NATION, Page 30A Tapestry of Prairie LifeIn Greenfield, Iowa, the Sidey family paper celebrates itscentennial. Can rural culture -- and the values it nourishesfor America -- survive another century?By Hugh Sidey
A new sign in stately Old English letters has been hung up on
the worn red brick building, the leaky roof has been repaired, and
the staff has thumbed gingerly through crumbling back issues,
gathering fragments of history to print again. The Adair County
Free Press of Greenfield, Iowa, is just about ready for its 100th
birthday next week. Same newspaper, same family of editors, no
sellout to a chain, no fortunes made or lost, circulation steady
at 3,200 in a county of 9,500 and a town of 2,200. The back issues
form a tapestry of small events, a century of stories of children's
birthdays, club meetings, 4-H calves, men and women going off to
war and, always, the terrors and joys of the Great Prairie weather.
Good people, good earth, both granted dignity and meaning on the
pages of a tiny paper.
Editor and publisher Ed Sidey, my brother, will drape a wisp
of bunting over the new sign, print a modest centennial edition and
later hold a small open house with coffee and cookies and a lot of
laughter. Then he and his crew of nine will begin the work of the
second century.
"Will the paper be around another 100 years?" he wonders. "Will
the town be recognizable in 2089?" He thinks so, but he is
troubled. So are all the people who still make up a rural culture
of farms and small towns from the Appalachians to the Rockies, for
all of our history a taproot that nourished the other branches. The
crisis of the farms themselves has passed for now, but around
Greenfield's town square the economic strain has worsened. A
hardware store, a drugstore, a grocery store, a Ford dealership
have all closed within three years. County residents are lured to
the shopping centers of Des Moines, 60 miles east over smooth
highways they helped build.
A Wal-Mart is going up in Creston, 20 miles away, and
Greenfield's merchants fear the worst. Wall Street traders will
hail America's richest man, Sam Walton, and his relentless
retailing march across the country. But Walton's new store, dropped
in a field of asphalt (one of 1,400 in his discount empire) will
suck a bit more of the commercial life out of Greenfield and
similar towns in the same radius. Another comfortable old building
with arched windows and high ceilings may have to be padlocked. Not
so long ago they were all open, and the square filled up on
Saturday night, when neighbors came to buy and gossip. Prices were
less important then than people. A caring society thrived there and
helped to sustain the values that politicians now like to talk
about as they see order and meaning melt away in urban complexes.
The rural culture was never as kindly and not always as
pleasant as legend would have it. But necessity forced a concern
for family and community and an interdependence that as often as
not subdued meanness and selfishness. A certain virtue and hope
were required for survival.
"A human community, if it is to last long, must exert a sort
of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in
place," Kentucky farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry told Iowans last
year in a lecture on the work of local culture. "Country people
more and more live like city people, and so connive in their own
ruin. More and more country people, like city people, allow their
economic and social standards to be set by television and salesmen
and outside experts."
Berry's view is that if nothing is done to preserve rural
culture, we will lose, as a nation, "the continuity of attention
and devotion without which the human life of the earth is
impossible." An extreme view, perhaps, but surely an echo of Thomas
Jefferson, who warned that successful democracy required people
with a sense of place, a closeness to the land.
Will the Free Press centennial mark in its own small way the
end of the idealized "heartland," a century crammed roughly between
the bookends of homesteading and the ascendance of television
tastes?
For those 100 years the heartland story was told by the Free
Press. The paper was founded by my grandfather and my
great-grandfather as the Adair County Democrat. One of the earliest
notes was about Grandfather: "If the Democrat is not up to the
standard this week our readers will excuse it as the editor has
gone to Canada to marry and left the office in charge of the
devil." Marriage apparently had its effect. In a few years
Grandfather served in the Iowa legislature, switched to the
Republican Party, changed the name of the paper. He never missed
a chuckle. Item: "Charley Overholt says if the price of corn does
not advance before planting time, he will raise white beans instead
and sell them to the school boys for marbles." Item: "All the sick
so far as we know are much better. Dr. Crosby is a dandy,
professionally, of course we mean."
The crops flourished, the kids played marbles with clay commies
and glassies. War intruded. Note from Nov. 21, 1918: "Mrs. Earl
McCreight received a daisy blossom from Dr. G.H. McCreight, who is
with the U.S. Army in France this week. It came all the way in a
letter and was in good condition." Rural culture was in wonderful
bloom. Already, though, the tractor, which would replace men in the
fields, and the automobile, which would carry away the young folks,
were making inroads in the society. By 1920 the population of Adair
County had fallen by 2,000 from its peak of 16,000 in 1900.
Deceptively, the town's population went up about 400, so few
worried.
My mother came in 1923, on the train from Sioux City that was
pulled by a stout little locomotive called the Cumberland Rose.
She was a schoolteacher. When asked today why she stayed, she says
simply, "It was enough." There were ladies' clubs, the church
choir, a hat store, bobsleds, walnut gathering, dances, two
department stores, four grocery stores, plays at the Opera House,
a county fair and young men home from the war. One of them would
be my father Kenneth Sidey.
He went off to the University of Missouri to study journalism.
At the end of the first year, he got a wire from Grandfather
telling him that because of the farm depression of 1920, the family
had taken his college savings to rescue the Free Press. He would
have to come home. He did, and spent the rest of his life on the
paper.
Writing the story of the land and people was enough. He set up
his huge Graflex in the middle of Depot Street one evening to
photograph the grain elevator gloriously in flames. He parked his
Ford in a cut made by a snowplow after one of the blizzards of
1936. The picture showed the snowbanks piled around the car. Every
farmer with a crazy scheme to kill the swarms of grasshoppers that
came with the drought got his ear. On a scorching day he watched
one farmer race around his pasture with a scoop fixed on the front
of a Model A. The man dumped the collected hoppers in a pile,
sprayed oil on them and triumphantly set them ablaze. Father,
knowing the futility of the effort, still murmured his appreciation
of such energy and ingenuity, wrote the facts down in his little
notebook. Story printed with picture.
When one turns the old pages, the start of World War II is
clearly marked. Every contingent of draftees was lined up in front
of the Trailways bus that would take them to camp. Their pictures
were snapped, their names and the names of their parents faithfully
recorded. In the fading volumes those placid, strong young faces
form a continuing gallery.
I learned the printing trade in those years and also the
discipline of small-town culture, so burdensome to Minnesota writer
Sinclair Lewis but only occasionally irritating to me. I often took
my place feeding the ink-caked flatbed press that would lunge back
and forth printing the pages. Each press run took nearly three
hours, sheet by sheet. There was no escape. All eyes bored into my
back. Patience was required, craftsmanship demanded, good humor
expected. On hot summer nights, after taking the papers to the post
office, I would stand with my Uncle John at the makeup stone, and
we would throw the old lead back into the scoops to be remelted and
used again. We would sip Pepsis and talk about printing and people.
It was better than school.
On winter nights when the icy west wind swept the town, I
sometimes halted on my post office run to talk to Russell Piper in
his tiny dry-cleaning plant. The steam and heat built up a coat of
ice an inch or more thick on the windows. He was a shadowy figure
behind the glacial facade. But he offered a cup of hot chocolate
and unquenchable cheer, even working through the night cleaning
other people's grease spots. Rural culture lived through the war.
The Free Press, with my brother at the helm, rode the ups and
downs of the postwar world. For a while it looked as if Greenfield
would grow dramatically. New houses went up by the score. Cattle
and hog prices climbed. Grain prices soared as a hungry world
sought aid. Chemical fertilizers hyped the yields. New machines
snorted through the thick fields. Norman Lear, the movie producer,
came around in 1969 to use the Greenfield square as a setting for
his film Cold Turkey. The Free Press went Hollywood with relish,
interviewing Bob Newhart, Dick Van Dyke and Tom Poston. That was
before the Dutch elm disease decimated the leafy canopy over the
square and left the side streets with sunstroke. Greenfield folks
watched in shock as the massive elms, more than 100 years old, were
cut down and hauled away. But immediately stories began to appear
in the Free Press of tree-planting programs and parties. The rural
society would heal itself once again.
Greenfield is still rallying. Almost weekly the paper runs a
story about plans for community regeneration, the hopes for some
industry to join the three small plants there now. The water supply
has been upgraded with new wells and a reservoir, a campaign is
under way to build an air museum for 17 antique planes collected
by a local flyer. Yet in the midst of this flurry there is the
vague feeling of something happening to the nation that is bigger
and more menacing than anything the rural culture has faced before.
It is economic. It is also spiritual.
The troubled plains states to the west -- cousins of the
prairie states -- have been studied by demographers and land
planners, and the preliminary findings are stunning. Frank and
Deborah Popper of Rutgers University predict, "During the next
generation, as a result of the largest, longest-running
agricultural and environmental miscalculation in the nation's
history, much of the Plains will become almost totally depopulated.
The Federal Government should begin to convert vast stretches of
the region to a use so old it predates the American presence -- a
`Buffalo Commons' of native grass and livestock." That will happen,
insist the Poppers, because limited water was squandered to
irrigate land that never should have been plowed to grow crops that
were in surplus. As water runs out, both below and above the
surface, as soil continues to blow away, a collapse of some sort
is inevitable. The plainsmen who cling stubbornly to their windy
reaches are outraged, and the argument is rumbling over the
horizons. It echoes oddly around Greenfield's square, for
misfortune in the plains could help Iowa.
If water shortages force an end to irrigated grain, Adair
County, with its abundant rainfall and spongy soil, could gain
economically. Further, a new study by the National Academy of
Sciences urges the Government to structure its crop programs to
move farmers away from the heavy use of pesticides, animal drugs
and synthetic fertilizers, applications increasingly condemned by
consumers. That study found that yields from more natural farming
could be economically competitive. Farms with diversified crops and
animals, rotated fields and natural fertilizers could be smaller
and more labor-intensive, encouraging farm families to stay put.
One of the farmers cited in the NAS report as a good example
of the new/old methods is Clark BreDahl of Adair County.
"(BreDahl's) case study illustrates that a family can still make
a living today on a 160-acre diversified farm in Iowa,'' says the
report. Wendell Berry has been suggesting something like that for
two decades. His has been an eloquent voice against the
agribusiness excesses.
But none of this solves the problem of contentment that is
necessary for an enduring rural culture. What in today's world is
"enough"? Can families set aside the blandishments of television
and be satisfied again with the spectacle of nature and living
close to it, with homemade entertainments and being with one
another doing good work on good land? Ed Sidey thinks they can, if
there is just enough money to keep people apace of the world in
education and health care, if the economic base is adequate to
support quality churches, parks and streets. The fundamental values
still celebrated along Greenfield's streets are as sound as ever,
their loss in cities the cause of human devastation, something
acknowledged now by most experts.
The Adair County Free Press will continue to tell that story
as it begins its second century; a couple more Sideys are coming
along. The story will be in the birth notices and the deliberations
of the school board, in the obituaries too. Diligent readers, like
those in Greenfield, can keep tabs on who starts out on the
