Chuck Holden was born and raised in Iowa and is a history professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

As readers of Bleeding Heartland know all too well, there are no signs that the hard-right GOP governing the state will stop its drastic reshaping of law and culture. Iowa, it appears, is competing with states like Texas and Florida for the title of most reactionary. But due to their size and much more diverse populations, Texas and Florida do not serve as good comparisons for a state like Iowa. Rather, Ireland in the mid-1900s, nearly all white and all conservative Christian, does.

The vision of Iowa that the state’s Republican leadership seems to have in mind is remarkably similar to that of the long-time Irish leader Éamon de Valera’s from the 1930s through the 1980s: lands of sturdy farms and humble, god-fearing families where “traditional” is worn as a badge of pride. But underneath the wholesome image one finds punitive regimes ever-alert to threats real or imagined of an encroaching modern world.

As Fintan O’Toole’s We Do Not Know Ourselves reminds us, the Irish state during these decades, like Iowa’s now, embarked on a long culture war. Always working in close conjunction with conservative Catholic leaders, the Irish government clamped down ferociously, and at times violently, on the reproductive rights of women.

Over decades, church and state conspired to imprison and abuse thousands of “penitents”—commonly young, unwed mothers or young women accused of sex before marriage—in the infamous “Magdalene Laundries.” Its 1861 law against abortion, which called for life imprisonment, remained on the Irish books until 2018. Ireland during the mid-1900s outlawed divorce and contraceptives in order, it claimed, to protect and preserve the family.

Both the church and state combed through Irish literature on the lookout for sexual innuendo, let alone actual descriptions of sex. In the early 1960s, Edna O’Brien’s novels about young Irish women resisting the thuggish behavior of fathers, biological and ordained, to discover romance and sex were burned from church altars.

In 1967, a member of the Irish legislature rose to protest a scene in Sean Ó Faoláin’s short story “The Trout” where a 12-year old girl leaves her bedroom at night to try and free a trout trapped underneath a rock. The fish, given a male pronoun, is found “panting in his prison, his silver stomach going up and down like an engine.” The girl enters the water in her short pajamas in the dark of night but struggled to get hold of the slippery trout: “the body lashed” as “they were both mad with fright.” Finally, “she gripped him, and shoved him into the ewer [a small opening to a jar].”

The legislator objected that the scene was “most suggestive” and that “there are parents who view this book with the gravest concern because of the language contained in it.” Nationally, the Irish government, at the Catholic Church’s bidding, throttled primary and secondary education into a conservatively narrow curriculum that enforced discipline through physical punishment and scorned open inquiry. And all of this while Irish leaders claimed to hold the nation up as a “bulwark” against the moral decadence of the modern world.

The long-term effects of these conservative policies left most Irish women and men desperately poor and undermined the image of Ireland as a family-centered refuge from modernity. Massive emigration produced “abnormally low” marriage rates among western European nations as of 1950—especially as many young Irish women simply fled the country.

Iowa’s conservative leaders today also believe the state is threatened by a complex modern world. Their concerns are often expressed in language invoking a looming moral panic not unlike de Valera’s constant lament that a modernizing Ireland would “sink into an amorphous cosmopolitanism.” Governor Kim Reynolds, echoing this fear, has accused the coastal elite and the Biden administration of “promoting an ever-shifting moral code of wokeness” that was “not an agenda for Iowa.”

While not all Catholic, Iowa’s political leadership is comprised of deeply conservative Christians, solicitous of their fundamentalist base. Like Ireland’s leadership decades ago, they are consumed by their own anxieties over sex and sexuality. Here is the painful review of their recent efforts:

• In March 2022, the state enacted a law prohibiting transgender girls from playing on female sports teams in schools.
• In January of this year, Reynolds and her allies in the legislature pushed through a sweeping bill that directs significant amounts of state funds to private (mostly Christian) schools.
• In March, the GOP trifecta banned gender-affirming care for minors and mandated that Iowans of any age use school bathrooms or other facilities matching their “biological sex,” their gender assigned at birth.
• The same month, Republican lawmakers attacked diversity and inclusion initiatives at Iowa’s state universities in response to the right-wing perception that universities are dangerous, “woke” outposts in a conservative land. An appropriations bill approved later imposed a hiring freeze for such programs at universities.
• In May, Reynolds signed a law prohibiting any instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from grades K-6, and banning school library or classroom materials that contain “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.”

Reynolds and her allies suffered a rare setback this past week when the Iowa Supreme Court deadlocked on whether to reinstate a six-week abortion ban passed in 2018. The 3-3 split affirmed a lower court ruling, preventing the so-called “heartbeat bill” from going into effect. Unaccustomed to not having their way, self-anointed moral leaders like Bob Vander Plaats, predictably, called for the offending justices to either resign or be impeached.    

As a result of this rightward shift, again not unlike what Ireland experienced, Iowa has witnessed the departure of many of its young people. Iowa’s “brain drain” of college graduates out of the state remains among the worst in the nation. The state’s recent loosening of child labor laws is likely to encourage more to leave, once they become of age.

“One would think,” Art Cullen observed recently in the Storm Lake Times, “that if you want to grow, you invite everyone into the enterprise.” But conservatives will not likely lose any sleep over the exodus of its more progressive youth, being in agreement, it seems, with the older Irish position. In O’Toole’s words, it “freed Ireland of the awkward ones.”

Iowans may also want to bear in mind, as Governor Reynolds and her conservative allies continue to gather power into their and their hands alone, that a similar system of unchecked authority wielded by the Irish church and state leadership enabled the hideous, shameful culture of abuse by the clergy and rampant corruption by the political elite. Iowa’s lone Democratic official elected in a statewide race, Auditor Rob Sand, having already found evidence that Governor Reynolds misspent millions of federal dollars intended for COVID-19 relief, has recently issued a warning about the likelihood of more shady dealings by the state’s top officials now that Republicans have stripped his office of much of its oversight power.

While history is not always a perfect guide to what lies ahead, sometimes it works pretty well. The Irish people paid a steep price for their leaders’ conservatism. One suspects most Iowans will, too. 

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Charles J. Holden’s books include In the Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post-Civil War South Carolina (U. of South Carolina Press, 2002), The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC (University Press of Kentucky, 2011), and, co-author, Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America (U. of Virginia Press, 2019).    

Top photo taken by Mike Holden from the Holden family farm in Greene County, published with permission.