What is it that Iowa fears about ideas?
The two best movies about Iowa are “The Music Man” and “Field of Dreams” for their wry and subtle understanding of our culture. No arguments about it. Don’t even bring up “State Fair” or “Bridges of Madison County,” each dreadful in different ways. I have not seen “Cedar Rapids” the movie but I hear it smells good.
Over the Fourth of July holiday I found myself tuned in again to “The Music Man” on TCM. Early in the musical — I am not a big fan of musicals but for this one — the mayor’s wife Eulalie MacKechnie Shinn demanded that Marian the Librarian remove the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám from the shelves in River City because it is a dirty, smutty book with references to “lying out in the woods eating sandwiches.”
Mrs. Shinn is immediately distracted by the next town controversy.
It then struck me that the other classic Iowa movie also has a censorship theme. Annie Kinsella summons her courage to take on the prevailing mood of a school board meeting to ban a book by a famed author endorsing “promiscuity, godlessness, the mongrelization of the races.”
What does it say about us that our two main cinematic hallmarks involve book banning?
Meredith Willson was a native of Mason City and wrote what he recalled in a loving but biting commentary in Music Man. W.P. Kinsella wrote “Shoeless Joe,” the book progenitor of “Field of Dreams,” while at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. They knew the territory.
Marian wins over Mrs. Shinn, and Annie wins over the town in her appeal against censorship. Iowa came through.
Except now we are actually banning books. There’s a list with “Catcher in the Rye,” and the “1619 Project,” that shall not be taught in schools. This has caused a rub between the Alta Public Library and the Alta-Aurelia School District, which share a nice library. The school needs to ban books, and the city librarian is mortified at the prospect.
In my life, I cannot a remember a time when I was aware of organized book banning in Iowa. Certainly not in Storm Lake.
So I rummaged around on the Internet for too long and could come up with few incidences of book banning in Iowa history, except for one: During World War I a state war panel asked local libraries to ban any German books, and asked churches to quit offering services in German. Letters were sent out asking for cooperation, but Storm Lake and Buena Vista County did not comply. Lutheran pastors continued to deliver sermons in German. Iowa Stubborn.
That does not mean that “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” was on most library reading lists. A lot of quiet censorship went on. The librarian knew what she could get away with. The budget simply didn’t allow for books with impure thoughts.
Now the state is actively going after schools and books that teach “divisive concepts” — such as the 1619 Project that details how racism was at the founding of the nation. It was written by Waterloo West High graduate Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. That gets you reprobation in Iowa.
We are a state of prudes, yes. No drinking or dancing or fun on Sunday, no sir. You could secretly look at a Stag magazine in the barbershop but the library would not hold the Memoirs of Casanova. If it did, you would be embarrassed to check it out in public.
We are also a state that says if we don’t like something neither should you. It was true in 1962 and in 1992 and 2022. You can’t build a baseball field there. You shouldn’t read that book because it may suggest that we don’t treat “other” people that well around here.
“Field of Dreams” became big money. The state gave $12 million to develop it into a huge dazzle deal based on a story about reconciling with the past.
“The Music Man” continues to show on the Fourth of July.
They remind us that this herd mentality around censorship is nothing new, and that we fail to appreciate the absurdity of it all. Haven’t we seen enough of Mrs. Shinn to recognize ourselves? Today she might be a Mom for Liberty, financed by a political action committee based in Virginia. Eee-gawd, Iowa!
Hicks? A man showed up at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., in May pushing a stroller with a bag attached and a gun inside. When the cop asked him what he thought he was doing, the man replied: “I’m from Iowa.” No charges were filed.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this editorial 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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When I was in Catholic high school in my blue collar, racially diverse but largely segregated, unionized manufacturing community in the early '70s, we learned about 1619. In religion class we read from "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison. In English class we read "To Kill a Mockingbird." Our modern lit class included George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" as well as "Wheels" by "Airport" author Arthur Hailey (which was pretty racy and not just for the cars) and "Babi Yar" by A. Anatoly Kuznetzov on the Nazi slaughter of Jews near Kyiv in the Ukraine and how the attempt by Vladimir Putin's Soviet mentors to literally cover it up caused a fatal mudslide (another Russia hoax?).
You'd see students with copies of "Catcher in the Rye," "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and highly scandalous and impure works like former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" and Erich Segal's "Love Story."
In history class we learned about "gunboat diplomacy," how Teddy Roosevelt helped a revolution to get Panama to secede from Columbia so we could build the Panama Canal and how the Caribbean was regarded as "an American lake." Oh yeah, and "The Ugly American" by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick also was a modern lit offering. It was an eye opener for a kid who was raised on "Sgt. Rock" comic books and watched "Combat!" and "Garrison's Guerillas" on TV.
We had one religion teacher, Father Joe Fagan, who helped found Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, left the priesthood and got married. He was on TV one night and said, "What's religion? Eating a cookie and getting a good feeling? You have to do something with it." To which my dad said, "Well he turned out to be one helluva priest."
We also had a presidential straw poll in my sophomore homeroom in 1972. I and one other student were the only ones who voted for President Nixon. Virtually everyone voted for George McGovern. Our 37th president barely edged out write-ins for Gilbert Giddyup from the Hardee's hamburger commercials and The Incredible Hulk to claim second place in the voting. A lot of us had older siblings who were in service and had or knew someone who'd been in Vietnam.
In short, there was all kinds of literature and thoughts some might say were dangerous. It was called critical thinking -- essentially, asking the questions, do we practice what we preach, and how can we do better.
No wonder school vouchers didn't pass then. Buncha hippies.
Greetings from a UNESCO City of Literature, where the grandson went trick or treating as Prof. Harold Hill and his grandmother thoroughly enjoyed your post.
In the belief that we should have the individual choice of what we do and do not read, I took the time to learn how to block a headache inducing voice among your responders.
A double thank you!