Iowa's People Lead the Nation

Insight on the News, Sept 6, 1999 by Aimee Howd

Despite being portrayed by the national media as a socially conservative backwater, a closer look reveals that the Hawkeye State has a diverse, pragmatic political heritage.

Iowa's landscape of rolling green cornfields, red barns and hay bales sprawls from the Missouri River on the west to the Mississippi River on the east with few interruptions. But the Hawkeye State is more complex than the quiet, orderly acres of verdant crops might lead a visitor to believe.

During election years, Iowa seems to grow nothing faster than a crop of myths founded half in reality and half in misperception. The quadrennial media frenzy around the straw poll and caucuses tags Iowans as a population of provincial farmers -- conservative, unsophisticated and uncultured.

The reality does not fit the stereotype. While an overwhelming proportion of the state's land area is sown with crops, less than 5 percent of Iowa's population today is directly involved in farming. Iowa still leads the nation in beef, pork, corn, soybean and grain production, but expensive high-tech equipment is taking the place of manpower in the fields and the job market has relocated to the state's urban areas. And the young people have followed.

"Rural folks right now are mainly worried about survival. Suburban folks are thinking about the kinds of things you can think about when you are economically secure," Iowa Democratic Gov. Thomas J. Vilsack tells Insight. His challenge is to chart a course forward for both sets of constituents. And won't be an easy task. Two distinct economies operate side by side at the same time, yielding two very different political cultures.

The state's 10 largest cities -- Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Sioux City, Waterloo, Iowa City, Dubuque, Council Bluffs, Ames and Cedar Falls -- are booming with insurance, health-care and manufacturing industries. Des Moines' skyline shoots upward with the headquarters of more than 70 insurance companies. Thanks to the urban upswing, Iowa's economy is holding steady with a very healthy unemployment rate of just 2.5 percent.

But along the rural roads, the only thing growing upward are cornstalks. Every year more farmhouses are abandoned and more villages look rundown. Storefronts around historic town squares stand empty, while the family farms continue their inexorable decline. The number of farms has decreased from 145,000 in 1970 to 97,000 last year. Whatever its past has been, Iowa's future clearly is not about its 5 family farms.

"A lot of the coverage of Iowans is so stereotypical," an Iowa homemaker tells Insight. She said she had just finished reading yet another inside-the-Washington-Beltway assessment that had every Iowan wearing overalls and stuffing presidential hopefuls with macaroni salads at pork roasts in exchange for political speeches that were over their heads. She resents the one-dimensional coverage. "We are middle, average, good, hardworking, real people.... In fact, because we are so middle and average we don't have a narrow, narcissistic, inward focus on ourselves. In that sense we could be considered less provincial than people from the east or west coasts. We are better at being aware of what's going on outside our little world."

According to the Iowa Historical Society, the state has been neither academically lacking nor socially backward during years past. Since 1910 it has led the nation in the percentage of people who can read and write, and continues to have a literacy rate of 99 percent. Its students consistently lead the nation in standardized achievement-test scores. The University of Iowa was the first public university in the United States to admit women and men on an equal basis. Today it has the highest per-capita participation of girls in high-school sports competition. Iowans read more books per capita than citizens of any other state. And the Des Moines Register, for decades a statewide paper, has won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other newspaper in the country except the New York Times.

As Insight informally canvassed the southeastern and central regions of the state in early August, Iowans -- whether liberal, conservative or apolitical -- almost unanimously characterized their state as less socially conservative than it is portrayed in the national press. "A lot of people think Iowa is a Republican state," says Republican Terry Branstad, who stepped down from the longest tenure as governor in the country last year. There is plenty to support that view. The Republican Party was first organized in Iowa. For 30 years, Iowa had a Republican governor and, when voters finally gave the office to a Democrat last year, they also put control of the legislature in Republican hands. Today four of Iowa's five congressmen are Republicans. In his fourth term, Iowa's senior senator, Republican Charles Grassley, is known as being one of the most conservative members in the U.S. Senate.

But there are other things that shake the state's conservative image. Democrat Tom Harkin, in his third term, easily is one of the U.S. Senate's most liberal members. Furthermore, notes Branstad, in the last three presidential elections Iowa went Democratic at the polls. In 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis carried the state by a larger margin than he did in famously liberal Massachusetts. "Clearly," says Branstad, "other people could look at it and say we're a Democratic state. I just think you've got a very independent constituency here."