Initially, during the 1970s, the increased efficiency of American farmers proved a boon for small-town America. OPEC, rich with a surplus of so-called petrodollars, was funding industry throughout the world—primarily in China, the Soviet Union, and Latin America—in the way the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank do today. Anxious to modernize their industry and infrastructure, these nations spent less money on food production, prompting U.S. farmers to—at the now-infamous behest of the secretary of agriculture—“feed the world” and “plant hedgerow to hedgerow.” U.S. food production was pushed to record highs. By the close of the decade, though, the gas crisis had abated, OPEC was lending less money, and U.S. farmers who’d overextended themselves in order to grow grain to sell to Argentina or the Soviet Union had to foreclose on their land. The farm crisis of the early 1980s was born, and followed by a massive rural out-migration.
Rural sociologist William Heffernan has focused much of his work on the period from 1970 to 2000. Heffernan refers often in his work to the effect “the formation of the three major food chain clusters” had on American farming—and as a direct result, on rural America. One of the clusters that Heffernan identifies is Cargill-Monsanto. According to Heffernan, by 1996, two years before my father retired, Cargill—with the help of Monsanto and its stable of seed companies—controlled massive shares of almost every food-related market. It was among the top five beef and pork packers, beef-feedlot owners, turkey-farming operators, and ethanol producers. It was number one in animal-feed plants and grain elevators, and number two in flour milling, dry corn milling, wet corn milling, and soybean crushing. Cargill was also moving aggressively into the transportation business, namely river barges, railroad cars, and trucking companies, as well as acquiring grocery store chains. As a result of this centralization, says Heffernan, “most rural economic development specialists discount agriculture as a contributor to rural development.” That’s to say that, whether you’re talking about Oelwein, Algona, or Ottumwa, Iowa, between 1980 and 1995, the lifeblood of those towns ceased to provide the same life that it had offered for over a hundred years—roughly since my great-grandfather arrived from Luxembourg.
Heffernan’s analysis shows an astonishing sea change in a very short period. Just a quarter century ago, as Heffernan points out, “when family businesses were the predominant system in rural communities, researchers talked of multiplier effects of three or four.” Meaning that each dollar generated by James and Donna Lein in Oelwein would exchange hands three or four times before leaving the community. Today, notes Heffernan, that number is down to one. Historically, farming communities were models of rural economic health, and mining communities like those in the Appalachians were an indicator of a crippling system of centralization. Today, farming and mining communities are indistinguishable, says Heffernan. Oelwein and Algona are statistically related to Elk Garden, West Virginia.
Much of the trip from Oelwein to Algona is on Highway 18. In an era of interstates, Highway 18 is a throwback, and little more than a well-kept country road running seven hundred miles from Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, across the Iowa and South Dakota prairie, all the way to Mule Creek Junction, Wyoming. Along its path, Highway 18 passes through twice as many Indian reservations (two) and national grasslands (also two) than towns of more than ten thousand people. In fact, west of Mason City, Iowa, it’s generally twenty or thirty miles between gas stations, and an hour or more between towns that have their own high schools. It is truly one of the more nostalgic stretches of American road—one that seems frozen in time, though of course that’s simply no longer true.
Ostensibly, I went to Algona to find my father’s house and the makeshift baseball field where he and my uncle Joe used to play. Because the high school didn’t have a ball field of its own, the Algona Bulldogs during the 1940s and ’50s played all their games away. My dad said the provisional diamond was somewhere east along the railroad tracks, near where the pheasants used to sun themselves on cold days while picking at waste grain dropped from the freight cars headed to Chicago via Oelwein and Waterloo.
Riding around town with my father giving me directions by cell phone, I went to his childhood home, a three-bedroom wooden-shingled farmhouse built in 1919. He wanted to know every detaiclass="underline" the color of the wood and the roof; if there was still a porch; and if the mulberry tree was still in the front yard. After I gave him my report, it became apparent that the only thing that had been changed in nearly sixty years was the color of the small front porch—from green to gray. State Street, Algona’s main drag, was also much as he remembered it, with the exception that the Iowa State Bank is no longer in existence, though the redbrick building that housed it still stands. Unchanged as well would appear to be the Reding habit for propagation stretching back to the first Nicholas Reding. According to the waitress who brought me a french-dip sandwich and cup of coffee at the town’s café, her sister is married to one Reding and her cousin to another. “By spring thaw,” she said, “you won’t be able to turn over a single rock in this town without a Reding crawling out from under it.”
After lunch, I called my dad again to help me find the old ball field. It was a fool’s errand, for the prairie in every direction was under eight inches of snow, beneath which was a hard layer of ice. Still, I wasn’t coming back to Algona any time soon, and I wanted to be near the place my father had once cherished, where he’d learned to hit and field and steal bases with Uncle Joe.
As I walked east along the tracks as they bordered Highway 18, it was clear and blue and frigid in the wake of the storms that had passed over the region in succession for a week. I could see, it seemed, forever, and forever seemed to be a sheet of white, frozen snow blown into topographical drifts. I have always found mountains to be beautiful. But I’m not moved by them in any way. The same is true of the ocean, and of beaches and large rivers. The Hudson and the Mississippi valleys are marvels of natural grandeur; they are magnificent, but not humbling. Prairie is humbling. The isolation—false as it may be, what with farmhouses every few hundred or few thousand acres—is at once exhilarating and terrifying. The sight of it that day, of all that open country, was gnawing at my stomach. The very idea that tiny Plains towns from Iowa to Montana are given names like Harvey and Melvin and Maurice, Dana and Bode and Britt—first names, familiar names—underscores the utter humanity of an attempt to exist in a place never meant to sustain our ill-fated and ultimately impossible desire for permanence. And yet here we still are, living and dying in Algona and in Cylinder, hunkered down in Fort Charles and Fort Dodge, having a french dip and walking down the tracks, looking forward to standing around the wood-stove at night with Nathan Lein and his girlfriend Jamie Porter. The argument of some sociologists, namely that we should pick up and leave, call a spade a spade, clear out the towns of the Plains rather than artificially support them on farm subsidies, put the land into a national park and re introduce the buffalo: this argument makes a certain kind of sense. Nathan Lein’s parents wonder every night how they’ll make it through another winter. And yet where else would we go? What, really, would we have ourselves do, if not this?
Even as I’m capable of criticizing my father’s legacy, I’m incapable of feeling anything less than terrific pride in his accomplishments. His story defies sociology. It is an example of individual greatness of its own stubborn accord: the essential component of the American dream. Nonetheless, there are consequences. The best of intentions sometimes don’t turn out like they’re supposed to—just as methamphetamine, the miracle pharmaceutical of the 1930s, has today become a nightmare. Somewhere along the way companies grew to have no respect for the people whose lives their products perhaps intended to improve, refusing to provide workers with a decent wage or health insurance. Despite this, people fight to endure, just as they always have. And as they fight, some percentage of them will look to a drug that falsely promises help in that cause.