IOWA

Situated in the center of the nation and between two major rivers, Iowa had some built-in advantages as pioneers began to move westward to establish farms on the prairie grasslands. Spurred on by the development of railroads, more and more people came to this fertile territory. Although the economy of contemporary Iowa actually depends more on industry and the service sector than on farming, the image of Iowa as a state of rolling farmlands and small towns persists. As the diary of Elmer Powers, a 1930s rural Iowan, indicated, Iowa farmers take pride in "[t]he responsibility of growing the food and flesh for a distant and often unappreciative city."

A trip down the Mississippi River in 1673 made Father Jacques Marquette the first European to visit Iowa. The territory was inhabited by several Native American tribes. The only permanent white settler for many years was a French trapper, Julien Dubuque, who obtained the right from the Fox Indians to work the lead mines in the area, which later bore his name. Iowa came under United States control when France included it as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark then went up the Missouri River on their famous expedition, stopping in Iowa and finding it a fairly empty region.

The westward wave of white settlement caused Winnebago, Sauk, and Fox Indians to flee to Iowa. Their stay was brief, however, as more whites moved into the territory and drove them out. Iowa was successively part of the Louisiana, Missouri, Michigan, and Wisconsin territories, becoming a separate territory in 1838. It entered the Union in 1846 as a free state at the same time Florida was admitted as a slave state.

Settlement in the territory proceeded at a rapid pace, since the new state boasted one-fourth of the nation's fertile topsoil. Farmers from Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee, and from far-reaching states, such as Virginia, New York, and the Carolinas, came in droves. According to historian Joseph Frazier Wall, the convenience of waterways was important to the development of Iowa. Travelers from the East could come via canals to the Ohio River, and from there down the Mississippi to Davenport or Dubuque. "The entire water trip," according to Frazier, "might take a month, but this was lightning-quick compared to the wagon and cart journey from interior Pennsylvania or Ohio or even farther east across a third of the continent from the Great Smokies of Carolina or the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia." These mostly Anglo-Americans made the state's culture quite homogeneous in religion and ethnicity. Later immigrants came from Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia during the 1870s and 1880s. Iowa was the second-highest producer of wheat by 1870, but in the following decades the wheat belt moved farther west and Iowa began to produce more corn to feed cattle.

Despite the abundance of farmable land in Iowa, pioneers by no means had an easy time taming it. The high prairie grass with its extensive root system made it necessary in many cases to hire a professional "prairiebreaker," a person who made his living by breaking up the soil with a team of oxen and a special, heavy-duty plow. According to Frazier, this process was effective but very costly to the average farmer who might have to work six to eight years to make his land claim pay for its cost. In addition farmers had to cope with periodic plagues of grasshoppers and plant diseases.

Some interesting sidelights in Iowa's history were the experimental socialist communities that developed in several areas of the state during the mid-nineteenth century, particularly the Amana colonies in Iowa County. In Amana, founded by a religious group called the Community of True Inspiration, all lands, mills, factories, tools, and livestock were held in common. While other utopian communities had failed, Amana flourished, growing to 26,000 acres of farmland and 1,800 inhabitants by the turn of the century. The communitarian character of Amana, however, was weakened by the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Amana soon became a capitalist corporation with each member a stockholder. Today it is a cooperative company town that has become famous for its manufacture of refrigerators, air conditioners, and microwave ovens, as well as for its tourist appeal.

Iowa supported the Union during the American Civil War (1861–1865), not only because of its anti-slavery sentiment but because of its strong desire to keep Mississippi River shipping alive during a time of crisis. Railroads were vital to the growth of agriculture in the state; the Mississippi and Missouri railroad was the first to cross the state, followed by the Chicago, Iowa & Nebraska, and later the Chicago & Northwestern railroads. Three other major railroads were the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Illinois Central, and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific. By the 1870s, despite the railroads' obvious benefits to commerce, Iowa farmers were against the high rates and monopolistic practices of the railroads. A powerful lobby in the state, the National Grange, succeeded in getting the legislature to pass the Granger laws to regulate railroads.

During the late nineteenth century Iowa was slowly becoming a center for much scientific experimentation in farming, especially in animal and plant genetics. Livestock and poultry were refined to meet the tastes of urbanized people who liked more tender beef and chicken. Soybeans were introduced from the Orient, and hybrid corn appeared early in the twentieth century, increasing corn yields significantly. Giant seed companies, such as Pioneer, DeKalb, and Cargill, grew rapidly to accommodate the farmers' increasing desire for the hybrids.

Because so much of Iowa's land was valuable for agriculture, towns and cities tended to stay relatively small. At first they grew up along the rivers—towns such as Dubuque, Burlington, Davenport, Bellevue, Keokuk, and Fort Madison. Railroads made possible the development of inland cities such as Grinnell and Waterloo. Still, the state did not develop major metropolitan areas comparable to Chicago or Indianapolis. Des Moines, the state's largest city, still has only around 200,000 people, and the second-largest city, Cedar Rapids, is only about half that size. Since much of Iowa's industrial production is related to agriculture no one metropolitan area dominates, nor is there any natural port of entry that would create a concentration of population and industry.

After World War I (1914–1918) prices for farmland rose considerably, forcing many cash-poor farmers to lose their land around the time of the Great Depression. A small number of farmers joined the Farmers Holiday Association, which staged a number of violent strikes in 1932. Most farmers, however, sought relief in political change within the system. Overwhelmingly, Democrats were elected to office in 1932 on all levels, and the state began to benefit from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's (1933–1945) New Deal programs. High demand for farm products improved the farmers' situation during World War II (1939–1945). After the war, however, the state's economy shifted emphasis from agriculture to manufacturing and service industries. Food processing and farm implement manufacture, early industries in the state, remain important to the economy. In the 1990s the service sector encompassed nearly 50 percent of the economy, with manufacturing at 25 percent, and agriculture at only nine percent.

Inflation plagued Iowa during the late 1970s, driving up the cost of fertilizers and farm equipment. Iowa also suffered during the recession of the 1980s, losing 7.9 percent of its population. A serious drought in 1988 prompted Iowa's governor to declare a state of emergency, as soybean and corn harvest dropped to their lowest levels in 14 years; this disaster was followed by an early frost, which further damaged the already ruined farmlands. Since 1970 the state has seen a loss of 41,000 family farms; more than 90 percent of all of Iowa's land, however, is still farmland. By the early 1990s diversification of businesses, industries, and agriculture had helped the state's economy to make a cautious recovery.

Iowa ranked well below the national average in unemployment, at 3.8 percent, in 1996. Its per capita income in that year was $22,560, placing it 28th among all states. Iowa's farm income, nearly $12 billion in 1995, came from the sale of livestock and meat products, feed grains, and soybeans. Some of the important industries in the state, all members of the Fortune 500, include Caterpillar Tractor, General Motors, Mobil, General Electric, General Foods, Procter & Gamble, and U.S. Steel. Around 12.5 percent of all employees in the state are members of labor unions.

IOWA

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