet his mortality.”179
In Abel’s mind the beauty of a place was enhanced – or even primarily influenced
by – the memories and family history associated with it. Likely because Stong grew up as
the son of a storekeeper rather than a farmer, his fiction rarely displays the same degree
of reverence for the land that Wood shows in his Regionalist paintings. Even so, Stong’s
nostalgic connection to his ancestral farm near Keosauqua was very real. In 1952, more
than twenty years after he had left Iowa to live on the East Coast, he wrote a reverential
magazine article about a Christmastime return visit to his home area in which he shows
appreciation for its beauty and history. “A crescent of red and green and yellow lights,”
he observes, is “spooning around the river bend, where a hundred years ago, the little
steamboats connecting the Mississippi with the center of Iowa would have been
discharging passengers.”180 This home acreage, called Linwood, was fictionalized as
Storrhaven in Stranger’s Return, and through the character of Grandpa Storr the author
attempts to channel the thoughts of his own Grandpa Duffield.181 In an early scene the
octogenarian grandfather character enjoys a view similar to Stong’s own two decades
later, one that could also have been the subject for a Grant Wood landscape as he peers
“down the sweep of lawn, across the cornfields at the bottom” before reminiscing to
Louise:
This where we’re standing, down to the river and over to the creek is the
old Storr place. Father settled that back in the ‘Thirties [1830s]. I can
179
Phil Stong, State Fair (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1996), 253-4. The novel was originally
published by the Century Company in 1932.
180
Phil Stong, “Christmas in Iowa,” Holiday, December 1952, 83.
181
Clarence A. Andrews, A Literary History of Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1972), 104.
83
remember the little Indian devils that played in that grove down there. A
squaw spanked me once. Jim – my brother – took up the hundred and sixty
north there – where you see the trees. He liked trees. It’s pretty good
pasture though. All the rest of it, west and southwest, I bought with money
I made in Nevada mining silver.182
Amidst these nostalgic passages about the land and its rustic beauty is an even
more prominent theme in Stong’s fiction: Iowa as a place of bounteous agricultural
products. In many respects State Fair is a coming of age tale for the Frake children,
nineteen year old Margy and eighteen year old Wayne, but the driving force of the plot is
Farmer Abel’s desire for his prize boar Blue Boy to earn the blue ribbon in the Fair’s
swine judging contest. Mirroring the main plot is a sub-plot involving Abel’s wife
Melissa, who is aiming for a blue ribbon of her own in the pickle judging contest. The
traditionally masculine world of livestock husbandry and the traditionally feminine world
of food preparation both play a part in Iowa’s reputation as one of the nation’s leading
food-producing states, and both were widely admired skills during the 1930s, a time of
scarcity for so many Americans.
According to data in the 1933 Yearbook of Agriculture released by the USDA,
Iowa’s reputation as the most important agricultural state was justified. During the hard
Depression years of 1931 and 1932 Iowa ranked as the nation’s leading state in the raw
production of hogs, corn, oats, and barley, and was second (behind Texas) in cattle.183
Hogs were an especially important Iowan product as the total weight of hogs shipped for
slaughter from Iowa was more than double the total of the next highest state (Nebraska).
Therefore it is fitting that aside from the Three Little Pigs, stars of the popular Walt
182
183
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 31-32.
United States Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture: 1933, Milton S. Eisenhower, ed.
(Washington: United States Government Printing Office), 1933, 606 (hogs), 432 (corn), 442 (oats), 450
(barley), and 590 (cattle).
84
Disney animated short released in 1933, the most famous literary farm animal of the
period was Blue Boy, Abel Frake’s prize Hampshire boar in State Fair. One book
reviewer noted, “Blue Boy becomes one of the solidest characters of recent fiction. You
are as much his partisan and as worried about what might happen to him as if he were the
leader of a beleaguered army approaching some Battle of the Marne.”184 The hog who
portrayed Blue Boy in the 1933 film adaptation was even the subject of an obituary in
Time magazine upon his untimely passing in 1934. Identified as the “star” of the film, he
died in Hollywood “of overeating and overgrooming” and was eulogized alongside ten
artists, politicians, and business leaders (all humans) who had also passed away that same
week.185
Abel trumpets the virtues of Blue Boy and Iowa’s preeminent status among hograising states numerous times in the pages of State Fair. He tells a fellow hog owner,
“Iowa’ll always raise better hogs than any State in the Union,” and in a private thought to
himself decides, “If Blue Boy proved to be the best Hampshire boar in Iowa, it followed
that he would be the best Hampshire boar in the world.”186 Abel’s dream becomes reality
when his hog is awarded the blue ribbon and the judge announces that Blue Boy is the
“Most remarkable boar I’ve seen in twelve years of judging and thirty-five years with
184
Arthur Ruhl, “Iowa, Old Style,” Saturday Review of Literature, May 7, 1932, 713.
“Milestones,” Time, January 29, 1934, 41. Blue Boy’s obituary was found to be in bad taste by at least
one reader, Rev. Alfred Gilberg of Helena, Montana, whose letter to the editor two weeks later asked,
“Where is your sense of propriety and decency?” The editors responded that they had previously honored
other “eminent beasts” such as Rin Tin Tin. “Letters: Swine,” Time, February 12, 1934, 6.
185
186
Stong, State Fair, 178 and 50.
85
hogs.” Abel is almost overcome by this affirmation of his farming abilities and jumps to a
logical conclusion exclaiming, “Oh, my Lord […], I own the finest hog that ever was.”187
The productive abilities of the Iowa farmer are also routinely celebrated in the
work of Grant Wood. His lush, rolling farm landscapes, such as Fall Plowing (1931),
have been described by Joni L. Kinsey as “bountiful and graceful” and depicting a
“voluptuous cornucopia.”188 These abundant fields provided fodder for a series of mural
panels by Grant Wood collectively titled Fruits of Iowa (1932) which make a clear case
for the state’s productive capabilities (Figures A9 and A10). The panels were originally
commissioned by Omaha-based hotel magnate Eugene C. Eppley, one of Wood’s earliest
benefactors. Originally installed in the coffee shop of the Hotel Montrose in Cedar
Rapids, the entire mural was moved to the Coe College Library in 1956 where it still
hangs.189 Four of the seven panels individually depict a farmer, his wife, his daughter,
and his son, all posing with animals or fresh vegetables against an empty bluish-gray
background. The other three panels feature a full basket of fruit, a farm landscape, and
the son milking a cow whose hindquarters are pointed squarely at the viewer. Much like
the Frakes, these family members constitute what was believed to be the average Iowa
farm family of the time. Wanda Corn argues that Wood took an anthropological approach
to the subject and portrayed the figures as “typical members of a particular cultural type”
who wore a “generalized ‘tribal’ dress” and engaged in “tasks typical of their age or
187
Stong, State Fair, 182.
188
Joni L. Kinsey, Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1996), 127.
189
The history of these panels is described on the Library Galleries page of the Coe College website:
<http://library.coe.edu/LibraryGalleries.html>.
86
gender.”190 For example the stocky farmer clad in denim overalls holds a bushel basket
overflowing with ripe ears of corn while two healthy young pigs stand beside his legs.
The farmer’s daughter wears a long, simple checkered dress and stands beside rows of
beets and onions while she holds a bowl of green beans in one hand and a head of lettuce
and a tomato in the other. The overwhelming impression one receives when looking at
the series collectively is one of profound abundance. James Dennis points out the “fecund
forms, ripe and robust” of every element in each panel: the family members are healthy,
the animals are well-fed, and the produce is ready to burst.191 Wanda Corn concurs
noting, “Plumpness is everywhere.”192
Iowa’s healthy plumpness did not merely exist in works of art and literature, but it
had some basis in fact with the story of Clista Millspaugh. A seventeen year old farm girl
from Mount Pleasant, Iowa, Millspaugh was judged to be “The Healthiest Girl in the
United States” at the 1934 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago, which earned
her a $250 cash prize.193 This honor came on the heels of being named the co-winner
(along with a girl from Missouri) of the National 4-H Health Contest in 1933. Described
as a “chunky youngster” in Time magazine and lauded by the Chicago Tribune for her
“white teeth, complexion that [is] rosy without the application of rouge or lipstick, and
sparkling eyes,” she could just as well have served as a model for the Farmer’s Daughter
panel of Grant Wood’s Fruits of Iowa series.194 In a short speech at the Fair reproduced
190
Corn, 94.
191
Dennis, 217.
192
Corn, 94.
193
“City and Farm Break Even in Health Contest,” Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1934, 4.
194
“Choose Winners in National 4-H Health Contest,” Chicago Tribune, December 6, 1933, 14.
87
in the pages of Time, she describes the healthy rural lifestyle that led to her awards: "I eat
all kinds of food we have on the farm and I get lots of work, play and sleep. I love to milk
cows, and pitch hay, and ride horses, and play baseball and basketball."195 Being named
America’s healthiest girl resulted in a great deal of media coverage, as she was featured
alongside the 1933 Miss America, Marion Bergeron, in a full page syndicated newspaper
article comparing their personal approaches to achieving beauty and good health. The
article’s conclusion is that “they’re both normal, likable American girls,” but Millspaugh
“gets up earlier in the morning, stays outdoors more, does more manual labor and worries
a whole lot less about what she eats than the beauty champion.”196
The article goes on to describe Millspaugh’s participation in the annual fall
threshing season, so she would have experienced many scenes similar to the one depicted
in Grant Wood’s large painting Dinner for Threshers (1934) (Figure A11). Featuring a
design based on a religious triptych from the Renaissance, Wood presents a cutaway view
of a kitchen, dining room, and farmhouse porch as a threshing dinner is served to a group
of fourteen hungry men by four farm women. Threshing refers to the process of
separating grain from its stalk, and it was a labor-intensive activity that usually required a
dozen or more hands (usually men) to bundle the grain and feed it through a steampowered threshing machine. Threshing collectives, or rings, often formed as groups of
neighboring farmers banded together to help each other during the busy late
summer/early fall threshing season. While the male threshers worked in the field,
women, also an integral part of the process, labored in the kitchen to prepare a large
195
“Healthiest,” Time, August 27, 1934, 30.
“Around the Clock with the Health and Beauty Champions,” The St. Petersburg (FL) Evening
Independent, August 2, 1934, 4. Accessed through Google News, April 20, 2014.
196
88
threshing meal for the hungry crew. Historian Mary Neth has argued that these large
undertakings were unique compared to other women’s work on the farm, pointing out
that these dinners “united the work of women to the male work of threshing, and […]
provided an arena where the women’s work skills were recognized. […] The rest of
women’s labor did not share this gender-integrated community status.”197 Meal time was
the highlight of the day for most workers, as former thresher Cecil E. Monson
remembered, “We would go run a bundle team all day in the heat and sun and never
complain at all just so we could eat the food.”198
Aside from a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes being carried into the dining room
by a young woman, none of the other food in Wood’s painting is actually visible save for
a slice of bread being held by the farmer at the far left end of the table. Otherwise the
plates are hidden behind the overall-wearing farmers sitting at the near side of the table.
A woman stands at the table serving food from an obscured bowl, one farmer’s head is
bent down seemingly in mid-bite, while another holds a coffee cup and eyes the fresh
helping of potatoes being brought into the room. On the far right side of the image two
women stand over a large cast-iron stove. One prepares to spoon some vegetables from a
pot into a small serving bowl while another with her back to the viewer tends to a larger
pot. A cat, enticed by the savory smells of a home-cooked meal sits on the floor of the
kitchen and watches the women at the stove. The scene is alive with food preparation and
serving activities while three more men stand outside waiting for a seat at the table. Even
though little food is visible, it is clearly present in large quantities. The farm, represented
197
Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in
the Midwest, 1900-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 155-156.
198
Hans Halberstadt, Threshers at Work (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1995), 22.
89
at the edges of the painting by a red barn, two draft horses, a hay wagon, and four
chickens, has provided sustenance for the hard-working folks who are now enjoying the
fruits of their labor.
A strikingly similar scene unfolds in the pages of Stranger’s Return when
threshing day arrives at Storrhaven and Louise and the two other female occupants,
Beatrice (Grandpa Storr’s niece by marriage) and Thelma (Grandpa’s stepdaughter), are
put in charge of feeding a dozen hungry threshers. Grandpa calls it “the annual cooking
Olympics” because just as a farmer like Abel Frake in State Fair may gain a sense of
worth from producing a prize hog, rural women competitively sought to cook the best
meal for the crew.199 At dawn on the morning of the feast Thelma and Beatrice prepare
the offerings, “roasting joints of meat, mixing dressing for the chickens, slicing cold
meats, making bowls of cole slaw, opening jars of pickles, jellies, preserved fruits, [and]
pouring pie contents into crusts which were already half baked.”200 Because this is her
first threshing dinner Louise is relegated to cleaning, setting the table, and serving.
During the meal the men good-naturedly give her a hard time, testing her patience by
asking her repeatedly to run back into the kitchen for additional helpings. She maintains
her composure and even calls one farmhand’s bluff when he continues asking for food
long after he had eaten his fill. In the end she wins the threshers’ admiration by standing
up for herself while also playing her expected role in this rural ritual. “She understood,”
199
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 128.
200
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 133.
90
Stong writes, “that this was an initiation; that these men were signifying that she was a
part of the community – a friend.”201
Melissa Frake, Abel’s wife in State Fair, also performs her expected food
preparation duties with aplomb. Throughout the novel she is usually either cooking or
cleaning up after a meal in every scene in which she appears, but she does so without
complaining. Melissa, however, is elevated far above the status of a typical household
drudge because of the long list of awards she has garnered for her cooking and canning.
For that year’s entry at the fair “she had concocted pickles of such intricate and
overwhelming delicacy that she hoped for another blue ribbon.” This hoped-for prize
(which she goes on to win) would join “a long row of yellow and red ribbons which she
had won for angel’s food, devil’s food and layer cake; cherry preserves […]; for chicken
dressing; for raised bread; for doughnuts. There were [also] two blue ribbons – one for
candied cherries and for a mincemeat.” Despite, or perhaps because of, this long prizewinning history, “she realized that pickles were a small matter as compared with Blue
Boy.” 202 This throwaway line indicates that in 1930s Iowa the rural countryside was still
unsurprisingly a man’s world and married women were expected to perform their
traditional role, which was vital, but of secondary importance.
The novel’s chauvinism would attract attention today, but it was not something
that appears to have concerned critics of the 1930s. Most of them enjoyed State Fair and
applauded Stong’s detailed rendering of his home state, as did the Time reviewer who
decided the novel’s “unusual native charm [..] is achieved less by literary magic than by
201
Stong, Stranger’s Return 140.
202
Stong, State Fair, 57-8.
91
[Stong’s] hometown knowledge of the farmer-philosopher civilization indigenous to
Iowa.”203 Louis Kronenberger summed up many happy responses by describing it as a
“gay novel of normal, healthy farm people, a novel with plenty of gusto and relish for life
in it which carries us through a State fair week at a fast pace.” He also noted, “Some
people will find in the novel two hours of welcome relief from the depression.”204 This
feeling of relief, however, is precisely the thing that most irked a different set of critics.
Robert Cantwell leveled the most spirited criticism, expressing confusion over how such
an “engagingly written” book could contain such “falsifications.” He continues, “We
normally expect writers who are willing to take the trouble to write well to write with
some respect for experience and observation.” Without stating it specifically he continues
by hinting at the same point as Kronenberger in regard to the novel’s escapism from the
Great Depression. “Mr. Stong’s dreamy Iowa,” he writes, “would seem an even more
appealing land if we did not have so much evidence indicating quite clearly that it does
not exist.”205
“A long way from breadlines and stock crashes”
Thomas Jefferson, as outlined previously, was a great champion of the small
independent landholder and he clearly expresses this view in a 1785 letter to John Jay in
which he writes, “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the
most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country
203
“Fair State,” Time, May 9, 1932, 56.
204
Louis Kronenberger, “The Brighter Side of Farm Life,” New York Times, May 8, 1932, BR6.
205
Robert Cantwell, “This Side of Paradise,” The New Republic, July 6, 1932, 215-216.
92
and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.”206 That same year he
published his Notes on the State of Virginia in which he expresses a corresponding
sentiment about late eighteenth century urban life. “The mobs of great cities,” he scoffs,
“add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the
human body.”207 This ideology has endured for generations and when the balance of
power has tipped too far away from rural interests during times of economic crisis, vocal
protests like those in early 1930s Iowa have erupted. The long history of distrust between
rural and urban interests has also become a popular theme in American art and literature.
Roy W. Meyer has identified the principal traits of the “farm novel” genre; one of the
most prominent being farmers’ hostility toward, and suspicion of, cities. He notes that
works of this genre commonly portray cities and towns as “the natural dwelling place of
evil, just as the country [is presented as] both the place of origin and the last refuge of
good.”208
Iowa undoubtedly acquired a reputation as a “last refuge” of sorts during the
1930s – and not only in farm novels. The imaginary, “dreamy Iowa” identified by Robert
Cantwell was a place where people could, as Louis Kronenberger suggests, mentally
escape and unburden themselves of their cares for a short time. The Iowa created by
Grant Wood and Phil Stong may not have physically existed, as Milo Reno and the
striking farmers of Crawford and Plymouth Counties knew all too well, but for a short
206
Thomas Jefferson Randolph, ed. The Letters of Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Jay, Aug. 23, 1785”
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. Query 19, “Manufactures.” 1785. On-line text
available at: <http://web.archive.org/web/20080914030942/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/
public/JefVirg.html>.
207
208
Roy W. Meyer, The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1965), 11.
93
time it did exist as a sort of Shangri-La in the cultural life of the nation. It is interesting to
note, however, that some people thought of it as a place where they could physically go
to escape their troubles. Among the most notable people to voice this sentiment was Janet
Allen Walker, the wife of New York City’s mayor, James J. “Jimmy” Walker. In August
of 1932 Mayor Walker was called before New York’s Seabury Commission to testify
about accepting large bribes from businessmen seeking political favors. Walker made a
final public appearance before boarding a train for Albany (where he was ultimately
forced to resign his office) and Time reported, “With the Mayor, as usual, when he is in a
tight place politically, was his plump little wife.” She announced, “My place is beside my
husband. If the worst comes, we can go to my Iowa farm.”209
Mrs. Walker’s real-life plan anticipated the plans of the fictional Louise Storr in
Stranger’s Return. Louise had separated from the “drunken newspaper man who had
married her,” but once the Great Depression hit, jobs in New York “got littler and littler
and finally there just weren’t any.” She tells Grandpa, “I could have held out, I guess, but
I’d never been back here and I was – tired.”210 Initially viewing Iowa as a way station
where she could collect herself before re-entering the larger world, Louise ultimately
discovers her true home. Grandpa notices this within days of Louise’s arrival and he tells
her, “This farm’s been bred into the family for three generations. Look at you. You’re a
farm girl – anybody can see it.”211 Midway through the novel Louise finally gives voice
“Susanna at Albany,” Time, August 22, 1932, 11. Former Mayor Walker never went to Iowa, he fled to
Europe to avoid prosecution, taking his longtime mistress Betty Compton with him. According to the
Milestones section of the March 20, 1933, Time, 36, Mrs. Walker later filed for divorce on the grounds of
“willful desertion.”
209
210
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 48, 31.
211
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 34.
94
to a similar sentiment, telling a local woman, “Somehow the old Storr place seems
natural to me; it seems like the place where I belong – home.”212 Later Grandpa tells
Louise, “[Storrhaven] is part of our minds and part of our bodies now. It’s grown into the
Storrs in four generations. Just as well talk of moving away from your two arms as
moving away from here. You’ll be here all your life. […] You were born back here a
hundred years ago.” Louise agrees, replying, “Yes, when I came back I thought that I was
returning.”213 This unique bond with the land is yet another aspect of the pastoral
tradition that Meyer has identified as part of the farm novel genre. In the case of Louise,
Stong is calling upon a “mystical concept of the essential unity of man with nature, a
unity spiritual as well as physical.”214
Within the pages of Stranger’s Return Stong also presents readers with Beatrice,
Grandpa’s niece by marriage, a character who is the polar opposite of Louise in every
way. The difference between the two becomes immediately apparent from their physical
descriptions. Louise is pretty with a “delicate” nose, “dark, waving hair”, and “long, dark,
humorous eyes.”215 Beatrice’s appearance, however, seems to lie somewhere on the
spectrum between that of an unfriendly schoolmarm and L. Frank Baum’s Wicked Witch
of the West. She is “tall, slender, and with a pallor which had not yet become quite
cadaverous.” Furthermore she speaks to Grandpa “as she would have spoken to a petulant
child, and extend[s] a lean hand toward him from the kitchen door.”216 Even though their
212
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 130.
213
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 159.
214
Meyer, 11.
215
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 18.
216
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 5.
95
varying appearance and attitude supply evidence enough, perhaps the most damning
difference between the two women is their degree of connection to the land. Whereas
Louise has been “bred” to inhabit Storrhaven, Grandpa dismisses Beatrice in the cruelest
way he knows: by identifying her as simply “some city woman” who married his
insurance salesman nephew. Never does she show any interest in the land, aside from as a
commodity she one day hoped to inherit, whereas Louise instantly felt connected to it.
217
One additional character from Stranger’s Return who figures into this discussion
is Mrs. Dengler, “a fat, elderly woman” with a “doughy face” who lives in town and
waddles when she walks. Beatrice considers her a friend and tells Louise that Mrs.
Dengler is “a leader in everything around here.”218 Beatrice soon enlists Mrs. Dengler in
a plot to smear Louise’s reputation and force her to move away (thereby maintaining
Beatrice’s supposed place in Grandpa’s will). Neighbor Guy Crane warns Louise and
tells her, “Old Lady Dengler would do it just for sheer deviltry, as the guardian of public
morals and everybody’s business.”219 As the area’s unofficial “guardian of public morals”
she kept a busy schedule, founding the local branch of the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union, organizing the Ladies’ Improvement Society, and serving as a
member of many other organizations including the Daughters of the American
Revolution. Mrs. Dengler would have been a force to be reckoned with, but luckily for
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 125. Fittingly, when Grandpa throws Beatrice off the farm on page 214, he
tells her to go “back to town.”
217
218
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 76-77.
219
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 145.
96
Louise the plot falls apart when Mrs. Dengler passes away unexpectedly but “peacefully”
in an outhouse.220
Grant Wood would surely have had a hearty laugh at the demise of poor Mrs.
Dengler if he read this novel because he had become embroiled in a public feud of sorts
with the Cedar Rapids chapter of the Daughters of the American Republic just five years
earlier. In 1927 he received a commission to design a stained glass window for the
Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids, and at the behest of the St. Louis-based
glass company with whom he was working, he spent a portion of the following year
overseeing the window’s production in Germany. When the local chapter of the D.A.R.
caught wind that German craftsman were putting together a stained glass window
depicting American soldiers, they “caused a ruckus” and delayed the official dedication
of the window until after Grant Wood’s death.221
This controversy likely spurred Wood to paint Daughters of Revolution (1932), a
portrait of three smug, elderly, city women standing in front of a print of Emmanuel
Leutze’s famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (Figure A12). Each of the
women has a slightly elongated neck that blends into her face in a cylindrical fashion.
The woman on the right of the frame leans her upper body at an awkward angle
somewhat reminiscent of a chicken while the tall woman in the middle daintily holds a
patterned teacup with her bony bird-like fingers. The color palette primarily consists of
dark browns, tans, and pale skin tones, as if to make an argument that the women are
faded relics of a bygone time. Wanda Corn argues that Wood was attempting to challenge
220
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 164-5.
221
Corn, 98, and Dennis, 67.
97
the D.A.R.’s “false claims to nobility” by creating a work in which the figures’ stiffness
is “played off against the gallant dynamism portrayed in the painting behind them.”222 As
one of Wood’s few depictions of city people the work can also be read in tandem with his
farm images as a challenge to false claims of urban superiority because these judgmental
women are neither productive nor wholesome like the farm family in the Fruits of Iowa
mural which was completed that same year.
Daughters of Revolution was Wood’s second major painting featuring urban
characters, the first was Appraisal (1931) which depicts a young farm woman and a
matronly city woman apparently negotiating the price of a chicken while standing in the
middle of a farmyard (Figure A13). The older woman from the city stands in profile at
the right of the frame exposing the viewer’s gaze to a thick double chin, which may have
reminded later viewers of Phil Stong’s Mrs. Dengler. Pulled low over her eyes is a
helmet-shaped brown cloth hat with a stickpin decorating its front. She wears large pearl
earrings and a heavy brown coat lined with grayish-tan fur while clutching a floralpatterned black purse under her left arm. Her eyes look downward at a brightly colored
chicken being held tenderly by a farm woman who appears to be in her thirties. The farm
woman wears a knitted cap, no jewelry, and a utilitarian green coat held together at the
neck with a safety pin. Her piercing eyes are focused on the city woman and her mouth is
held in a tight half-smile.
Clearly there are two appraisals happening: the city woman
has come to appraise the chicken (and the woman selling it to her) while the farm
woman’s appraisal focuses on the impending financial transaction with her guest who
222
Corn, 100.
98
appears, in Wanda Corn’s phrase, as a “creature from another planet.”223 Social class
differences, of course, are at the heart of this mutual appraisal, as the women can be seen
as representatives of the producing and consuming classes more generally. Furthermore
the original title of the painting was Clothes, which places a stricter focus on the
utilitarian versus the decorative apparel worn by each figure, as the farm woman wears a
hat for warmth and a pin to hold her coat together while the city woman wears a
fashionable hat adorned with an ornamental pin, leaving her earlobes exposed in the
presumably cold weather.224 Wood does not portray the city woman as harshly as the
D.A.R. members in his painting of the following year. He is not settling a score, instead
he seems to be posing a question about whether city and country, or upper middle and
working classes, can coexist in a mutually beneficial way. The tensions over
governmental intrusions into agriculture that led up to the Cedar County Cow War in the
fall of 1931 would have been percolating just one county away while he was working on
this painting, so whether or not that was a direct influence on his work Wood was at the
very least addressing a very real issue for many people in rural communities.
Phil Stong also addresses the question of compatibility between urban and rural
people by creating romantic entanglements for each of the Frake children in State Fair.
As the novel begins Wayne Frake is seeing Eleanor, his high school sweetheart, who has
recently begun attending Iowa State Teachers College in Cedar Falls. Margy is dating
Harry, a young local farmer who has imminent plans to ask for her hand in marriage.
Both young Frakes, however, find more worldly new lovers during their week at the Fair.
223
Corn, 80.
The painting’s original title is revealed by James M. Dennis, Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and
Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 78.
224
99
While playing a game on the midway Wayne meets Emily, the daughter of the fair’s
horse show manager, and is instantly smitten by her “gamine” beauty. She wears a white
beret over dark red curls and “had slipped a thin white sweater and a very short and tight
skirt over curves which were precociously rounded; incredible lengths of net-hosed leg
reached from the skirt’s edge to the top of her high-heeled slippers.”225 Wayne later
admits to her, “I’ve lived on a farm all my life and I’ve never seen anybody the least bit
like you.”226 Meanwhile during a roller coaster ride Margy encounters Pat Gilbert, a
“twenty-seven or eight” year old reporter for the Des Moines Register. He wears a light
gray tweed suit and has “a well-browned face and […] hair of platinum blond for which
any chorus-girl would have given her soul a dozen times over.” Margy romantically
imagines that he “had evidently been around the world hundreds of times, had tired of
wine, women, and song, and had taken up roller-coastering as an End in Life.”227
The Frake children each experience whirlwind romances during the week of the
Fair. Wayne and Emily dine in downtown restaurants, smoke cigarettes, go to the theatre,
bet on horse races, and ultimately end up in her hotel room. In that room Wayne
experiences his first taste of alcohol and watches Emily slip out of her kimono, a foreign
piece of clothing marking her as someone apart from Iowa’s buttoned-up conservatism.
Not wishing to be too explicit about what follows, Stong indicates that Emily’s exotic
sexuality induces Wayne to “[step] across the thin, infinite border between boyhood and
manhood.”228 Margy and Pat, meanwhile, spend most of their time exploring the Fair and
225
Stong, State Fair, 87.
226
Stong, State Fair, 104.
227
Stong, State Fair, 117.
228
Stong, State Fair, 239.
100
taking repeated rides on the roller coaster. They forge a deep emotional connection and
declare their love for one another even after Pat admits that he has acquired a deservedly
bad reputation for “running around” with a lot of women.229 Like Wayne, Margy also
seizes the opportunity to gain her first sexual experience as she willingly accompanies
Pat to his apartment from which they don’t emerge until “a long time afterward” with Pat
talking expectantly about marriage.230
Ultimately neither relationship can sustain itself past the end of the Fair and in the
novel’s epilogue Wayne and Margy find themselves back together with their original
country beaus Eleanor and Harry. The Frakes’ respective flings both come to an end
because the young woman in each relationship realizes that she would not be happy if she
crossed the dividing line between being a city person and a country person. Emily breaks
things off with Wayne telling him, “Can you imagine me living on your farm, Wayne,
milking cows and all that sort of thing? […] I don’t know anything about farms […]
except that what you would expect of your wife is something I couldn’t be.” Wayne
replies, “I hate to think of it being all over. But I was raised to run a farm – and you
weren’t – and we couldn’t ever reach middle ground.”231 Similarly Margy’s post-coital
break up with Pat occurs when he begins talking about the possibility of the two of them
living in New York one day. Margy replies:
229
Stong, State Fair, 210.
Stong, State Fair, 214. These “racy” passages were the cause of much criticism. For example Arthur
Ruhl wrote the following in “Iowa, Old Style,” Saturday Review of Literature, May 7, 1932, 713: “I find it
a little hard to fall in with all the implications of [Wayne and Margy’s] behavior at the Fair. The latter was,
to be sure, a tremendous adventure and release for the whole family; both youngsters had quarreled with
their semi-fiancés just before leaving the farm, both were in a twitter of adolescent nerves, and that they
should more or less dive off the deep end, once in the glittering maze of the corn belt kermess, is natural
enough. But that they should go the whole hog, so to say, seems to me not only inconsistent with their
character and environment […] but out of key with the gay, richly humorous tone of the whole story.”
230
231
Stong, State Fair, 236-8.
101
New York? How would I get along in New York? What would people
think of me? I don’t know any of the things they know […] Back in
Brunswick [Iowa], I’d be useful and people would like me. I could run a
house. I’d have children, four or five, and they’d grow up like me and live
to bring more land into the family.
When Pat asks if she still loves Harry she answers, “No. It’s just he loves me. […] And I
love – his kind of life. I’d be – somebody – back there. And he’d always love me. You’ll
get bored with me after a while.”232 Margy’s inferiority complex aside, Stong has
seemingly come to a similar conclusion as he did with his characters Louise and Beatrice
in Stranger’s Return: there are country folks and there are city slickers and each type
needs to settle into life in their designated sphere in order to achieve optimal comfort and
happiness. In Stong’s fictional universe each can get along in the others’ world for a short
time, but prospects are dismal for the forging of long-term connections.
The outlook for rural-urban coexistence is also dismal, and in fact deadly, in
Grant Wood’s 1935 painting Death on the Ridge Road (Figure A14). Described as
“Wood’s most sober assessment of modernity’s impact on country living,” the image
depicts three vehicles on a paved gray road that curves uphill along a green ridge from
the lower left toward the upper right of the frame. 233 Pointed toward the viewer at the
crest of the ridge is a large red truck taking up nearly the entire road. Rushing toward it is
a long black sedan careening dangerously over the center line as it has just passed a
slower moving dark blue Ford. The sedan and the truck appear to be just yards apart as
they speed toward an imminent crash. The painting is unique in that it marks the only
time Wood depicted a mechanized means of transportation, but the rest of the image
232
Stong, State Fair, 216-7.
233
Corn, 82.
102
contains other ominous elements that are also unusual in his work: barbed wire fences
mark the edges of green fields on each side of the road, a row of tall utility poles pierce
the sky as they follow the edge of the road, and a thunderstorm rages beneath dark clouds
in the upper right corner of the frame, casting an eerie darkness over the entire scene. The
natural balance and harmony of Wood’s other rural scenes is absent, as reminders of the
industrial age have intruded into his typical scenes of pastoral bliss. Anedith Nash has
written an insightful essay about this painting and she concludes that it:
[L]eaves us with a sense of Wood’s questions about the future. […] The
values of the urban way of life – the speed, the consuming needs of the
city – have penetrated the rural Midwest. There is tension and impending
disaster. Something about the promise of the machine and the progress of
modern life has gone wrong.234
The image can be seen as a commentary on the risky short-time thinking that had already
contributed to the ongoing Great Depression, but difficulties, of course, were ahead, for
Wood as he would soon run headlong into so-called progressive forces in the art world
that left his career and reputation damaged along a figurative rural roadway for decades
into the future.
Even though Wood still enjoyed widespread popularity at this time in the mid1930s, he was not without some critics. It seems not everyone was pleased by his choice
of themes or his promulgation of Iowa as a pleasant oasis untouched by the current
troubled times, as he absorbed some particularly heavy shots from critics for advancing
this myth. One of the most biting critiques came from his former protégé at the Stone
City Art Colony, Francis Robert White. He took a thinly veiled swipe at his one-time
mentor in a speech at the First American Artists’ Congress in 1936 when he attacked
Anedith Nash, “Death on the Ridge Road: Grant Wood and Modernization in the Midwest,” Prospects 8
(1983): 297.
234
103
Depression Era Iowa artists who are “prompted to make pseudo-romantic halos out of the
circumstances.”235 A more pointed and blistering critique was put forward by leftist critic
Stephen Alexander who wondered:
[W]hy Mr. Wood, who certainly knows about farming and the Middle
West, having lived there most of his life, should paint only rich,
prosperous farms, with spick-and-span new buildings, fat cattle, fine,
fertile crops, and peaceful and contented farmers… when we’ve been
reading so much these last several years about farm foreclosures, milk
strikes, pitched battles between farmers and state troopers, sheriffs’ sales,
etc. You’d think that if he were so concerned about truth, authenticity, and
honesty, he might have included some of these things in his pictures of
Iowa farm country and people.236
Finally, Lincoln Kirstein looked upon Wood’s work more favorably than did Alexander,
but he still posed a pertinent rhetorical question about the overall message of Wood’s
oeuvre: “Does he not corroborate the general wish-dream that after all everything is quite
all right?”237
The simple answer to Kirstein’s question is “yes,” even though that is an overly
simplistic view of Wood’s body of work. Wood’s primary goal was never to gain fame or
profit from whitewashing the harsh realities of the time, but in creating paintings that
reminded him of everything that was good about his childhood in Iowa he may have
become guilty of supporting the “wish-dream” of which Kirstein writes. But Wood was
also a canny artist with a puckish sense of humor, so his outwardly simplistic
presentation of rural Iowa may in fact have been an ironic running commentary on
Americans’ apparent desire for that very fare. “Since Wood spent much of the decade
Francis Robert White, “Revolt in the Country,” Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First
American Artists’ Congress, ed. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1986), 192.
235
236
Stephen Alexander, “White Haired Boy of the Crisis,” New Masses, May 7, 1935, 28.
237
Lincoln Kirstein, “An Iowa Memling,” Art Front, July 1935, 6.
104
creating biting satires of American myths and tongue-in-cheek portrayals of Midwestern
life,” writes Joni L. Kinsey, “it is likely that he was keenly aware of the complicated
implications of this work”238
There is no question that one reason for the popularity of Wood’s Iowa paintings
and Stong’s Iowa novels during the same period is that they reminded many people,
especially Caucasians, of a time in America’s past that was seemingly free from the
problems of modern life. Citizens living in the throes of a Depression found it easier to
convince themselves that previous times were simpler, and therefore better. Wood and
Stong tapped into these memories (real and imagined) by typically showing that modern
problems could and would be kept at bay. Their creations likely contained an element of
hopefulness for the two that they could eventually gain freedom from the demon of drink,
in Stong’s case, or the need to closet his sexuality, in Wood’s, but in so doing they helped
preserve Iowa as a safe place for lovers of art, fiction, and film. As Louise Storr remarks
in Stranger’s Return, “It seems a long way from breadlines and stock crashes and
bootleggers’ wars.”239 She is referring to Grandpa’s farm, Storrhaven, but she could just
as well have been speaking about the fictional Iowa that was created for mass American
consumption during the early to middle years of the Depression.
238
Kinsey, Plain Pictures, 139.
239
Stong, Stranger’s Return, 62.
105
CHAPTER THREE
A BEAUTIFUL LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE:
IOWA “FARM PICTURES” IN HOLLYWOOD
The Corn Belt Comes to the Star Belt for Laughs and Heart-Aches
A Laughing Epic of Home-Spun People Uprooted from Their Native Soil and
Transported to Hollywood’s Wonderland
An Enchanting Story of Home-Spun People in a Silk and Satin Land
Ad copy ideas for the 1936 film
Farmer in the Dell240
Phil Stong’s 1936 novel The Farmer in the Dell includes a scene in which Kelly
Callahan, president of the fictional film studio Masterart Pictures, has convened a
meeting with his leading advisors. They are there to decide how to best feature one of
their little-used contract players, Magda Gratz, an actress who had grown up on a farm in
eastern Europe. The winning suggestion is to “get a script about a poor immigrant girl
among the homespuns of Iowa, naturalizing herself, making her place in the community,
and so on.” With the inclusion of a “wholesome” leading man and “all the dirt baloney,”
Callahan recognizes the makings of a hit and confidently tells his secretary, “We might
just be able to put it over.”241 The scene is fictional, but it provides a hint at the actual
popularity Iowa films enjoyed within film studios and among audiences for a short time
in the early to mid-1930s. The idea of Iowa as a simple but beautiful and welcoming
utopia was not only disseminated through Stong’s fiction and Grant Wood’s art, but also
through a series of Hollywood films based on Stong’s books, beginning with State Fair
240
Howard S. Benedict. Farmer in the Dell Publicity Booklet, RKO Pictures, 1936, 20-21. Margaret
Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.
241
Phil Stong, The Farmer in the Dell (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 148-151.
106
in 1933 and continuing later that same year with Stranger's Return. Those two were the
most successful, but three more followed: Village Tale in 1935, The Farmer in the Dell in
1936, and Career in 1939.242 The popularity of State Fair in particular spawned a brief
flowering of the farm film genre as its success prompted film executives to search for
more rural-themed scripts to satisfy audiences' apparent desire for comforting homespun
entertainment.
A close look at these rural films set in Iowa reveals that they share seven qualities
that can be regarded as the essential traits of Midwestern farm pictures during this
period.243 First, the films open with a series of establishing shots of fields, large white
farmhouses, barns, and domesticated animals, which firmly place the setting in the
American heartland. Second is a demonstrated affection by the rural characters for old,
familiar things such as treasured possessions or personal habits and beliefs. Third,
common rural practices and pastimes (such as livestock judging contests, threshing
dinners, and square dances) are frequently the settings for key scenes. Fourth, there is
always a practical rural patriarch character, played by a venerable actor like Will Rogers
or Lionel Barrymore, who dispenses rustic wisdom and displays a strong moral character.
Fifth, the primary antagonists are typically women who have either been born in a city or
have adopted urban values (typically greed or sexual licentiousness) which clash with the
morals of the family patriarch. At the same time the women who are lionized are those
who love rural life and happily fulfill their roles as supportive homemakers. Sixth,
242
Village Tale, however, explores some darker elements of small-town Iowa life as the townspeople
engage in vicious gossip about a possible love triangle.
This list of essential farm traits is informed by Roy W. Meyer’s list of “conditions” that define a farm
novel, as set forth in his book, The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 7-12.
243
107
dialogue and situations encourage a belief that some characters, both male and female,
are “naturals” who have an almost mystical connection with the land and are unable to
achieve happiness anywhere else. Finally, the seventh trait is a portrayal of all farmers as
non-ethnic Caucasians occupying the same social position. Not a single one of the
protagonists or their neighbors ever speaks with an accent or has an “ethnic” name, as the
films present the Frakes, Storrs, and Boyers along with their neighbors who have
surnames such as Ware, Crane, and Davenport. Furthermore none of the rural characters
is better or worse off financially than the others, as no one is a tenant farmer or
overextended on their credit, as was the case for so many actual farmers of the time. Only
when the characters visit a city or town do they encounter characters of a different
(higher) class or a recognizable ethnicity (such as a French maid or a fake Russian
nobleman).
These traits contributed to the comforting effect that farm pictures had on wide
audiences, who undoubtedly appreciated not only the humorous situations, but also the
celebration of what Americanist Michael Steiner has described in another context as “the
primal, basic America.” This imagined America, similar to the world of most of the farm
films, was often patriarchal and ethnically uniform, and as Steiner has argued, provided
“memories that could bring a sense of order and certainty to a tumultuous present.”244
The sense of order and certainty felt by 1930s movie-goers, however, only placed a
temporary veil over the economic difficulties that often remained when they returned
from the theater. Likewise many of the film studios, directors, and movie stars involved
in producing these comforting films were also experiencing tumultuous times in their
Michael Steiner, “Regionalism in the Great Depression,” Geographical Review 73, no. 4 (October
1983): 432.
244
108
personal lives or careers, so while the films were celebrating the pastoral myth, they were
obscuring the more difficult reality that often existed behind and beyond the screen.
“We're from I-O-way, I-O-way / State of all the land”
Andrew Bergman, an expert on 1930s films, has identified an “agrarian drive” in
Hollywood during the Depression years and noted that in the eyes of filmmakers, “The
country was still Arcadia – an idyll, a way to escape the city and find oneself apart from
all those shysters.”245 Iowa was well-suited to be the setting for this Arcadia because, as
Marty Knepper and John S. Lawrence have pointed out, “while some films present a
depressing view of life in the heartland, the prevailing, persistent image in the most
popular Iowa films is of an old-fashioned, rural landscape where people experience core
American values such as patriotism, romance, family and community connections, and a
love of the land.”246 In many ways Iowa was the perfect setting at the right time and Phil
Stong’s lighthearted stories were exactly the tonic many moviegoers craved to take their
minds off the hard times.
Even though rural Iowa achieved its greatest popularity among film executives
and moviegoers immediately following the success of State Fair in 1933, the state had
previously been used as a primary setting for at least four silent films: The Strange
Woman in 1918, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford in 1921, Watch Your Step in 1922, and
That French Lady (a remake of The Strange Woman) in 1924.247 Each of these films
Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (New York: New York
University Press, 1971), 71-2
245
Marty S. Knepper and John S. Lawrence, “Iowa Films 1918-2002,” Annals of Iowa 62, no. 1 (Winter
2003): 30-1.
246
247
This information comes from a comprehensive study of Iowa films by Marty Knepper and John S.
Lawrence, “Iowa Films 1918-2002,” Annals of Iowa 62, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 30-100.
109
features a plot in which circumstances bring an outsider (be it a Frenchwoman, a conman, or a man running from the law) to Iowa, and in every case the protagonists’ troubles
are lifted, prompting them to stay and build happier lives. These films were just a few of
the many silent pictures with rural settings released during the 1910s and 1920s, a period
of rapid urbanization and industrialization. Cultural historian Hal Barron has argued that
such films “were instrumental in establishing new understandings of the countryside for a
modern, urban nation [experiencing] vexing social changes.” In his study of rural silent
films he writes:
Urbanites, one step removed from the countryside, found reassurance that
the admirable traits they had learned on the farm would not be 'defeated by
the city' […], and they relished the visual images of home that the silver
screen provided. Their country cousins, in turn, appreciated the
validation of their lives and values in rural films precisely because they
were being challenged and eclipsed by larger social and cultural
changes.248
Despite the many positive portrayals of rural life on the silent screen that satisfied
all audiences, there were also numerous films, especially during the 1920s, which called
Midwestern small town life into question. These films were largely inspired by the
publication of Sinclair Lewis's 1920 novel Main Street, which according to cultural
geographer James Shortridge, “exposed cultural flaws that the public knew were there but
had not wanted to admit.”249 Chief among these flaws, at least in the minds of silent
filmmakers, was a lack of cultural, educational, and economic opportunity, and in at least
four films this problem drives Iowa-born characters to flee their home state for a big city
(usually New York). Stardust (1921), Night Life of New York (1925), A Slave of Fashion
Hal Barron, “Rural America on the Silent Screen,” Agricultural History 80, no. 4 (Autumn 2006), 384385.
248
249
Shortridge, 42.
110
(1925), and High Society Blues (1930), all portray an Iowan (or family of Iowans) who
journey to New York City to either pursue their dreams (which are unattainable in Iowa)
or simply escape a life of boredom.250 Even though these films typically offered a critique
of small town dwellers rather than farmers, the broader implication was that the Midwest
had fallen behind other, more vibrant, regions of the United States, and in Barron's
words, as “agrarian society became associated primarily with one's childhood or the
nation's past […] it became easier for Americans to make the break culturally from the
countryside.”251
The onset of the Great Depression, however, brought about a reassessment of this
cultural break and many Americans wondered whether we had moved too quickly away
from the agrarian values that had become increasingly associated with the Midwest.
Shortridge observes that despite Depression hardships the Midwest “was once again
feeling good about itself” as its farms and small towns were “seen as havens for body and
soul.”252 Accordingly, Iowa-set films of the 1930s returned to the positive rural themes of
the earliest Iowa silents, particularly in King Vidor's The Stranger's Return, which has a
plot that reverses those of the 1920s films and mimics those from the 1910s, as a
struggling young woman from New York City journeys to her grandfather's farm in Iowa
and finally finds her true place in the world, remarking, “When I came here I thought… I
was returning to where I belonged.”253 The Stranger's Return is just one example of the
Knepper and Lawrence, “Iowa Films: 1918-2002”; and the AFI Catalog of Feature Films.
<http://afi.com/members/catalog/ >. November 17, 2013.
250
251
Barron, 385.
252
Shortridge, 59.
Stranger’s Return. Directed by King Vidor, 1933, Los Angeles: MGM. Film. UCLA Film and
Television Archive, Los Angeles, California.
253
111
“folksy comedy” genre dominated by the MGM and Fox studios that, according to film
historian Tino Balio, became the “popular favorite during the early thirties.”254 Balio
estimates that one quarter of all films made during this period could be categorized as
comedies, and likewise Anthony Harkins, in his cultural history of the hillbilly character,
observes that the wide circulation of comedic entertainment during this period “suggests
just how much Depression-era Americans relied on humor, particularly forms that
celebrated the simple ways and values of the common people, to cope with the economic
crisis.”255
The psychological needs of the film-going public along with Iowa's enduring
“middleness” (to use Dorothy Schwieder’s description) were the primary factors behind
the popularity of folksy Midwestern comedies during this period, but an overlooked
reason that Iowa captured the attention of filmmakers in the early decades of the
twentieth century is that thousands of real-life Iowans had been moving to southern
California ever since the turn of the century. In fact so many transplanted Midwesterners
settled in and around Long Beach that the city was nicknamed “Iowa by the Sea,” and it
played host to an annual “Iowa Picnic,” which attracted numerous dignitaries, including
future President Herbert Hoover in 1928, and upwards of 100,000 guests by the 1930s.256
According to Long Beach newspaperman Tim Grobaty, these “huge waves of Hawkeyes”
were primarily retirees “who were giving up the family farm for a forgiving climate in
254
Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 258.
255
Balio, 256; and Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 156-7.
Vickey Kall, “Iowa Picnics – Long Beach – and Elsewhere,” History, Los Angeles County (blog),
August 26, 2010. <http://historylosangeles.blogspot.com/2010/08/iowa-picnics-long-beach-andelsewhere.html>.
256
112
the sunshine of a beach town.”257 California historian Kevin Starr notes that the state was
also attractive to these newcomers because its vast agricultural areas somewhat
resembled the Midwest, while its nearby mountains and seacoast trumped the “monotony
[…and] anxiety brought about by endless empty space.”258
The first Iowa Picnic was held in Pasadena in 1900, and one of the attendees,
native Iowan C.H. Parsons, later remembered that “a singular excitement was in the air”
as he heard “the steady oncoming tread of the dauntless Iowans.”259 Within a decade he
had formed the Federation of State Societies, which helped newcomers to California from
every state, although the Iowa Society was the largest and most influential. Famed
journalist Carey McWilliams noted that Parsons had a “great flair for organization” with
which he molded the Iowa Society into a “thing of beauty and an object of wonder.”260
He was largely responsible for designing the logistics of the picnic, devising a funding
scheme, and publicizing the event. He was so successful that attendance jumped from
3,000 in 1900 to 6,000 the next year, to 12,000, then 18,000, and onward toward 100,000.
McWilliams reports that Parsons was proud that the meeting had grown to such an extent
that “there was no hall in all Southern California large enough to house the Iowans.”261
With so many people in attendance the picnics garnered regular attention from
major newspapers including the likes of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times,
257
Tim Grobaty, Long Beach Chronicles: From Pioneers to the 1933 Earthquake (Charleston, SC: History
Press, 2012), 110.
258
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1973), 416.
259
Quoted in Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City: Gibbs
Smith, 1946). 167.
260
McWilliams, 168.
261
McWilliams, 167, 169.
113
the latter of which published detailed descriptions of each celebration’s guests, activities,
and weather. Also, beginning in the 1920s two annual picnics were held: a winter picnic
in Los Angeles’s Lincoln Park and a summer picnic in Long Beach’s Bixby Park, with an
approximate attendance of 100,000 guests at each. A prime example of the major
newspaper coverage of these get-togethers is a front page article from the February 24,
1935, edition of the Los Angeles Times, which describes the event as “the world's largest
picnic” due to the “more than 100,000 persons” who gathered to celebrate in Lincoln
Park.262
Accompanying the front page article is a large photograph from the picnic
showing California governor Frank Merriam shaking hands with a well-dressed woman
as other former Iowans await their turn to greet him. Merriam was a frequent guest of
honor at these picnics, as he himself was a former Iowan and one-time president of the
Iowa Society. Merriam was born in Hopkinton, a small town in eastern Iowa, and began
his political career there in 1896 when he was elected to the Iowa House of
Representatives. He later served a term as state auditor before moving to California in
1910, where he was elected as the state representative for the Long Beach area in 1916,
thus beginning his rise in California politics which culminated in holding the
governorship from 1934 to 1939. According to California historian Kevin Starr, as
governor, Republican Merriam “had shown himself as a solid, stolid, accommodating
servant of the boyars [or, aristocracy],” and he was frequently derided by Democratic
opponents such as Upton Sinclair and George Creel who both labeled him a
262
“Thousands Crowd Park at Huge Iowa Picnic,” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1935, 1.
114
reactionary.263 At the Iowa Picnics, however, Merriam was with friends, and in 1935 he
curried further favor when he announced his continued devotion to his home state,
declaring that “Iowa was the greatest state in the Union in which to be born and reared.”
He also credited the assembled throng for their role in improving the Golden State and
cautioned them that the Depression posed a continuing threat to their standard of living:
California has built herself into a unique civilization, chiefly through the
efforts of the middle westerners who flocked here from their own secure
homes. This brave immigration has helped her increase in riches,
highways, churches, schools, and all the material things of life. [But...] we
must not forget that we still have a grave problem to solve. Are we going
to preserve these blessings?264
The day's program also included a speech on the topic of “Iowa-away-fromhome” by Paul Stillman, a former speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives who had
likewise become a California resident, and the reading of a telegraphed message from
Iowa's governor, Clyde Herring, who celebrated this “great day” during which the
attendees would be “looking upon the faces of a group the equal of which could not be
assembled in California upon any other occasion.” He also provided an apt description of
the transplanted Iowans' adopted state when he good-naturedly encouraged the picnickers
to one day return to the Hawkeye State from “this beautiful land of make-believe.”265
While speeches by dignitaries dominated the program of these events, the
picnickers’' main reason for attending was to mingle with like-minded people from their
home area, while sharing a pot-luck lunch. As per Parsons’ design the picnic grounds
263
Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 199, 155. Upton Sinclair once called Merriam, “one of the oldest and stupidest reactionary
politicians in America.”
264
“Thousands Crowd Park at Huge Iowa Picnic.” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1935, 1-2.
265
Ibid, p. 2.
115
were organized into 99 sections, one for each county in the state. The gathering,
according to the Times, “more closely resembled a migration than a celebration […as]
Iowans moved continuously throughout the entire day from booth to booth, scanning the
registration sheets for names of relatives and friends from back home.”266 A large high
angle photograph on page two of the newspaper captures the bustling scene as a row of
palm trees towers over a countless number of people who are clustered around signs and
banners for the counties of Marshall, Linn, and Buchanan, among others. The reunion
often lasted from sunrise to sunset and by the 1930s always featured a group sing-along
to the “Iowa Corn Song”, which was originally written in 1912 for a Des Moines Shriners
trip to Los Angeles. This unofficial state song is often remembered for its memorable
chorus which touts “I-O-way” as the “State of all the land”:
We're from I-O-way, I-O-way.
State of all the land,
Joy on ev-'ry hand.
We're from I-O-way, I-O-way.
That's where the tall corn grows.267
The sound of 100,000 recently-minted Californians singing this song in unison
twice each year was figuratively heard all the way back in Iowa and the close connection
between the two states prompted the Des Moines Register to send Harlan Miller, writer of
the paper’s long-running “Over the Coffee” column, to Long Beach in 1937 to file a
report on this growing enclave of Hawkeyes. His article “Long Beach – The California
Paradise for Aging Iowans,” detailed a typical day on the “cornfield Riviera.” According
to Miller’s colorful travelogue, the day would begin with “chores” for the “retired
266
267
“Thousands Crowd Park at Huge Iowa Picnic,” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1935, 2.
Song lyrics by George Hamilton and Ray W. Lockard, with music by Edward Riley, 1912. Additional
info from: <netstate.com: http://www.netstate.com/states/symb/song/ia_corn_song.htm>.
116
farmers,” but in sunny Southern California the “chores” were a game of horseshoes. The
city, however, was not a playground for the idle rich, since aside from a few “ultraswank” apartment buildings, Long Beach was “geared to frugal spenders.” This was a
necessity for the Iowa transplants because:
Most of these elderly couples […] have less than $100 a month to spend
on the essentials and baubles of existence. Many live on $60 to $70 a
month. Of this sum, about $30 would go for rent, $25 for food and
clothing, $10 for doctors and medicines, $10 on riotous living – gasoline,
tobacco, church collections, movies, postage, fantastic souvenirs for the
grandchildren.268
These former Iowans were getting by on relatively modest means and, as Miller
reported, they occasionally complained about the comparative quality of California’s beef
and chickens, “but they loved the warm weather and wouldn’t trade it for anything.”269
To be sure, they found themselves in a more ethnically diverse state, as California’s
population of Asian, Hispanic, and African-American residents eclipsed that of Iowa, but
as more people arrived from the Midwest during the early decades of the twentieth
century their Long Beach enclave quickly began to resemble home, with the exceptions
of the ocean views and the warm temperatures. In fact its years as a Mecca for
Midwestern retirees stamped Long Beach with a rural and small town character for
decades, as Tim Grobaty observed, “The Iowa by the Sea thing was real,” when asked by
a reporter about the city’s reputation as a “cultural backwater” in a 2012 interview.
“Iowans and Methodists,” he said, “had a big impact in terms of mores and laws in the
268
269
Miller is quoted in Grobaty, 110-111.
Miller is paraphrased in Bill Barich, Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1994), 447.
117
town's early days.”270 Travel writer Bill Barich, a native Midwesterner, also noticed these
mores during his visit to the city in the early 1990s, suggesting that the “Hawkeye spirit
still lingered” at the “modest” beaches where “hardly anyone wore a bikini.”271
The sheer number of Iowans in the community gave them a growing sense of
political and economic power; after all, one of their own, Frank Merriam, was living in
the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. In fact, Carey McWilliams points out that C.H.
Parsons’ Federation of State Societies was “for many years […] a major political force in
Southern California, with politicians clamoring to be ‘introduced’ at the picnics and
eagerly identifying themselves with one or another of the state societies.”272 Nevertheless
many new arrivals from the farm displayed a certain measure of Midwestern modesty and
naïveté when they first arrived in the city, which serves as a reminder of the city/country
tensions that were a subject for so many creative works by Grant Wood, Phil Stong, and
others. Longer-tenured Californians apparently had low expectations for the selfconscious newcomers, and former Iowans’ stories about their bumpy integration into
their new communities eventually filtered back home. These tales prompted the Eldora
(Iowa) Herald-Ledger to publish an editorial on the subject in August 1933:
When an Iowan comes to California, many natives of that state expect to
see pieces of straw sticking out from the cuffs of his trousers. Many of
them forget the fact that by now, the average California resident can trace
his ancestry right back to an Iowa farm. Californians should be careful of
their treatment of Iowans. Think what a terrible calamity for that state it
would be if Iowa would send its… retiring citizens to Florida instead.273
Sander Roscoe Wolff, “Tim Grobaty Chronicles Long Beach,” Long Beach Post, May 22, 2012.
<http://lbpost.com/life/2000000288-tim-grobaty-chronic#.U1q971fgeBQ>.
270
271
Barich, 447-448.
272
McWilliams, 170.
273
Re-published in Des Moines Register, August 13, 1933, G11.
118
That same year the two most successful Iowa farm films, State Fair and The Stranger’s
Return, were released in theaters, so while some real-life Iowans may not have always
been welcomed in California, Phil Stong’s stories about them were in high demand
within Hollywood movie studios and they quickly became popular from coast to coast.
“The curse seems to be off rural pictures”
The film version of State Fair was a hit for the Fox studio upon its release in early
1933, and like the silent films set in Iowa during the 1910s and 1920s, this talking picture
celebrates the state's rural virtues. Directed by the experienced Henry King, who already
had helmed more than sixty short and feature films, and starring Will Rogers and Janet
Gaynor, two of Hollywood’s top five box office draws during that period, the picture was
groomed for success from the start.274 Following a successful premiere at New York’s
Radio City Music Hall on January 26, 1933, State Fair went on to garner two Academy
Award nominations (for Best Picture and Best Adapted Writing), was named one of the
Ten Best Films of the Year by the National Board of Review, and according to a study of
film revenues published in 1944, was ranked among the top fifty grossing films of alltime with $1.8 million dollars in box office receipts.275 Success in Hollywood often
breeds imitators, so within one week of the film’s opening the New York Times was
reporting that Fox had already ordered another “farm yarn” because “the curse seems to
be off rural pictures. […] The acclaim given Phil Stong’s novel on the screen convinced
274
According to Andrew Bergman (page 71), the other top box office draws from 1932-1933 were Marie
Dressler, Eddie Cantor, and Wallace Beery.
“Gotham Hails First Showing of State Fair,” Des Moines Register, January 27, 1933, 1; and Lon Jones,
“Which Cinema Films Have Earned the Most Money Since 1914?” The Argus, March 4, 1944, supplement,
3.
275
119
Mr. [Winfield] Sheehan [Fox’s chief of production] that, whatever prejudices existed in
the past, good rural stories will be accepted today.”276
Stong rightfully gave much of the credit for the film’s success to director Henry
King, about whom he wrote shortly before the release of the film, “I’m sure the picture
isn’t going to need luck – and not because of the book or the gilded cast, but because of a
fine and sympathetic director.”277 King was not merely a director for hire on the film, as
he initially recommended the novel to the studio and fought for his desired cast,
particularly Will Rogers in the role of Abel Frake. Fox Films had been experiencing a run
of bad fortune that year, as a string of disappointing pictures led to falling box office
receipts and dangerously low stock prices that had not yet recovered from the 1929 Crash
when they plunged from $106 per share to just $19.278 The turmoil within the studio
made King’s pitch difficult, especially since his previous film, The Woman in Room 13
(1932), was unsuccessful, as were the recent star vehicles for both Rogers and Gaynor.279
King, however, was one of twenty-six film luminaries (along with the likes of Cecil B.
DeMille, Irving Thalberg, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford) who founded the
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 1927, so his recommendations carried
276
“Hollywood in Review,” New York Times, February 5, 1933, X5.
277
Letter from Phil Stong to Henry King , Nov. 2, 1932, Henry King Papers, File 46, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.
278
Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States,
1929-1933 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 63.
279
King, Rogers, and Gaynor were so determined to make State Fair their comeback hit that each of them
deferred their salaries when the studio found itself unable to meet payroll during filming. This story is
found in Walter Coppedge, Henry King’s America (Metuchen, NJ.: Scarecrow Press, 1986), 86.
120
a good deal of clout. “During his time in the industry,” writes his biographer Walter
Coppedge, “King was held in the royal esteem his name suggests.”280
King first read Stong’s novel shortly after its publication in the spring of 1932,
and because he was searching for material “worthy of his energies” as a director, he
enthusiastically presented it to Fox executives, threatening to purchase the rights himself
if the studio passed. Some of the executives balked at the idea, as they were especially
concerned that the studio had “killed” Rogers’ box office appeal because of the poor
quality of pictures in which he had recently been cast, but Winfield Sheehan and
producer Sol Wurtzel decided the project had a chance to become a much-needed hit so
they gave it a green light with full studio support. Sheehan informed King, “If you take
Rogers, we want you to take Janet Gaynor, Spencer Tracy, and Sally Eilers – everyone
we have in the studio.” King replied, “I’d be silly not to accept it.”281 Tracy was unable to
join the cast due to a commitment to another film, but Gaynor was tabbed to play Margy
Frake, Norman Foster was selected to play her brother Wayne, Eilers became Wayne’s
love interest Emily Joyce, Louise Dresser was cast as Abel’s wife Melissa, and Lew
Ayres played Des Moines reporter Pat Gilbert.
The widespread popularity of Rogers and Gaynor had a great deal to do with the
film’s ultimate success. Rogers, a fifty-four year old Oklahoman who was one-quarter
Cherokee, was beloved around the world for the folksy charm and political wit he exuded
on screen, in his radio show, and in a widely syndicated newspaper column. King’s
biographer describes Rogers as “perhaps the most popular American sage since Benjamin
280
Walter Coppedge, Henry King’s America, Metuchen, NJ.: Scarecrow Press, 1986, 2.
281
Coppedge, 73-4.
121
Franklin” and credits him with influencing countless citizens to vote for Franklin
Roosevelt in the 1932 election.282 Another film historian explains the secret to Rogers’
success, writing that he “spoke with seeming sincerity and without malice. He was Mr.
Everyman – it was soon realized that he spoke for Mr. Joe Public.”283 Phil Stong also
held Rogers in high esteem, as he once wrote to Henry King, “I don’t believe anything I
read in the newspapers any more, except, occasionally, Will Rogers.”284
Rogers stepped into the role of Abel Frake with bona fide rural credentials, as he
grew up working on his family’s ranch prior to traveling to Argentina and South Africa
for further ranch work. He also worked as a trick roper for Wild West shows and circuses
in South Africa and Australia before returning to America to pursue a vaudeville career.
Rogers does not fit neatly into the non-ethnic Caucasian portrayals of most characters in
Iowa-based art and literature, because, as his biographer Ben Yagoda explains, “He was a
Cherokee Indian, and also the son of a Confederate veteran who fancied himself a
southern gentleman; the heir to a sizable fortune, and also an itinerant cowboy [who was]
a high school dropout.”285 This personal history is colorful, and Yagoda notes that he
“had to invent himself,” which he did largely through his love of rural life and ranching.
The role of wise cowboy suited him well, and from there it was not a stretch to play a
family farmer, another quintessentially American rural figure.
282
Coppedge, 74.
283
David Shipman, The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 485.
284
Letter from Phil Stong to Henry King , November 2, 1932, Henry King Papers, File 46, Margaret
Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.
285
Ben Yagoda, Will Rogers: A Biography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 3.
122
Meanwhile the younger Gaynor, twenty-seven years old in 1933, was a
Philadelphian by way of San Francisco, who had already won an Academy Award for
Best Actress five years earlier. She successfully made the transition from silents to
talkies, became the leading actress under contract with the Fox studio, and was a natural
fit for the suddenly ascendant genre of farm films. Andrew Bergman describes her screen
persona as “plain and sweet, the touchingly drab, small-town girl,” which is what
Hollywood was looking for during a period that witnessed plummeting popularity for
more glamorous leading ladies such as Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo. “The most
attractive stars of 1932 and 1933,” Bergman discovered, “were doughty, homespun,
commonsensical and, […] not of the city.”286 In reality, of course, Gaynor was most
definitely “of the city,” as the only places she had ever lived were Philadelphia, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles. Furthermore during her life she was involved in separate
romantic relationships with two fellow actresses, Margaret Lindsay and Mary Martin, and
was married to three different men, all of whom are presumed to have been
homosexual.287 So the simple small-town girl roles she played, such as Margy Frake in
State Fair, helped hide the complicated nature of her personal life, and in fact her girlnext-door image may have even helped her maintain widespread popularity despite a
personal life which would have offended many moviegoers of the time.
Having secured a cast with many connections to the middle of the country (in
addition to the Oklahoman Rogers, Dresser and Foster hailed from Indiana while Ayres
was a Minnesotan), King found it that much easier to retain “an authentic Midwestern
286
287
Bergman, 71.
William J. Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 (New
York: Viking Penguin, 2001), 83-84.
123
feeling about the picture.” This was important to him because he was raised on a farm in
Virginia and his understanding of rural life encouraged him to show that “the country
[setting…] is just as important as the character[s].”288 Gregory Peck, who was directed by
King in six films during the 1940s and 1950s, later described him as a “middle
American” because of the “values and standards” that were his guide.289 King also added
an authentic Iowa flavor to the picture by taking a small crew to the 1932 Iowa State Fair
to gather footage that would appear in the background behind the actors. Principal
photography occurred in California on the Fox back lot, but during a 1933 publicity stop
in Des Moines, Will Rogers explained how the location shots were incorporated into the
film. “Remember that shot in State Fair where I was in the pen with Blue Boy?” he
asked; “We did that by building a pen in the background. About eight feet back of this
was hung a big screen and on this was projected shots taken in the hog barn. […] A lot of
the scenes in that film were made the same way.”290
Prior to the film’s release, however, it was closely scrutinized by Will Hays’
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America [the MPPDA] to ensure that it
adhered to the expected moral principles, commonly called the Code. Colonel Jason Joy,
the head of the MPPDA’s Studio Relations Committee, was among the first to comment
on the proposed script in June 1932. Writing to Fox’s Winfield Sheehan, he commented
on two delicate romantic subplots that could challenge the Code, but more intriguingly he
288
Coppedge, 76, 78.
289
Quote from his foreward to Coppedge, ix.
290
“Will Rogers Here in Plane, Discourses on State Fair,” Des Moines Register, April 29, 1933, 18.
124
took the opportunity to expound on the recent history of rural literature and film, and of
the potential for State Fair to shift the paradigm:
I think you have a magnificent opportunity to tell a new and interesting
story of American small-town and farm-life which will be refreshingly
different from the usual stories of this character. For years, in fact ever
since Sinclair Lewis made Main Street an object of derision, novels and
pictures of farm life have either poked fun at the farmers for their lack of
culture, or they have depicted the latter as repressed creatures choking
with Freudian complexes of one sort or another. My guess is that one
reason for the great success of this novel is that it puts a new light on the
subject and admits that people can be happy and normal in such an
atmosphere […]. The gusto of farm life, simple pleasures, normal humans
-- all of these things should be highly acceptable at this time.291
Joy is presumably referring to the influence of the Great Depression on audience viewing
habits in his qualifier “at this time,” further indication that studios realized the
psychological tonic that “happy and normal … [and] simple” films could provide.
Prior to the release of State Fair, Joy left the MPPDA to take a job as a Fox
executive, so James Wingate took his place as director of the Studio Relations
Committee. Wingate was similarly enthusiastic about the film, calling it a “delightful
piece of screen entertainment” that tells “a story of the American backcountry that we
feel the screen has been wanting to tell for some time.”292 Script reader (and future
Hollywood journalist) Maude Lathem agreed, describing it in an MPPDA memo as “a
picture of merit, far above the average in wholesome entertainment. It is too bad more
291
Letter from Jason Joy to Winfield Sheehan, June 20, 1932, Production Code Administration Records for
State Fair, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles,
California.
292
Letters from James Wingate to Jason Joy and Hettie Gray Baker, January 19 and 23, 1933, Production
Code Administration Records for State Fair, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts
and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.
125
pictures of this type cannot be found.”293 State Fair indeed proved to be a picture of
merit, but its wholesomeness was called into question by some within the studio and by a
vocal minority of moviegoers nationwide. Of particular concern was a bedroom scene
between Wayne Frake and Emily Joyce, who in the novel is the daughter of the fair’s
horse show manager, but in the film is transformed into “The Queen of the Air,” a
glamorous trapeze performer. Wingate sent a memo to Winfield Sheehan on November 1,
1932, that in addition to questioning the inclusion in the script of one “Lord,” one “Hell,”
and two “Damn[s],” included a note about the scene in question: “Scene 186 – the action
of Emily letting her kimona [sic] fall back, indicating that she is nude, and Wayne's
consequent expression, are of course, contrary to the Code; and we feel sure that in
shooting you will see that this scene is handled so as to eliminate these objectionable
elements.”294
The studio felt they had solved the problem by ending the scene just prior to
Emily dropping her kimono, but nevertheless outraged viewers made their feelings
known. In a letter to James Wingate in March 1933, Carl Milliken, executive secretary of
the MPPDA, wrote:
[Y]ou will be interested to know that we have had more protests against
what the preview groups described as, “the ugly and totally superfluous
incident of the son's adventure,” in State Fair, than regarding any other
motion picture in the last two years. […] The number of protests is
accounted for by two factors, in my judgment. First, the scene is resented
as being entirely incongruous and unnecessary in that particular story.
Second, it was resented because the public has grown accustomed to
relying upon Will Rogers' pictures to provide unobjectionable humor for
293
Script notes by Maude Lathem, November 7, 1932, Production Code Administration Records for State
Fair, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.
294
Letter from James Wingate to Winfield Sheehan, November 1, 1932. Henry King Papers, File 47.
Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.
126
the entire family… [These protests] might well be noted by the producers
as an indication of the resentment that incongruous vulgarity always
provokes. Such stuff is not only bad morals, but it is very bad art.295
As a specific example of the angry reactions to the sexually suggestive scene, Milliken
quoted from a letter that had been written by Mrs. H.G. Smith “an influential
clubwoman” from Salem, Oregon, in which she asks:
How much longer will the decent people of America have to be insulted
by such scenes in that play of Will Rogers', the State Fair? One never
feels safe in going to a movie for fear of having to see something that is
indecent and immoral. There are thousands and thousands of us who feel
that way. […] I know of at least a dozen who wouldn't go because they
had heard of what a disgusting scene was in the play. I have heard of
others who have been who were sorry they went […] From what I hear
from other women belonging to women's clubs, the D.A.R. and such, they
are getting tired of such vulgarity and will do what they can to keep people
home from all plays that cater to the vulgar side. I shall certainly help. [...]
After seeing State Fair I am afraid it will be a long time before I go again,
and I feel today that I never will attend another movie.296
Milliken responded to Mrs. Smith that same day, thanking her for her “frank comment”
and for pointing out that the scene was “an offense against good taste [which] will tend to
deter any [producers] from making the same mistake again.”297 Undoubtedly she would
have been gratified to learn that prior to the 1935 re-release of the film, Joseph Breen,
chief of the new Production Code Administration, informed the Fox studio that the film
295
Letter from Carl Milliken to James Wingate, March 21, 1933, Production Code Administration Records
for State Fair, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles,
California.
296
The letter from Mrs. H.G. Smith is quoted in the letter from Carl Milliken to James Wingate, March 21,
1933, Production Code Administration Records for State Fair, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of
Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.
297
Letter from Carl Milliken to Mrs. H.G. Smith, March 21, 1933, Production Code Administration
Records for State Fair, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los
Angeles, California.
127
would only be approved “if, and when, you eliminate the entire bedroom scene with the
dialogue between [Norman] Foster and [Sally] Eilers.”298
The minor controversy over this scene did not keep the film from doing excellent
business and receiving mostly positive reviews from film critics. New York Times
reviewer Mordaunt Hall praised Will Rogers for many “excellent” sequences and called
the film “a homey tale, with many an intriguing bit.”299 Eugene Burr, of The Billboard
magazine, which was then based in Cincinnati, thoroughly enjoyed the tale of “bucolic
pleasure and pain…[which] is so simply and touchingly told, so beautifully played by the
name-studded cast, that even a city crowd (unused to hawgs [sic] and pickle tasting and
the glories of the midway) should find itself spellbound.”300 Likewise it earned plaudits
from trade magazine Variety for its “charm of naturalness and virtue of sincerity” and
from William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, which hailed it for being as “rich
as the soil itself and ‘homely’ as the heart of the hinterlands.”301
One very notable exception to those who enjoyed the film was Dwight
MacDonald, a New York based social critic, who lambasted the film for ignoring what
was really happening in rural Iowa:
I find it hard to write with the proper critical restraint. I am not one who
insists that a work of art shall be judged by its social implications, or lack
of them. But there is a limit to the detachment of art from present-day
realities. At a time when the American farmer is faced with ruin, when the
298
Letter from Joseph Breen to John Gain, August 22, 1935, Production Code Administration Records for
State Fair, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles,
California.
Mordaunt Hall, “Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor in a Film Conception of Phil Stong’s Novel, State Fair,”
New York Times, January 27, 1933, 13.
299
300
Eugene Burr, review of State Fair in The Billboard, February 4, 1933, 12.
Variety review quoted in Coppedge, 86; New York American review quoted in “Des Moines has State
Fair, Story of Iowa”, Des Moines Register Sunday Magazine, February 19, 1933, 5.
301
128
whole Midwest is seething with bitterness and economic discontent, a
movie like State Fair is an insulting ‘let them eat cake’ gesture. The
vaudeville rusticity of millionaire Will Rogers, the ‘cute’ little-doll face of
Janet Gaynor – thus Hollywood embodies the farmer! There was no
excuse for the cheerfully trivial tone of the whole thing, the studied
avoidance of anything more serious in the life of the farmer than whether
his hog will win the state championship… What a chance for a realistic,
documentary film of American farm life in these times! And Hollywood
gives us a movie about as earthy as the gingham overalls in a musical
comedy number. [… T]he whole fabric was rotten with evasion of
reality.302
Some observers within Iowa, however, believed the film could gain positive attention for
the Iowa farmers suffering through the Depression. One such commentator was Des
Moines Register columnist Harlan Miller, who gushed over the film, calling it, “one of
the most magnificent, exquisite, pictures I have ever seen. I think it will seem so to all
Iowans and to those who love Iowa. It is the most eloquent argument that the farmer
could offer to those eastern critics who think he asks too much.”303
It is impossible to gauge whether the film’s respectful treatment of Iowa farm life
had any impact on federal farm policy, but MacDonald’s claim that it did the farmers’
cause a disservice is bolstered by the studio’s directive telling Henry King to add a happy
ending to the film, even though the script is otherwise very faithful to the novel. Whereas
at the end of the novel Margy has gotten back together with Harry, her bachelor farmer
boyfriend, the film ends with a joyous reunion in the country between Margy and Pat
Gilbert, who has driven from the city to embrace her in a pouring rainstorm. This
concluding scene was suggested to King in a memo from studio executive Sheehan who
wrote, “At the finish you have to show the girl with Ayres [who played Pat Gilbert]. I
Dwight MacDonald, “Notes on Hollywood Directors (As of 1933)” in Dwight MacDonald on Movies
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 88. The essay was originally published in The Symposium,
April 1933, 159-177; and July 1933, 280-300.
302
303
Harlan Miller, “Over the Coffee,” Des Moines Register, February 8, 1933, 18.
129
want to see them in each other's arms at the end -- big clinch.”304 This development, of
course, undercuts one of the key themes of the novel, which posits that the rural/urban
divide is typically too wide for people on either side of it to be truly happy on the other.
The change is emblematic of the industry’s tendency to smooth over as many
incongruous rough edges as possible. By catering to as wide an audience as possible the
competing interests of country and city have been left largely unchallenged, which also
served to promote a comforting sameness for Depression era viewers who, more than
ever, were viewing the film as an escape from their everyday lives, which were often
fraught with difficulties.
For his part Stong does not seem to have minded the change to his original
ending, as he was involved with the adaptation and later remembered that “the ideas of
the original story were respected and recognized by a very great director.”305 Even if he
had objected his protestations would have been of little consequence as Sheehan’s
suggestion came at the behest of Jason Joy, in his role at the MPPDA, who as early as
June 1932 made the not-so-subtle suggestion that the film should be a love story that uses
the “pleasures of the Fair” as a “pleasant and active background.” He wrote to Sheehan:
If I were making the picture, the romance with the girl [Margy] and the
reporter would be the biggest element in it… I have a strong feeling that
your audience will want this romance to be safe with a definite intimation,
if not an actual portrayal, that [Margy] and the reporter are going to find
this common ground and be married… It seems to me the greatest
opportunity lies in the subordination rather than in the development of sex
situations.306
304
Memo from Winfield Sheehan to Henry King, October 25, 1932, Henry King Papers, File 47, Margaret
Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.
305
306
Phil Stong, “Writer in Hollywood,” Saturday Review of Literature, April 10, 1937, 4.
Letter from Jason S. Joy to Winfield Sheehan, June 20, 1932, Production Code Administration Records
for State Fair, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles,
California.
130
The film’s primary screenwriters, Sonya Levien and Paul Green, took these suggestions
to heart, adding the happy ending and removing the novel’s hint that the relationship
between the two had been consummated in the bedroom of a Des Moines apartment. Joy
described the relationship as a pairing between “farm life at its best which [Margy]
represents, and the city life which [Pat Gilbert] represents,” which calls to mind Hal
Barron’s characterization of rural silent films as key texts that helped Americans
negotiate the transition from living in a rural nation to an urban one.307 The happy
conclusion to State Fair suggested to audiences during the Great Depression that the
interests of country and city could come together, given the right circumstances, and that
the resolution did not always have to play out on the city characters’ terms. Therefore in
this particular case the happy ending, rather than obscuring the plight of real-life farmers,
may have inadvertently offered hopeful encouragement to citizens in the nation’s
midsection who were wrestling with rural/urban tensions stoked by mandated animal
testing, milk strikes, and bank foreclosures.
“My God, how the money rolls in”
Despite Dwight MacDonald's misgivings, Hollywood took notice of State Fair’s
positive reviews and strong box office performance, so as a result many of the people
associated with it soon found themselves working on other rural films set in various
pastoral locations. Henry King helmed a rural film in each of the three following years:
Carolina (1934), which is based on a play by State Fair co-screenwriter Paul Green and
307
Letter from Jason S. Joy to Winfield Sheehan, June 20, 1932, Production Code Administration Records
for State Fair, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles,
California; and Hal Barron, “Rural America on the Silent Screen,” Agricultural History, 80, no. 4 (Autumn
2006), 384-5.
131
stars Janet Gaynor as a northern farm girl helping to restore the fortunes of a Southern
plantation family; Way Down East (1935), which is about a Maine farm family taking in
a stranger; and The Country Doctor (1936), which was written by Sonya Levien, Green’s
State Fair co-screenwriter, and tells the story of the Dionne quintuplets’ birth in rural
Ontario. Will Rogers’ career, meanwhile, was reinvigorated by State Fair and his next
role was the lead in John Ford’s Doctor Bull (1933), in which he plays a country doctor
working to stem a typhoid outbreak in rural Connecticut. Rogers went on to star in nine
additional rural films before his untimely death in an airplane crash in 1935.
Phil Stong’s Hollywood fortunes were also given a strong boost by State Fair’s
success and he was immediately persuaded to complete his next novel, Stranger’s Return.
Writing to his college roommate Harvey Davis in February 1933, Stong mentions that he
and a pair of respected literary critics, Burton Rascoe and L.A.G. Strong, “think it is a
better book [than State Fair],” and his agent Ann Watkins “has Fox up to $15,000 for it
now and thinks she will get $20,000 or possibly $25,000.”308 MGM, deciding to produce
its first rural film in four years, ultimately outbid Fox for the rights and released the film
in July 1933 to capitalize on the apparent interest in farm pictures.309 Earlier in the
process Stong explained to Davis, “[MGM] got anxious to put it out. […] They’re in a
stew about it – I suppose they’ll shove it right along.”310 Stong was grateful for the influx
of money, joking that if the studios had failed to purchase it, his “next yarn [would] be
308
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, February14, 1933. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
MGM’s previous rural film was the King Vidor-directed Hallelujah (1929), which was set amongst
black sharecroppers in the rural South.
309
310
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, June 19, 1933. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of Iowa
Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
132
‘$20,000 In Debt to the Government,’” but the sale also meant he had to return to
southern California to assist with the screenplay, which was a distressing thought for
him.311
Stong did not enjoy his first taste of Hollywood while working on State Fair, and
he expressed his disdain for the place in a letter to Davis near the end of that experience:
I’ve been out in this abhorrent place fighting with the world’s choicest
collection of subnormal nincompoops for three months […]. This is a
perfectly beastly little town – all plaster and platinum blondes and trees
that look like they had been made in Japan and flowers that seem very
improbable indeed. It is just so damned silly and smug and show-offish
that by and by you get an irresistible impulse to step on it and squash it.312
Five months later while contemplating his imminent return, Stong’s opinion about the
place had softened very little. He remembered, “Hollywood was lousy. Dopy trees and
flowers, punk food, no company for anyone with more than an eighth grade education.
The movie business was rather interesting but there’s nothing else to say for the town –
they didn’t even produce sunshine.”313 But the money and his own protective impulses
toward his story lured him back for a second time, this time with his wife, Virginia
Swain, in tow. “I like to come out and see that my books get a square shake from the
louses,” he wrote to Davis.314
311
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, February 14, 1933. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. Later in his life Stong maintained his strong aversion to Hollywood,
writing to his friend Don Farran, “[I] Don't expect to be in Hollywood soon – it is a hideous town and the
only thing that could get me out there would be lots and lots of money.” From Phil Stong letter to Don
Farran, November 13, 1953. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
312
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, September 19, 1932. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
313
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, February 14, 1933. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
314
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, September 5, 1933. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
133
The “louses” of which he spoke were typically studio executives and middlemen,
rather than the respected directors with whom he worked on his first two films. Just as he
had complimented Henry King after the completion of State Fair, he characterized King
Vidor as “a swell director” after his second Hollywood experience.315 Vidor was, by that
point, a three-time Academy Award nominee for Best Director, and according to a 1933
essay by Dwight MacDonald, he was “once the brightest of Hollywood’s bright young
directors,” but of late he had simply been “grinding out movies with sausage-machine
regularity.”316 As one of Hollywood’s “resident intellectuals,” with an avid interest in
Christan Science and the metaphysical, Vidor often chafed at the constraints of the
Hollywood studio system. “It was his hard luck,” his biographers explained, “to work the
studio system when it was most rigidly an assembly line, and when the Hays Office
ensured a narrow spiritual monopoly.”317 A third-generation Texan whose grandfather
had emigrated from Hungary, Vidor had an independent, restless streak that his
biographers have assigned to his upbringing in the West. They note that the early to mid
1930s, when he made Stranger’s Return, was a “particularly frenzied era in his private
life.”318 Just prior to the film’s on-location shoot in Chino, the film’s leading lady,
Miriam Hopkins, had abruptly ended an affair with Vidor. Greatly upset, he was
commuting to Los Angeles on weekends to undergo psychotherapy, in part because he
315
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, June 19, 1933. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of Iowa
Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
316
MacDonald, 78-9.
317
Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, King Vidor, American (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988), 3, 9-10.
318
Durgnat and Simmon, 16.
134
responded to the break-up by sawing the legs off her couch. He remembered, “That's one
of the only crazy things I ever did. She didn't think it was funny.”319
Despite his fragile emotional state at the time Vidor was a very able director and,
like Henry King, felt a kinship with Stong’s source material. He told an interviewer in
1971:
The farm has always been my favorite atmosphere. It’s proven by the fact
that I now live on one. I used to be kidded many times about having a
plow in every picture turning over the earth. […] It meant a new cycle of
life, a new generation going on. […] Just a plow turning over the earth,
cutting through, and turning over fresh soil, black earth, always had a big
meaning for me.320
With this predisposition to the material, it is little surprise that Vidor admired Stong’s
novel because he knew the writer “knew what he was writing about. He had a feeling for
the people and atmosphere and characters [of]… the middle west.” Furthermore Vidor
also felt an artistic connection to the setting of Stong’s novel. “I was very interested in
Grant Wood,” he remembered, “I own a couple of Grant Wood paintings and [the novel
is set in] Grant Wood country and the people are somewhat Grant Wood types.”321
Vidor described Stong as a “very bright man,” but despite their shared interest in
country matters he found working with him on the set to be “a very strange experience.”
Vidor remembered:
319
King Vidor. Interview. June 19, 1971. M51778. American Film Institute Oral History Project. UCLA
Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles, California. He explains that he took out his anger on the couch
because he had always stubbed his toe on it during visits to Hopkins’ house. He tipped her butler $5 to let
him in and do it.
320
King Vidor. Interview. June 19, 1971. M51778. American Film Institute Oral History Project. UCLA
Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles, California.
321
King Vidor. Interview. The two Wood paintings he owned were Arbor Day (1932) and January (1940).
When he agreed to loan them out for a Grant Wood memorial exhibition in Indiana in 1942, he wrote to the
gallery director, “I don't mind telling you that our home seems quite empty and unfriendly without the two
paintings.” Source: Letter from Vidor to John Rogers Cox, October 12, 1942, King Vidor Papers, Box 4,
Folder 47, UCLA Special Collections, Los Angeles, California.
135
I would get Stong to write some sequence and he'd leave out or spoil or
change something until one day I said to him, “Who wrote this book, you
or your wife?” He had a very bright wife [she was a novelist who also
wrote for McClure’s and the Saturday Evening Post], but his wife talked
as if she'd helped him a lot writing the book. He did this two or three
times, completely changed his original book and […] he would be
surprised when I told him “You've left out the main part of a scene,” and
he said “I did? I did? I don't remember that.” I didn't think it would be
possible for the fellow who had written the book to forget some of the key
scenes, but he left them out.322
Stong did not leave any record of these incidents, but it is reasonable to assume that his
memory lapses may have been related to his alcoholism, a long-time affliction which his
wife documented in letters to her friends over many years, including one brutally honest
missive from 1940 in which she writes, “I don't really think he will stop drinking in time
to save his life. All I can do is sit tight and wait and see. I'm convinced that he was slated
for a drunkard's grave from birth.”323
Stong’s affliction may have been an annoyance to Vidor, but the writer was
surprisingly pleased with this filmmaking experience, perhaps because he spent much of
the time on set in Chino, an hour’s drive from his much-reviled Hollywood. He wrote to a
friend, “They did a splendid job of filming. […] It was a good summer in every way. We
had a congenial cast and good bunch of cameramen, etc. […] MGM was pleasanter to
work with than Fox – bunch of nice hard-boiled, rational people.”324 Under Vidor’s
direction the other principals on the film were, of course, his former mistress Miriam
322
King Vidor. Interview. June 19, 1971. M51778. American Film Institute Oral History Project. UCLA
Library, Los Angeles, California.
323
Letter from Virginia Swain to Bertha Craver, February 3, 1940. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University
of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. Stong experienced brief periods of sobriety, but he frequently backslid
and eventually died of a heart attack at age fifty-eight.
324
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, June 19, 1933. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of Iowa
Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
136
Hopkins as New York-born Louise Storr along with Lionel Barrymore as Grandpa Storr,
even though he was reportedly battling crippling arthritis and a resulting morphine
addiction.325 The excellent supporting cast was filled out by Beulah Bondi as the
conniving in-law Beatrice, Franchot Tone as handsome neighboring farmer Guy Crane,
and Stuart Erwin as Simon, a well-meaning hired hand. Stong claimed that he “got to be
very good friends with Tone, Erwin, and especially Bondi and Grant Mitchell [who
played Allen Redfield, another of Grandpa’s in-laws].”326
During the shoot the entire cast and crew bonded while staying together at an
abandoned country club in the Pomona Valley, an area which was selected as the location
because it was “just about as close to farming as you could get” in southern California,
remembered Vidor.327 The rural set, according to noted Hollywood writer and reporter
Rosalind Shaffer, had “all the cast sighing for and talking about ‘back home.’” Shaffer
had been invited to the location and subsequently wrote an article about it for the
Chicago Tribune in which she describes the results of the crew’s efforts to turn the
California acreage into an authentic-looking Iowa farm:
[I]n a quiet valley where tall cottonwood trees stand along a river, cows
graze in the tall grass, and the heart of the easterner is rejoiced by the sight
of the old fashioned farmhouse with gingerbread woodwork framing its
veranda. A huge barn with a pigeon cote on top, a corn crib, pigs rooting
about and greedily champing the red apples tossed them from the actors’
box lunches all made the typical Iowa farm setting for the story… The
picture was so beautiful that Miriam Hopkins expressed delight that they
were going to do some night shooting. “There’s bound to be a grand moon
tonight, and we’re going to do the scene when I come home from a
325
David Thomson, Lost Hollywood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 78.
326
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, June 19, 1933. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of Iowa
Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
327
King Vidor. Interview. June 19, 1971. M51778. American Film Institute Oral History Project. UCLA
Library, Los Angeles, California.
137
country dance in a white organdy dress with my beau by moonlight – and I
am thrilled already,” she said.328
Stong also commented on the night shots, albeit somewhat less favorably, remembering
that they “frequently worked from daybreak till one or two o’clock in the morning.
Daylight is precious on location shots and if night shots are scheduled in addition there is
no rest for the wicked. The work was cool, rational, and incessant, for Vidor knows when
he has his ‘shot.’”329
This careful attention to detail is seen from the first frames of the film, which
capture the essence of the Midwestern setting. Writer Brown Holmes’ early script
treatment describes the anticipated shots of Storrhaven farm that were later captured for
the film’s opening scene:
Fade In. Storrhaven... in the early morning sun... Gently rolling pastures...
tall thick granaries hulking against the sky... level fields of corn... The
huge barn, massive and sharp-angled... the broad sweep of the hay-fields...
a long line of sentinel trees... the wheat field, smooth, gently blowing –
seen through the sharp dark angles of a farm machine sitting heavily in the
foreground... The contrast of plains and masses giving a rhythm that is
gentle and calm and peaceful.330
These scenes are prominently featured at the beginning of the finished film, but so are
shots of farmers pitching hay into the barn’s hayloft intermixed with images of grazing
cattle, horses, and pigs, as the entire farmyard is brought to life in a way that cannot be
conveyed in the script. These images of agricultural bounty provide the kind of
reassurance that audiences would have been seeking for their own, and their country’s
Rosalind Shaffer, “Iowa Farm Set Stirs Hearts of Film People,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 14, 1963,
SC8.
328
329
Phil Stong, “Writer in Hollywood,” Saturday Review of Literature, April 10, 1937, 14.
Brown Holmes, Stranger’s Return script treatment, March 21, 1933. King Vidor Papers. Box 1, UCLA
Special Collections, Los Angeles, California.
330
138
future. Thus it is notable that in one of the film’s relatively few lines of dialogue that does
not appear in the novel, Louise Storr turns to Grandpa while they are surveying the farm
and says, “[P]eople in the family always speak of Storrhaven the way other people speak
of Iowa or America.”331 Storrhaven, Iowa, and America, coalesce here in the minds of the
two lead characters as well as for Depression era audiences who were becoming
increasingly accustomed to seeing corn fields, farm houses, and good-hearted (white)
working class farmers presented as symbols of the “real” America.
The racial component of this amalgamation can be easy to overlook, but these
images were being disseminated during a period in which “whiteness was
reconsolidated” and America’s “racial alchemy” was altered, according to cultural
historian Matthew Frye Jacobson. He explains, “The period from the 1920s to the 1960s
saw a dramatic decline in the perceived differences among white Others… [and] redrew
the dominant racial configuration along the strict, binary line of white and black.”
Immigration restrictions such as the Johnson-Reed Act, along with the Great Migration of
African-Americans to northern cities, cleared the way for “probationary white groups [to
be] remade and granted the scientific stamp of authenticity as the unitary Caucasian
race.” 332 Thus, with more people able to identify as Caucasians, these Midwestern
pastoral fantasies offered yet another avenue for recent generations of immigrants to
assimilate into American culture. The white rural characters in these films have been
Stranger’s Return. Directed by King Vidor, 1933, Los Angeles: MGM. Film. UCLA Film and
Television Archive, Los Angeles, California.
331
332
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8, 14.
139
stripped of any ethnic identifiers and in many ways are presented as the ideal Americans,
equipped with wisdom, virtue, and a secure position in the social pecking order.
These messages are conveyed in Stranger’s Return much like they were in State
Fair, and upon its release the film received reviews that were every bit as positive as its
predecessor. The Des Moines Register wrote that it belonged in “a class of high class
pictures” and praised “the excellence of the performances.”333 Mordaunt Hall of the New
York Times called it “an excellent example of the successful cooperation of an author and
the producers” and declared it to be “gentle and natural and pleasantly free from
hokum.”334 Time, meanwhile, described it as “an even more appealing pastoral [than
State Fair], distinguished by author Stong’s incisive characterizations and by King
Vidor’s direction which is so authoritative that Lionel Barrymore acts all through the
picture without belching once.” That reviewer also expressed admiration for the
emergence of the farm picture genre, crediting Stong for writing “novels [which] have
supplied the cinema with something it has needed for a long time – true-to-life stories
about U.S. farmers.”335 In terms of its awareness of contemporary rural problems, it most
certainly was more “true-to-life” than State Fair. Dwight MacDonald did not weigh in on
this film, but he would have been gratified that it at least acknowledged the existence of
the Depression by portraying four Storr relatives who had all been buffeted by economic
problems after the Crash, and found themselves seeking refuge in the comforting
environs of the ancestral farm.
333
“New Films,” Des Moines Register Sunday Magazine, July 30, 1933, 5.
334
Mordaunt Hall, “Phil Stong’s Drama of Rural Life,” New York Times, August 6, 1933, X3.
335
“The New Pictures,” Time, July 31, 1933, 19.
140
King Vidor went on to specifically address the idea of moving to the country as
an escape from the problems of the Depression in his very next production, Our Daily
Bread (1934). The unemployed protagonists of the film leave the city (presumably New
York) when one of them inherits a run-down farm upstate, which soon becomes a cooperative as they are joined by individuals facing similarly difficult economic
circumstances. Years later Vidor remembered:
I had a strong feeling about what was happening in the country, [with
farmers] overturning milk trucks and spilling milk on the highway to
combat prices. And Hoover villages in Washington… and farms and
ranches being foreclosed, bought up for a few dollars and all sorts of
things going on. Because of [the] Depression I was very conscious of this
and thought some film should be made about it… and finally I read in
Reader’s Digest an article about [how] it looks like we'll all have to go
cooperative and cut out the use of money and just use self help and
barter.336
The film received some criticism for its “pinko” sensibilities, and it did not perform well
at the box office, but according to Vidor “nobody lost any money on the venture,”
because it was made on the cheap. Most of all he was proud because:
[I] made the film as an American document, recorded the facts and tried to
influence opinion neither one way nor the other. Perhaps the facts were
not too pretty at the time; certainly we have enacted a lot of legislation and
spent a heap of government money in correcting them, so I don’t think I
should have been censured for depicting them as they were.”337
Vidor returned to directing prestigious pictures for 25 more years, receiving two more
Best Director Academy Award nominations along the way. He also maintained his
interest in documenting the effects of the Depressions throughout the 1930s, as he
proudly served as an advisor for his friend and famed documentarian Pare Lorentz as he
336
King Vidor. Interview. June 19, 1971. M51780. American Film Institute Oral History Project. UCLA
Library, Los Angeles, California.
337
King Vidor, A Tree is a Tree. 1952 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 226-227.
141
created important films for the U.S. government, including The Plow That Broke the
Plains (1936), The River (1937), and Fight for Life (1940).338
Phil Stong, however, never demonstrated any interest, publicly or privately, in a
similar sort of documentation. Much of his career was spent pursuing the goals of literary
respect and economic security, and he usually fell short of both expectations. Thus he
developed a love/hate relationship with the “seductive” film business because even
though he felt screenwriting work “gave me wretched troubles with a bad habit of overvisualization for weeks,” he also liked the fast infusion of income a screenwriting job
could provide.339 “My God, how the money rolls in,” he wrote to Harvey Davis in the fall
of 1933, “I did technical advice and some touching up for the Ford Company on a little
house movie they’re getting out [the lost film These Thirty Years (1934)] – it took me
four evenings - $1000.” In that same letter Stong revealed that he had also been hired to
adapt a story by the Scottish novelist A.J. Cronin, which would pay him $1000 a week
for seven more weeks.340 He was torn between accumulating “enough money to write
novels all the rest of one’s life with no worry about their sales or popularity” and his
belief that “it seems ruinous for a novelist to condition himself to expression which must
be either visible or audible, in which a forty-word speech is garrulous, [and] in which the
taboos on words and situations are established by the vehement old-maidery of the
country.” 341 On top of that he felt that his friends may have been correct in assuming that
338
King Vidor. King Vidor on Film Making (New York: David McKay Co., 1972), 187.
339
Phil Stong, “Writer in Hollywood,” Saturday Review of Literature, April 10, 1937, 14.
340
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, September 5, 1933. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
341
Phil Stong, “Writer in Hollywood,” Saturday Review of Literature, April 10, 1937, 14.
142
his Hollywood jobs amounted to “nothing but a swift and profitable prostitution.”342
Therefore it is not surprising that within two years he would pour his ambivalent feelings
about the film business into The Farmer in the Dell, a novel about an Iowa farm family
and their adventures in Hollywood.
“We even grow better cinema”
Phil Stong’s Hollywood novel, The Farmer in the Dell, was published in July
1935, and despite being serialized in the Saturday Evening Post it was met with less
fanfare than had attended the releases of State Fair and Stranger’s Return. His star had
dimmed a bit during the preceding two years with the publication of two mediocre
novels, Village Tale (1934), a darker take on small-town Iowa that was adapted into a
film the following year, and Week-End (1935), which was set in Stong’s adopted home
state of Connecticut. The lukewarm reviews to those books prompted Stong to confide to
a friend, “I feel, as many reviewers did, that by this time I should do something better
than this… something with quick and direct insight into the motives of men and their
results.”343 The tenor of the reviews did not change for The Farmer in the Dell, as Robert
van Gelder, an arts reporter for the New York Times, gave Stong the most tepid of
backhanded-compliments:
[T]his novel will disappoint many of Mr. Stong’s more serious-minded
admirers who were inclined for a time following the publication of State
Fair to see him as a white hope of American writing. But there is no real
reason why it should, for while it is completely unambitious, it has its
342
343
Phil Stong, “Writer in Hollywood,” Saturday Review of Literature, April 10, 1937, 3.
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, March 14, 1935. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
143
moments of accuracy and brightness, and Mr. Stong never really achieved
much more than that.344
Another reviewer for the Times, Fred Marsh, likewise pegged the novel as a pleasantly
forgettable diversion: “You can read it in two hours in a hammock without strain on some
Sunday afternoon in the country just before dropping off in a doze.”345
Great literature it is not, but The Farmer in the Dell does provide a fascinating
insider’s perspective into connections between Iowa and Hollywood during the Great
Depression, a moment in time when farm pictures were especially popular. Stong’s book
is also of interest as an example of the “Hollywood novel” literary genre. One of this
genre’s chief chroniclers, Nancy Brooker-Bowers, has identified a “common stereotype”
in Hollywood novels of the first half of the twentieth century, in which “a naïve Iowan
travels to movieland seeking his fortune.”346 Prior to The Farmer in the Dell the most
prominent Depression era Hollywood novel featuring naïve Iowans was Headed for
Hollywood, written by Homer Croy in 1932. Croy was a Missourian who grew up
approximately twenty miles south of the Iowa border and became well known for his
novels and non-fiction books about the Midwest. He also maintained connections to the
film industry, beginning as a film production manager during World War I and
continuing as a part-time screenwriter during the 1930s, during which time he developed
a close friendship with Will Rogers. His biographer Zachary Michael Jack describes him
as “a popular literary humorist whose universal appeal sprung, paradoxically, from a
particular plot of ground in Corn Country” and as a “pioneer [of film] who, uniquely,
344
Robert van Gelder, “Books of the Times.” New York Times, July 18, 1935, 17.
345
Fred Marsh, “Mr. Stong’s Comedy of Hollywood Iowans.” New York Times, July 21, 1935, BR7.
346
Nancy Brooker-Bowers. The Hollywood Novel: An American Literary Genre. PhD diss., Drake
University, 1983, 106.
144
embraced the camera as an extension of the pen, not a threat to it.”347 Thus it stands to
reason that he would use his experiences to write his own Hollywood novel about
transplanted Iowans.
That novel, Headed for Hollywood, follows Pearl Piper, a wholesome beauty
contest winner from fictional Bender, Iowa, as she decamps to Hollywood along with her
star-struck aunt Minnie, her patent medicine salesman father Andy, and Andy’s
stereotypical Native American assistant High Bone. Hijinks ensue as Pearl ineffectually
chases her dream of becoming a movie star as her family blunders its way through their
attempts to help her impress the powerful Jewish owner of a film studio and his director
son. The Pipers are initially excited about their new circumstances, as Aunt Minnie
breathlessly remarks, “I wonder where the stars live?... Just think of being in the same
town with them!” and the book’s narrator points out, “It seemed like a dream to Andy
that he was in Hollywood. Hollywood! The alluring, the mysterious, the much-heralded,
the most famous town for its size in the world!”348 As part of her beauty contest prize,
Pearl is quickly given a small part in a film titled Chapped Knees, and she “began to like
studio life. It was as if she had been picked out of a drab world and dropped into a
wonderful and enrapturing one. ‘How I ever stood Bender is more than I know,’ she
said.”349
Pearl soon falls in love with her director Joe Gumpertz and eventually begins
running with a fast crowd, causing Andy to change his mind about their new locale,
Zachary Michael Jack, “Introducing the Inimitable Homer Croy, Chronicler of Corn Country,” in Homer
Croy: Corn Country Travel Writing, Literary Journalism, Memoir. Zachary Michael Jack, ed. (North
Liberty, IA: Tall Corn Books, 2010), 29.
347
348
Homer Croy, Headed for Hollywood (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932), 66.
349
Croy, Headed for Hollywood, 81.
145
which is related in a scene that finds him beginning to look for a way back home: “Now
that he had had time to get acquainted with Hollywood and Hollywood life, Andy saw
that it was not the place for him, nor for Pearl. She had her fling at pictures. There wasn’t
as much in it as he had thought; a sane, normal life was the best, after all.”350 The best
place for him to experience a “sane, normal life”, of course, is Iowa, so he concocts a
series of plans to convince Pearl to return there with him. When Pearl and Joe set out to
elope, Andy joins forces with Nat Gumpertz, Joe’s studio boss father, and after an
impromptu airplane ride and a hair-rising automobile chase, they convince the pair to
wait. This cooling-off period brings about a “subtle change” in Pearl as she realize her
new Hollywood friends “were not her kind of people [and] her father’s homely phrase
returned to her: ‘They’re not your breed of cats’… her breed and their breed would never
mix.”351 It is not long before the family happily returns to Bender, Iowa, and Pearl’s
affections shift to Gene Crawford, a former beau: “Gene with his simple, wholesome,
hearty enthusiasms, and his unwavering affection for her. Joe had been a rocket which
dazzled Pearl by his glory, but Gene was the evening star, not so brilliant, but steadfast
and dependable.”352
The Los Angeles Times published a positive review of the novel, celebrating
Croy’s depiction of the “lively sense of the fun to be derived from the contrasts and
absurdities and exaggerations of Hollywood.”353 The New York Times reviewer,
meanwhile, complains about the hackneyed “note of blaring satire,” which was an
350
Croy, Headed for Hollywood, 229.
351
Croy, Headed for Hollywood, 287.
352
Croy, Headed for Hollywood, 295.
353
“Homer Croy Inducts the Pipers Into the Movies,” Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1932, B8.
146
indication that Hollywood could no longer be depicted “with accurate detachment.”
Nevertheless the reviewer enjoyed the Pipers’ “loving but not too helpful steadfastness,”
and complimented Croy for bringing “a good deal of the flavor of Iowa to Hollywood.
That may not sound unusual; we have been told very often that California is vastly
populated with Iowans. But in this case the emphasis is upon the friendly interpretation of
the Piper family’s native characteristics.”354 What the reviewer goes on to describe as the
book’s “pervading rustic humor” was in a similar comedic vein to that which would be
mined by Stong in his most successful works, the first of which was just six weeks from
publication.
But even before State Fair could be released and its rights sold to Fox Films, a
twelve-part live radio adaptation of Headed for Hollywood was attracting attention of its
own. Venerable Los Angeles Times columnist Lee Shippey pointed out, “Not only was it
the first radio premiere which was handled like a theater premiere, but it was the first
time a dramatized version of a popular novel has been put on the air while the book still
might be called brand new.” The event was significant enough that it was written about in
the pages of the New York Times, but Shippey, who had roomed with Croy in Paris
during World War I, provides the best description of the landmark event:
We had expected it to be a novelty, but we were abashed when we got
there. We felt conspicuous because we hadn’t put on evening clothes.
There were flood lights out in front of the broadcasting station [KTM],
just as there are out in front of theaters at premieres. Inside, everyone we
met had on open-face clothes. It really was a big evening for the laundry
business. And Chic Sale [a popular actor and vaudevillian] and other
celebrities were there to say a few words over the mike. But it differed
from any motion-picture premiere we ever saw in that there were cries of
“Author! Author!” The author [Croy] was actually called on to make a
speech. Nothing like that ever happened in the movies.
354
“Iowa in Hollywood,” New York Times, March 27, 1932, BR24.
147
Despite a few technical glitches, Shippey enjoyed the performance, particularly the
pastoral sounds and images that were conjured in the minds of the audience: “[I]f you
shut your eyes… you hear trains coming and going, you heard – and in imagination saw –
an old-fashioned country town street carnival in which barkers and yokels performed
naturally.”355
Croy’s position as the Depression era’s chief literary chronicler of Iowans in
Hollywood was usurped by Phil Stong in 1935 with the publication of The Farmer in the
Dell, which became the latest, and probably the best, depiction of naïve but honest
Iowans negotiating their way through tinseltown. The main character in the novel is Ernie
“Pa” Boyer, a retired Iowa farmer who has moved to California to live off the proceeds of
his rented Iowa farm. He is a “white-haired, sturdy” Midwesterner who sees things in
black and white: “There was nothing medial in his soul. People were good or people were
bad. Good people were people he liked; bad people lied and didn’t do what was right.”356
Accompanying Ernie in southern California are his wife Lou, “a stoutish, benignant farm
woman” who is known for her excellent cooking, and eighteen-year old daughter
Adrienne, “a fresh and honest beauty … [with] a virginal armor… [and] no artifice, no
intricacy.”357 The family’s migration mimicked that of the many transplanted Iowans who
gathered each year at the massive Iowa Picnics in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Stong’s
primary preoccupation in the novel, however, is the movie business, as the plot revolves
around Ernie being accidentally “discovered” and turned into a Hollywood star.
355
Lee Shippey, “The Lee Side O’ L-A,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 1932, A4.
356
Phil Stong, Farmer in the Dell (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 3, 21-2.
357
Stong. Farmer in the Dell, 14, 55.
148
Ernie’s first break occurs while eating a pork sandwich at Rudy’s, his favorite Los
Angeles lunch counter, where the proprietor routinely greets him, “Hoddy, Ioway!”
While enjoying “a patriotic orgy on the national animal of Iowa,” another man at the
counter asks if he is from Iowa because, “[W]e’re makin’ an Iowa picture up at Colossal”
and Ernie is told that he could get work as an extra because, “They’re shy of farm types
for the parade crowd.” Knowing that his financial outlook was cloudy on account of “the
cussed drought” back in Iowa, he reluctantly shows interest and is told to “just look kind
of happy and naweeve [sic] like [Janet Gaynor] does and they’ll hire you.”358 Ernie is
hired as an extra on the Iowa picture titled The Growth of the Earth, but his
responsibilities expand beyond looking like a “farm type” when he is asked to be a
consultant after the director learns that Julian Stillman, his Iowa-born writer (a
fictionalized version of Stong himself), is a “corn-fed boloney… [who] ain’t been to Iowa
for sixteen years and wrote his masterwork of bucolic struggle in a New York penthouse
and doesn’t know a hame strap from a riding plow.”359 Soon Ernie is given speaking lines
and becomes an on-camera star because of his homespun demeanor that makes him a
natural for the many farm films in production.
When word gets out about Ernie’s sudden popularity, a Hollywood publicity
agent tells the film’s leading lady that the director has “picked up this natural from Iowa,
and anybody can see the green corn waving and pink pigs playing when they see him.”360
Before long this actress, Maude Elverill, attempts to gain some credibility by hitching her
358
Stong. Farmer in the Dell, 5-9.
359
Stong. Farmer in the Dell, 33-4.
360
Stong, Farmer in the Dell, 49.
149
wagon to Ernie’s star as she tells the press, “If we’re going to make Growth of the Earth
a great epic of rural life in America, we’ve got to have truth haven’t we? Yes, Papa Boyer
is going to teach me truth.”361 The next thing he knows, Ernie is dining with stars at the
famed Brown Derby restaurant, becoming the subject of studio bidding wars for his
services, and finding himself in the middle of a feud between Elverill and Magda Gratz,
another Hollywood diva. Through it all he maintains his Midwestern morals, defends the
dignity of farmers, and ultimately signs on to an important farm film titled Stranger in the
Land, co-starring Gratz, a Latvian actress who also comes from a family of farmers. She
tells him, “What a picture we will make, we two farmers. […] They may talk and they
may talk, but everything good comes from the farm, from the earth […] And now we will
show these funny people that we even grow better cinema.”362
Ultimately Ernie’s success and his chemistry with new co-star Gratz send Elverill
into a drunken jealous rage at a well-attended Hawaiian-themed party at her home. She
calls him a “hayseed,” a “rube,” a “plow-pushing dumbbell,” and a “dirty old muddyfooted pig nurse,” but even as she insults his provincial roots, she simultaneously
questions his authenticity, asking, “Were you ever in Iowa?” and “Did you ever see a
farm?” In his passionate retort he proudly defends his background while displaying pride
in his homesteading ancestors and keen awareness of the seriousness of the combined
hardships of Depression and drought that were afflicting Iowa at that time:
There’s good men workin’ out in my country for a dollar a day. You put
sand on your back yard [for the Hawaiian party] an’ give people drinks
worth a dollar apiece, no better’n hard cider. Who are you? How many
[of] your granddaddies cut down trees an’ made along with the Indians?
What are you? The crops is all burned up, and here you are makin’ a
361
Stong, Farmer in the Dell, 87.
362
Stong, Farmer in the Dell, 223.
150
ocean. Where was your folks when mine was talkin’ to Black Hawk? You,
so mighty proud... What are you?... I get along as a rule. I guess we’re not
goin’ to.363
This speech distills the message of Stong’s Iowa farm novels and most of the films based
on them. They present a world populated by honest, hard-working, white Middle
Americans, and anyone who is unable to appreciate the sacred bond with the soil is
portrayed as petty, greedy, and duplicitous. All three of those traits are displayed by
Beatrice in Stranger’s Return, and likewise they are present in Maude Elverill’s
character, as she is the embodiment of Hollywood, described in the closing pages of the
novel as a “great, foolish city” because of its “silly pretenses, stucco fronts, insane
herbage,” and “mad careers and aspirations” which leaves it sorely lacking in the “solid
rock, the truth.”364
This novel about the film adaptations of Iowa novels was itself turned into a film
in 1936. Stong did not go to Hollywood to work on it because he and RKO Pictures
“couldn’t get within $5000 of each other on a price,”and he voiced some concern about
this in a letter to his friend Davis before the film’s release, writing, “They’ve let me know
nothing about what they did with the story.”365 He had reason to be concerned, as the
“louses” got hold of it and changed the plot considerably. Stong’s criticism of Hollywood
artifice, which was a key element of the novel, was largely removed in order to comply
with the Production Code’s ban against material criticizing the movie industry. Left in its
place is a forgettable film that still features the transplanted Boyer family, but its silly
363
Stong, Farmer in the Dell, 212-3.
364
Stong, Farmer in the Dell, 217.
365
Letter from Phil Stong to Harvey Davis, April 18, 1935. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of Iowa
Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
151
plot revolves around Ernie’s small-minded wife and star-crazed daughter Adie who team
up to extravagantly spend every penny he earns as an actor. An unimpressed Stong wrote
to Davis and told him, “I have seen the Farmer twice but as yet I haven't been able to
find any resemblance to the book except in the first general situation. There isn't a line of
my dialogue in it […]. I think I did a better job adapting this house with the money they
gave me than they did on the novel.”366
Inexperienced director Ben Holmes was put in charge of the project, which stars
Fred Stone as Ernie, Esther Dale as his wife Lou, and Jean Parker as Adrienne.367
Stone, whose performance in the film was described as “ruggedly real” by the Los
Angeles Times, was a vaudeville actor and close friend of Will Rogers.368 Review after
review singled out his performance as the chief reason to see the film, for example the
New York Times’ Frank Nugent declared the picture “quite a bore to the innocent
bystander [but] Fred Stone makes it endurable with his warm and believable
characterization.”369 Motion Picture Daily was the rare publication to offer a positive
recommendation, but it still went out of its way to praise the film’s lead: “Comparisons
with Will Rogers here are inevitable, and it cannot be said that Stone suffers particularly
by such a comparison.”370 Most reviews, however, were lukewarm at best, such as the
366
Phil Stong letter to Harvey Davis, June 22, 1936. Phil Stong Manuscripts, The University of Iowa
Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
367
The cast also included a young Lucille Ball as a sassy script girl.
368
“Best Performances in Current Pictures,” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1936, B1.
Frank Nugent, “Passing Notes on The Farmer in the Dell, at the Palace,” New York Times, March 7,
1936, 11.
369
“The Farmer in the Dell,” Motion Picture Daily, February 26, 1936, unknown page. Review is a
clipping found in the Farmer in the Dell file at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures
Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.
370
152
one in Variety which claims “there is no particular appeal to the outline, and […]
probably it will be better suited to the smaller spots, where they react more decisively to
homespun sentiment.”371
Even though the film is not an artistic success, the advance publicity material that
RKO sent to movie theater owners and newspapers provides an interesting window into
contemporary attitudes toward farm pictures. Most importantly the studio uses the packet
to emphasize the film’s rural virtues rather than its glitzy Hollywood setting, touting what
it calls the film’s two “capital claims to entertainment”: first is Phil Stong, described as “a
son of the Iowa farm belt” and “a past master of Middle Western farm folk drama,” and
second is Fred Stone, labeled “a ‘Natural,’ one of those rare people to be met once in a
lifetime – unpretending, kindly, gentle, and genuine.”372 The terms “natural” and
“genuine” are used again and again throughout the packet in an attempt to link this film
with the positive feelings many Depression era audiences had for “simple” rural people
and situations. As a case in point the studio proudly asserts, “The characters portrayed in
The Farmer in the Dell are all real people. The farmer, his wife, their daughter and the
girl’s Iowa boyfriend are all genuine Midwest rural folk.”373
The publicity materials also provide theaters with ideas for marketing the film,
from ideas for ad copy such as “An Intriguing Tale of Love, Laughter, and Pathos that
Surged in a Hay-Seed Heart” to special events such as a contest to determine the
“The Farmer in the Dell,” Variety, March 11, 1936, unknown page. Review is a clipping found in the
Farmer in the Dell file at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences,
Los Angeles, California.
371
372
Howard S. Benedict. Farmer in the Dell Publicity Booklet, RKO Pictures, 1936, 1. Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.
373
Benedict, 4.
153
“prettiest farmerette.” Theaters are also given ballyhoo ideas including staging an auction
in the lobby “with various rural household articles,” dressing their ushers and usherettes
in the costumes of “farmer boys and girls,” and partnering with a local dairy to give way
milk coupons or with a book store to use Phil Stong’s novels as a selling point.374 The
promotional packet demonstrates that Stong’s name still meant something to audiences
across America even though his star was no longer shining as brightly as it had just three
years earlier. Only one more of his novels, Career (1939), would be turned into a film,
but he had already made his mark on Hollywood and Iowa, helping to establish cinematic
expectations for the themes and visuals of Iowa films that have persisted into the present
day.375
374
Benedict, 20-22.
Grant Wood also left his mark on Hollywood, not only as part of King Vidor’s art collection, but with
the numerous spoofs of American Gothic that have appeared in films and television shows for decades.
Furthermore Wood also spent time in Hollywood in 1940, as one of nine artists commissioned to create
paintings to help advertise The Long Voyage Home, a film adaptation of a series of Eugene O’Neill plays.
The film was directed by John Ford and starred Iowa-born John Wayne, who is one of seven actors to
appear in Wood’s painting, Sentimental Ballad (1940). Wood received $10,000, plus expenses for the
work, so like Stong he was assuredly surprised by the easy money to be made in Hollywood.
375
154
CHAPTER FOUR
RUBBING THEIR NOSES IN THE FACTS:
RURAL IOWA AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
We still do not want to face fundamental facts. But if you are really sick with a
fundamental trouble, you must sooner or later admit it and act accordingly. You
don’t need to be downhearted about it. You can laugh and smile and face the facts
resolutely. But there is always a time when you have to stop kidding yourself.
Henry A. Wallace, New Frontiers, 1934
As opposed to their on-screen counterparts actual Iowa farmers received media
attention during the Depression era for their occasionally violent protests as well as their
corn husking exploits, but the two Iowa natives who garnered the most national media
attention in the early 1930s were President Herbert Hoover and soon-to-be Secretary of
Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. Republican Hoover, who spent the first ten years of his
life in the village of West Branch, and recently converted Democrat Wallace, a farm
magazine editor from Des Moines and son of a former Secretary of Agriculture,
represented two sides of the changing political climate in their home state and the nation.
These men were often described by others in terms of their connections to, or
embodiments of, Iowa, and Hoover in particular was fond of referring to his Midwestern
upbringing in speeches as a subtle testament to an inherently good character. The political
fortunes of these two men, however, were trending in opposite directions and their
respective ability to “perform” the role and fulfill the duties of a dependable and caring
Iowa man, had much to do with that.
These performances mattered because the nature of the times called for reassuring
leadership qualities. Popular culture scholar Anthony Harkins has provided a list of
155
characteristics that many Americans of this time period “saw as endangered by a modern,
industrialized, and increasingly atomized society” and foremost among these are a
“pioneer spirit, […] a closeness to nature and the land, authenticity and purity, rugged
individualism and a powerful sense of self, and the ‘horse sense’ of average people as
opposed to scientific and bureaucratic ways of thinking.”376 Thus, during the Depression,
Americans were hoping to be led by a trusted patriarchal authority in the mold of State
Fair’s Abel Frake and his later literary and cinematic descendents, a role for which
Hoover was particularly ill-suited despite his Iowa roots. On the other hand Wallace (and
Franklin Roosevelt, the president in whose Cabinet he served) displayed an ability to step
much more ably into those well-worn work boots. After all, Hoover even looked
uncomfortable holding an ear of Iowa corn, while Wallace was later convincingly
portrayed as a farmer by Grant Wood in a special portrait for the cover of Time
magazine.377 The personas of Hoover and Wallace were on prominent display during the
1932 presidential campaign and the early months of the New Deal when journalists,
artists, and political figures frequently resorted to tried and tested Iowa stereotypes to
explain the two men’s actions and intentions to the nation. Hoover's difficulties
ultimately opened the door for Franklin Roosevelt, who sensed the tenor of the times and
began portraying himself as a gentleman farmer in order to help gain the trust of the
American people and enhance his chances to win votes in the crucial Midwestern states.
376
Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 6.
Hoover’s photo with the ear of corn is described in Ray T. Tucker, “Is Hoover Human?” North
American Review, November 1928, 516; Wood’s cover of Time featuring Wallace was for the September
23, 1940 issue.
377
156
Some years following Roosevelt’s victory and his installation of Wallace as
Secretary of Agriculture, artistic units from various New Deal government agencies,
many with ties to the Department of Agriculture, began portraying Iowa in less
stereotypically pleasing ways as a way to help bring the true effects of the Depression
(and the government’s ongoing attempts to ease them) into much clearer focus. In the
latter 1930s a federally funded play, along with social documentary photographs and a
non-fiction film, all used Iowa as a setting for images of unrest, poverty, and
environmental distress, showing Americans that the middle of the country was anything
but the safe haven it had typically been made out to be. This turn toward social realism
occurred nationwide, and as a result images of Iowa came to resemble the more enduring
depictions of Oklahoma and its Dust Bowl migrants. The miserable plight of the “Okies,”
which still resonates with audiences today thanks to classic works by John Steinbeck,
John Ford, Dorothea Lange, Woody Guthrie and others, presented a difficult idea for
Americans: a notable example of white poverty in a country where Caucasians were
supposed to be superior. Charles J. Shindo writes about this startling fact in his study of
Dust Bowl migrants: “As white, Christian, native-born Americans, the migrants
presented [… a] threatening image of the inequality and injustice of the agricultural
economy” and in turn these destabilizing images led to the migrants unwittingly serving
as “catalysts of public debate.” 378 Whiteness scholar Matt Wray adds, “What had begun
as a distinctively regional term emanating from the upper South soon became
378
Charles J. Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1997), 2.
157
transregional [… and] poor whites […] posed a serious problem of classification and
categorization.”379
While the images of poor whites in Iowa did not generate as much attention as the
“Okies,” they served the same purpose for American audiences, which was, in Henry A.
Wallace’s words, to “rub their noses in the facts.”380 One of the facts that could
reasonably be gathered from these images is that the idea of the American Dream, which
had been codified in 1931 by James Truslow Adams, was in fact a myth. The idea of
America as a “land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man,
with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement,” seemed like a cruel
joke upon seeing, for example, images of Iowa children “celebrating” an austere
Christmas with a simple meal in a rickety shack (Figure A16).381 Activist scholar
Roxanne A. Dunbar, who has written that she was born into “a segment of white trash
called ‘Okies,’” in the 1930s, points out that the very existence of poor whites is
“potentially dangerous to the ruling class [because] we are the proof of the lie of the
American Dream.”382 Roosevelt, Wallace, and most other governmental representatives
of the ruling class ultimately suffered little, if at all, from the proliferation of these
“potentially dangerous” images. In his first inaugural address Roosevelt distanced
himself from Hoover’s position by assuring Americans, “The people of the United States
have not failed,” and that sentiment was present in these later images of poverty and hard
379
Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006), 73, 95.
380
Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 362.
381
James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1931), 404.
Roxanne A. Dunbar, “Bloody Footprints: Reflections on Growing Up Poor White,” in White Trash:
Race and Class in America, Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 75-77.
382
158
times.383 The visual documents not only displayed harsh realities, but as a whole they
were used to emphasize the government’s attempts at improving the situation, thereby
heading off potentially dangerous impulses.
“I have the brand of Iowa upon me”
Herbert Hoover, the only native Iowan to ascend to the U.S. presidency, was born
in 1874 in West Branch, a small town settled two decades earlier by Quakers from Ohio.
Located just east of Iowa City in the eastern part of the state, West Branch is surrounded
by farmland, but Hoover spent his boyhood in town as the son of the village blacksmith.
Orphaned before the age of ten as the result of separate illnesses that claimed his parents,
Hoover lived for a short time on his uncle’s nearby farm, where he helped with chores.
Soon, however, an eleven-year-old Hoover was sent to live with another aunt and uncle
in Oregon in 1885, thus bringing an end to an Iowa boyhood that he would later mine for
folksy stories to use in political speeches.
Following a remarkably successful early career which included a lucrative turn as
an international mining executive, Hoover rose to prominence in 1917 when he was
named the head of the U.S. Food Administration during World War I. His slogan “Food
Will Win the War” was taken to heart by the American population and the resoundingly
successful effort to supply rations to the troops led to a post-war position as leader of the
American Relief Administration, which put him in charge of overseeing the distribution
of millions of tons of foodstuffs to starving and displaced Europeans. With his political
career thus launched Hoover was named to a cabinet position as Secretary of Commerce
by President Harding in 1921, and was selected as one of the “Twelve Greatest American
383
Quoted in William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, 1973 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 21. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Presidential Inaugural Speech, March 4, 1933.
159
Men” by the New York Times in 1922 alongside such luminaries as Thomas Edison,
Henry Ford, and Woodrow Wilson.384
His business and political successes had taken him around the world and to the
corridors of power in Washington, D.C., but he always retained positive thoughts about
Iowa and in the ensuing years spoke often of his fondness for the people and geography
of his home state, ultimately choosing to locate his Presidential Library and Museum, as
well as his grave, in West Branch. Hoover expressed his warm feelings for his home state
in an informal address to the Iowa Society of Washington in November 1927, and his
bucolic descriptions of Iowa are not unlike those of the many commentators who five
years later would rush to white-wash the state’s reputation after farm protests turned
violent in some counties.385 The speech emphasizes the adventures Hoover enjoyed amid
the state's natural bounty, such as sledding down steep hillsides, splashing in a swimming
hole, and trapping rabbits in a forest. “I prefer to think of Iowa as I saw it through the
eyes of a ten-year-old boy,” he remembered, “and the eyes of all ten-year-olds are or
should be filled with the wonders of Iowa's streams and woods, of the mystery of
growing crops. His days should be filled with adventure and great undertakings, with
participation in good and comforting things.”386 One of the “good and comforting things”
Hoover most enjoyed was eating meals cooked by his Aunt Millie. He claimed, “I have
had opportunity to eat both of the presumably very best food in the world, as well as of
the very worst […] and when I ate the best I was still sure that Aunt Millie was a better
384
“Twelve Greatest American Men,” New York Times, July 23, 1922, 84.
Herbert Hoover, “Informal Address Before the Iowa Society of Washington.” November 1927. Located
on-line at <http://www.hooverassociation.org/hoover/speeches/iowa_society_of_washington.php>.
385
Hoover, “Informal Address.” Also located in Maud Stratton,'s book Herbert Hoover's Home Town: The
Story of West Branch (West Branch, IA: unknown publisher, 1948), 58.
386
160
cook. […] If all the cooks of Iowa are up to Aunt Millie's standard, then the gourmets of
the world should leave Paris for Iowa.”387
Within this speech Hoover shows awareness of his own sentimentalized
descriptions and attempts to convince his audience that he has not fallen prey to nostalgia
in his effusive praise of Iowa. “You may say that it is the appetite of youth,” he
acknowledges, “but Iowa through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy is not all adventure or
high living.” Instead, he notes, it “was filled with school […] and they were days of
chores and labor [including...] planting corn, hoeing gardens, learning to milk, sawing
wood, and the other proper, normal occupations for boys.”388 Here he mistakes his
nostalgic rural Middle American childhood for what is “proper” and “normal” for all
boys, and therein lies one reason for his later inability to empathize with the poorer
classes who bore the brunt of the Great Depression. Nevertheless he believed all of his
early experiences had enhanced his moral character and had helped vault him, at that
time, into the president's cabinet (and soon into the White House). Not surprisingly he
maintained a life-long belief in the Horatio Alger myth that everyone could succeed
through a similar combination of hard work and clean living. In his calculation the rural
Midwest provided an especially fertile environment for pulling oneself up by the
bootstraps, so he proudly declares, “I have the brand of Iowa upon me” (which he
literally did as the result of a childhood accident in his father's blacksmith shop), and
concludes his address by unequivocally stating, “There is no man or woman born in Iowa
387
Hoover, “Informal Address.” Also in Stratton, 60.
388
Ibid.
161
who is not proud of his native state,” a sentiment which was surely well received by the
members of the Iowa Society in attendance.389
Hoover remained proud of his Iowa roots and made tiny West Branch a key part
of his 1928 campaign for the presidency. Two months after the Republican Convention
he returned to his hometown on August 21 for an event at which he delivered the second
major address of his campaign.390 According to historian Ray Sweigert, Jr., “Interest in
Hoover's background was shown by friends and enemies alike,” and upon closer
inspection those friends and enemies discovered a reassuring “story of a chubby little boy
who lived earnestly and had little to say unless it was important and who was selfsupporting at the age of eleven.”391 Earnestness, reserve, and responsibility were three
key traits of any self-respecting small-town Iowan of the period, and this was just what
Hoover's advisors hoped would shine through in their campaign against their Democratic
opponent, New Yorker Al Smith, a Catholic who was strongly against Prohibition. The
1920s were a time of wide cultural divisions in America, and many voters refused to
compromise their values by electing a “wet” Catholic with ties to the Tammany Hall
political machine, so Hoover’s campaign emphasized his conservative Midwestern
Protestantism. “The idea was,” later remarked Timothy Walch, Director of the Hoover
Presidential Library, “you return home to reaffirm that your values were shaped by the
389
Hoover, “Informal Address.” Also in Stratton, 62.
390
Stratton, 125.
391
Ray Sweigert, Jr. Herbert Hoover of West Branch (West Branch, IA: Herbert Hoover Birthplace
Foundation, 1957), 10-11.
162
community where you were born, and to carry forward, as a representative of those
values, as a candidate for President of the United States.”392
With a national listening audience and a host of reporters on hand, an appropriate
scene was set for Hoover's address as “Iowa's tall corn was abundantly used in decorating
the speaker's platform” which stood in front of the estimated crowd of eighteen thousand
people.393 During his address Hoover frequently referred to himself as a “son of Iowa”
and described the “spirit of the people of Iowa” as “the spirit of the thousands of villages
and towns in all this wide land.”394 He also elaborated on the boyhood memories he had
invoked in his speech to the Iowa Society one year earlier in his list of “the joys of Iowa,”
which included:
[T]he glories of snowy winter, the wonder at the growing crops, the
joining of the neighbors to harvest, the gathering of apples, the pilgrimage
to the river woods for the annual fuel and nuts, the going to school, the
interludes from work, in the swimming hole, fishing in creeks, the hunting
for prairie chickens and rabbits in the hedges and woods.”395
These scenes would be at home in any cinematic or pictorial portrayal of the agrarian
myth, and he does not shy away from placing the state of Iowa on a lofty pedestal:
The good Lord made [Iowa] the richest stretch of agricultural land that
ever blessed any one sovereign government. It was settled by the
adventurous, the courageous, who fought their way across the everextending frontier; they have builded [sic] here in so short a period as
seventy-five years a state with the least poverty, the highest average
Timothy Walch quoted in “Hoover's 1928 Campaign Visit,” Herbert Hoover National Historic Site. June
22, 2010. <http://www.nps.gov/heho/historyculture/1928-campaign-visit.htm>. June 1, 2013.
392
393
Stratton, 125. The attendance figure comes from Wanda Corn, 83.
Herbert Hoover, “Speech in West Branch, Iowa” (August 21, 1928) in The New Day: Campaign
Speeches of Herbert Hoover, 1928 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1929), 47.
394
395
Hoover, “Speech in West Branch, Iowa” (August 21, 1928), 48.
163
intelligence, the most generous education which ever blessed a single
commonwealth.396
This description of Iowa as a sort of promised land that is the epitome of everything that
is right with America anticipates the literary, artistic, and cinematic portrayals of the state
that became popular in the 1930s and served as the focus of the two preceding chapters.
Hoover’s campaign thrust West Branch into the national spotlight and “all
through that summer, people new and old flocked [there].”397 Much of the attention was
focused on the modest house in which Hoover was born, with more than 17,000 people
visiting within the first year after his nomination.398 Hoover himself even returned there
to eat breakfast with then-owner Mrs. R. Portland Scellers during his 1928 trip, and in the
following months Mrs. Scellers set up a souvenir stand in her front yard, charging tourists
ten cents admission to step inside the house.399 When Hoover was a boy the house was a
small three-room cottage, but by the late 1920s a two story house had been added to the
property and was connected to the original dwelling by a covered walkway. This new
three-part structure became the subject of a painting by Grant Wood in 1931 titled The
Birthplace of Herbert Hoover (Figure A15). Surrounded by orderly trees showing autumn
leaves, the rather ordinary-looking white house sits at the center of the frame with a small
figure standing on the lawn pointing toward it, thereby directing the viewer's gaze. Art
historian Wanda Corn surmised that for Wood, “It wasn't President Hoover, but the
396
Hoover, “Speech in West Branch, Iowa” (August 21, 1928), 50.
397
Sweigert, 10.
398
Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983),
83.
399
Corn, 83.
164
sanctification of the Hoover birthplace, that inspired [him] to paint this picture” as he
“intentionally spoofed the American habit of enshrining meaningless monuments.”400
By the time Wood had finished his painting in 1931, Hoover's popularity was
dwindling as a result of the country's economic distress and his apparent inability to do
anything that might help alleviate the citizens' suffering. The Nation sent a correspondent
to the Midwest in the spring of 1931 and discovered voters who “display a striking
eagerness for an opportunity to turn [Hoover] out of office [because]… his refusal to
recognize the magnitude of the depression and particularly his failure to call Congress
into special session have hurt him beyond measure.”401 Hoover had been an appealing
candidate in a strong economic climate, but faced with adversity he lacked any sort of
personal charisma to charm enough voters into standing by him. As far back as his
relatively easy 1928 campaign, some commentators had witnessed warning signs that
indicated he was unfortunately too far removed from the practical and down to earth
Iowa-born everyman that he sometimes portrayed in speeches. For example Ray T.
Tucker of the North American Review observed Hoover's discomfort when posing for
press photos:
[He] stood for a picture of himself holding an ear of Iowa corn at
his birthplace, but he grasped the ear too awkwardly for one seeking
to catch farm votes, and too gingerly for one contemplating a bit of
the succulent vegetable that has brought fame to the state and trouble
to the Republican party. All through the campaign he has been the
most elusive figure veteran pressmen and photographers have ever
pursued.402
400
Corn, 83-4.
401
“Midwest Discontent.” The Nation May 6, 1931, 495.
402
Ray T. Tucker, “Is Hoover Human?” North American Review, November 1928, 516.
165
Hoover, in fact, rarely lived up to the 1930s cultural expectation of an Iowa man as an
affable, salt-of-the-earth type. Instead he is more commonly described as “sullen,”
“brusque,” and in the words of historian Donald Ritchie, as someone who “seemed to
combine an absolute confidence in his opinions with a painful sensitivity to any
criticism.”403
These personality traits were magnified even more during the 1932 presidential
campaign when the Democrats nominated gregarious New Yorker Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. In a story about the two nominees for the New York Times, Anne O’Hare
McCormick described the upper crust Roosevelt as someone “perfectly at home in the
world; his fluent charm is the fruit of assurance and savoir-faire,” while she characterized
Hoover as “shy, never quite at ease with life, never wholly relaxed or un-selfconscious.”404 Hoover’s uncomfortable bearing with people may simply have been a
matter of personality, but perhaps there is an element of class consciousness as well. His
modest Iowa boyhood was a different world compared to that of the rich and powerful
with whom he mixed as an adult. Perhaps he retained a measure of the Midwestern
inferiority complex while Roosevelt always felt comfortable among the influential and
wealthy class in which he was raised.
Given Hoover’s withdrawn nature and the attention demanded of him in
Washington during the Depression, he had delayed his active re-election campaign until
one month before the November balloting. This proved to be a miscalculation as
403
Donald A. Ritchie, Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932 (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 2007), 44.
Anne O’Hare McCormick, “The Two Men at the Big Moment,” New York Times, November 6, 1932,
SM1.
404
166
Roosevelt had the entire summer and early fall to assail Hoover for failing to take steps to
ease the effects of the Depression. When Hoover belatedly emerged onto the campaign
trail in October, even the supportive editors of Time magazine intimated that he had made
an error in judgment: “Out of the White House where he was buried in work, into the
Midwest where he was born in want, a harassed and long-suffering President last week
carried his case for reelection. For three years he had hugged his desk tighter than any
chief executive ever did. The country had lost sight of him as a human being.”405
No such problem existed for Roosevelt, who despite having his body ravaged by
polio, was barnstorming energetically across the country. Once Hoover hit the campaign
trail the two candidates’ differing demeanors were put on comparative display during
their respective whistle-stop campaign appearances. According to Donald Ritchie,
Roosevelt “loved a crowd and excelled” at these moments which “reminded the reporters
of a family party”, while Hoover “usually looked like he would have rather been
somewhere else” during his recitations of set speeches which often lacked the specific
references to local events that Roosevelt never failed to include.406 Hoover did, however,
offer specific greetings to the audiences who turned out for him in Iowa. Upon arriving in
Davenport on October 4 during his first trip of the 1932 campaign, he reminisced about
boyhood visits to that city and thanked the crowd for its warm reception, which provided
him with a “glow of happiness and encouragement.”
After leaving Davenport the train’s next stop was West Liberty, located
approximately ten miles from his home town, and there he was greeted by Mollie Brown
405
“Republicans: Out Steps Hoover,” Time, October 17, 1932, 11.
406
Ritchie, 139.
167
Carran, a “devoted and self-sacrificing” seventy-three year old woman who was his third
grade teacher.407 Journalists seized upon this rare public glimpse at someone from
Hoover’s boyhood and most major publications wrote about their reunion, noting that
Mrs. Carran remembered the president as a “very attentive, very obedient” student. She
joined him on the platform while he accepted a gift of six ears of corn, and a “band of
moppets” sang the “Iowa Corn Song” prior to his brief remarks.408 Hoover’s short speech
at this event relied upon the same sort of nostalgic rural Iowa stories that he had shared
during addresses to groups of Iowans in previous years. He remembered:
[My] adventures on an American farm in an American village are the
stimulus in life I could wish for every boy and girl. Working with one's
hands in the growing crops, the harvest, the preparation for winter, new
discoveries and adventures in the streams and the hills with every
changing season-all build for health and the understanding of life which is
denied many of our city children. No food will ever taste so good as the
family supper of those days; no sport will ever equal the mud-lined
swimming hole; no speed will ever seem so great as sliding down hills on
one's tummy. No prowess in ascendancy over wild animals will ever equal
the rabbit tracked through the snow to his lair; no deed of valor so great as
to bring him back alive.409
Mrs. Carran provided a corporeal link to those bygone days, so perhaps it was fitting that
after Hoover’s speech she boarded the train with the president and first lady as they
journeyed westward to Des Moines, where that same evening he presented the first major
address of his 1932 campaign.
Waiting in the Des Moines Coliseum was a “friendly, heckle-proof audience” that
had been carefully selected from a pool of local Republicans to hear the president’s
407
Herbert Hoover, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1932-33 (Washington, DC: United
States Office of the Federal Register, 1977), 457-458.
“Education: Resurrected Platitude,” Time, October 17, 1932, 29; and “Iowa Gives Hoover a Rousing
Welcome,” New York Times, October 5, 1932, 19.
408
409
Herbert Hoover, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1932-33, 458.
168
speech. His arrival, however, had been preceded by a two thousand person-strong
demonstration led by Farmers Holiday founder Milo Reno. The protesters had marched
through the city carrying signs with anti-Hoover messages such as “In Hoover we trusted;
now we are busted” and another that mocked both him and his Secretary of Agriculture:
“Hoover, Hyde, Hell and Hard Times – The Republican 4-H Club.”410 Despite rumors
that the protesters would each be carrying “half a dozen rotten eggs” to throw at Hoover’s
car, he arrived without incident at the venue, where he was presented to the crowd by a
former Speaker of the Iowa House, Joseph H. Anderson.411 Using some of Hoover’s own
typical pastoral rhetoric, while adding an allusion to the idea of manifest destiny,
Anderson’s introduction began, “Out of the open frontier of Iowa a farmer boy worked
and played among the children of the 1880s. The hardships of that frontier laid the
foundation for the splendor of his future service. While yet a boy he crossed our western
border and followed the star of his own destiny.”412
Upon taking the stage for an important speech that was broadcast nationally on
the NBC and CBS radio networks, Hoover referred to himself as a “son of the soil of
Iowa” and once again expressed his happiness at returning to his home state. Musing
upon the pioneer lives of his parents and grandparents who helped settle West Branch and
his own later relocation to the Pacific coast, he marveled at the way his own family
provided a “vivid picture of the change and the progress of American life” while
expressing “gratitude” toward Iowa because, “It was here that the doors of opportunity
410
“Republicans: Out Steps Hoover,” Time, October 17, 1932, 11.
411
“The Presidency: Opener,” Time, October 10, 1932, 7.
412
“Farmer Pays Tribute to Hoover,” New York Times, October 5, 1932, 19.
169
were first opened to me.”413 He went on to share his memories of growing up in the wake
of the Panic of 1873 and acknowledged the comparative seriousness of the current
economic depression, calling it an “unparalleled storm.”414 The bulk of his nearly twohour speech, however, served as a spirited, albeit weak defense of his administration’s
response to the crisis, particularly in regard to farm policies. He claimed, “My solicitude
and willingness to advance and protect the interests of agriculture is shown by the record.
Protection and advancement of this industry will have my continued deepest concern, for
in it lies the progress of all America,” but in his concluding statements he admitted, “I
come to you with no economic patent medicine especially compounded for farmers.”415
The record to which he referred was one largely of inaction, as he seemed unable to
understand the nature of farmers’ problems, and he admitted as much during his brief
remarks to a roomful of Iowa newspaper editors at the Fort Des Moines Hotel
immediately following his speech at the Coliseum. “Iowa,” he said, “is a mystery to me.
Everything has been given to your state that could be given in natural resources and other
possibilities, and yet we prove ourselves unable to capably administer it.”416 The “we”
upon which he lays blame seemingly does not include himself or his administration, as he
had just spent two hours defending his record on that score, so he is likely alluding to
political opponents and members of lower classes who have failed to pull themselves up
by their bootstraps.
413
Herbert Hoover, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1932-33 (Washington, DC: United
States Office of the Federal Register, 1977), 459.
414
Herbert Hoover, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1932-33, 461.
415
Herbert Hoover, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1932-33, 484-5.
416
Herbert Hoover, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1932-33, 489.
170
Responses to Hoover’s speech at the Coliseum were mixed. Time magazine
praised his “always earnest, sometimes touching” appeal, but reported that the delivery
was characterized by a “sing-song monotony” that only “occasionally lifted to a
tremulous note.”417 Meanwhile the White House supplied the New York Times with
copies of approving telegrams the president had received, such as one from George
Godfrey of Des Moines who wrote, “My greatest impression in regard to your speech in
Des Moines was the evident honesty and sincerity in your attempt to solve our problems.
I came to the meeting rather lukewarm as to your relation to our agricultural condition,
but am now convinced that you are honestly and forcefully giving the best you have in
trying to bring better conditions for agriculture.” Countering the positive messages were
remarks by unimpressed Democratic officials from the Midwest. House Majority Leader
Henry Rainey of Illinois pointed out, “The only remedy he had for agriculture was
‘Tighten up your belt and wait for dinner time,’” while another listener, June Fickel, vice
chairman of the Iowa Democratic Committee, reminded everyone that there were real
people feeling the consequences of inaction. “From the temper that is being manifested
by the farmers of Iowa,” she said, “I am certain that they will not be deluded by Hoover
promises this year as they were deluded four years ago.”418
In retrospect throughout Hoover’s brief campaign it seems as though he and his
supporters believed, or at least hoped the voting public would believe, that his Iowa roots
made him uniquely attentive to the needs of suffering farmers. A certain kind of
mythology developed around his boyhood years, encouraged by comments like those in
417
“Republicans: Out Steps Hoover,” Time, October 17, 1932, 11.
418
“Messages Praise President’s Speech,” New York Times, October 6, 1932, 16.
171
Joseph H. Anderson’s introduction of him, when he described Hoover as a “farmer boy.”
Hoover himself attempted to burnish his agricultural résumé that same night when
discussing the farm problem and he dubiously claimed, “It was in this industry that I was
born.”419 Perhaps these rhetorical interjections were a purposeful response to Franklin
Roosevelt’s own claims to be a “Hudson Valley farmer,” by which he was referring to
Krum Elbow, his mother’s estate in Hyde Park, New York. These claims, made during
Roosevelt’s campaign trips to the Midwest and West, led to a Time magazine article
about the back and forth sniping between supporters of each candidate over who had the
worthiest agricultural background. Henry Field, an Iowa-based seed entrepreneur and
radio magnate, who was the 1932 Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, revealed, “At
Krum Elbow, there is no hog lot, but there are a polo ground and tennis court. What
appears to be a silo is an elevated water tower for care of the lawn and the sunken
garden.” His claims were answered by former governor of Virginia Westmoreland Davis,
who visited Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate and claimed, “I found a herd of Guernsey
cattle, dairy and horse barns, poultry houses, a silo filled with corn ensilage, farm horses,
hogs, and over 600 laying hens. The fields were in corn, alfalfa, and pasture. There’s no
pseudo silo and sunken garden.”420
Roosevelt himself openly questioned Hoover’s knowledge of farm matters,
sarcastically declaring that as the president began his campaign trip to the Midwest, “For
the first time [he] had discovered that there is such a thing as a farm mortgage.” Hoover’s
Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills responded with what had become a typically false
419
Herbert Hoover, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1932-33, 485.
420
“Agriculture: Krum Elbow & Mortgages,” Time, October 10, 1932, 9.
172
reading of the president’s past, stating, “Herbert Hoover knows the meaning of ‘farm
mortgage’ as few men in high position do. He was born on an Iowa farm.”421 Despite
these attempts to equate Hoover’s Iowa boyhood with a necessarily agricultural
background, Midwestern voters overwhelmingly went for Roosevelt in the November
election. He captured every state west of Pennsylvania, most by at least a ten-point
margin, including his traditionally Republican home state of Iowa, which chose
Roosevelt 57.7%-40.0%, a rate virtually identical to the national split of 57.4%-39.7%.422
“As earthy as the black loam of the corn belt”
Even though Iowa voters repudiated one of their native sons in the 1932 election,
another Hawkeye with much deeper ties to Iowa agriculture soon emerged as one of the
most powerful figures in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal cabinet. Lapsed Republican
Henry A. Wallace, a hybrid seed corn pioneer and editor of the influential Wallaces’
Farmer journal, agreed to serve as the new Secretary of Agriculture, a post which his
father Henry C. Wallace had held under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
Born on his family’s farm near tiny Orient, Iowa (approximately sixty miles southwest of
Des Moines), Henry A. was part of one of the most notable farming families the state had
ever seen. According to his biographers John C. Culver and John Hyde, “Nothing about
the Wallace family ever quite fit the norm… They were part of, but apart from, the
general husbandry of Iowa.” The family patriarch, Reverend Henry (usually called
“Uncle Henry”), became a major landholder, established family control of the region’s
421
Agriculture: Krum Elbow & Mortgages,” Time, October 10, 1932, 9.
Election data obtained from Dave Leip, “1932 Presidential Election Data - National,” Atlas of U.S.
Presidential Elections, 2012, <uselectionatlas.org> (accessed March 9, 2014). For a fascinating closer look
at the 1932 election campaign in Iowa see Lisa Ossian, The Depression Dilemmas of Rural Iowa, 19291933 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011), 151-168.
422
173
most important farming periodical, and was routinely wooed by politicians to run for
office. Culver and Hyde note that he was “consumed” by a “belief that man must worship
God through service to his fellow man. And the men Uncle Henry cared about most were
farmers.” His descendants carried on his mission, as this “cause of religion and duty and
agriculture rolled into one [was] stamped indelibly on the Wallace family name.”423
Uncle Henry’s son (and Henry A.’s father), Henry C., served alongside Herbert
Hoover in the Harding/Coolidge cabinet, where the two were mortal enemies. Hoover
tried unsuccessfully to strip the Agriculture Department of some of its powers, possibly
because he distrusted the “Farm Bloc,” a Wallace creation that brought together rural
congressmen from both sides of the aisle to advance agricultural interests. Wallace,
meanwhile, was disturbed that Hoover routinely sided with big business instead of
agriculture, especially on tariff questions. In his book Our Debt and Duty to the Farmer,
Henry C. had Hoover in mind (and anticipated the future president’s later reaction to the
Depression) when he wrote that some men were “willing to entertain a feeling of
sympathy for farmers who are having a hard time, provided that sympathy costs them
nothing and further provided that they are not asked to cease worshipping at the shrine of
laissez-faire.”424 Hoover, for his part, later wrote of Wallace in his memoirs, “My
colleague, the Secretary of Agriculture, was in truth a fascist, but did not know it, when
he proposed his price and distribution-fixing legislation in the McNary-Haugen bill.”425
423
John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New
York: Norton, 2000), 4.
424
425
Henry C. Wallace, Our Debt and Duty to the Farmer. 1925 (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 169.
Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920-1933 (New
York: MacMillan, 1952), 174.
174
McNary-Haugenism, which was heavily influenced by Henry A. and his studies
of an ancient Chinese grain storage system, would have established a national “evernormal granary” to keep commodity prices steady through government storage and
exports. Hoover and Coolidge fought against the plan, earning the eternal enmity of all
Wallaces. In the months before its defeat, Henry C. worked doggedly to change minds in
Washington, but he only succeeded at endangering his own health. In October 1924,
plagued by severe sciatica and a gall bladder that needed removal, he died rather
suddenly at age fifty-eight of toxemic poisoning, while still in office. Henry A. was
crestfallen by his father’s passing, and he placed much of the blame on their chief
political rival. Five years later he confided to his family’s biographer, “I hope I never
again feel as intensely antagonistic toward any one as I did then… for a while there, I
felt, almost, as if Hoover had killed my father.”426
When Hoover was nominated for the presidency in 1928, Wallace became an
active campaign participant for the first time. Embracing his inner Hamlet he was, at last,
unable to resist opposing his father’s enemy, especially after Democratic candidate Al
Smith announced his support for an agricultural plan similar to McNary-Haugen during a
campaign speech in Omaha. Wallace was in attendance and later marked that speech as
the event that turned him into a Democrat, even though he remained a registered
Republican until 1936.427 “I think,” he wrote in Wallaces’ Farmer, “it would be a fine
thing for farmers who are thinking about the welfare of Iowa agriculture, if they would
426
Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 285. Interestingly, Lord titled
one of the sections of his book “Corn Belt Hamlet?”, in reference to Henry A. Wallace.
427
Lord, 275-6.
175
plunk their votes solidly for Smith.” 428 Wallace continued to voice his measured support
for the Democrat in print, in public speeches, and during a campaign road trip across
Iowa with future Farm Holiday founder Milo Reno and other like-minded individuals.
Biographers Culver and Hyde point out that Reno and Wallace constituted an odd pair of
traveling companions: “an elderly rabble-rouser with a bullying air and a solemn young
editor who loathed the gaudiness of political combat.”429 Nevertheless Wallace enjoyed
the trip and the thrill of “raising his voice against tariff-fed industrialists who were out to
skin farmers further and increase their own unseemly corpulence by hoisting tariffs some
more.”430 Russell Lord, the family’s biographer, also notes that Wallace “liked the spirit
of these nonconforming farm rebels, but he seldom placed great value on their
judgments,” an observation which goes a long way toward explaining the later falling-out
between Reno and Wallace in response to the New Deal farm reforms.431
Wallace, Reno, and Hoover’s other opponents were ultimately unsuccessful, as Al
Smith lost the election in Iowa and elsewhere by a wide margin. Wallace fully expected
this outcome, which he admitted in a speech before a meeting of the Farmers’ Union and
in the pages of Wallaces’ Farmer less than two months before the election. “I honestly
think,” he announced, “that Hoover will carry Iowa by 200,000 votes.”432 Wallace proved
to have excellent prognostication abilities, as Hoover actually won the state by 244,259
428
Henry A. Wallace, “Odds and Ends,” Wallaces’ Farmer, September 28, 1928, 7.
429
Culver and Hyde, 87.
430
Lord, 277.
431
Lord, 182.
432
Henry A. Wallace, “Odda and Ends,” Wallaces’ Farmer, September 28, 1928, 7.
176
votes, a margin of 61.8% to 37.6%.433 Even in a losing cause, Wallace’s foray into
politics set the stage for his invitation to join Roosevelt’s team four years later. In the
meantime he experienced the onset of the Depression from the editor’s desk at Wallaces’
Farmer, which provided him with daily reminders of the ways in which real farmers were
suffering. Letters containing “heart wrenching cries for help” poured in, and he wrote
privately to Omaha attorney Roy M. Harrop, “I am afraid that the cup of iniquity of the
Republican party is not yet full in spite of the very hard times from which so many
people are suffering this year.”434 He rarely used Wallaces’ Farmer as a bully pulpit from
which to batter Hoover, even though his exasperation with Hoover’s inaction was clear to
those who knew him. As a case in point, a few months after the stock market crash he
told Russell Lord, “I still think Hoover’s ideas about helping agricultural recovery, and
general recovery, are about 99 percent wrong… The smash we’ve had already isn’t
anything to the smash that will come.”435
During this time his analytical mind for agricultural matters, as well as his famous
family name, brought him to the attention of Franklin Roosevelt and his advisors. Henry
Morgenthau, who also published a farm newspaper, The American Agriculturist, was the
first member of FDR’s inner circle to meet with Wallace during the spring of 1932.
Around the same time at a series of conferences Wallace became drawn to the “domestic
allotment” plan of M.L. Wilson, an agricultural economics professor at Montana State
Agricultural College, who proposed that farmers be paid for agreeing to limit production.
Dave Leip, “1928 Presidential Election Data - National,” Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, 2012,
<uselectionatlas.org> (accessed March 9, 2014).
433
434
Wallace’s letter to Roy Harrop quoted in Culver and Hyde, 92.
435
Lord, 285.
177
Wilson had struck up a friendship with Rex Tugwell, a Columbia University economics
professor, who was an early member of Roosevelt’s brain trust, and an interested student
of agricultural policy. These connections led to an August summons from Roosevelt
himself, inviting Wallace to Krum Elbow to discuss the plight of Midwestern farmers,
since Roosevelt was making them a key target of his campaign. Wallace was won over by
the Democratic nominee, and he related many of the details of their meeting in the pages
of Wallaces’ Farmer, describing Roosevelt as a “man with fresh, eager, open mind, ready
to pitch into the agricultural problem at once.” In a slightly veiled barb aimed at Hoover,
he explained, “Roosevelt does not have the extreme pride of personal opinion that has
characterized some of our more bull-headed presidents. He knows that he doesn’t know it
all, and tries to find out all he can from people who are supposed to be authorities.”436
From this point forward Wallace was committed to the Roosevelt campaign. He
and Wilson collaborated on a draft of a key agricultural policy speech that Roosevelt
delivered in Topeka, and he became more outspoken in his Wallaces’ Farmer column. In
the October 29th issue he stated, “The only thing to vote for in this election is justice for
agriculture. With Roosevelt, the farmers have a chance – with Hoover, none. I shall vote
for Roosevelt.”437 Privately he made even more caustic comments about Hoover,
especially after the president’s disheartening campaign speech in Des Moines in early
October. A wry Wallace wrote to Morgenthau, “[A farmer] quietly sitting in his home
436
Henry A. Wallace, “Sizing Up Eastern Attitudes,” Wallaces’ Farmer, September 3, 1932, 18.
437
Henry A. Wallace, “Odds and Ends,” Wallaces’ Farmer, October 29, 1932, 5.
178
must have been amazed to learn from Herbert Hoover that the depression was so
completely conquered.”438
Wallace surely reveled in the election results that witnessed the political fall of his
family’s longtime nemesis, but he had little time to gloat because just after the first of the
year Roosevelt sent him, along with Wilson and Tugwell, to Washington, D.C. to oversee
the impending reorganization of the Department of Agriculture. One month later, on
February 12, Roosevelt asked Wallace to become his Secretary of Agriculture. In his
final column for Wallaces’ Farmer, which ran on March 4, 1933, the date of Roosevelt’s
inauguration, Henry A. said goodbye to his readers and looked forward to his new
responsibilities:
In going to Washington in this new administration, I hope to attack the
problems of this day with as much courage and vigor as my father brought
to the same task twelve years ago… While I am away from Iowa, no
matter how long or how short the time, I shall continue to feel that I
belong to Wallaces’ Farmer and Iowa Homestead and the farmers it
serves… It is going to be hard not to be able to talk to corn belt farmers
through the columns of this paper, as I have done for years, but of course
my time and energy now belong to my new work. I am going to miss
particularly the farm letters that come in to the paper on the hundred
subjects that interest and touch farm people. I shall miss, too, the farm
people that dropped into the office to talk over feeding and marketing and
corn growing… When I come back to Iowa, I hope prices will be higher,
mortgages smaller, and taxes lower. I will try to do my part in
Washington. No doubt I will make many mistakes, but I hope it can
always be said that I have done the best I knew.439
These words would have made his father and grandfather proud, as he was pledging
himself to uphold his sacred duty to lift up farmers. Based on his family name and
consistent support for agriculture, his readers trusted that he had their best interests at
438
Wallace’s letter to Henry Morgenthau quoted in Culver and Hyde, 104.
439
Henry A. Wallace, “Odds and Ends,” Wallaces’ Farmer, March 4, 1933, 5.
179
heart, which is something that could not be said about Herbert Hoover, even though his
sporadic returns to the state were marked by much pomp and circumstance in celebration
of a local boy who had achieved great things. Instead Henry Wallace and his ancestors
earned respect based on their day-to-day deeds, as Russell Lord observed, “Iowa farmers
knew [the] Wallaces not only by what they wrote in their paper but face to face in
[regional] rough-and-tumble controversies.”440
Farmers in Iowa and throughout the Midwest were familiar with Henry A.
Wallace, but he was a relative newcomer to the national political scene and therefore
generated a good deal of national interest. It also became quickly apparent that the
Department of Agriculture, which also included Rex Tugwell as Assistant Secretary,
would be a major player in Roosevelt’s administration, so in short order a number of
national publications presented articles introducing Wallace to a curious populace. There
proved to be little consensus about the new Secretary of Agriculture, partially as a result
of partisan sentiment, but mostly because observers were not sure what to make of him
since he was a bit of an eccentric and did not conduct himself as a typical politician.
Following the preliminary announcement of Roosevelt’s early cabinet selections, the New
York Times noted, “There is real interest in Mr. Wallace, because the other economic
classes have begun to awaken to the fundamental necessity of restoring the buying power
of farmers.”441 Initial concerns about Wallace’s role in the cabinet regarding his potential
partiality and radicalism were also addressed by the Times. “The President-elect,” wrote
James A. Hagerty, “feels that Mr. Wallace is not a sectional choice, for, although a
440
Lord, 182.
Arthur Krock, “Roosevelt’s Cabinet of 11 Exceeds Hoover’s By One,” New York Times, February 26,
1933, E1.
441
180
resident of the mid-West, he is well known to farmers and their leaders in the South and
Pacific Coast.”442 Meanwhile Arthur Krock took the temperature of Capitol Hill
Democrats who “ventured to hope that the solid phalanx of ‘sound money’ Cabinet
associates would hold down his fiscal and farm allotment ideas.”443 Wallace’s ties to the
Republican Party were also a concern, although he was not alone in the cabinet in that
regard, as Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and Treasury Secretary William Woodin, were
also still members of the G.O.P.
As might be expected Wallace’s selection was a popular choice in the Midwest,
because as Times correspondent Roland M. Jones reported,
The new Secretary of Agriculture is a true product of the corn belt. In
birth, education and career Henry A. Wallace is thoroughly representative
of the agricultural interests. The corn belt believes him to be as able as he
is earnest, for it knows him as one who has the objective interest of the
scientist in his specialty combined with the sympathy of one who has lived
among the grass roots.
The fact that he was “thoroughly representative” of the Midwest most likely was
understood as a true compliment, as Americans of the era were accustomed to positive
cultural messages about heartland farmers, especially those from Iowa, as has been
detailed in the preceding chapters. Another Midwesterner pleased with Wallace’s
selection was author Ferner Nuhn, an Iowa native himself, who wrote a biographical
sketch for The Nation titled “Wallace of Iowa” (note that the title is not simply
“Wallace”… his home state matters). Published just after the inauguration, Nuhn’s article
highlights the importance of place in the development of Wallace’s strong sense of social
James A. Hagerty, “Roosevelt Names Wallace, Farley as Cabinet Aides,” New York Times, February 27,
1933, 1.
442
443
Arthur Krock, “Capital Democrats Cool to Cabinet,” New York Times, February 23, 1933, 2.
181
justice and invokes the city/country divide that was also common in the art and literature
of the period:
Wallace has lived among farmers all his life… For in Iowa, where he was
reared, agriculture is the basic industry. The towns and cities with their
heterogeneous architecture, their chambers of commerce, their pseudoindustrial, Hooverized Republican tendencies seem hollow and unreal in
comparison. But beyond the cities things take on a life that seems
authentic. The pattern of windbreak and farm cluster, the shapes of barn
and silo, the design of fields, impress one immediately as the basic and
fundamental expression of the state… [T]here is little doubt that in Henry
A. Wallace the Middle West contributes to national affairs an authentic
figure.444
Perhaps Wallace’s ascension to a position of influence in Washington, then, can be
partially attributed to the state where he had lived his entire life. Unlike Hoover he was
perceived as an “authentic” Iowan, who not only knew how to properly hold an ear of
corn, but also how to develop more robust strains of hybrid corn, evidenced by his
involvement in the 1926 formation of what became the Pioneer Corn Company, which
now, as part of DuPont, has become the largest American producer of agricultural seeds.
Not everyone shared Nuhn’s enthusiasm for Wallace’s appointment, as shown by
some of the comments in the New York Times even before Roosevelt had taken office. A
far more mean-spirited attack against his character, however, appeared in Time magazine
during the week of the inauguration. An article, possibly written by conservative editor
Henry Luce, questions Wallace’s qualifications for the position, noting that he has never
held public office, and dismissively claims, “Wallace, 44, got into the Cabinet because of
a family grudge against Herbert Hoover.” He is described as “no ‘dirt farmer,’” and a
“gloomy, solitary man preoccupied with the farmer’s woes as seen from an editorial
office,” plus he is derided for “loudly advocat[ing] currency inflation to relieve farm
444
Ferner Nuhn, “Wallace of Iowa,” The Nation, March 15, 1933, 125-6.
182
debt.” Finally, the article closes with a cautionary sentence which picks up on a chief
concern of the Congressmen interviewed earlier by the New York Times: “Around the
Cabinet table his radicalism will probably need checking by cooler, more conservative
heads.”445 These descriptions are somewhat softened versions of Time’s typical
characterization of Milo Reno, Wallace’s former campaigning partner, as the loud
demeanor and radical ideas of the former similarly attracted Luce’s scorn. It was much
better, in the eyes of Time’s editor, to wait patiently and hope for improvements rather
than to consciously make an attempt to change the status quo.
Wallace was not about to remain inactive as had Hoover and his Agriculture
Secretary Arthur Hyde, so he threw himself into his work following the inauguration,
feeling that emergency actions were necessary to provide immediate help to farmers.
Within days he and his staff, with input from representatives of the country’s leading
farm organizations, put together what would become the Agricultural Adjustment Act,
the centerpiece of which was M.L. Wilson’s domestic allotment plan. Placed on the fast
track in response to the threatening actions of Milo Reno and his rebellious farmers in the
Midwest, the bill was passed into law on May 12, 1933. This was one of the first major
pieces of New Deal legislation, and President Roosevelt proudly called it “the most farreaching farm bill ever proposed in peacetime.”446 The basic goal of the act was to raise
commodity prices by reducing surplus, which was to be accomplished by paying
subsidies to farmers for leaving some land unsown, plowing up some fields that had
already been planted, and (as would be announced later) slaughtering portions of
445
“The Cabinet: Roosevelt’s Ten,” Time, March 6, 1933, 15.
446
Culver and Hyde, 119.
183
livestock herds. A new government agency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration
(or, AAA), was created to oversee this process. Time reacted predictably to what it
termed a “monster farm measure” that was the “most radical experiment so far in the
New Deal… [which] bulged with dictatorial powers over the nation’s food supply.”
Without any apparent evidence the article also gloatingly claims, “Secretary of
Agriculture Wallace seemed all at once overwhelmed by the magnitude of his job and the
obstacles that lay ahead.”447
To be sure, Wallace had his hands full with the new bureaucracy he had helped to
create, often working “from early morn until midnight and often later.” He remembered,
“Those were hectic days. Somehow we got through them though it was a rare day when
an irresistible desire didn’t crash into an immovable fact, with heavy damage to frayed
nerves.”448 In order to personally explain this important piece of legislation to the people,
he traveled the country giving speeches, delivering radio addresses, and writing articles
for high-profile publications, such as a gigantic eight-column article in the New York
Times on “The Purposes of the Farm Act.”449 Perhaps his highest profile appearance was
his major address, “A Program for the Corn Belt,” which he delivered during Farm Week
at the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago. Touted as “one of the most
important speeches delivered by a cabinet member since the Democratic administration
took office,” a live audience of more than one hundred thousand people was in
attendance, and it was broadcast to millions more listeners around the country on the
447
“Monster in Motion,” Time, May 22, 1933, 17.
448
Henry A. Wallace, New Frontiers (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934), 170.
449
Henry A. Wallace, “The Purposes of the Farm Act,” New York Times, June 4, 1933, XX3.
184
NBC and CBS networks.450 Stating, “The Corn Belt has always been my country and
nearly all of my life I have lived there,” Wallace opened the speech by identifying
himself with his home region, which in 1933 was a sure-fire way to gain the audience’s
trust, and he went on to discuss the economic and weather conditions that have brought
the Midwest to its current disastrous situation. The crux of his speech was his unveiling
of the AAA’s new “Corn-Hog Program,” which required the immediate slaughter of six
to seven hundred million pounds of live pork and a substantial reduction in corn acreage
for the 1934 growing season. Few people realize, he argued, “what a terrible mess this
richest section of the world continues to be in unless it is willing to dig deep in thought
and action.”451
Wallace knew the Corn-Hog Program would be controversial, but he hoped that
his reasonable explanation and personal credibility would stem most of the rebellious
impulses. “It was a foregone conclusion,” he remembered, “that the public would not like
the idea of slaughtering baby pigs… To hear them talk, you would have thought pigs are
raised for pets. Nor would you realize that the slaughter of little pigs might make more
tolerable the lives of a good many human beings dependent on hog prices.”452 Wallace
and the AAA were strongly opposed by Milo Reno and other dissenters, not only because
of the antithetical destruction of livestock and crops, but also because economic relief had
Earl Mullin, “Farmer Throng at Fair Today to Hear Wallace Today,” Chicago Tribune, August 18,
1933, 7; and Century of Progress Promotion Department Press Division, “Farm Week,” Century of
Progress Press Release (August 18, 1933), A Century of Progress Records, Special Collections and
University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago.
450
Henry A. Wallace, “A Program for the Corn Belt,” Address at Farmers’ Week, Century of Progress,
August 18, 1933, Series X, Box 21, Henry A. Wallace Papers, The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City,
Iowa.
451
452
Henry A. Wallace, New Frontiers, 180.
185
not yet been seen in the Midwest, even though modest gains had been made in parts of
the South and West. Reno described the AAA as “diabolical” and said, “Wallace would
make a second-rate county agent if he knew a little more.” Time even reported a
November protest in Shenandoah, Iowa, where “a dummy marked Henry Wallace was
soundly spanked by three stout rustics with barrel staves.”453 Despite the backlash he
endured in the fall of 1933, Wallace was more personally troubled by the earlier plow-up
of crops in the fields and the position in which the Coolidge and Hoover administrations
had put him. “To have to destroy a growing crop,” he wrote, “is a shocking commentary
on our civilization. I could tolerate it only as a cleaning up of the wreckage from the old
days of unbalanced production.”454
The protests of fall 1933 dwindled after the weather turned colder Wallace had
delivered an important speech in Des Moines that reassured Midwestern farmers that they
had not been forgotten even though assistance may have been slow in reaching them.
“Wallace Speech Does Much to Counteract Influence of Strike Leaders,” announced the
New York Times, but the arrival of government subsidy checks on farmers’ doorsteps was
ultimately the tonic that was needed to cool their revolutionary passions.455 The amounts
were not large, but they offered a life-line to the struggling farmers, along with a promise
of more to come. Their ultimate acceptance of the AAA had a far-reaching impact that
permanently altered the relationship between farmers and government in this country. As
Russell Lord observed,
453
“Agriculture: Money to the Grass Roots!”, Time, November 6, 1933, 18.
454
Henry A. Wallace, New Frontiers, 174-5.
455
Roland M. Jones, “Radicalism Wanes in Corn Belt Area,” New York Times, November 19, 1933, E6.
186
Starved and bewildered at the outset, the rampageously individualistic
American farmer, having tasted now the bread and honey of adjustment
payments and a mild inflation, with a resulting rise in braced prices, sent
delegation upon delegation to Washington demanding that the Department
have done with such mild tail-twitchings and other gentle gestures of
guidance, and assume absolute control.456
The illusion and image of the solitary, independent family farmer still remained in the
nation’s cultural memory, but the reality was all but gone as a result of the domestic
allotment plan which still forms the basis of much agricultural policy today.
Perhaps that development does mean Wallace was a somewhat revolutionary,
even radical figure, as his detractors in the 1930s suggested. By and large, though, his
work earned him enormous amounts of respect from people inside and outside of
Washington. Owen L. Scott, who went on to serve as executive editor of U.S. News and
World Report for 31 years, wrote an article on the first anniversary of Roosevelt’s New
Deal in which he named Wallace as the “leading member” of the Cabinet. In just a year
he rose from being “pretty much an unknown factor” to being the “undisputed boss of his
bailiwick.” He continues:
Washington appraisers… almost uniformly are awarding the palm for
effectiveness and for growth in national standing to the Iowa member of
the cabinet. They find in him a quiet, unassuming individual and one who
will go to great lengths to avoid offending others. But he has stood up
under all kinds of fire, maintained his good nature and poise, and at no
time has been given to making wild promises or painting gilded pictures of
the lot that faces the farmer… Mr. Wallace inclines to the middle course...
He has earned a name as the greatest realist among the new deal leaders by
his frank facing of problems. There is plenty of opportunity ahead for any
man to stub his toe, but after the first year of the new deal the secretary of
agriculture admittedly is the outstanding figure among the men who are
running the Washington show.457
456
Lord, 360.
Owen L. Scott, “Wallace Rated as the Leading Member of the President's 'Recovery' Cabinet,”
scrapbook clipping from unknown publication, March 1934. Box 69, Reel 41, Henry A. Wallace Papers,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
457
187
Laudatory articles like this one were rather common. “Coincidentally, and without really
trying,” Wallace’s biographers note, “the once little-known farm editor was becoming an
appealing national figure. Photos of him peering intently at a farm animal or inspecting a
cornfield – often in shirtsleeves, his hair askew – were commonplace in newspapers and
farm magazines.”458
Henry A.’s wife Ilo also became a minor media celebrity, in large part because
she was able to be characterized as a supportive and domestically capable Midwestern
housewife. Typical of the attention given her was Lois Schenk’s article for The Farmer
magazine detailing a visit to the Wallaces’ home:
[Mrs. Wallace] came forward to meet me – sweet, cool, and pretty. So
simple was her greeting, I might have been in one of our Mid-western
farm homes instead of in Washington. We sat down to chat of homely
things. She has the eyes, I thought to myself, of one who looks calmly out
upon the milling stream of life, quietly chooses what she wants from it,
and doesn't make a great commotion about it… But not until we spoke of
kitchen affairs, of stirring up your favorite recipes and serving them up to
an anticipating family, did that soft glow come into her eyes. “I like to
cook,” she cried softly.”459
The Christian Science Monitor likewise emphasized her traditional gender role,
describing her as “one of the prettiest and most gracious of the Cabinet wives.” So, as Ilo
Wallace played the sweet, simple Ma Frake type, Henry A. was the capable and “natural”
Pa Frake. The Christian Science Monitor article contributes a treasure trove of
stereotypical descriptions for an Iowa male of that period, or perhaps from any period as
Wallace is incorrectly characterized as a “Real Dirt Farmer” and as someone who
458
Culver and Hyde, 150.
Lois Schenk, “Mrs. Wallace Plans Her Meals Simply,” The Farmer, January 20, 1934, 19. Scrapbook
clipping, Box 69, Reel 41, Henry A. Wallace Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
459
188
“brought to Washington the informality of the country… he has the slightly stooped
shoulders often common to those who have lived close to the soil. His hair does not
respond easily to a comb and across his brow are lines plowed deep by thought.” 460
Another indication of his notoriety is his selection as the fourth best political speaker in
the nation (behind FDR, NRA head Hugh Johnson, and Senator William Borah) in a
national poll of radio broadcasting officials, which was due to his “very natural manner
and pleasing Midwest accent.”461 But journalist John Franklin Carter contributes the most
representative quote, offering a direct parallel between contemporary views of Wallace
and the pastoral image of his home state that Grant Wood and Phil Stong had helped
popularize: “He epitomizes American civilization in its most genuine form… He is as
earthy as the black loam of the corn belt, as gaunt and grim as a pioneer.”462
Herbert Hoover, of course, also claimed to possess the pioneer spirit of his
forebears, and after quietly departing the national stage following his defeat, he reemerged in the fall of 1934 with a book titled The Challenge to Liberty which defended
his principles and questioned the New Deal.463 The book was released to the public on
September 28, 1934, following the publication of two provocative installments in the
Saturday Evening Post.464 The occasion for the book, as he writes on page one, is his
“Name of Wallace Ranks High in Capital on Farm Matters,” Christian Science Monitor, February 21
1934, 3. Scrapbook clipping, Box 69, Reel 41, Henry A. Wallace Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
460
461
“Roosevelt Heads List in Radio Appeal Poll,” New York Times, August 2, 1934, 19.
John Franklin Carter (writing as “Unofficial Observer”), The New Dealers (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1934), 76-7.
462
463
Herbert Hoover, The Challenge to Liberty (New York: Scribner’s, 1934).
Herbert Hoover, “The Challenge to Liberty,” The Saturday Evening Post, September 8, 1934, 5-7, 6970, 72; and Herbert Hoover, “Consequences to Liberty of Regimentation,” The Saturday Evening Post,
September 15, 1934, 5-7, 85-6, 88-9.
464
189
observation that, “Not only in the United States, but throughout the world, the whole
philosophy of individual liberty is under attack.”465 The remainder of the book sets up a
contest between the American principle of liberty, as characterized by triumphant
moments at such places as Lexington, Gettysburg, and San Juan Hill, to the restrictive
principles of socialism, communism, and fascism, which, he worries, are being absorbed
into the American system through the New Deal. He peppers his commentary with praise
for the Constitution and argues that American liberty and economic health were
recovering under his care in 1932 before suffering a set-back with the implementation of
the New Deal in 1933.
In our present America, Hoover would be a darling of conservative media for
making such claims, as he would enjoy a certain measure of popularity from preaching to
the choir. No wonder, then, that his supporters leaped to his defense after the New York
Times book reviewer, John Chamberlain, offered a sharply critical analysis of the work.
Calling the writing style “turgid and emotional” as well as “bitter” and “brooding,” he is
also put off by the straw-man argument on which the book’s argument rests. “We still
have a two-party system,” he writes, “And as long as labor has the right to strike..., and as
long as businessmen have the right to vote for men to do away with price-fixing, and as
long as newspapers can say what they please, where is the ‘menace’ to liberty?”466 The
Times published a number of Letters to the Editor in response to this review, and notable
among them was a missive from humorless John Spargo, of Old Bennington, Vermont,
who wrote, “Mr. Hoover has approached a great subject with seriousness and even
465
Hoover, The Challenge to Liberty, 1.
John Chamberlain, “Books of the Times,” book review of Herbert Hoover’s The Challenge to Liberty,
New York Times, September 28, 1934, 21.
466
190
reverence. Those whose literary taste has been depraved by jazz and wisecracking, so that
they demand that subjects of the most momentous importance be written about in trivial
language, will call the book dull. People who have escaped that debasement of taste will
enjoy it.”467
Henry A. Wallace was among the readers who did not enjoy it, at least not the
first excerpt in the Saturday Evening Post. Responding to Hoover’s opening salvo, the
Agriculture Secretary objected to Hoover’s characterization of the farm program as a
“usurpation of the primary liberties of man by government,” and said, “He has inferred
that the kind of liberty we ought to have in the economic world is the liberty one takes in
running by a red light in an automobile.”468 Coincidentally just one week after Hoover’s
book was published, Wallace released a tome of his own titled New Frontiers. 469 The
book details his experiences leading the Department of Agriculture during the first year
of the New Deal, and it received near-unanimous positive reviews. John Chamberlain, no
fan of Hoover’s writing, judged New Frontiers to be “such a candid, well-written, and
downright endearing book that it may over-persuade the many readers it deserves,” and in
a subtle reference to his recent reading of Hoover, he continues, “Unlike other politicians
who write, Mr. Wallace does not insult his audience by adopting the mannerisms and
clichés of the soap-box or the election platform.”470 A second review in the Times, by
Letter to the Editor from John Spargo, “Mr. Hoover’s Book Defended,” New York Times, October 8,
1934, 16.
467
“Wallace Assails Hoover Criticism,” New York Times, September 6, 1934, 5. Hoover’s quote appears on
p. 88 of his book, The Challenge to Liberty.
468
469
Henry A. Wallace, New Frontiers (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934).
John Chamberlain, “Books of the Times,” book review of Henry A. Wallace’s New Frontiers, New York
Times, October 4, 1934, 21.
470
191
Henry Hazlitt, dispenses with subtle allusions altogether and offers a direct comparison
between the two political books: “Especially for any one who has just struggled through
the molasses-like periods of Herbert Hoover, it is a sheer joy to be borne along on the
smooth current of his simple and lucid prose. Where the former president is
sesquipedalian and abstract, the present Secretary of Agriculture is colloquial and
concrete.”471
Hazlitt was not the only reader to place the Hoover and Wallace books side by
side. The Book of the Month Club, under the editorial direction of Kansas newspaper
man William Allen White, made the two works co-selections of the month for October
1933. The Yale Law Journal, meanwhile, published a joint review in which Edward S.
Corwin, a professor of politics from Princeton, considered the books together. He came to
much the same conclusions as did John Chamberlain, questioning Hoover’s argument
(“The effect upon the reader… is one of considerable confusion and self-contradiction”),
while praising Wallace’s “vitality of spirit” and “intellectual candor.” In his estimation,
“It is difficult to imagine anything more refreshing than to turn from Mr. Hoover's
volume to Secretary Wallace's… the two books are miles apart.” In the end he praises
Wallace’s skills as a statesman and uses a soil metaphor to provide an apt final analysis
of the influential Iowan: “If his head sometimes bumps the ceiling of Utopia, his feet are
generally well planted on terra firma.”472
Henry Hazlitt, “The Aims of National Planning,” book review of Henry A. Wallace’s New Frontiers,
New York Times, October 7, 1934, BR1.
471
472
Edward S. Corwin, Book reviews of The Challenge to Liberty by Herbert Hoover and New Frontiers by
Henry A. Wallace, The Yale Law Journal 44, no. 3 (January 1935): 546-549.
192
“We need you; we need you”
Wallace kept his feet on the ground in the ensuing months as the AAA and the
Agriculture Department’s other programs swung into motion. Meanwhile myriad other
New Deal agencies continued to be created, making for an alphabet soup of new
organizations that Roosevelt and the advisors in his “Brain Trust” hoped would stem the
tide of the Depression. A number of these new units were devoted to the arts, providing
work for unemployed writers, actors, directors, artists, and musicians. These programs,
known collectively as Federal Project One, were created under the auspices of the Works
Progress Administration (WPA), which was directed by influential Iowa native Harry
Hopkins. This major endeavor was begun in the summer of 1935 and included separate
divisions devoted to Art, Writing, Music, and Theatre.473 Notable participants and
employees of these programs included a veritable who’s who of the arts during that
period, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller,
Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Grant Wood (who
directed the mural program in Iowa).
1935 also witnessed the blooming of an artistic impulse in another agency, the
Resettlement Administration (RA), which was under the direction of Wallace’s former
assistant Rex Tugwell. In order to better focus public attention on the plight of the rural
poor, a photography unit was funded and soon talented photographers including Walker
Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee, were criss-crossing the
country to document the ravages wrought by economic and ecological disasters. The
following year the RA added a filmmaking unit, and produced a number of notable
473
In November 1935, the Historical Records Survey was spun off from the Federal Writers Project and
became the fifth element of Project One.
193
documentaries directed by the likes of Pare Lorentz, Joris Ivens, and Robert Flaherty.
Funding problems and bureaucratic reshuffling shifted the photography unit to the Farm
Security Administration for the bulk of its existence, while the filmmaking wing bounced
between a number of governmental homes. Nevertheless all of these agencies produced
important and interesting work that often provided stark commentary on the state of
America at the time. Iowa was by no means the only relevant setting for these creative
works, but the governmental depictions of the Hawkeye State were vastly different from
those popularized by Phil Stong, Grant Wood, Ding Darling, and others. Henry A.
Wallace once was asked whether photographers and journalists should be discouraged
from documenting the crop and livestock reduction efforts of the AAA in order to spare
the public from being shocked. “Rub their noses in the facts,” he declared, “We must
clear the wreckage before we can build.”474 That also became the overriding sentiment
for many government-sponsored artists as the Depression continued, and in the latter half
of the decade it became more common to witness images of Iowa that showed hungry
children, homeless workers, and abandoned, crumbling farmsteads, instead of happy,
well-fed families living in picture-perfect farm houses on their beautiful, fertile lands.
These more desperate portrayals of Iowa were part of a greater movement in
Depression Era America toward documenting the grim realities of the time. American
Studies scholar William Stott wrote the seminal book on this subject in which he argues
that the documentary impulse arose because of the nature of the Depression itself, “Not
only was [it] easy for the casual eye to miss, but those who should have brought it to
public attention – the Hoover government, the business community, most of the media –
474
Lord, 362.
194
overlooked or minimized it, hoping thus to restore confidence.”475 Thus it was left to
social scientists, oral historians, documentary filmmakers, photographers, and non-fiction
writers (Stott leaves fiction writers out of his definition) to catalog the ills of the society
and present them to the citizenry in an understandable format. Many of their projects
gained traction in the middle and late 1930s thanks to the New Deal funding that became
available. That well, however, began to run dry after the Republicans gained a total of
seventy-nine seats in the two houses of Congress and objected more strenuously to the
propagandistic elements in some of the output. Nevertheless many of the artistic
representations of hard times that were created still endure today as they give current
audiences a way to see and feel the 1930s.
The first example of a nationally recognized, government-sponsored cultural
product set in Iowa was the Federal Theatre Project’s Triple-A Plowed Under, which
premiered in New York City’s Biltmore Theatre on March 14, 1936. This play was the
second production (but the first to be performed in front of live audiences) of an
experimental new format called “Living Newspapers.”476 This style had been influenced
by similar plays that Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan had seen in Russia
during a 1926 Guggenheim Fellowship theatre trip throughout Europe. The style had
developed in Soviet workers’ clubs as a way to keep illiterate members informed about
current events and issues.477 On a 1930 return trip with her drama students from Vassar
475
William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1973), 68.
476
The first production, Ethiopia, had fallen victim to State Department censors who feared negative
ramifications from the play’s depiction of two living rulers, Haile Selassie and Benito Mussolini, and so it
never premiered.
477
Joanne Bentley, Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988),
73.
195
she saw a play about collective Soviet farms and, undoubtedly reminded of her girlhood
years in Grinnell, Iowa, she wrote in her diary, “Imagine any actors in America being
passionately interested in tractors! Imagine a play on farm relief! An audience listening!”478
Little did she know, but time and circumstances would make such an idea exceedingly
possible, and she would be in the most influential position to bring it about. Thus the die
was cast for the future production of Triple-A Plowed Under.
After being named head of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), she came up with
the notion to stage Living Newspapers because she had a lot of actors at her disposal, but
not all of them could be cast in the FTP’s major productions of more traditional plays,
and this format would keep them employed. “We could dramatize the news with living
actors, lights, music, movement,” she told her collaborator Elmer Rice, and they
proceeded to organize the Living Newspaper staff “like a large city daily…. [that] was
concerned not with surface news, scandal, human interest stories, but rather with the
conditions back of conditions.”479 The staff took its research seriously as well, as the
printed editions of the play scripts included citations for each scene, indicating which
primary printed sources had been consulted. New York Times drama critic Brooks
Atkinson appreciated the attention to detail by the “newshawks” on staff, as he pointed
out their inclusion of a “list of accredited sources long enough to break your arm off.”480
The first Living Newspaper, Ethiopia, about the Italian invasion of that African
country, had fallen victim to State Department censors who feared negative ramifications
Quoted in Lynn Mally, “The Americanization of the Soviet Living Newspaper,” The Carl Beck Papers
in Russian & East European Studies, no. 1903 (February 2008): 13-14.
478
479
Hallie Flanagan, Introduction to Federal Theatre Plays: Triple-A Plowed Under, Power, Spirochete, ed.
Pierre de Rohan (New York: Random House, 1938), vii-viii.
Brooks Atkinson, “‘Power’ Produced by the Living Newspaper Under Federal Theatre Auspices,” New
York Times, February 24, 1937, 18.
480
196
from the play’s depiction of two living rulers, Haile Selassie and Benito Mussolini.
Therefore the stakes were high for the future of Living Newspapers before the premiere
of Triple-A Plowed Under, which highlighted the plight of the American farmer between
1917 and 1936. Flanagan remembered that a number of cast members threatened to walk
out because of the nature of the production: “They complained that there was no plot, no
story, no chance to build up a character, no public interest in the subject matter. ‘Who in
New York cares about the farmer, about wheat, about the price of bread and milk?’”481
The play, however, was a success, and Flanagan wrote to a friend after the show to say,
“[I] never saw such excitement… It was a swell show… They clapped for eight minutes
at the end.”482 It went on to be staged eighty-four more times in cities from coast to coast,
and more Living Newspapers followed, on such topics as the Tennessee Valley Authority
and the fight against syphilis, until the unit ran afoul of the House Un-American
Activities Committee and was disbanded in 1939 because of its leftist sensibilities and
propagandistic style.
Triple-A Plowed Under borrowed techniques from newsreel films in that there
was a stentorian narrator guiding the audience from topic to topic as the scenes shifted
from one location and group of characters to another, often in rapid succession.483 The
events in Iowa detailed earlier in this project figure prominently in the play beginning
with Scene Four, when an actor playing Milo Reno appears on stage at a rally in Des
Moines, laying out the principles of the Farmers’ Holiday Association and threatening a
481
Hallie Flanagan, ix.
482
Quoted in Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art
out of Desperate Times (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 81.
483
There are twenty-six scenes in the approximately forty-five minute play.
197
strike. This is followed by a “Middleman” manipulating milk prices in order to maximize
his profit at the expense of both farmers and consumers. Next, the scene shifts to Sioux
City, Iowa, where a conference of farmers has gathered to discuss a strike and a speaker
emerges from the audience to announce, “Men! We’ve got to save ourselves, with or
without Milo Reno – and the only way to do that is to dump every truck and spill every
can of milk we can lay our hands on. Let’s stop talking and do something!”484
One of the play’s more dramatic scenes follows, as the scene opens on a darkened
stage as a group of men stand near a boulder as two lights approach, accompanied by the
sound of a truck. A voice calls out, “Get down off that truck,” and after a pause more
voices chant, “Dump the milk!” and “Turn over the truck!” This scene, which is based on
an article by Bruce Bliven about his recent trip home to Iowa, is given more drama
through a stage direction: “From off stage is heard the ripping and smashing of boxes
being hurled from the truck,” and when someone yells, “Push!” there is, “A moment…
then the final terrific crash as the truck is turned over,” and the two headlights from the
beginning of the scene turn over as well.485 This series of Midwestern scenes culminates
in Scene Eight, a farm auction in which a sheriff and auctioneer are conducting a sale of a
$20,000 farm. A group of neighboring farmers has assembled and they successfully
execute a penny auction strategy, in which one of them purchases the farm for thirteen
cents, keeping money out of the hated bank’s pocket.
The remaining two-thirds of the play follows the rise and fall of AAA legislation
and its effect on shoppers (who were experiencing higher prices) and farmers, some of
484
Living Newspaper Editorial Staff, Triple-A Plowed Under, in Federal Theatre Plays: Triple-A Plowed
Under, Power, Spirochete, ed. Pierre de Rohan (New York: Random House, 1938), 18.
485
Living Newspaper Editorial Staff, 20.
198
whom (especially owners of large tracts of land) were receiving large subsidy checks,
while Southern sharecroppers, both black and white, were being squeezed out of the
system and forced off the land. These scenes include appearances from actors playing
several key real-life figures: Henry A. Wallace (in two scenes), Hugh Johnson of the
National Recovery Administration, Earl Browder of the American Communist Party, and
Supreme Court Justices Owen Roberts and Harlan Stone. These people all play a part in
the play’s climax, which depicts the events of January 6, 1936, when the Supreme Court
ruled the AAA unconstitutional due to the fact that tax monies were being
unconstitutionally used to pay farm subsidies.486 This left farmers uncertain of how they
could survive with the double whammy of reduced acreages and no government
subsidies. An amended Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed in 1938, and a Soil
Conservation Act was passed in 1936 to help affected farmers, but the future was still
uncertain at the time the play was performed. The play ends with farmers, union workers,
and the unemployed all coming together as a chorus, repeating, “We need you. We need
you,” in order to urge the audience to gain awareness and support their cause.487
The play’s purpose was to demonstrate the interconnected fates of country
farmers and city workers who were facing similar problems, and to argue they would all
be better served by working together to find solutions. In his review of the play for the
New York Times, Bosley Crowther praised it for being “hard-biting,” “frequently
brilliant,” and a “dramatic story honestly told,” but he also points out the factor which
would, more than two years hence, eventually bring down the unit. “[It] violates one rule
The play’s title may have been taken from the headline of a New York Times article about the Supreme
Court’s decision: “AAA Plowed Under: Wanted: A Substitute,” New York Times, January 12, 1936, E1.
486
487
Living Newspaper Editorial Staff, 57.
199
of a good newspaper story,” he observes, “It waxes editorial. It takes sides. It concludes
by no uncertain implication that the farmer, the workingman and the middle-class
consumer are the victims of capitalist speculators – in other words, ‘the system.’”488
Those who aligned themselves with the capitalist speculators, of course, found much to
dislike. A Republican congressman called it “pure and unadulterated politics,” while a
Hearst newspaper deemed it “the most outrageous misuse of the taxpayers’ money that
the Roosevelt administration has yet been guilty of.”489 Finally, Garet Garrett of the
Saturday Evening Post may have been more exasperated than anyone, as three months
later he dredged up old concerns about Communism in a lengthy article venting his
outrage that American public money was being spent to produce a play that “ended with
a tableau that was enthusiastically applauded by the Communists who packed the
audience because it happened to embody the idea of a militant workers’ and farmers’
alliance, and this happens to be the official program of the Communist International for
the Communist Party, U.S.A.”490 As Garrett’s reaction indicates, even a decade and a half
after the Red Scare, fears of rabble rousing Communist infiltrators dogged the theatrical
community as well as farm protest organizations and cast all of their activities in a
suspicious light.
The second, and likely more broadly familiar, example of Iowa being depicted by
a government agency during this period is its use as a setting by the workers in the
Resettlement Administration’s photographic unit (later to become more commonly
Bosley Crowther, “The Living Newspaper Finally Gets Under Way with ‘Triple-A Plowed Under,’”
New York Times, March 16, 1936, 21.
488
489
Quoted in Bentley, 221.
490
Garet Garrett, “Federal Theater for the Masses,” The Saturday Evening Post, June 20, 1936, 8.
200
remembered as part of the Farm Security Administration (FSA)). Between 1935 and 1944
at least ten photographers employed by the Historical Section of the RA and FSA
produced nearly eighty thousand photographic prints and many more negatives of scenes
from across the country. At its most basic, the original goal of the Section was to record
the activities of the Resettlement Administration, which focused on relocating poor
families from agriculturally damaged land to planned communities, and building relief
camps for migrant workers. But the man whom Rex Tugwell installed as director of the
Section, a former student of his at Columbia named Roy Stryker, placed a nearly equal
emphasis on what he saw as “the second part of the photographer’s job [which] would be
to record and report the milieu in which the agency performed its primary function. As a
result, the photographers took pictures of nearly any subject that was significant as a
document of American culture.”491
Stryker assembled a core group of talented photographers as the Section found its
footing in 1935 and 1936. Arthur Rothstein typically covered the High Plains, Carl
Mydans (and later Russell Lee) the Midwest, Walker Evans the South, and Dorothea
Lange the West Coast. Respected leftist artist Ben Shahn also took some photos, but he
came on board primarily in an advisory capacity and helped Stryker understand how and
why certain photos were more effective than others in making an argument. Once, when
discussing a photo of an environmentally damaged area, Shahn told Stryker, “Look, Roy,
you’re not going to move anybody with this eroded soil – but the effect this eroded soil
has on a kid who looks starved, this is going to move people.”492 At the outset the team
491
Quoted in F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary
Photography in the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 54.
492
Quoted in Hurley, 50.
201
was “problem oriented,” as “the photographers,” according to historian F. Jack Hurley,
“felt the immediacy of the nation’s rural troubles and the need for pictures to make these
problems clear to the rest of the country.”493
The Midwest certainly still had its share of troubles in 1936, despite the
improvements brought about by the AAA and other New Deal relief programs. When
Carl Mydans left the Section to take a job with the brand new Life magazine, his
Midwestern beat was taken over by Russell Lee, an Illinois native whose family owned
farm land in northern Illinois. Lee had been trained as a chemical engineer, and worked
his way up to being a plant manager after four years, but he left that career behind to
become a painter and, ultimately, a photographer. Those who knew him remembered him
as a “big, charming, sympathetic man – a little closer to Will Rogers than to Gary
Cooper,” and described his work as having a “friendly ‘family album’ quality that
provided an honest contrast to some of the harsher photographic statements that other
agency photographers made.” In Hurley’s estimation, “Lee’s pictures seemed to say:
‘Look, here is a fellow man who is having a hard time, but he is a decent, hard-working
man and with a little help, he’s going to be all right.’”494 It is likely that quality of
humanity in his photos, along with his impressive output, that has led to his images being
reproduced more frequently than that of any other RA/FSA photographer in the Library
of Congress collection.495
493
Hurley, 60.
494
John Szarkowski, Foreward to Russell Lee Photographs, Linda Peterson, ed. (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2007), ix.; and Hurley, 80.
495
J.B. Colson, Introduction to Russell Lee Photographs, Linda Peterson, ed. (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2007), 10.
202
Two of Lee’s most noteworthy images were taken in Iowa during his solo road
trip through the Midwest in December 1936. The full caption of the first is “Christmas
dinner in home of Earl Pauley. Near Smithfield, Iowa. Dinner consisted of potatoes,
cabbage, and pie” (Figure A16). The image is one of a series he took at the ramshackle
Pauley home in northeastern Iowa and depicts a dark-haired Earl Pauley, wearing striped
denim overalls while sitting on the right side of a very small dinner table, apparently
buttering a slice of bread. To his left are four children, three girls and a boy ranging in
age from approximately two years up to six. The youngest, a girl wearing a simple floral
patterned dress, is at her father’s left hand with her back to the camera while standing on
a wooden peach crate. Next to her also standing with his back to the camera is the oldest,
a boy wearing denim overalls of his own. A girl with a tangle of thick, short hair and
wearing a non-patterned dress is standing next to him, with her elbow bent as if shoveling
food into her mouth (although her plate is obscured by her brother’s shoulder). Finally at
the opposite end of the table next to the wall stands another girl, mostly obscured by the
other bodies, but her right hand is at her mouth while her large eyes look ahead at her
father. What is shown of the interior of the dining area is tidy, but unimpressive. The
walls appear to be simply the back of the outer siding, as the home’s wooden frame is
exposed inside. The corner of a cast iron stove appears behind the father’s back and a
calendar hangs on the wall above him. Otherwise there appear to be no adornments.
The overall effect of the image calls to mind the above description of Lee’s work,
as a viewer is left to hope that this is “a decent, hard-working man and with a little help,
he’s going to be all right.” Clearly the family is not living in luxury, as there is apparently
only one chair and meat is notably not on the menu for this spartan Christmas dinner.
203
Missing from the photo, of course, is the children’s mother, and the image is more
dramatic for that absence, since the idea of four motherless children living in these
conditions would make this a heart-wrenching depiction of one of the saddest
Christmases ever. The mother, however, was alive and well and even appears in another
photo in this series, standing in the exterior doorway of the family’s dwelling. The
caption of this second photo indicates that the Pauleys are tenant farmers, which means
that they were likely receiving very little government assistance at the time, as tenant
farmers were not foremost in the minds of the dealmakers in Washington resulting in
owners of large and mid-sized acreages receiving the bulk of the benefits. Their tenuous
position as tenants living in a run-down house with but one visible chair places them
perilously close to being labeled as “white trash,” or members of a “residual, disposable
class” to use one of Matt Wray’s definitions.496 They appear to be on the verge of being
left behind by the modern world, although they have not slipped to the level of the
Alabama sharecropper family famously photographed by Walker Evans, as these Iowans
are at least still wearing shoes and pants. Nevertheless it is shocking to viewers of this
photo that it was taken in Iowa, rather than somewhere in the Deep South, where images
of white rural poverty were more common.
On the opposite side of the state during the same trip in December 1936 Lee shot
a second notable image titled “The hands of Mrs. Andrew Ostermeyer, wife of a
homesteader, Woodbury County, Iowa” (Figure A17). This striking image features a
woman’s torso taking up most of the frame as she holds her wrinkled and gnarled hands
in front of her dark, striped work skirt. Her mottled hands are weather-beaten and
strikingly bent from arthritis, as they dominate the viewer’s gaze. Very little of her home
496
Wray, Not Quite White, 3.
204
can be glimpsed in the background, but it appears to be made of cinder blocks, and there
is a metal trellis, likely awaiting spring vines, standing before it. She appears to be
holding a wood-frame screen door open with her back as a front step and the corner of a
door appear on the right of the frame. From the little visual information presented in the
frame Mrs. Ostermeyer seems to be living a more rooted life than the Pauley family,
although captions of other photographs in the series reveal that she and her husband,
original homesteaders, had lost their farm to foreclosure and were now living with their
son. She is seventy-six years old, and has lived through many previous ups and downs of
agricultural markets, whereas the Pauleys have begun building a family at an inopportune
economic time. If the young family is to survive on the farm they will need to emulate
Mrs. Ostermeyer’s apparent perseverance that is written all over her gnarled hands. This
is a simple image, but it makes a clear statement that this is a sturdy woman who, along
with her husband, has spent a lifetime living from the soil. An argument is also being
made about the severe toll that this rural lifestyle takes on the body when living a life of
poverty. Her hands also clearly indicate that this has been a much more burdensome rural
life than the idealized version of farming depicted in the rounded cherubic characters of
Grant Wood’s Fruits of Iowa series or Phil Stong’s comfortable Frake family.
These photos, and countless others in the vast RA/FSA catalog, are of vast
importance as social documents of their time, in addition to being artistically composed.
However, as John Raeburn points out in his cultural history of 1930s photography, “their
present renown greatly surpasses what it was in their own era… Most of the Section’s p
photographs remained unseen in the thirties… they never became more than irregular
205
journalistic fare.”497 The photos did make a bit more headway in the art world, as they
appeared in exhibitions and were published in a book titled Land of the Free, a
collaboration with poet Archibald MacLeish.498 Books combining documentary photos
with non-fiction text became an important and popular publishing trend during the 1930s,
with Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces (1937)
and James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) likely being
the two most well-known. Land of the Free, in Raeburn’s estimation, “solidified the
Section’s reputation as a sponsor of distinguished work, more so than any other single
event,” as MacLeish was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who maintained a “prominent
visibility in the nation’s intellectual and artistic life.”499
Nine of Lee’s photos appear in the book, including the images of Christmas
dinner with the Earl Pauley family and Mrs. Andrew Ostermeyer’s arthritic hands.
Raeburn notes that Land of the Free “emphasized the Section’s hardscrabble pictures of
people dazed by what had happened to them,” and reviewers of the book responded to the
power of these images, noting that they “speak for themselves” since “words would be
weak alongside these photographs of the real America and actual Americans.”500
MacLeish did, of course, supply words on a page facing each photo. Beside the Earl
Pauley family photo are words that obliquely ask readers to consider the psychological
effects of rural tenancy and poverty: “Taking the bread with it:/ taking a good man’s
497
John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2006), 144.
498
Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 1938.
499
Raeburn, 173.
500
Raeburn, 175, and reviews quoted in Raeburn, 176.
206
pride in a/ Clean field well tilled: his children/ Fed from furrows his own plow has made
them.”501 Most reviewers had less regard for MacLeish’s poetry than they did for the
photos themselves, calling his words “thin-blooded and cool” and “contrived.”502
Nevertheless MacLeish had helped the FSA Photographic Section gain notoriety and
credibility as it “confirm[ed] the Section’s reputation for making documentary
photographs of the highest esthetic distinction, deserving of an honored place in
photography’s art world.”503
Far fewer people have had an opportunity to see the final example of a New Deal
depiction of Depression effects in Iowa. The documentary film The Land, was completed
(but not released to theaters) by legendary director Robert Flaherty in 1941 under the
auspices of the short-lived U.S. Film Service. American government-sponsored
documentary filmmaking efforts during the 1930s were under the leadership of the writer
named Pare Lorentz. He was largely responsible for five important documentaries, four
of which were primarily intended to publicize rural issues. In 1935 Lorentz was selected
to lead and expand the Resettlement Administration’s public relations filmmaking efforts,
as the creation of smaller relief agencies created places in which Lorentz could
potentially find a supportive environment. He remembered a conversation he had with
Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace: “[He] said that the Agriculture Department was
an old, old establishment and very set in its ways and would probably not be a good place
501
MacLeish, 48.
502
Quoted in Raeburn, 176.
503
Raeburn, 178.
207
for me to try to work. He mentioned, however, a brand new organization called the
Resettlement Administration.”504
The RA, of course, was created as a relief agency and was directed by Rex
Tugwell, who created a long-range plan for his agency that “represented a concerted
attack on the problems of the small farmer.”505 As with other New Deal agencies, the RA
felt it had a mission to educate the public about the problems facing America. Part of this
work was done by its photographic unit, but Tugwell, however, felt that despite their
excellence, these still photographs “could not reveal the violence of a dust storm in
action. Motion pictures could.”506 He wanted to produce films that would have a wider
appeal than those already being made, and Lorentz believed that government films could
be every bit as good as those coming out of Hollywood, so these complementary goals
resulted in the RA bringing Lorentz on board.507
Curiously, prior to his hiring, Lorentz had never made a film; but he had been a
professional writer for ten years, a film critic for eight, and was a vocal supporter of
Roosevelt and the goals of his New Deal. In formulating his filmmaking strategy, Lorentz
believed that his films for the RA should accomplish three goals: to inform the public of a
current social problem, to explain to them what is causing it, and to show what the
government is doing to correct it.508 These goals are each present, to a greater or lesser
degree, in all five of the films that Lorentz produced for the government: The Plow That
504
Pare Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts (Reno: University of Nevada, 1992), 36.
505
Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film, 1968 (Reno: University of Nevada Press,
1994), 22.
506
Snyder, 24.
507
Snyder, 25.
508
Snyder, 26.
208
Broke the Plains (1936), The River (1937), The Fight For Life (1940), The Power and the
Land (1940, directed by Joris Ivens), and Flaherty’s The Land (1941). These productions
came to be known collectively as “The Films of Merit.” Despite the fact that most parties
could agree on the quality and message of these films, Lorentz and his projects began
running up against ever-increasing opposition from Hollywood and, more importantly,
from certain members of Congress. The Hollywood community disliked these films for
two major reasons. First, Douglas Churchill wrote in the New York Times that it was
because the moguls had “an abhorrence of becoming involved in thoughtful discussions,
which might lead to charges of bias,” and second, Ray Tucker wrote in New London Day
that “the insignificant amounts which the government spends in filming and distributing
admittedly remarkable pictures threaten to show up professional production costs.”509 In
other words, they did not want the competition.
Meanwhile a number of Congressmen were uncomfortable with using film as a
sort of propaganda for government programs, despite the fact that Lorentz was producing
“remarkable pictures” and spending “insignificant amounts” to do so. Plus there were
others in Congress, political opponents of Roosevelt, who criticized the films simply
because they were another example of FDR’s liberal New Deal politics at work. Funding
for filmmaking soon began drying up, even within the Department of Agriculture, so
Roosevelt was forced to rescue Lorentz and his unit by creating a new agency called the
United States Film Service in 1938, placing it under the umbrella of the National
Emergency Council. According to film historian Richard Barsam, the U.S. Film Service
was established with two primary goals: “to educate government employees and to
Douglas Churchill, “Caught On the Wing in Hollywood,” New York Times, April 24, 1938, 149; and a
as quoted in Snyder, 145.
509
209
inform the public about ways of solving contemporary problems.”510 Of course it was the
latter of these goals that was of primary interest to Lorentz, as he had plans to make more
films about America’s social problems. The creation of the Film Service, however,
proved to be only a temporary reprieve, as it became an easier target out from the
protection of the Department of Agriculture. It only lasted for three years, but during that
time Lorentz directed The Fight For Life, and produced two films: The Power and the
Land and Robert Flaherty’s unreleased The Land.
The Land paired Lorentz (as producer) with famed documentary director Robert
Flaherty. Flaherty had made a name for himself with the classic Nanook of the North in
1922 and had spent most of the intervening years making films about exotic peoples far
away from his home country. Administrators of the Agricultural Adjustment Act had
requested that the film be about soil conservation, particularly how new machinery could
be used constructively to benefit the soil.511 Flaherty, however, did not fulfill that
mission; rather he painted an oftentimes depressing portrait of the country and its ills as
the Depression began its second decade. By the time he had completed the film, the U.S.
Film Service had been killed by Congress, and America was involved in World War II.
Fearing that it could be used by Japan or Germany as anti-American propaganda,
government officials refused to release the film and it never received a theatrical run.512
Senator Robert Taft summed up Congress’s position: “A United States documentary film
is a United States propaganda film. I do not care how good the purpose of that kind of a
510
Richard M. Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, Rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992),
157.
511
Mike Weaver, Robert Flaherty’s The Land (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter, 1979), 17.
512
Barsam, 162.
210
film may be, I do not believe it is an undertaking in which the Federal Government
should engage.”513 The government’s nervousness stemmed from the Nazis’ successful
use of documentary films by Leni Riefenstahl and others to publicize their dangerous
nationalist messages, so in that way the death of the U.S. Film Service has some
ideological parallels with the attacks on Grant Wood’s artistic reputation. Much like
victims of the Communist Red Scares after each World War, once a person or group had
been identified as sharing the same strategies or styles as artists affiliated with enemy
ideologies, there was little that could be done to rehabilitate one’s image.
As the final production of the U.S. Film Service it is appropriate that The Land
features footage from a variety of locations across America, with those filmed in Iowa
being among the first shots taken.514 These scenes appear near the middle of the film and
show a montage of healthy animals and productive fields as ominous symphonic music
plays in the background. The narrator reaffirms Iowa’s agricultural reputation before
briefly explaining the economic situation:
This is Iowa. Nowhere is there better land. Good cattle, well fed. Good
homes. Good farms. But even here in this rich state there is trouble. […]
Here and everywhere so many don’t own their homes any more, or the
land either. Almost fifty percent are now tenants living in other men’s
houses, working other men’s land.
Ownership has long been a vital part of a farmer’s sense of self-worth, so as with the
photographs of the Pauley family, the government is interested in spreading these
sobering messages in order to urge citizens and lawmakers to take action and save the
farmers from these regions from falling further into poverty or destitution.
Quoted in Richard Dyer MacCann, The People’s Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion
Pictures (New York: Hastings House, 1973), 112.
513
514
The Land. Dir. Robert Flaherty. United States Film Service, 1941.
211
Iowa’s is also the setting in Flaherty’s film for a scene of a corn-picker
progressing through a ripe cornfield. The close-up, low-angled shots present it, in film
scholar Mike Weaver’s view, as a “metallic, prehistoric monster moving without any
apparent sources of power through the cornfield. We are not intended to understand it but
to find it merely monstrous…. [It is] porcine, relentless, insatiable, disgorging streams of
corn.”515 The voiceover narration, partially written by Wallace family biographer Russell
Lord, helps situate the viewer spatially by announcing, “Out in these wheatfields farther
west [the previous scenes were in Kentucky] you don’t see many people either.” In some
ways these images hearken back to Grant Wood’s paintings of golden cornfields, but his
creations were notably absent of mechanical beasts, as his farm activities were
consistently powered by horse. The viewer of this film is left with the impression that the
machines have taken precedence over humans, but after a cut to a road, people who the
narrator identifies as “crumbs of the roadside,” do come into the picture. A thin
androgynous person stares unemotionally at the camera while the narrator intones, “I
don’t know what some of us would do if it weren’t for the food the government gives us.”
This “crumb of the roadside” is an example of the poor whites at the bottom of the social
hierarchy that were most affected by the Depression, and while the narrator’s words
signal gratefulness to the government for its assistance, the person’s expression is more
one of stunned resignation to whatever cruel fate life still has in store.
As the final government impression of Depression era rural Iowa, this image
provides a reminder of the differing media coverage of rural Iowans in the early 1930s,
when a corn belt rebellion was a real concern for many. Apologists at that time in the
government and media attempted to explain away the very real anger that existed, but the
515
Weaver, 26.
212
social documents of the late 1930s display a more grim view of the situation that had
been obscured for a number of years by pretty paintings, funny stories, and movie stars
“playing” farmer. The later images showed poor Iowans to be no different than poor
Oklahomans or any other struggling Americans, and helped gain acceptance for New
Deal policies intended to alleviate their misery. In terms of actual Iowa farmers the most
long-lasting impact of the New Deal policies was the reliance they came to have (and still
have) on government subsidies. This development challenged long-held notions of rural
independence, but for better or worse, as rural historian David B. Danbom has written,
“[T]he government was in the agricultural market to stay.”516
516
David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006), 217.
213
CONCLUSION
Depictions of Iowa and its “honest to goodness farmers” continue to have a place
in American culture, even though they have never coalesced during a single period as
they did during the early to mid 1930s. Vestiges of that period, however, still remain
since that is the time during which Iowa was at its most Iowan, at least in terms of
common conceptions about the state and its people. Phil Stong’s State Fair, for example,
has enjoyed a long life as it has periodically been revived in multiple versions for stage
and screen. Gaining a new lease on life just twelve years after Henry King directed his
Oscar-nominated adaptation of the novel starring Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor, State
Fair was transformed into a movie musical in 1945 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar
Hammerstein. Released by Fox just after the official conclusion of World War II, Walter
Lang directed a cast led by Jeanne Crain and Dana Andrews in a version that remained
quite faithful to the original story while including catchy songs such as “All I Owe
Ioway,” which reaffirms Iowa’s status as a site of American abundance with its lyrics:
I am Ioway born and bred,
And on Ioway corn I'm fed,
Not to mention her barley, wheat, and rye!
I owe Ioway for her ham and her beef and her lamb,
And her strawberry jam, and her pie!517
The movie was positively received and still remains the version most readily available to
be seen by home audiences.
Following a 1962 remake of the film musical which changed the setting to Texas
(during a year in which the classic film The Music Man was set in Iowa), various efforts
were made to adapt State Fair into a Broadway musical. After preliminary stagings in
Oscar Hammerstein II, lyrics, with music by Richard Rodgers, “All I Owe Ioway,” from State Fair, Dir.
Walter Lang, Twentieth Century Fox, 1945.
517
214
cities including Long Beach and Des Moines, State Fair opened as a Broadway musical
in March 1996, with John Davidson and Andrea McArdle leading the cast. The setting
was restored to the Iowa State Fair, but the time period was shifted to 1946, a time of
American triumph after World War II and the Depression. The adaptation seems to have
suffered from an abiding superficiality, as veteran New York Times critic Vincent Canby
described it as “utterly mechanical.” Criticizing the “pastel-prettified, intentionally rather
old-fashioned scenery,” he continued,
There’s nothing wrong with the good old family values that State Fair is
still promoting, except they’re now being promoted with less theatrical
guile than brazen push […] Typical is John Davidson’s performance as
Abel Frake […] The broad smiles, the arched eyebrows, the large winks
won’t quit. At the end of the show you wouldn’t be surprised to find him
loitering in the lobby, waiting to sign autographs.518
Lacking the cultural relevance of the 1933 and 1945 films which were released during
periods of national crisis, the Broadway version closed after a disappointing run of one
hundred and eighteen shows before going on a national tour.519 Perhaps the poor returns
could be chalked up to an uncoupling from its Depression era backdrop, but in 1996 the
economy was strong and the nation was enjoying relative stability, so unlike 1933 and
1945, there was less of a desire for people to escape to an imagined Arcadian past.
Meanwhile Jonathan Larsen’s vibrant Rent was the talk of the theatre world as it was
soon to win the Pulitzer Prize and four Tony Awards. Rent and State Fair are both
musicals, but the similarities end there as State Fair surely seemed old-fashioned and
518
Vincent Canby, “Farm-Family Values of Mid-40’s Iowa,” New York Times, March 28, 1996, C14.
Robert Viagas, “John Davidson to Star in State Fair tour,” Playbill, March 14, 1997,
http://www.playbill.com/news/article/33407-John-Davidson-To-Star-in-State-Fair-Tour (accessed April 29,
2014).
519
215
frivolous in comparison to Rent’s tale of a multi-ethnic, cross-class group of young artists
who are affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
While the Broadway version of State Fair proved to have more style than
substance, developments in the years following 9/11 proved that there was still an
audience for reminders of 1930s Iowa. As a case in point, during the fall of 2002 the
Iowa Quarter Commission selected five designs as the finalists to appear on the Iowa
state quarter, part of a multi-year effort by the U.S. Mint to release a twenty-five cent
coin representing each of the fifty states. Of the five final designs three of them featured
Grant Wood paintings from the early 1930s: the previously discussed American Gothic
(1930) and Young Corn (1931), along with Arbor Day, a 1932 work depicting a teacher
and students planting a tree in front of a rural schoolhouse. After the announcement of
these finalists the Des Moines Register conducted a poll as to its readers’ favorite, and
thirty-nine percent of respondents selected Young Corn, part of an overall design called
“Beautiful Land,” as the best representative of the state. Among those favoring this
design was Angela Wetrich, a twenty-seven year old who appreciated the design for
rekindling memories of her girlhood as well as capturing an element of what makes Iowa,
in her view, superior to other states. "We lived on a hill,” she remembered, “and when
you looked out the window, that's basically what you saw. When you're in the air, Iowa
looks like a patchwork quilt. I've visited other states that are filthy and dirty, and Iowa is
beautiful. This design represents the many things that are Iowa." Meanwhile, Merrill
Stoffregen, a seventy-six year old from Waterloo, succinctly stated, "It's Grant Wood.
He's from Iowa. That's it."520
Ken Fuson and Jonathan Roos, “First quarter; Wood’s Land Art is Iowans’ Top Pick,” Des Moines
Register, October 20, 2002, 1.
520
216
Iowa’s then-governor, Tom Vilsack, who went on to become the U.S. Secretary of
Agriculture in 2009, ultimately selected the design featuring Arbor Day, titled
“Foundation in Education,” and the coins were released to the public in 2004. According
to a U.S. Mint estimate, more than one hundred and thirty million people collect these
quarters, so Grant Wood (whose name appears on the coin) and his conception of rural
Iowa became further cemented in the mind of the public as the coins found their way into
circulation.521 This is just one of many recent examples of a cultural text hearkening back
to 1930s Iowa, an indication of the powerful attachment many Americans have to that
time and place because of its nostalgic pastoral past which can seem so reassuring in its
apparent simplicity. Interest in Wood, for example, has only grown in recent years as in
addition to his work’s appearance on the Iowa state quarter, numerous places associated
with him have become tourist locations. In 2004 his Cedar Rapids studio loft, 5 Turner
Alley, was opened to the public, and in 2007 an interpretative center was opened across
from what has come to be known as the American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa. Here
visitors can don overalls or a simple patterned dress, grab a pitchfork, and pose for a
photo of themselves in front of the actual structure that inspired American Gothic. The
painting continues to be one of America’s most famous and frequently parodied works of
art, as it has appeared everywhere from the opening credits of Paris Hilton and Nicole
Richie’s 2003-2007 reality show The Simple Life to packages of Newman’s Own organic
foods. It has even spawned a twenty-five foot tall statue of the painting’s characters by J.
Seward Johnson Jr. titled God Bless America, which stood in downtown Chicago from
Ken Fuson, “Detail of Wood’s Work May Become Lost on Coin,” Des Moines Register, October 20,
2002, 4.
521
217
2008 until 2010, where it experienced “wild popularity among camera-ready tourists.”522
It is now touring the country.
During this period when Grant Wood seemed to be everywhere one turned, from
people’s pockets to the Chicago skyline, Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s memoir Little
Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
became a surprise bestseller.523 Kalish, a retired English professor in her mid-eighties
when the book was published in 2007, spent her childhood years on a farm near Garrison,
Iowa, approximately forty miles from Grant Wood’s home of Cedar Rapids. Upon
growing older (and moving to California like so many Iowans before her), she developed
a greater appreciation for the period in which she was raised. “I discovered, she writes,
“somewhat to my surprise, that I have come to view that time as a gift. Austere and
challenging as it was, it built character, fed the intellect, and stirred the imagination.”524
She calls to mind the landscapes of Wood in her sensory descriptions of the “sheer bliss”
of experiencing the “astonishingly thick green grass that carpets the woods in Iowa,” as
well as the “high blue sky, the brilliant leaves, the toasty warm earth beneath our bare
feet.”525
Originally conceived as a series of farm stories for her grandchildren which she
planned to publish through a vanity press, the manuscript found its way into the hands of
Duaa Eldeib, “Face It: American Gothic Statue is Gone,” Chicago Tribune, February 26, 2010,
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-02-26/news/ct-talk-american-gothic-statue-gone-022720100226_1_gothic-art-institute-statue (accessed April 25, 2014).
522
523
Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the
Great Depression (New York: Bantam Dell, 2007).
524
Kalish, 7.
525
Kalish, 186.
218
a New York publishing executive, and soon Kalish was on a cross-country book tour in
addition to appearing on CBS and C-Span programs as a bestselling author. The book
was the subject of a glowing review in the New York Times from Elizabeth Gilbert,
author of the Oprah-approved phenomenon Eat, Pray, Love. Calling Kalish’s memoir a
“veryveryverygoodbook,” Gilbert celebrates the author’s “pure charm” and spirit of “real,
rare happiness.”526 Millions of readers felt similarly drawn to Kalish’s brand of happy
nostalgia, including reader Anne Salazar, a woman in her fifties from Huntington Beach,
California, who tellingly responded, “I hope I don't sound too old when I say that I miss
the good ole days, even though I wasn't fortunate enough to have lived through them. I
miss the excitement over even the smallest things (birth of an animal, fresh-baked foods)
and the simple but important teachings of [Kalish’s] ever-present family…. HOW this
country has changed!”527 Salazar’s longing for a time she never experienced
demonstrates yet again how the idea of 1930s Iowa can still beguile audiences some
eighty years later. Henry A. Wallace admonished Americans of the 1930s that the best
way to overcome hard times is to face the facts and accept one’s present circumstances,
so he would think Salazar and many others like her are doing themselves and others a
disservice by relying upon a notion that is out of date, or never existed in the first place.
Kalish’s book was named as one of the New York Times’ “10 Best Books of
2007” as well as earning a place on the year-end best-of lists published by both the
Christian Science Monitor and the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. It stands as the most
Elizabeth Gilbert, “The Home Place,” Book review of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on
an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. New York Times, July 1, 2007,
F1.
526
527
Anne Salazar, Customer review of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm
During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Amazon.com, August 26, 2007 (accessed
April 28, 2014).
219
successful, although far from the only, example of Depression era Iowa farm memoirs.
Novelist Curtis Harnack, historian Dwight W. Hoover, and influential communications
scholar Everett M. Rogers, are among those who have written volumes with titles such as
A Good Day’s Work and We Have All Gone Away which evoke the rural virtues and
nostalgic yearning for the past that have often been present in cultural representations of
the period.528 These books are just a few examples of the other ways in which 1930s Iowa
periodically re-emerges as a symbol of a simpler and better way of life that has been lost
to time. The revived interest in Grant Wood and the popularity of Kalish’s memoir during
the 2000s suggests that ideas of rural Iowa regained a measure of their previous cultural
value in the wake of 9/11, just as they had during previous periods of national stress.
With new fears of Islamic extremism giving rise to the Bush Administration’s colorcoded scale of terrorism threats and a corresponding spirit of xenophobia that was
predictably directed at undocumented Latin American immigrants, the setting was ripe
for people to take pleasure in evocations of a lily-white rural past. This is not to say that
Kalish, her readers, or Grant Wood’s admirers have necessarily been complicit in the
dangerously reactionary spirit of that decade (although there certainly may be some
overlap), but rather, like Anne Salazar, many of them have chosen to retreat from the
ugliness of torture, war, and senseless death, by escaping, albeit temporarily, to the safe
remove of 1930s rural Iowa.
Even though representations and events of that period have been my focus, I will
close with a few words about the ways in which Iowa has been used as a setting for
528
Curtis Harnack, We Have All Gone Away (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1973); Dwight W.
Hoover, A Good Day’s Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007); and
Everett M. Rogers, The Fourteenth Paw: Growing Up on an Iowa Farm in the 1930s (Singapore: Asian
Media Information and Communication Centre, 2008).
220
Hollywood films and discussed in the national news during the past twenty-five years. It
is not too difficult to discern strong parallels between popular notions about Iowa in the
1930s and contemporary views of the state, even though some notable demographic
changes have occurred. According to the U.S. census, 60% of the state’s residents lived
in rural areas in 1930, but by 2010 that number had decreased by nearly half, to 36%.
Over the same period the racial composition of the state has become a bit more diverse
with the white population dropping from 99% in 1930 to 91% in 2010.529 A viewer,
however, would have difficulty realizing that many changes had occurred by watching
recent films set in Iowa. The Hawkeye State continues to be portrayed almost exclusively
as a location for heart-warming family stories that are set against a backdrop of fields,
fairs and other rural symbols. We have seen this most famously in the 1989 Oscarnominated film Field of Dreams, in which a son reconnects with his dead father on a
magical baseball diamond created out of a cornfield.530 The film’s famous exchange, “Is
this heaven?” / “No, it’s Iowa,” captures the essential idea in so many popular portrayals
of the state over the past century, as its beautiful landscapes, abundant produce, and nearsaintly denizens have been made to seem like something out of a celestial paradise, at
least to viewers who are able to identify as members of this exclusive (primarily white)
club.
The reputation of Iowa as a special place where the impossible can happen has
been further embellished in 1999’s The Straight Story which is about an elderly man
Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals By Race, 1790 to
1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For The United States, Regions, Divisions, and States,”
Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, September 2002. http://www.census.gov/population/www/
documentation/twps0056/twps0056.html (accessed April 30, 2014).
529
530
Field of Dreams Dir. Phil Alden Robinson. Perf. Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones. Universal
Pictures. 1989.
221
driving a John Deere riding lawnmower across the entire state to visit his dying brother,
and more recently in the 2011 film Butter, which returns to the Iowa State Fair to witness
an orphan girl win a butter sculpting contest and get adopted by a loving family whom
she describes as “the whitest people I ever met.”531 Even though the orphan in Butter is
African-American, film depictions of Iowa usually fail to account for racial, ethnic,
sexual, geological, or even occupational diversity, which in turn makes it all the more
surprising to national commentators when events happen that do not fit neatly into the
popular narrative, such as Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucus
or the 2009 judicial decision which made Iowa the third state in the nation to legalize
same-sex marriage. Maybe one day those impressions will change and there will be a
gritty urban drama set in Davenport or a film about a ruthless businesswoman in Des
Moines, but for the better part of the past eighty years, due in part to the myth-creating
and myth-enhancing farm films, novels, and paintings of the 1930s, many Americans
have continued, in the words of historian Paul Conkin, to “[turn our] eyes back to the
land, to the old homestead, to security, to a memory.”532
531
The Straight Story, Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Richard Farnsworth and Sissy Spacek. Walt Disney
Pictures, 1999; and Butter. Dir. Jim Field Smith. Perf. Jennifer Garner and Ty Burrell. The Weinstein
Company. 2011.
532
Paul Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1959), 11.
222
APPENDIX
Figure A1. Jay N. “Ding” Darling, “That’s Where the Tall Corn Grows,” undated.
_______________________________________________________________________
Source: The Editorial Cartoons of J.N. “Ding” Darling, Iowa Digital Library.
<http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/ding/id/12951>. Reproduced
courtesy of the “Ding” Darling Wildlife Society.
223
Figure A2. Jay N. “Ding” Darling, “What Would You Do If He Did?”, August 17, 1932.
_______________________________________________________________________
Source: The Editorial Cartoons of J.N. “Ding” Darling, Iowa Digital Library.
< http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/ding/id/4648>. Reproduced
courtesy of the “Ding” Darling Wildlife Society.
224
Figure A3. Jay N. “Ding” Darling, “A Great Holiday for the Farmer,” Sept. 1, 1932.
_______________________________________________________________________
Source: The Editorial Cartoons of J.N. “Ding” Darling, Iowa Digital Library.
< http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/ding/id/4657/>. Reproduced
courtesy of the “Ding” Darling Wildlife Society.
225
Figure A4. Jay N. “Ding” Darling, “They’re All For You, Frank,” September 29, 1932.
_______________________________________________________________________
Source: The Editorial Cartoons of J.N. “Ding” Darling, Iowa Digital Library.
< http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/ding/id/4677>. Reproduced
courtesy of the “Ding” Darling Wildlife Society.
226
Figure A5. Carey Orr, “The Farmer’s Black I-owa,” April 29, 1933.
__________________________________________________________________
Source : The Chicago Tribune. Accessed through Proquest Historical Newspapers.
Copyright permission sought from The Chicago Tribune and Carey Orr Estate.
227
Figure A6. Jay N. “Ding” Darling, “In Iowa? -- Then Where Not?”, April 29, 1933.
_______________________________________________________________________
Source: The Editorial Cartoons of J.N. “Ding” Darling, Iowa Digital Library.
< http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/ding/id/4792>. Reproduced
courtesy of the “Ding” Darling Wildlife Society.
228
Figure A7. Grant Wood. American Gothic, 1930.
_____________________________________________________________________
Source: The Art Institute of Chicago. Copyright: Figge Art Museum, successors to the
Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
229
Figure A8. Grant Wood, Young Corn, 1931.
_____________________________________________________________________
Source: Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids Community School District
collection. Copyright: Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood
Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
230
Figure A9. Grant Wood, Farmer with Pigs and Corn (Fruits of Iowa series), 1932.
_________________________________________________________________
Source: Coe College, Gift from the Eugene C. Eppley Foundation. Copyright: Figge Art
Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York,
NY.
231
Figure A10. Grant Wood, Farmer’s Daughter with Vegetables (Fruits of Iowa series),
1932.
_______________________________________________________________________
Source: Coe College, Gift from the Eugene C. Eppley Foundation. Copyright: Figge Art
Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York,
NY.
232
Figure A11. Grant Wood, Dinner for Threshers, 1934.
________________________________________________________________________
Source: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D.
Rockefeller. Copyright: Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood
Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Figure A12. Grant Wood, Daughters of Revolution, 1932.
________________________________________________________________________
Source: The Cincinnati Art Museum, The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial.
Copyright: Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed
by VAGA, New York, NY.
233
Figure A13. Grant Wood, Appraisal, 1931.
______________________________________________________________________
Source: Dubuque Museum of Art, Carnegie-Stout Public Library collection. Copyright:
Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, NY.
234
Figure A14. Grant Wood, Death on the Ridge Road, 1935.
______________________________________________________________________
Source: Williams College Museum of Art. Copyright: Figge Art Museum, successors to
the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
235
Figure A15. Grant Wood, The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, 1931.
_____________________________________________________________________
Source: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Des Moines Art Center. Copyright:
Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, NY.
236
Figure A16. Russell Lee, “Christmas dinner in home of Earl Pauley. Near Smithfield,
Iowa. Dinner consisted of potatoes, cabbage, and pie,” Dec. 1936.
________________________________________________________________________
Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LCUSF34-010125-D].
237
Figure A17. Russell Lee, “The hands of Mrs. Andrew Ostermeyer, wife of a
homesteader, Woodbury County, Iowa,” Dec. 1936.
________________________________________________________________________
Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LCUSF3301-011121-M1].
238
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archival Collections
Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA
Grant Wood Digital Collection
Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington D.C.
Henry A. Wallace Papers
Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles,
CA
Production Code Administration Records for Farmer in the Dell
Production Code Administration Records for State Fair
Henry King Papers
UCLA Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles, CA
American Film Institute Oral History Project
UCLA Special Collections, Los Angeles, CA
King Vidor Papers
University of Illinois at Chicago Special Collections, Chicago, IL
A Century of Progress Records
University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, IA
Henry A. Wallace Papers
Jay N. “Ding” Darling Papers
Milo Reno Papers
Papers of Grant Wood
Phil Stong Manuscripts
Newspapers and periodicals
Art Digest
Chicago Tribune
Des Moines Register
Farm Holiday News
Los Angeles Times
The Nation
New Republic
New York Times
Time
Wallaces’ Farmer
239
Films
Butter. Dir. Jim Field Smith. Perf. Jennifer Garner and Ty Burrell. The Weinstein
Company. 2011.
Farmer in the Dell. Dir. Ben Holmes. Perf. Fred Stone and Jean Parker. RKO Pictures,
1936.
Field of Dreams Dir. Phil Alden Robinson. Perf. Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones.
Universal Pictures. 1989
The Land. Dir. Robert Flaherty. United States Film Service, 1941.
State Fair. Dir. Henry King. Perf. Janet Gaynor and Will Rogers. Fox Film Corp., 1933.
State Fair. Dir. Walter Lang. Perf. Jeanne Crain and Dana Andrews. Twentieth Century
Fox, 1945.
The Straight Story, Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Richard Farnsworth and Sissy Spacek. Walt
Disney Pictures, 1999.
Stranger’s Return. Dir. King Vidor. Perf. Lionel Barrymore and Miriam Hopkins. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1933.
Books, articles, and internet sources
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1933, BR7.
Adams, James Truslow. The Epic of America. New York: Little, Brown, and Company,
1931.
AFI Catalog of Feature Films. http://afi.com/members/catalog/ (accessed Nov. 17,
2013).
Alexander, Stephen. “White Haired Boy of the Crisis.” New Masses, May 7, 1935, 28.
Andrews, Clarence A. Andrews. A Literary History of Iowa. Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 1972
Atkinson, Brooks. “‘Power’ Produced by the Living Newspaper Under Federal Theatre
Auspices.” New York Times, February 24, 1937, 18.
Baigell, Matthew, and Julia Williams, eds. Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of
the First American Artists’ Congress. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1986.
240
Balio, Tino. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Barich, Bill. Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California. New York: Pantheon Books,
1994.
Barron, Hal. “Rural America on the Silent Screen.” Agricultural History 80, no. 4
(Autumn 2006): 383-410.
Barsam, Richard M. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, Revised ed. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1992.
Bentley, Joanne. Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1988.
Bergman, Andrew. We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. New York:
New York University Press, 1971.
Biel, Steven. American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting. New York:
W.W. Norton, 2005.
Bliven, Bruce. “The Corn Belt Cracks Down.” The New Republic, November 22, 1933,
36-38.
-----. “The Farmers Go On Strike: Home Thoughts From Afar.” The New Republic,
August 31, 1932, 66-68.
-----. “Milo Reno and His Farmers.” New Republic, November 29, 1933, 63-65.
Brooker-Bowers, Nancy. The Hollywood Novel: An American Literary Genre. PhD diss.,
Drake University, 1983.
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