The Big Lie in Iowa
MARGOLIS, RICHAKD J.
States of the Union THE BIG LIE IN IOWA BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Populist anti-Semitism was entirely verbal. It was a mode of expression, a rhetorical style, not a tactic or a program. —Richard...
...I thought that you looked Swedish...
...Kansas is only an hour from here, and that is where Populism found its voice...
...I do not protest...
...In Carbon, Iowa, to be a Swede is probably to be within striking distance of redemption, and certainly to be innocent of any connection with the Eastern Jewish Imperialist Conspiracy...
...From the start I have figured him for a homegrown radical...
...In the second place, this farmer dresses like a populist, from the tips of his muddy boots to the brim of his John Deere visor cap...
...John and Helen look alike...
...Pretty ok...
...For most of their lives they were farmers, but last year they went broke and the farm was auctioned off for debts...
...In the first place, we're in southern Iowa, where populism never quite died...
...Back on the road, with Carbon receding in my rearview mirror, I am thinking about Richard Hofstadter...
...James Baird Weaver, the People's Party candidate for President in 1892 (he collected 22 electoral votes), practiced law hereabouts and eventually settled in Colfax, about 100 miles down the road, where he got himself elected mayor...
...The whole town's undermined now...
...You can get a bowl of homemade chili there for a dollar and a spicy Polish sausage sandwich for $ 1.25...
...It meant the opposite of the dark-skinned Central American peasants with whom he sensed something in common...
...And in the third place, he's been lecturing me for 45 minutes about the sins of Wall Street imperialists and their habit of exploiting poor people in places like Guatemala and El Salvador...
...Only a common language, an agreed-upon vocabulary that adequately accounts for the American condition, can bring us together at last...
...Reaganomics," John explained to me...
...Nonetheless, like the pronouncements of Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, my Iowa tale can remind us why anti-Semitism continues to thrive this side of paradise: It consoles the weak and protects the strong...
...The good people of Carbon suspect that something is wrong somewhere...
...I am sitting on a wooden barstool in the J&H Corral, sipping a Bud and soaking up the Iowa Zeitgeist, when the farmer I've been bantering with spoils everything with a crack about the Jews...
...To that extent we can forgive my farmer's populist trespasses...
...Yup," he goes on," the American Jewish millionaires , they're the ones that own the land down there...
...She showed me a loose-leaf book the people of Carbon had assembled a few years back in honor of their centennial...
...It is true that populism still represents a struggle of ordinary people against extraordinary forces—forces that must be named and understood before they can be deflected...
...If the populist current subsequently dipped underground, it has never stopped flowing, and from time to time has surfaced to swell progressive streams...
...If I was making $65 a year and Dr...
...To those who can't see themselves living anywhere else, the causes of such catastrophes appear beyond reach and reason...
...There wasn't much coal left anyhow...
...There used to be lots of coal beneath Carbon, and lots of people—maybe as many as a thousand—living on top of the coal...
...Populism, alas, has never lacked for scapegoats...
...they are groping for a name to give the invisible hands that have made the villagers dance to urban tunes...
...There was a picture of young Iva Strait, pale and prim, standing among a half-dozen sooty miners...
...Walking on eggs, I crossed the highway to the J&H Corral, a small brick edifice that Iva's father had built...
...That's why so many Latins go Commie...
...In the American body politic, it may be an indispensable virus...
...I'm a Jew...
...I was born and raised in Minnesota...
...We're really glad to see you, even though we may not mention it again...
...I spring for two more Buds...
...John removed his glasses and carefully wiped the lenses with a paper napkin...
...Well, that's all right," he drawls...
...Something, either thirst or curiosity, made me hit the brakes when this little place swept past my windshield: a cafe, a welding shop, a one-pump gas station, a wooden post office, a dozen gray houses, and a sleepy river suitably named the Nodaway...
...The hell that Watson, Lease and others raised back then lingers on, confronting liberals today with a major dilemma...
...I think he suspects that I once banked at Chase Manhattan...
...Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform The story you are about to read is pre-Jacksonian...
...Castro came knocking on my door, I'd say 'Walk right in.' Wouldn't you...
...For more than half a century Carbon has indeed been undermined...
...Is that how it works...
...Inside, I met both J and H—John and Helen Olson, proprietors...
...Actually, I am only passing through...
...I guess you could say I never got very far in the world...
...You better believe it...
...It occurred a year or so before Hymietown became a spot on the political map...
...The farmer grins and slaps me on the back...
...To my agrarian drinking companion, "Jewish" signified whatever was suspect in corporate America, a helpful abstraction that he embraced in anger and ignorance...
...Is he going to thank me for the beer...
...You know," he says, "it's the Jews who're behind it all...
...Mary Elizabeth Lease liked to describe Grover Cleveland as "an agent of Jewish bankers and British gold...
...You should choose your words more carefully," I tell the farmer...
...Well, how has his life been so far...
...I can't see myself living anyplace else...
...But forgiveness will not close the gulf between us, any more than Jesse Jackson's San Francisco apology will heal Jewish wounds or allay liberal fears...
...They want no part of this little chat I am having with their farmer friend, someone they have known all their days...
...Now, at the mention of "the Jews," the Olsons are keeping very busy behind the bar, glancing everywhere except in my direction...
...All the land down there is owned by American corporations," he explains in a loud nasal drawl...
...In the course of biting off a piece of the truth, he had swallowed the biggest, most persistent lie in Western history...
...The coal seams ran for miles in all directions," she said...
...The farmer blows off some foam and gives me a thoughtful look...
...The postmaster was out, but Iva Strait, his 89-year-old mother, was on hand, and she proved to be all anyone needed to get educated about Carbon...
...Them and the Israeli people...
...They resemble fate, and if fate has a human face, it is the face of the stranger...
...Strait told me...
...What first comes to mind are some of Meredith Willson's lyrics from The Music Man: "Welcome to Iowa...
...We stare at each other...
...I asked him if he liked living in Carbon...
...They pay the peasants slave wages and ship the profits back to New York...
...Ok," he finally said...
...Carbon, Iowa—population 73.1 nosed my rented Falcon up to the front of the PO and, like Fidel Castro at the peasant's door, walked right in...
...The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the Old World have invaded us...
...It was from a Kansas platform that Mary Elizabeth Lease advised bankrupt farmers to "raise less corn and more hell...
...He was right—populist anti-Semitism was, and is, "a mode of expression, a rhetorical style, not a tactic or a program...
...Where you from...
...Connecticut now...
...It is apeace offering of sorts...
...She'd been postmaster herself for 25 years, passing the job on to her son in 1963...
...The Buds cost 50 cents a mug...
...Would a reactionary wear bib overalls...
...They are gaunt, bespectacled and friendly...
...The scum of creation has been dumped on us," he declared...
...Not that it mattered much by then," Mrs...
...Depression, war, out-migration, and now a farm crisis— brought on by high interest rates and Reaganomics—have shaped their days and harried their nights...
...I ask...
...His own establishment, the Pioneer Store, used to stand next door...
...Their tavern is a darkroom with a bar, a few scarred tables and chairs, a pool table and an ancient, unlit jukebox in one corner...
...Thomas E. Watson, the Georgia Populist, got elected to Congress in 1890 by slandering strangers of all origins...
...But when World War II came along, all the miners marched off to glory, never to return...
...I was born here," he replied...
...Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman could not have been elected without help from populist tributaries...
Vol. 67 • August 1984 • No. 14
