William R. Staplin is a former scientist specializing in utilizing molecular biology techniques to investigate RNA plant and animal viruses, research and development of vaccines to protect against infectious viruses; husband to Ruth A. Staplin; father to two independently minded young college students; cancer and spinal cord disability survivor; supporter of girls and women’s equal rights, reproductive rights, bodily autonomy and healthcare; supporter of reclaiming LGTBQIA+ civil rights and liberties; supporter of Black and Brown Lives Matter; full-time greyhound owner and walking companion to Tailgater. 

When you listen to Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land,” what do you think of?  

Does its message advocate for the private ownership of public land, private “walls,” or does it elicit thoughts of the grand picturesque publicly owned landscapes of the American Parks, National Forests and Mountains that make up the United States? 

I would imagine it would be the latter. Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” in February 1940, reusing the melody roughly carved out from the folk standard “When The World’s on Fire” popularized by the infamous folk family musicians, The Carters, as a rebuke to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” sung by Kate Smith.

Steve Corbin is emeritus professor of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa and a contributing columnist to 246 newspapers and 48 social media platforms in 45 states, who receives no remuneration, funding, or endorsement from any for-profit business, nonprofit organization, political action committee, or political party. 

Peggy Noonan has been a conservative voice for The Wall Street Journal since leaving the Ronald Reagan administration as his primary speechwriter. Five of Noonan’s books have been New York Times bestsellers. Consuming every word of her weekly column keeps me politically balanced.

In Noonan’s June 14-15 column titled “America is losing sight of its political culture,” she characterized our 47^th president as America’s Mr. Tinpot Dictator. This term refers to a leader who acts like a dictator, often with delusions of grandeur and authoritarian tendencies. I decided to investigate how much Trump resembles a dictator.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

Given the turmoil of today’s politics and environmental concerns, it’s time to revisit Okefenokee Swamp and attend to the wisdom of Pogo Possum. He sagely advised more than 50 years ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote that line for the Pogo comic strip in 1971, as Pogo Possum and one of his cartoon companions, Porky Pine, surveyed the human despoliation of their wetlands home. The swamp covers almost half a million acres straddling the Georgia-Florida border; the cartoon depicted it as awash in discarded furniture, a bath tub, a car half sunk in the swamp and other tons of trash.

Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years.

How can John Dewey’s ideal of a thriving democratic education revitalize an American commitment to freedom and democracy?

‍In June 2025, Zinn Education Project hosted their 5th annual Teach Truth Day of Action, which organizers in Iowa City have participated in since 2022. Human Restoration Project has been a co-sponsor of the national Teach Truth Day of Action and the local Iowa City event. These are spoken remarks from the author edited for publication. Photos are also from the author documenting the Iowa City Teach Truth Day of Action event held in Chauncey Swan Park on June 14, 2025.

My name is Nick Covington. I taught social studies for ten years at Ankeny High School before leaving in 2022 after being told “Current Events Do Not Belong in History Class.” I’m a co-founder of Human Restoration Project, an Iowa-based progressive education non-profit and co-sponsor of the national Teach Truth Day of Action.

Sometimes resistance looks like taking care of yourself and those around you. Shout out to every caregiver building a better world one child at a time. Shout out to everyone trying to make ends meet, balancing the needs of their families with the urgency of this moment and couldn’t be here today. In a system intended to grind you down, sometimes resistance looks like survival.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

On June 1, 1950, U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith (a Republican from Maine) delivered a speech that she called her “Declaration of Conscience.” She targeted fellow Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and the fear, hate mongering, and divisiveness that was tearing the nation apart in McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade to make America great again.

Seventy-five years after Smith showed courage and patriotism, Republican Senator Joni Ernst took the opposite path. She mocked an Iowan who cried out against GOP legislation and MAGA efforts that divide the nation today.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

World War II is still The Good War.

The celebration last month of the 80^th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in May, 1945 was the latest rush of World War II nostalgia, joining a similar timed anniversary last year of the D-Day landings in Normandy in June, 1944, and the 85^th anniversary of the British evacuation from the disaster at Dunkirk in early June, 1940.

World War II still draws audiences. On American television, “Band of Brothers” remains a streaming sensation with a companion “Masters of the Air” released this year. Subscribers with enough channel power regularly call up Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) and Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” (2017), both of which had enjoyed strong theater runs.

It’s not hard to see why Americans have maintained a nostalgic obsession with the Allied victory in Europe in 1945. The European theater included the ancestral homelands of most Americans. The vanquished Nazis could be loathed without reservation and their end came without an unexpected shock that the atomic bomb provided for the defeat of Japan in the Pacific. Unlike the glorified truce of 1918, the victory over Germany in 1945 was decisive and total, not subjected to the “stab in the back” ruminations that fed later Hitlerian resentment.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Stray Thoughts.

If an opinionated old guy from southern Iowa delivered the recent commencement address at the United States Military Academy, my message would have contrasted with the one given by another opinionated old guy, one from Queens, New York, by way of the White House.

When I was a newspaper editor, I sometimes told the staff they needed to run a belt sander across an article to remove rough spots before publication. So it was with President Donald Trump’s speech to 1,000 new Army second lieutenants at West Point in May. His staff needed to take the Oval Office belt sander to his message.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

It usually takes a while for specific changes by the federal government to work their way down to the local level. But after about 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term, executive orders have begun to directly tighten the screws in Greene County.

Three examples:

Elesha Gayman is a Mom, educator, advocate, Iowan, and American who served in the Iowa House from 2007 through 2010. She has been speaking truth to power since age 14 and writing to change hearts and minds since 2025.

Can you recall a moment in your life when you changed your position on an issue or shifted an opinion you held?

I am not talking about changing your mind on whether to go out to dinner or stay in, but rather a fundamental shift in your beliefs. How did that happen? Was it a massive heart attack or near-death experience that you needed to survive to finally stop smoking or start exercising?

When I challenge myself with these questions, one thing is clear: I am more stubborn than I would like to admit. I don’t make decisions in haste and am very good at sitting on the fence until I get adequate information to formulate a position or opinion. In the Iowa legislature, we often referred to this as “keeping our powder dry.”

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

Iowa’s senior U.S. Senator, Republican Chuck Grassley, met with more than 50 of us from the Jefferson area here on April 17. Unlike most Republican members of Congress these days, Grassley has continued to make himself available to his constituents in all 99 Iowa counties.

Some of his meetings are true wide-open town meetings; others are by invitation. The hour-long Jefferson session was billed as a Q and A with local business and development people, but many of those in attendance did not fit that description. Still they asked their questions, and Grassley answered each of them.

Grassley opened the session by noting that he has taken his 99-county tour annually over his 45 years in the Senate. That practice now defies the advice of Republican strategists, who frown on letting people raise their voices face-to-face in disagreement with GOP members of Congress. He is correct in his defiance, and that stance earned him the thanks of some of those at last Thursday’s meeting, even if they strongly disagreed with his positions and his answers to their questions.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com.

Growing up in the 1950s, Evans family vacations seem typical by rural Midwest standards: car trips to the Ozarks, the Black Hills, Nauvoo and New Salem in Illinois, or St. Louis for a Cardinals baseball game.

But one memorable summer trip, around 1960, occurred when we motored north through Minnesota to Canada, the only foreign country my parents ever visited and a place more exotic than the Wisconsin Dells. 

Exotic? Absolutely. This trip required us to stop at the border and clear a Canadian customs check.

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

John Muir, among our nation’s earliest and most passionate conservationists, died on Christmas Eve, 1914. Yet I swear I can hear his voice, crystal clear, responding to President Donald Trump’s recent actions. 

Earlier this month, Trump directed federal agencies to seek ways environmental regulations could be circumvented with plans of increasing timber production in 280 million acres of national forests and other public lands. He signed an executive order allowing the U.S. to bypass Endangered Species Act protections.

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer.

I’m sure many readers can look back at their careers and think of certain years which stand out in red letters. 2008 is one of those years for me.

At that time our bank’s trust department held several commercial buildings in downtown Waverly in a fiduciary relationship. On June 9 I went downtown in my knee-high rubber boots. I was able to get into one of the buildings through the glass side entrance doors. The corner office was rented to a professional group, and I joined them in carrying files upstairs to the mezzanine. 

Every time we went out into the lobby to the stairs the water was a little higher on those glass entrance doors. It was eerie. We worked as long as we could.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

Like many words, “peace” carries a number of meanings. U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy use “peace” to describe two different scenarios.

When Trump says peace, he means the absence of physical fighting. He says the goal in Ukraine is to stop the war, which he emphasizes has killed thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians and Russians.

That’s a laudable goal. And it’s Zelenskyy’s goal as well. But when Zelenskyy says peace, he has more in mind. He means the peace that comes when the aggressor is defeated and withdraws, when his invaded nation is no longer partially occupied by foreign troops.

Arnold Garson is a semi-retired journalist and executive who worked for 46 years in the newspaper industry, including almost 20 years at The Des Moines Register. He writes the Substack newsletter Second Thoughts, where this article first appeared.

It had been 65 years since Henry Ford, the pioneer automaker and one of America’s most outspoken, hateful, and prominent anti-Semites, had yielded to pressure and ended his overt effort to promote the hatred of Jews. 

My mother, in her early 70s, asked me for assistance in finding and purchasing her first new car. Among other things, I asked whether she had any preferences regarding make and model. 

“Well, not a Ford,” she replied.

This was 1992. Henry Ford had been dead for more than 40 years, but my mother had neither forgotten nor forgiven him. She was standing at the end of a very long line of Jews in America. Up near the front of that line was a Jewish family from Sioux City, Iowa, that stood alone against Ford when he was at the height of his antisemitic rampage.

The Barish family of Sioux City was guided by determination, principle, and courage. More about this unusual family to come.

Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers and the author of the Substack newsletter The Odd Man Out.

Iowa used to be a state of Firsts. It was introduced as a free state to counter Texas as a slave state into the United States. Iowa was famous for its participation in the Civil War on the side of the Union. Iowa has such a steeped and storied history in education that leaders chose a schoolhouse for the state’s commemorative quarter, to demonstrate how much Iowans value education. The Iowa Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional 86 years before the U.S. Supreme Court mandated desegregation nationally. 

The rights of women via the suffragists were a massive force in Iowa. The University of Iowa was a destination for many award-winning writers like Kurt Vonnegut, and Iowa State University broke racial barriers with Jack Trice and George Washington Carver. Iowa was among the first states to legalize same sex marriage in 2009 before it was done nationally. Governor Robert Ray, a Republican, became famous for welcoming immigrants, setting up a refugee center for thousands of Tai Dam refugees during the 1970s.

That positive impact is still felt today.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com  

In the fall of 1975, I was a freshman at Central College in Pella, Iowa. I had spent the summer detasseling corn, so college rescued me from dew-drenched mornings and sweat-dripping afternoons.

I graduated from high school with twelve other students. I wasn’t the valedictorian or even salutatorian, but I was in the top ten. With that academic record, graduation from college was the goal, but it certainly wasn’t a given.

Like all freshmen, I first had to conquer general education requirements. One of those was a religion class. I attended Sunday school and church my whole life, so I registered for New Testament.

Arnold Garson is a semi-retired journalist and executive who worked for 46 years in the newspaper industry, including almost 20 years at The Des Moines Register. He writes the Substack newsletter Second Thoughts, where this article first appeared.

This essay tells the stories of a handful of Jews who played important roles in shaping the state of Iowa and some cities during the 19th century.

The first official white settlement in what would become the State of Iowa began in June 1833, following the Black Hawk War—a year-long skirmish between the Indians of Eastern Iowa and the Illinois Militia.

The Indians ultimately surrendered, but the federal government also required them to open for American settlement a 50-mile-wide strip of land along the west side of the Mississippi River. The strip ran about 200 miles north from the Missouri border.

Alexander Levi, Iowa’s first Jew

Alexander Levi wasted no time in getting to the newly opened unorganized territory. He was born in France in 1809 with ancestry that traced back to the Sephardic Jews of Spain. He immigrated to America at age 24 in 1833, arriving at New Orleans. He appears to have proceeded north with other pioneers via the Mississippi River to the northern tip of the newly opened territory.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

President Donald Trump renewed his eight-year tariff war last weekend by declaring tariffs of 25 percent on most goods from Mexico and Canada (10 percent on Canadian oil) and 10 percent on China. No sooner had the war been declared than we had a 30-day truce as Mexico and Canada promised various reinforcements of their border that supposedly will stanch the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.—policies both countries had announced weeks earlier.

Trump famously told us eight years ago that trade wars are “easy to win.” But if they’re so easy, why are we still fighting them eight years later? U.S. armed forces needed just half that time to subdue Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II.

Trump and his MAGAtoids can claim short-term victories with the Mexican and Canadian truces. But bigger hills remain to be seized. China might not be so easy to bully. Neither will be the European Union. To those of us of advanced ages, the 30-day truce was reminiscent of the occasional truces during the Vietnam War, when hopes were raised around the world only to be shattered by the resumption of bombings and guerilla ambushes.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

The Iowa Department of Education may be first in the nation in commemorating a centennial to be ashamed of.

I’m talking about the 100^th anniversary of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which took place from July 10 to July 21, 1925. John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was convicted of violating a state law, the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach human evolution in public schools. He was fined $100 (about $1,800 in today’s dollars), but never had to serve jail time.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

Here’s a look at perspectives on Donald Trump’s return to the White House and some thoughts about how to deal with that.

For example, despite the political polarization in Iowa and across the nation, one might argue there can be some contrived agreement with this wording: “Donald Trump’s return to the White House will not be as bad as millions of citizens fear.”

MAGA WELCOMES TRUMP’S RETURN

On the one side we have some two thirds of Republican voters who cheer the return because they believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats.

Many Republicans reject criticism of Trump’s first term in office, from 2017 through 2020, because they were said to be based on fake news or disproved by “alternative facts.”

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

There once was a time, now no longer true for Democrats, when if Iowans wanted to see, meet, probably visit with a candidate seeking to become president of the United States, you could. It wasn’t especially difficult. They came around, perhaps to your county, certainly to your region… and spoke, took questions, engaged with potential voters. For maybe a four-month period every four or eight years, presidential aspirants were about as accessible as U.S. Senate or U.S. House candidates.

As many have noted, this is largely because of a certain presidential campaign in 1976.

This is my way of introducing that, over the years, I had numerous small encounters with the late President Jimmy Carter. I chuckle at the thought, in part because in his presidential campaigns, I was never a staunch Carter supporter.

For many Iowans, myself included, Jimmy Carter’s recent death brings forth a fresh wave of memories.

Tom Cope worked on two of Congressman Jim Leach’s re-election campaigns and on his district office staff, from 1991-1995. He is a principal in the Iowa lobbying firm of Cope Murphy + Co. and serves on the Johnston City Council. 

I consider myself to have been very blessed in my life. One of those blessings was the opportunity to work for Congressman Jim Leach from 1991 to 1995. I managed his re-election campaigns in both 1992 and 1994, and worked in his district offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport in between those times. 

As I think about Jim and all that I learned, there are three things that are important to remember about him.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

In an era when sex and religion are politicized, it was inevitable that food would follow.

Two bookend events in 2025 may catapult our eating habits off the Food Network and onto mainstream cable and broadcast news. First will be the confirmation hearing for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Then an ad hoc committee of experts must release the legally-required rewriting of the federal government’s food and nutrition dietary guidelines, which are due by the end of 2025.

“They don’t make them like Jim Leach anymore,” posted the elections analysts at The Downballot after learning Leach had passed away on December 11. They were commenting on his extraordinary warning to the Republican National Committee chairman that he would not caucus with Republicans in the next Congress if the Iowa GOP continued to fund direct mail attacking his 2006 Democratic challenger.

Among Iowans who have served in Congress, Leach was unique in many ways.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

President Joe Biden’s recent pardon of his son Hunter Biden has reignited the debate over the presidential pardoning power. And argument over this constitutionally protected prerogative of the president will not go away with Donald Trump’s return to power next month. Trump already has used the pardoning power for the benefit of his political cronies during his first term (2017-2021).

Biden is reportedly mulling whether he should go further in light of Trump’s threats to bring charges against some of his political enemies after he returns to office in 2025. In light of those threats, Biden is reportedly considering preemptive pardons for former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney, former Representative and now Senator Adam Schiff, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, and General Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Eighth in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2024 state and federal elections.

Iowans could reasonably view the 2016 general election as an anomaly. Diverging sharply from the national mood, this state voted for Donald Trump by more than a 9-point margin, even as Hillary Clinton won the nationwide popular vote by a little more than 2 points. But maybe that was a one-off; Iowa had been a swing state for the previous six presidential elections.

When Joe Biden failed to flip a single Iowa county in 2020—even heavily Catholic counties where he should have done substantially better than Clinton—I concluded that Iowa was no longer a swing state. That post got some pushback from Democrats who thought I was reading too much into the results.

Trump’s third win in Iowa, by his largest margin yet, underscores how far this state has moved from the center of the national electorate. As Democrats search for a way back to winning more statewide and down-ballot races, they need to recognize that reality.

Henry Jay Karp is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He is the co-founder and co-convener of One Human Family QCA, a social justice organization.

In 1990, Michael Godwin observed a phenomenon on internet and proposed a concept known as “Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies.” It stated, “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches one.” Godwin’s law quickly spread to all forms of conversations and debates on hot-button issues.

Folks like me, who did not grasp the meaning of the phrase “approaches one,” have explained it as either “you know the discussion has gone on too long” or “that thread is over and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.” As a writer in the Guardian once reframed it, “The longer an argument runs, the greater the likelihood Hitler gets mentioned.”

The point of this rule is that Nazi analogies are over the top. They are a kind of hyperbole that trivializes an argument, using reckless and thoughtless comparisons to win.

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

In the time before the election, I’ve become a TV junkie. So, I did see a clip of Donald Trump trying to win votes in Pennsylvania by telling penis jokes. It shows how low he and his applauding fans can go.

Arnold Palmer’s daughter told ABC News Donald Trump had disrespected her late father’s memory by fawning over the size of the golf champion’s penis. There’ll probably be a cross burned in their front yard.

It’s now nine days until voters decide the fate of the nation and possibly the whole world. I’m on pins and needles. Anxious, and frankly, scared.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

On October 14, the state of Iowa observes Indigenous Peoples’ Day, in recognition of the roles native tribes have played in the state’s history and culture. It’s not a federal holiday, but an increasing number of states and cities now observe it instead of Columbus Day, the traditional name for the mid-October holiday. (Governor Kim Reynolds made the change in Iowa in 2018.)

October 11 was the anniversary of another notable event in Iowa history: on that day in 1842, the Sauk and Fox tribes signed a treaty ceding to the United States a large chunk of central and southern Iowa, including what is now Greene County. (The term “Sac and Fox” is a designation historically employed by the American government. A more accurate term is “Sauk/Meskwaki.”)

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

James Madison, a key figure in adopting our Bill of Rights and our fourth president from 1809 to 1817, seemed to foresee the Donald Trump phenomenon and the farce and looming tragedy of the 2024 election.

In 1822, Madison wrote, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will for ever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own Governours, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Journalists cite Madison’s concerns as an argument for access to government meetings and public records so a “watchdog press” can hold government accountable and also serve as “The Fourth Estate” of government.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

Thirty-three years ago on a snowy Friday in November, the nightmare of mass school shootings shocked Iowa like it has never been shocked before.

It was 3:40 p.m. A former University of Iowa graduate student with a brilliant scientific mind, and a .38-caliber revolver, walked into a conference room in Van Allen Hall, the home of the university’s renowned Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

The anguish and angst visited upon us this election year is faithful to the old saying “Politics makes strange bedfellows.’” That take is adapted from a line in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—”Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”

Inspired by this season of anguish and angst, this post offers dots connecting George Orwell, Bob Feller, Donald Trump, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, and Joseph Welch. You’re familiar with most of our cast. And you may recall that Welch is the attorney who grew up in Primghar, Iowa and attended Grinnell College. He gained national fame as the U.S. Army’s attorney 70 years ago, when he got fed up and asked Senator Joseph McCarthy on live television, “Have you left no sense of decency?”

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

You’re invited to time travel with me today, to April 1968, fifty-six years ago. Newspaper headlines on April 1 said President Lyndon Johnson won’t seek reelection. Some might have thought it was an April Fool prank. A much bigger jolt came April 4, with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The number of Marines in Vietnam peaked just under 86,000. Tragically, U.S. fatalities in Vietnam also crested in 1968, almost 30 percent of all American battle deaths happening that year. And, after 249 shows, the final episode of the Andy Griffith Show aired. Bucolic Mayberry seemed strangely out of synch with what was going on in America.

On April 27, 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey formally declared his candidacy for president. The second paragraph of his announcement:

Arnold Garson is a semi-retired journalist and executive who worked for 46 years in the newspaper industry, including almost 20 years at The Des Moines Register. He writes the Substack newsletter Second Thoughts, where this article first appeared.

The story of Iowa’s Arabella Mansfield has been widely mentioned in Iowa newspapers and historical accounts but seldom told.

Mansfield’s name appears every year or so on average in an Iowa newspaper somewhere, usually as a stand-alone sentence or short paragraph within a longer news article about women of achievement in general.

The reference most often includes a single fact: Mansfield was the first woman lawyer in Iowa—and in the United States.

What? The first female attorney in the U.S. happened in Iowa? How did that come about? Who was this woman and what is the rest of her story?

The fascinating answers to these questions require a deeper dig.

This column by Daniel G. Clark about Alexander Clark (1826-1891) first appeared in the Muscatine Journal on February 7, 2024.

For the second year since becoming an official state holiday, February 1 was George Washington Carver Day. What better kickoff for Black History Month every year?

I attended the Carver Day celebration at Iowa State University, in the same Memorial Union Great Hall where, as a 9-year-old boy, I saw Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1960.

You can watch the entire event online. It runs most of two hours, and I heartily recommend it. The program starts 17 minutes into the video.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

Sorry to rain on the parade, but here’s a metaphor about the news media excitement and anticipation generated by the forecast of a September 10 presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump: Looking forward to that debate (and its possible sequel) is like going to the busiest intersection in town or camping out along a freeway looking forward to a traffic accident—maybe, if you’re lucky, even one in which someone is seriously injured.

Inherent in the presidential debates is a sense of suspense, and it’s not whether worthwhile information will be offered to viewer. The suspense has been whether one of the two, or both, may suffer a self-inflicted injury by blundering into a campaign-damaging statement or behavior. 

Trump, however, seems to escape being accountable despite his frequent lies. It is a real-life application of what he said in Sioux Center in January 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?…It’s, like, incredible.”

Ed Wasserman is a 52-year resident of Iowa and a professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at The University of Iowa. The views expressed in his piece are his own and do not in any way reflect those of his employer.

Donald Trump has often been credited with being a supremely slick sloganeer. Indeed, who among us is unfamiliar with such memorable monikers as: Little Marco Rubio, Ron DeSanctimonious (DeSantis), Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Nikki “Birdbrain” Haley, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, “Shifty” Adam Schiff, “Wacky” Jacky Rosen, and Laffin’ Kamala Harris? All of these scornful sobriquets concisely convey Trump’s deep disdain for his many political rivals.

Yet, long before Trump, another Republican office-bearer garnered high marks for his cutting political invective. Spiro T. Agnew served as the 39^th Vice President of the United States from January 20, 1969 to October 10, 1973, when he was forced to resign after pleading ‘no contest’ to a felony charge of tax evasion.

Expertly aided by White House speechwriters Pat Buchanan and William Safire, Agnew delivered a series of strident speeches in 1969 and 1970 attacking the Nixon administration’s many enemies, both perceived and real.

Dave Leshtz is the editor of The Prairie Progressive.

In August 2023, Bleeding Heartland published my memories of the Hamburg Inn. The venerable Iowa City diner that I had patronized for more than five decades was on the verge of going out of business. Michael Lee, the absentee owner, had returned to his home in China when COVID-19 struck, leaving the restaurant in the hands of inexperienced staff who struggled to keep it alive, even after the pandemic subsided.

My memoir was a eulogy to a dying business, and to my own youth. The Hamburg Inn was a touchstone in college, a regular stop as an adult, and finally a frequent destination while I worked for political candidates and a U.S. Congressman. The diner’s travails seemed to embody the loss of local culture nationwide, as franchises and chains relentlessly took over family-owned establishments that had endured economic ups and downs for years.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

During the “Progressive Era” in American history—two decades or so, from roughly 1896 until 1917—a number of states adopted the “initiative” and “referendum” as part of the way their governments operated. Many of those states were in the American West. Iowa was not among them. What would it be like here if we had taken that step—or if we did so now?

The initiative allows citizens to propose new legislation on the election ballot, and the referendum allows voters to vote those proposals up or down. That combination provides a way to bypass the state legislature which, as we know, doesn’t always enact legislation that is the people’s choice.