Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper by Art Cullen. 

4/5 rating. 

Book #21 of 2020. April 11, 2020.

This is an interesting book written by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Newspaper Editor of The @stormlaketimes. While I might be biased as it’s about my hometown, I think it is a fascinating foray into the goings-on in a small town in Northwest Iowa.

Art does a great job of blending this book together from a few different topics: his life, the newspaper, and the current topics and discussions happening in the Midwest. Storm Lake is an anomaly as compared to a lot of the Midwest because of its large meatpacking plant bringing in a plethora of different races, cultures, and backgrounds. This mixture causes the people to be more cognizant of the positive impact that immigrants have on a town: something Art talks about at length.

One of the other largest topics is the changes that have occurred in agriculture over the last generation or so. While farms have become more efficient, this has completely changed the fabric of Iowa’s small-towns and rural population: pushing many people out and forcing the farmers who stayed around to take on ever-more disruptive forms of farming to stay afloat.

This book would be a great read for anyone who wants to better understand Iowa, the Midwest, and obviously small-town life, a little bit better. It is a great story about how with phenomenal staff, small-town newspapers can still make a difference in communities and the world!

Quotes:

“Storm Lake was on edge. The entire town was built around meatpacking. Hygrade had six hundred men working. They sent their kids to the Catholic school and gave the church enough money that there was no tuition fee until our later years in school. They bought new pickups every other year, and boats. And now they were out of work. It was the Reagan era. They were freed from the union, and from employment.”

“Disease comes on weather’s wings and it is not at all clear whether such critical masses of livestock can be sustained under existing confinement technology. The USDA would have us believe that waterfowl spread the bird flu, but it has not contemplated in its formal research whether population density itself gives rise to the virus. Few waterfowl were found with it in Iowa or Minnesota. Outdoor chickens raised within sneezing distance of infected turkey barns were healthy, not even a sniffle.”

“Farming is business, and figures say the business is going broke.”

“I don’t dwell on it because I should dwell on our newspaper and nobody else’s. If we can’t find out the news without reading another paper or listening to the radio or melding our minds to Twitter and Facebook, then we are not reporters.”

“Iowa produces more renewable energy per capita than any other state; half of our electricity now comes from wind turbines. We are first in that, in corn and hogs, and in elderly and wrestling, and in almost every other category we are thirty-seventh. We like being thirty-seventh. It keeps us out of the way of Texas.”

“King says that giving the children of undocumented status a pass amounts to amnesty. Ancestry implies an offense. That children can be considered to be violating the norms of Iowa or America by merely being here and going to school and wanting to get ahead puts logic upside down and mocks the biblical values hello high during the ceaseless campaign.”

“During that time period, every angry man got himself a cell phone, then a smartphone with which he could share angry memes about that Crooked Hillary and show pictures of Barack Hussein Obama in a turban. The angry and forgotten man’s wife is driving a huge SUV and texting on her smartphone to the girls that she will pick them up after cross-country practice because they are too tired to run home.”

“The formula to revitalize rural America through education and federal/state investments could work – it is working in Storm Lake – if our politics didn’t have the attention span of our president or any other typical politician. Like stock market investors demanding dividends in the next quarterly report with no long-term view of the future of the company, our political class is tuned to the next poll, whose curiosities distract us from the real goal: You get an education, you get a better job. You innovate. That is the American way. It was the Iowa way.

It’s harder to get an education when the legislature continues to cut the budget in a relentless attack on public universities in particular and higher education in general. Legislative appropriations for state universities have dropped by a third since 2001, subtracting inflation.”

“We don’t ask each other anymore. It’s hard to have a prejudice against someone you know.”

“If you can just visit you can change hearts and minds. Most, anyway.”

“The message we don’t hear as much is how that fealty to ethanol might be undoing rural communities or polluting our lakes and streams from corn cultivation.”

“Most Iowans never met a Mexican or thought about wielding a knife eight hours a day in a chilled room over a pork carcass. Yet they started believing that immigrants were threatening the way of life where no Mexicans or black folk live, thirty miles from Storm Lake. Rather than invite the poor to live in their communities like Ida Grove or Sac City, they bus them in thirty miles from Storm Lake to work in their village factories and return them home when day is done. The noise machine makes us think that way, that brown people are dangerous or somehow corrosive to our community. If their labor is cheap enough, it is good enough, but they need not live in the town they are bused into. Let Storm Lake house them and school them.”

“The money even creates news as fact finders are marginalized by fantasies planted in social media and through email networks as fact: They will take away your freedom to farm, plus your guns. Immigrants will infest your town with drugs. The propaganda is meant to distract from the reality that contemporary corporate agriculture shall grow unimpeded.

Stoking fear helps strengthen the underlying message: Don’t mess with Big Ag. It is our lifeline. Even though you are living paycheck to paycheck, you wouldn’t have a paycheck were it not for agri-industry. It gets people to think that they must put up with water pollution, thyroid cancer, and a deteriorating Main Street or they surely will starve to death instead.”

“The all-Republican statehouse is in classic overreach – gutting Medicaid and collective bargaining, building unconstitutional budget deficits that upset even the governing Republicans, putting state universities at the foot of business, and causing property tax increases by defunding K-12 schools and community colleges.”

“Iowa always comes back to its senses, just before it’s about to ride off the cliff into Kansas.”

“[Republican Gary] Worthan told us that he would not talk to us because he could not get ‘a fair shake’ from us – despite the fact that we had run every one of his weekly legislative columns verbatim, which he generally used to complain about the minority Democrats getting in his way. Every committee appointment of his we duly noted in the paper. Now the strategy of running against the news media had seeped down to the local level. Tom Cullen was perfectly willing to report what Worthan wanted to say, but Worthan used his ridicule of our straight news reporting to pick up votes from a hard-core King base that believes we are patently dishonest.”

“When it did rain in spring it came in buckets. The warmer, wetter nights roll out violent thunderstorms that wash our soils – with few buffers to stop them – down the river to choke the Louisiana bayou and suffocate the Gulf of Mexico with our phosphorus and nitrate and herbicide detritus. What soil is left is not sufficient to feed the plant. Our corn is getting poorer and starchier, although through mechanical, biological, and chemical engineering we manage to ratchet up yields. Over time, the farmer, although he might not quite see it, is losing value for his crops and land, once the full honest accounting is made relative to what the chemical complex took from him.”

“Of the world’s fresh water drawer annually, agriculture drinks 70 percent of it.”

“It doesn’t cost billions more to let rivers run clean. It takes a conscience. Or a USDA requirement that to get government crop insurance you must set aside 10 percent of your land to grass, as we did before Nixon agriculture secretary Earl Butz urged farmers to plant fencerow to fencerow to feed the world. The world remains starving, and planting through the fencerow is producing more headaches than food. We are beginning to learn that rethinking our approach reaps great rewards. Dr. Matt Helmers, a distinguished ag engineer from ISU, found that returning as little as 10 percent of a rolling farm field to native prairie grass can reduce nitrogen and phosphorus loss from a field by up to 90 percent per year.”

“But the action must come from Congress, which continues to insist on cutting conservation programs that actually have been proven effective for the land and appreciated by farmers. We have wasted a lot of conservation money, but we also have done a lot of good with it at the margins and especially with the Conservation Reserve Program. The most recent speciousness is an argument that conservation programs hold back acres that would otherwise go to beginning young farmers. Which beginning young farmers are those? The ones whose fathers already control a couple of thousand acres? They will say anything in Washington these days.”

“‘I had too many problems in the United States because I am Mexican,’ he said. ‘Too many Americans don’t like us. Whatever the problem, they say Mexican, Mexican, Mexican. But it’s African, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran. I work in the snow, in the hot, on the kill floor, in the welding shop. But too many Americans say, “Hey, wetback.” This is no good. Mexicans go to the United States to work. That’s it.’”

“We were immediate best friends. Everywhere you go you meet somebody from Iowa.”

“When James Madison wrote the First Amendment to the Constitution, he had you in mind. The reporter is the cornerstone of an informed electorate and a functioning democracy. Tyranny prevails wherever the press is not free.”

“We strive for accuracy. When you spot your mistake in the paper, it should make you want to retch. Really. This is a healthy neuroticism. Correct your errors prominently and your credibility will build. When you lose that nausea over a mistake, go be a shaman in India.”

“Newspapering is the most fun you can have fully clothed. If you find writing is a chore after a while, you are in the wrong business.”

“Get the news up front. Don’t wander around. Get in and get out. Over-report and under-write. Write for readers and not other editors. Write as if you were telling your mother about it in the kitchen. When appropriate, make them cry.”

“The best journalism is that which builds communities. You build your community by publicizing good deeds done, by reporting on the cheats and scoundrels and other politicians, by urging yourself and those around you to do better, by allowing dissenting voices to be heard, and by making certain that your town’s issues are heard in Des Moines and Washington’s. Use your power to build, and the newspaper will grow naturally.”

“You can change the world through journalism. Tom Paine did it with Common Sense. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post did it with Watergate. Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams did it – with one brutal photo he started the end of the Vietnam War. That’s the only good reason to get into this business. Because, when you’re looking for a friend, remember that the dog can’t read.”

“It was the small-business owners who had the last word, and it was unexpectedly powerful. ‘Everybody here’s talking about being fair to the insurance companies – when have they been fair to us?’ Mr. Cullen said. ‘Why do we have to be fair to them? It just incenses me when people talk that way. These people are legal thieves with antitrust protection, and we want to treat them with kid gloves. It drives me nuts!’”

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