

How Iowa Conquered the World:

### The Story of a Small Farm Small State's Journey to Global Dominance

By Michael Rank

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 Five Minute Books

All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents

Introduction: One Small State's Outsized Impact on Modern History

1. How Iowa Created the Global University System – and Silicon Valley as a By-Product

2. Mennonites, Transcendentalists, and Utopian Communes: Why Iowa is the Multicultural Capital of the World

3. How Iowa Saved Billions of Lives in the 20th Century By Averting A Global Famine

4. How Iowa Standardized the English Language

5. Why Iowa Controls Your Political Destiny, Wherever You Live on Earth

Conclusion: Iowa At The Crossroads

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Other Books by Michael Rank

About the Author

#  Introduction

# One Small State's Outsized Impact on Modern History

When Troy Davis stepped off the bus to his new life at Iowa State University in 1993, a world away from the nightclubs and beaches of his home in Miami, he knew that he wouldn't fit in.

The 5'8'', 198-pound running back was a football sensation in high school but passed over by the Florida universities, partly because of his poor academic record, but more so because of he was simply too small to play great football. His size made him an oddity on the field. Only kickers were as short as he was, and they didn't have to fend off tackles from behemoths twice their weight. College coaches in Florida saw little potential in Davis.

So Davis's choices were few. Iowa was far away and very foreign to this Floridian, and the team drafting him was abysmal. A year after Davis's arrival the team's year-end performance was a winless 0-10-1. Not the stuff gridiron dreams are made of.

However, the perception of Davis as being undersized and unimportant proved to be terribly wrong.

Davis's moment came in the first game of his sophomore year against the University of Ohio, when by halftime the ISU team had already fallen into a familiar losing pattern and were playing like a poor high school squad. With little to lose, new head coach Dan McCarney sent Davis into the game, even though the young player had spent most of the previous year on the bench.

Within a few minutes of play, Davis astounded his teammates, coaches, and fans. He created openings in the defensive line that didn't exist, smashed through linebacker tackles, and leapt for first downs. Defenders missed him completely. By the end of the game, he had set a team record for single-game rushing for 291 yards and was instrumental in generating the first win for the Cyclones in nearly two years.

Then, three games later, Davis rushed for over 300 yards against UNLV. The pattern was repeated over and over again, with Davis running an average of nearly 200 yards per game. By the end of the season he ran a total of 2,010 yards, the fifth running back in NCAA Division 1-A history to pass the 2,000-yard mark.

Even though his team still did poorly that year, Davis earned All-American honors and finished fifth in Heisman voting. Davis nearly won the Heisman trophy the next year – in which he ran for an astonishing 2,185 yards and 21 touchdowns and finished first in all the Heisman voting regions but one. He ultimately lost to Danny Wuerffel, who was on a winning team and headed to a bowl game.

Davis also was nominated for the College Football Hall of Fame in 2014 but did not receive enough votes to be inducted. Even though he is the only NCAA running back to have back-to-back seasons with more than 2,000 rushing yards, many believe the specter of playing for a losing team diminished the recognition of Davis's legacy.

The snubbing of Davis sadly continued into his professional career. He left for the NFL after his junior year at Iowa State, forgoing his senior season of eligibility and opting for the 1997 draft. He was selected in the 3rd round by the New Orleans Saints and played for three unremarkable years before joining the Canadian Football League. The league had smaller stadiums, meager pay, and games in the bitter cold. He had successes here in the modest league but was mostly forgotten by Americans. Davis finished his CFL career in 2007.

Davis might have been a transplant to Iowa, but his story runs parallel to that of his adoptive state. Both Iowa and Davis accomplished amazing results, even though each was/is perceived as unremarkable.

Instead of being honored, both were usually labeled as insignificant or under-performers. In the case of Davis those unaware of his accomplishments wrongly disparage him as an academically challenged rusher on a losing team in a second-rate conference. In the case of Iowa stereotypes suggest it to be filled with overall-clad farmers that respond to every statement with a simple "Ayup."

But when one takes a closer look at Davis the football player and Iowa the state, anomalies emerge. Davis is statistically one of the best college football players in history. And I have discovered that Iowa has produced more innovations in education, technology, science, and culture than Silicon Valley and Hollywood combined. In fact, it invented or built of both of those.

The goal of this book is to make an extremely difficult argument. I will attempt to convince you why Iowa is the greatest cultural force in the world. Not in the Midwest or the United States, but in the world. Its culture of creativity, hard-work, and lack of class structure has allowed its inhabitants to cultivate their skills and rise to extraordinary heights. The state's egalitarian culture has spread out across the country, influencing everything from the way Americans speak English to utopian communes. Due to all these factors, I will make an argument that few would ever consider and even fewer believe – that Iowa has, with its influence on modern global society, conquered the world.

Iowa has certainty attempted to brand itself as a success story. For instance, Iowa license plates through the years contained such slogans as "Fields of Opportunity," "A State of Minds," and at one time, the straightforward, "The Corn State." But slogans like these have trouble sticking when public perception might more easily suggest: "Iowa, So Easy to Forget."

Most in the U.S. have heard of Iowa, of course, and guess it might be somewhere near the center of the country.But besides a general sense that corn and pork are produced here, and information gets fuzzy.When I told Californians I was from Iowa, most frequent responses were divided almost equally between, "That's the one with the potatoes, right?" and "Isn't Columbus the capitol of Iowa?"

Unfortunately, the knowledge that does get disseminated about the state doesn't put our best food forward. Take, for example, the way an Onion article from 2012 decided to make fun of two notable Iowa institutions: the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, and the Iowa State's Fair annual exhibition of a life-sized sculpture of a cow, carved from a giant slab of butter.

The tongue-in-cheek report was titled: "600-Pound Butter Cow Sculpture Wins Iowa Caucus." The text reads that the ever-popular butter cow received 64 percent of all votes, defeating the entire slate of Republican opponents.

"For one thing, I'm more familiar and comfortable with the butter cow," a fictional Iowa voter was "quoted" in the article, and went on to say he'd cast his vote for the creamy sculpture because of its even demeanor, its pro-agriculture agenda, and the fact that it was not Mitt Romney.

However, I can't fault The Onion for its choice of targets, because I've done my share of mocking my home state and home town, as well. I hail from Knoxville, Iowa (population 7,313). Knoxville is a former coal center that is slowly diminishing in population, like many small towns in the state. While it is the global capital of sprint car racing (high-powered race cars that dart around circular dirt tracks), its largest employer – the VA hospital – closed in 2009. Many stores in the town squares have closed and too many for-sale houses have no buyers.

But even before Knoxville's downturn, I never had delusions about its grandeur. When I was in high school my gym teacher, Mr. Cunningham, doubled as the town's mayor, juggling his gym teacher duties along with political ones. For instance, he would duck into his office during our dodge ball games and take calls from the city commissioner.

Mr. Cunningham may not have been our most notable mayor, but he was always able to coast to easy re-election. His only real opponent came in 1998, when a former VA mental patient and unrepentant drug user named Josiah Dillinger ran his own mayoral campaign.

At the time of his campaign, Dillinger was homeless, living in storage sheds until owners discovered and evicted him. Dillinger's bold campaign planks included such gems as adding an adults-only section to the local library. But I found his most interesting proposal to be an offer to solve the town's methamphetamine problem by using his knowledge as a licensed American-Indian medicine man to administer peyote to those suffering addiction.

He lost the election.

I told stories like these because like others, I had bought into the popular perception that Iowa's fumbling backwardness meant it deserved whatever ribbing it took. However, I stumbled over an unavoidable challenge to the practice of demeaning my home state – and I found this challenge in the most surprising of places, in the history of the Middle East.

I am a historian, researching Middle Eastern History at Central European University in Budapest. But as I was studying the intellectual history of the Middle East in the late 19th century, I started to notice something strange; incongruent, actually.

In the final decades of the Ottoman Empire – the Middle Eastern power that controlled southeastern Europe, Turkey, and the entire Arabian Peninsula – Iowans began popping up in the most unexpected places. In the period from the 1860s until World War I, dusty little villages in Anatolia had Iowans visit them and even inhabit them.

What were Iowans doing on the other side of the globe in tiny Middle Eastern provincial towns, at a time when Iowa had only been a state for a few decades America itself was still expanding west? The answer? These transplants from Iowa to the Middle East came spreading agricultural technology and Christianity, with remarkable results.

George E. White was a good example. He was born in the Ottoman city of Marash in 1856, where his Congregationalist missionary parents had arrived some years earlier. Later he returned to the United States to study theology at Iowa College in Grinnell. He came back to the Ottoman Empire in 1890 when the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions appointed him to Merzifon to serve as the dean and treasurer of the Anatolia College in Merzifon. White taught theology, science, agriculture, Hebrew, Biblical Greek, and mathematics to young Armenians, Greeks, and Turks.

White was a scholar, but he brought his Iowan farm knowledge, mechanical skills, and love of tinkering along with him. With these skills, he helped transform the Merzifon missionary compound into the technological and educational center of the region. The eight acres of the missionary station were filled with schools, houses, mechanic shops, a bakery "already famous for its good bread," and about 2,000 books in the library. White and the Americans introduced the first telephone, sewing machine, heating system, and farm implements to the region. Their station even had a small farm that imported new agricultural techniques from America. White and other missionaries taught students and local farmers irrigation and crop rotation – new forms of farming that were decades ahead of anything else in the Middle East. Also, their schools were of such excellent quality that Sırrî Pasha, the Ottoman governor of the province, noted that the foreigners taught the Turkish language better than in the state's own Turkish schools.

When I saw that Iowans like White with a notable place in Ottoman history, I began to wonder if there were other ways that Iowans had influenced the world in unexpected ways. What other arenas had Iowans exercised influence that I would not have expected?

After digging into more research, I was more than a little surprised by the answer. In amazingly diverse fields of achievement – whether the biological sciences, the development of the digital computer, global politics, or even communist movements – there were Iowans. We were in the background and foreground of countless technological and social developments of the 19th and 20th centuries. Sometimes we quietly supported a project; other times we were out in front directing it. Was it serendipity that put so many Iowans into influential positions in recent history, or was something else going on?

I found that it was the latter. Iowa life had two features not found in most parts of the world, or even in many parts of the United States. First, its young people were exposed to hands-on work, whether on the farm or elsewhere. Second, they were also given an excellent education. Public schools became commonplace in the state by the late 19th century, even if they were the one-room variety. Even the most isolated farm children could become literate, learn mathematics, and develop professional competency. Throughout history most people had one but not the other – either they worked at manual labor but were denied education, or they received fine instruction as a part of an elite class but were never exposed to the hard work that would enable them to transform theories into change-drivers.

Because of this combination, a small-town tinkerer like Robert Noyce could experiment with a transistor at his Grinnell college, then go on to found Intel, a company known for its egalitarian, Midwestern culture. A farm boy like Norman Borlaug could get a Ph.D. in genetics but still spend his career in the fields of Mexico and teach millions of farmers how to avoid crop failure. A beloved Iowa radio personality named Ronald Reagan could go on to acting and political fame but keep an amiable, humble personality throughout his life.

This book will tell the stories of people and groups that made Iowa the cultural force it is today. It will explore larger-than-life figures whose stories have largely been forgotten or never showcased in the first place.

Norman Borlaug is a perfect example. The crop scientist isn't a household name today, but nobody saved as many lives as he did in the 20th century. Borlaug's on-the-ground experiments in wheat cross-pollination made crops drought and disease resistant. This was a godsend to nations at risk for famine such as Mexico, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and India. Western experts wrote off these third-world nations as unrescuable, their people doomed to starvation.

However, when Borlaug finished his work, he left behind the tools to create harvests so large that in Pakistan, for example, public schools and government offices had to be closed and used for temporary grain storage. Countries previously forced to import wheat now have sufficient crops to export the grain. Today Borlaug's story is ignored in favor of more daring protectors of human life like Oscar Schindler, but Borlaug actually saved more lives by a factor of one million.

Also, a state that's assumed to be monolithic and provincial was – and still is – the setting for dozens of experiments in communal living and New Age societies. Many utopian communities sprung up in Iowa in the 19th century; the state had more of these than anywhere else in America. Most notable were the Icarians, who built America's longest-lasting secular communist society in Corning, and the German settlers of the Amanas, where tens of thousands of transplanted religious pietists shared food, housing, furniture, and beer in common.

In the 1980s Fairfield, Iowa became home to thousands of followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his brand of meditation called Transcendental Meditation. There they set up a university and even built a new community called Vedic City. The town has traditional Vedic architecture and bans all non-organic food, giving it a higher concentration of organic grocers than the most hipster of Brooklyn neighborhoods.

Iowa has broadcast its influence to the farthest corners of the world. Every university around the globe that teaches career-oriented skills owes its origin to the land grant university revolution that took place in 1850s Iowa.

Furthermore, anyone who is learning to speak English with an American accent – and more than a billion are doing so – is unknowingly learning how to speak like an Iowan. Because of the disproportionate number of Midwestern-born broadcasters and actors during Hollywood's golden age, general American English is based on the Iowan accent.

Iowa even leads the selection of the U.S. president. The Iowa caucuses have the power to launch a presidential campaign that will go all the way to the White House, as it did for Barack Obama in 2008, George W. Bush in 2000, and Jimmy Carter in 1976. For this reason Iowan voters are so valuable that politicians spend approximately $200 in campaign expenses for each vote they win during the Iowa caucuses. (In contrast, campaigns spend as little as _a tenth_ of this in other early-voting states.)

Not bad for a state thought to have nothing but corn, a cow made of butter, and more pigs than people.

This book will tell the untold history of Iowa. It will examine the state in terms of its own development, but also its influence on national and world affairs. It will explore Iowa's unique attributes and what made its people so influential, hard working, and capable of generating great change on the world.

Let's now take a look at how Iowa conquered the world, and what the world got out of it in return.

#  Chapter 1

### How Iowa Created the Global University System – and Silicon Valley as a By-Product

It was 1974, and Robert Noyce was on top of the world.

The 47-year-old was already a living legend, and now chairman of the board of Intel. The company single-handedly led the digital revolution of the 20th century. Intel had breakthroughs in microprocessing as regularly as the changing of the seasons. It had amplified the powers of computers by a factor of 100,000. Its miniaturized processors made the Apollo missions possible, redefining possibilities for space travel.

Noyce could have rested on his laurels and spend the rest of his life on executive boards, playing golf and yachting. But he was not content to merely change the scientific world. Now he wanted to change the business world.

In his new role as chairman of the board he became a spokesman for Silicon Valley. It was an easy role for him to fill: Noyce essentially built Silicon Valley with his development of the semiconductor and microchip. Nearly every tech company in the valley was founded by a former employee of his first enterprise, Fairchild Semiconductors. They all adopted his ethos of egalitarianism, where the lowest designer could pitch ideas directly to the owner and even _argue_ with him – both fireable offenses in the East.

His radical democracy at Intel was already legendary. Noyce in his tenure as CEO shunned corporate cars, reserved parking spaces, office furnishings, and private jets. His secretary had a better desk than his scratched metal workspace. His office space was in the same open area as any other worker. This lack of hierarchy permeated the culture of Intel, and it became embedded in the DNA of the emerging Silicon Valley. Noyce became the model for the next generation of CEOs, paving the way for today's Silicon Valley start-ups, staffed by dozens of hoodie-clad programmers, led by a boss who dresses no differently.

Noyce was an elite innovator, but he did not have an elite background. Although he earned a doctorate in physics at MIT, Noyce's story begins at Grinnell College in Iowa.

Unlike other famous figures from small towns, he never disparaged his humble origins later in life. Noyce hated journalists and authors who described his hometown with Dickensian colorings, making Iowa something for him to overcome before he could get on with life. Quite the opposite – Noyce credited his creativity and problem-solving abilities with his humble Midwestern upbringing. In a small town, one had to be an engineer, tinker, and technician, all rolled up into one.

"In a small town," Noyce said, "when something breaks down, you don't wait around for a new part, because it's not coming. You make it yourself."

This Midwestern mindset followed Noyce to California and stayed with him throughout his career. He was among the richest men in Silicon Valley by the latter part of the 20th century, and the most celebrated, winning the National Medal of Science in 1980 and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1983. Despite these accomplishments, Noyce lived an understated life. He loved sports cars and mansions, but he hid his cars in garages and his estate behind an enormous wall of trees.

Noyce, in his mission to flatten corporate hierarchy at Intel, eliminated the notions of management all together. Beyond him and co-founder Gordon Moore there were only strategic business segments, which were highly autonomous. They were run like a separate corporation. Middle managers, many in their mid 20s, had more power than vice presidents of corporations back East, who spent their days locked in bureaucracy and labor-management battles. This allowed for the capacity to move quickly from product planning to product production. At meetings everybody was an equal. A young engineer who disagreed with Noyce could speak up and correct him. Such behavior at a New York firm could get an associate banished to the mailroom.

Workers could also dress as they pleased, a shocking innovation to the Mad Men-era office culture of the 1960s. Most came to work in a coat and tie, but they came off when the lab coat came on. Gone were the double-breasted pinstripe suits of Harvard business school graduates.

The origins of Noyce's value system, and Silicon Valley's value system by extension, start in the Midwest, but they aren't merely small town values. Nor were they the religious values of his family, although their Congregationalist church did reject hierarchy and thought every Christian his or her own pastor, a self-starter mindset that was widespread at Intel. Nor were they the values of his lower-middle class background, in which his family lived in a rented house off the main street of a town of 7,000.

The strongest of Noyce's influences was the peculiar breed of Midwestern universities that he attended as an undergraduate. These schools believed in the odd notion that higher education should connect to one's future profession. While providing a good technical education, they did not have the polish or curriculum of classical instruction that Ivy League universities offered. Iowa's university system was respectable in the 20th century but not thought important. But by the end of the century, its ambassadors such as Noyce spread across the United States, Europe, and capitals of the developing world.

Few understood how far-reaching the system's influence was. Iowa's higher education system – which didn't exist in 1850 – became the template for the planet's university education system by the late 20th century.

### The Modern University System and Its Midwestern Roots

No matter where you go in the world, the university system is set up in the same way. There are engineering, mathematics, and other hard sciences programs, along with history, philosophy, literature, foreign languages, and other social sciences and humanities. These degree programs are directly or indirectly connected to a future job. The relative wealth of a university in Gambia is starkly different than its counterpart in America, but the curricula of both is largely the same. Why is this? Because most new universities in the world are based on the same American model.

Initially, American universities were rooted in elitism. Universities with any practical career-focus did not exist until the very recent past, not even in America. If a young person attended a university in the late 18th or early 19th centuries (which only about 1 or 2 percent of the population did due to the high social and academic bar for admittance) he typically hailed from the elite society of northwestern New England.

He (and it was almost always a he) would study subjects with only the loosest connection to a future career. The aspiring lawyer or businessman would take courses in Greek rhetoric or Latin even if he never used the information ever again. For most families, sending a child to college was more about social status than it was about education.

The entrance exam to elite universities of the past would be incomprehensible to all but today's elite students. Harvard's undergraduate entrance exam from 1869 expected the prospect to know things few doctoral candidates would know today. For example, students were required to translate into Latin the following sentence: "Who more illustrious in Greece than Themistocles? Who when he had been driven into exile did not do harm to his thankless country, but did the same that Coriolanus had done twenty years before." Then the student would have to give the Latin grammar rules for the subjunctive after _dum, cum, quominus_ and whether or not _ne_ or _ut non_ follow _restat_ and _monco,_ respectively. Following this were similar questions about the Greek language. The history and geography sections were no simpler. Students were asked the chief rivers of Ancient Gaul and Modern France and whether France was larger or smaller than Transalpine Gaul. To wrap up, they would describe the significance of Leonidas, Pausanias, and Lysander, with no leading questions that might offer directional clues for their answers.

Amazingly, at the time some suggested these standards were _too low_. In 1869 The New York Times wrote critically that university education was a "buyer's bazaar," because classified ads from Columbia, Harvard, Yale and others fought for students from a limited pool of qualified candidates.

As this entrance exam shows, only elites attended higher education before the mid-19th century, which totaled only 63,000 students, or 1 percent of the American 18- to 24-year-old population. Of this number even fewer finished their programs. Only 21 percent of those who attended were female. Today about 33 percent of all 18 to 24-year-olds are in college. More than 50 percent of college students are female.

Practical concerns pushed early shifts in curriculum. Historian Kenneth Wheeler notes that people started questioning whether translating the ancient Greeks and Romans was the best way to acquire a decent education. More schools started allowing elective courses to respond to this criticism. They also did so to accommodate an explosion of scientific knowledge in the 19th century. Universities tried to grapple with things like scientific agriculture and new discoveries in medicine. Soon there was a shift toward the modern academic emphasis that people take for granted in collegiate university coursework.

Then a new fad in education popularized practicality. One early factor that supported the trend away from traditional education was the Manual Labor Movement. It was a fad in the 1820s and 1830s in which students and professors worked on a college farm for hours each day. The Manual Labor movement came out of Europe, in which reformers such as Swiss educator John Heinrich Pestalozzi and Phillip Emanuel von Fellenberg believed that manual labor would reinforce hierarchy and class structures. They supported denominational and charitable institutions where orphaned and low-income boys could earn their education. In America it was adapted so that teachers and students worked equally. The concept was connected with abolitionism and eliminating any distinctions between racial or class groups. (Abolitionists tried to level social hierarchy while the Europeans wanted to structure it.)

American manual labor programs came to Connecticut in 1819, Maine in 1821, and Massachusetts in 1824. Following these the Oneidas Manual Labor Institute came to New York, emphasizing daily activity in workshop and fields, with the rest of the day devoted to classroom work. The program structured itself as training the whole person, both mind and body. Religious instruction was also kept in the mind of every branch of study to feed the soul, a common part of university instruction at the time. The Oneidas Institute stated in a list of its core values that it would provide a system of education to train in habits of industry, independence of character, and originality, greatly diminish the cost of education, do away with distinctions in society, and "render prominent all the manlier features of character."

Such programs did not last long in the East because of lack of interest and opposition from existing universities. But when these programs were transplanted to the Midwest, they found ideal growing conditions. The student body there was already familiar with manual labor, compared to East coasters from a more pampered background. Midwesterners wanted a mental, moral, and physical education instead of a purely abstract one. For example, at Western College, faculty and students worked together on the college farm each day. It was an egalitarian system where professors and pupils mucked out the stalls and planted corn.

Practical concerns generated technical problems. The Manual Labor movement died out by mid-century, but in its place came growing demand for vocational instruction. By the 1820s and 1830s, American politicians realized that the developing country needed more roads, bridges, dams, and waterways, and large plantations in its Western frontier. Harvard could produce plenty of seminarians or lawyers, but it couldn't produce engineers or crop scientists.

New schools were set up specifically for this purpose. The military academy at West Point was established in 1802 to provide special training to military officers and engineers – mostly civil engineers – how to use artillery correctly and manufacture weapons. They did not teach classes beyond this specialized instruction until 1817 or develop a full curriculum until the 1820s. This and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute were the only engineering programs in the East until the 1850s. Everything else was small workshops, manual labor institutes, or apprenticeships, which were looked down upon by the gentry.

The new colleges in the Midwest took on the character of their settings and thrived in their new environment, free from such class snobbery. There was no aristocracy in the Midwest. Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri were sprawling lands settled by humble farmers and small businessmen, if they had any population at all. New colleges followed suit, establishing hands-on technical programs that reflected the hands-on culture.

"The mistake has sometimes been made to transplant eastern education systems without any modification to the West," said Oberlin College professor J.H. Fairchild in 1860. He believed universities were an outgrowth of their society, and a successful "Western" system must have a connection with Western society and reflect that place. Schools in the Midwest, therefore, were located in small towns instead of cities. Colleges barely existed in cities like Detroit or Cincinnati in the 1850s but sprung up in towns with 2,000 inhabitants or less. Their catalogues claimed that such locations were ideal for university study – away from the vices of the city and conducive to building intellectual and moral character. These schools had a genuine belief that their community was something like a monastic community, with the university as the center of town life.

### College for Farmers: Waste of Time or Fulfillment of the American Dream?

The spark that really set off the Midwestern university revolution was a piece of legislation that passed in the 1850s. At this time a U.S. Senator Justin Morrill Smith argued for the government to make changes to America's system of higher education. Morrill was a self-taught businessman who had bootstrapped his way through life. He believed in the Jeffersonian philosophy that America would be a nation of active educated farmers, even though this dream had not come to fruition more than seventy years after America's founding.

Morrill had a more practical worry. Agricultural output of U.S. farms was declining, and American farmers were behind the curve in adopting the latest advances in crop science. European farmers were becoming more sophisticated in their use of crop rotation to improve per-acre output. Morrill knew that a nation could grow only as much as it could be fed. He advocated for a new kind of college that would be specifically aimed at educating farmers. The senator emphasized the notion of industrial colleges that would focus on mechanical arts, which became engineering.

This was a controversial idea. The concept of agriculture or engineering as a subject of university study didn't exist at this time. The mechanical arts were considered to be a craftsman's job, akin to the work of a cobbler or carpenter. Elites recognized mechanical technicians as a necessary part of society. But many thought that including these professions as a part of university study was as out of place as teaching coursework on trash collection. The ancient European bias against manual labor lived on in the East. To many, engineering was considered another form of manual labor with a thin veneer of science. Pure sciences of the likes of Newton were still respected, but engineering was a form of labor ranked below that of businessmen, lawyers, military captains, or doctors.

But advocates of Morrill noted that out of 100 American workers, society needed just five employed in professional jobs like lawyers, politicians, or doctors, but 95 to work industrial class jobs. They needed better education to produce better technology.

What came next led to the birth of agriculture and engineering colleges. In 1856 Morrill implemented a scheme that would create colleges for farmers. Tuition would be free; taxpayers would cover all bills. In arguing for the plan Morrill believed an investment in Americas farms would be similar to the country's investment in railroads, harbor improvements, and coastal surveys. To fund these schools, the federal government would give states wide swaths of federal land that they could sell to raise money to fund these new land grant colleges. There would be at least one per state.

The bill passed in 1859, but President James Buchanan vetoed it. He believed that the proposed colleges would be unsuccessful, and that agriculture and mechanics weren't legitimate fields of study. It finally passed in 1862 with Abraham Lincoln as president, but opposition remained from critics who thought that farmers should be working in the fields instead of idly sitting in front of a blackboard.

The fear of farmers slackening in the agricultural output was so sensitive an issue that when land grant colleges started out they required that students should be engaged in several hours a day of routine manual farm work for fear they would be educated out of their jobs. This was the case at Iowa State College when it was established in 1858 and incorporated into the Land Grant Act in 1864. It offered agricultural and technical training. The first building on campus – which still stands today as a historical museum – was a massive farmhouse. It became the home of the superintendent of the model farm and later years other deans of the school. On this site farm tenants could conduct agricultural experimentation, testing the crossings of crops to improve yield and using early forms of factory-designed farm implements.

It wasn't easy to convince farm families to send their children to college either. Even though tuition was free, farmers did not understand the purpose of a university education for their children. "We can train them in a shop or on the farm; why do we need to send them off to school?" they asked. University recruiters and government officials structured their programs to answer these objections. Schools only ran from March to October so that students could go home to plant in the spring and harvest in the fall.

Instructors skipped over the routine aspects of farming that students already knew. They focused on the industrial possibilities of a large farm and changed their pupils' understanding of a farm as a stubborn piece of land that required sweat, blood, and endless toil into thinking of it as a lucrative business.

An influx of farmers grew the market for education. Farmers were trained to produce more food in specific soil types and climates to feed a growing and hungry nation. Iowa State established institutes, small workshops and county extensions to train new farmers arriving to the Midwest in the 1860s. Many came at this time. Almost any American not fighting in the Civil War joined the Western exodus due to Congress passing a whole slew of acts that incentivized immigration. They included the 1862 Homestead Act, which gave an applicant ownership of farmland at little or no cost as long as the applicant never took up arms against the United States, was 21 years old or older, or the head of the family. Politicians believed it would fill the nation with what Jefferson called "virtuous yeomen" and give new lands to independent farmers rather than wealthy planters with platoons of slaves as seen in the South. At no other time in the history of the world did a lower-class farmer have such an opportunity to claim a large tract of his own land. It spawned a global immigration push to the United States.

Other acts that year included the Pacific Railroad Act, which promoted the construction of a transcontinental railroad across the United States. The government issued bonds and grants of land to railroad companies to build a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. The line was finished in 1869 and made travel to the Midwest from the East coast a pleasant day-long ride rather than a multi-week journey through empty prairie. Passenger carts were filled with idealistic farmers, ready to plow the land and transform virgin soil into a productive, lucrative harvest. Historians credit the Transcontinental Railroad as having as much economic and social impact on 19th-century America as the moon landings did on 20th-century America.

Midwestern universities arguably had a greater effect. In 1870, only 1,200 students attended the land-grant colleges in Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. The number shot up to 5,000 by 1880. Two decades later over 40,000 students attended land-grant schools, with 18,000 studying agriculture or engineering. The University of Nebraska had over 2,000 students by 1900 even though it was located in a barely-populated farm state, with little visible change from its frontier days. Midwestern engineering departments had the largest attendance levels in the nation, lagging only behind Cornell University and MIT. Only 48 engineering students graduated from Rutgers in 1899, 44 from Yale.

Engineers became more than glorified tradesmen. Historian Paul Nienkamp, who received his doctorate from Iowa State, notes in his dissertation that the growth of Midwestern land-grant institutions permanently altered the demographics of America's pool of formally-trained engineers. It also shaped the nature of Midwestern culture and professionalism for middle-class Americans in frontier states. In the late 19th century, university faculty lobbied for better laboratories and modern equipment. This along with gifts from wealthy businessmen allowed programs to professionalize. Engineers changed from skilled mechanics to educated professionals. The public no longer considered the practical application of scientific knowledge to be the domain of tinkerers or farm boys. Even high schools now began to separate the educational spheres of mechanical arts based on trade skills from professional engineering programs.

Schools in America that had the highest percentage of baccalaureates getting their PhDs in the hard sciences were clustered in the Midwest. Of the top 50 colleges in the country, it was small colleges in Iowa such as Simpson and Grinnell that were putting out top-tier scientists, not the Ivy League. In 1900, four times more engineers graduated from Iowa State University, the University of Wisconsin, and Michigan State University than all engineering students from the East Coast combined. Nebraska State University graduated more engineering students in 15 years, over 2,000 graduates, than all southern university students combined.

While there was good scientific instruction on the East Coast, most people didn't see a career in the hard sciences as a pathway to a high level of respectability in society. Most young men went into business or law. Science simply wasn't sufficiently bourgeois. The farm mindset, in contrast, went hand-in-hand with engineering. It respected hard work and perseverance. It did not look down on mistakes but respected those who overcome problems with ingenuity, whether fixing a broken harvester on the spot or working through the night to repair a tractor engine on the eve of harvest season. This outlook differed sharply with the more traditional East Coast outlook that favored conformity, a prestigious family name, and membership in the right church.

Modern engineering and science-based education in American schools was solidly underway, and it did not come from the industrialized East. It came from the educational philosophy and practices of 19th-century Midwestern colleges. A love and respect for science flourished in the Midwest long before it did in other parts of the United States. The Manual Labor Movement of the early 19th century translated into the late 19th-century scientific endeavor. These professors and administrators developed a culture of technical knowledge that changed how America viewed science.

### The Religious, Gender-Inclusive, Culturally Inclusive Heritage of Midwestern Schools

The Midwestern can-do culture made for good scientists, but it was also deeply religious.

In the 19th century there was not a clash between religion and science as most in the 21st century assume. The egalitarian culture of this period was still heavily tied to a Protestant worldview that saw nature as God's creation and understandable by rational inquiry and investigation. The local church was still the hub of social activity, and communities pressured local businesses not to open on Sundays. (still a thorny issue in towns such as Pella, where nothing outside franchise stores are open).

Religious groups funded numerous colleges. Small denominational schools had as much influence in the Midwest as state universities and technical schools. In Iowa, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists built schools at every crossroad; state legislatures in the Midwest freely handed out collegiate charters to nearly any religious group that asked. In contrast, South Carolina would not charter any denominational colleges until the 1850s; it preferred a state university put together by government class. The old guard of the East coast only gave charters to the denominations that had roots in its region – Massachusetts favored Congregationalist colleges, Maryland favored Catholic schools. But there was no established church in the Midwest, so little colleges sprang up, funded by small denominations such as the Swedenborgians, the Universalists or the Free Will Baptists.

Such a mix of denominational schools reflected the religious diversity of the region, as opposed to the South, which at the time was sharply separated between the Methodists and Baptists. The Midwest was no-holds-barred in terms of denominational diversity and competition. Methodists were the first to arrive in the state, following in the wake of circuit riders who travelled on horseback throughout settled portions of Iowa in the 1840s. Each rider typically had a two-week circuit in which he provided sermons for the local congregations and visited families. These riders attracted hundreds of converts. Following this Methodist wave came Catholic immigrants, many of whom moved to the settlement of Dubuque along the Mississippi River. Congregationalists arrived in the 1840s, led by a group of 11 ministers whose motto was "each a church; all a college."

These and other denominations built universities soon after building churches. By 1900, Methodists and Catholics had each created five colleges. They included Marycrest, Saint Ambrose, Briar Cliff, Loras, and Clarke by the Catholics; and Iowa Wesleyan, Simpson, Cornell, Morningside, and Upper Iowa University by the Methodists. Congregationalists established Grinnell College in 1900, which became known as the Harvard of the Midwest. (Today its endowment is second only to Harvard, due in large part to its early investment in Noyce's Intel). Other denominations followed suit. Presbyterians established Coe and Dubuque Colleges; Lutherans established Wartburg and Luther; Baptists established Central College; and the Disciples of Christ established Drake College.

These were religious, yet female friendly. Small denominational schools were the first in the United States to offer co-education. Elite schools in the East Coast at the time did not allow females into their universities. They thought such a practice was only suitable for high schools or academies, and admitting women could damage their brand.

Midwestern schools had no such worry. The Christian colleges were more interested in the moral development of students regardless of gender. A word that appeared often in the discussion of student development was "usefulness." The word was used frequently in a 19th-century debate at Grinnell College on whether to admit nine female students from Davenport, Iowa. One administrator argued in favor. He said the college needed to be co-educational from the start. If they didn't develop the character of both young men and women, _useful for society_ , then "the devil will get us all into his net." Ultimately the board agreed. They hoped to produce more useful Christian citizens with the benefit of a university education.

At Midwestern public schools women had opportunities that did not exist in the East, much as they did at smaller denominational schools. Iowa State University had the first home economics program in the United States. The first president, Adonijah Strong Welch, told the first female students, "We offer, then, to the young women who shall resort to this College, a scope for scientific progress and research as unlimited and free as that which we offer to the other sex." His wife Mary Beaumont Welch developed the "ladies course" for female students.

For females, the freshman year curriculum was identical to the men's course in agriculture. In their sophomore year women studied botany, chemistry, physics, with the option of Latin and French, English Literature, or Music and Drawing. Such coursework continued the next two years, with smatterings of history, psychology, geology, and other sciences. Mary Welch believed that women could learn the sciences in a laboratory-like setting because it mirrored running a large, well-organized home. Women should also learn economics, she believed, because they often ran the business and accounting aspects of farm management from behind the scenes.

Working as lab assistants, women made several important but unrecognized contributions to research science. Some ended up marrying their professors, but others made startling discoveries that are only beginning to be recognized. When James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the DNA double helix in 1953, the data and research of Rosalind Elsie Franklin was critical in determining the structure. However, her images of x-ray diffraction, which confirmed the helical structure of DNA, were shown to Watson without her knowledge or approval, so recognition was denied her.

Despite snubbings, the land grant university opened career paths to women that were once closed. Iowa State Teachers' College – now the University of Northern Iowa – was founded in 1876 to train teachers for the state's public schools. Many women became public school teachers after World War I. Before this time the profession was dominated by men, mostly due to university academic calendars of the time. Male university students took courses in the spring and fall and taught public school courses in the winter. As men left these jobs to fight in the war overseas, women filled in the gaps. Midwestern universities educated these new female workers. They slowly broke down the notion that men work outside the home, women do not, and the two shall not mix.

Even minority students had new opportunities in the Midwest that were unavailable in much of the rest of the country. Many of today's historically black colleges and universities were established as land grant universities. Minorities were also admitted into the flagship land-grant schools.

One notable alumnus of Iowa State University is its first black student and its first black faculty member, George Washington Carver. The renowned botanist was accepted into the school in 1891. As a faculty member, he revolutionized the uses of the peanut. His research into the promotion of this alternative crop, along with soybeans and sweet potatoes, helped aid in nutrition for farm families.

Carver wanted poor farmers to grow alternative crops both as a source of their own food and as a source of other products to improve their quality of life. Until the 1930s the peanut was mainly a garden crop and used for animal stock. He utilized this cheap crop in ways never imagined. Carver developed and promoted over a hundred products made from peanuts useful for farmers and their homes, including cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, peanut butter, gasoline, and nitroglycerin.

### A Seedbed for Technology

Along with Carver's work, technological innovations from Iowa State included a curiosity known as the digital computer. It was built by mathematics and physics professor John Atanasoff and engineering student Clifford Berry from 1937 to 1942. It was a monstrosity that could do much less than today's average smart phone. But at the time it could do binary arithmetic and parallel processing, which were revolutionary for the time.

Universities around the globe began to copy the model of the land grant institution. While there are ancient universities in Europe and the Middle East that predate America's by centuries – notably Al-Azhar university in Egypt, which has taught theological coursework for over a thousand years – nearly all universities built in the 20th century copy the American model. Take the example of Turkey. The country of 70 million has built dozens of universities in the last decade. Turkish administrators have copied the American model down to the letter. Nearly all have the exact same programs as a land-grant school: a college of engineering, business, life sciences, humanities, and social sciences. There is no difference in these programs from their American counterparts except in small areas (for example, Turkish history replaces American history). The similar program of study across the globe makes student exchanges and international study abroad programs possible since equivalent courses exist around the world.

Midwestern science and technology universities continue to influence the world, mostly in terms of foreign graduate students. Any engineering, mathematics, physics, or chemistry department lab is largely staffed by graduate students from India or China. They come to the United States from an Asian model of education that rewards compliance, respect for order, obedience, and heroic levels of memorization. After their stay in the United States of two to five years, they return home with American education models. If their education included a PhD, they run their laboratories and classrooms on the same models as the lab in which they were trained. At these labs, traditional Asian models of education are used less than models that prefer critical thinking and open dialogue between professors and students.

American professors may want foreign students in their labs for their dedication and focus, but these same students are usually not the ones setting up the experiments in the beginning. It is the Western-trained students who come up with creative solutions. A technology writer observed, "When you look at the production of phones and laptops and gadgets we use, the production is going on in China. They have the workforce and political structure that makes it cheaper. We don't produce these things in the U.S. anymore. But we consume them so that the beginning and end of this economic structure are still in the U.S. This goes back to the ideas of the older state universities that were focused on critical thinking and how we approach problems."

In discussing the impact that Iowan universities have had on the course of history, it would be wrong to discount other schools outside of Iowa State. The University of Iowa, founded in 1847, has consistently ranked as one of the best public universities in the nation. It has a distinguished record as a university focused on the social sciences and the humanities. Probably one of the most well known programs the Iowa Writer's Workshop. This graduate-level creative writing program has arguably had more impact on American literature than any other institution. Over its history its faculty have won numerous national book awards and other literary honors. Six U.S. Poets Laureate have graduated from the workshop, and faculty and graduates have won 28 Pulitzer Prizes. Alumni include Flannery O'Connor and current Poet Laureate Charles Wright.

### How Midwestern Values Created Silicon Valley

Of course, no discussion of the entrepreneurial spirit of Iowan colleges is complete without a closer look at the life of Robert Noyce.

As we saw earlier, his technological accomplishments rival that of Thomas Edison. Born in Burlington, Iowa in 1927 and educated at Grinnell College, Noyce co-founded Intel Corporation in 1968, invented the integrated circuit, and was dubbed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley" for his personal mentoring of dozens of the next generation's CEOs. Steve Jobs idolized him for creating the open source spirit of Silicon Valley. Jobs thought his mentor to be a rebel against the status quo, a mutation in the body of American business. What Jobs didn't know is that Noyce merely brought the Iowan spirit of education and business to California.

Noyce was the son and grandson of Congregationalist clergymen. His mother was a graduate of Oberlin College and dreamt of being a foreign missionary before she married. From an early age Robert put together inventions. He built a radio from scratch and attached a motor to his sled, using a propeller and parts from an old washing machine. Noyce then graduated to building a small aircraft. When he was 13, Robert came across an illustration for a glider that he found in _The Book of Knowledge_ , a multi-volume encyclopedia, for building a glider. He and his brother pooled $4.53 to buy materials. It included bamboo spindles for the frame from a furniture store and cheesecloth to cover the wings. A girl on their block sewed the cloth to their frame. When finished it was four feet tall and stretched 18 feet. They tied it to a neighbor's car and managed to launch the glider a few feet above ground. A few years later Robert rode it off the roof of a barn. He flew for three seconds before crashing to the ground. Thankfully he avoided injury.

Noyce's community may have disliked his eccentricities, but it never looked down on him or his poor family. Grinnell was fiercely egalitarian and rejected class division. Although his family lived in a house owned by a local church, there was no stigma attached to not owning one's own house. Thomas Wolfe argues in his essay "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce" that Grinnell's Congregationalist roots made the town reject the idea of social hierarchy as fiercely as a religious hierarchy in the Catholic or Anglican churches. The Congregational Church was a breakaway from the Church of England in the sixteenth century. Each congregation of the Congregationalist Church was autonomous. Their rejection of a church hierarchy reflected their hatred of a British class system divided into royalty, aristocracy, yeomen, and peasants. A minister led by teaching, not by using the threat of excommunication. Each church member was supposed to learn moral teachings and be his own pastor in dealing with God. As a result, divisions weren't marked by the rich or poor in the Midwest; they were divided by those who were devout, educated, and hardworking, and those who weren't. Being poor wasn't a social gaffe. Taking tennis or riding lessons instead of working an odd job was.

Noyce was accepted by the community, but he was an irascible student and got into frequent trouble. When a university student at Grinnell, he stole a 25-pound pig from the town's mayor. He and his friends roasted it at a student luau, a popular event in the years following World War II when soldiers returning from the Pacific Theatre brought Polynesian culture back with them. The mayor wrote a letter to Noyce's parents, reminding them that in Iowa stealing livestock was a felony that demanded a minimum sentencing of one year in prison and a fine of $1,000. The crime went deeper than that, however. To a Midwesterner, livestock was both a livelihood and a primary source of food. Stealing it was a crime against the whole person and demanded fierce punishment. The issue resolved only when Noyce's physics professor, not wanting to lose a star pupil, intervened and compensated the mayor.

Noyce was still a college student in Iowa in 1947, but at this time he began working on state-of-the-art technology. The transistor had just been invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey. One of the co-inventors was John Bardeen, college friends with Grant Gale, Noyce's physics professor. He read about the breakthrough in the newspaper and asked Bardeen to send him technical writings on the transistor. The invention performed the same function as a vacuum tube (invented by another Iowan, Lee De Forest) which amplified specific electrical signals such as a radio wave. But it was fifty times smaller and did not require glass tubing, a vacuum, or a plate. Gale got a hold of the two first transistors ever made in the world, which he showed to his eighteen physics students in Grinnell. He wasn't interested in its technological applications. Gale merely thought the transistor might be a good teaching device to show the flow of electrons through a solid.

Noyce, one of the lucky few to see the technical curiosity, was fascinated. He saw the future potential of this device and threw himself into his physics studies, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1949 (although not before leaving with the Brown Derby Prize, which recognized the senior who earned the best grades with the least amount work).

On the recommendation of his professors, Noyce applied to MIT's physics doctoral program in 1949 and finished 1953. When he first arrived in Boston, some of his professors had never heard of the transistor. They couldn't be blamed for this ignorance – Noyce was doing academic research at Grinnell, the only place in the world outside of Bell Labs where one could study the transistor. But they could be blamed for dismissing the full potential of the transistor. Many thought of it only as a novelty developed by a telephone company, with little commercial potential. To his annoyance, Noyce found that MIT was behind Grinnell College when it came to adopting new technology.

Following graduation, Noyce joined 11 other electrical engineers with doctorates to work for William Shockley, a future Nobel Prize winner in physics who understood the digital possibilities that could be unlocked by the transistor. He formed the startup Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1955. Shockley proved to be a poor manager, so seven engineers, Noyce included, defected to start their own semiconductor company. The "Traitorous Eight" – whose leaving Shockley described as a "betrayal" – established Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in 1957. They began in a humble two-story warehouse in Mountain View at the northern end of Santa Clara Valley. At the time Mountain View was still full of apricot, plum, and pear orchards. Nearby companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard were already up and running. Both were trying to develop the electronic computer.

Fairchild was perfectly positioned to offer the semiconductor to these manufacturers. With the Soviet Union launching Sputnik the same year, the dawn of the space race made large companies clamor for more computing power. The government in particular wanted small computers that could be installed into rockets to provide onboard guidance, which was impossible in the age of vacuum-tube-powered monstrosities. Transistors could shrink computers to such a size. With Noyce's invention of a solid-state circuit using silicon, he created the industry standard for the integrated circuit, or microchip. Miniature computers were now possible, and the possibilities were endless. Robots, complex computing, and even rockets to the moon were no longer science fiction. He parlayed his success into founding Intel in 1968.

Noyce started the company with Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove. Noyce was the visionary, Moore the technological genius, Grove the management scientist who pushed Intel's laid-back company culture. Grove was a Hungarian-born Jew who avoided the Holocaust and escaped the communist country at the age of 20. His early-life experiences made him appreciate a business climate of democracy and collaboration. Grove was dubbed "the guy who drove the growth phase" of Silicon Valley.

But it was Noyce who ultimately drove the egalitarian spirit at Intel that he learned in Grinnell. Even after becoming rich from his integrated circuit discovery, he opted to stay in the modest Mountain View rather than move to a wealthy part of Palo Alto. He rejected the social hierarchy found in the East Coast and all the social markers of wealth, CEOs with their oak bookcases, leather-bound books, and carved paneling. There were no reserved parking spaces at Intel; manager and secretary fought for the same spots. Everybody began the work day at the same time – eight a.m. – and their were no office suites for the executives. There was no dress code, except for the unwritten expectation that workers dress modestly. Wolfe describes the clash between these mindsets when Fairchild CEO John Carter came to visit Noyce's office:

One day John Carter came to Mountain View for a close look at Noyce's semiconductor operation. Carter's office in Syosset, Long Island, arranged for a limousine and chauffeur to be at his disposal while he was in California. So Carter arrived at the tilt-up concrete building in Mountain View in the back of a black Cadillac limousine with a driver in the front wearing the complete chauffeur's uniform: the black suit, the white shirt, the black necktie, and the black-visored cap. That in itself was enough to turn heads at Fairchild Semiconductor. Nobody had ever seen a limousine and a chauffeur out there before. But that wasn't what fixed the day in everybody's memory. It was the fact that the driver stayed out there for almost eight hours, doing nothing. He stayed out there in his uniform, with his visored hat on, in the front seat of the limousine, all day, doing nothing but waiting for a man who was somewhere inside... People started leaving their workbenches and going to the front windows just to take a look at this phenomenon... It wasn't merely that this little peek at the New York-style corporate high life was unusual out here in the brown hills of the Santa Clara Valley. It was that it seemed terribly wrong.

Noyce renounced such hierarchy with the ferocity of Martin Luther at a papal court. He was the young CEO of the company and not afraid to give incredible levels of responsibility to new hires, even those fresh out of graduate school. There were no layers of staff and management between the top and bottom of the company, a shocking contrast to legacy companies such as GM or GE, which in the mid-20th century employed hundreds of thousands, separating them with management levels as hard as sedimentary rock layers. Noyce preferred quick movement instead. Any functionary could make a large purchase. Back East, it would take the approval of one or two superiors, and the request could take weeks. At Intel, only one request form was necessary.

Defectors from Noyce's company started dozens of their own companies, all supplying microchips. Fruit trees were uprooted and replaced with office buildings housing hi-tech start-ups, with cultures inspired by Noyce's ethos of informal codes of conduct and no social distinctions. They embodied the California spirit of the 1960s, with casual surfers, political protestors, and hippies that defied any social convention imaginable, and even a few unimaginable. Yet their laid-back exterior belied and incredible work ethic, another trait that the Midwesterner Noyce bequeathed to the new business community.

Noyce became a patriarch of this newly-minted Silicon Valley. He was a father figure to the next generation of Silicon Valley giants. After leaving daily management at Intel in 1975 he mentored Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and imbued the energetic young entrepreneur with his vision of business. Their relationship may have also influenced Jobs' 2005 decision to transition to Intel processors, which it still uses today. Jobs later recounted the influence that Noyce had on his career, teaching him both how to think and how to act:

Bob Noyce took me under his wing. I was young, in my twenties. He was in his early fifties. He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand... My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that changed this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person. And if we really go back and we examine, did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments. [And] knew about human anatomy. And [combining] all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.

Noyce was a thinker and a doer. He had the theoretical knowledge of a physicist and the practical ability of a craftsman. He was a secular Protestant saint, a worker who did not isolate himself like a Vatican bishop or New York CEO but was a hands-on laborer who walked among the cubicles. Although he abandoned the simple moral light of his childhood and left the church later in life, Noyce brought a different form of this light to Silicon Valley. Wolfe said three decades ago that Noycisms are still repeated in Silicon Valley like a holy catechism: "Datadyne is not a corporation, it's a culture," or "Cybernetek's assets? Its assets aren't its hardware; they're the software of the thousand souls who work there." Those phrases are still repeated today. They are Midwestern folksy truisms transformed into 21st century corporate speech.

Noyce was his own man, but he was also the product of the global university revolution that started in the Midwest. In the 19th and 20th centuries, education at the university level was democratized for the masses. It left the hands of a small number of Northwestern New England elites and spread throughout the Midwest. Here the values of egalitarianism, experimentation, and hard work were internalized. From this solid beginning, higher education spread throughout the rest of the globe, forever eclipsing the Harvards, Oxfords, and other old, stuffy institutions obsessed with status and family heritage. These values spread to California soil and took root in the business community like corn transplanted to virgin Iowa soil, returning a hundred-fold harvest.

These universities believed in building something out of nothing: coming to an empty field and building a school that could provide technical instruction for otherwise uneducated farmers. The graduates went on to create companies that believed a few tiny gold wires and bits of silicon could transform the global economy.

A final story from Noyce sums up this very Midwestern ethos of creating opportunity where none existed before. Andrew Grove would ask at employee meetings, "How would you sum up the Intel approach?"

"Many hands would go up," Wolfe writes, "and Grove would choose one, and the eager communicant would say: 'At Intel you don't wait for someone else to do it. You take the ball yourself and you run with it.' And Grove would say: 'Wrong. At Intel you take the ball yourself and you let the air out and you fold the ball up and put it in your pocket. Then you take another ball and run with it and when you've crossed the goal you take the second ball out of your pocket and reinflate it and score twelve points instead of six.'"

#  Chapter 2

# Mennonites, Transcendentalists, and Utopian Communes: Why Iowa is the Multicultural Capital of the World

#

Every day at 5 p.m., 1,700 residents of Fairfield, Iowa file into the Golden Domes, a twin set of buildings that look like flying saucers sprayed with polyurethane foam. The number of residents is carefully dictated, chosen for its sacredness, as it is one percent of America's population divided by its square root. But the 1,700 aren't there to argue mathematics. They are there to take flight.

Each of the residents puts themselves in the lotus position. Then they propel themselves in the air using only the force of their buttocks. Smiling serenely, they start to bounce higher and higher. This is the first stage of yogic flying, a "natural extension" of Transcendental Meditation. The second stage, adherents claim, is floating in the air. The final stage is taking flight. While the second and third stages have not yet been reached – although mediators have been optimistic for decades that a breakthrough is around the corner – levitation isn't in the only benefit of this technique. According to Yogic Flying Club for Students, other effects appear when sufficiently large numbers of people practice the technique.

"This coherence-creating effect, termed the Maharishi Effect, neutralizes stress and negativity in the innermost fabric of the nation. The crime rate drops. Sickness and accident rates drop. Inflation and unemployment decline and the economy improves. Even terrorism and open warfare have been reduced or stopped and the superpowers have become friendlier."

The mediators explain this technique with difficult-to-capture technical jargon. "The latest scientific discoveries" or quantum mechanics are frequently mentioned. Additional validation is offered in the form of photos of yogic flyers appearing to hover in air.

These transcendentalists have been in Fairfield since the 1970s, yet traditional Iowans consider Fairfield to be an anomaly, a weed growing in the cracks of the state's cultural asphalt. What most Iowans don't know is that utopian communities like Fairfield are not an aberration in the state's otherwise vanilla-plain identity. They are hard-wired into the state's character.

In the last chapter we looked at the entrepreneurial spirit of Iowa and how its egalitarian approach to business created the culture of Silicon Valley. This risk-taking spirit had remarkable influence on the business world. But new arrivals to Iowa did not restrict this spirit to business or work life. They also applied it to religion and government. For this reason, idealists and socialists built many experimental communities in Iowa.

The abundant land, freedom, and privacy allowed any group from around the world with more than a few dozen adherents to come, purchase a sizable acreage, and conduct their social experiments. They came with wide-eyed enthusiasm and believed that their community would bring the next stage of human progress. Out of their experiments a New Man would emerge, free from poverty, social strife, or greed. While most of these experiments ended in failure – and they usually failed, ironically, over money – they stand as a testament to the multicultural nature of the state.

Descriptors like "multicultural" tend to be assigned to places like California, not Iowa. In 2010 I worked for the U.S. Census Bureau in California conducting door-to-door interviews. Part of the questionnaire asked residents their ethnic make-up. Though most fell into the main categories of white, black, or Latino, there were endless mixes and matches thrown in. They were one-fourth this, one-half that, a bi-racial grandmother here, a pan-racial father there. Some residents even reported ethnic backgrounds that were mathematically impossible. One man said he was one-third Japanese, one-quarter Guatemalan, and half white. (I don't know if he was irritated at my presence or genuinely confused with his lineage, but the work of the census drone is to report, not argue, so I logged the results without comment.)

You will not encounter nearly as much ethnic diversity in Iowa. In some communities a mixed marriage is still thought of as a German-background person marrying a person of Danish or Swedish descent. Spanish speakers are few except in Iowa's larger cities. To paraphrase an article in The Onion, "White Family Moves To Town," diversity in Iowa means that whether someone is of Irish, English, German, Italian or Swedish background, we are all the colors of God's white rainbow.

Iowa may appear to lack ethnic diversity, but a quick survey of town names in the state suggest a far more complex cultural diversity. Des Moines and Dubuque have French names, befuddling visitors to the state who attempt to pronounce them. (Is it "Dey Mwah" or "Dah Moyne"?). The names point to the brief French control of the state. Iowa was the sight of considerable French exploration, fur trapping, and basic industry when France owned much of the continental United States prior to selling it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. They were the first European visitors to Iowa.

In 1673, Father Jacques Marquette, a studious 35-year-old Jesuit, and Louis Jolliet, a 27-year-old philosophy student-turned-fur trapper, went west of the Mississippi, thought to be the first two white explorers to see Iowa. After surveying the area, they commented in their journals that Iowa appeared "lush, green, and fertile" – as did immigrants who came to Iowa two centuries later to farm. The French and Spanish governments established trading posts along the Mississippi River over the next century, but American settlement didn't begin until after the War of 1812. The U.S. government encouraged settlers to come after strong-arming Indian cultures to leave through forced population movement. The Sauk and Meskwaki tribes were pushed out altogether in 1846 after Iowa gained statehood. But in the 1850s the Iowa Legislature allowed the Meskwaki to purchase land in the state, an unprecedented move. There is still a large Meskwaki reservation in Iowa today.

The number of foreign-born settlers in Iowa remained small prior to the Civil War. It increased shortly after when active recruitment for immigrants began. The state printed a 96-page book in 1869 called _Iowa: The Home of Immigrants._ The booklet provided educational, social, physical, and political descriptions of Iowa. It was published in English, German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish to attract any would-be immigrant groups. Iowans welcomed northern and western European immigrant groups to fill out the sparse landscape, considering these groups to be "good stock."

Germans were the largest immigrant group, settling in every county in the state. Most were farmers but others became craftsmen and shopkeepers. They published German-language newspapers, opened schools, and managed banks. Other European groups included Swedes, Norwegians, Dutch, Danes, and various groups from the British Isles. Schwieder notes that they usually occupied the same corner of the state. Norwegians settled in Story County; Swedes came to Boone County; and Danes settled in southwestern Iowa – there the "sen" suffix of last names dominates. Later immigrant groups included Italians and Croatians, who were poorer and often lacked vocational skills to do work other than hard manual labor. They turned to coal mining, which was the simplest but most physically intensive work available at the end of the 19th century. Italian immigrants usually came to America with the financial support of his family or friends. Laborers worked in the coal mines to pay back their travel loans, then saved to bring over their wives and families. For two generations Italians dominated the Iowa coal industry until it began to decline in the 1920s. It all but disappeared by the 1950s.

Immigrants typically traveled in groups of a few dozen and formed towns with a specific ethnic identity. Such towns that popped up in the early 1800s were Pella, a Dutch town; Elk Horn, which is primarily Danish; or Melrose, which is Irish. These groups often came for reasons of religious persecution. Pella was founded as a unit of eight hundred Dutch immigrants who were one congregation of a dissident minister. They travelled to America with all their savings in a large iron safe pulled by a team of oxen and guarded by a group of burly Dutchmen. They found a new site in Iowa to locate their new town and construct a planned community. The Hollanders purchased the land and began to build their settlement. The community was united by common ideals, and the settlers built the town with a common plan and purpose. The name Pella was a biblical term meaning "city of refuge."

Other less mainstream groups also settled in Iowa. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Russian Jews came to Sioux City. The city had at least a half-dozen synagogues. At the turn of the century Sioux City had a cosmopolitan luster and appeared poised to become another Chicago, a midwestern cultural and commercial hub that attracted immigrants from across the world. These Jews were part of a massive wave of Russian and Eastern Europeans fleeing Russia's pogroms. They came to Iowa for its farms, meatpacking plants, and coal mines. Many of them also joined communist groups and supported the Bolshevik Revolution. The most famous – or infamous – figure to emerge from this community is George Koval. He was a scientist who became a Soviet Spy and infiltrated the Manhattan Project. Historians believe he accelerated Russia's nuclear program by years, making the Cold War and Soviet-American mutually assured destruction a possibility in the 20th century.

### Dreams of a Communist Midwest: Iowa and the Utopian Experiment

A much more interesting trend in Iowa's immigrant history is its many communist colonies. From the beginning of the state until 1900 several utopian communities were founded in Iowa. These groups had different ideologies, but most were fleeing economic misery or political/religious persecution in Europe. They were attracted to philosophies like communism that spoke of empowerment for the lower classes. They also came with nothing, so they had nothing to lose – why not take a risk and try to build a perfect society from the ground-up?

Most communities ended in failure shortly after their founding: Abner Kneeland, a pantheist, started Salubria in Van Buren County in 1839, but the community folded five years later after he died. Hungarian refugees founded New Buda in 1850 after fleeing the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Economic difficulties forced them to abandon the town three years later and move to Texas. Followers of French socialist Charles Fourier established Phalanx in Mahaska County in 1844, but it folded two years later. Fourier believed that a society that shared all its resources could eradicate poverty and vastly improve its production levels. His social structure called for farmers to feed a community of artisans, craftsmen, and intellectuals. Eventually all creative activity including industry, craft, and agriculture would arise from a liberated passion. It didn't work. Sharing resources was a difficult task among farmers, many of whom barely produced enough to feed their own families, let alone other members of the community.

Although most of these communities failed after a few years, the idea of utopianism took hold in the American psyche during the 18th and 19th centuries. Utopian communities were based on the idea of achieving religious or social perfection based on communal living. According to Robert V. Hine, author of _California's Utopian Communities_ , the definition of a utopian community "consists of a group of people who are attempting to establish a new social pattern based upon a vision of the ideal society and who have withdrawn themselves from the community at large to embody that vision in experimental form."

Over 250 communal groups formed in the United States before the mid-20th century. The communities were small, sometimes only numbering a few dozen. Other groups attracted a larger following. Perhaps the most well-known are the Shakers, which had 6,000 members at its peak in the mid-19th century. They were a group of dissenting Quakers under the leadership of Mother Ann Lee. They came to America in 1774 and received their name for their ecstatic behavior during worship. Mainline Protestants frowned at their dancing, whirling, and clapping in a church building. They were more mystified by the Shaker insistence on celibacy. New members came from converts or adopting children.

Iowa, however, held a special attraction for utopianists. "Iowa had a very large number of communal groups, at least a dozen in the mid-19th century. That's a larger number than you'll see farther west and in the south," said Peter Hoehnle, president of the Communal Studies Association, in an interview with Iowa Public Radio.

The early settlement of Iowa coincided with utopianism reaching its high point in the 1830s and 1840s. Iowa was open ground, known to be good farm land, but also isolated, which is attractive when trying to establish a new order. It had good connections to the Mississippi River and wasn't totally unreachable, but empty enough to build whatever the community wanted to build. "It was a rich canvas on which the utopian picture could be painted," Hoehnle said.

The idea of community life in which members held all things in common existed for two thousands years in Christianity, with monastic groups living out the principle of first-century Jerusalem in which believers "held all things in common." (Acts 2:44). The idea became popular among secular thinkers in the 1800s, who fashioned themselves as the heirs of classical Greek thought. Plato put forward the concept of a human utopian society in _Republic_ , in which he wrote of a fictional Greek city-state with communal living among the ruling class. Thomas More, the 16th-century English statesman, developed Plato's ideas in his book _Utopia_ in 1516, describing an idyllic political and social system on a fictional island. Few readers realized that the world "utopia" means "no land" in Latin, a play on words that suggests Thomas More thought such a place to be unworkable.

Nevertheless, 18th-century European rationalists believed in empiricism and creating new political orders. They thought that a well-organized society could be free of poverty, greed, ignorance, and any forms of immorality. French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that vice and sin came from external forces. But if man could return to a state of nature – free from social conditioning that put him in conflict with his neighbor – then a new, perfect social order could emerge. Thus utopian movements and their communities were formed.

It is easy to judge harshly such experiments today because we sit on the other side of history and know that they did not work. From our 21st-century perspective, we think of these colonists as wingnuts, willing to follow any charismatic leader, and not too different from a religious cult. But we have to take that time in history in to consideration. In the 18th and 19th centuries, social changes were happening that had never happened before. The French Revolution overthrew France's king and queen. That part is not remarkable, as plenty of monarchs had been overthrown over thousands of years. But what is remarkable is that they did not _replace_ their rulers with anyone. The French called for unity, equality, and brotherhood, and the utter alien notion that all members of society deserved the same rights and were liable to the same laws. Under this new system, a king could receive the same punishment for lawbreaking as a peasant. Many found it absurd.

The French Revolution failed, but the equally radical American Revolution succeeded. The rebel American colonists managed to install democracy as their operational government model. What had only been a strange ruling practice by the Ancient Greeks was now the guiding principal behind a massive new nation. It was a time in which startling changes were happening across the globe.

The future seemed limitless. If a country could rule itself without a king and queen, some thought, why couldn't it rule itself without any ruler at all? Many utopian thinkers asked themselves that if one Greek form of government, democracy, could be dusted off after thousands of years on the shelf, then why not try other discarded ideas? Perhaps the time had come for Plato's vision of a utopia.

From the 1830s to 1850s, charismatic leaders formed groups of 50 to 100 Europeans who followed a basic ideology or religious denomination and set up communist communities in Iowa. As we saw earlier, most experiments failed after a few years. These towns were distant from cities and the community members were forced to pursue farming, even though few had any experience in agriculture. Wide-eyed utopianists could articulate the values of communism, but they couldn't translate this enthusiasm into working a plow. They struggled to learn on the job, but their early harvests were barely large enough to feed the community, let alone accrue any capital. As a result, the town's mortgages and land purchases were never paid. Debt accumulated until the towns went bankrupt.

### Corning: A Utopian Case Study

But a few towns stabilized in their early years. A few even lasted for decades. One of the greatest utopian success stories in Iowa was Corning, founded by the Icarians. They were a French-based utopian socialist movement inspired by Étienne Cabet, a French philosopher who wanted to replace capitalist production with workers' cooperatives. Cabet was a radical politician who played a leading role in the Revolution of 1830, which returned a constitutional government to France. Later conflicts forced him into a five-year exile in England. Upon his return he wrote a novel _Voyage to Icaria_ , which explained his economic and social ideas.

Cabet appealed to European artisans of the early 1800s who were being priced out of the market by cheaper goods churned out of European factories. A blacksmith who could not compete on the cheap costs of metal factory goods was suddenly out of work. Immigrating to America with like-minded fellows and joining a society free from poverty and social strife seemed like an attractive proposition.

Cabet called for mass migration to the United States to put his ideas into action. He believed that 20,000 working men would immediately heed his call, with numbers soon reaching a million as news of the colonies' success spread across Europe. Wide enthusiasm greeted his appeal. Donations of money and farm equipment came pouring in. Cabet even contracted with a Texas land agent to obtain a title for 1 million acres of land, as long as it was colonized by 1848.

Critics thought of Cabet as an effete thinker who preferred academic speculation in a comfortable house to the hard work of actually building such a community. Years after Cabet's dream communities had become a reality, researcher Charles Nordhoff visited the community. He praised his followers but dismissed their petty leader: "One cannot help respecting the handful of men and women who, in the wilderness of Iowa, have for more than twenty years faithfully endeavored to work out the problem of Communism according to the system he left them; but Cabet's own writings persuade me that he was little more than a vain dreamer, without the grim patience and steadfast unselfishness which must rule the nature of one who wishes to found a successful communistic society."

The conditions upon arrival were definitely grim. An advanced guard of 69 Icarians left France for Texas and arrived at the port of New Orleans. To their discouragement, they found the land grant was only for 10,000 acres, and it was much poorer soil than promised. To make matters worse, the plot was not a contiguous piece of land. Parcels were cut up in a checkerboard fashion, making large-scale farming or community development impossible.

Despite these difficulties, other colonists came. They set up communes in California, Missouri, Illinois, Texas, and Iowa. The Illinois colony was ironically purchased from Mormons who were leaving for Utah, anxious to sell or rent their buildings. One utopian community handed its resources to another.

The shining star of the Icarian movement was the Iowa colony in Corning. It lasted for 46 years until it ultimately disbanded in 1898, making it the longest-lived secular commune in American history. The Icarians purchased 3,000 acres of land in Iowa in 1852. Immigrants from the failed colony in Nauvoo, Illinois joined them in 1860 after it fell apart due to factional battles and financial difficulties. The Nauvoo residents donated all their worldly goods to the community and passed a probationary period of four months before they could join the Corning settlement.

The French-speaking settlers arrived, greeted with nothing but mud hovels. Unlike the Nauvoo colony, the land had never been farmed before. Settlers had to break the sod for the first time, making the initial year full of backbreaking labor. But communal living was there from the onset. To ensure that everyone lived equally, they built modest log cabins for each family. Larger multi-purpose buildings were used for laundering, dining, and other activities. By 1874, they built up the community to include a two story, 1,200-square foot dining hall and school, along with a dozen houses to accommodate the 11 families. They ate all their meals at the community halls; partly out of custom, but also out of necessity since there were no kitchens in any of the houses. Work was divided by gender. Women were ironers, seamstresses, and cooks; men were blacksmiths, shoemakers, mechanics, masons, and tailors. After a few years the Icarians produced enough to sell their goods to nearby towns. They sold cattle, hogs, and wool, which was a prosperous venture during the Civil War.

Corning's political and social life stayed faithful to communist principles. The group governed itself through weekly meetings every Saturday. The colony elected a president as its formal head each year, but officers were elected each week for the conduct of meetings. There were no formal religious observances in the community. Most rested on Sunday, with some electing to go hunting or put on a musical or theatrical production for the amusement of the other colonists.

The child-rearing practices also reflected their unique way of life, and it strongly resembled the daycare system in the United States and Europe today. At the age of two all children went to the nursery. There they were cared for by older women. Schwieder notes that all toys were held in common, and children were instructed to think of others at all times. Mothers, who were not tasked with watching their children, were free to work in the garden, laundry, kitchen, or sewing room. The usage of helpers to raise one's children was an alien practice at the time for all but the wealthy, so this daycare model was revolutionary.

Charles Nordhoff visited the colony while preparing his book _The Communist Societies of the United States_. He spoke positively of Corning's commitment to education and equality among all members. Everyone was free from servitude and promised an education, which was a major priority in the commune. The library in their former colony of Nauvoo had over 4,000 books. This is a paltry number today, but it was quite a collection at the time, especially among laborers and craftsmen. Much of Europe was still mired in rigid class structures, with aristocrats hoarding resources and denying lower classes a formal education. Russia had only liberated its serfs a decade before. America had done the same with its black population, but perpetuated a de facto slavery in the form of emerging institutions such as sharecropping. Universal public schools were not yet common. Equally among all regardless of class status was a promise in the Constitution, but its full application was still a work in progress.

Nevertheless, Nordhoff noted that their living conditions were spartan and dull:

The living is still of the plainest. In the common dining-hall they assemble in groups at the tables, which were without a cloth, and they drink out of tin cups, and pour their water from tin cans. 'It is very plain,' said one to me; 'but we are independent — no man's servants — and we are content.'"

Over the years, ideological splits developed. They soon threatened to break apart the small community. In the 1870s colonists were split over allowing women the right to vote. Thirty-one colonists opposed the measure; 17 supported it. Those 17 left the community and moved to a new site a mile down the road, naming it New Icaria. The two groups divided up the land and property. The citizens of New Icaria were older members of the original group and found it difficult to continue supporting their community. They could not perform arduous physical labor and had to hire outside help. Nor could they produce children for the next generation of Icarians. This daughter colony disbanded in 1878 due to bankruptcy.

The original community, Old Icaria, limped on until 1895. The younger members believed that their parents had forgotten the ideals of the community and wanted to bring in new members. They also wanted to bring in new businesses, expanding the ideas of the movement beyond its limited reach. Integration with society tempted many to leave altogether, particularly those who had a better handle on English than their French-speaking parents. Some members decided to abandon Iowa for California, but even in their new home the group did not stay together.

Those that remained behind in Iowa disbanded voluntarily, assimilating into nearby communities. Some returned to France, while others stayed near Corning as individual farmers.

### All Things in Common: The Amana Colonies' Biblical Vision of a Shared Society

No discussion of utopian societies in Iowa is complete without mentioning the Amana Colonies. Founded by the Inspirationalists, a German dissident movement against the Lutheran Church, the Amanas were a network of seven villages on 26,000 acres in eastern Iowa. The villages were settled by an initial wave of 700. It is perhaps the most successful and longest-lasting experiment in communism in the United States. All the more ironic for its intense focus on Christian piety.

Thousands of settlers lived in the religious community, which was based on peace and prayer. All residents were provided free housing, education, health care, and three large meals daily. Families lived in one of four 15-by-15-foot bedrooms in each home. They worked in common shops, factories, or gardens, and they attended at least 11 church services a week. The all-things-in-common structure lasted from 1855 until 1932. It was only brought to a final end due to fires in the flour and woolen mills and economic hardship from the Great Depression.

The Inspirationalists began in the 1700s as a breakaway movement. They sought to reform their religion and worship in a simpler way than the formal practices of the Lutheran church, much as Martin Luther had done with the Catholic Church. The German government forbade them from purchasing property. The group came to America for land and religious freedom.

They also became socialists there. The Inspirationalist communal movement began in Ebenezer, New York in 1842 on 5,000 acres of land. Christian Metz, the leader, rejected capitalism and national markets, embracing a cooperative economic system. Due to their past problems with the state, Metz believed that the community must separate itself from outsiders or government reliance, becoming completely independent. They desired to build a self-sustaining economic system, a town with its own flour mills, factories, farms, wineries, furniture shops, schools, and saw mills. American currency would be replaced with bartering. Members would dress in plain clothing without differentiation or embellishment.

The movement was initially successful, so successful, in fact, that 5,000 acres was not sufficient for their needs. In 1855, the first members immigrated to eastern Iowa and purchased 30,000 acres of land in Amana. Over the decades they built seven self-sustaining communities. Each adult was required to work in the colonies. Most moved from job to job – men cared for animals, worked in the fields, or toiled in the factories. Women tended the gardens, did the laundry, and worked in the kitchens. Older women looked after the children.

Meals were always held together in the dining hall, taken in groups of 30 to 45. Communal kitchens produced the meals, making the whole affair resemble a university dorm cafeteria, except for conversation being discouraged at the dinner table, as meals were not considered social affairs. Menus were largely standardized to promote equality, but they all consisted of standard German fare: pork sausages, boiled potatoes, streusel, and boiled beef. The practice of communal dining continued until 1900, as the community grew and commitment to communism ebbed. Families began to eat alone, taking food from the communal kitchen to their own homes, which, like the Icarians, they did not own.

### Happiness In The Spirit(s)

Marriage and children were frowned upon and seen as a sign of weakness. Celibacy was celebrated as total commitment to God. Weddings were rather stern affairs where the "happy" couple was reminded of their difficult responsibilities ahead. To even receive permission to marry required the groom to be at least 24. The couple had to wait a year after receiving permission from the council before they could wed. Marrying anyone from outside the colony was grounds for expulsion, even if the outside partner wished to join.

The definition of happiness in the Amana Colonies was based on a peaceful life and being filled with the Spirit of God. Pious living came from avoiding the evils of the outside world, such as anger, impatience, and desire. The colonies adopted twenty-one rules to guide their daily living. Some of these rules are as follows:

I. Study quiet, or serenity, within and without.

V. Abandon self, with all its desires, knowledge and power.

VII. Do not disturb your serenity or peace of mind - hence neither desire nor grieve.

VIII. Live in love toward your neighbor, and indulge neither anger nor impatience in your spirit.

XI. Be honest, sincere, and avoid all deceit and even secretiveness.

XV. Have nothing to do with unholy and particularly with needless business affairs.

XVI. Have no intercourse with worldly-minded men; never seek their society; speak little with them, and never without need; and then without fear and trembling.

XVII. Therefore, what you have to do with such men do in haste; do not waste time in public places and worldly society, that you be not tempted and led away.

XX. Dinners, weddings, feasts, avoid entirely; at the best there is sin.

The last ordinance encouraged moderation. It worked – feasting and merry-making was as rare as Haley's Comet in the Amanas – but it also made for dull living. Not that there was much else to do in the villages outside of work. Everybody labored long hours. Men and women arrived back at their homes exhausted each night from chopping the wood, plowing fields, fixing machines, or cooking for three dozen. Even children in the Amana Colonies were kept incessantly busy. Children attended school six days a week, year-round. The program continued until the age of 14, when boys took a job on the farm or began their craft apprenticeships. Such professions included tailoring, blacksmithing, and shoemaking, printing, milling, or wool-weaving. Girls worked in the gardens or communal kitchens.

Not to say that there weren't ways for the colonists to enjoy themselves. As Germans they could not say no to a good drink, no matter their level of piety. The colonies once featured five breweries, until they were closed in 1884 due to Iowa prohibition laws. Colonists reopened the Millstream Brewery after national Prohibition ended in 1933. It remained Iowa's only brewery well into the 1990s.

With beer out of the picture, wine production remained a popular activity in the late 1800s among the Amanas, who were largely immunized from the Temperance movement. Most homes featured grapevines on trellises along the sides of the four-square brick houses. Popular varieties included wines made from dandelion, blueberry, cranberry, raspberry, plum, and local grapes. Wine was piped directly from presses to church cellars.

Each resident had enough wine to drown a horse. Men received 20 gallons of wine annually, and women 12 gallons, working out to 120 wine bottles per family per annum. That is not to say the Amanas were a colony of alcoholic pietists. They obeyed Prohibition when it became national law in 1920. Residents dumped 19,000 gallons at once into the Iowa River and according to legend, the fish had hangovers for a week.

The success of the Amana colonies would have pleased any communist. Nobody received any wages for their labor. Profits were spread among the community. The only leadership was a board of trustees. Property was recognized legally as collective, and each family received the same wage. Individuals were given $25 to $50 each year. This money was spent at village stores. Mismanagement of funds was grounds for expulsion from the community.

When labor shortages occurred, hundreds of hired laborers were brought on from surrounding communities during the agricultural season. Due to the productivity and efficiency in their endeavors, the colonies became financial successes. They were even contracted for mechanical work when the first refrigerator was invented in Iowa City. The refrigeration company "Amana," which is now a subsidy of Whirlpool, was formed when the company hired their craftsmen.

"The motto was 'Alles muss Genaues sein' – everything must be exact," explained Barbara Hoehnle, librarian for the Amana Heritage Society. Amanans were systematized, hard working, and organized. They built their goods to exact specifications. Houses were also designed with the same table, clock, bureau, and rocker. They were so similar that anyone could go into any house blindfolded and find his way around.

Of course, no communal society could completely be an island unto itself. Interaction with the larger American public was necessary, even if the colony bylaws threatened expulsion if a member cavorted too much with Americans. In order to deal with the outside world, Amana set up controlled entry points for trade. Each village had an exchange center where all goods were purchased. Raw materials and manufactured goods such as grease, raw wool, oil, pipes, and fittings came in; manufactured goods, handicrafts, and simple machinery went out.

Despite the Amana aversion to worldliness, the colonies were known for their hospitality. Any homeless person or traveler passing through on train could be temporarily taken in by the colony and fed. They could work for wages and would be provided with shelter for the length of their stay. These workers supplemented the seasonal help hired each year to do agricultural and industrial jobs. The colonies were likely an important stop on the national hobo railway circuit.

In spite of its successes, not even the Amana Colonies could escape the national demise of utopian communities in the 19th and 20th centuries. All other communities had died out decades ago or assimilated into wider society to avoid total ruin. The Amana Colonies did this in 1933, when they abandoned cooperative living. The Great Depression wreaked havoc on the colonies, which were not able to earn the minimum revenue necessary to house, feed, and clothe its members. Residents voted to abandon communal life in 1932 and reorganize the colony based on the principals of capitalism. Each member received stock in the new community corporation. Dollars came into the colony the next year.

The failure of the Amana Colonies raises many questions. Is communal living ultimately destined for failure? Were the pious colonists hopelessly behind the times? Could they have done anything to save their community from falling apart and forcibly integrating into American society? These questions are more difficult to answer than they appear. Lanny Haldy, executive director of the Amana Heritage Society, said in a 1993 interview with The Seattle Times that the colonists were both backwards and forward-thinking.

"They were taking the Chicago Tribune and Scientific American - they were very much in contact with the outside world. They had telephones 10 years after the outside world did. They sent students to college to become doctors in the 1860s. The colonies lasted for three generations - it's remarkable they lasted as long as they did."

But as time passed, Haldy noted, many of the young people were no longer committed to pietist socialism. And it was harder to live differently than the rest of the world in 1932 than it was in 1882. Radio programs, roads, the automobile, global war mobilization efforts, and higher population densities made the outside world more intrusive than ever.

Not that the colonies passed without their mourners. Elsie Caspers, a former clerk at the Ehrle Brothers Winery who was born in 1933, said the changes bothered her grandparents, who missed the old way of life.

"There was camaraderie, but hard work too," she said. "The women had to get up so early to go to the kitchens."

The descendents of the Amana colonists still live in the villages. They still go to church and practice a 21st-century version of the trades that their great-grandparents did. Many residents still speak High German and a dialect known as Amana German. But meals aren't held in dining halls anymore and nobody threatens excommunication for talking with outsiders. Amanans couldn't avoid outsiders if they wanted to – the colonies get over a million outsiders in the form of tourists each year, who visit the independent shops, crafts stores, and family-style restaurants.

There are those who keep the original dream of the German Inspirationalists alive. Some argue that the colonies didn't even fail. The end goal of the Society of True Inspiration was never communal living – this was merely a means to an end to their true goal of faith, piety, and a simple expression of worship. The committee members voted to embrace capitalism in the 1930s because they believed incorporation with society was a better means of achieving this goal than communal living, which had outlived its purpose. Many of the current residents of the Amana colonies, who still make church and piety the centerpiece of their lives, would agree.

### A Muslim Freedom Fighter's New Home in Iowa

It wasn't just European immigrants who made Iowa's culture interesting in the 19th century. Iowa was home to one of the earliest Arab immigrant communities anywhere in the United States. In the 1880s and 1890s Christian Arabs first arrived, mostly from Syria. Arab Christians arrived before Muslims because they were more connected to Western culture, and there was no religious gap between themselves and their new neighbors. The first arrivals were Tom Bashara, a Syrian from Damascus, and the Lebanese brothers Charles and Sam Kacere.

It is not clear why they chose Iowa, but the most likely reason was agriculture. Another reason is that they likely met Iowans when they still lived in the Middle East. If a Syrian Christian were considering a move to America, he would ask the nearest American where to move. This would almost definitely be an American missionary. American missionaries traveled to the Middle East by the thousands in the 19th century. There they built hundreds of schools, hospitals, and orphanages in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia. And many of these missionaries were from Iowa. They couldn't help but recommend their home state to an America-bound Arab.

Muslims came to Iowa shortly after Arab Christians. In 1888, Haji Abbas Habnab emigrated from the Ottoman Empire and settled in Fort Dodge. His reasons for choosing Iowa are unknown, but his three brothers Musa, Yusef, and Ali joined him over the next seven years. They and other immigrants spread out from northwest Iowa into Sioux City and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The new Muslim arrivals received support from the Arab Christian community. Sam Bashar, a Syrian from the same region, had established a general store warehouse and supplied the newly-arriving men. Others began to trickle into the state upon hearing that a Muslim community existed there. In 1907, Haji Yahya William Aossey heard about Bashar while on a ship outbound from Brazil. An American he befriended on the ship said that he had come across Arabs in Iowa. Aossey arrived at the port in New York then boarded the first train for the Midwest. He got off in Iowa and met the Christian Arab brothers, who welcomed him warmly.

Aossey began his new life in Iowa. He first worked as a peddler, selling small goods across the state. He walked nine or ten miles a day, spent nights in barns, churches, schools, and the occasional farmer's home. Aossey eventually married one of Abbas Habhab's daughters and settled in Cedar Rapids.

From the early 1900s to the 1920s, Cedar Rapids became the home base for these young Syrian merchants. According to Saudi Aramco they formed the first and oldest Muslim community in the United States. By the 1920s there were several dozen Muslim and Christian Syrian-Lebanese communities in Iowa. Most Iowans failed to distinguish Arabs according to their religion. They tended to lump them together as "the Syrian peddlers." Religious distinction became sharper after 1914, when Arab Christians completed the St. George Syrian Orthodox Church in Cedar Rapids. The Ottoman Empire also joined the Axis Powers in World War I, and to some residents any Middle Easterner was an enemy Turk. In one instance Aossey was chased away at gunpoint when he revealed his religion to a farmer whose dinner he had been sharing.

The Cedar Rapids Muslim community continued to expand. Some converted a rented hall into a mosque. In 1934, they built a permanent structure and called it the Mother Mosque of America, which is still in use and is America's oldest mosque in continuous usage. The original building bore no resemblance to a typical domed mosque. The members did much of the work themselves and drew upon the architecture style of Iowa. The building could be mistaken for a prairie-country schoolhouse or even a local church due to its white clapboard exterior and stark lines. The only adornment to distinguish the building as a mosque was a small dome sitting atop the protruding entrance with a crescent-topped spire. Signs in English and Arabic welcomed visitors.

In 1948, Yahya William Aossey donated 12 acres of land in Cedar Rapids to establish the First National Muslim Cemetery in North America. In 1971, a new Islamic Center was built in Cedar Rapids. The original building is now on the National List of Historic Buildings. Governor Terry Branstad recognized this heritage. He instituted Muslim Recognition Day in 1992.

One famous Iowan Muslim was Abdallah Igram, a World War II Army veteran who had the chance to meet President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. He asked the president a novel question – why didn't the military recognize the religion of American Muslims as they did Protestants, Catholics, and Jews? Why was there no symbol for Islam on a Muslim soldier's dog tags so he could be given appropriate burial rights if he was killed in action? Good question, Ike answered. The president, at Igram's urging, pushed to have the symbol "I" stamped on the ID tags of Muslim soldiers.

It is strange to imagine Muslims coming to Iowa in the 1890s, settling in the midst of cornfields, which looked nothing like the arid landscape of their homes in the Middle East. But in one sense they might feel like they were getting a warm reception. Two counties over from Cedar Rapids there was a little town with the name of Elkader. They soon realized, to their delight and astonishment, that this spelling was an English transliteration of _el-Kadir_ , an Algerian religious scholar, Sufi, and guerrilla leader who fought against the French colonial invasion of the mid-19th century.

How did a town in Iowa become named after a Muslim militant? The story is strange, but it originally came as a tribute to the fighter. In 1845, when land developer Timothy Davis prospected a site along the Turkey River for a flour mill and settlement, he looked for a name of the town that would convey its future values. Davis wanted to name the city after a nationalist patriot across the ocean. It was a common practice in Iowa – Kossuth County was named after Lajos Kossuth, the president of Hungary after the 1848 revolution. Davis ultimately settled on Abd el-Kadir after reading about his fight against the French in American press accounts. He thought of him as a "valiant Arab chieftain."

Many other Americans thought the same. Because Abd el-Kadir saved the lives of 12,000 Christians during the Damascus uprisings in the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln sent him a special commendation and a gift of Colt pistols. Napoleon III, Pope Pius IV, and Queen Victoria showered him with praise as a humanitarian statesman. When Abd el-Kadir died in 1883, a New York Times obituary praised him as "one of the few great men of the century."

The memory of Abd el-Kadir lived on in the town for a few decades after its founding . A local college named its student newspaper "The Arab Chieftain." He was then forgotten for nearly a century. Today Elkader is a small town of 1,200 nestled in the Turkey River valley. Its inhabitants are mostly of German and Scandinavian background. It is quaint beyond belief, lacking a single traffic light. It is known mostly for its sandstone arch bridge over the Turkey River and having America's oldest grocery store west of the Mississippi.

El-Kadir would have likely remained forgotten if not for an Algerian liason at the American Embassy who discovered the town in the 1980s. The liason, Benaoumer Zergaoui, established a sister city relationship between Elkader and Mascara, Algeria – the birthplace of the emir. For the last six years it has welcomed a delegation of Arab dignitaries that celebrate this connection between the United States and the Islamic world.

"Our audience is the people who are compassionate already," said Kathy Garms to The New York Times in 2013. She is the driving force behind the Abdelkader project, a movement to restore the historical memory of El-Kadir. "But there are so many people who are ignorant or scared or even hateful. We just hope that once they get across the starting line they will listen."

Ties continue to strengthen in this unlikely alliance between Iowa and Algeria. In 2008, Garms visited Algeria, talked with government leaders, and visited el-Kadir's grave. When the Turkey River flooded two weeks later, destroying thirty homes and causing $8 million in property damage, she learned that the Algerian government was interested in sending money for disaster relief. She expected a few thousand dollars. The amount turned out to be $150,000. Today, there are matched sets of poles with the word "peace" in French, Arabic, and English that stand in Mascara and Elkader.

There's even a restaurant that serves Algerian food. Schera's Algerian American Restaurant is run by the town's only Muslim, Frederique Boudouani. In an even more unlikely twist, he is an openly gay man who runs the restaurant with his partner, a native Iowan. The two have been largely accepted into the community and the restaurant has its regulars, even if many locals politely decline to come.

Boudouani said that he feels as though he has become a member of the community. Although some locals still treat him as the official spokesman for Islam in the event of terrorist attacks.

"If there's a bomb in a nightclub in Bali people come and feel compelled to ask me why did that happen, can you explain it to us. I turn into this sort of weird spokesman for the whole faith," he said to PRI.

The town of Elkader is a testimony to Iowa's multiculturalism, even if Iowa is not considered diverse according to the calculus of 21st-century American racial politics. Admittedly it does not have as large a heterogeneous population of black, Latino, and Asian residents as Texas or California. Despite this, Iowa still has many multicultural feathers to put it in its cap. Like the utopian communities of the 19th century, it is still a place where people come in groups to start a new life. Here they conduct experiments in social living with the hopes that they can improve the world by changing it on the local level. Others – like the Transcendental Meditation movement – strive to go one step further and change the world on a quantum level.

Silicorn Valley: Fairfield and the Transcendentalist Business Boom

In the 1970s the Transcendental Meditation movement decided to make a new home for itself in Fairfield. It is in many respects a normal Iowa town, with a population of slightly over 10,000, rolling farmlands, and a quaint town square with characteristic Midwestern brick buildings. Here there are small diners where corn and cattle farmers breakfast, discussing the futures market, and complain about the city manager. Fairfield remained quiet and predictable for much of the 20th century.

All that changed in 1974, when the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an international celebrity who popularized meditation in America, directed his followers to move from their headquarters in California and make a mass exodus to Iowa. They relocated to Fairfield and began to build their organization. It is now a $300 million-dollar empire.

The Maharishi taught millions of people his meditation techniques during a set of world tours from 1958 to 1965. According to his teachings, through meditation a person could enter his own consciousness and join with other invisible fields in the universe to improve one's life. His technique consists of closing one's eyes for 20 minutes while repeating a mantra to create deep relaxation, attain clear thinking, and eliminate stress. His technical presentations of meditation became popular among celebrities, including the Beatles, Clint Eastwood, and Mia Farrow. Among his disciples were Deepak Chopra, who has taken his teacher's business approach and built his own multimillion-dollar network.

The yogi parlayed that fame into a heavily endowed worldwide network of Transcendental Meditation (TM) centers to promote unorthodox views of medicine, science, politics, and economics. He founded the Maharishi International University (MIU) in 1971 in Goleta, California. At this time his popular influence was at its height. Famous musicians and actors consulted him. He was honorarily dubbed one of the "fifth Beatles" after the band began studying with the Maharishi at his Himalayan retreat in northern India. His techniques gained respect in the medical world for reducing stress-related ailments. The school thrived in the West Coast.

But directors of the university decided to move it to Iowa anyway. This decision was based on two reasons. First, they believed in the Maharishi Effect, a theory that if a significant number of people practice TM at they same time, they could affect their natural and spiritual environment. Enough people practicing at the same time and the same place would be greater than the sum of its parts and increase "life-supporting trends." These positive unity force fields could reduce the world's crime rate, ease global tensions, raise the stock market, and even reduce traffic accidents. According to the Maharishi, using a complex array of charts, graphs and barely intelligible mathematical formulas, all of the world's problems could disappear if only 7,000 people would meditate together daily. Group leaders realized that thousands of meditators practicing in the geographical center of America could send out positive energy like a radio transmitter to the four corners of the nation. Iowa was perfectly located.

The second reason was simple economics. MIU was able to purchase Fairfield's bankrupt Parsons College – dubbed "Flunkout U" by one publication – at the fire sale price of $2.5 million. MIU was established with the philosophy of Transcendental Meditation in mind. Its principle was to develop the "full potential of the individual, realize the highest ideal of education, improve government achievements, solve the age-old problem of crime and all behavior that brings unhappiness to the world, bring fulfillment to the economic aspirations of individuals and society, maximize the intelligent use of the environment, and achieve the spiritual goals of humanity in this generation."

The new college kept up a high profile in popular culture. In 1978 the Beach Boys, which had embraced the spiritual elements of the Baby Boomer generation, recorded their album _M.I.U_., named after the university, on campus. Andy Kaufman, the eccentric actor, was a dedicated practitioner of Transcendental Meditation. One scene of his biopic _Man on the Moon_ takes place at the school, where he is asked to leave because his public image and private behavior did not match that of an enlightened person. The university awarded Jim Carrey, who played Kaufman in the film, with an honorary Ph.D. in 2014 due to the actor's own interest in meditation.

The integration of an eastern spiritualist movement with a quaint farm town has had its bumps. At first the locals merely stared at the West Coast transplants walking down the street. They did more than stare when the group hosted the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1984. Over 7,000 followers descended on the town. In order to accommodate all the visitors, MIU erected two major buildings and brought 200 mobile homes from Indiana in the short span of the Christmas and New Year holidays. The university ordered 8,000 blankets, 1,200 cots, and a trailer-load of pasta for the festival.

Some residents disliked the more outlandish claims from the TM practitioners. M.I.U. administrators stated that due to the massive assemblage of meditators at the conference, hospital admissions had fallen, U.S. relations with other nations were improving, and the stock market was rising. Other residents were less optimistic of the meditative effects: "A lot of people just wish these wackos would go home," said Charles Barnett, then-member of the Chamber of Commerce.

Further friction points came when Mayor Robert Rasmussen received a call from the Federal Aviation Administration. The Maharishi had put in a request to close down the town's tiny municipal airport for a week to have a laser light display of the Maharishi's bearded image on the clouds over the whole town. It was more than the mayor, who earned an honorary $300-a-month salary, could handle.

"Why me? Why here? Why now?" he asked in exasperation.

A few years later over 5,000 devotees descended on Fairfield for the "Heaven on Earth" assembly. After meditating en masse twice a day, attendees claimed that international tensions had eased and an upsurge of positivity and progress in world consciousness.

"Did you see the paper today?" asked Patty Schneider, public affairs director of M.I.U., who described to The Los Angeles Times the real-world effects of their meditation. "In East Germany they apologized to Jews for the Holocaust and a couple of days ago those hostages were released in the Mideast. You can't tell me this stuff doesn't work."

The town and its new arrivals have been able to smooth relations over the years. A large part has to do with the economic shot in the arm that the new arrivals have brought to Fairfield. Major Maharishi festivals and events meant hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing into the local economy. Some events attract thousands, requiring several temporary structures to be built in a short amount of time. Local construction companies and sub contractors get weeks, or even months, of overtime pay. Fairfield also has an airport for corporate jets and a new 522-seat Stephen Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts.

The Maharishi have developed Fairfield's economy in other ways. Thanks to the university's business school, the town has attracted entrepreneurs from around the United States. Some of the startups springing from these cornfields of Southeastern Iowa have become multi-million dollar businesses. Fairfield has been called one of the state's economic superstars and received multiple entrepreneurship awards. Oprah Winfrey visited here in 2012 to produce an episode of her TV show _Oprah's Next Chapter_ on Fairfield's meditators. In honor of the more than 40 software development and telecom companies, locals call their town "Silicorn Valley."

Many of the Maharishi believers already had business experience when they came to Iowa from the coasts. One of them, according to a 1998 New York Times profile of the town, was Cliff Rees, the co-owner of an oil company, who came to Fairfield in 1985. He launched the telecommunications company Telegroup. It became the 13th largest telecommunications company in the United States in the late 90s, with revenue of $337 million and more than 600 employees.

Rees credited meditation for his business success. Sitting cross-legged in his office, he said it was "a great business tool that clears my mind and allows me to focus on detail." Some locals would point out that Fairfield already had a business legacy that predated the arrival of Maharishi University. But once the groundwork was laid, it was easier for their new companies to develop, creating a ripple effect of new business creation.

### Vedic City

The most visible mark that the TM movement has left on Iowa is the Maharishi Vedic City, a square-mile-sized town of 259 designed with Vedic architecture, located just outside of Fairfield. Disciples incorporated the town in 2001. Designers hope for the population to swell to 10,000 as word spreads of the town's symmetry and harmony.

Maharishi Vedic City is the new North American capital of the Global County of World Peace. Its ancient Indian system of city planning and architecture is said to promote happiness and peace. All buildings are designed according to precise Vedic proportions. Rooms are placed according to the movement of the sun. All buildings face east, have a central "quiet space," and are topped with a golden dollop called a _kalash_. Building houses to such a specific code is expensive due to consulting fees from designers with a highly specialized body of knowledge. Prices run from $200,000 to $800,000, a princely sum for a small-town midwestern house.

The town features an outdoor observatory with ten, 6-foot-tall, white, concrete-and-marble astronomical instruments. Its designer claims that each is perfectly aligned with the sun, moon, and stars, and can calculate their movements in order to create tranquility and physiological balance.

That is not to say that perfect social harmony has been reached among all members of the community. Along with its non-permanent residents are 1,000 Indian pandits – a Hindu scholar and a teacher – who have come to the United States on a religious visa program. The program does not lack controversy, as many of the pandits have "disappeared" in the past, presumably to work illegally in the United States. Further controversy erupted in March 2014 when the Jefferson County sheriff was called in to investigate a protest over the deportation of a popular pandit. The sheriff arrived at the compound only to have his car damaged after being mobbed by 60-70 pandits.

Nevertheless, the city has mostly lived up to its ideals. Since 2002 the city council passed an ordinance that banned the sale of non-organic food within its borders and the use of synthetic pesticides. In 2005, it became the first all-organic city in the United States. Vedic City's organic grocer looks like it belongs in a college town or a hipster portion of Brooklyn – except for its bulletin board advertising guru services. The city has received federal grants to develop renewable energy sources and recycling programs. The city's 160-acre organic farm runs on wind turbine energy, which was developed from a federal renewable energy grant. It sells 50 varieties of fruit and vegetables produce to restaurants in Iowa City, Des Moines, and Chicago, and retailer outlets such as Whole Foods.

The color pink dominates the town. Citizens wear it. Rooms and buildings are painted with it. Even the private plane that first spirited the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to Iowa in 1971 was done up in it. The name of the town's trailer park is Utopia Park, located near Taste of Utopia and Heaven streets.

The aesthetic of an Indian-style city in the Midwest is still jarring. Some critics have said that it transplants an eastern architectural style into the heartland without bothering to incorporate local elements, like a strip mall in an open field. Immediately outside of the town is a landscape dotted with cornfields, red barns, and small farm houses. Such a move comes across to some observers as brash. Carina Chocano, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, came to the city in 2006 for a profile. She said it "displays all the architectural characteristics of a new exurban development: gaudy, over sized construction that has no stylistic relation to the environment but instead vaguely alludes to a theme-park version someplace sort of magical and far away."

Ironically, the spread of meditation across the United States since the 1950s might be the undoing of Fairfield's unique culture. Practitioners of TM came to Iowa as part of a utopian movement, but meditation has been absorbing into mainstream culture ever since. It also does not help that much of the leadership is still from the Baby Boomer generation, most of whom are well into their 60s or older. Young blood continues to course through the university, but college-age members of the TM movement do not consider it as revolutionary as their parents. Americans have practiced yoga and meditation for decades; millions do it without signing up to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's brand of philosophy.

To some, the TM movement's relentless talk of positive energy permeating the conscious has devolved into an infomercial pitch like a commercial for a Snuggie or Showtime Rotisserie. Chocano notes this irony – this Eastern utopia may have been an alternative lifestyle 40 years ago, but now it is just another marketable lifestyle product. It is an "entropic mix of spirituality and materialism; self-betterment and self-absorption as a cure for all of humanity's ills; consciousness-expansion as a way to building wealth and saving the world. For the not-so-low price of $2,500 [for a three-day meditation seminar] you're offered inner peace, world peace, reduced blood pressure and the sense of yourself as a maverick pioneer, a 'cultural creative.'"

All this proves, she writes, is that the early 21st century may be looked back upon as a time when it was made clear that money, good PR, and an honest banality have the power to normalize anything. Constantly quoting a study from the National Institute of Health or findings in prestigious medical journals on the powers of the meditative effect only resulted in severe scientific proof fatigue.

The story of new arrivals to Iowa in the 20th century is not only that of the Maharishi. In the late 20th century, new waves of immigrants came to the state, primarily in the form of refugees. In the 1970s, turmoil in Southeast Asia led to the emigration of the Tai Dam. They are an itinerant people that once lived in China, then North Vietnam, then in Laos. When communists captured their new home, they fled to Thailand for fear of their property being confiscated. From Thailand, some came to Iowa. Dorothy Schwieder writes in _Iowa Past to Present: The People and the Prairie_ that like earlier groups of immigrants, the Tai Dam families have brought along their crafts and culture. At different events in Des Moines they presented native dances and prepared special food.

Other groups of recent immigrants escaping war-torn countries include Bosnians and Sudanese. Bosnians began to arrive in the mid-90s, with the outbreak of war in the Balkans and the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Muslims. More than ten thousand Bosnians lived in the state by 2001, with at least six thousand living in Des Moines. They have opened restaurants, food stores, and coffee bars in the capital and Waterloo. Sudanese refugees arrived at the same time, also due to a civil war between the largely Muslim north and the Christian south.

But the story of Fairfield and its transcendental meditation is still unique. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi founded MIU based on his wide appeal and fame as the Beatles' onetime spiritual leader. He may be dead, but his movement, his university, and its Golden Domes of Pure Knowledge still remain. So does the dream of coming to Iowa and launching a global ideological revolution.

### Postville: Where the Midwest Meets Ultra-Orthodox Judaism Meets Rural Mexico Meets Somalia

Postville is a town of 2,227 tucked in the northeast corner of Iowa. The county hugs the Mississippi River and features topography found in few other parts of the state. The high stone bluffs, abundant creeks, and deep valleys owe to the last Ice Age not flattening this part of the land. For this reason some affectionately refer to the area as the land the glaciers forgot.

Everything changed in 1987. The town was still reeling from the Midwest Farm Crisis, when land values dropped by one-third, thousands of farmers were forced into bankruptcy, and soaring interest rates crippled everyone else. In this year Aaron Rubashkin, a Hasidic butcher from Brooklyn who was born in Russia, purchased an unused meat-rendering plant in Postville. He transformed it into a state-of-the-art center for producing glatt kosher meat, which must be prepared under strict conditions to meet orthodox Jewish dietary standards. He moved to Iowa to take advantage of the proximity to livestock and the lack of unionization in the Midwest. The economic investment put a new lease on life for the struggling town. His company Agriprocessors was born.

Rubashkin's purchase was not remarkable in itself. What was remarkable were the hundreds of Hasidim who moved with him to Postville to help manage and operate the facility. They arrived wearing their traditional garb and practicing their customs. Groups of bearded men walked down the street in full black dress, with tassels hanging from their shirts and _shtreimel_ s, large hockey-puck-shaped fur hats, on their heads. Such garb would barely raise an eyebrow in New York. It could cause a car crash in rural Iowa.

Over 100 Hasidic families moved to Postville. They opened schools for their children and a synagogue. As their numbers increased, business at Agriprocessors grew. The slaughterhouse became the largest owned and operated by the Lubavitchers in the world. By 1996, it processed 13,000 cattle, 225,000 chickens, 700 lambs, and 4,000 turkeys a week. The plant shipped kosher meat all over the United States and even to Jerusalem. Postville now had the highest concentration of rabbis of any American city.

Author Stephen Bloom chronicles the challenges of inter-communal harmony in his book _Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America._ Hasidic Brooklyn and rural Iowa could hardly be more culturally different. The mutual suspicion of the Hasidim and the locals, most of them of Lutheran background, was hardly to be avoided: "Clearly there was a culture clash of the strongest magnitude between two groups, both born-and-bred Americans, who rarely had the opportunity to clash. Here was a kind of experiment in the limits of diversity and community, the nature of community, the meaning of prejudice, even what it means to be an American. Postville seemed like a social laboratory, perhaps a metaphor for America."

Bloom found that both communities were insular and suspicious of strangers. He wondered whether the Iowans were prejudiced or the Lubavitchers simply unbearable. Bloom ultimately sided with the local Iowans as being more open and friendly. They recognized that Postville might have fallen into ruin if not for the financial injection that the Jewish manufacturers brought to the town. They opened the community to the newcomers. Bloom, a secular Jew who taught at the University of Iowa, attacked the Hasidim for their "closed-off" nature and suspicious attitude towards all non-Jews. He criticized them for maintaining their Jewish Eastern European culture regardless of the society around them. Even in their piety they had an ulterior motive. In one scene Bloom described them visiting a dying man and praying for his soul, perhaps with an intrusive missionary intention.

The Lubavitchers, he writes, were not interested in mingling with the locals. They considered the quaint Lutherans as fundamentally inferior and treated them in rude ways. They inhabited a Manichean worldview, where total good is in conflict with total evil. The New York butchers haggled with local merchants, which is not a custom of rural Iowa culture. They took any personal disagreement or opposition as a form of anti-Semitism. Over time, conflict grew between the two groups.

"Ultimately, I discovered, carrying on a conversation with any of the Postville Hasidim was virtually impossible. If you didn't agree, you were at fault, part of the problem. You were paving the way for the ultimate destruction of the Jews, the world's Chosen People. There was no room for compromise, no room for negotiation, no room for anything but total and complete submission."

Bloom narrated the conflict as a showdown, but relations between the locals and the Hasidim were never this tense. They couldn't be – Postville has had to accommodate other groups besides the Orthodox Jews in recent years and approach a flexible mindset to foreign cultures. Many came to work on the slaughterhouse's floor. Russians and Ukrainians first worked at Agriprocessors when it opened. Over time, Mexicans and Guatemalans moved to the town to take up jobs. By the 1990s Postville was split largely into three cultural clusters: Central American, Hasidic Jewish, and Midwestern. The town, in addition to its Methodist churches, now had a synagogue and Catholic churches with services in Spanish.

But the Latin American men were different than the Hasidic arrivals. The Hasidim came in family units. Even though their lifestyle was different, they found a place within the rural, family-centered Midwestern social fabric. The Latino newcomers, in contrast, were largely single men, causing locals to worry that crime would follow them. It didn't, and the single men returned home and brought wives with them. Many now lived as families, but marriage did little to integrate the Latino community into Postville. They did not rely on public assistance, social programs or the Family Investment Program. Their independence prevented a strain on social services, but it isolated the Latino arrivals from the larger culture.

Most of the immigrants did not plan on staying in Iowa indefinitely. In the meatpacking world, if a better job offer comes along, a worker will take it, even if it involves moving to another state to earn a dollar or two more an hour. Others returned to their homeland after earning enough money. Even for those few who planned to reside long-term, family life came first in the Hispanic households, before jobs or community. This view made for stable family units, but also led to self-segregation.

Over time community members fell into a pattern. Different groups found a way to co-exist, even if they did not freely mingle. A 2012 account from the New York Times described the public schools' K-12 bilingual program as integrating immigrant children into Iowan culture. A Mexican restaurant and grocery store appeared on the main street, along with a Guatemalan restaurant. Workers dropped by these stores to wire money back home and purchase Spanish-language DVDs. In 2005, a Guatemalan factory worker took over the local bakery and transformed it to a place where farmers could sip coffee while Latinos could purchase _pan dulce_ and tostadas. Aaron Goldsmith, an Orthodox Jew, even won a seat on the city council.

### The Postville Raid

Postville's holding pattern collapsed on May 12, 2008. The Department of Homeland Security raided Agriprocessors. Nearly 400 immigrant workers were arrested, the largest single raid of a workplace in U.S. history. The move was made to pressure companies with an illegal workforce and make an example out of Agriprocessors. The plant had already been under investigation since 2006 for complaints of workplace safety issues, unsanitary conditions, and violations of workers' rights. The meatpacking industry is dangerous even in the best of times and often draws desperate immigrants willing to work long hours where mistakes on the line lead to injury. But Agriprocessors failed to meet even this low standard. Workplace accidents led to broken bones, hearing loss, and even mishaps resulting in amputations. No compensation came to these illegal workers since they had no contractual rights.

Foreign workers were ultimately charged with document fraud, identity theft, and the use of stolen Social Security numbers – the first time that government officials used felony charges to prosecute workers instead of immigration law. Over 300 workers were convicted of document fraud within four days. Many served a five-month prison sentence before being deported. The owner, Aaron Rubashkin, escaped charges, but the plant's chief executive, Sholom Rubashkin, was convicted of bank fraud and sentenced to 27 years in prison.

David Strudhoff, the superintendent of Postville's schools, said to the Washington Post that the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town's population of 2,300 was "like a natural disaster – only this one is manmade."

The raid sent tremors through the town. The next day, half of the schools' 600 students were absent, nearly all of them Hispanic, because their parents had been arrested or were hiding. Businesses saw a drop in revenue by at least 50 percent. The Mexican grocery store closed down, along with the Guatemalan restaurant. Tax revenues for the town took a steep dive. A small number of arrested workers that were allowed to stay in Postville after being processed had to wear ankle bracelets while awaiting trial.

Agriprocessors quickly scooped up replacement workers wherever they could find them. Other immigrants or residents of homeless shelters and treatment facilities took their place on the factory line. Groups came and went, whether a Native American contingent from Nebraska or students from Kyrgyzstan. Ads even appeared in newspapers and on telephone poles in Guatemala City that advertised meatpacking jobs for $8.50 an hour in Postville, "a technologically developed town with a friendly atmosphere, pretty green areas, public schools and family recreation areas."

The Postville raid has led to a new multicultural chapter in the town's story. Mark Grey, an anthropology professor at the University of Northern Iowa, said that government raids on meatpacking plants in the Midwest has resulted in them steering away from hiring Latinos. They fear government scrutiny. So they instead recruit African and Burmese refugees and other non-Latino immigrants. The workforce for a Midwestern plant in a small Iowan town is even more ethnically diverse, even if they are hired legally.

Shortly after the raid, Agriprocessors recruited 170 people from the Pacific island of Palau. They traveled 8,000 miles on plane and buses, adorned with flip-flops and brightly colored clothes. In 2008, Agriprocessors even recruited Somali refugees from Minnesota to work at the plant. They were promised a hiring bonus and a month of free housing. These Somali Muslim workers form the backbone of the plant today. Many leave Postville on Saturday – when the plant is closed due to the Jewish Sabbath – and travel to Minneapolis. There they enjoy the company of the city's large Somali population, purchase halal meat butchered to an Islamic standard, and buy Somali tea.

Oddly enough, some local residents felt more kinship with the illegal Latino groups of 10-20 years ago than the new African workers today.

"People can scream about the illegal work force, but a legal work force will also be more ethnically diverse," he said. "In these towns, I have people whispering in my ear, 'I miss my illegal Mexicans.' "

Postville is in a perpetual state of cultural adjustment. Its historical population of white Lutherans has been forced to accommodate different races, religions, and languages. But its story – along with other stories of Iowa's immigration history, whether German pietists, French utopianists, transcendental meditators, Muslim traders, or Somali meatpackers – speak of an untold diversity in Iowa's history. While the state may not win diversity awards anytime soon, it has far more multicultural merits than most suspect.

Each ethnic group has contributed something to Iowa, continually altering its identity and leaving a mark on its cultural tapestry.

#  Chapter 3

How Iowa Saved Billions of Lives in the 20th Century by Averting a Global Famine

Norman Borlaug had only recently arrived in Mexico, but he had already lost his temper. A local bureaucrat argued with Borlaug about his intention to go out into wheat fields himself to conduct crop research and show farmers how to cultivate stronger strands of wheat.

"Dr. Borlaug," the official said, "we don't do these things in Mexico. That's why we have peons. All you've got to do is draw up the plans and take them to the foreman and let them do it."

The tall, scrawny Iowan had had it. He came to Mexico in 1942 to launch an attack on hunger. The country already imported half of its wheat, its second most-important food source, at a cost of $21 million per year. Per-acre yields were half of those in the U.S. And whole harvests could be wiped out from wheat rust.

If solutions couldn't be implemented soon, starvation would set in. Borlaug wasn't about to let a pompous official stop him.

"That's why the farmers disrespect you!" he shot back. "If you don't know how to do something yourself, how can you possibly advise them? If the peons give you false information, you wouldn't even know. No, this has to change. Until we master our own efforts, we will go nowhere with this project."

Thanks to his brute determination, Borlaug did go somewhere with the project. He spent the next two decades in the fields of Mexico under the burning sun. Clothed in his checkered shirt, brown pants, and work boots, he spent his days coated with dust as he laboriously analyzed wheat samples.

Billy Woodward recounts Borlaug's remarkable stamina and ability to conduct monotonous research over enormous stretches of time in _The Biggest Lifesavers of the Twentieth Century_. In one hand Borlaug held a pair of needle-nosed tweezers. The other calloused hand encircled a head of wheat containing the tiny fleck of grain. With surgeon-like precision he plucked each tiny starmen – the male part of the plant – from the flower. He then slid a small glassine envelope over the wheat head, folding over the top and sealing it with a paper clip. He returned to the same plant five days later, removed the paper clip, and slipped in the starmen of another type of wheat. With each of these crossings, Borlaug made wheat that was marginally better at resisting fungal diseases and thriving in poor soils.

After thousands of these crossings and twenty years of work, Borlaug stopped a famine in Mexico. After tens of thousands more, he saved a billion lives around the world from starvation.

Seventy years later, in March 2014, the U.S. Congress honored Norman Borlaug by adding his statue to the Capitol's Statuary Hall to honor his 100th birthday. U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell said this unlikeliest of revolutionaries helped create a world with less misery and more hope, and he did all this with a grain of wheat. Others heralded him as the best proof that humans are the ultimate resource against hunger.

He is credited with saving over a billion lives in the 20th century and helping global poverty decline by 80 percent since 1970. And his "Green Revolution" hasn't ended. In 1980, 47 percent of the children in the developing world had stunted growth because of malnutrition. By 2000, the number had dropped to 33 percent.

However, Borlaug did his work with little support from the broader society that he could succeed. By the 1960s experts of the time had already decided that humanity was doomed to mass starvation.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published _The Population Bomb_ , a book that argued rates of population growth would always rise compared to the rates of food production growth. A catastrophic worldwide global famine was inevitable. The battle to feed all of humanity was over.

Ehrlich looked upon humans as irresponsible breeders and called for compulsory sterilization, abortion on demand, and even a federal Department of Population and Environment which would regulate procreation. He encouraged heavy taxes on baby carriages to send a message of official disapproval toward child rearing. In an Orwellian move, Ehrlich called for photos of large, happy families to be removed from the print media. To him, unwanted or excessive births were a cancer on the planet. He explained, "A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people."

Such a mindset influenced a genre of 1970s dystopian science fiction in which humanity scrambled for dwindling resources of an overpopulated earth. Examples include Charlton Heston's 1970s camp classic _Soylent Green_. The plot involves the U.S. government harvesting the citizenry of a futuristic New York with 40 million residents as food to feed itself. Episodes of the original _Star Trek_ took up this plot, along with the British sci-fi film _ZPG_ from 1972, which featured a number of British A-listers including Geraldine Chaplin and Oliver Reed.

The trend even extended into the 1990s. The eco-friendly cartoon _Captain Planet_ ran episodes that warned its child viewers not to have too many children, less they risk sucking the planet dry of resources and killing Gaia, the Spirit of the Earth.

None of this happened, all thanks to Borlaug and crop researchers like him. Much of his success can be credited to his farm roots.

Borlaug was born in Saude, Iowa on his Norwegian grandparents' farm. He helped with farm work from age seven onward, tilling the fields, feeding livestock, and splitting wood. Borlaug walked over a mile to school in the winter in blowing snow to a one-room schoolhouse. His grandfather Nels admonished him to get an education rather than ease into a farm life. "You're wiser to fill your head now if you want to fill your belly later on," he said. Borlaug heeded his advice and attended Cresco High School, 15 miles away.

He then attended the University of Minnesota, where he learned a lesson about hunger that stayed with him during his decades in Mexican and Indian wheat fields.. Borlaug was a star on the wrestling team and frequently binge fasted to compete in his weight class. On one occasion he fasted five days, only drinking a little water and spending hours in a steam box. He was shocked at the anger and short-temper that overtook him. Normally peaceful and soft-spoken, Borlaug lashed out at another wrestler and had to be pulled away by onlookers before punching him in the face. He realized that hunger had a dehumanizing effect. He would later observe, "You see, it wasn't me at all. It was primitive, rudimentary. I can't explain how hungry I was. I was starving, and I found out that a hungry man is worse than a hungry beast."

Borlaug's career began in the early 1940s. He was fresh off his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in plant pathology and genetics. He was then employed as a microbiologist at DuPont where he led research on industrial and agricultural chemicals such as preservatives, fungicides, and bactericides. With the onset of World War II the U.S. government converted his lab into a research facility and assigned the task of developing technologies that would aid the Americans in the Pacific Theatre. The DuPont lab developed camouflage paint, aerosols, and chemicals to purify water. One particularly tricky request was to develop a glue that could withstand the South Pacific's warm salt water and not disintegrate so shipping containers providing supplies to troops in Guadalcanal would hold together. He and the other researchers developed a solution within weeks.

Borlaug's career took an important turn when the Rockefeller Foundation sent him to Mexico in 1944 to aid their Ministry of Agriculture in boosting Mexican wheat production, a project intended to indirectly support U.S. economic and military interests. The project's ultimate goal was to train Mexican scientists on modern farming techniques so they could run crop experiments and not have to depend on America.

In all, Borlaug worked with four other researchers as a plant pathologist over the course of 16 years to help Mexico develop adequate agricultural infrastructure to feed its own people without handouts from the United States.

The early years of the project were difficult. The team lacked scientists and equipment to deal with consecutive years of poor harvests. There were no irrigation supplies, gasoline, trucks or tractors. The rural landscape was depleted after the war effort. Worst of all, farmers were experiencing catastrophic crop losses from stem rust, a fungal infection that affected cereal crops by lowering the plant's seed count or killing it. The fungus could infect a healthy crop three weeks before harvest and reduce it to a black tangle of broken stems and shriveled grains. It was the stuff of nightmares for Mexican farmers, who could see a year of work disappear before their eyes.

Borlaug labored in loneliness in those early days. He had left behind his pregnant wife Margaret and 14-month-old daughter when he flew to Mexico City to lead the program as geneticist and plant pathologist. His family later joined him, but they rarely saw him because of his long hours in the Mexican wheat fields. Also, farmers in the wheat fields were initially distrustful and cold to him. A large cultural gap separated them and this American college graduate who was giving them untried new technologies but didn't speak their language.

Borlaug persevered, mostly due to his rural background and seeing Mexican cultivators as fellow growers in need of a hand. He learned Spanish. More importantly he got his hands dirty. Richard Zeyen, a professor of plant pathology at the University of Minnesota who knew Borlaug for decades said the idea of improving the Mexicans' quality of life attracted him. "He had that small town farmers-help-each-other spirit. He was strong and he knew he was strong and he knew he could use his strength to help others."

Borlaug first sought to speed up the breeding of wheat in the highlands of Texcoco by taking advantage of the two growing seasons of the country and utilizing a process known as shuttle breeding. He bred wheat in the highlands, then took the seeds to the lower altitude region of Yaqui Valley in Sonora. His superiors vetoed the plan because agronomists of the time wrongly believed seeds needed a rest period after harvest to store energy for germination. His colleague George Harrar thought Borlaug's plan was ridiculous. "It makes no sense to risk a round trip of 2,500 miles through that country," he said, thinking of the broken roads and inaccessibility of most areas. "You could lose everything – and for what? The guts of our problem are here in the poverty areas."

Borlaug recounts in his biography that he knit his brows, thrust out his chin, and before responding, took a stance he had learned in his days as a wrestler.

"Don't try to discourage me, Ed," he said. "I know how much work is involved. Don't tell me what can't be done. Tell me what needs to be done – and let me do it. There's one single factor that makes the Yaqui effort worth a try, and that's rust. Breeding two generations a year means beating and staying ahead of the shifty stem-rust organism. If I can lick that problem by working in Sonora, then we've won a victory. To hell with the extra work and strain. It's got to be done, and I believe I can do it."

His plan was eventually approved. The results were startling. The double wheat season produced a faster crop. The plant generations produced at different altitudes and environmental conditions allowed the production of wheat varieties that fit a larger range of ecologies. The project would not need to produce wheat that was specific to each geographic region in Mexico. Borlaug could assault the country with the planting program. He could also supercharge the process of determining which wheat varieties were the best, rather than plant a crop, wait for it to grow, and see which varieties survived.

His accomplishment with wheat surprised some because he had spent his childhood in the cornfields of Iowa. Vice President Henry Wallace commented on this disparity when he visited the project in the 1940s. "What's a good Iowa boy like you doing working on wheat?" he said jokingly.

Borlaug continued to strengthen the wheat varieties through the processes of dwarfing and backcrossing. Dwarfing meant shortening the tall, thin stems of wheat into shorter stems, which can support the extra grain produced by the wheat grown in the nitrogen fertilizer that Borlaug introduced into the thin Mexican soil. Backcrossing is the crossing of a hybrid with one of its parents to achieve genetic identity closer to the plant's parent. This allows an elite genotype to be recovered and allowed Borlaug to transfer various disease-resistant genes to a single parent. Soon his crop lines were resistant to common pathogens.

By 1956, his work was bearing fruit. Borlaug's new wheat varieties allowed Mexico to achieve self-sufficiency. By 1964, Borlaug's semi-dwarf wheat was planted in 95 percent of Mexican wheat fields. The once-famished country was now a wheat exporter. Each year it released different high yield varieties of wheat. Output was six times higher than when he arrived. Farmers who were once at risk of watching their crops fail and falling into terrible poverty watched their incomes rise year after year.

Borlaug was now an international celebrity for his successes, but he did not rest on his laurels. The Indian Agricultural Research Institute had heard of Borlaug's success with crop production in Mexico, and requested that he visit the subcontinent to develop varieties of dwarf spring wheat strains. During the early 1960s, India and Pakistan were at war and the U.S was sending millions of tons of grain to the region to avert famine. He arrived in 1963 and oversaw the planting of 220 pounds of seed from four promising strains in test plots in India.

Paul Ehrlich had used India as a prime example of a third-world nation unable to cope with the challenges of feeding its massive population. He and other intellectuals wrote off the subcontinent as on the brink of an unavoidable starvation. He declared, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971... India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."

Borlaug had already been hard at work for years when Ehrlich made his prediction, and was proving Ehrlich wrong. Borlaug's team imported tons of semi-dwarf seed to Pakistan and India, working with war raging in the background and artillery flashes lighting up the sky. Despite damage to the seeds in a Mexican warehouse, they produced an initial yield that broke South Asian records. Though Pakistan continued to import thousands of tons of wheat in 1966 and 1967, at the same time the country launched a vigorous program of planting Borlaug's dwarf varieties, covering 1.5 million acres of wheat land. The harvest saw yields so high that storage space quickly ran out. Government agencies had to use any municipal building it could to hold the harvest. Local schools were temporarily closed to hold the grain.

By 1968, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; by 1974, India was self-sufficient in cereal production. In a rebuke to Ehrlich, both nations produced wheat faster than population growth. Borlaug helped per-acre wheat output increase so much that over a hundred million acres of land did not need to be converted into farmland.

In India, the national gross yield of wheat rose from 12.3 million tons in 1965 to 20 million in 1970. The numbers continued to rise throughout the century. In 1999, India harvested a record amount of wheat, 73.5 million tons, an increase of 11 percent over 1998. The nation's population has more than doubled, its wheat production tripled, and its economy octupled. Ehrlich's prediction has proven embarrassingly wrong – so much so that he quietly omitted the prediction from later editions of _The Population Bomb_. Borlaug's revolution spread to much of the rest of Asia, when his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research developed similar forms of high-yield rice varieties.

Fame caught up to him. In 1970, Borlaug's wife Margaret pulled up to the Toluca station in Mexico in their beat-up car. Borlaug, standing in a plot of wheat in his mud-splattered clothes, boots, and baseball cap, feared that one of their children had been hurt. He dropped his wheat samples and asked what happened to them.

"Nothing," Margaret laughed. "You've won the Nobel Peace Prize, that's all."

He refused to believe it and went back to work. Borlaug came around 40 minutes later when the press descended on him.

At his acceptance speech in Stockholm, Borlaug reflected on all the progress that had happened since the 1940s. The third world was feeding itself and the specter of famine was disappearing. But he spent most of his speech reminding the elite audience not to forgot the majority of humanity that they had likely never seen:

It is a sad fact that on this earth at this late date there are still two worlds, "the privileged world" and "the forgotten world." The privileged world consists of the affluent, developed nations, comprising twenty-five to thirty percent of the world population, in which most of the people live in a luxury never before experienced by man outside the Garden of Eden. The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.

He tried to retire in the 1980s, but third-world officials coaxed him back to work. (Not that he ever really could retire; Borlaug was an Iowan farmer at heart who would have preferred to die laboring in the fields rather than ever stop working). This time, Borlaug traveled to Africa to bring the Green Revolution there. He came despite protests from environmental groups, which so opposed inorganic fertilizers in Africa that they had persuaded Western European governments to stop supplying fertilizer to the continent.

However, the Japanese shipping magnate Ryoichi Sasakawa personally funded a project to ease famine in sub-Saharan Africa. The 72-year-old Borlaug began implementing his research in Ghana in 1984. By 1991 the area was producing all its own food and began exporting to other countries. The key to this success was a new form of corn called Quality Protein Maize (QPM), a grain packed with nutrients. Once again, Borlaug averted a famine. Once again, he helped a nation record the largest harvest of major crops in history.

Borlaug was a universally respected figure, but he was not afraid to tackle controversial issues. Many developing nations at the time required their farmers to accept only half of world market prices so these governments could pacify the urban populations with low food costs. These unfairly low payments to farmers resulted in underproduction of crops and hoarding. Borlaug used his international prestige to persuade Pakistan and India to eliminate these policies and pay poor farmers the standard global rate for their grain.

### Iowa: The Crucible of Agricultural Breakthroughs

Taking a step back from the life of Norman Borlaug, it is important to understand his contribution in the context of his upbringing. He is not a wholly self-made man but a product of the agricultural ingenuity of Iowa. How do we make sense of the entrepreneurial spirit of this state that formed his values? To do so, we need to take a detour through Iowa's agricultural history.

A first step is to consider Iowa's landscape. If you have ever driven through Iowa, you would notice that farms are everywhere. A forest, a cornfield, or a soybean field covers any stretch of rural land. These crops contribute significantly to the state's economy. They are also the primary reason that America dominates global agriculture.

Oddly enough, neither corn or soybeans was preferred by the Iowa Territory's first settlers, who first appeared in the 1830s. As farms spread across the Midwest during the 19th century, the first big cash crop was wheat. Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota are thought of as corn country, but they were all wheat producers first, quickly supplanting the Mid-Atlantic States in terms of its production. Corn was common but bulky and tough to transport for profit. Farmers consumed it at home as Johnnycakes, a cornmeal flatbread, rather than sell it. The rest was distilled into spirits, which could be better transported at a higher economic value. It was not until corn was adopted wide-scale as animal feed that its value was truly recognized. Instead of letting animals feed on prairie grass, farmers hauled feed to animals, allowing them to be raised in smaller confines and requiring less pastureland. (Animal rights activists and grass-fed beef lovers likely do not celebrate this development, but raising livestock was now simpler and cheaper than it would have been without this development.)

Iowa was ecologically destined to be an agricultural center of the world. Its massive production capabilities have to do with its environmental conditions, which are perfect for corn production. It has hot humid summers, many hours of daylight, a long growing season, and optimal rainfall. Those factors make it a good area for raising a crop like corn that has a tremendous biological payoff in terms of mass. A corn kernel is no bigger than a fingernail. But when planted and harvested it produces far more kernels when compared to wheat. There is a greater payoff in terms of plant material fiber, or cellulose, which is important for feeding livestock and raising thousands of hogs and cows. The seed is a high sugar, high calorie product and necessary for converting feed into flesh.

Iowa's role as the agricultural hub of the United States came with the expansion of settlers with the 1833 Black Hawk Purchase. Many of these settlers, which came in family units, arrived from New York, Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. There they found endless prairie that contrasted with the heavily timbered homes back East.

These settlers had to be hardy folk. For one thing, the land appeared bleak and desolate, compared with the homes they had left behind. Historian Dorothy Schwieder quotes an account of a woman settling in Iowa from New York State who announced to her husband she would die without any trees. To some new settlers this threat of death was a literal truth – prairie fires were common in the dense tall grass and it took the help of all family members on a farmstead to keep the flames at bay. Iowans slept with one eye open for fire until the first snow fell.

Early farm machinery was just as dangerous as nature. Entrepreneurs had steam-powered threshers dragged from town to town, threshing farmers' crops for a fee. One spark from the boiler could shoot out and set the whole prairie on fire.

But underneath the prairie grass rested some of the richest soil on earth. Much of the state was settled by the 1860s with immigrants who dreamt of lucrative work in farming. Railroads came into the state in the 1860s from Chicago, bringing thousands of settlers eager to homestead and claim their own land. Council Bluffs became the eastern terminus of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1867. By the 1870s family farms covered the state. They kept busy year round. In the winter farmers butchered livestock, mended fences, and chopped wood; in the summer they sheared sheep, hayed, and threshed; in the fall they harvested.

Women were just as active as men and often had the same chores. An account of a Midwestern farm wife in 1900 from the book _The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves_ describes her role on the farm:

No man can run a farm without someone to help him, and in this case I have always been called up on and expected to help do anything that a man would be expected to do. I began this when we were first married, when there were few household duties and no reasonable excuse for refusing to help. I was reared on a farm, was healthy and strong, was ambitious, and the work was not disagreeable, and having no children for the first six years of married life, the habit of going whenever asked to became firmly fixed, and he had no thought of hiring a man to help him, since I could do anything for which he needed help.

Tough-minded pioneers like these took to farming rich soil, forming an Iowa asset that lasts to today. Farmers moved from the East Coast brought with them short-season 90-day corn, well adapted to New England; those coming from the South came with the 120-day gourd seed corn variety. People began to deliberately or accidentally cross those varieties. The result is the grandfather of our modern-day dent corn. Farmers discovered cattle and pigs could relatively easily digest this cross-pollinated variety. This discovery helped encourage a shift from pasture feeding to feed lots.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917 and transformed into a wartime economy, farmers saw their profits increase dramatically. Federal officials urged farmers to increase production, so they purchased more land and raised more livestock. A ready market existed, because the U.S. Army bought whatever they produced making many farmers rich.

Another Iowan, Herbert Hoover, made use of this expanded agricultural output to feed Europe at the end of the war. He was in charge of the American Relief Administration, an American outreach to Europe after World War I. The multi-million-dollar program was funded by Congress, and the organization saved millions of lives throughout Europe and Russia by averting a massive famine.

U.S. agriculture lagged after the war and collapsed in the Great Depression. Farmers had little relief until another Iowan, Henry A. Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, went to Washington to design a new farm relief program. He crafted the Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933, which paid farmers to curtail their agricultural production and withhold land from farming. Wallace, former editor of the leading farm journal of the Midwest, _Wallace's Farmer_ , hoped to return prosperity to the sector.

Wallace challenged the cherished belief that it is good to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. This was an idea deeply embedded in the mindset of farmers, and continues to be so today, with their obsession on total crop yield and productivity. Instead, Wallace basically paid farmers not to farm. His federal farm programs restricted too much production and offset price decline in crops. This price control mechanism was arguably successful. But it lived on for decades after its original expiration date, ballooning into a program that today costs billions of dollars.

Keeping all this history in mind, how has Iowa contributed so much to the technological advancement of agriculture? After all, technology does not come from the organic effort of crop cultivation and soil tillage. It comes from scientific research. Most of this innovation has come from Iowa State University. It was founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm. The modest farm was a testing ground for new agricultural methods such as crop planting, crop growing, cross-pollination, disease resistance, and drought resistance.

At the time European scientists were making startling advances in biology. Gregor Mendel presented a paper on hybridization in 1865 and Louis Pasteur developed a cure for anthrax in 1881. Charles Darwin popularized the idea of evolution of plants and animals in 1859 with his book _On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life_. But it was at such research programs as Iowa State University that these ideas were put into practice.

One of the most influential research wings of Iowa State was its mechanical arts department. Here engineers and designers worked on more efficient farm implements. Their discoveries coincided with technological breakthroughs happening around the world.

In 1837 John Deere developed the cast-steel plow. Before this invention, most farmers used wooden or iron plows that stuck to the Midwestern soil. The smooth steel plow solved this problem, cut through the soil, and aided the massive migration to the American Great Plains.

In 1892 John Froelich produced the first gasoline-powered tractor., built to replace the bulky, dangerous mobile thresher. He replaced the hazardous steam engine with a one-cylinder gasoline engine on his steam engine's running gear. It worked; the new machine could move at a blistering three miles per hour. Now 26 gallons of gas could provide power to thresh more than a thousand bushels of grain a day. As a result, a farmer could easily acquire more power to do work than animals pulling the machines could have ever supplied.

Farms became mechanized with the application of gasoline engine technology to threshing machines and reapers. Tractors came and quickly grew in size. The early models were rated at 15 horsepower on the drawback and 30 on the belt, compared to a modern-day John Deere 9400, a tractor rated at 425 horsepower and costing nearly $200,000. Early tractors were little more than mechanized draft animals, pulling implements such as the grain binder formerly drawn by horses. Over time, the machines were built to accommodate tractors. The tractor and corn picker were designed together and made into a self-propelled machine: the combine.

The pace of evolution was startling: corn farmers of the 19th century used a single-row, horse-drawn planter, which was replaced by the tractor-pulled two-row planter. Then came the four-row; then the 12-row; and now the 24-row planter. Combines today are self-propelled and self-leveling to accommodate uneven terrain.

Tractors had a side effect of reducing the number of people in the state who actually farmed. With mechanization came a reduced need for laborers and the consolidation of small plots. Larger farmers started to accumulate more wealth and gobble up properties next to them.

Tractors increased in number from 1.6 to 3.4 million from 1940 to 1950. Horses were literally put to pasture and kept only for recreational purposes. Today farmers feel affinity for their tractors in the way that their great-grandfathers felt for their horses. For example, it is not uncommon to see a farm family decorate their infant son's room in John Deere green and yellow.

With mechanization came enormous gains in efficiency. According to the book _The Agricultural Revolution of the 20_ th _Century_ , if a farmer from the Old Testament were dropped in American in 1900, he mostly would have recognized the implements being used: hoes, harrows, rakes, and plows. But if he came in the 20th Century, he would think he was on a different planet. The changes that occurred during the previous century exceeded all changes that had happened during the 10,000 years since humans first began cultivation of crops during the Neolithic Revolution. In 1939 the per-farm average value of land, buildings, and equipment was only $6,000. By 1996, the sum increased by a factor of eighty.

In 1910, it took approximately 70 minutes of labor to earn a dollar of farm income. By 1980, only four minutes were required. In 1900, it took a farmer 81 minutes to produce a bushel of corn. With the use of mechanical power, today it takes less than two minutes. Due to this massive growth in productivity far fewer farmers are necessary to grow crops. Nearly 30 million Americans were involved in agriculture in 1900. This number fell to less than 5 million by 2000. Farmers constituted nearly 39 percent of the population in 1900; they were less than 1.5 percent in 2000.

The productivity gains are so great that farmers, despite constituting a fraction of the total population, have long ago set their sights beyond merely feeding the American population. They now consider how to feed the rest of the world, and feed them toward better health. They seek to rid the world of nutrition-related diseases such as scurvy, goiter, rickets, and pellagra.

With an explosion in agricultural technology, biotech, and high-tech farm equipment came the mindset of industrialization. Farms used to be the simplest, most granular part of an agrarian society. They were now part of the global industrial economy. Farmers accepted the idea that agriculture requires scientific expertise, not merely hard work or experience working the land, using knowledge passed down from generation to generation. In the 20th century it capital requirements for farming were so great that farmers needed financial systems in place. Buying hundreds of acres and million-dollar combines took enormous bank loans backed by federal financial securities and national programs.

Farms morphed from household operations to small businesses and even miniature factories. Along with this came professional accounting practices. A typical farmer's ledger before World War II did not pay much attention to cash flow – if he was buying some nails or hardware, he didn't bother to compare the true expenses of repair and maintenance versus buying new equipment or housing. But after the war, the U.S. government took a more direct role in agriculture and forced farmers to pay income taxes. Farmers had to know how much money they were making since they paid taxes based on their revenue. That imposed an accounting system on agriculture.

Iowa ignited the global explosion of agriculture, which sent ripples throughout the rest of the world. Previously untouched areas such as Argentina or Australia saw an expansion of cash crops. In 1905 Western Canada was a desert; in 10 years Canadian Pacific Railway actively promoted agriculture and put millions of acres into tillage. Agriculture expanded not just in the United States but everywhere. The growth of the global crop market made food prices drop across the industrialized world.

Lower food prices changed the diets of average Americans, whether a Midwestern farmer or a New York banker. As early as the 1880s and 1890s, tailors began talking about how proportions of the male body were starting to change; better nutrition meant the average man was no longer rail thin. The size 38 or 40 jacket had to be cut differently to accommodate the larger frames of the male populace.

It also meant the creation of the middle class. Most of the world's population worked in agriculture up until World War II because the prices of food were so high that all but the relatively wealthy could only get by if they grew their own food. In the early 1900s, over 25 percent of a family budget was spent on food; in 2000 it was less than 14 percent. Families now had more money to spend more on consumer goods, clothing, and housing. Family cars were affordable, along with track housing. And those houses wouldn't be complete without toasters, ovens, refrigerators, and Zenith televisions. For the first time in history the middle class became a majority of society's population.

And change keeps happening. Researchers estimate that in 20 years the output of an acre of fertile Iowa farmland could produce 300 bushels of grain, double what is currently produced now. Some even estimate it could get to the 400 or 500 level mark. While the new generations of Paul Ehlrichs have come along to preach a gospel of starvation due to overpopulation and depletion of natural resources, a new generation of Norman Borlaugs is rising up to answer their call, ready to feed the planet and continue growing the global economy.

### A New Generation of Norman Borlaugs

Borlaug brought productive agriculture to the third world, but his work remains unfinished. Vast swaths of farmland in Africa, Asia, and the Americas are barely productive enough to support a farm family, let alone the surrounding community.

A lack of agriculture will permanently cripple a poor nation's future. Global development leaders such as Allan Savory say that agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds. It is the production of food and fiber from the world's land and waters. It is also the fulcrum on which any kind of social, cultural, and political development turns.

He has said, "Without agriculture it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, university, church or army. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy."

Fortunately a new generation of Iowan farmers and researchers are rising to the challenge of feeding the world. They are creating new farming technologies to increase yields and make crops grow in the developing world. Their research is generations beyond diesel tractors or plows. They are blending farming with genetic engineering, robotic harvesters, and satellite-guided tractors.

The idea that farmers are utilizing such advanced technology may sound surprising, but that is only true for those who believe Midwesterners do subsistence farming and barely live above the poverty line. This may have been true three generations ago. But a modern farm is more akin to a multimillion-dollar business than a quaint family operation with a red barn and one tractor. Today a top-line tractor is smart phone-controlled and can be steered via GPS. Intelligent sensors know exactly how much fertilizer to spray. They collect massive amounts of data, enabling farmers to continually boost crop yields. Farms use hybrid specific GPS and a digital map of the field to maintain pinpoint accuracy.

Clay Mitchell of Geneseo, Iowa is a Gorlang-style pioneer. Using satellite navigation, computer piloted tractors, and thousands of sensors, Mitchell pushes the limits of technology to re-create farming. His autopilot-controlled John Deere crop sprayer uses different nozzles to apply the right amount of pesticide down to the drop. This is a far more exact science than altering spray pressures along the field, and the droplets coat leaves more effectively, saving money on pesticides and keeping chemicals on the field. "Environmentally, drift is a big issue," he said in a profile with _Wired_ magazine. "If the entire outside edge of the field gets a sub-lethal amount, then it's a sure thing that it's only going to take a couple of years for some weeds to develop resistance."

He is one part Pa Wilder, three parts Tony Stark

In this future world of agriculture, farm tools act with as much precision as insects extracting nectar from a flower. Although farm mechanization is a process that has gone on for at least a century, traditional implements such as threshing machines and seed drills are blunt and imprecise. Mitchell's new tools are anything but. He has installed a fixed GPS receiver on his land and programmed it to broadcast coordinates to farm vehicles to spontaneously account for errors while working on his fields. This allows him to inject the soil with fertilizer in rows and come back a few months later to place a seed on top of each granule, determining each position by using lasers and cameras. His efforts to increase productivity have paid off – he reaps approximately 750 bushels a hectare a year, compared to the average of 75 bushels a hectare a century ago.

Mitchell is the embodiment of an intelligent but down-to-earth Midwesterner. He was born on the Geneseo family farm and helped his father build much of the farm equipment. When in high school he wired the grain bin's storage screws with electrical inputs and outputs. After graduation he studied biomedical engineering at Harvard.

Mitchell returned to the family farm in 2000. He installed his own RTK system after reading about it in a farming magazine, which was originally designed for horticulture. He personally overhauled his tractor with RTK auto steering, then his seeders and fertilizer machines.

John Deere now funds many of his experiments. Mitchell controls them from his computer station set up at the back of his barn, near a fridge full of Red Bull. He computer shows a color-coded map of the field that displays plants with nitrogen placed at different distances from the seed.

Mitchell is not the only Iowan transforming agriculture with technology. Dave Dorhout, an entomologist who graduated from Iowa State University dreams of planting an entire field with an army of robots that are modeled on insects. Dorhout, an amiable researcher who once dreamt of opening a pizza shop, has designed a hexapod robot named Prospero. He built it to control farming on a plant-by-plant, seed-by-seed basis. It will operate in a swarm of planting, tending, and harvesting, running on the principle of game theory behavior algorithms to operate on the fly. To him, this is not a bizarre, Isaac Asimov take on the future of farming. Rather, it is agriculture assuming its proper role as the traditional early adopter of new technologies.

"Looking back at history agriculture seems kind of quaint," Dorhout said to _Popular Science_. "But I realized growing up around a farm in Iowa that rather than being one of the last industries to adopt technology, agriculture is one of the earliest adopters." He pointed to innovative technologies like genetic engineering, statistics, and the diesel engine, all used early on by farmers to squeeze out more productivity per acre.

Prospero is the opposite of a massive tractor. Smaller is bigger, and according to Dorhout, hundreds of little robots can do far more work than one massive one. It's the same concept as a huge lawn mower versus millions of micro-mowers: a massive mower can cut down hundreds of grass blades a second. But millions of micro-mowers that each cut down one blade in five minutes will finish sooner. Prospero is an off-the-shelf robotics platform that is simple, costs less than ten dollars, and is equipped with sensors such as photo resistors and an LED, along with a fertilizer sprayer and a seed hopper. The robot communicates with other robots with a weak radio signal. It walks around the field and only bothers to detect what is directly beneath it. If there is no seed planted in the soil below, or immediately around it, then Prospero drills a hole, deposits a seed, sprays an exact amount of fertilizer, covers the seed, and marks the spot with some paint that other robots can detect. The "paint" is similar to a pheromone mark that insects leave to communicate with each other.

The degree to which the robots look and act like insects is creepy: They operate in a swarm pattern and do not bother to plant the field in straight rows, but instead with optimized seed spacing for whatever shape the field might take. Prospero robots "talk" to each other like drones in an ant colony. If a robot detects a large swath of soil with no seeds, then it signals other robots to come to the area and get to work, much like ants working in unison to drag a leaf back to the colony or protect a queen in danger. The swarm method's purpose is to cut down on expensive data crunching because each robot does not have to know the exact position of each other robot.

All of these futuristic prospects are exciting, but the modern industrialization of agriculture hasn't come without its controversies. This is particularly true in considering the power imbalance between rich Western agriculture companies and poorer farmers in the developing world. Borlaug's motives in feeding the third world were pure, but his legacy of a wide-scale approach to farming has put new burdens on third-world farmers. The wheat varieties that Borlaug and others developed required more fertilizer applications than local varieties due to the poor local soil. A farmer who used his new types of dwarf wheat could expect a better harvest but had to buy expensive imported fertilizer.

Unanticipated consequences resulted. Farmers across the world, whether in Iowa or the poorer parts of Mexico and Ethiopia, now rely on synthetic fertilizers. Countries that once relied on subsistence farming must now practice input-intensive farming. They now have the IV drip of global agribusiness injected into their economies and are dependent on international companies like Monsanto that offer combined seed and chemical packages. It forces an agenda of U.S. corporations onto poorer, weaker countries to create an uneven food distribution system. Money flows up from the poorest farmers to the richest CEOs, a practice that critics call "farming the farmer."

Industrialization has also presented environmental challenges both inside and outside the United States. Aggressive farming results in soil erosion, which, if not controlled, renders land useless. This is a dangerous prospect in Iowa, in which soil is likely the state's most precious commodity; what coal is to West Virginia, fried cheese to Wisconsin, or lawsuits to California. To reduce the threat of soil erosion, minimum tillage was developed, along with the farm machinery to implement it. More advanced machines used laser-guidance to lay plastic tile with the desired gradient through an undulating surface. But concerns remain.

Lastly, the industrialization of farming threatens to eliminate the most American of all institutions: the family farm. In the early 20th century, farming was be a family enterprise. This was true throughout history, and a reason that farmers preferred large families in order to create more workers.

Today the total value of an average farm, including land, equipment, and buildings, exceeds half a million dollars. Other than a few wealthy families, the only true "owners" of farms are corporations or banks. The average Iowa county had hundreds of independent hog farmers prior to the 1990s. But when pork prices plummeted later that decade, the number was reduced to less than a dozen.

The family farm can survive into the 21st century, but only with great difficulty. To do so, it must redefine itself. Don and Philip Paarlberg argue in _The Agricultural Revolution of the 20_ th _Century_ that in the original idea of a family farm, the farm family supplied all forms of production, whether the land, labor, capitol, or management. However, due to the enormous investments required, one person cannot supply all these different factors of production. External factors must enter into the equation. These include borrowing money, earning off-farm income, contracting with integrating firms, hiring labor, and reducing the amount of decision-making power of the farm operator.

Borlaug acknowledged these difficulties before his death in 2009 at the age of 95. He admitted that while the Green Revolution had been a net positive, it had not transformed the world into a utopia. He also worried that future potential for land expansion and cultivation of crops would not be as simple in the 21st century as it was in the 20th, even though demand for more crops would continuously rise. The world food supply needed to be doubled by 2050, with up to 85 percent of the growth having to come from lands already in use.

Nevertheless, Borlaug dismissed most of his critics of the Green Revolution and its "shotgun wedding" between first-world agribusiness and third-world farming. With Midwestern lack of pretense, he blasted those critics as pampered elites more concerned about abstract environmental threats than the very real threats of third-world starvation. In 2008 he said, "Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

To Borlaug, the threats to future food security were not issues with production. The real threat was a pervasive but camouflaged bureaucracy strangling the global supply chain. Environmental activities and international agencies could interfere in biotechnology and crop cultivation to the degree than a man-made famine was possible, a ghastly repeat of Stalin's man-made famine triggered in Ukraine in the 1930s. Barring such interference, Borlaug remained optimistic that scientific breakthroughs would continue to boost crop production to meet the demands of 2025, in which the global population is expected to reach 8 billion. Before his death he predicted that the world could feed up to 10 billion if policy makers stayed attuned to rural development.

Borlaug's greatest achievement, and those of other Iowans who helped feed the world in the 20th century, was to prove that modern agriculture could be made to work in fast-growing developing countries where it was needed most, even in the small farms removed from cities. He proved that the greatest asset for any hungry country is human ingenuity.

Borlaug's legacy literally covers the Earth. Gary H. Toenniessen, director of agricultural programs for the Rockefeller Foundation, calculated that half the world's population goes to bed every night after consuming grain descended from one of the high-yield varieties developed by Borlaug or his colleagues.

"He knew what it was they needed to do, and he didn't give up," Toenniessen said to The New York Times in Borlaug's obituary. "He could just see that this was the answer."

His answer was to feed the planet. The unassuming Iowan and other farmers like him conquered the world. They conquered not with a military campaign like Alexander the Great or plundering campaign like Genghis Khan. They won with but with something far more important: food.

#  Chapter 4

### How Iowa Standardized American English

Lynn Singer's therapy sessions have changed her clients' lives, but the change hasn't come without suffering. Some clients burst into tears when sessions begin. Others have taken years to overcome their past. One client has come to her Manhattan office weekly for more than 11 years.

Their problem? All have a New York accent and want to speak with neutral English. That is, they want to speak like an Iowan.

Singer sits across from her clients and looks at their mouths closely. She works with the sounds that they have the most trouble pronouncing. Improvement techniques include enunciating vowels that use the back of the tongue and conscious sound substitutions that replace their swallowed vowels. The process – as described in a New York Times profile – can take years. But the payoff is worth it. New York accents have been rated as the most disliked style of speech in the United States.

Her clients drop r's in their words (doctor becomes doctuh, water becomes wawtuh). Actresses complain of not being cast in movies because their accent makes them sound ignorant. Corporate execs worry they are not understood by clients or stereotyped for their speech patterns. Their speech pigeonholes them as tough guys or mafia members. Every word sounds like a line from _The Sopranos_. The New York accent – a mix of German, Irish, Yiddish, and Italian – is among the most stereotyped of all American dialects.

The worst among working class New Yorkers sound like the chorus of a 1946 song by Bobby Gregory: "Who is de toughest goil in dis whole woild/Moitle from Thoidy-Thoid and Thoid."

But no such speech therapists exist in Iowa. Nobody tries to lose their Iowan accent. Why? Because there isn't one. The language spoken in American films, national news, commercials, radio programs, and TV series is the natural language of a farmer in Decorah or banker in Marshalltown. This is the preferred accent of broadcasters across the nation. You won't hear a CNN reporter use a Southern twang in which a one-syllable word becomes three. Nor will they use a Northeastern accent in their description of a "pahty platah of clahm chowdah."

General American English is found in its native habitat only in a tiny chunk of the Midwest. Maps of the accent place it in a swath that begins in central Illinois, moves west to cover the lower half of Iowa and a tiny portion of northern Missouri, then ends in the western third of Nebraska. The full spectrum of the accent, however, likely includes Ohio, Missouri, and Kansas, with parts of Michigan and Wisconsin thrown in. But the epicenter of standard American English, if one wants to be precise, is in Iowa.

Today English learners around the world are learning to speak with an American accent, and by default, an Iowan accent. The omnipresence of Hollywood films and popular television dramas make the U.S.-style of speech easier to understand and learn than British-style English. Global media exposes more citizens to it, giving the American accent more cultural capital. Learners in Asia say it makes them sound more contemporary and a better fit within the international business world.

American accent schools are flourishing in places such as Hong Kong. Parents send their children there with the hopes that a North American accent will increase their employability, particularly with a U.S. firm. There, students as young as nine recite speeches by U.S. politicians, enunciating each word with perfect American diction.

In the school Nature EQ, Charlotte Yan goes to the front of her class, where a giant American flag hangs on the wall. She recites a 2008 campaign speech by Hillary Clinton in front of dozens of fellow students.

"Make sure we have a president who puts our country back on the path to peace, prosperity, and progress," she says, opening her mouth wide to pronounce her phonemes correctly.

Yan is one of many Hong Kong language students who are learning the accent. Children as young as five chant words in unison and memorize Robert Frost poems. Teachers quickly correctly any enunciation error. Although Hong Kong is a former British colony, her family prefers the accent to the more common English-style speech.

Many others believe the American accent is more relevant in the globalized world than British English. The boom in accent schools reflects this belief – wealthy Chinese mainlanders are crossing into Hong Kong and filling these programs. Nature EQ was set up 17 years ago with 40 students. Today 350 attend. Nearby another school hosts an American English workshop. It enrolled 180 students in its first year.

"I intend to send my sons to America for further study so I chose an American accent for them," said Victor Chan to Agence France-Presse. "I think having an American accent is better for their employment [prospects] in Western countries."

What all of these accent learners don't realize is that they are mimicking the speech of Iowans. General American English is modeled off of Midwestern English. General American English has become the global standard for accent. To complete the syllogism, Midwestern English is now the global standard. Few know this. A Chinese college student would be shocked to learn that the template for "correct" English is an insurance salesman in Des Moines or feed lot operator in Keokuk.

The story of the Iowan accent becoming the template for the General American accent is an accidental history. Nobody planned for it to happen. The speech trajectory of America could have very well gone in a different direction. Perhaps in an alternate reality, Asian schoolchildren and broadcasters try to speak like Minnesotans (let's get on the fishing boot, _eh?_ ). Why did it happen this way?

Language evolution is a complex and ongoing process. It happens faster in certain places than others and sometimes doesn't happen at all. Isolated immigrant communities in America have managed to retain the accent of their homeland. One noteworthy group are the Tidewater communities around Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. They are descendants from settlers from Somerset and Gloucestershire in the West Country of England. To the delight of linguists and tourists everywhere, they still speak the Victorian English of their predecessors. More extreme examples are Mennonite communities that speak a dialect of German called _Plautdietsch_ (Low German), due to the perpetuation of their culture from their pietist roots in Germany.

Dialects persist in smaller regions, but every nation has a standard form of its speech. A British gentleman or lady prefers to speak the Queen's English. Most French citizens do their best to mimic a Parisian accent, which itself came from the royal court and French aristocracy of centuries earlier. Even in Turkey, most residents prefer to copy the Istanbul accent, with its steady flow of harmonized vowels, rather than the clippier speech of the Black Sea or Anatolian hinterlands.

This story is repeated across Europe – as nations began to consolidate in the 1700s and 1800s, schools were built and teachers sent to staff them. In this new universal education system, one dialect came to dominate all the others. These dialects were typically associated with the aristocracy, the upper class, or the monarchy and made the standardized version of speech throughout the rest of the nation.

The spread of radio broadcasts in the early-20th century further entrenched these accents. In 1917, English researcher Daniel Jones introduced the concept of Received Pronunciation, which is a standardized form of the Queen's English, or BBC English. This archetypal accent spread to the masses, even though only about 1 in 50 residents of England spoke this way at the time. Centuries-old dialects soon died. The original accent of Shakespeare, which sounds like a hybrid of Gaelic, Irish, and working-class English, diminished to the point of irrelevance. This was a great loss, as many of the rhymes in his original plays were rendered meaningless when reproduced in the Queen's English.

America followed a different path in its language standardization. There is no "President's English." Nobody tries to mimic his speech, except in a Saturday Night Live skit. Many U.S. presidents have had a strong regional drawl, such as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. John F. Kennedy's speech style has become the go-to accent for over-the-top Northeastern speak ("ahsk nawt what yah cahntry cahn doo fohr yoo...").

Nearly all American broadcasters speak with a Midwestern, Iowan accent. Unlike European nations, they do not speak with the accent of the powerful (a New York accent) or the aristocratic (New England). We all know this is not how it is, but why is it not like this? Accents in other parts of the world gravitate to the center of wealth and power. Those from the hinterlands mimic those in the capital. Why shouldn't an Iowan hoping to become a film or television star mimic a New York accent? Why doesn't he or she practice in front of a mirror how to say "the baseball battah got to thoid base"?

To answer that question, we need to look into the history of American English. The story takes on unexpected twist and turns. It would have to – how else could the standard for American English come to reside in Iowa?

### The History of America's Accents

Early American colonists spoke with a British accent. They did so for the simple reason that they weren't Americans – they were British subjects. It only evolved into General American English through centuries of immigration.

Language is a mutable force. It does not conform to exact weights and measurements. It is not like the kilogram, which was and still is based on a small piece of metal in the town of Sèvres, France, created in 1889 as the International Prototype Kilogram. In order to preserve the integrity of the metric system of weights, it is kept in an environmentally-controlled chamber and protected by three bell jars that can be opened only by three keys from three different people. It is taken out once every 50 years to compare to six sister copies, used as a model for 34 replicas around the world.

Language doesn't exist in such controlled conditions – it is shaped by its environment and society. As settlers pushed further West into America, the language evolved from its English roots. A standard variety of American English formed in most of the country by the 19th century. It was based on the dialect of the Mid-Atlantic states, with notable features being a flat "a" and a strong final "r."

Not that the Founding Fathers didn't want to control the evolution of a new, standard American accent. They knew of the heavy class divisions in England and discrimination against lower-class workers due to their manner of speech. Language aficionados such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Noah Webster wanted to spread a neutral English that was free of such regional dialects. Although America never made English its national language, unlike Australia or England, the idea continued to germinate in the following decades.

The spirit of language reform and standardization began with Benjamin Franklin, who went so far as to call for the abolishment of "unnecessary letters" such as 'c', 'w', 'y' and 'j.' John Adams continued this reform movement. He proposed in 1780 that Congress establish an "American Academy for correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English language." Adams dreamed of establishing a public authority to fix and improve the language, as many of the nations of Europe had done. He spoke highly of the academies in Spain, France, and Italy, and their great successes in standardizing their own languages. It was to the shame of England that although many learned men had proposed a similar institution, the government never imposed it in such a manner. As a result, there was no standard dictionary that carried any public authority. Spellings of words were so widely divergent ('jail' could be spelled 'gaol' or 'goal'), that meaningful communication between two parties was unnecessarily complex. If the United States could standardize its language, the nation could achieve unbounded levels of success:

"The honor of forming the first public institution for refining, correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English language, I hope is reserved for congress; they have every motive that can possibly influence a public assembly to undertake it. It will have a happy effect upon the union of the States to have a public standard for all persons in every part of the continent to appeal to, both for the signification and pronunciation of the language. The constitutions of all the States in the Union are so democratical that eloquence will become the instrument for recommending men to their fellow-citizens, and the principal means of advancement through the ranks and offices of society" _(The Words of John Adams, Second President of the United States.... by his Grandson, Charles Francis Adams:_ Boston, 1852 _)_

Noah Webster went further in his effect on standardizing and simplifying American spelling. His dictionaries and reference books sold like wildfire throughout the colonies, with his "The American Spelling Book," a fixture as common in schools as the Bible in a church. He is credited with unique American spellings different from British English, with _theater_ and _center_ instead of _theatre_ and _centre_. He also made the British 'u' (colour, flavour, honour) fall out of fashion. He is the one who is credited with creating American Standard English.

But new waves of immigrants to America threatened this project. In 1813, Thomas Jefferson saw the influx of Irish and Scottish immigrants to the young country and worried of a cultural clash with the newcomers and America's established residents. A common identity unique to America needed to be formed, and this included the manner of speaking: "The new circumstances under which we are placed call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An American dialect will therefore be formed."

Jefferson believed that American English would evolve into a completely different language from English. At the end of the 19th century, English linguist Henry Sweet predicted that in 100 years, "England, America, and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages, owing to their independent changes of pronunciation." Obviously this didn't happen – Brits and Americans understand each other perfectly well, even though they both snicker at the others' accent.

Global communications have mitigated these changes, but they haven't eliminated them altogether. American English developed many of its own words, thanks to pioneers pushing west and coining terms to describe new lands with new flora and fauna. The Lewis and Clarke Expedition introduced over 500 new words to American English, many taken from Native American terms themselves. But they also gave us some of their own words. When they talked of the strange qualities of the "outlands" beyond the Mississippi River, it evolved into the term "outlandish."

Other explorers with a plucky spirit and a sense of humor created new colloquialisms. Figures such as Davy Crocket made their own quirky neologisms – such as riff-raff, hunky-dory, skedaddle, lickety-split, rambunctious, rip-snorter, humdinger, and shenanigan. Although these words are no longer used outside of aunts who cook pot roasts in linoleum-tiled kitchens, other phrases from the American frontier are more common in everyday English. They include sitting on the fence, knuckle down, go whole hog, kick the bucket, face the music, a chip on the shoulder, barking up the wrong tree, stack the deck, horse sense, stake a claim, and two cent's worth.

That is not to say that the East Coast aristocratic society did not contribute its own terms to American English. Perhaps the most universal utterance of Americans, and the phrase that foreigners immediately latch onto when they are speaking English with an American, is "OK." This term comes from the 1830s. Its origins are obscure and debated, but the most interesting theory is that it comes from the presidential campaign of eighth president Martin Van Buren. He was born in the village of Kinderhook, New York. The 20th-century etymologist Allen Walker Read argued that the wide usage of the phrase OK started during Van Buren's presidential campaign and subsequent presidency as an affectionate way to refer to "Old Kinderhook."

Today there are approximately 4,000 words that separate British and American English, such as tap/faucet, bath/tub, biscuit/cookie, and bonnet/hood. The difference became apparent enough that by the early 1900s, George Bernard Shaw quipped that "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." The reasons for the changes were many, but one reason is the English preference for comportment and erudition, and the American preference for reform and simplification.

Beyond this diversity in Transatlantic accents, differences linger in the hundreds of American dialects and sub-dialects. They can be as small as a Minnesotan pronouncing "boat" as "boot," and other features borrowed from their largely Scandinavian heritage. A Southern Pennsylvanian might use the long 'o' in words like "goat" or "go." Missourians might even call their home state "Missour-a" instead of "Missouri" (a sin many Iowans are guilty of as well).

Accents can really go off the rails in the Upper Midwest, which was made famous by the film "Fargo." This speech style is only heard in rural North Dakota or Minnesota, and rarely spoken as thickly as the characters in the film, but still has a distinct musicality. If you ask somebody about their pet goat, they'll look at you quizzically and then respond with, "Oh, you mean my pet gawwwt?"

Western American accents diverge even more sharply. The use of 'like' as an emphatic statement or signifier of indirect speech (He was like, what are you, like, doing here?") dominates. My wife is a Californian, and although her English is excellent, she has friends that use "like" more than "the."

The emergence of General American English came with industrialization and the Civil War. With new lands in the Midwest opening up to homesteading, railroad lines, and factories, America's economic center of gravity moved west. The eastern port cities and cotton regions of the American South, which still had strong economic ties to England and preferred their pattern of speech, passed the baton to new manufacturing centers of Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis. Americans had been slowly discarding the British accent for over a century, but this process accelerated as British influence on America diminished.

The Midwestern dialect becoming the basis of General American English is often attributed to the mass migration of Midwestern farmers to California or the Pacific Northwest. Most of the settlers were of German, Scots-Irish, or North British descent, producing an amalgamation that largely resembled standard American English today. Rhoticism was a dominant feature of this accent, which means that speakers pronounce the 'r' in words such as hard, instead of the BBC-preferred 'hahd.' Many of the new European settlers spoke with this accent; their settling in the Midwest fortified it. Industrialists of the Midwest began to eclipse their brethren back East, and non-rhotic English lost its luster, dying out in the United States.

But the standardization of Iowan English would not have been complete without the help of Hollywood.

### Iowa's Influence on Hollywood

Famous TV personalities spend much of their early career working to eliminate their regional accent. Stephen Colbert, a South Carolina native, spent hours a day eliminating his draw, because he knew that Southerners were depicted as unintelligent on television. Decades of shows like _The Beverly Hillbillies_ left their mark. It would not have benefited his current career as a satirist, skewering the unintelligence of the American journalistic and political classes. Linda Ellerbee, a long-time reporter for NBC News, strove early on to eliminate her Texas accent. "In television, you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere," she said.

But early television and film stars were from somewhere, and that somewhere was Iowa. It was the role of Iowans on the silver screen that confirmed their accent as the standard American dialect. During the Golden Age of Hollywood (late 1920s-early 1960s), when film dominated the American consciousness in a way that it never did before or never has since, the screen was full of Midwesterners who took their accents to the masses. At this time America saturated its nation with movie theaters. After World War I, nearly 40 percent of the world's theaters were in America. It produced more films than any other nation, filling the world's cinemas with American films. "The sun, it now appears, The Saturday Evening Post wrote in the mid 1920s, "never sets on the British empire and the American motion picture." And the American motion picture was filled with Iowans.

Film goers across the nation may have been under the impression that this was the "correct" way to speak. Who could blame them? John Wayne strutted his ruggedness and calm demeanor across three decades of cinema. The native of Winterset, Iowa appeared or starred in over 170 films from 1926 to 1976. He was a marquee star whose name was displayed in small town theaters across the United States. Wayne's profile rose further during World War II, in which the 34-year-old toured U.S. bases and hospitals in the South Pacific from 1943-1944.

Wayne desperately wanted to fight in the war, but his studio was too afraid of losing him and prevented his status from turning into draft eligible. The actor reportedly carried guilt for decades for failing to serve in the military. His widow later suggested that he atoned for this "dereliction" by crafting an image of a super patriot in films throughout the rest of his life. He became an American cultural icon who symbolized traditional values, individuality, ruggedness, and integrity.

Other iconic Iowans emerged at this time. Two of the first superstars of television, which began to grow in popularity among middle class Americans in the 1950s, were George Reeves, the star of _The Adventures of Superman_ , and Jerry Mathers of _Leave it to Beaver_. Reeves was born in Woolstock, Iowa. In 1951, he was offered the roll of Superman, even though he was reluctant to take it. Reeves considered television unimportant, much like an actor today appearing in a web-only series. The budget for _Superman_ was tight. At least two half-hour episodes were filmed every six days. Multiple scripts were filmed simultaneously in order to save money by taking advantage of the standing set. Many scenes of Clark Kent talking with newspaper editor Perry White were shot back-to-back.

Despite the show's low budget, Reeves quickly became a superstar. Young fans planned their day around the show, gathering around their humming cathode ray tube screens. Reeves was aware of this status and worked to avoid public vices, such as smoking where children could see him. Although he had many extra-marital affairs – a typical practice for Hollywood stars during the Golden Age – he kept secret a relationship with a married ex-showgirl that was eight years his senior. Reeves maintained his Midwestern, down-to-earth nature throughout his career. A sign on his dressing room said "Honest George, the people's friend."

Donna Reed, the co-star of _It's a Wonderful Life_ , was literally a farm girl that didn't consider acting until she was selected beauty queen at her high school in Denison. Today the welcome sign to her hometown still boasts of itself as "Home of Donna Reed." She moved to California and began her acting career at the age of 20, signing herself over to MGM studios at the height of the studio system. She received stardom for her Best Supporting Actress Academy award for her role as the prostitute Alma in _From Here to Eternity_ (1953). She then moved to television and hosted _The Donna Reed Show_ from 1958 to 1966.

Jerry Mathers, one of the first child stars of television, also took a large role in the American pop culture consciousness. His show, _Leave it to Beaver,_ is the program most associated with idyllic American life. It was not an immediate hit. Leave it to Beaver was cancelled in its first season in 1957, ridiculed by critics for its uber-quaint take on American life, and never made a dent in nightly ratings. ABC picked up the show from CBS and ran it for another five years, but the show failed to gain traction.

It found a second life in syndication and grew in popularity. Over the decades it has proven to be the most enduring of any television show from the 1950s and considered the most purely-distilled form of mid-20th century American life. The Cleavers are the quintessential American family: two brothers who have various hijinks but never get into any real trouble, a father who works a stable job and can afford a suburban house, and a mother who vacuums while wearing a pearl necklace. The show is much parodied today for its heavy-handedness dictating the requirements for a proper middle-class life in such stifling terms.

Other prominent Iowans that dominated America's television sets included Johnny Carson, host of _The Tonight Show_ from 1962 to 1992. The Corning, Iowa native was the most universally recognized television figure during the turbulent years of the 1960s to the 1980s, providing a comic, carefree escape from social tensions challenging the cohesiveness of American society. He also launched the careers of future sitcom stars and talk show hosts including Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne Barr, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jeff Foxworthy, and Tim Allen. He even introduced the game Twister to the world when he played it on TV in 1966 with actress Eva Gabor.

But despite his fame, Carson was reserved in nature. He avoided most large parties, considered "the most private public man who ever lived," and preferred the quieter aspects of life. Carson also had the Midwestern tendency to avoid controversy and stirring up division. Unlike 21st-century comics, who overwhelming skew to the political left and have made their beliefs known with increasing volume in recent years, Carson explicitly avoided mentioning his views on the Tonight Show. None of them were earth-shattering – he was against criminalizing extramarital sex and favored racial equality – but he did not want to be pinned down to any ideological group or alienate audience members. He said it would "hurt me as an entertainer, which is what I am... in my living room I would argue for liberalization of abortion laws, divorce laws, and there are times when I would like to express a view on the air. I would love to have taken on Billy Graham. But I'm on TV five nights a week; I have nothing to gain by it and everything to lose."

Other famous media personalities spent significant stretches of their career in Iowa. Ronald Reagan was a famed radio broadcaster, first for WOC in Davenport in 1932, the first commercial radio station west of the Mississippi River. His inaugural assignment was to broadcast the University of Iowa's homecoming game against Minnesota, which he did for $5 and bus fare. Although not a native Iowan, his years in Iowa radio likely influenced his transformation into an avuncular president during the 1980s.

Reagan gained national exposure when WOC consolidated with WHO, an NBC affiliate. His salary skyrocketed to $100 a week, an extraordinary sum for the 22-year-old. Reagan displayed his improvisational talent on air, recreating Chicago Cubs baseball games from the studio, using nothing but simple game statistics coming off the wire, creating "play-by-play" broadcasts that he never witnessed. In one episode in 1934, the wire went dead during the ninth inning of a Cubs-Cardinals game. He had the players continue to foul off pitches continuously – to the point that Billy Jurges was nearing a record for successive foul balls – until the line was restored. Reagan was the most popular radio personality in the state. He became a huge celebrity, so much so that WHO broadcasted his farewell party when he left Iowa to move to California and begin his acting career.

Iowa no longer dominates the silver screen or television set the way it did decades ago, but many influential actors and actresses still come from the state. Notable examples include Ashton Kutcher, a Cedar Rapids native who attended the University of Iowa for one year. Kutcher spent nearly a decade on _That 70s Show_ , then jumped to the producer and host of MTV's _Punk'd_ , then a slew of low-budget comedies before joining the cast of _Two and a Half Men_ in 2011, following Charlie Sheen's Fukushima-level public meltdown. He tested his dramatic chops with the Steve Jobs biopic _Jobs_ , which proved to Hollywood that casting an actor based purely on his physical resemblance to a real person is never a good operating procedure.

Other Iowans have literally saved the world. Brandon Routh, the star of the 2006 film _Superman Returns,_ hailed from Iowa. He was the last Superman able to save Metropolis without simultaneously destroying it, unlike Henry Cavill's most recent incarnation of Kal-El in the 2013 reboot _Man of Steel._ Another famous Iowan is Victor native Elijah Wood. While he may not have saved our world, he can be credited for his character Frodo Baggins preventing Sauron from recovering the One Ring and overrun Middle Earth in the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy.

### Iowan English's Dominance and Its Discontents

Not to say that there aren't Iowans who don't speak with some type of accent, particularly those who live in rural areas. Many speak with a casual patois. My father, who grew up in Deep River (population 279) prefers to say "warsh" instead of "wash" or "crick" instead of "creek." If he were experiencing terrible heat on a summer day, he might decide to go "warsh" in the "crick."

These discrepancies are ignored because there is a level of social conditioning among Midwesterners that their accent is perfect. Teachers do not correct students' normal pronunciation, and speech therapists do not offer any accent-reduction lessons, as they might in other corners of the country.

Other scholars have contested that Midwesterners do not speak with a neutral accent. Mathew J. Gordon, professor of English and linguistic researcher, published an article in 2002 that challenged this myth. Although he acknowledges that it is easy to imitate Southerns (y'all) or New Yorkers (fuhgedda-boudit) but not so simple with Midwesterners (uhhhh...... where's the corn?) this is not true.

Gordon's illusions were shattered in college when he discovered that words he had always pronounced as homonyms were supposed to be distinct. These included pairs such as _cot_ and _caught_ and _Don_ and _dawn_. The vowel sound in the first of these pairs is supposed to be produced with the tongue low and back in the mouth and with the lips spread open, while the vowel of the second members of each pair involves a slightly higher tongue position and a rounding of the lips. Most Midwesterners pronounce these the same, unaware that they are missing a vowel.

Regardless of the error, this mistake reinforces the dominance of Midwestern English rather than negates it. Nobody criticizes the cot/caught mistake, if they are even aware of it at all. Midwestern English, for all its faults and quirks, has become the default standard for correct speaking in the United States. Gordon argues that linguistic stereotypes have less to do with the actual speech of a region than with popular perceptions of the region's people. As long as the Midwest is considered by the nation at large as average, boring, neutral, or otherwise nondescript, its speech will be seen the same way.

The movement toward simplified English has had many critics over the century. Many are British, who resent that American communication forms are having an undue influence on their own language, watering down its intricacies for the sake of brute-force communication. The sharpest critic was George Orwell, who thought contemporary English of the mid-20th century to be "ugly and inaccurate." In his dystopian novel _1984_ , he wrote of a totalitarian government that eliminated words in everyday speech, reducing "bad" to "ungood." By cauterizing the population's vocabulary, it worked to eliminate their ability to even produce the mental concept of these words, ultimately shutting down higher brain functions and making them ignorant and blindly submissive.

Despite criticisms of General American English, the dialect dominates the world today. It is the accent taught to people learning English as a second language across the globe, a number at least in the hundreds of millions, possibly over a billion. From packed schoolrooms of Chinese students to Korean businessmen to European doctors, all listen to the same language CDs teaching them the Iowan style of pronunciation.

The recordings nearly always feature these accents, even if they do not fit the material. My wife, an American, was asked to do a voice recording for an English instructional CD while we lived in Budapest, Hungary. The dialogue featured a British woman who had recently moved from London to her new home abroad. My wife asked the producer, "Does it matter if I am speaking with an American accent for this British character? Should I fake something?" He waved his hand – "No, no, don't worry about it. This is better."

Of course the Iowan accent can never be spoken correctly without a few extra requirements. Having straw in your mouth as you speak is the first. The second is to make innocuous and quaint comments about the weather ("reckon that storm will do a number on that unfinished 4H building at the fairground"). The third is to meet and greet people with equally folksy sayings ("weeeeelllll sir, reckon I better head back. You take care now.")

Learn these basic speaking patterns, and you will have mastered Iowan, the purest form of the English language, the apotheosis of American English.

#  Chapter 5

### Why Iowa Controls Your Political Destiny, Wherever You Live on Earth

In the throes of a harsh Iowa winter, a young mother in the small Iowa town called Pleasantville prepared to vote. She didn't have a ride to the voting station, but that didn't matter. She also didn't have a babysitter for her 2-year-old, but that didn't matter either. Republicans and Democrats had offered both of these, if only she would show up to cast her ballot on January 3.

She took advantage of the offers.

Pollsters, door-to-door campaigners, had harassed her and phone calls for months, she reasoned. Why not get something back? Besides, the army of politicos and reporters that had invaded her home state would be mostly gone by tomorrow. By next week it would be as if they had never heard of Iowa or its voters.

Iowa has by far the most disproportionate influence on who becomes president of the United States. Every four years Iowans get the chance to vote as the first state in the presidential nomination process. Any candidate who wins the Iowa caucuses usually wins presidency. As a result, each candidate spends months in the state.

The person who is vying to be the next American president, the person to control history's most powerful military juggernaut, one equipped with enough precision to kill a lone jihadist on the other side of the planet but enough firepower to blow up the planet twenty times over – this Seeker of Power must meet and greet and try to win over every last Iowan.

Because the American president is the leader of the free world and the most influential figure on the planet, pound for pound, vote for vote, Iowans have more political power than anyone else on earth.

Political campaigns realize this and allocate their resources accordingly. So many millions of dollars pour into Iowa for leaflets, campaign events, canvasser salaries, and rallies that the average vote of an Iowan costs over $200. (In contrast, candidates will spend less than a tenth of that amount wooing voters in other states).

Two years before an election takes place, both Democratic and Republican party candidates begin the grueling process of campaigning in Iowa. Some of them go so far as to make the state their de facto home. Campaigning means travel to every single one of the 99 counties, even counties with only 2,000 people, and attending six or seven campaign events a day to groups that often consist of fewer than 20-30 attendees.

Candidates are forced to attend the Iowa State Fair in the sweltering heat of August and munch on corn dogs or whatever else can be fried and put on a stick (which at the Iowa State Fair might include Snickers Bars and Chinese food). They have to greet residents on the town squares of tiny burgs and show up at meat packing plants at 6 a.m. And no matter the candidate's background, obligatory photo ops must include red barns, farm machinery, corn fields and livestock.

Relationships with local political power brokers are essential. A normally meaningless endorsement from the Chair of the Orange City Republican party is as coveted as a papal blessing. With enough of these endorsements, the reasoning goes, there is the possibility of winning the caucus. If they win Iowa, then they get an explosion of publicity to help fundraising and give momentum in other early-voting states. The White House, it appears, is just a few miles from Iowa.

Some politicians have tried to ignore this process, only to see their campaigns implode.

In 2007, Rudy Giuliani was the heavy favorite to win the Republican nomination for the 2008 presidential election. However, the former New York mayor bypassed Iowa and New Hampshire to focus on Florida, where many New Yorkers had retired.

Giuliani initially dominated the polls in Florida. But as the Iowa and New Hampshire contests pushed other candidates into the media spotlight, Giuliani began to lose traction while the media swarmed around John McCain and Mitt Romney. McCain won Florida and eventually the party nomination. Giuliani came away with a harsh reminder that hell hath no fury like an Iowa voter scorned.

Other politicians utilized the Iowa caucuses perfectly. Jimmy Carter finished first among named candidates in 1976 (although "Undecided" actually won in terms of total votes). This launched him on the road to the White House.

John Kerry and John Edwards finished first and second in the Iowa caucuses in 2004, giving their sputtering campaigns new life, and pushing them into the presidential and vice presidential nominee slots for the Democratic Party.

Barack Obama performed a major upset win over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 caucus. Obama was considered an outlier until he won the Iowa caucuses. But his win that led to a massive surge of volunteers and donations. He dubbed this triumph the beginning of his political revolution and perhaps even a new chapter for the nation. In his victory speech, Obama declared, "Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope."

### The Caucuses From An Insider's View

I was a college student during the 2004 Iowa caucuses and worked for Iowa State University's student newspaper, the _Iowa State Daily_. I was given the political beat and reported on the caucuses in the months leading up to the vote. It was an exciting time to be a a rare opportunity to report on actual news, especially since assignments for student reporters more typically involved coverage of one of the campuses' hundreds of student groups holding a bake sale or some other non-descript event to "raise awareness."

The Iowa caucuses were a world away from those non-issues. Suddenly I was going to campaign events, rubbing elbows with reporters from the Associated Press or The New York Times, and interviewing the same presidential candidates that these national journalists were. It was like a kid suddenly being invited to the adults' table at Thanksgiving, then being asked my opinion on politics or the economy.

In November 2003 I attended a debate among the Democratic candidates in Des Moines. At a press event afterwards each of the candidates came backstage to talk to the media. I was given the chance to lob questions about foreign policy or whatever else to these politicians, which I did, of course, while trying desperately to sound intelligent.

Celebrities that aligned themselves with the Democratic Party were on hand, too, and I was ecstatic to see Rob Reiner, who directed _Spinal Tap_ , one of my favorite films of all time.

As if I did this all the time, I casually walked up to him and said "Thanks for _Spinal Tap_."

"My pleasure," he responded.

Though that evening I rubbed elbows with more major political figures than I would again in my lifetime, this Rob Reiner moment definitely took the night.

Other chances to talk to important politicians included 30-minute phone interviews with then-candidates John Kerry and John Edwards. In no other state would these candidates give the time of day to a semi-coherent student reporter. But they knew that students read the _Iowa State Daily_ , and each candidate was desperate for as many votes as possible.

Kerry, who is now Secretary of State, talked to me the same way he talks in every interview or press event: eloquent but long-winded and with a propensity to wander off from his main point. Edwards, who is now a disgraced former politician known best for cheating on his terminally ill wife and fathering a child with New Age video producer Rielle Hunter, also came off the same in a one-on-one interview as he did in the media. Edwards oozed smarminess and faux car-salesman charm, even over the phone.

Whatever opportunities I had to talk to these politicians, I was one of thousands of Iowans caught in the middle of a media circus. Iowans simply get used to seeing the national and global media on main streets in towns across the state. CNN satellite trucks are parked on small-town streets to cover debates between presidential candidates. Associated Press reporters show up at diners in places like Carlisle or Norwalk to ask residents their opinions of the flat tax or Mideast terrorism over coffee and scrambled eggs.

An endorsement to a candidate from The Des Moines Register means more than the favor of The Washington Post or The New York Times. When the Register unexpectedly endorsed Mitt Romney instead of Barack Obama in 2012, the endorsement itself ate up an entire national news cycle.

The only thing more plentiful than the media are the political campaigners themselves. Their TV commercials, radio ads, brochures, and phone calls seemed to be pumped into the state's air and water. Approximately $36 million is spent in advertisements. In the month before the caucuses, there are about nine hours of commercials every single day. There are Commercial breaks feature non-stop political announcements. As January 3 draws closer, pollsters or campaign volunteers call each house three or four times a night.

In 1972, Sen. George McGovern, who went on to be the Democratic candidate in the presidential election that year, explained the significance of Iowa with these words: "Iowa is terribly important. It's the first test in the nation, where we get any test at all."

His statement is only partly true.

There is another test that comes earlier, although it is far more informal and open to manipulation by the better-funded caucus campaigns. The first voting event in Iowa is the Ames Straw Poll, a presidential straw poll on the August of years in an election cycle. It is for Republican candidates only and is the first weather vane of popularity for the candidates.

A candidate can often win this contest by busing in his or her supporters, and artificially inflate the numbers. In 2003, Mitt Romney, who funded his campaign with his own personal wealth and those of his associates, put air conditioning in his campaign tent at the straw poll – a tempting lure to the undecided wanting to escape the stifling August heat. The straw poll also acts as the party's immune system, forcing out candidates that might have rabid supporters but are so fringe they might embarrass the party.

"The straw poll allows Republican contenders to strut their stuff, round up and bus in supporters, sponsor some music and food, and blare out their message," said Steffen Schmidt, an affable Iowa State political science professor known by his students and the media as "Dr. Politics."

"The results may serve as an early warning system for Iowa Republicans and the tens of thousands of caucus attendees as to what 'whacko bird,' as Senator McCain might call them, is on the hunt. The straw poll is like a food fair where the media can come and snack on the wares. Journalists go away reporting what's delicious and what's inedible. That spares the rest of the nation that distasteful job."

The real test of the Iowa caucuses is important for reasons that go beyond being the first voting contest in the nation. The level of support that candidates get from rank-and-file voters shows a good indication of how they will do with the rest of America. Iowans show close to the median of America in most categories: income, social views, military support, and tolerance of government intervention in daily life. The results from a campaign in Iowa serve as a microcosm of the rest of the nation and tell a candidate if his or her platform will gain traction elsewhere. If the message fails to affect voters in Iowa, it's probably not going to elsewhere.

The caucuses are also a good testing ground for a dark horse candidate to determine if he or she should bother with sticking through the entire campaign. Running in only one state is much simpler and cheaper than launching a nationwide campaign. Candidates can live off the land here and run their campaigns into near-bankruptcy, praying for a win or strong finish so that new supporters will come to their aid. For this reason, many second or third-tier candidates drop out of the race entirely if they do poorly in Iowa. To retire their debt, they offer their endorsement in a bidding war among top-tier candidates in return for a generous donation to the failed candidate.

Media attention swarms around the Iowa caucuses winner for two or three days; many start to consider his or her campaign to be viable. The winner also gets a fundraising explosion of several hundred thousand, if not millions, of dollars since many wealthy donors sit on the fence and wait to see who won before pulling out a checkbook. National party leaders will see the winner as a possible presidential candidate and start to warm up; they've shown their platform is desirable. Iowa is representative of Middle America and winning there proves that one is not an extremist and possibly has a shot at the national election.

### Voting for the Next President in Your Neighbor's Living Room

Explaining how the Iowa caucuses actually work is a four-year tradition that is as predictable in its coming as the voting process itself. Millions of Americans – and hundreds of millions more around the world – hear about the contest on the news for months, but they have no idea what it means, beyond a vague idea that it is a voting contest where somebody wins, and that winning is very important. Reporters alike are confused, as nobody but the veteran reporters have any idea how this voting process differs from regular voting. Don't voters just pull a lever or fill out a paper ballot, and the winner is the one who gets the most votes?

If only it were that simple.

The caucuses are run by the state Democratic and Republican Parties, not by the government. Approximately 1,781 caucuses take place around the state, where citizens gather in small community meetings to choose candidates and discuss local party business. These take place in meeting halls, church basements, municipal centers, and even living rooms. Perhaps the best explanation of the process comes from the _Economist_ , a bit ironic considering it is a British publication. Here is a paraphrase of their take on the voting contest:

Caucuses are held precincts around the state. Representatives of each candidate speak before those attending mark their choice on a ballot. After a convoluted series of regional and statewide meetings, the candidates are awarded "delegates" in proportion to their share of the vote. The delegates, in turn, attend the national convention in August at which the party's presidential nominee is formally selected.

Iowa will send just 28 delegates to the convention, out of a nationwide total of 2,286. But because it is the first state to vote, its influence is completely out of proportion to its size. Candidates who do well in the caucuses gain momentum that can propel their campaigns forward; those that do poorly often find themselves starved of media attention, donations, and volunteers. The results from Iowa, along with those from New Hampshire and South Carolina, the next two states to vote, usually narrow the field down from nine candidates, leaving the rest of the country with just two or three options.

In the Republican caucuses, there is no opportunity to switch candidates after an initial tally, and no obligation to reveal your choice. But everybody votes at the same time and does so publicly. This open book process allows supporters of one candidate to exert pressure on their friends, neighbors and fellow parishioners.

The Democratic Party's caucus procedure is a more complicated. Everyone is in a big room, and participants show their support for a candidate by standing in a designated area of the caucus site. Democratic caucuses require more time and multiple candidate preferences from a participant. For 30 minutes, you can talk with your friend or neighbor, and try to convince them why you should vote for this or that candidate.

Some people in these groups will be deputized, and they go to other groups trying to pull in their support. After 30 minutes, supporters for each candidate are counted, and one has to meet a 15-percent threshold. If the group doesn't, they disperse and go join other candidate groups. Supporters of third-tier candidates that are unlikely to meet this threshold usually agree beforehand whom they will support. Then there's another 30 minutes of politicking where people try to convince one another. And when it's all over, the people in each camp are publicly counted and the results tabulated.

The turnout for the caucuses is low. Only 119,000 Republicans voted in 2008 to pick Mike Huckabee over Mitt Romney; just 88,000 were present in 2000 to choose George W. Bush over John McCain. That is a small fraction of the state's 645,000 registered Republicans, besides its 3 million residents. The caucus-goers tend to be older, whiter, and more religious than most Republicans, which is a party that is older, whiter and more religious than the nation as a whole.

That can lead to strong showings for candidates like Mike Huckabee, who was a former Baptist minister. It also diminishes the prospects of more moderate candidates, such as Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts. And the low turnout and the public element of the voting can favor candidates with dedicated ranks of volunteers, such as Ron Paul, a libertarian from Texas.

The Iowa caucuses already give outsized power to Iowa's 3 million residents; the nature of the caucuses amplifies this power by handing it to the 100,000 politically engaged citizens who actually show up. In sum, the future president is chosen by a population sample smaller in size than any of New York's five boroughs.

The voting procedure is also notoriously non-scientific. For the Republican Party caucus, each voter officially casts his or her own vote by secret ballot. Voters are presented blank sheets of paper with no candidates' names on them. Voters write down their choices, leave after they declare their preferences, and the Republican Party of Iowa tabulates the results.

This method has led to controversial snafus. In 2012, Mitt Romney was declared the winner by only eight votes. Three weeks later party members announced that Rick Santorum had actually won by eight votes. Analysts said that if the results had been correctly counted in the first place, Santorum would have got the party nomination, because he would have enjoyed the advantage of the press attention and donations that come from winning the Iowa caucuses. _Des Moines Register_ senior political reporter Jennifer Jacobs wrote that such inaccuracies devalued its credibility in the eyes of the national media and both political party leaders.

Whatever the drawbacks to the Iowa caucuses, the entire process feels like a throwback to a Revolutionary-era America, where government policies were hammered out in raucous town hall meetings, with participants giving rousing soliloquies as they drank from their tankards of ale. It even evokes feelings of Athenian democracy, where any citizen can give a speech regardless of their knowledge – or lack of knowledge – on the topic at hand. The audience shouts praise or disagreement at their speech, creating a strong give-and-take dynamic.

Surprisingly, the national importance of the Iowa caucuses is a modern phenomenon. Drake University Professor Hugh Winebrenner documented it as a product of the TV and George McGovern Era in his study of the caucuses, "The Making of a Media Event." It began in 1972 when Democrats moved their caucus to January, giving the state its first-in-the-nation status. This status was then codified into law. According to Title II Chapter 43.4 of the Iowa Code, "the date shall be at least eight days earlier than the scheduled date for any meeting, caucus, or primary which constitutes the first determining stage of the presidential nominating process in any other state." Republicans followed suit by moving up their caucus in 1976.

That means that Iowa is legally obligated to stay in first place. It has been the epicenter of political and media attention ever since.

No state has ever put up an adequate fight to challenge Iowa's first-in-the-nation status. New Hampshire may harbor feelings of jealousy, as its primary only comes a few days after the Iowa caucuses. But New Hampshire has the first primary in the nation, giving the Granite State its own special status. Some campaigns have succeeded in the past by bypassing Iowa all together and focusing on New Hampshire instead. Two famous examples are John McCain's insurgent campaign against George W. Bush in 2000, where his win challenged the inevitability of Bush's nomination. Hillary Clinton also resurrected her campaign here in 2008 after a stunning loss to Barack Obama in the Iowa caucuses.

Whatever its quirks, the Iowa caucuses remain a treasured affair. Iowans consider it to be a pure form of democracy. Farmers and local professionals who engaged in the type of grassroots activism envisioned by the Founding Fathers passed it down. The caucuses are a break from the superficial sound bite culture of 21st-century politics, where complex positions on deficit reduction and nuclear proliferation are dumbed down to 30-second, focus group-tested statements. Caucuses allow for slower, in-depth discussion and honest exchanges between neighbors.

"It's magic to see people stand up and declare their support for a candidate, and it's a communal activity," said Gordon Fischer, a former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, to The New York Times in 2008. Iowans agree.

### Strange Hopefuls

Perhaps one of the most interesting effects of the Iowa caucuses is the strange characters that it brings to the state. Besides the Democratic and Republican Party heavyweights are a slew of dozens of third-party contenders who flood the ballot every election but have no chance of winning. They spend months campaigning in Iowa, pushing as hard for their platform as do the legitimate candidates despite little attention except from those who share their eccentric views.

Some represent fringe beliefs such as fascism. Jackson Grimes was the 2004 front-running candidate for the United Fascist Union in 2004 and was an ardent follower of Italian leader Benito Mussolini. If elected, he promised to move politics toward astrology and paganism.

"I believe it is my destiny to become President," Grimes said on his Web site, www.ufu.gq.nu. "The stars and planets say it is time for the United Fascist Union to rule America, so that Pagan Rome can be back in the Physical World once more. It was written in the stars from the dawn of creation that Jack Grimes would become president."

If voters weren't excited about fascism, they could turn to the National Barking Spiders Resurgence Party, which promised lower crime, a cleaner environment and meatloaf on Wednesdays. "Today's National Barking Spider Resurgence Party is truly determined to renew America's most basic bargains: triple coupon Saturdays and ballots even a child can fathom," said candidate Michael Bay on his campaign web site.

Grimes and Bay were two of the many unknown figures running for president in 2004. A total of 178 people were registered to run for president, including 66 Democrats, 27 Republicans and 37 other political parties, including the Christian Falangist Party and the Turtle Political Party.

Robert Lowry, an associate professor of political science at Iowa State University, pointed out that off-key candidates have been a staple of every presidential election. Any American-born citizen with a few hundred dollars, several signatures and the right registration forms can campaign for the White House, and many do.

"There have always been these candidates running for president," he said. "Sometimes these people want to get their issue out. Other times they just want to get publicity."

Not all unlikely candidates exist under the radar. Ross Perot ran under the Reform Party in 1992 and 1996 and took more than 15 percent of the popular vote. In 2000, Ralph Nader was the Green Party alternative to traditional party candidates Bush and Al Gore.

However, the majority of third-party candidates are dismal failures. Prohibition party candidate Earl Dodge — whose main goal is reinstating the 1930s alcohol ban — has run three unsuccessful presidential campaigns. William Bryk, the Federalist Party candidate, represents a party that has been largely defunct since 1824.

Some candidates run despite being obviously ineligible. An example is Daniel Vovak, who ran for president in 2004. At the time he was a 31-year old Republican (U.S. presidents must be at least 35 years of age) who wore an American Revolution-era wig to his campaign events.

Vovak ran his campaign armed only with his colonial wig, a semi-reliable cell phone, and his truck, which he affectionately called "Air Ford One." He crisscrossed Iowa for several months prior to the 2004 caucuses. When voting results were tallied and Vovak sadly did not meet the minimum threshold, he dropped out of the race and become a waiter in Florida. But he was still proud of the ideals of his candidacy.

"I don't know the difference between Medicare and Medicaid," Vovak said in a 2003 article for _The Iowa State Daily_. "They both sound the same so I can't see why the government doesn't lump those two programs together." However, this lack of political acumen didn't stop his campaigning.

I had the chance to follow Daniel Vovak when he visited Iowa State campus. It was quite a sight to behold: an eccentric man in a fake powdered wig approaching students and telling them of his simple ambitions for the future."Hi," he'd begin, "I'm Daniel Vovak and I'm running for president."

Vovak wore the wig so voters would remember him. He claimed that he spent his time in small settings because he touted a platform called "Small Ideas for America." His three main platform ideas centered on tightening America's borders, controlling judges and lawsuits because they're "out of control," and canceling the White House copy of The New York Times because the president "should be reading about small- town America from small newspapers."

Vovak's enthusiasm was met with mixed reactions from students. Responses varied from confused laughter to questions like, "President of what?" But the laughter subsided when listeners realized that underneath the Revolution-era wig was a man completely devoted to winning the White House.

"At first I didn't believe he was running for president," said student Jennie Erwin. "It would be great to get somebody young elected. But the wig isn't helping him out."

The candidate disagreed. Vovak believed the wig was the key to giving him recognition as a candidate. It was a clever idea to help audiences remember him; it saved millions of dollars on advertising; and it evoked the Whig Party roots of the Republican Party and demonstrated his commitment to the fundamentals of the United States Constitution. "When I first arrived in Iowa in July on a Greyhound bus, they accidentally lost my luggage, which included my wig," he said. "When I lost my wig, I nearly lost my candidacy," he complained.

Vovak did get plenty of free publicity. He garnered interviews and feature stories in 52 newspapers and 6 television stations. Vovak's campaign strategy was to drop by the newspaper office when he first entered town. The editor would meet with him briefly, then run into the newsroom and say to a reporter, "You won't believe it. Some guy in a wig says he's running for president. Do you want to interview him?"

Reporters jumped at the chance. The wig-wearing candidate gave the small-town reporter a chance to write an amusing story about an eccentric figure, letting him or her break away from the tedium of reporting on high school basketball games, bake sales, grip-and-grin photos, and local charity auctions. As the reporter asked Vovak questions about his candidacy, in the back of his mind he or she was constructing anecdotes and clever quips about a vagrant trying to seek the White House. In return Vovak got the press attention he craved, so both won.

Vovak rightfully boasted of running his campaign on a shoestring budget. He slept in the back of his truck whenever he couldn't find someone willing to put him up for a few days. Indeed, when I interviewed him several years back, he didn't know where he would sleep that night. And he showed he understood the irony of this approach to campaigning. "A few months ago I met with [former Iowa Governor Tom] Vilsack and six hours later I was sleeping in the back of my truck. I'm showing people the humility of my campaign and that it's grassroots of the truest form."

It truly was grassroots. Vovak never had a permanent home during his campaign. When he politicked with locals and small town folk, he often asked them if he could stay on their couch for the night, right after articulating how he would be the best person to run the free world. And many, often pastors of small congregations, took him in.

Why would a well-spoken and seemingly intelligent man live for months in such an unpredictable, transient life for a stunt campaign? Was this a promotional scheme for some larger project? Was he secretly being filmed crashing formal events, similar to Sacha Baron Cohen's _Borat_?

It turns out that he had had a career as a comedy writer and had written a script for an unproduced film that satirized the Monica Lewinsky scandal. A former editor of newspapers in Ohio and Connecticut, Vovak had also ghostwritten a variety of novels. A book published under his own name initially opened the door for his presidential candidacy. The book, loosely based on Vovak's life, is about a young ideologue named Luke Vovak who is prompted to run for president. At the end of the book, the reader is left guessing as to whether Luke will run.

His actual campaign through Iowa was less storied. When he fired a question at the Iowa Governor during a press conference at the Iowa Press Convention, the governor waved away the question and called the wigged man an "invader from the east." On January 11, 2004, he was ejected from the audience of the final Democratic presidential debate because the event was invitation-only and not for Republicans.

In the end, he lost, of course, in the Iowa caucuses by then-president Bush.

However, Vovak was not finished with his political career. When Jack Ryan withdrew as the Republican Senate candidate for Illinois in 2004, Vovak sought the nomination against a young upstart named Barack Obama. The Illinois Republican State Central Committee even interviewed him to run. He showed up in his wig and did nothing to hide the facts that he was still living out of his truck and not even a resident of Illinois so they declined his candidacy.

Later in his life, Vovak spent time in legitimate politics. He was elected member of the Montgomery County Republican Central Committee, serving at-large in Maryland's largest county. Vovak died of cancer in 2011. His whimsical take on politics will be sorely missed in the Iowa caucuses, which can easily turn into a stuffy affair, regardless of its importance.

### Too White, Conservative and Old?

Strange hopefuls aside, much criticism of the Iowa caucuses remains. We already mentioned that to a large degree, the most radical supporters participate in the caucus voting process. And typical voters are older, whiter, and more traditional than the average American. In the end, 100,000 people who don't represent a good cross section of the American public may well choose the next president. Thus the Iowa caucuses are at high risk of swaying elections in the wrong direction.

Critics complain that Iowa is too parochial, quaint, conservative, and out of touch with modern life in the United States to represent all people in America. The stereotype persists of farmers or small-town dwellers with social values two generations behind the mainstream, barely able to tolerate people of other races when most states have confronted these issues years ago.

Exhibit A offered to support this premise the argument is the outsized influence of Bob Vander Plaats. The three-time failed gubernatorial candidate has become a socially conservative power broker in Iowa and is courted by every Republican presidential hopeful. The lanky former high school principal rose to fame when he took on the Iowa Supreme Court's 2009 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. Vander Plaats engineered a statewide campaign against three justices on the ballot in November 2010, leading to their crushing defeat. He hopes to eventually have the marriage law overturned.

Because of his position in Iowa, every prospective Republican candidate pays Vander Plaats a visit, and they typically must renounce abortion or same-sex marriage to have any hope of winning his support. If Vander Plaats is pleased with a candidate he will throw the support of his small and committed group of activists behind that person's election.

To outside analysts such as Steffen Schmidt, Vander Plaats is a "poodle trainer," who makes candidates "jump through hoops, threatens them, and makes them come to him if they want support. And he's been remarkably and frighteningly successful."

He has definitely been successful. Rick Santorum earned Vander Plaats's endorsement in 2012 and nearly won the Iowa caucuses as a result. Mike Huckabee won his support in 2008 and did win the Iowa caucuses.

Richard Cohen, a columnist for The Washington Post, blasted the entire Iowa voting contest for these reasons. In his column, "Iowa and New Hampshire, the GOP's Primary Problem," Cohen reacted to the Republican National Committee's "Growth and Opportunity Project" report this way:

Missing from the report are any critical words about the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary. These are the early contests where, if past is prologue, the presidential candidates of the future will take positions pleasing to the ears of extraordinarily conservative and religious voters. They will call for a roundup of illegal Hispanic immigrants; condemn same-sex marriage; sing hosannas to local control of the schools; denounce the federal government in all its varied forms; promise to die for ethanol; lament the absence of God from the classroom; utter cockamamie warnings about vaccinations; vow to eradicate Planned Parenthood from planet Earth; rail against foreign aid, the United Nations, the mainstream press, the teaching of evolution and, for good measure, the mainstream press again. Whoever does this best might win the first two contests.

However, political analyst Steffen Schmidt answers these criticisms of Iowa's biases by countering that the true problem with Iowans having so much political power is not a problem with the voting system, but elitist columnists' _oikophobia_ , or fear of the common man. Coastal elites worry that those knuckle draggers in the flyover state have too much electoral power. Imagine the horror that a New Yorker could ultimately be governed by a politician chosen by an Iowan.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni expressed as much. He wrote that Ron Paul in 2012 trumpeted the endorsement of a pastor who spoke of executing homosexuals and Rick Perry pledged to use predator drones and thousands of troops to protect the U.S./Mexican border from illegal immigrants, using language often reserved for terrorists from Pakistan. They were only topped by Rick Santorum, who when bringing his "Faith, Family and Freedom" tour to eastern Iowa promised not to bend to secularists that believed a stable family did not require God-fearing parents. These candidates, Bruni wrote, all spoke to Iowa's shame:

None of these three men is likely to win the Republican nomination. But before they exit stage right — stage far right, that is — they and a few of their similarly quixotic, similarly strident competitors will do no small measure of damage to the Republican Party and no great favors to the country as a whole. What happens in Iowa doesn't stay in Iowa: it befouls Republicans' image nationally, becomes a millstone around the eventual nominee's neck and legitimizes debate about some matters that shouldn't be debatable.

To Bruni, Iowa merely served as a theater of the absurd, underscoring "general nuttiness and moral extremism." The primaries served to bring out the extremism in candidates, when they tested statements that would resonate with a highly conservative audience. In Iowa, 100,000 of the most fervent voters, most of them white, coax out of the candidates a "Bible-thumping, border-militarizing harshness... that's a tonal turnoff to the swing voters who will probably decide the general election."

However, Schmidt argued that the Iowa caucuses are not as susceptible to the hijacking of "extremists" as its critics suggest. First of all, judging by how well the GOP has done winning statehouses and governorships, the Republican Party offers alternatives to Democrats' much more liberal positions. Regional and state races aren't won with just the Republican voters, since neither the GOP nor the Democrats have majorities. That means that Republicans in these 30 states have also attracted independent voters and probably also some "Reagan Democrats."

Second, Schmidt notes that while a "liberal like Cohen" may well see the Republican positions as sharply defined, extreme views are in reality Rush Limbaugh's and Michele Bachmann's positions. The Mitt Romney wing of the GOP was leading on the 2012 caucus night. The Romney wing takes a much more nuanced and sophisticated position on most of these issues. Furthermore, many Americans are, in fact, conservative in spite of changes in public opinion on issues such as same-sex marriage. In other words, Cohen seems to have missed the fact that some of these positions actually are the views of the vast majority of Republicans, and not just in Iowa.

Schmidt acknowledges that the Iowa caucuses are imperfect. But he defies anyone to come up with a better solution. After all, Iowa has a good track record of picking winners to run the state. Iowa and New Hampshire have very effectively picked winners in the past. Democrats Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama all won the Iowa caucuses and went on to get their party's nomination. Obviously, several of them also became president. On the Republican side, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole and George W. Bush won the Iowa caucuses and the nomination, and several of them went on to become president.

"We know that even final election results are imperfect," he wrote in a 2014 Des Moines Register opinion column. "While the vote counting can be improved, it's just silly to claim that this nullifies the very useful role Iowa plays in winnowing the field of candidates. After all, the 2012 caucuses produced three strong representatives of the three factions that are the Republican Party today. I'd say that Iowa voters have done their very best to take presidential candidate selection very seriously. They have never 'picked' the president, but they always have given people who think they could do the job a good looking over on behalf of the media and the American people. Iowa voters have then sent on their way three choices, one of which in all but one [election] year went on to become the candidate of their party."

### An Imperfect – But Successful – Process

Not to say that other problems don't persist. Campaigns are willing to pay top dollar for Iowan politicians to join them and provide local expertise. This can result in bidding wars and even illegal, under-the-table payments for consultants to switch campaigns. The high dollar amounts are sore temptations to Iowa politicians, whose salaries rarely break out of the mid-five figures.

The Des Moines Register reported on the guilty verdict handed down to Kent Sorenson in 2014 for concealing payments he received from Ron Paul's presidential campaign. Sorenson, a Republican elected to the Iowa Senate in 2010, obstructed the investigation into the incident. He secretly negotiated with the Paul campaign to abandon Michelle Bachmann's sinking ship in 2012 and received $73,000 in secret payments to do so. One $25,000 check was given to Sorenson's wife by a company owned by a Paul campaign staffer's wife. Other monthly payments were routed through a film production company to avoid Federal Election Commission reporting requirements.

Iowa politicians moved into quick damage control to protect the status of the caucuses, their darling of civic democracy. After the verdict, Governor Terry Branstad said he believed the integrity of the caucuses remained intact. The Sorenson case, he said, was an isolated incident of wrongdoing. It was not like Illinois, whose Chicago style politics results in a revolving door between prisons and the Senate Chambers.

"This is the way we do things in Iowa," Branstad said. "When we find wrongdoing, we investigate it and we take action to see that justice is done. I think it is a tribute to the political system of our state and to the Senate itself."

In short, whatever the problems that surround the ballot-casting process of the caucuses, Iowa deserves its status as having the first-in-the-nation voting. It is a remedy to the problems that many Americans perceive as the sickness in our politics.

Analysts such as Glenn Reynolds have dubbed the current class of Congressional representatives as the worst in history. Many see these officials ignorant, uninformed, and controlled by lobbyists' cash.

In light of the foibles in America's national politics, there is something delightfully quirky about handing over so much power to run-of-the-mill Iowans. Yes, they are not fully representative of a democratic cross-sampling of every racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological group in America. Yes, it is mostly the party zealots who come out to vote. And yes, Iowa is a small farm state that looks nothing like California or New York.

But once every four years the American political system, so often dominated by powerful outside interests, corporations, and billion-dollar lobbying firms, is guided by something so small and understated as a quiet state in the center of the country. How right it seems, somehow.

#  Conclusion

# Iowa at the Crossroads

Iowa could be called the small state that always punched above its weight. At its most densely populated time, only 3 million people lived here, and many people outside of Iowa would be hard-pressed to name any of its natives, except perhaps President Herbert Hoover, hardly an exemplary choice. But as this book has shown, it managed to change global agriculture, reform the world's university system, teach the world how to speak English, and provide plenty of multicultural fodder for the American dream.

Iowa is an underappreciated land with an outsized influence and a capacity to inspire extraordinary affection.

There is another place that has the same number of residents and also has a mighty reach despite its small size. That place is Jamaica, the Caribbean island known for reggae, dreadlocks, steel drums, and Olympic sprinters.

Roifield Brown is a British producer and digital media strategist of Jamaican background. Much like myself, he has worked to show how his homeland's deeds remain unsung. Also like myself, he wants to sing those songs and make them known. He has produced the podcast "How Jamaica Conquered the World," which was fully sanctioned by the Jamaican government. The end result is an oral history of the island from its Western colonization to the 50th anniversary of independence in 2012.

But has Jamaica really had that much influence, or is he merely a native son looking at his ancestral homeland through rose-colored glasses?

Brown argues the former.

Other countries of similar geographic size such as Qatar, Lebanon, and Gambia barely register on the global radar. Those with similar population sizes such as Armenia, Mongolia, and Kuwait are similarly non-descript. But Jamacia's Olympic athletes consistently overpower its American and Chinese competitors. Its accent is the lingua franca of the world's youth. And its music transformed the global record industry.

"Jamaica conquered the world primarily through music," Brown told me. "The one thing that anyone in the world will say about Jamaica if you ask them to name one thing is reggae. Then, they will say Bob Marley. And increasing in the last five years, they'd probably end up saying Usain Bolt. That in itself feels incredibly unremarkable. But if you are to put everything in context of other countries of a similar size or GDP, such as Cambodia, it is a country which has an incredibly rich history, but the average person couldn't say one thing about Cambodia. If Jamaican culture were 3,000 years old, there would be professors studying it like ancient Greece. It would be a serious topic for study and commentary."

To Brown, Jamaica is a global culture that is used to express everything from euphoric joy to rebellion. When the Arab Spring started in Tunisia in 2011, protestors were singing "Get Up, Stand Up" as they marched down the road. Slums in Kampala, Uganda feature images of Bob Marley as a symbol of fighting oppression. Puma, the official sponsor of the Jamaican Athletics Team, deliberately sponsored Jamaica because it has an attractiveness to Western youth and youth around the world.

But despite Iowa and Jamaica's similar outsized influence in the world, they have little culture in common. A white middle-aged farmer dressed in a flannel shirt and Carhartt jacket wouldn't have much to say to a dreadlocked Caribbean Rastafarian.

Sadly their homelands also face similar problems. Both have struggled with long-term economic decline. In the American colonial period, Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean were the wealthiest places to settle. Vast tracts of land for sugar cane production made its owners rich beyond belief. The earliest migrants to the mainland American South hailed from the Caribbean. Their new home was much poorer and more disease-ridden than their old home. Today, the relative wealth of the American South and Jamaica is completely reversed.

Iowa is experiencing similar hardship. It has watched its small towns die for decades. The farm crisis in the 1980s meant bankruptcy for thousands of farmers. Some switched careers to lower-paying jobs, but most left the state. Its population dropped by 5 percent, a loss of 150,000 citizens. Today, many small towns look like the ruins of a once-great civilization. Half of the businesses on the square are shuttered. The rest are filled with second-hand stores, church annexes, or pay-day loan centers.

Many small towns rely on an outdated economic model. They thrived in the 20th century when physical proximity to goods and services mattered. It no longer matters in the 21st century, when most Americans prefer to shop at big box retailers in large cities or on the Internet. Businesses closed and families left. In response, the state government has been consolidating resources for decades. Small-town schools close in favor of county-wide schools.

Global forces drive traditional manufacturing, commerce, and other businesses out of small towns. More people are living in urban areas than non-urban areas for the first time in history. The leaders of this drive are the college-educated, or those with highly developed vocational skills. As they leave, the professional resources and tax base leave with them. If too many people in a rural community only have high school diplomas, there will not be enough high-paying blue collar jobs to sustain them.

Keeping the smallest Iowan towns alive requires everyone's help. CNN reporters visited Lone Rock in 2012. The 146 neighbors in the town were close-knit and helped each other when a business or farm was floundering. In the past they joined forces to harvest a sick farmer's field or cook, clean, and operate the Chatterbox Cafe when its owner was ill. But the average age of Lone Rock is 57. Few young people remain and nobody relocates there.

Similar problems plague more than 500 other towns that can barely keep themselves financially solvent or maintain their infrastructure. The Department of Natural Resources says many of these towns are not in compliance with the Federal Clean Water Act due to their leaky septic systems. Fixing them would cost millions of dollars for a new sewage system. Lone Rock took out loans of more than $600,000. Others simply fold.

With the loss of taxes comes a small-town death spiral: the town can't fix its infrastructure, so businesses leave. Soon the population dwindles. Schools shut down. Then banks. Then diners. Then bars. Soon there is nothing but empty buildings, elderly couples in run-down houses, and potholed streets. It is Detroit writ small, surrounded by corn-fields.

This book has argued that Iowa has an under-appreciated legacy and outsized influence on the globe. But that does not change the fact that Iowa is a second-tier state with deep economic and social problems. And whatever impact Iowa had in the past, its influence today can never match that of the larger, wealthier parts of the nation. Rich foreigners buy property in Los Angeles, Miami, or New York, never Des Moines. It is not part of the tourist route of any overseas visitor. When an Iowan travels abroad and tells locals where they are from, as I have many times, the answer leaves them confused. When I say that it is near Chicago (as near as 300 miles can be), they respond with, "Oh, OK – Michael Jordan!" Will Iowa always be doomed to this second-class status?

There are certainly problems for it to tackle in the future. The first is brain drain. The state's smartest students never stay in Iowa if they can help it. Why work at a small investment firm in Des Moines and barely make six figures when the same job can net you millions in New York? Why stay in Iowa if you want to be an actor, doing little more than commercials for local pizza chains, when you can seek fame in Hollywood? Why be a computer programmer for an insurance company when you can go to Silicon Valley, design software, and have enough money after the IPO to buy an NBA team?

Many of the stories of famous Iowans in this book are about those who left the state, even if they managed to take their values with them. John Wayne changed America's accent, but only when he relocated to Hollywood to appear in its films. Robert Noyce changed technology and American business, but only when he ran successful ventures in Silicon Valley. Even Norman Borlaug only revolutionized crop science when he did his doctoral studies in Minnesota and left the United States altogether.

A second problem is substance abuse. Drug problems that have plagued America's urban centers since the 1970s are also tearing apart the heartland. Iowa has among the highest rates of methamphetamine usage and production in the United States. Why Iowa? Any fan of _Breaking Bad_ will know that methamphetamine production requires a serious amount of lab equipment and produces noxious fumes. It is not a process that lends itself well to cramped areas. Large, open spaces away from the eyes of the law are preferred. Plus it doesn't hurt to produce it in an area with central distribution for the rest of the United States. For these reasons, the Midwest is perfect.

Although meth production in Iowa has declined in recent years, addiction remains in its wake. Mexican drug cartels have entered the state with their own high-purity forms of the drug. To stop this drug flow, Iowa has passed meth precursor laws, which bans the possession of critical substances for meth that can be freely purchased, such as anhydrous ammonia and ethyl ether. The law has had the unintended consequence of encouraging more dangerous methods of making the drug. More explosive materials are used, resulting in more lab deaths. One out of every 10 cooks will accidentally set their labs on fire.

Even the future of farming is under threat in Iowa. The family farm was once the bedrock of the state's culture, but it has been diminishing for decades and is all but dead. Only 1-2 percent of the population is directly involved in agriculture. Those that are involved typically have massive plots of more than 1,000 acres and run it with minimal staff. Even 3,000 acres can be run with a handful of workers, something that would have required the labor of dozens two generations ago.

Farmers that have stayed in business and reaped the spoils of longevity have net worths up to millions of dollars. But it is not their entrepreneurship alone that makes them wealthy. The largest farmers take hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies per year in the form of crop insurance. In 2013, Iowa farmers received $1.3 billion in subsidies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly 10 percent of all national subsidies. Supporters say this program keeps America on top of global agriculture. It helps stabilize food prices for consumers and protects farmers from weather-related losses. Without this insurance, financially-stricken farmers might take land out of production, causing food prices to sharply fluctuate.

"Would you rather pay a dime now or a dollar later?" asked Mark Kenney, 33, a farmer from Nevada, Iowa. He raises 3,000 acres of corn, oats, and soybeans. He believes crop insurance is the best hedge against risk, both for himself and the national economy. "Of all the industries to be involved in, the security of our food, fuel, and fiber is of the greatest importance."

But critics say that crop insurance has turned American farmers into fat cats at the expense of tax payers. Subsidies have mutated into welfare for farmers that almost completely removes risk from agriculture. In 2013, drought drove corn prices to record highs. But farmers with "harvest price option" policies were paid those same record prices for what didn't grow, giving them record earnings as well.

Since the Depression, federal crop insurance has incentivized farmers to gamble on risky plantings by providing them with income even if their harvest fails. In 2013, it insured $117 billion worth of crops, or all the corn, cotton, wheat, and soybeans grown in the U.S. The program even covers the bills if crop losses exceed a predetermined limit. The program has been marred with fraud, ballooning to $14 billion in insurance, more than seven times higher than it was in 2000. Direct farm aid payments are capped at $40,000, but there is no limit on crop insurance subsidies, and the names of those who receive them are not publicly disclosed. Politicians have called it crony capitalism and a way to secure votes and donations from the farm lobby. This lobby spent over $91 million on candidates in the 2012 election cycle. Congress is afraid to cut them off and is poised to give billions more to wealthy farmers.

"The crop insurance program is terrible budget policy," said William Frenzel, a former 10-term Republican representative from Minnesota who served on the House Budget Committee and now analyzes fiscal issues at the Brookings Institution. He spoke to Bloomberg News about the network of fraud connected to the program. Over $100 million was bilked in North Carolina alone over the course of a decade through a network of claims adjusters, insurance agents, and farmers. "It's the kind of congressional back-scratching that got us into our debt and deficit situation."

Despite crop insurance's longevity, some of these rich subsidies have become politically toxic and are on the budget chopping block. The most notorious program is the billions of dollars given to the production of ethanol, a corn-based biofuel. A 2007 federal mandate guaranteed corn's role in the U.S. fuel supply. Back then oil imports soared and gas prices skyrocketed. Many thought it would reduce U.S.-reliance on Mideast oil.

The actual result has been a spike in corn prices, which has trickled down to hikes in food prices, putting strain on lower and middle class family budgets. Even many environmentalists such as Al Gore, who once touted ethanol as green energy of the future, have abandoned it. They say it diverts millions of acres of farmland from producing foodstuffs into fuel that is inefficient and even increases carbon emissions.

"Corn ethanol's brand has been seriously dented in the last 18 months," said Craig Cox, director of the Ames office of the Environmental Working Group, to Politico. He opposes the mandate as it's now structured. "The industry is still very politically well-connected, especially in the Midwest... but it certainly doesn't occupy the same sort of pedestal that it occupied two years ago."

Nevertheless, the outcome of ethanol funding, which is part of a massive subsidy program to Iowa, could mean economic life or death for the state. There are currently 41 ethanol plants and 14 biodiesel plants in the state, plus several cellulosic operators set to open. All of them could close if politicians kill the mandate.

Even if the elimination of federal farm grants don't ruin Iowa's economy, the depletion of its own soil could. Wind, rainstorms, and poor irrigation in fields remove tons of fertile topsoil from the state's 88,000 farms each year. The result of economic loss tops $1 billion in yield, according to Iowa State University Agronomy Professor Rick Cruse.

Agriculture is responsible for 25 percent of Iowa's annual gross domestic product of $152.4 billion. If the soil isn't properly buffered, the results could be catastrophic for its long-term economy. Some crop scientists even think that the trend of erosion is accelerating. With the reduction of Iowa farms from half a million in 2007 to less than a hundred thousand today and farmers chasing higher corn and soybean prices, conservation takes a backseat to profit.

### Reasons for Optimism

Despite all these problems, Iowans have many reasons for optimism. Iowa boasts some of the best schools in the United States. Its high schoolers rank in the top tier in standardized testing. The low tax rate makes it attractive for relocating businesses. It has never suffered from urban crime epidemics sweeping nearby cities like Chicago or St. Louis.

Iowa is even tackling some of its persistent problems. The long, slow death of its small towns may be exaggerated. That's at least what Iowa State Professor Terry Besser said to Iowa Public Radio. Many towns have been able to keep themselves alive due to pride and "social capital" – the sense of belonging to a real community. People band together in ways that would be alien in larger cities.

One example Besser gives is Conrad. In the 1980s many realized that the grocery store was going to close. They were horrified, since this was considered an "anchor store" in smaller communities, and would seal the fate of the community if it shut down. The community held a town meeting and came together to keep it running. After many small fundraisers, community events, the business was saved. Conrad weathered the storm, and it lives on today.

Farmers are also adapting to the 21st century. While big farmers dominate, as do their dependance on federal subsidies, smaller farms are sprouting up in the cracks. One such innovation is for farmers to trade their corn for grapes and open wineries. A 2006 profile on the phenomena noted that in Iowa, a new winery had been licensed every two weeks for the past year with nearly 70 commercial wineries in operation. The state has even hired its first oenologist to guide the novice winemakers.

Newly developed cold-hardy grapes are thriving in the rich soil of the Midwest. Some young people who grew up on farms and went to college are returning to enter the wine industry. They are attracted by the potential profits. One acre of corn can only net $40, while an acre of grapes can net $1,500. Some have reported more profits off selling grapes from two acres than 1,000 acres of corn and 3,000 head of hogs.

The most unimaginable bit of good news about Iowa, though, is that some hipsters are actually starting to consider Des Moines cool. In October 2014, The National Journal ran an article headlined "Do the Most Hipster Thing Possible – Move to Des Moines." Forget Brooklyn or Tacoma – Des Moines is the real place to be, due to its blossoming culture scene, urban beauty, and thriving start-ups. The article appears at first to be a bit of kitsch-loving hipster irony. After all, wouldn't a sub-culture whose entire wardrobe is ironic clothing want to live in the most ironically "cool" place on earth?

It turns out authors Matt Vasilogambros and Mauro Whiteman are dead serious. They write that ambitious minds are in the process of building a new Des Moines, a "tech hub in Silicon Prairie, an artistic center in the heartland, a destination for people who want to create something meaningful outside of the limits imposed by an over-saturated city like Chicago or New York."

Some of the new residents of Des Moines embrace these authentic virtues of the city and its kitsch value at the same time. Former Brooklynite Zachary Mannheimer moved here seven years ago to found the Social Club, a non-profit center for the arts. The 36-year-old had launched theater projects and restaurants in New York, but he wanted to find a place where he could revitalize a backwards urban community.

After visiting nearly two dozen cities, Mannheimer settled on Des Moines and founded the Social Club. It is lodged in a former firehouse built in 1937 and has bars, an art gallery, a theater, classrooms, and a restaurant. Over 20,000 visitors come through every month. Building such a center in Brooklyn would have cost over $300 million. The same facility in Des Moines cost $12 million. Similar cost savings affected his living quarters – trading a microscopic New York flat for lush digs in Des Moines.

"How much are you working every day? How much are you being paid? How much is your cost of living?" Mannheimer said to National Journal. "What if I told you we have per capita the same amount of cultural amenities here that you do in New York? Get over your, 'How do we even pronounce Des Moines?' and 'Where is it?' and 'Why should I even care about it?' Get over it, and come out here and visit."

Many young transplants to Iowa who have heeded his call work in start-up spaces. Gravitate, founded by Geoff Wood, inhabits 6,000 square feet of office space in the heart of downtown Des Moines for tech start-ups. The 12-story building houses multiple businesses on five floors. Over 40 entrepreneurs inhabit it, decked out with its artsy furniture, hardwood floors, desks, and open spaces. The number will soon rise to 100. These developers benefit from the lower costs in Iowa, which make them highly competitive with Californian developers.

The example of Wood and Mannheimer shows that the dream of Iowa still exists. People still come from across the nation to inhabit a place with open spaces, low prices, and the opportunity to create something new. The cost of living is six percentage points below the national average, job growth is 2.9 percent, unemployment has always been several points below the national average, and millennials are coming to the city in droves. In the fall of 2014, Forbes listed it as the best city for young professionals.

Iowa does not have the cultural flash of New York. It lacks the gorgeous landscape of California. But it has swaths of virgin soil – both literally and figuratively – where ideas, business, and social movements can be planted and take root. Unlike the coastal cities, nobody has to build on somebody else's foundation or depend on massive family fortunes. All it takes is vision and the hard work to make the dream a reality. The Midwestern blend of selflessness, ambition, and hard work still fuel new possibilities.

One last question remains in our discussion of Iowa.

If our beloved farm state has all these virtues and such a fantastic history, why doesn't anyone know about it? For anyone outside of the Midwest, it doesn't even register on their radar. If it does at all, a generic joke about its backwardness usually suffices to typify the state, even if the joke is better suited for somebody from West Virginia. A fast internet search of "jokes about Iowa" turned up some of these gems:

Q: Did you hear that the governor's mansion in Iowa burned down?

A: Almost took out the whole trailer park!

Perhaps my favorite gem is this:

Q: Why does all of the corn in Iowa lean to the east?

A: Because Nebraska blows and Illinois sucks!

The two jokes fail spectacularly. The first one looks like the handiwork of a third-rate stand-up comedian, doing the comedy club circuit and ending up in Des Moines without any new material, trying to rib the local audience with a generic zinger. The second joke has such a degree of Midwestern insider talk that it looks petty and quaint to an outsider. It would be as nerdy as a high school AV Club member insulting a marching band member's uniform.

Iowa does not register on the consciousness of outsiders because the identity of the state is the identity of its people writ large. Iowans are a humble people. Bragging of one's accomplishments, even if they are justified, comes across as pompous arrogance. A New Yorker might consider it a sign of confidence, but an Iowan thinks of it as grotesque flashiness, like wearing a designer coat on the farm while tending livestock at 5 am.

This is the true paradox of Iowa's greatness. Its people have accomplished much because of, not despite, their understated nature. Yes, it fed billions in the 20th century. Yes, it created the global education system. Yes, it provided the template for American English that is now being mimicked across the globe. Yes, it has more political power, vote-for-vote, than any place else on earth. Yes, it provides opportunities for those who want to create something from nothing.

Most importantly, it does all of these things without shouting its merits from the mountain tops. No state bumper stickers will say "Don't Mess With Iowa." Pop singers will never drone on endlessly about Iowa the way they do about California.

The wonder of Iowa is this – it is one of the most influential forces on earth. But if its citizens are doing their job correctly, you will never know it.

Acknowledgements

Being a native Iowan simplified the writing of this book because it put me in touch with Iowans whose knowledge of the state is staggering. More importantly, I had access to kind people willing to give much of their time and go down any rabbit trail, and I had plenty.

I would like to thank the historians of Iowa that gave me the context to to frame all these issues. To Paul Nienkamp, who gave exceptional insight into the university system of the Midwest and for sharing his doctoral research with me. It would have been nearly impossible to find all this information on my own, as I would not have even known what questions to ask when approaching the subject. Kenneth Wheeler's knowledge on the same topic but from a different angle was no less helpful. His profiles of Iowan students and notable graduates added color to a chapter that might have otherwise been duller. Similar thanks go to Joseph Anderson and his knowledge of the global agricultural revolution in America.

Nobody can approach the summit of Iowan politics without the sherpa guidance of Steffen Schmidt, whose mental feats on the topic are no less impressive than the physical feats of a sherpa guide on Mt. Everest, carrying hundreds of pounds of hikers' luggage at an altitude of 28,000 feet. Dr. Schmidt was my professor at Iowa State and helped me get into grad school with his recommendation. His energy is inexhaustible, as he is willing to talk to any media outlet that calls him up – this included me when I was a student reporter at The Iowa State Daily.

I would also like to thank the other researchers and professors at Iowa State University who made the writing of this book possible. In particular I would like to thank Steve Coon, Tom Emmerson, and Dick Haws. The cadre of the journalism department, circa 2002-2004, taught me the craft of writing and reporting. As most of them started their careers at small papers in rural Iowan markets, they also showed me how to explore the state's social landscape and mine it for the human element, bringing to light the stories of real people that can often get buried in images of a quaint farm life resembling a Norman Rockwell painting.

To Mark and Lori Raymie, who let me test out this material before a live studio audience at Coffee Connection in Knoxville, Iowa. If anything was amiss in my material, then the attendees were certainly going to let me know it. I appreciated their contacting the local media and working to promote this book project before it was anywhere close to being finished.

To early readers Helen Klinepeter, Cathy Peper, Billy McCorkle, Bernd Muckenfuss, Nancy Taylor, Kendra Enders, Andreas Wettstein, Jeremy Brock,and Joanna Gould. I couldn't have caught all the things I missed without you, nor would I have realized which parts to expand and which parts to contract.

I would not have even considered writing this book if not for the influence those who embody the values described in this book. In no particular order I would like to thank Nathaniel and Amber Adkins, Paul and Bonnie Beck, Tim Gartin, Peter Swanson, Greg Karssen, Phil Hays, Josh and Rochelle Beck, the staff at Cornerstone and Salt Company, Greg Stults, Brad Wilson, Grant Nelson, Brian Fenoglio, and John King.

Most of all I would like to thank my family. Although I never grew up on a farm, they did their best to instill the values of hard work and putting in grunt work but never bragging about it. But I also lucked out in that I didn't actually have to follow through on much of those – no 5 a.m. feeding of the livestock or walking corn rows in the summer. Instead my mornings were spent asleep in our suburban house and my summers were spent bagging groceries in an air-conditioned supermarket. To my father, who was a jack of all trades but accomplished more than any jack could ever hope to do, whether campus minister, auto mechanic, small business owner, Kiwanis president, or school board member. To my sister, who was there throughout my odd childhood and has become a great friend as an adult, along with my brother-in-law Chris. Kendall and Jack will be awesome. To my mother, who helped me become a writer. Giving a child a quarter every time he used a large word correctly incentivized me to use ten-dollar words when a dime word would suffice, much to the annoyance of my journalism professors. But it started me on a path of words and ideas, which I am always working to improve.

Lastly I would like to thank my wonderful wife Melissa. She may not be an Iowan, but I consider her to be an honorary Iowan. This is the highest compliment that our people can give to an outsider, short of carving a life-size image of them in butter and displaying it at the Iowa State Fair. Thanks for being a rock of support in these last few years and a source of happiness as I churned out books and whiled away in the PhD program. And for giving us two wonderful daughters, Eleanor and Sophia. I can't wait for them to discover their Iowan roots!
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### Other Books by Michael Rank

Off the Edge of the Map:

Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers

That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

Spies, Espionage, and Covert Operations:

From Ancient Greece to the Cold War

Lost Civilizations:

10 Societies that Vanished Without a Trace

History's Most Insane Rulers: Lunatics, Eccentrics, and Megalomaniacs

From Emperor Caligula to Kim Jong Il

The Most Powerful Women in the Middle Ages:

Queens, Saints, and Viking Slayers: From Empress Theodora to Elizabeth of Tudor

History's Greatest Generals: 10 Commanders Who Conquered Empires,

Revolutionized Warfare, and Changed History Forever

From Muhammad to Burj Khalifa:

A Crash Course in 2,000 Years of Middle East History

The Crusades and the Soldiers of the Cross: The 10 Most Important Crusaders

From German Emperors to Charismatic Hermits, Child Armies, and Warrior Lepers

Greek Gods and Goddesses Gone Wild: Bad Behavior and Divine Excess

From Zeus's Philandering to Dionysus's Benders

History's Worst Dictators: A Short Guide to the Most Brutal Rulers

From Emperor Nero to Ivan the Terrible

# About the Author

Michael Rank is a doctoral candidate in Middle East history. He has studied Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, and French but can still pull out a backwater Midwestern accent if need be. He also worked as a journalist in Istanbul for nearly a decade and reported on religion and human rights.

He is the author of the #1 Amazon best-seller "From Muhammed to Burj Khalifa: A Crash Course in 2,000 Years of Middle East History," and "History's Most Insane Rulers: Lunatics, Eccentrics, and Megalomaniacs From Emperor Caligula to Kim Jong Il."

### One Last Thing

If you enjoyed this book, I would be grateful if you leave a review on Amazon. Your feedback allows me to improve current and future projects.

To leave a review all you need to do is click the link below and it will take you to the Amazon book page. Make it as short or as long as you prefer.

