RIENT, Iowa - Walk the land out back beyond the white clapboard house - press your boots onto the corn and soybean fields that start where the dirt road ends - and along with the chill winds you will feel the two elements that shaped modern Iowa:
High-tech wind turbines on this northern Iowa farm stand in sharp contrast to the windmill and barn relied on in olden days. (AP Photo)
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Isolation. Possibility.
Here, 55 miles southwest of the street corners of Des Moines, is the endless horizon that is Iowa's, and that stands as a metaphor for America, from pioneer days to the present. Here, an hour from the world of malls and machines, are some of the richest farmlands in the world, the source of Iowa's wealth, and of America's.
And here, in obscure Adair County, is the birthplace of Henry Agard Wallace.
Wallace - publisher, philosopher, politician - stood firmly at the center of all the important tensions that formed the state that today holds the first important political test of this presidential election year.
In a career that began with family-owned Wallaces' Farmer magazine and included the founding of the Hi-Bred Corn Co., service as secretary of agriculture and vice president in the New Deal years, and a longshot 1948 presidential campaign on the Progressive ticket, Wallace personified the transformation from local to national control in agriculture and politics; the application of science to traditional ways of life and of thinking; and the movement toward stronger, more activist government.
That is the story of Iowa, and of America, in the last 100 years.
The fact that tonight's Iowa precinct caucuses are the opening of the political season is merely a happy coincidence of the calendar. But stretching 310 miles, from the Mississippi to the Missouri, and standing right here in the center of the country, Iowa is marked by the wagon tracks of history's march from the East and by the highways and the fiber-optic cable that ease the movement of technology and trends from the West.
Iowa has a physical shape much like America's - and an outlook much like the country's.
''We ... hold to our two major aims,'' Wallace wrote in his magazine in April 1926, half a decade before the Depression, ''to make the readers of Wallaces' Farmer efficient enough to survive in the bitter struggle now going on; to bring about mass action of farmers as a class that will put agriculture on a level with other occupations.''
In the past 100 years many of the great themes of modern American history - the ''bitter struggle'' that Wallace chronicled, and conducted - have been played out in the prairies, farm towns, rail centers, river towns, and urban markets of Iowa. Here, all of the historic tensions between insiders and outsiders - the American story - have been made real.
Like the country, modern Iowa was shaped by the struggle of Catholics and Protestants; of natives and immigrants; of labor and capital; of wet and dry; of those who favor isolationism and those who favor international engagement; and by struggle between the dreams of whites and the aspirations of racial minorities, whether they be the blacks who lived in de facto segregation in Des Moines and had their own branch of the NAACP as early as 1915, or the Asians who in the 1980s crowded into meat-packing centers like Dubuque and Sioux City, or the Latinos who even now are flocking to river cities like Muscatine and small industrial centers like Marshalltown.
This was the home of Herbert Hoover, who, like Wallace, prided himself on being a scientist and on feeding the multitudes but whose leadership was repudiated in his home state, and around the country, in the depths of the Depression; of James Van Allen, who discovered the high-intensity radiation bands around the earth and who symbolizes the state's, and the nation's, willingness to look to the far beyond; of Meredith Willson, who wrote ''The Music Man'' and spoke of trouble in River City, which is to say, in Hometown, USA; of Carrie Chapman Catt, who organized for women's rights and sought to mobilize half the nation's citizens; of Norman Borlaug, the crop geneticist who exported Iowa knowhow (and agricultural fecundity) around the world; and of George Gallup, who popularized the notion of public opinion and is one of the high priests of the political arts being celebrated tonight at more than 2,000 caucus sites across this state.
At the very beginning, Iowa was formed by glaciers, which, like the settlers who followed many thousands of years later, carried the pebbles of the past to Iowa. But unlike the cattle frontier of the Great Plains, the mining frontier of the mountain West, and the fur-trading frontier of the Great Lakes, all settled by single men who were only temporary visitors, Iowa was settled by farmers. They planted crops and planted roots.
It was, and remains, the family-farming frontier. The state had women and children from the beginning. No domestic culture ever was imposed on this state. It grew here naturally. ''We've been G-rated from the beginning,'' says Thomas J. Morain, who once taught history at Iowa State University but who today is the administrator of the State Historical Society of Iowa.
For that reason - because, nearly alone among the pioneers of frontier states, Iowans weren't just passing through - all the struggles of Iowa history have been intimate and intense. And they can all be traced to the relationship between Iowans and the land - and to the conviction, expressed by the first Henry Wallace, the founder of the family magazine, that the prairies and the people who worked them were the ''underlying foundation of our republican institutions'' and ''the stay and character of the country in times of war and its guiding and controlling interest in times of peace and prosperity when other classes lose their heads.''
That theme is planted deep in the character of the people, and the farmlands, of Iowa. In his 1913 history of Fort Dodge and Webster County, L.S. Coffin spoke of how Iowans broke the sod in the early spring: ''A man with an axe would follow the line of every second or third furrow, strike the blade deep in the ground, a boy or girl would follow and drop three or four kernals of corn in the hole and bring one foot down right smart on the hole in the sod, and the deed was done.''
The relationship between the ''beautiful lands'' that Father Jacques Marquette noted in his journal in 1673 and Iowa's men, women, and children has always been organic, in every sense of the word.
And so when the compact between man and the land - between the family frontier and the needs of the family - has been broken, whether by nature or by markets, there has been disappointment, despair - and rebellion.
In the last 100 years, rebellion has flared twice.
It came first when Henry Wallace's readers - isolated, their children in bad schools, their homes without electric lights or indoor plumbing - were excluded from the prosperity of the 1920s. Almost every issue of Wallaces' Farmer in 1920 carried this ad: ''Time for farm women to learn about Jell-O like city women.''
But the rebellion wasn't about Jell-O. In the 1920s, Iowa led the nation in bank suspensions. By 1932, farm products were selling for half, or less, of their average price in the 1920s. In the first nine months of 1932 alone, 257 Iowa farms were sold at foreclosure. The situation was so bad, Iowa farmers came to believe that state testing of cattle for bovine tuberculosis was a conspiracy to lower meat prices. The result was the Iowa Cow War, a mass protest by farmers determined to prevent veterinarians from performing the test.
Soon the Cow War led to war in the streets and in the chambers of the state Legislature. With grain prices frighteningly low, pitchfork-wielding farmers invaded the Capitol. Farmers blocked all 10 highways leading into Sioux City, sometimes with spiked telephone poles, hoping to prevent any milk from entering the city and calling for a ''farmers' holiday.'' Mobs halted farm foreclosures in Pocahontas, Dakota City, and Roland. The effort to stop foreclosures led angry farmers in Le Mars, in the western part of the state, to drag a judge from his bench, strip him down to his long johns, put him on a truck, threaten him with castration, and nearly hang him.
''People think of Iowa as a pretty quiet place,'' says George Mills, 93, who covered the farm rebellion for the Marshalltown Times Republican. ''But it was pretty wild in this state.''
It was pretty wild, too, a half-century later, when the rural credit crisis of the 1980s brought Iowa's family-farm culture under new strains and pressures. With land prices dropping and farm debt growing, farmers were caught in a classic squeeze. By the end of 1986, two dozen banks in Iowa had failed, along with farm-implement manufacturers and dealerships.
''The '80s was a decade when many Iowans affected by the economic crisis lost whatever innocence they had left, when the social fabric of long-standing personal and community relationships built on mutual trust and common purpose unravelled in the heat of economic chaos and unleashed market forces,'' wrote David Ostendorf, who was a cofounder of PrairieFire Rural Action, perhaps the principal group of farm activists in the 1980s.
The continuing struggle to preserve the family farm is a symbol of larger struggles in Iowa and across the country. In the years from 1973 to 1987, a period that marked the ascendancy of the corporation from coast to coast and across international boundaries, Iowa lost 22,000 farms. In the past half-century, more than 100,000 family farms have disappeared from Iowa.
Farm struggles, moreover, have stood as emblems of larger tensions throughout Iowa's history.
The struggle between rural America and urban America is neatly encapsulated in the bitter, bruising Iowa fight over the otherwise prosaic product called oleomargarine. Iowa had regulated oleo since 1886 and had imposed regulations restricting descriptions of oleo that ''suggested any connection ... with a cow, dairy or creamery.'' During the Depression, the state even imposed a nickel-a-pound tax on the product. It wasn't until 1953 that the legislature legalized oleo.
''The oleo legislation, allowing margarine to compete on equal terms with butter, represented a victory for the growing urban forces in Iowa and, as such, underscored the most significant change under way in Iowa in the 1950s,'' wrote the Iowa State University historian Dorothy Schweider in ''Iowa: The Middle Land.''
All these changes have been reflected in the politics of Iowa, which for much of its early years was so devoutly Republican that Senator James Dolliver proclaimed in 1883 that ''Iowa will go Democratic when Hell goes Methodist.'' Nobody dissented from that view. Indeed, the few Democrats were primarily in the railroad towns and river cities, where Irish and German Catholic outsiders, working in roundhouses, rail shops, packing houses, and small factories, mingled uneasily with the Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians who until that time dominated small-town Iowa.
But the farm distress of the 1920s and 1930s shook Iowa to its rural roots, and eventually the state rejected its favorite son, Herbert Hoover of West Branch, giving a stunning 60 percent victory (and a 65 percent margin in rural areas) to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1932 election.
The 1930s were a decade of immense change, accompanied by the revival of the Democratic Party in the state. The Agricultural Adjustment Act and Farm Credit Act of 1933 provided swift and effective assistance, and as late as 1936, the Works Progress Administration provided work relief to 10,000 farmers. All this contributed to the centralization of power in big government. A big strike at the Maytag plant in 1938 underlined the growing power of big labor - and divided the farm/labor coalition that so changed the political character of Iowa in the New Deal years.
Some of the traditional Republican cities that strayed to FDR's column in 1932 and 1936 veered back to the Republicans shortly thereafter, in part because foreign-policy issues began to dominate political discourse.
Republicans thrived in statewide elections and the Democratic strength of the New Deal disappeared by the 1950s and 1960s. Terry Branstad, a conservative Republican who represented a break from the moderate Republicanism that was ascendant in the 1970s, won election to four consecutive terms as Iowa's governor in the 1980s and 1990s. But in national elections, many of the country towns remained Democratic, and in the decade of the modern farm crisis, Governor Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts ran stronger in Iowa in 1988 than even Roosevelt had in 1932 and 1936.
Today's Iowa is less rural and less isolated than ever before - but more rural and more isolated than much of the rest of the country. The sense of possibility that filled the fields around Henry Agard Wallace's homestead is as durable as ever. So, too, is the ethos of Wallace, which combined the rural and the scientific, the romantic and the rational, the cultural and the political.
For years the front cover of Wallaces' Farmer carried its guiding credo: ''Good Farming, Clear Thinking, Right Living.'' The magazine is still in business, and though the publishers dropped the credo, so evocative of old Iowa, last fall, the sentiment remains in the new Iowa that tonight provides the nation with its political guidance.
