Some reasons to love Des Moines
Starting with support for freedom of expression
It was a real thrill to receive the Iowa Author’s Award from the Des Moines Pubic Library Foundation on Oct. 14. Last year’s honoree was Waterloo native Nikole Hannah Jones for her Pulitzer Prize-winning work on The 1619 Project for The New York Times.
Sharing the award this year were Heather Gudenkauf of Cedar Rapids, a repeat performer on The New York Times best-seller list, for fiction; and Nate Staniforth of Iowa City, a magician, as this year’s emerging author.
A few things struck me from the evening:
First, Jim Spooner of Des Moines and Storm Lake knows everybody and likes to rib all of them. In fact, everyone in the room seemed to know each other. Des Moines is like a big small town. When I ask, “So ya live here in town, then?” they tell you that they are really from Mason City, Council Bluffs, Waterloo or Holstein. Of course, you know somebody they know. That’s Iowa.
The crowd was an A-List of Capital City business leaders — bankers, stockbrokers, lawyers, insurance executives — who challenge each other to give more to the library. They believe in it. Which is pretty remarkable from a Storm Lake perspective, where the library and art gallery are forced to fight over crumbs.
Des Moines has a class in its quiet, nondescript way, where the library can draw out its most fortunate on a Friday night.
For starters, they presented a special award for service to Elaine Graham Estes, who retired in 1995 after 17 years as director and 39 years as a library employee — the first Black director in Des Moines. She asked the crowd to read the Library Bill of Rights with her, and was interrupted by applause when they read this particular:
“Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”
And these:
“Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.
“Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.”
I did not see a single Che Guevara hat in the house.
But I spoke with a lot of genuine, sincere people of means who look on where Iowa and the nation are headed with furrowed brows. A retired district court judge sat next to me dismayed over how changes to our judicial nomination process have politicized Iowa courts. A real estate lawyer stood in disbelief over election deniers, and a clear and present danger to democracy.
When the money doesn’t like which way things are flowing — when they are willing to recite freedoms over rubber chicken — it makes you feel like the heart of Iowa is beating.
It should make an Iowa heart proud that the Library Bill of Rights was written by Des Moines Library Director Forrest Spaulding in 1938 in response to the “growing intolerance, suppression of free speech and censorship affecting the rights of minorities and individuals.”
It was adapted by the American Library Association in 1939 as fascists waged war on freedom.
That is our legacy, and it is alive and well in Des Moines.
It made my heart proud to share the stage for a conversation with Michael Gartner, himself a Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial writing, and probably the state’s best flat-out writer. We talked about how a free press informs democracy right down to the Buena Vista County Board of Supervisors. Gartner was considered among the best editors in America. It made me think of all the tremendous writers the state produced, from Bill Bryson to Bob Houlihan to Ruth Suckow (with a brief fostering of Mark Twain). There’s a reason we punch above our weight. It has to do with the spirit of Forest Spaulding and Elaine Graham Estes. It’s Iowa, at its core, on display as a Black woman led a White crowd in reminding ourselves what we are about, as if it were a litany, a prayer.
Art Cullen is 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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