Worries of a Prosperous People

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency/Hugh Sidey

Out on a small patch of prairie last week, Greenfield, Iowa, graduated its 100th high school class. From a fragile start, the procession has gone through 99 years of corn crops, Presidents, wars, droughts, babies and blizzards. Six girls formed the senior class of 1883. They stood up for their diplomas in the Greenfield opera house on a June night. Greenfield was still tentative then, with wooden buildings, dirt streets and the scuffed look of any human habitation that dares stand before the scouring west wind. "A land without echoes or shadow," wrote John Madson in his evocative new book, Where the Sky Began.

Surely those six girls were lovely; certainly they were daring. Lula Easton gave an oration called "Sculptors of Government." One wonders if she dwelt on Chester A. Arthur, the first voluptuary to hold the presidency. Even then he was planning to decorate the White House to resemble a gambling parlor. (Harry Truman claimed that the self-indulgent Arthur harbored a woman of sin on the premises.) Back then, Greenfield High School's Nellie Garlock may have had all this in mind when she recited "Virtue's Laurels."

Nellie Haddock seemed to pick up the theme in her 1883 oration, "The Perils of Luxury." A niece of Nellie's was at the 100th commencement last week. Ruth Haddock, 90, drove her 1963 Dodge from her home on the south side of town near the depot up to the new school auditorium on the north side of Greenfield. She took in all the proceedings, declared them worthy of her Aunt Nellie, pointed out that there was still peril in luxury and drove back home again beneath scowling thunderheads that were bridged by a double rainbow.

The Greenfield auditorium was full, a tribute to the century that had been and to all those families that have lived on the land and want to stay. There were memories of Theodore Roosevelt, whose muscular idealism enraptured the town at the turn of the century, as well as stories of men who had fought at Belleau Wood in World War I and the Bulge in World War II. And always there was talk of the weather, of drought and flood and tornado and sun. Many on this graduation day had left their tractors and corn planters bogged down in fields too wet to work--one more worry in the struggle to survive under God's laws.

There were 44 seniors in the Greenfield class, quite a drop from the high of 72 who graduated in 1979. The baby boom has run out. Only about half of the 100th class will go to college, estimated Superintendent William Sandholm. That is an admission of retreat before the economic realities of these times and the Reagan Administration's budget cuts. ("Dutch" Reagan's sportscasts of Big Ten football and major league baseball from Des Moines entertained many of these Greenfielders a half-century ago.)

The strains of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, played by a 42-piece band, echoed over the prairie as they had for decades. The dress and demeanor of the audience were those of prosperous people, but even in this celebration of achievement there was deep worry, masked by the natural good manners of country folk. They do not like to burden others with personal stress. Yet, when they had the opportunity, they asked a visitor over and over: "Does Washington know how bad it is out here?"

On the day that the 100th class went out into the real world, there was a genuine fear that something was slipping away. The people's hold on the future, which had never been doubted in a century except during the grim days of the Depression, seemed to be loosening.

Still, there were smiles, hugs and tears. There was, for the moment, a rekindling of strength by being together. And there was a weather report of clearing in a couple of days. That could mean sun and drying earth and time to get the crops planted and to think ahead to the 101st high school graduating class.

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