Thresher Spirits

We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?

Christina Rossetti

One hundred years ago, at the threshold of the 20th century, a pair of Henrys made decisions that would redefined Iowa. Henry Wallace chose to enroll at Iowa State College and study agriculture while Henry Ford hired a design team to build gas engine tractors. Not so coincidentally, half of Iowa’s counties peaked in population at that same time.

Hybrid seeds and industrialized farming would have come even if Wallace had gone to Harvard to study archeology and even if Ford had diversified into aircraft instead of farm machinery. Still, Wallace and Ford’s decisions hastened the depopulation of rural Iowa and the rise of Des Moines as much as than anything else these last 100 years. When technology and politics turned agriculture into an industrial enterprise, economics drove farmers to cities.

Iowa is irreversibly no longer a farm state. Most of us live in suburbs and cities and most farmers are now over 55, with only 8% under 35. The average farmer now makes barely $10,000 a year from the sale of crops and is dependent upon political incentives.

Des Moines is a city of people who average two and a half generations of separation from a family farm - so our blood still carries the DNA of farmers. That is particularly obvious in the Fall, when ancient harvesting instincts resurface. Each September, the Old Threshers’ Reunion draws huge crowds of nostalgia seekers to Mount Pleasant. Those who remember their family’s farm are ironically moved by antique machines that uprooted so many lives. Nonagenarian Verle Reynolds of Chariton comes every year and camps for the entire five days with her daughter and grand daughter. She spoke elegantly of her love for old technologies.

“Our first water pump was a miracle. The first washing machine meant all we had to do to wash clothes was crank a fly wheel. The worst job I remember on the farm growing up was hand stripping the sorghum, then a machine did it. When we got our first tractor, we didn’t have to ride ponies to school,” she recalled.

“To most people these machines are old curiosities, to me they are old friends. I lived through the Depression and two World Wars, I like to come here and see that these old friends are still working. I can’t believe I have lived to see these miraculous machines come and go. Rendering lard, butchering, caning, now that was hard work. Kids today are so cozy they think these are old machines. I remember them as miraculous gifts,” she told us.

When Iowa was a farm state, people connected to each other by necessity. Machines and people alike moved from farm to farm for harvest each others crops. Reynolds recalled 18 hour days as a child, preparing meals for some 20 extra people at harvest time. Today, the thresher spirit lives in the parking lots of football stadiums, where people share the bounty of harvest with neighbors who help with the work. Though the tailgate party is vaguely related to the thresher dinner, it is no coincidence they share a common season. As Easter became Lupercalia, new spirits absorb the old. At the threshold of the 21st century now, it's time to take stock of how two gargantuan projects are doing at their expressed intentions of redefining Iowa again. Though Jordan Creek Town Center is private and the Iowa Events Center is public, both were built on daring assumptions about the new Iowans who must support their heavily leveraged constructions. The shopping mall and entertainment complex are laden with trappings of status and luxury that used to make Iowans uncomfortable - valet parking, private suites, club levels, imported marble and stained glass. Both are more Las Vegas than traditional Iowa.

At the mall’s opening, we asked developer John Bucksbaum which tenants brought the most cachet to his place. He dropped three names, two of which were hot shot Wall Street restaurant chains. P.F. Chang’s and The Cheesecake Factory both look like Vegas: dazzling in ersatz gimmicks; notable for quantity not quality; and as inauthentic as a theme hotel.

Long lines, reminiscent of Vegas buffets, suggested that Bucksbaum knows his marks, that the great grandchildren of Verle Reynold’s generation are cozily enough removed from a real harvest to have forgotten the taste of fresh food. If that is right, no one will mind sitting in nose bleed seats at the new Events Center, while others pay dearly to be catered in luxury. And factory food, designed solely for corporate profits, will chase independence and creativity from our restaurants, just like corporate farming vanquished diversity from the food chain, and family farms from our landscape.

But the Iowa that Verle Reynolds loved, the state of interdependence and sharing, the Iowa that abhorred the putting on of airs, will be gone with the thresher wind.