Our rights we will maintain

My buddy Walt Bradley of Algona asked me why we came back here from college in Minnesota over 45 years ago.

That’s easy: Family. It’s the only reason.

Walt was an art major who followed his family into the car business. Brother John was working at the Algona newspaper and wrangled me a job as I was eminently unemployable in the Land of Sky Blue Waters. Our family roots are in Bancroft, Whittemore and Algona.

We were reared in Storm Lake. John came back because he missed the old hometown. I returned because John started a newspaper here in 1990.

The City Beautiful called us home for all its comely charms. We chose it. By this time we had established our bona fides as ink-stained wretches and could have moved on to Windom or Worthington or some other windswept place not Iowa. I do recall driving down I-90 one dark winter Sunday afternoon wondering what I am doing here and where I belong.

Here. It took awhile to appreciate that it is comfortable and familiar. Home. We are grateful to have been plunked down where walleyes flop into your boat.

Too bad what happened in the meantime to Iowa. It became a sanctuary state for reactionaries. When is the spring book-burn? Love your neighbor on Sunday and deport them on Monday. If you’re queer you might not be welcome here. We choke the rivers with chemicals because this is Iowa. We have established an implicit right to pollute. It’s how we do things.

Get used to it. This is the Iowa way. If you don’t like it maybe you don’t fit in. Sometimes people have to remind us that this is Iowa, as if we were unaware or could not comprehend where we have built our den.

Wait one minute: Our ancestors were among the first settlers of Palo Alto County when it was just a slough and Inkpadutah was in the neighborhood. Bradley pioneers are buried at St. Patrick’s on the Lizard Cemetery near Clare. Our grandpa helped to build the baseball field at Bancroft. He also drained everything around Union Slough to create farmland from swamp. We’re legit.

You can be made to feel the outsider if you aren’t running with the program. Things can get a little bit standoffish if you’re Anglo and downright hostile or worse if you’re guilty of being Mexican on a Saturday night in the wrong small town.

Less stubborn people who have the means give up and move on to where the pickings are easier and the neighbors are more welcoming.

The tenacious must remind themselves that Iowa lost more sons to the Civil War per capita than any state. We sheltered freed slaves. Iowans like Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace were instrumental in drafting and implementing the New Deal. Gov. Bob Ray embraced Tai Dam war refugees and an Algona boy, Wayne Johnson, led the state effort to get them settled here (that office was just closed).

Iowa fostered a heritage of civility and civil rights, and of tolerance, if you can set aside the fact that we set aside Native Americans.

Amish populated Grant Wood country amid the rolling hills around Iowa City. (Grant Wood, by the way, was gay.) Prussian draft dodgers found refuge at St. Ansgar. Mason City had a sizable population of Mexicans working sugar beets before Donald Trump ever heard of the Gulf of Mexico. Carrie Chapman Catt of Charles City drove the women’s suffrage movement.

That’s all a part of Iowa, too, along with the John Birchers and the Klan and the Moms for Liberty.

It is easy to overlook or forget when you live in a one-party state where dissent could mark you as divisive or subversive, potentially grounds for eviction. It has become evident that we came back to stick up for our heritage. Our liberties we prize and all that. Those Bradleys buried along Lizard Creek came here from Ireland to escape oppression and starvation. Their heirs do not forget where they came from. So we stand our ground.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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